skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not insulting the king while in Thailand or on Thai sites sounds fair enough, but it shouldn't apply to those of us in the rest of the world. Just as US laws and norms shouldn't apply outside of the US, Thai norms and laws should not apply outside of Thailand.
They admitted they screwed up and the CEO stepped down.
If you listen to the audio recording, it couldn't be more fair. His account was linked (same bank account and same test devices) to an account that was fraudulent. All he has to do is write a blog post that says that, not that he did anything wrong...but the facts. Simple. No character assassination, no accusations, just the truth.
The only reason to inform both accounts is if you believe the developer's story about his relative using the account (which is a "my dog ate the homework" excuse) and that Apple needs to explore every possible edge case scenario that could explain the innocence of the developer. The credit card, the bank account, and the devices were all the same. That's more than enough for Apple to reasonably believe that the accounts belong to the same person and to shut him down.
It's an interesting recruitment setup where overqualified candidates are rejected.
Keep in mind, iOS apps send your devices' serial number & MAC address via a simple API command, and this can all be done without asking for permission. If you bought an iDevice in a store, you're also on CCTV buying that device and it can absolutely be traced to your canonical name.

The idea behind Ubuntu tablets is that it imports the security model of the Debian Linux trust chain to the user, and so worries of serial numbers and the typical 'link-ability' one finds in proprietary iOS devices are vanished.
Steam Dev Days: Steam Controller
NUT4NT: Four-Channel, All-Frequency, GNSS RF-To-Bits Receiver
The original plan[1] was to distrust both WoSign and StartCom after a certain date. Shortly after that, Mozilla met with representatives from Qihoo, WoSign and StartCom, and considered the possibility of treating StartCom separately under certain conditions[2]. The latest remediation plan seems to discard that notion (except that only WoSign will have to wait a year to re-apply).

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C6BlmbeQfn4a9zydVi2UvjBG...

[2]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...
Anti-chess is fun.

1. You win if you get rid of all your pieces

2. The king is just any other piece. No castling, no check/checkmate. A pawn can promote to king.

3. If you can capture you must capture. You can only decide if you have more than one capture option.
> The Case Against PHP

Apart from prevailing wisdom and the popularity of Ruby, Go and Node.js the Slack team make a detailed, reasoned explanation of why they picked this tool.

It was a surprise to me that the back-end of Slack would run on PHP.
> At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously

My guess is when the number of applications per position actually drops far enough that the false negative rate starts to hurt.

Until then, an interview processed optimized for avoiding false positives at all costs will persist. Totally makes sense for a company worth hundreds of billions though, can you imagine if they had a few more bad hires sneak in? Oh my god, it would destroy everything.
This isn't the only interview. But if you can't pass this one, technical skills won't excuse that, yes.
I know the name well (and am looking at a copy of K&R right now), and I didn't know he had died either.
There is a big difference between a for-profit school, like the University of Phoenix, and for-profit companies in the education space which work with all types of schools as vendors or sell directly to students.

LeapFrog in the first paragraph is a for-profit company in the education sector not a school - Leapfrog makes things like software that teaches young kids to read and tablets that have education-related games on them.

This is a ridiculous article, especially coming from the "co-director of the media-and-technology program" at Columbia Business School.

It does not really answer "Why?" nor is it clear the author knows what "for-profit education" means.

Further, for-profit education of any definition doesn't appear to have some huge failure rate above other types of startup businesses or a specific reason why failure occurs when it does. And the article completely brushes over success stories. I used Kaplan recently; it is for profit, worth billions and is an 80 year old company, and I had a positive experience as a customer.

For-profit schools, like for-profit health care, like for profit military work, is a debate worth having. But this article, which basically says "in education don't try to do big things - a few rich guys have failed trying that", is not helping anyone.

Build an education-related business however you want, big or small. Education is full of problems needing fixing and there is no reason the solutions can't come from more for-profit companies that just don't suck at it.
No wonder Google built (is building) custom accelerators in hardware. This points to a completely different architecture from Von Neumann, or at least it points to MLPUs, Machine Learning Processing Units.
(Tiny thin grey sans-serif font!? What the point? Why bother writing an article, why not just use lorem ipsum!? Do you hate my eyes?)

I think they're making a very important point, although the definition they give of "computational thinking" is woeful.
> Do you realise how insane it sounds to tell someone to profile their build config?

This is absolutely not insane.

I've saved over a minute per project per build simply by switching linkers (bfd -> gold IIRC?) in a large set of C++ projects. There were several projects - this easily saved 10 minutes per build when touching core libraries.

