skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not the be-all end-all, but it seems like a decent first-pass filter.

It is really not, I have been round and round about this with every organization that I have been in that does these. The only thing it displays is the persons ability to answer trivia and solve puzzles. These are not the characteristics of a great developer, the characteristics of a great developer are simplicity, creativity and rapidly adaptation.

You would be better off handing them a paint brush and a canvas and using that as a measure of their creativity. If that seems like a weird concept, then you start to get a picture of how far off these trivia puzzles are, they are literally of no value, not only that they can filter out the best candidates and worse yet they make a company seem like a bunch of elitist that think they are smarter than the average bear.
CartoDB: An open source cloud-based geospatial platform
I want to add something from my own experience.

One particular company I was interested in had few puzzles on their website. I once worked the whole weekend to solve them as good as I can. Spent lot of time writing a custom cover letter, resume and attached the C++ solutions to the puzzles.

Its been several months and I am still waiting for the damn reply!
Looks like the MIT Press Logo just drank illy coffee:

http://cyberiancafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/illy1.png
Tagged Acquires Facebook Competitor Hi5
IANA Cryptographer but as far as I know, the initialization vector (IV) of a cryptographic protocol is usually public and an integral part of the protocol specification. Both parties must agree on the value of the IV so they can understand each other. If the IV were secret, some kind of handshake (similar to key agreement) should take place before the connection is initiated.

I don't know how using a block cipher in cipher block chaining (CBC) would be different here. In the article, OP suggests that it may be related to short messages. Indeed, if the plaintext is less than or equal to one block, and you re-use the same key (which you should never do) it's possible to do replay attacks.

If anyone has deeper knowledge of cryptography and block cipher modes in particular, please explain to us how CBC is vulnerable if the IV is known by the attacker? Why are short messages more vulnerable and to which attack modes?

As I said, I'm not a cryptographer, only a uni student with an exam on crypto tomorrow. To me, it seems like the article had a linkbait title and it didn't describe a very big threat anyway (and it was only superficially related to AES). But if crypto class has taught me anything, it's that intuition often fails. So don't take my word for it, there may be a real threat behind this.
With BugMuncher it was less than a day , and Hacker News is directly responsible.

I posted a Show HN, someone at The Next Web saw that and wrote and article about BugMuncher. On the back of that article I had 5 customers with in a day! Of which I think 4 are still paying customers :)
If you want the security guys at Apple to hear about the issue, you should file a bug directly with them:
http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/

Then add it in here for the benefit of others:
http://openradar.appspot.com
Reading some of the comments here, I think the real reason companies are having problems hiring might be that they're unwilling to pay someone with 7/4 years of experience 25% more than a bigco will pay an undergrad straight out of school.
We need to ban drivers from cars.

Nanny states are borne from thought processes like this.

It doesn't matter that the overwhelming majority of drivers don't get into accidents because of their phones, nor does it matter that eliminating risk from an inherently risky activity such as traveling in a 3000-pound metal object is all but impossible.

Regulations and rules are useful. Banning things outright is ridiculous.
Big point: Salary was not included in my initial contact email. That means only 5/50 companies even knew what I was looking for.

"I expect to get paid $115K to lead a team as a senior developer, but don't want to relocate in order to be with the team"

I forgot to add, 50% of the positions I applied to gave salary range of 80-130K. Also, I state I am willing to relocate eventually. All the positions claimed to be open to telecommuting.

I had no idea that telecommuting == less salary. I would be open to negotiating.

"lead a team"
Seems like people are assuming that b/c I have exp as a CTO that I want "control". Not the case at all. I applied to a "Sr. Developer" position with the idea that I would be working under a technical leader etc
One should add MigLayout to the list of painkillers

http://www.miglayout.com/
Again, that is no worse (better, in fact) than any of the many libraries which default to ECB mode. You might just as productively yell at Java and OpenSSL.
The "generator tricks for systems programmers" presentation has been on HN several times. It's one of those links that seems to pop up about once a year. It's not necessarily that people are learning about them for the first time, but they think, "Hey, cool, let's talk about this."
I use the "Build me a system that controls elevators" as an interview task. It's saddening how many I've interviewed that can't even get me a naive case of all destination floors get shoved on a FIFO queue. If we even get to the discussion on optimizing I've usually already decided to recommend the candidate for hiring.
Scientists break world record for data transfer speeds - 186Gbps
I've worked on similar systems as described in this article. If you ever watched "Lie To Me", the Fox TV show, that show is based on a real person and one of my long term business partners is a real life R&D firm working with the real life person "Lie to Me" is based. We have neural nets that "correct poor quality images" of a person, identify their emotional state, and can do so much more that is too scary to relate without violating trusts.

