skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are zero products that go directly from mockups to success. It's relatively easy to knock off something that already exists and is proven to work.

Building a knockoff is a relatively linear process. The challenges have already been solved and the work that needs to be done is clear to all involved.

Creating a new product is significantly less linear and a lot of budget gets burned because of that. The time of engineers, designers, project managers and QA all cost money. Aligning them to the same (non-obvious) vision therefore costs money. There are additional real costs every time the plan changes even slightly (scope creep, customer feedback, founder waffling, etc).

"No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy"
- Helmuth von Moltke
i bought the car to go places, not because i wanted to own a car. fuel is what makes everything go places. is it that shocking that the propellant itself (a consumable, as opposed to a rapidly depreciating asset) would be the main expense?
More-over, lots of congress people do fly commercial and yet support the TSA (either politically or actually).

Because they use pre-check. And congresspeople get access to the top of the tiered justice system in America so they don't care about the liberty implications of Pre-Check.
> I'd say they are one step away. They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means.

Motive, opportunity, and means do not conclude that a crime will or must occur. Full stop. These are indicators used AFTER a crime has occurred to indicate that an individual likely perpetrated the crime in the american court system.

If someone disrespects me by shoving me or yelling at me while we are alone, and I happen to have the pocket knife I always carry, then I have motive, opportunity, and means to conduct an assault with a deadly weapon. Somehow I manage to avoid being arrested for things that I could do every single day. How do I manage this? I don't stab people.
gov.uk might look pretty, but often the language used on it is imprecise and often inaccurate.
directgov (the previous site) was terrible to use and look at, but the information on it was unparalleled in its accuracy and comprehensiveness, which is what I really want from the government.

sadly gov.uk have stated that they are more interested in making the information easy to read, rather than accurate.
EVMParty Progress Update – Counterparty
Given that Al-Qaeda and ISIS recruit aggressively online, I'd rather that the FBI get to these sickos before they do.
The way to have a system with an ideal model is to not use it... just publish a paper about it, and then lament that nobody gets it. Even though it hasn't been tested in many different situations and settings, you can still be smug about it.

Whenever something hits the real world, people will add hacks to solve their immediate problems. That's just a property of software that has nothing to do with Unix.
That's usually not how it works though. You're more likely to be laughed out of the room for asking such a silly question, despite the fact the (presumably technical) interviewer could do no better without the teacher's copy in front of them.

An aside, but I think interviews like this should allow Internet connections. Give the candidate a minute to look something up and digest it in their own way. It should be obvious whether they'll get the concept or just recite the Wikipedia definition. Just as important is how they do their research, and how they draw connections between foreign and familiar concepts given a blueprint of the former.
In Vietnam, we didn't annihilate any country's military (arguably, the Viet Cong was largely crushed, but they weren't a national military; the NVA, which was a national military, wasn't crushed.)

So, even with the newly stated point, citing Vietnam as evidence of our ability to annihilate a country's military isn't really a good idea.
If incomes had not stagnated / declined in real earnings against cost of living patronage would be a much, much more viable field to replace all IP and advertising.

Though in general, I think there is an obvious trend in markets - if the people are rich, you reinvest money into new products or into improving your existing products so you can sell more stuff. When the people are poor, you use psychologically targeted advertising to make people buy things they cannot afford and sit on vast cash reserves because fundamental to capitalism is that markets respond to the needs of capital, but when you have incredible wealth inequality the only demand of capital is making more capital, and sitting on money becomes more profitable to shareholders than taking risks trying to get the drippings out of an already empty pot of middle class wealth.

Simply put, my favorite metric of whether an economy is fair is how large an advertising budget the economy as a whole has. The larger it is, the less fair the market is, and the more unequal the wealth distribution is, and every society should aspire to be one where nobody needs to advertise because all your reinvestment can go into making more, better stuff rather than trying to manipulate people in buying your stuff over someone elses stuff. The more valuable advertising is the poorer your country is.
Agreed. Joeboy's description of this screenplay as "word salad" was perfect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11876333

I like your scoreboard too -- that pretty much sums it up.

Although I do wonder if actors/directors could use this as a practice tool. Challenge: turn word salad into a meaningful scene. It almost seems like it could be an exercise in a theatre class.

You wouldn't want to do this for the full 10 minute screenplay (it's a little painful even with these talented actors). Maybe generate a 2-3 minute scene or generate the whole screenplay and you get to pick a scene. An optional crutch -- the actors get to do their own 2-3 minute scene before and/or after to give it real context and meaning. That could be interesting.