Considering my experience was that gradle builds were faster than corresponding ant builds (when not much has changed, in codebases with relatively small amounts of Java - e.g. I'm doing small iterations, which I care to optimize for), profiling what exactly is to blame seems worthwhile. I do it for 200ms hitches, why shouldn't I do it for multi-minute builds?

You want a build pipeline so fast that you don't even have a build step? So do I, but devs will still figure out how to add one which may take several minutes (e.g. unit tests.) - better to aim for a practical compromise that lets you iterate fast (hot reloadable scripts and data for example.)

> The fact that people need to do this is the problem.

To move this towards the realm of tautologies - performance problems are problems, yes. So solve them. But profile to ensure you're actually solving the right problem first.

Yes, ideally our build systems already have perfect caching - and could rely on filesystem events instead of directory scans for cache invalidation - and have blazing fast parsing steps, all resulting in subsecond build times.

On the other hand, it's insanely complicated to reach perfect caching for all buildable things - and there's only so much you can do if one of the buildable outputs is a large compressed file, for example (which is a common feature in pretty much every project I see, containing all the assets bundled and compressed in some form for better runtime performance.)

Dumb and simple tends to be more reliable, more understandable, and usually not too much worse. Although sometimes you'll be left profiling the edge cases and adding or fixing the caching involved.
I enjoy the discussions on the Entreprogrammers channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/entreprogrammers
I'm not speculating. This all took place during a phone call so the post is completely the interpretation of the author with regard to how the recruiter answered the questions. For all we know, the author just paraphrased everything as "That's wrong" to make the recruiter look like a simpleton so that they themselves wouldn't look silly for not passing. We have no other information except for 1 side that happens to be the author's side. Others have commented that they took this same test and were told after that the person doing the interview was a psychologist that wasn't testing technical skill. That's where my speculation is based.
Already using it. Great tool, thanks
Thailand has cycled between elected government and military dictatorship something like 15 times while he was King, the miracle is he didn't have an outright civil war during his reign. If you've ever visited Thailand, you'd know that compared to surrounding countries (with the exception of Malysia perhaps) the level of infrastructure and standard of living is much higher in Thailand, things generally work there whereas in neighbouring countries like Cambodia/Laos/Burma they generally don't, or at least they haven't until very recently.

To at least my outside perspective, The King seems to have been a stabilising force which prevented Thailand from descending into outright civil war.

And I can't help but feel that somehow insinuating that America shouldn't consider Thailand an ally after the events you listed is a bit ridiculous considering the year before they occured the US was still in Vietnam fighting a war with allies who were torturing and killing a damned site more people than what was happening in Thailand around the same time.
What reuptable certificate authorities are left besides LetsEncrypt?
To note: that's not from the royal Thai family, but from the policing structures in Thailand.
Replacing npm with Yarn
I had the same argument with my wife (fortunately not huge...)
printing this comment and framing it for my office wall.
I was probably 13 or so when I bought a "Freewheelin Bob Dylan" cassette out of a bargain bin for maybe a dollar. I thought then, and think now, that "Masters of War" was embarrassingly juvenile. I mean, come on:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Really right up there with "Suicide is Painless". And rhyming deathbed and "you're dead" is an awkward classic finish. I wouldn't bother opining this way but that dumb song's reputation is truly bizarre.
Fun Fun Function is often entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1cgjhGzsSYb1rsB4bFe4Q
It was, another certificate is up now with a valid intermediate, so wikipedia should now work.
Hands on with the Nextcloud Box
That is seriously neat. But! The user has to know this. Surely, if you're trying to copy a 6GB file, it's better to take a lesson from wget and print a progress indicator than force the user to (1) read the man page, and (2) keep polling the program to ask how it's doing.
Why was this posted? Because some news agencies screwed up and published Bhumibol's passing away before embargo was lifted?
so much wrong with that statement

iOS and Android are actually very similar and become more and more similar with each major revision. Where the syntax diverges, the unique concepts remain the exact same.
In the past I would have loved to live in a library, but now I live in a normal house and it doubles as a library with an almost infinite amount of reading material, and you, reading this also live in a library! What times we live in, such luxury. Surely the ancients would have happily done some murdering for this privilege.

As a kid I'd eat my way through the shelves of the library (it wasn't a very big one), anything about physics, electronics, space, crafts and so on. There were days I went twice because I'd finished the books I was allowed to take out on a subject (sometimes only one).
Provenence for wikileaks material
Why does anyone give credence to material from Wikileaks? Seems trivial to edit/create text files purporting to be stolen email than to actually hack someone's email account. Does (or can) Wikileaks provide any sort of believable provenance for their material?
Ah I agree on the dependency part. I suppose it was easy enough for me to just pull in the jars but I suspect my projects had rather simple dependency needs. Sounds like what you were doing was much more involved!