The biggest customers for the system are casinos and the interstate highway patrol. After that is organizations the help find missing children.
I hardly think the optimization function is obvious.

1. Are you optimizing for total travel time including waiting, or is reducing wait times more important?

2. Are you going for mean or median?

3. If you're going for mean or median, is there a chance the max travel time is very high? Maybe you want to bound the maximum travel time?

4. Is it more important to make going up fast than it is to make going down fast? It seems like first impressions of a building might be more important to some.

5. Should the algorithm change as the traffic patterns change? 9am surely looks different than 5pm.
Read Write Web acquired by SAY media
Zis is Hacker News, we don't dududu here.
An introduction to reinforcement learning
This is kind of a silly thing to file a bug about.

The library design decision we don't like is that the IV isn't required; ie, an IV is not among the required arguments of some function in the argument.

There's no reasonable hot fix for this problem. It requires an API change to "fix".

Believe me, please believe me, there are much much worse things that developers will get wrong with AES on the iPhone than not remembering to set a random IV.
Every death on every road in Great Britain from 1999-2010 mapped
There's a good chance the LLVM backend will emit PTX, not machine code. PTX is well documented [1]. Under such a system, the generated PTX would be JITed at runtime by the driver.

Note that LLVM already has a (very experimental and not complete) PTX backend [2].

[1] http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/3_0/toolki...

[2] http://llvm.org/releases/3.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#whatsnew
Amazon Silk revisited: Is the “split” cloud browser any faster?
"dont worry, we will only use our power to shut down websites without due process in the really really bad cases where (insert objectionable internet content here) is so bad that almost nobody would defend it."

I find his justification for creating a great wall of America insufficient.
IMHO - I love to work with java, I've used all kinds of JEE frameworks and my favorite setup is Spring 3 + Spring MVC for almost all sites... If I need to work on a form filled web site I would use Vaadin or JSF2 + primefaces + EJB 3.1 (EJB 3.1 which is way better then previous versions).

Java is great and you can be as productive as you want.

Another thing is that the JVM environment is getting richer every year, with more Frameworks and languages.

As I said before, Java is a work horse. My fun coding is now in Javascript and Scala, but to work, for me nothing beats Java and it's stack.
The same URL can't be submitted twice. If you submit a dupe, it just gives a point to the original. Note that for the generator tricks submission, the submitter put a "?" after the URL to get it past the dupe-checker. Other tricks people play are to link to different parts of the site (say, the page containing a presentation instead of the presentation itself).
How often does telecommuting really jive with a senior/leadership position? If you're just coding away then sure I can see telecommuting being very viable. If part of your job is earning the respect of a team and being able to drive them and steer them in a direction, then not being physically there could very well be a huge barrier.

Not to mention only really wanting telecommuting does potentially imply less commitment to the company and/or position. That might be a turn off for a senior role.
And yet we do this for websites. You hit up Gmail and your browser pulls down all the Javascript, CSS, HTML, and images that you need to "run the app". This is not fundamentally different from downloading a native app. The web content is granular so you don't have to download everything up front, and your browser caches to avoid fetching unchanged resources constantly, but these techniques could in theory be applied to native apps as well.
Or you can just modify screen(1)
I really believe content distribution has to work this way, so much so that we've created a site (http://momeant.com) that allows you to enjoy content and then "reward" it after the fact. As Louis proved, audiences will support something they find value in, especially if the price is spread across a large volume of people.
Macroeconomic Risks at the Close of 2011
"80% did not respond at all"

This is prob the biggest point. Whats the problem? Even MEGA corp knows about autoreply emails.
>And if you compare to broadcast, all of cable looks non-mainstream.

That part is surprisingly less true nowadays. Pawn Stars on History this week got a 2.1 18-49 rating. Community on broadcast NBC got a 1.5.
> no logo is recognizable when it's first designed

I am surrounded by logos anyone with even the most a tenuous grasp of written language would be able to interpret correctly in less than 5 seconds. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Philips, HP (the current one), iG (the company I work for). The ones that would require more work would be the Microsoft flag, Apple's bitten apple (which is obviously an apple) and Ubuntu's circle of friends. I understand your point of continuously using the logo in order to build context, but this one is not like Cisco's bridge - it's a very generic set of four parallel lines. When someone tells you it's HP's logo, you say "ah! of course!" but, until then, people will scratch their heads for a while.
Building a Mobile Ecommerce Dashboard in Google Analytics
You have a good point, but it's still suggesting that you can implement CBC correctly without a good IV.
JQuery Performance Tips Cheat Sheet
The article had a linkbait title, to be sure.

