skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want conformity that's fine. What would you think if your company instituted a very specific dress code? Requiring specific trivial knowledge is just as restrictive and constraining.

If you want to find engineers with talent then you need to do a lot more leg-work in plumbing their knowledge, experience, and skill than merely ticking off a checklist of shibboleths.

P.S. Personally I love hacker jargon and lore, I like knowing about scratch monkeys, core memory, the usenet cabal, and even 0xDEADBEEF, but I wouldn't take ignorance of those things to translate to ignorance of engineering fundamentals or of passion in software development.
Vote to amend the DMCA and help music apps like Grooveshark stay alive
All those articles and blog posts hammering on the "make money by playing live shows" theme, feel to my European tastes as written by Texan rednecks, whose idea of music is Willie Nelson or something... (and DMB is not that far off).

Oh please. Live shows aren't an American thing. AC/DC, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Queen, U2, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Rammstein, Elton John, and Scorpions are or were very successful live performing bands, and none of them are from North America.[1]

The divide is probably electronic vs. rock, because the prevailing attitude in rock is that a real band plays live.[2] Okay, there aren't many continental European bands on my list (Rammstein and Scorpions are German) but that's probably because continental Europe isn't that into rock. (But who knows? There's no shortage of continental metal bands and festivals.)

[1] It seems cheating to count Canadian bands as "not American", otherwise I'd include Rush in the list.

[2] Note that the Beatles were a pop band, not a rock band. There was no money in touring in the 1960's, so of course they quit after they didn't need to generate publicity.
Poll: Would you tell a "white lie"?
I'd take a look at a candidates github account or other open source work. That might preclude the need to ask for code during the interview.
Fair enough, although that's not really competing in search is it? Doesn't work on an iPad so I can't see it right now.
I'd call it more of a "people we are really, really, really sure are what we consider smart" filter rather than a "dud filter", considering they want to find the top M% rather than remove the bottom N%.
I've heard about 17 different versions of this story, which are probably all bullshit. Here's a few:

http://pinds.com/2007/05/27/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/

http://www.guidancechannel.com/default.aspx?M=a&index=65...

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/agile/sessions/sess...

http://pocky.tumblr.com/post/49520543/knowing-which-screw-to...
On average, the price of NAND flash memory drops 40 percent per year.

This is good news for databases. Flash drives have much better random access performance than magnetic drives. With the price of these flash drives dropping, it will soon be cost-effective to replace an entire database with flash for the IOPS increase. Right now people are using flash for extra cache, but soon we'll be able to fit the whole database in flash for a reasonable $/IOPS.

It will extend the life of single-instance databases significantly, and mean everyone can wait that much longer before distributing the database.
Google isn't completely neglecting the app store, but the Android App Market is not as important to their revenue model as iTunes is for Apple.

What's clearly in Google's interest is for people to discover mobile content through Google search.
What's wrong with forums?

For a community driven mainly by external content, something like HN/Reddit makes sense - the links are the focus.

For a community driven mainly by the visitors' experiences and opinions, a forum is still a remarkably versatile and useful tool.

StackOverflow... StackOverflow is built around factual answers to exact questions, rather than open-ended discussion.
You do realise that the no votes will most likely be lies too? ;)
Don't buy into the notion that if it's not "legal" it's not hacking.

One of the things that makes hacking possible is that the actual rules are different than the stated rules.
I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.

Would you consider the primary output and product of your company software? Perhaps you are just working in a position creating software in a non-software company.
Google again discloses IE flaw before Microsoft can issue patch
Are you referring to careercup.com? The author of this article is the owner of that site.
"Half-terabyte": because "512 gigabyte" just doesn't sound as impressive.

Really, though, what I'm interested in is getting enough SSD space at a reasonable price. That might not make quite so eye-catching a headline, though.
At least we have a long history of data on which to base conclusions. Unlike some of the stuff Monsanto is eager to spray on your food, lead wasn't invented in a lab last year.
And see how long it took for the harmful effects to become apparent? Longer than a FDA testing cycle, definitely!

As for tomatoes, there was a serious lack of information regarding many topics in Europe at that time. Did the people living in lands to which the tomato is indigenous suffer from that misperception?

Anyway, the point is to analyze these substances based on what we know now, not what someone thought 250 years ago.
Admittedly I have only signed one "real" employment contract, but it was sent to me in two signed copies of which one was to be sent back. So making the changes and then having them accept the changes by signing afterwards isn't really possible.