I appreciate the reply
> The reason that this is on the front page is because not everyone is a serious astrophotographer.
Absolutely! Despite critics, they can feel native due to increasingly better phone hardware and picking a good framework (KendoUI Mobile, Ionic, React Native, Xamarin). I use KendoUI Mobile and Knockout.js for mine currently, with plans to probably switch to Ionic someday. Users don't care what the tech is - it's about the experience. I've sold over $100k in apps over 3 years... just launched an Untappd beer app if you're curious - www.getBeerSwift.com.
It's not my wishful thinking. Others in this thread have confirmed that they took a similar test when interviewing for Google and some of them actually got the job. One user even mentioned that the person doing the interview was a psychologist. I'm not attacking you. I'm simply saying that you're just like the author of the post. You assume, because the author says so", that this was a technical assessment when Google employees in this thread seem to be confirming that it is not. Your management experience is irrelevant to a basic failure to recognize this for what it is. This was a phone call. It's not like the interviewer was making these deductions of the interviewee simply by reading their answers on paper.
My rule of thumb: don't use Kubuntu, use some other KDE distro ( used to be mandrake/mandriva, now possible OpenSuse or Arch or something, I don't follow it too closely ATM.)
You should be ashamed then, because these are definitely the questions used on SRE phone screens.
That depends on if the interview process actually does protect from bad hires.
Write React Components in Go
The Republican Party has failed to field a credible candidate for quite some time. If you believe in science and equal rights for women and minorities, those damn "elites" are all we have.
To be fair, the rest of the questions were demonstrably pedantic, and I would completely expect a question like this to be on the bill of fare:

Q: What does lstat return?
A: A struct
>> Wrong, it returns an error code

That type of technical specificity about what well-known functions return is absolutely something I've heard people use as an interview question. Knowing it returns an error code (rather than the value you want) seems like a good indicator of "has actually coded in C" (whereas many other languages return the value you want and raise an exception if it had an error).
As a Canadian I especially love Leonard Cohen, I think it's wonderful people are learning more about him and his music, I grew up listening to it. If you're into poetry, his poems are mostly his songs, and his songs his poems, so if you don't like his voice (It's an acquired taste much like Hawksley Workman) - I highly recommend reading some of his poetry, it's quite beautiful. :)
I believe the parent means installing Ubuntu Touch on your android phone. The best tool to do this with is MultiROM[1], an app in the play store that allows you to select the ROM you want at boot time.

I tried this a couple years ago on a N6 and was very unimpressed as it was incredibly slow and unresponsive, had no apps you could install, and just barely met the definition of "phone OS". It was more of a PoC and didn't even have a shell prompt. Things have probably improved a bit since then[2], but I would expect you'll get bored of it. I follow the android ROM scene and (unlike iOS) I've never seen people say "#$%$% all this! I'm gonna run Ubuntu Touch from now on!"

Still, it's fun to install just so you can say you did.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tassadar.m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch
This explains why Google is incapable of attacking any product that requires an understanding of humanity to be successful rather than just raw data. (e.g., google+, youtube comments, etc)
How HTTPS Secures Connections: What Every Web Dev Should Know
These are not in any particular order and I do not watch every single video on their feeds, just the ones that are relevant or seem interesting.

ChromeDevelopers: https://www.youtube.com/user/ChromeDevelopers

LevelUpTuts: https://www.youtube.com/user/LevelUpTuts

Strange Loop: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_QIfHvN9auy2CoOdSfMWDw

Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-y-6csu5WGm29I7JiwpnA

funfunfunction: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1cgjhGzsSYb1rsB4bFe4Q

Wes Bos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoebwHSTvwalADTJhps0emA
MIT channel is awesome. Learnt a lot. Take a look at this course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6U-i4gXkLM
I second that - I'm mostly a book kind of guy, but he is entertaining, informative and funny.
That's helpful.
The plural form is "con men"
What if the wall was housing for the poor
Doesn't seem to mention the reason why Ritchie's death was overshadowed at the time. Believe it was that the news came shortly after the death of Steve Jobs, who was well-known outside the industry.
> "The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory"

I'd be marginally okay with it if the interviews actually selected for this sort of engineer! I've seen multiple people who fit this description to a T who flunked the process, hard.