It is a significant problem to have deployed CBC with predictable IVs (all zeroes is no worse than any other predictable IV), for the very same reason it's bad to use ECB mode.

The IV does not need to be secret, but an attacker shouldn't be able to predict what the IV for a given piece of plaintext will be before it's encrypted. If that makes sense.
Re: weird extra steps: the idea isn't that they're cool. The idea is that if you are willing to attempt it and solve it successfully, it says something about your problem-solving skills. It's not the be-all end-all, but it seems like a decent first-pass filter.

The problem is that you're asking candidates to spend 1+ hour before you've even given them a personal response. I've seen positions with well known companies who ask you to do 4+ hours of work before they even talk to you in person. Imagine if every company did that?
9 Free Spotify Alternatives Working Everywhere in The World
Spotify is great for US people and some other European countries too, but what about the rest of us living outside these countries. For them I've created this list containing 9 of the most popular free services available worldwide where you can listen, share and create music lists.
Hmmm, algorithms to control elevator behavior.

How about algorithms to punish inefficient human behavior on elevators:

a. If people are on the elevator, it stops on a floor for a button that has been pressed, and no one gets off (as measured by weight), this means that someone must have pressed a button by accident. Switch from soft muzac to loud Rich Ashley music until the next stop.

b. If someone enters an elevator (as measured by weight) and within 3 seconds 2 buttons are pressed within 1 second of each other by the same finger (as determined by biometrics), that means some dumbass couldn't even press the correct button. Shock them on the second button press.

c. If the elevator is planning to discharge passengers (see a.), and people get on before people get off (as measured by weight), dump hot liquid on the rude entering passengers (those closest to the door).

d. Photograph anyone who summons the elevator by pressing the up or down button on their floor. If the elevator stops and no one gets on (as measured by weight), post their picture on elevatordouchebags.com.

e. If anyone farts on an elevator (as determined by sensors), identify them with a spotlight so that the sufferers don't have to guess who made them suffer.

f. If anyone gets on the elevator without a cart or baby carriage (as determined by sensors) and presses 1 floor down, go up 1 floor instead. When the door opens, flash a message, "Use the stairs next time!"

g. If too many people get on (as measured by weight), open door slightly and shake violently, knocking people out until the weight is under the limit.

Any other ideas?
It has a lot to do with trust. Without trust, how can a relationship work?

Also, do I want to find out twenty years later that I raised the child of another man? No, I don't.

Thirdly, getting blood tests that may turn out positive through no fault of my own is down right fucked up.

And fourthly, it fucking hurts to be betrayed like that, regardless of how you judge the morals.

Why is rape bad? Not because sex is bad, or forcing someone else to do something might be considered bad (parents force their children to do things all the time), but because it fucks the victim up. Cause and effect.

Through observation it's easy to see that a person experiences extreme pain through the infidelity of his partner. Maybe some don't feel a thing, but I did.

What frustrates me is that people see another causing this damage to another, and they don't give a shit. That's the crux of my problem. Complete and utter apathy for the suffering of another human being. Simply another form of complicity.
13 is louder than 12, after all ;-)
Public Mapping Project
Could someone help me understand the Atlantic Ocean thing? Specifically the phenomenon of rich royalty and businessmen like Columbus, Queen Isabella, etc spending huge amounts of money on ocean-travel-related projects.

I, like many nerds, grew up with a powerful fascination with oceans, foreign lands, and the myriad mythology stories based around the various problems and possibilities of ocean travel. I understand the allure. I am also a capitalist, and therefore don't begrudge these guys the opportunity to do with their money as they see fit.

What I don't get is why we never hear of wealthy royalty spending their money on technology projects that would have a much much larger benefit to humanity, and arguably cooler than ocean travel. Things like medicine, farming, and hell, even waterwheel-powered machinery come to mind.

Why cross the Atlantic?
I don't much care for "personas" but I did enjoy filling in the blanks of the template at the end.

And as subtle as it seems, I think there's a difference between "why do people use your product?" and "why do people hire your product?". "Hiring" seems to imply selection from multiple candidates, payment for (and an ongoing involvement with) the product etc.
Except this worked before the internet too. I have a ton of albums from working folk musicians in cardboard home-made sleeves, with great production values on the music and crap for polish so they'd cost $5. I found most of the bands I listen to from mixed CDs friends made for me. The Grateful Dead got rich off people stealing their music. The Sullivan Show, radio stations, MTV and clubs were letting people listen to music for free before Napster; together they made every big commercial artist in the last sixty years.
The new thing the internet adds isn't "free music" or "sell things that are easily pirated for cheap". It's that big-names can do it and we can measure the results.

