skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, there's a divide there.

But the salient point I've seen raised is that the problem isn't so much access. It's the guidance or other motivation to use the access that's the problem.

Access without the proper guidance/motivation is just another way to destroy the productivity of the people who can least afford to lose any.

It's like the lottery problem. The people who can least afford the disposable income that should allow for engaging in such a statistically unlikely reward are the ones who far and away spend the most on it. The lottery increases the prosperity gap in this country, and the very institution that should be decreasing that gap (the government) acts to increase it.

Is free access of net benefit or detriment? I think we should put assumptions aside and evaluate that question carefully. Once the government takes action, it rarely pulls back -- even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it's doing more harm than good. That's because the momentum of government action produces too much money and power for the people in charge.
Content Curation - Asking the right questions
Macon County Line

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macon_County_Line
What stops me from asking a friend to help me? Or worse still, if this is used as a campus recruitment tool, someone might mail working code to the entire college!
I've been saying that wrong in my head for a long time now. Thank you :-).
GTD == "Getting Things Done", it seems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
The examples given take way less than 10-15mins, though. OF course, they're not really "webapps", just very basic HTTP APIs.
Death Note (Anime series)
مسلسل روبي الحلقة 80
Hackathon--Connected World
Are you the best? Put your skills to the test. Join the Chicago Hackathon June 11-13, and create the perfect app. Register today, it’s free. http://www.connectedworldmag.com/conference/index.php?q=Register-Now Cash prizes. Winners appear on cover of Connected World magazine, plus story about winning solutions. We provide all the Red Bull and Five-Hour Energy you can drink. http://connectedworldmag.com/conference/index.php?q=hackathon
Option 1 will NOT give you the correct answer. You CANNOT use confidence intervals as a stopping criteria. If you do this, you end up running many tests, and then you need to apply a multiple test correction to account for this. Otherwise you run a VERY HIGH risk of picking the wrong result.

I emphasize, because this is a common problem made by A/B test practitioners. For a fuller discussion of the problems, check out the papers by Armitage (frequentist) and Anscombe (Bayesian) on the topic. Or see my summary of the issue here:

http://blog.custora.com/2012/05/a-bayesian-approach-to-ab-te...
I'm required by bootstrapper law to mention a project I'm working to get out of beta now:

http://spintoapp.com

Spinto is Git-based, like Heroku, and uses Jekyll with pre-processors for Sass/Scss (and Compass, Bourbon), Less & CoffeeScript. I agree with Brandon that FTP is hopelessly out of date and frustrating. Even more than that, I think there is madness in the idea that you need a database backend for your website to let somebody else change a comma, or an image (sometimes you need full-blown-CMS, but not always).

I'm trying to make a static websites easier for us to create, deploy, and collaborate on. Feedback _always_ appreciated.
Oh, now programmers are graphic designers too? Don't want to play the submit three logo comps and maybe we'll hire you game?

Geez, even a hired gun has to shoot someone for free once in a while just to show potential employers he's still got it! No one really knows what you did before (unless you have code groupies). Employers certainly do not give a shit in today's job market, they want to know you will fit in with the team and that you work as advertised. No one in their right mind believes advertising or resumes these days. So what's the alternative? You want to slip them source someone else paid you to make! I sure as shit would not hire you if you share like that. Competitions surely suck for losers who do not learn from their loss(es).

Suck on this - if you are bored then YOU are boring. If you won't build a small (not going to make anyone else money) solution to show a potential employer you can, you probably can't.
A lot of people are commenting that they don't want to have to solve this type of problem before applying, but I don't see an issue. I could whip up a simple program that listens for HTTP requests and e.g. reverses a string in minutes, using any high-level language. I spend more time than that writing a nice cover letter.

Given the number of "non-coding coders," I think this is a decent service.
Sneakers (1992). Too many secrets.
I also learned a lot from GTD like getting things out of my brain, next actions, and zero inbox. Te challenge I found in GTD is exactly what you're pointing out - theres so many projects that it's hard to prioritize and sid you do your next actions based on context it doesn't ensure you're working on the most important things. But I still think some people with certain types of jobs can make GTD work, especially if you have a less creative job and just need to get a ton of tasks done... and you like to work that way.
Well yes, but thats applicable any remote interviews. Or even telephonic interviews.
As a solution you could have the candidate solve a challenge on premise. or having him explain the code or make small modification on premise(what i do, if I have a doubt)
Sherlock (TV series) very modern and high paced, love the way they put SMS messages in view http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1475582/
It could be an exercise to build a very simple webapp in 15 minutes. I mean, there are so many 'build a blog in 15 minutes' tutorials out there. It would test if you have enough rails/django/x-framework experience to build a simple crud app.