Did you make your employer aware of the changes openly?

Edit: I mean, I could sign their copy, take a photocopy of my own and send it back to them, but at no point would they be accepting my changes.
Of course, it's only a matter of time before Linux succeeds on the desktop.
I e-mailed a link to a related article from a few months ago (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-evidence-that-we...) -- I sent it to some co-workers and also copied my wife.

My wife (a psychologist and a Christian) defended the (mostly psychologically oriented) experiments as posed in the paper and the method behind them, whereas several atheist/strictly-causality-believing coworkers and also a conservative Christian with a strong anti-psychology bias dismissed the idea of spooky action from the future outright. The stormy e-mail exchange raged on (and I did not contribute to the discussion). The conservative guy accused me of abandoning my wife in the argument. I believe she's well capable of handling herself.

In any case I wrote this (bad) poem in response:

My act is mostly mute and unseen,
I wear no costume, I don’t vent my spleen.
Spending most time behind the stage,
Conceiving a plot I prepare the cage.

I have few resources, can’t sponsor M-M-A,
Must find some other way to while away the day.
I step out briefly to address the crowd,
I hope today they’ll surely be wowed.

My mind’s been active, reading Hacker News,
What’s this I see? Some interesting views,
on whether the future can affect our present,
I’m sure this will stoke plenty of dissent.

I have my materials for a good time today,
Setting the stage is just an e-mail away.
My fingers fly fast, the idea’s not hokey,
My actors will soon be addressing the spooky.

I press ‘Send’ and my time on stage is done,
I’ve set the parameters, now it’s time for fun.
The actors appear to have done my bidding,
I just hope it doesn’t end in too much bleeding.

Sure, I’ll show up from time to time,
The audience gets tired of hearing everyone whine.
They need to see larger schemes at play,
The actor’s philosophies won’t save the day.

Arguments, screeds, reasoning galore,
It’s exciting for a time, not yet a bore.
I’ll step back just about now,
It’s time for some more.

This audience of one will now sit back,
Got a few more bugzillas to whack.
I won’t make it to peer-reviewed journals,
But empirically it’s great to see what sprouts from a kernel.
Is it? My Verizon Droid phone came with Google as the browser's homepage. I haven't seen Bing once.
Seems kind of irrational since the poll is anonymous but well...
Not like Tor, nor like BT, really.

It's more like.. Gnutella and JSON?
Viking Found Organics On Mars, Experiment Confirms
JavaScript explained
> If you want conformity that's fine. What would you think if your company instituted a very specific dress code? Requiring specific trivial knowledge is just as restrictive and constraining.

It's not about hacker folklore, it's about a debugging technique.

No one implies that this question is asked of every candidate. That's why these lists are useless. It's also not the way I'd ask a question about memory markers (I'd ask them about how they go about debugging such a problem and how the tools they use e.g., gdb and valgrind work), but it's a fair question to ask those claiming experience with or interest in low-level development much like it's fair to ask candidates who claim experience with data mining what the kernel trick is (...but it would be misleading to ask a Linux kernel hacker that question as that would mean something else to him, much as dead beef would mean something else to a data mining guru).
yeah, I've read this blog post before, and this bit has always stunk to me.

The pattern might be 0xDADADADA, 0xCAFEBABE, or 0xDEADBEEF. But it seems perfectly reasonable to ask what one might use this for. In fact, you'll find 0xDEADBEEF in the man page for libgmalloc.

(and all of the replies are about "raw memory" debugging... wtf)
How You Become the Controller
It would be interesting to see this used in a non-public fashion, like for maintaining a distributed MongoDB-like system.
".see" as a property seems it could get a little annoying in many languages, given that period - you can't map keys directly. Why "." and not some other character? I'd think common unary characters should be avoided, as they may not be unambiguous in language-X, but why periods? And since there are periods and plusses, why not go hog-wild, and allow "^supercommand", "$(&@^!boom", and others?
I said set limits so that hard boundaries aren't reached, not so that they can't be. If I'm across the room, my kid can get to the head of the stairs before I get there. But her exploratory game is at the soft boundary, with no intent to cross the hard one, so she never does that.

And yes, she can navigate the stairs just fine. But they are steep and large for her, so the rule is that she is only allowed to do it under close adult supervision, holding on to the railing, etc.

