skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our company hired a promising recruit who as it turns out had 'embellished" their resume and it caused a lot of friction and general bad feeling for both parties when they couldn't complete some relatively simple tasks. I took responsibly as I had hired them - although next time I will probably implement the obligatory whiteboard! As it is a basic web dev shop I don't place too much value in a prospective employee with college degree(s) for the work involved - it would almost be overkill! However working effectively in the respective domain is what I would consider important (for this particular job anyway).
The one thing I think Rack really messed up is the hard requirement for rewindable input. Try streaming an upload through to a back-end. Can't do it.
You don't know that for sure. For all we know, they email "DTCNE" to everybody.
One quick way to detect bots is to look for a GET request of the robots.txt file
Adobe kept the ship afloat in the 90s until the iMac appeared.

I will concede that I forgot how long ago Apple started going consumer centric. Maybe I just felt iMacs were geared towards young artists.
While fraudulent traffic is a very real and annoying issue, it's largely irrelevant when you're optimizing campaigns based on things such as ROI or conversion rates. If the traffic source does not pan out you either attempt to figure out why and fix it or simply move on to another.

In this sense, while you may be paying for the traffic on a click by click basis, you're still effectively buying it based on achieving your goals.

Additionally, buying PPC traffic is far more accessible then attempting to get things done on a pay per sign up basis.
Hmm, that looks very interesting, but I've had Varnish serve 100k requests on a small (512 MB RAM) VPS without me actually noticing (I only found out when Google Analytics had a spike the size of a mountain).

Can nginx do that? It sounds like this solution wouldn't really be able to, having to go through Lua and all, but nginx is an all-around very solid piece of software too, so I wonder...
What is really the use? I don't have an interest in killing time with it, so if there is a real use maybe I can take advantage of that in a more focused way without continuously sampling from an endless stream of drivel.
You'd want to white-list both based on user-agent string and IP / CIDR origin.

Keeping those lists maintained would be a bit of fairly constant effort, unless you could come up with a self-training mechanism, or a self-validating mechanism.

Killing Google's ability to crawl your site is pretty much as bad or worse than blocking bots. Though you should also be able to ID bad guys by noting which IPs the spoofed user-agents are coming from to, say, some honey-pot links specifically disallowed for that user-agent in your robots.txt file.
Relevant experiment done by the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18819338

(paraphrased) "Virtual Bagels": A company that does nothing gathers 4000 likes in 4 days. When set to Worldwide, it soared from hits in Egypt, Indonesia and the Philippines. When limited to the UK the needle barely moved.
Chaos Monkey source code on GitHub
I suspect there will be bad interactions with EventMachine as it doesn't have a flow control model for writes and will just accept an unbounded amount of data into its write buffer. This is a big problem if you have slow consumers.
> Can someone tell me why it was criminalized in the first place?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jO_ncXj7RE&feature=play...
The problem here isn't Apple's advertisement. The problem is that you have bet the farm on a tightly regulated, centralized, closed platform over which you have no control.
This case against Gladwell as a corporate shill is weak. The article cherry-picks a handful of controversial (sometimes wrong, whatever) positions that align with corporate interests. Note that not all of his positions do, the entire thesis of Outliers is offensive to many in the corporate world.

There's no evidence of a quid pro quo anywhere.
Have you looked at the Code Year track? The last challenge before the start of the Python course and following a flurry of jQuery challenges is a project aimed at demonstrating programming prowess attained up until that point [1]. It seems like the perfect place to start to "build a portfolio" as you say. It's also at a great point in the track since people should be very comfortable with a stack like html/css, js, jQuery.

It's easy for us experienced folk to say "forget that rubbish, build a portfolio" but that argument quickly falls apart in the context of teaching people who have no idea what programming even is and who want to explore it more. As much as I would love to have sat down at the age of 14, looked at a computer, and started pumping out concurrent, distributed Ruby web servers, it doesn't happen that way. You really do have to start from the basics, poking and prodding, until you can actually build anything worthwhile.

[1] http://www.codecademy.com/courses/web-beginner-en-R7w8I/0?cu...
This week’s local news scare: porn trolls are coming for you
People do lie on their resumes, but it's kind-of hard to catch them. When I was in charge of tech interviews, we had this one candidate who came in, I looked at his resume, asked a few general questions and then started asking tech stuff. I think he had "SVN" listed, and I asked if he's familiar with SVN. He said "no". I said it was listed on his resume. He didn't know what to answer. It was awkward.
Edit: I meant Mozilla Persona.
Can someone explain how this works? Looks like the page loads socket.io - is Python running in a sandbox on a server?
Recursive-super-ultra-meta-induction: Whenever someone refers to a level of meta-ness, someone else will refer to level n+1.
London 2012 Artistic Gymnastics Men’s Rings
London 2012 Artistic Gymnastics Men’s Rings http://www.psdmate.com/2012/07/31/london-2012-artistic-gymnastics-mens-rings/
London 2012 Artistic Gymnastics Men’s Rings http://www.psdmate.com/2012/07/31/london-2012-artistic-gymnastics-mens-rings/
London 2012 Artistic Gymnastics Men’s Rings http://www.psdmate.com/2012/07/31/london-2012-artistic-gymnastics-mens-rings/
Google+ is What Internet Forums Should Have Been
I need to qualify this a little better because it sounds like I am saying "no college" is good. That's not the case. I would not hire someone who's only finished high-school and had zero college work. The only way I could possibly do this if their verifiable work was so outstanding that there was no doubt they could perform.