Besides, this is just a platform, it's up to the interviewer to set an appropriate task. The interviewer can provide an existing web app and ask the user to do something with it, instead of writing something completely from scratch.
Amazing film.
Takedown (2000)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
Old Boy. Fantastic South Korean thriller about the perils of the revenge mentality.
Beats me as to the name of it, it was found on a free landing page template site.
Die Hard 4.0
(What hackers are cabable of doing) !!
"I have no problem saying that I write good code" - funny, read about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
You are, sadly, overshooting the worldwide population of A/B testing developers by at least an order of magnitude. Great news for my consulting business, bad news for everyone else.
"We did not understand the science of cutting," says Mr. McMurray, rubbing his hands together. "This is when you appreciate what a human can do."

The above is probably that hardest step engineers / programmers have to deal with when doing this type of thing. It comes sometime after the realization that some things human's do are pretty hard.
The Conversation(1974): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/
In this world, where 90% of new start-ups seem to be born out of an exclusive love for a technology or another, it's refreshing to read someone who believes the tools are just...tools, designed to serve a greater purpose.

Now I can continue laughing at those outfits that believe their business success is a matter of arranging Ruby, Python, Clojure, CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Scala and other technologies in some semi-magical combination.

And I can return to my review of the state of Ruby on Rails, where, nearly 5 years after Zed Shaw' "Rails is a Ghetto", it's still awfully difficult to install a single open source Rails-based app that doesn't lead you to dependency and packaging Hell.
Leaving aside whether or not this is a valid way to attract top people, my suggestion is to rebrand the name - "cull" has too negative a connotation ("cull the herd").

So #1, I'm part of "the herd", and #2 this tool is being used to possibly cull me. Great. No thanks, I'll spend my time applying to a place that doesn't have a tool dedicated to weeding me out. It doesn't portray the hiring org or your tool very well.

I'd be afraid that you're turning off devs right away, before they even get to the site (which has the potential to turn them off even more). My $0.02
A Year Hosting on Rackspace Cloud
can you explain more about the nginx thing?
Since it's a GitHub repo, why you need a web server?
1. I imagine USA Today uses the term "bath" to refer to any number of things. Here's the Washington Post: "...the lean beef passes through a tube the size of a pencil, where it is exposed for less than a second to a tiny amount of ammonia gas."[0]

2. Be that as it may, they are the people in charge of telling us whether or not food is safe to eat, and they said this was safe to eat. They also happen to know a lot more about this stuff than we do, which brings us to...

3. It is quite literal ignorance to say "Ammonia? I have a bottle of that under my sink! And they feed this to children?!" while ignorant of the fact that you exhale ammonia with every breath, and could eat the same amount of ammonia by simply making a bigger burger.

Not that that gives it an automatic pass, but it sets the bar for someone saying, "Yeah, we tested this and it's completely safe to eat" a hell of a lot lower.

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06...
Pi (1998)
As an EE, I say ask one specific branch of the Electrical Engineering profession.

see [1], here there are 3 specific sub disciplines you can test in, and all are considered "EE"

computer

electronics

power

you want to talk to an expert in the power arena, but from what I remember when studying for the exam, the content was mostly things way above residential (which is what this discussion has been about) and more of power gen and conversion. Y, delta configurations and conversions, power angles and factors, etc. the kind of thing you come out really knowlegable in one very small area and still clueless on the NEMA power plug.

[1] http://www.pels.ca.gov/applicants/refs.shtml
It's actually quite simple: A surface has no holes if its Euler Characteristic is 2. Since 3D objects are already expressed in a triangulated form, this is quite easy to check.
1. Ghost in the Shell
2. Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex - series not a movie
3. Primer
4. Zizek The Movie
5. Pi
6. Gattaca
7. Waydowntown
If you have a problem with ammonia used in food preparation, then don't eat ice cream either.

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Ammonia-leak-at-ice-cr...
Thanks, I never thought of it that way. Will check.
Buckaroo Banzai
* Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
* Revolution OS (2001)
* Code Rush (2000)
* The KGB, the Computer and Me (1990)
* Infinity (1996)
* Antitrust (2001) -- mildly entertaining and fun
Waking Life (2001)
Why Great Design is so Hard?
I can also recommend the The Chaser (2008): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190539/
Nikita The Complete Seasons 1-2 DVD Box Set
Nikita is a trained assassin gone rogue trying to stop a secret U.S. agency known only as Division from recruiting deeply troubled teenagers and training them to be assassins.
Anybody else thinking these guys are doing this just to drum up coverage?
I'm also from Poa :)
Write out what .CSV columns you need and what formats they need to be in, and I will happily get you this for a handful of A/B tests. (Though probably not faster than late July. As much as I love A/B testing there is the small matter of a wedding and honeymoon to throw a wee bit of a wrench into my near term schedule...)
Memento (2000)
Sadly, this is true. Here's Groklaw's report on the jury selection of this case[1]. Note how both sides manage to get rid of anyone that's got any experience with IP, Patents or Programming, including a woman who happens to work for Oracle and a Patent Attorney. They then get into more detailed questioning, including asking if anyone owns a cellphone with internet access.