As for the book, I have no idea which aspect of the book would benefit you. For me, personally, the biggest piece is that it taught me a lot about how attachment works, and I discovered that one of my deficiencies is that I didn't listen enough to how my kids want to engage me (rather than having me actively engage them).
DMB has never been very succesful outside of North America. My grandma would know who Bon Jovi is, but wouldn't have a clue about DMB, as wouldn't my parents.

Not scientific, but some music doesn't translate across the pond.
Then use Chromium. Just as open source, and it's not like Android: Chromium development is public and anyone can work on it.
Window Maker: Retro, yet elegant
I'm curious about how "depends on the situation" interacts with the definition of "white lie", which I've always understood to mean "a harmless lie, generally told to be polite." I'd think that most cases one might come up with as being bad times to tell a white lie would be be cases where it's not actually harmless.

Besides, almost everyone is going to answer "fine"/similar to "how's it going?" regardless of how their day has really been. :)
Does "white lie" include diplomatic fictions?

I've been known to say things like "pleased to meet you" when I really couldn't care less about meeting the person in question; but I'm not sure that it's fair to call this a white lie, since it's a social pleasantry which everybody knows doesn't actually mean what it says.

If you limit "white lie" to mean things like "yes, your vegetable casserole was delicious", then no, I don't think I do tell white lies. (I have gotten very good at not answering questions, though.)
I marked 'no' but that's not a completely true answer.
I was just to delete that option. (And have since deleted.) I realized it was a bit oxymoronical.
How to create an IVR for FreePBX that accepts DTMF OR voice responses
Twitter ranking equation
Several trading firms have ask for my SAT scores when I've applied for quant jobs. I too thought that was odd since the only applicants are usually PhDs.
It's very cool that ssd's are getting the sizes to be able to replace my hard drive rather than just be used in laptops or be used as a boot disk. Hopefully the controller will be as fast as they claim and be competitive with intel and OCZ. The only problem, is that as the manufacturicing process has shrunk (from 50nm, to 30nm, to now 25nm I think), the number of writes before the NAND would no longer hold a charge has significantly decreased from 10000 to 5000 and downward. While these are still large enough for heavy use to last a few years, hopefully these new drives will still be able to last a few years with sustained use.
Or at least, this is my current understanding of SSD tech.
Ye there're some problems with the preferences, I'm working on it. Are you on 10.6.5 by any chance?
I agree completely. I'm a CS student at MIT and I've used OCW here and there to supplement courses or to fill in when I've missed a lecture, etc. It definitely helps and it's nice to have all those resources. I think it's a great service. But honestly, I think the value of my education comes from being around tons of people who are really brilliant (and make me feel dumb heheh). Seeing a problem set online and working on it by yourself is way different than working with a group of people and seeing how they think and gaining new perspectives. Also, of course, going to college is far more than just the in-class education. There are research opportunities, competitions, etc... and the social aspects obviously. I also have the option of going to office hours, talking to TAs/professors, etc. Interaction is what's lacking in OCW but maybe that's something that will happen in the future.
I marked no, because I commonly do tell white lies (particularly on polls).
Well if you protect against CSRF you should be checking a nonce for all form submissions anyway. This doesn't appear to be all that different to me.

I'm intrigued now, I hope someone can give details!
It goes back to Spolsky's famous Strategy Letter V [1]: like so many successful companies before them, Google aims to commoditize the complement.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Yes, it gets propogated to subdomains, but the point was that if you have subdomain X.y.z, as long as you set the cookie for y.z, the cookie is valid for X.y.z and U.y.z.
This could be a strange loop[1] in the making.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop
And slightly recursive…
As far as I know, Bing is the default on the Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy S) on Verizon, but not any other Verizon Android phones. And certainly not on the "Droid" series (which is distinct from Verizon's other Android offerings)...
it is an attempt to erect as large
a barrier as possible to participation

The "barrier" is only as tall as a postage stamp.
Chegg Hires Former Netflix COO To Manage Massive Textbook Warehouse
and freedom: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/27958/freedom
No reason it couldn't, it is a matter of minimizing overhead.
"Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed..."

I believe he meant the Web or perhaps the other applications that run on top of the Internet. Email, ftp, and the Usenet were on the "Internet" in 1984.
Nike Better World: A beautiful evolution of 'HTML5' web design
My point was that you don't want the cookie to be sent to other subdomains, so you'd actually want to set the domain to X.y.z. You can't do that if you're web domain is y.z.
CES: Vizio details its Google TVs' sizes, LEDs
Keep in mind, I'm responding specifically to the idea that "[explaining] the significance of ‘dead beef'" is a valid interview question. Have you done a survey of memory debugging experts to determine how common knowledge of "dead beef" is?