If the goal here is "pick the hyper-mathy, deep-CS types out of the crowd" I'd argue the process isn't even very good at that.
Interview with Paula Wolff (Hitler's Sister)(1945)
Thailand in a sense is a very divided country, the one thing that the majorities on either sides could agree on was their respect for the king. They called him a "stabilising force" for precisely that reason, the huge majority of Thai's genuinely loved and respected the man if for no other reason than he was a public figure who'd been around before most of them were born and whom was mostly above the kind of day to day dirty politics that lead Thailand to be in an endless cycle of elected government followed by coup.
The muscles of humans and other mammals are only about 20% efficient at turning food into mechanical work. Overall efficiency is even worse when you consider resting metabolism during non-work times, such as when people are asleep. That profligate waste is happening on top of the inefficiency of using plants to produce human-edible "fuel" for workers; less than 5% of incoming solar energy gets stored as something humans can eat, or a bit better if you include parts that ruminants can eat.

Motors running from battery-backed solar power can do much better than that. Cheap solar modules made of multicrystalline silicon can convert 16% of incoming solar energy to electricity, and after going through a battery and a motor you can still get 80% of the original electricity back as mechanical work. A solar farm "feeding" electrical machinery is 1-2 orders of magnitude more productive on an areal basis than a plot of land feeding manual laborers with human foods. Additionally, the solar farm doesn't need weeding, irrigation, fertilizer, or fertile soil. A reversion to muscle power would be expected following a massive societal collapse, but it would not be a rational plan for a high-tech society to increase its efficiency and sustainability.
I'm glad that someone has some sense around here. I'm getting buried for saying the same thing. Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it. This was a culture interview, not a technical interview, and the fact that the author misinterpreted it only strengthens the interviewer's decision to not consider them further. They are very obviously not a good fit for a Director-level position at Google.
(Standard disclaimer, speaking for myself)

1. Your interviewer didn't give you a good interview or follow guidelines. In interview training they tell you the first thing you must do to start an interview is to ask if the candidate would like to get some water / use the restroom, then break the ice before starting any questions (applicable also during phone screens).

2. Proper interviews actually are supposed to lean heavily toward real-world problem solving approach rather than arcane knowledge. For example, when I interview I look for rational decisions at every turn (not a random example but considering boundary cases, adding a new example to help you visualize the solution should give information gain rather than be something random). My questions are not math oriented, nor do they require deep knowledge of obscure theory. Based on what questions my coworkers ask, I know at least for my team this is not a correct characterization.

What we do test for: understanding of fundamental data structures and algorithms, ability to thrive in uncertainty (ask clarifying questions! state your assumptions!), ability to break a problem down and solve it from first principles.

Good interview questions are required to have multiple solutions.

And then you have the generalization at the end about creativity and diversity; in my limited experience we seem to get pretty decent diversity and even if there is some homogeneity (we need more women and minorities) it's certainly not the kind you described. No, it's not a bunch of mathy theory wizards writing code at Google, it's way more diverse than that. Not perfect, but not awful like you're describing.
You'll get a way better overview on the landing page https://cloudrail.com. The page which was linked here provides actually more details.
computerphile isn't really for developers. It's for non-developers to get a glimpse into the world of developers. Everything they explain there is extremely elementary. However, I quite enjoy Bradey's other channels (numberphile, and sixty symbols) as I am not a professional in physics or math.
Site is down. Does anyone have a mirror?

Edit: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh1...
My jaw hit the floor on that item.

Trust matters.
> ... like they can memorize but not think.

Which is really bad, when they're trying to hire people for a job where thinking is the fundamental skill...
That's not what it means. Reductio ad 'X' means assigning guilt by association to X. I don't feel like I really need to make the actions of the Republican Party in the 1960s in the south (yes - southern strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) any more wrong by associating them with Trump. Lynchings kind of speak for themselves.

Do I think that Trump is drawing on the same political tradition by 'othering' Mexicans, LGBTs, Blacks to win political support? Do I think that most of Trump's political constituency comes from the 'base' that the likes of Karl Rove built? Do I think that 'liberal political elites' is a dogwhistle for 'progressive social change I don't like' - you bet.

Edit: By reductio ad 'X' I mean in reference to Reductio ad Hitlerum (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum), which as commenter below points out is actually a bastardization of Reductio ad Absurdum
Game of the Year: Kanye West Meets Salmon in Fins of the Father
Oolong whether roasted or aged are a good start. It's between a black tea and a green tea. Medium caffeine.
He seems to be pretty proud of GWAN, but it doesn't appear to have stood up well to HN traffic.
Answer a straight question: was 100% of the increase in crime a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by white flight that would not have happened otherwise?

If you answer in the affirmative, you'll need to bring some proof.

This is how I'm addressing your argument about causality. If any of the crime increases happened before white flight, or if the increases would have happened anyway, then you are wrong about causality. The best you can do is to claim that white flight made a pre-existing increase in crime worse. That is not what you have argued up to now.
Wikipedia's resident expert on polar explorers