I have a feeling that something like this kind of exercise is probably already done in training (any actors on HN?). Although I bet this algorithm is better than humans at coming up with difficult challenging incoherent word salad gibberish.
Having worked on Persuasion 1.0 (Powerpoint's only real competitor for a while) being part of Office eventually killed Persuasion (when Adobe owned it later) because Powerpoint was "free".
Over the past year, our government received far more power than they could dream of. For one, a couple months ago a bill passed that allows Police to tap on any internet traffic with no warrant. Now we also have phone surveillance and to make sure that nobody slips by, all pre-paid SIM cards need to be registered. And it's only since November since the elections...

Many say that PiS, the current party that got the majority of votes in the parliament is the hardest-working one since Poland regained its independence from Russia. What a pity that they're working towards this populist, overarching surveillance state...
New Trending Word on Google
Foreign paid speakers fall, by definition of the words into immigrants who are entering the country in order to work (paid employment). The law does not special-case people who are going to leave immediately afterwards.

This is, sadly, not a new problem. It's been a problem for touring musicians for decades.
Even when I came to the US to move there on a valid working visa I told them I was on holiday. I was too afraid to say otherwise. They were skeptical, had to defend myself to 3 different agents. I'm pretty sure they knew I was lying, but lying to authority is something you do by default to not look suspicious. I told them I was on holiday to see the city, and to look at neighborhoods to live in.
How  ESSA changes standardized testing
HN works fine without javascript. The only change is that voting requires a page load. Most sites (especially ones that are basically just a bunch of text with junk around it) work fine without javascript, and it's easy to turn on for sites I want it on, so I have it turned off by default for sites I haven't visited, and if that causes them to just give a big expanse of blankness I usually leave.
Google wants to beam super-fast Wi-Fi into your home
Free Cities Trends
>I've since left and move to the Linux world, but have become more involved with using OCaml.

Have you taken a look at F# on .NET Core? It's still in alpha, but aside from some of the FSharp.Core libraries you can write a lot of code with it.
That would be awesome! I've been working with Relay and GraphQL since they were released. Having messed with most of the boilerplates in that ecosystem, this one is the best IMO: https://github.com/fortruce/relay-skeleton

But I would love to see it with a testing framework, a css pre-processor and a production build script.

I'll track the issue and see how I can help.
Hopefully they overhauled iMessage's e2e crypto protocol first, before expanding the support to a platform that will only make it harder to change it later.

Matthew Green:

> In the long term, Apple should drop iMessage like a hot rock and move to Signal/Axolotl.

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/attack-of-we...
Retro posters from NASA for various planets
After interviewing thousands of candidates over the years, I say anything is possible. One candidate I recall was 24+ years of development experience mostly consulting in firmware. He graduated from a top school and was referred by our VP of ASIC engineering. Yet he struggled at the most basic C pointer question. He tried everything in the interview to prevent us from asking any coding questions.
This is the kind of thinking that destroyed GNOME 3.
A meta-comment on the whole discussion: this whole jock/nerd business is very very American.
That's what happens when get to buy a company with a fixed price government contract at a low-ish multiple of the contract value (fair enough price based on the contract), that you can get revised to let you charge end-users for the service months later in a field that's growing at a ridiculous rate.
When I visited UK for the first time I did say I was giving a talk at a conference (which was true). I didn't know you're not supposed to say that. Granted that was many years ago, but they let me through.

I think the important part is that she visited for a second time. They already had her in the database and flagged her for some reason.
"turned them into a single array lookup."

Midway between nested conditionals and lookups is using flags and a tablesque series of conditionals. Redundant but easily understood (and therefore testable).

I first learned about this technique from Code Complete (linked in the TFA). IIRC, McConnell used the term "truth tables".

"...since the code is far less branchy."

Code construction GoF style Design Patterns just introduce another level of indirection. That's it. (Insert cliche here.)

"Design Patterns" are overused, especially in the Java world (eg J2EE/Spring, Service Providers, Strategies, DI, IoC).

The "design" part is figuring out the least complicated balance between conditional branches and call stack depth, between composition and inheritance.

Rant over.
The Second Edition of Courant & Robin's 'What is Mathematics?', revised by Ian Stewart is good. This is from the preface:

" In short, it wanted to put the meaning back into mathematics. But it was meaning of a very dif- ferent kind from physical reality, for the meaning of mathematical ob- jects states "only the relationships between mathematically 'nndefined objects' and the rules governing operations with them." It doesn't matter what mathematical things are: it's what they do that counts. "

https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Ideas...
I don't perceive "Javascript Luddism" in GP's post, more annoyance with the abusive and gratuitous use of Javascript so prevalant today.
It is definitely well-supported -- I recommend reading http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/index.html (available in print too)
That's not that much different in Java or Scala either. So many libraries that do JSON.
I'm often crossing all those borders and can say unequivocally that Canada and Australia have some of the absolutely most nasty border guards.
I just went to Europe recently (for leisure), landed twice at LHR from US and Germany with no issues whatsoever. The border folks were very friendly.
Modem* chip.
I had a pretty interesting experience with this.