It's not a knowledge question, it's a trivia question. A shibboleth. It is neither a necessary nor sufficient pre-condition for knowledge of memory debugging techniques and it probably has about as much correlation with them as asking whether they have read The Lord of the Rings.
Anyone have insight on whether this is Microsoft gunning at mobile platforms, or loosing faith in the dominance of x86?
Groupon rails against Aussie ‘domain squatters’
If the guy who wrote the comment ever reads this, it's "brightened". :)
I have not, though I am aware of it. Perhaps the planned white-space open licensing would give us the bandwidth to address this problem, and the performance of such decentralized systems could be improved. If such an improvement is possible, then something like mesh would have a good shot at market success.
Is there any place where it is easy to find high quality summer internships for students?

I did research at GA Tech when I was working on my Chemistry degree and had a blast / learned quite a few interesting things.

I would like to do something similar for the CS degree I am also working on this summer, but it has been difficult to find a "list" of companies offering quality summer internships.

Could anyone offer any directions?
When I was writing a malloc implementation for a class, I defined a value I used in place of NULL to terminate a structure sort of like a linked list. With debugging off, it actually was defined to NULL; with debugging on, it was defined to 0xDEADBEEF so that I could see the distinctive value when debugging.
You only get ingredients cheap when you buy them in bulk. I can totally see a good steak and a veggie costing $7 when you buy them solo.
> ...help awesome music apps like Grooveshark stay alive...

haha, what? Grooveshark profit off streaming content they do not have the rights to stream and abuse the DMCA to get away with it. As much as the music industry is broken and as awesome as the DMCA is, Grooveshark is not in any way shape or form an example of its true (or proper) purpose.

Grooveshark suck, they wilfully let users upload pirated material (if they didn't want it to happen they could easily prevent it, how many labels just mosey along and upload an artists entire library to a service without as much as a phone call?) and then use the DMCA to justify it, "oh if you don't want it here you can remove it!". No thanks, not supporting them, if they want to be legit they can follow Spotify in their methods.

Edit: I'll find the grooveshark AMA from reddit where a bunch of employees basically said "we don't know how we get away with it, that's for the lawyers".

Edit: Here you go, here's the IAMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c2udg/iama_grooveshark... and a comment from an artist http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c2udg/iama_grooveshark... who happens to want his music there, but what if he hadn't? They have made money off it until he noticed, how on earth is that justifiable? Why didn't they do what Spotify did? Maybe that's the sort of thing ycombinator likes, just saying "whatever fuck you" to an industry that works differently to how you'd like, but doesn't seem ethical to me...

"As many of you know, we are involved in a major lawsuit with Universal Music over this exact issue." because you took their content and made money from it without permission. "We’ve worked hard to stay legal so that we can continue bringing you the music you love, and a few minutes of your time could go a long way." we've worked hard to abuse the rights we have to make money from stuff we really shouldn't be without permission. If someone came along and made a website (think themeforest) and took your website designs and sold them until you said "oh hey, uh, can you stop selling my work?" would you support that? So much contempt for the music industry makes easy for grooveshark to persuade people to support them, when if it were an industry people using grooveshark worked in they'd be super pissed.
> It is neither a necessary nor sufficient pre-condition for knowledge of memory debugging techniques and it probably has about as much correlation with them as asking whether they have read The Lord of the Rings.

It's a hexadecimal number, that should be quite obvious. It's a noteable and easy to notice one. Others may have used a different one (I used 0x12341234 for the task as others have used 0xdeadbeef) but it should be obviously what you'd use it for.

Is it one of the better questions? No. Is it merely a shibboleth or a piece of trivia? When asked to low-level hackers, no.
I am actually sensitive to MSG and I still eat the stuff. In large doses that it causes my lips/tongue/throat to numb. It took me years to figure it out since it would only happen after eating at certain restaurants or foods and I could never find anything in common.

It wasn't until I bought a bottle of MSG and started putting it on everything that I managed to reproduce it at home. Of course, I was putting it on things like pizza (I thought it was the greatest substance since salt!).

Most restaurants and snack foods don't put nearly as much on food as necessary to trigger my reaction.

I still think MSG is awesome.
Group texting startup GroupMe raises $10.6M
I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year