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120416085550...
Yes that's a valid point. We do ask the candidate to submit the source code once the they have solved the challenge. So employers who need only say "Rails" developers can mention it in the instructions and check the source later.

"However, as a very quick "can this candidate actually write code" filter, I think you're well on track."

Yes, that's exactly what I wanted this to be. Quickly filter out the 80% and move to the next stage where you can do much better justice reviewing the candidate's past work, working with the candidate on a project etc.
On the "move window / switch focus to workspace N" front, there's VirtuaWin (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/). You need to set up the Alt-1, Shift-Alt-1, etc. keybindings, but it works quite well.
Cool way to make money and get on the cover of a national magazine.
You falsely portray all opposition to industrial food production / GMO as unscientific / irrational / illogical?

It certainly seems to be a favoured industry angle (esp. in regards to Genetically Modified Organisms): portray opposition as ignorant, anti-progress, unscientifc, luddite etc

Some cursory examination into any of these issues uncovers reasoned, rational, scientific concern behind much opposition.

The 'pink slime' issue originated with a US Department of Agriculture microbiologist who was disgusted that the USDA approved it for human consumption. Hardly 'hysteria grounded in not a whit of logic'.
Or at least restaurants / fast food will use it in more dishes. Look at how McDonald's brings back the McRib when poultry prices go down[1].

1) http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib...
SELF SERVICE LOAD TESTING FOR FACEBOOK APPS
Just use singular, it works fine with ORM :)
Also, why post links to so old questions on SO?
Cube (1997)

For all you A/B, MAB testers out there.
Even assuming that allowing the unlabeled sale of ground beef containing some quantity of LFTB was an inside deal, ammonium hydroxide in general is classified as GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe)[0]. In the opinion of the FDA, it's as safe to put on food as anything else.

> characterising all concern over the product as illogical / irrational is completely disingenuous.

Frankly... no, I don't think it is. In absence of any documented health issues, in absence of any reason to suspect danger, what is the logical, rational reason for concern?

You may not like it[1], and if enough people don't like the idea that may be cause to stop selling it, but calling it unsafe is definitely both ignorant and irrational.

[0] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/fcn/fcnDetailNavigatio...

[1] Which is also pretty irrational, because it's pretty much the same thing as ground beef, just slightly more so... but no accounting for taste.
It might be "over" for those eager to hype the "next big thing" but for the rest of us it is only just happening. We now have services as reliable as any we could run in house available to us. Even when my start-up is big enough to need in house specialist server techies I still can't see us running actual hardware at our location.
Ubuntu is focused on delivering a great desktop. I'm not a fan of Unity and find that to get the same performance I used to have, I have to run my games on Unity 2D. Regular Unity (3D) eats a lot of my games's FPS.

If Steam picks Ubuntu then I hope they work with Canonical to get Unity to perform as fast for games as Unity 2D (and Gnome 2).
Why the New York Times did us all a good deed by charging for online content
Disclosure:
1. This is my blog
2. I do not subscribe to NYT or any of the other news providers mentioned in the article.
3. I have used workarounds for these digital walls before.
Great recommandation, I saw that last year.
This and the other startups like Interview Street seem to be focusing on the less lucrative side of the hiring problem. Like Joel Spolsky said, and like I know from personal experience, my best developer friends aren't in the market salivating to take interview tests, and do code sprints to prove they are good. They are passionate about developing, have many great jobs to pick from at a given time if they tried. If they have free time, they would rather put it on an open source project that excites them, or a smartphone/web app that they are making for themselves.

If you look at filtering mechanisms themselves, there are companies that try to have puzzles that they ask you to solve before joining (eg: ITA software). But they are really challenging puzzles that I would solve just for fun anyway, (which is what I did for months till I one day decided to apply for a job there). The fact that these puzzles are also made by the company (and not a third party website) makes a difference. It tells me about the people that work there and potentially about their culture. On the other hand, building a random web app to prove basic skills is not something I would imagine most talented web developers would like to do anyway.

If you look at it from the perspective of a company that is hiring, tools like this solve merely one part of the puzzle. It takes the subset of developers who are already in the market for a new job and filters them. As a startup though, what I want to do is lure the great engineers who are content at their regular jobs and not looking at all because of inertia. It sounds like there is more of a "search for developers" problem that will expand the breadth of all the developers available to me, instead of focusing on the ones who are already out there (and are most likely not the cream of the crop by definition).