We were doing a bunch of interviews and decided to try out FizzBuzz. I wasn't doing this round of interviews, but things ended up a bit confused with timings and I had a 30-40 minute very casual chat with each candidate prior to the actual interview.

In each of those I ended up probing a bit on technical stuff and everyone seemed to have a decent base level of competence. But they all went to pieces over fizzbuzz in the interview.

The one I actually saw, I had had a fairly in depth conversation about what it actually means to use "ref" and "val" in C#, but then watched the same guy freeze and barely scrape through fizz buzz.

My conclusion is that some people just can't write code in that kind of environment. What makes it tricky is some people (myself included) find it easy or even fun - maybe I can write fizz buzz in a single LINQ statement...Those people can assume that everyone not like them can't code.
Former HR grad here. I gotta back up Shawn, and HR in general. Hack Reactor is filled with lots of staff who care deeply. I graduated before the author's cohort, so I can't speak directly to the author's issues. But I can say the founders and the staff care deeply. If there was a rough patch, I know they'll fix it, and it sounds like they already have taken great strides to do so.
But the author's main points just don't make sense. A 98% job placement rate is ludicrously good. Does a CS program have that rate? Maybe. But even if they do, it takes 4 years and 250k. HR is more than an order of magnitude less in both time and money, and this is being cited like they could do better? Seriously?
Also, could you learn stuff on your own? Yeah of course you could. But you pay 20k because HR gives you an environment and team mates to learn from that you just can't get on your own. Also, they've iterated on the curriculum literally hundreds of times at this point (they do (or at least did) sprint reflections every 2 days, and actually implemented the feedback given). It's an excellent curriculum.
The school is 100% worth it. I had a friend who just graduated a week ago, and said that "he had high expectations, and even those were blown away."

Even the author said they got a job after a couple months! Which is exactly what the school promised. How does the poster feel like they wasted their time/money??

Also, the author has no grounds to say HR isn't the best, cause they haven't been to others. I can't say it's the best either. I can say I had an excellent experience, and so did all of my class, and many others. And I do have 3 friends off the top of my head who have gone to other bootcamps, and they all cited those as having major problems (no help finding jobs, bad teachers).
Anyway, this post sounds whiny. HR does excellent work.
If the travel is in the other direction, entering the USA, the penalty for "misrepresentation" is a lifetime bar.

Yes, there are potentially waivers available, but lying to border agents -- and getting caught -- can make your future travel plans range from very difficult to impossible.
Agile methodology: how to make it work?
Looks like that's https://www.gov.uk/tier-5-temporary-worker-creative-and-spor...

Occasionally someone high-profile has a visa denied: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/mar/28/musicnews.music
I believe Halo, one of the Xbox's most popular games, had its first version (first one you could buy, i mean) on Mac
Well, the entire point of this story is how unwarranted hype can cause disaster, which seems like you should like it then? I'm not exactly sure what point you're making with the minority mentions though. Do you mean there would not have been the disaster-inducing hype in the first place if the founder wasn't a well-connected white person?
Don't swing 'til the ball gets there. If it can wait, it probably should wait.
They might not be trivia, but they're not presented in the same manner as someone would be doing on the job and/or the candidate isn't given the same access to tools they normally have when working and/or there's an 'on the spot' requirement to answer the question.

I don't store everything in my head anymore. I have a general understanding of the concept and a mental pointer in the form of the search term to put in google to refresh how to implement the thing.

I have to implement 10-20 concepts across 5-10 languages or APIs or technologies every single day usually, my brain doesn't work like a database where every record that's inserted is there permanently until I update or delete it. The stuff I'm not using regularly gets fuzzier and fuzzier and goes back to "general concept mode" if I'm not actively using it.

So when someone asks me to write a full iOS app during an interview when I've been making Microsoft business apps for the past year, even though I've written and released multiple full iOS apps at previous jobs, I can't just sit down and produce a perfectly working app like a robot, especially if I didn't have much time to prepare for the interview (that recruiter contacted me three days earlier and didn't tell me he set up an interview until 8pm the night before).