Where are the glowing articles about how much extra money an artist made after adding DRM to their game, video or music? I don't think torrents wreaked the commercial market; I think they wreaked the bootleg industry (http://books.google.com/books?id=hUyMNhH_l-EC&lpg=PA236&...). The people who says otherwise are self-interested and fail to offer the kind of concrete numbers that reluctant experimenter after reluctant experimenter produces from every creative industry.

I will note that this is the only venue I saw this on; not from my friends or Facebook or Twitter or any of the other "viral" channels. It seems to me like it's already to the point where it is normal. It is working because this approach works, just like it always has.
How we are using Android to increase government transparency in Rwanda
For what it's worth, I'm involved in the hiring process at chartboost.com. (Company tripled in employee size the past couple months!) When we get a resume / inquiry from somebody who wants to work remotely, it's instant rejection. Telecommuting is a long debate whose scope is outside of this discussion, but for a lot of companies that's a tough sell. Especially at 115k.
There are lots of examples of artists blowing up without labels (though some subsequently start their own or get signed) in the past few years by distributing their music on the internet for free. See: Pretty Lights, Girl Talk, Odd Future, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, etc. It won't be viable for every artist/band but neither is the music industry of old. You must bring something special because otherwise nobody will care.
On Intellectual Dishonesty
I think you're making a "gotcha" point. It's impossible to implement any crypto protocol safely with ECB mode. And yet libraries far more popular than this one aren't subject to blog posts dinging them for being "broken by default".

I actually agree with you that not requiring an explicit IV is a bad interface choice.

On the other hand, I'm appalled by the idea of any library that exposes AES directly to applications anyways. There's a myriad of mistakes developers make using AES directly. CBC IVs are not among the top three.
For any of the hot tech $115k is actually about $5k low. The author did state ROR which would put him in the hot tech camp and that would be the going rate for that market. I just passed on a w2 position with a pre-IPO company that was $140k. $115 is actually a bargain rate for a senior developer.
A fascinating question! I think we're all talking about it because Louis CK is pretty popular.

None of this is a counterpoint to my claim. A counterpoint to my claim would be actually showing that it is novel, e.g. that this experiment contains attributes which have not been seen before.

People have produced and sold videos direct over the internet many times before, so that aspect isn't new. Is there some other aspect to this which I'm missing which is novel?
This post pretty much reflects my observations back when I was job hunting a year or so ago. I had a good amount of experience, was willing to relocate, wasn't looking for a telecommuting position, and was very flexible on salary. I advertised myself to several high-profile companies, many of which have affiliations with YC. None of them were through recruiters, and a few were even direct contacts with some core developers happening to advertise the company on twitter: cough Disqus cough.

The number of responses I received even acknowledging that they got my personalized cover letter and resume? Zero. Nada. Zilch.

I ended up getting a job by being referred through a friend to a company completely outside of the whole startup/valley/YC culture. The absolute worst thing you can do is have your job search and advertisements become a black hole.

So every company reading this comment: get your shit together.
This isn't Reddit. You can make your point without being smarmy about it.
it's interesting because I just got the elevator question for the first time a month or two ago and was still scratching my head trying to figure out where the decision point on that question is. i ended up spending about half the interview talking about different ways to optimize for minimal waiting time, but now it seems like that may have just been banter after we'd covered the FIFO queue.
That's actually too rosy a picture of the situation in Europe. While indeed many people have no objective need to own a car, most families do own at least one. We might not have quite the ridiculous amount of cars as the Americans, but large parts of Europe are not that far behind. [1]

More importantly - since this discussion is about driver behavior - if you look at traffic deaths per vehicle, per driven kilometer, or even per inhabitant, the US do better than a lot of European countries. [2] I'm sure that the total disregard for the existing bans on cellphones [3] for drivers is a factor here.

Also, regrettably, Europeans are repeating the mistake that I hear some US cities are now regretting: building giant shopping areas outside the city centers, thereby destroying commerce in those centers and worsening the traffic situation. In one particularly megalomaniac example [4] they want to build a giant shopping center right next to one of the busiest roads in Belgium (the ring around Brussels), less than 10km away from several existing and perfectly fine city centers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_p...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
[3] http://www.cellular-news.com/car_bans/
[4] http://www.uplace.eu/Default.aspx?PageID=166&Culture=nl