In short, I don't mean to be negative, and am not saying that there might not be a market for a tool like this. But I am pretty certain that if you are a great developer, you don't have an incentive to make a web app on this.
The Life Aquatic
Look on pro.jamendo.com
My natural (non)system is to work on whatever I feel like until bored. Then to work on whatever else I feel like until bored. Continue.

It used to trouble me greatly, and I tried using Things, all sorts of custom text files, sticky notes, and many other devices to force myself into a predictable pattern of work. What I found though is that the natural system self corrects.

All the time spent on any project or interest is used to its maximum potential, as I am fully engaged, work at a brisk pace, and explore actively. At the cost of an unpredictable, slower schedule, I am able to extract very high quality output, across a wide variety of projects and interests. This combination of depth and breadth also sometimes allows connections to be made across fields, leading to possible value multipliers. And since the only constraint in the system is "until bored", it acts as an optimal Attention to Value Conversion Machine (AVCM).
globals, static methods... bad code again.
Oh. My. God. I have one of these working for me, remotely.
I can't seem to find your email in your profile, but you can email me here: justin [at] breeziee [d o t] com.

Thanks!
That's one side of the coin, yes. The other side of the coin is they want people who don't have preconceived notions. It's not the jury's role to decide the law. They just decide what, factually, happened. E.g. in a software patent trial, I would want a bunch of reddit neck beards on the jury who don't believe in software patents. I want them to decide the facts in light of the actual law, not the law as they wish it were.
Hey
Whatsup
Oh, I guess I could use GitHub hosting, but I wanted to host it on my own server. (I actually have a good reason to - I needed to access a WebSocket server on the same origin)
I feel the author's pain. My to do lists are miles long and it can be overwhelming. However, rather than abandoning GTD, the solution is deciding what projects are priorities, what can be delegated, and what you should just strike from your list.

Your time and attention is finite, 'curating' your GTD lists is a necessity.
In that case you probably also have seen I Saw the Devil (2010) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588170/
I don't have any hard data to back this up, but my MacBook Pro seems to lose 10% or so if it's battery a day when asleep.
Sarcasm is one of the most sophisticated modes of communication. Sanctimony is not.
Will Wright’s personal gaming startup falls apart in litigation
"This trend in our field is really making me uncomfortable. Judge me on what I know and what I did before, no more, no less."

You are uncomfortable in demonstrating your knowledge in a practical way? I don't understand. You are looking for a role doing web development, which requires up-to-date knowledge not just of techniques, but of understanding. These code exercises make an excellent starting ground for a technical interview, and has the advantage of being built in your preferred choice of environment, entirely in your style. It's a time where you can show off your real skills. Which is what hiring companies want to know about.

There's very little room to hide in these coding challenges / exercise.

I've been on both sides of web developer tests / challenges, and the one I enjoyed the most was interviewing for Global Radio in London. I had a weekend to build a web app. So I built something I wanted to build anyway, gave it to them.

The next step was to go in with their web development team who then code reviewed it.

Still use that web app today.
Well, I've been through this twice now, and I can tell you that when your cloud provider goes down, as EC2 does all the time, and you find out that your backup cloud provider is actually using EC2 but didn't tell you, you'll look differently at hosting your own "private cloud" (what we used to call a "Colo") to ensure that you have control over your own destiny.
Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as above-average drivers is not a delusion; it happens to be true given quite reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most people are above average drivers.

The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly everybody in the population has an above-average number of legs.

Similarly: The number of car accidents the average driver causes per year is fractionally more than zero, so if you caused no accidents last year you were "an above average driver". Some measurable attributes just happen to be "chunky" in that way - they don't follow a normal distribution.
It's completely sensical to eliminate a woman who works for Oracle from the jury in a case in which Oracle is a plaintiff. It also makes sense to eliminate the patent attorney. The judge in the case decides the law and explains it to the jury--we don't want a patent attorney incorporating his preconceptions of the law into his judgment. It also makes sense to eliminate people with Android phones (they might root for their side--you know how people get with their fanboyism).
Movies.io Reinvents Movie Torrents, With Style
If you add a midpoint along each edge Visvalingam creates, invert the reduced poly then remove the original points, you'll get a containing polygon. I think. But we're heading rapidly into hackish bodge territory :-)
You would think that using prepared statements would be the norm by now, but I'm not so sure anymore. Today as I recovered my password from website of a multi-national gym, I got it in plain text. There are some crazy shit out there so treat every service like it will be hacked some day.
Cull is perfect from HR's point of view and speaks to the heart of the problem they are having trying to find viable candidates in a sea of resumes.
Schedule Shutdown or Restarts in Windows 7 using the Task Scheduler
Oh, the Places You'll Go
More to the point, showing your skills after you've been granted an interview, and being forced to do spec work before you are allowed to apply (wtf?????) are not the same.
Good presentation, well done.