With technical questions it's even worse, because I could have been spending days and days refreshing my knowledge but you happen to choose one of the things I didn't think to refresh my brain on. And so I waffle on the answer and you go "oooh, looks like he doesn't know anything". No, I've got a full decade of making apps and software, in lead roles, in multiple industries with a bunch of different technologies. I know plenty. I just didn't have that question fresh in my head.

Then you pass, and lose out on someone you would have benefited from greatly in favor of the recent grad student that hasn't made anything but toy programs yet got tested on all those concepts within the past six months so it's fresh in their heads.
How Clinton Foundation Donor Bought Seat as Hillary's Nuclear Weapons Advisor
Ugh. Does anybody else just feel that patents simply shouldn't be transferable?
Master's Thesis: Split Packing
Plan 9 was basically more Unix than Unix. More things were files, and more things were file systems (Networking was done with file systems.)

The design ideas originated with Unix. They were quite explicit, read this book: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/index.html
I'm sorry she had a terrible experience. But the visa requirements are pretty clear, and she needed a standard visa.

Here's the "do you need a visa" website. https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa

Walk through it. She's from the USA. She's travelling for work, academic or business. She's planning to stay less than six months.

Here's the result:https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa/y/usa/work/six_months_or_le...

You don't need a visa for some business and academic visits, but you must get a visa to work in the UK.
You may be able to come to the UK without a visa if you:

are invited as an expert in your profession
come for other business or academic activities

[...]

If you’re invited as an expert

You can stay in the UK for up to 1 month without a visa, but you can only be paid to do certain things, eg:

give guest lectures at a higher education institution
provide advocacy in legal proceedings
take part in arts, entertainment or sporting activities

Check the full list of what you can be paid to do - it’s the same as what you can do on a Permitted Paid Engagement visa.

[...]

If you come for other business or academic activities
You can stay in the UK for up to 6 months without a visa, but you can only do certain academic or business-related activities, eg:

go to a conference, meeting or training
take part in a specific sports-related event
perform as an artist, entertainer or musician
do academic research or accompany students on a study abroad programme

Check the full list of what you can do - it’s the same as what you can do on a Standard Visitor visa.

Here's the permitted paid engagement visa: https://www.gov.uk/permitted-paid-engagement-visa

Here's the standard visa: https://www.gov.uk/standard-visitor-visa
I am really curious, what would the results be like if this we run on Facebook? Does the poll being ran where it is bias the results. ~34% say privacy, but it that sample bias? Or a real representation of what people as a whole are interested in?
When I arrived at SFO a few days ago, it was only 8 prints (they didn't want my thumbs).
Being paid by a company in any country is equally not OK. It seems the Germany-part is just a red herring/the officer being a dick (it seems they could have easily rejected her straight at the desk - you're here to work, you don't have the visa, done, have a nice flight back, next please).
Yes, it isn't the neutrinos you have to worry about, its the mass of protons traveling at relativistic speed that nail you.
You can even do it temporarily, which is neat (year-end reports or data crunching, for instance).
Does better financial education actually help? I mean, I know it sounds like it should, but does it? I ask because I have a super-hazy memory of seeing some report that it turns out not to make much difference to later wealth, happiness, etc.
You didn't read the blog post
Arrghh...jesus there are a lot of "engineers" in here that can't seem to see the forest for the trees.

Yes we developers and engineers as a class of human beings love being able to set things to the nth degree as can be seen by the comments here but that's not necessarily the right choice for the vast majority of projects.

Most normal human beings want simple tools that do what they say on the box and don't require much cognitive load at all.

Every setting, every "knob" introduces to the average user a feeling of frustration, confusion, complication.

To an engineering minded person they might find all those options exciting but to someone who just needs to GET SHIT DONE those extra options are hellish and anxiety inducing.

In a few rare cases an application is best designed with more knobs but it's very definitely the exception and almost always a clear sign of shitty design made by engineers for people who they imagine are like them and not professional designers who have actually worked with the general public and know what they actually want, how they think, what they need.

More knobs is almost always a sign of lazy thoughtless design.
Hmm. Do you actually need full-blown tests for MVP?
Yeah, they're trained to pick up on the tiniest things. People seem to get hung by the details they share.

I try to follow the "say as little necessary to answer the question" advice. Out of numerous trips, I've only ever gotten to mentioning speaking once. Every other time, "why are you entering [country]?" gets "to attend an industry conference", and that's usually the end of it.
> They are now in a database for ten years where they will be shared with all members of the EEA, which is most European countries.

Given that she's an American, I really have no sympathies for this. I've had to give my fingerprints to the US border agents every time I went to the US.