I want to see basics such as college-level math, calculus, physics and, ideally some CS course work. If they dropped out after that and the work history and relevant knowledge checks out I would not hold being a college dropout against them.

Very few people can get a solid education by themselves just out of high-school without being exposed to college-level work.

I know people without any degrees that have more college units than most people with two degrees. They are simply perennial self-driven students and have not interest in degrees but rather, knowledge. Admirable, if you can do it.
> They could show the product in use.

I'm thinking Samsung has exclusive rights to advertise for consumer electronics (or something like that) during the Olympics. (Keep in mind these ads debuted for the Olympics' opening ceremony.)

Therefore Apple has to advertise in a way that gets around these exclusivity deals. Therefore products are a no show.
> The product pipeline will take years to screw up. But the ad pipeline can be screwed up in no time.

Did you read the post you're commenting on?
Making up Dylan quotes seems a lot more benign than discouraging people from suing tobacco companies and saying Ritalin is safe.
Too bad the videos are not subtitled/captioned.
Is it really so alien to you that people are invested in the brands they buy?

People who buy Apple products need, on some level, for Apple to continue making great products. I have a self-interest in the iPhone and the Mac continuing in their tradition, and not deviating along a path I find less than promising.

Samsung buyers are maybe not in the same exact position, since you could buy a very similar phone from .e.g., HTC.

Don't construe this as a defense of fanboy-ism though. Buying a Mac or an iPhone is, for me, a decision that accommodates my preferences as a user. It's not an afront to me if someone thinks that Apple sucks as a company, I don't take that to mean my preferences are dumb.
From watching the developer tools network tab it looked like Chrome respects Ctrl+F5, but I've also had the nagging feeling that two refreshes are sometimes necessary, and I've made that a habit when testing changes. I thought I was just being silly though. Would a browser really ignore Ctrl+F5 in the name of speed? That doesn't seem logical to me.
> that we worry Google would be subject to lawsuits for trying to guide users

um no, it's Google that would worry. Myself, I don't care if they got a lawsuit. I'd applaud G for trying (and who knows the publicity that such a lawsuit would (hopefully) generate might do some additional good).

I can imagine Google not pursuing such a strategy without a really good reason, though.
"Comparing being a shill to fabricating quotes is preposterous, they are such different things that have a huge and overlapping spectrum of possible impact" -Ben Franklin
Well I see no problem with speculating either. I mean it's a discussion forum, not a court of law. We're entitled to do so.

I lived for many years off my Apple stock, bought when I speculated that Steve Jobs was, essentially, the heart and soul of Apple and that his return , and his cohesive vision, would make a big difference.

If I held the stock today, or was considering buying some, or I was a competitor....this is the sort of speculating I'd be doing.
If step #1 isn't "Dump IE now!" then I wouldn't trust any of it.
so the net result would be the same.

Someone's grandmother miss-clicking and then mashing back is about as useful to the advertiser as a bot. conversions are where it's at. Poor quality traffic / bots / it's all the same. the advertiser quits paying
Going on an Elephant Safari in India
>> "if you've done very well in a program than I'm familiar with"

That's not proper English grammar.
It's the reason I don't star issues any more. The number of "me too!" comments is out of hand.
Bigots sounds the same, even when they're degreed.
Could you be a bit more specific on what you mean by "transforming proxies" ?
That is a very important context to these ads. So much so, that it renders the rest of the conversation essentially moot.

Do you have a link explaining the situation?
Awesome! Looks like it needs a little help in regards to Cambodia though:

"In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the US Air Force secretly dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of general purpose bombs, carpet bombs, napalm bombs and dart-cluster bomblets on neutral Cambodia. The action had been authorised by the then President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger. Initially the campaign’s aim was to expose the Ho Chi Minh Trail used by Communist North Vietnamese troops. Therefore, the areas in the east of the country bordering Vietnam were worst affected. Later a massive countrywide bombing campaign was launched to support the pro-American Lon Nol government fight the communist Khmer Rouge. As a result 600,000 Cambodians died out of a population of 7 million and another 2 million people became refugees. Today unexploded ordnance still remains a risk. Kicking or picking up unknown pieces of metal can have disastrous consequences.

For more than thirty years, it was generally accepted that 539,129 tons of bombs were dropped during Nixon’s four year campaign. The number of air raids between April 1969 and March 1973 was put at 3,530 [1]. These figures, however, have come under scrutiny recently. To explain, we must first go back to 1994. "
http://www.conorwallphoto.com/pages/tutorials/landmines.html

Wah wah.
Wouldn't it be great if a framework got the headers/compression right without sprinking extra options in?
Fuzz testing involves an automated process commenting out each line of your code one-by-one and running your unit tests to see what lines are actually tested.
Oh yes. Exactly this. It's infuriating!
But the average person applying for a particular job who can get in is about equivalent to other people doing the same. But people prefer people with degrees. Therefore, if all else is equal, the average person you hire with a degree is worse than the average person without one.

I'm not sure it follows that a person you hire with a degree will be worse than the average person that you hire without a degree. After all, you said "if all else is equal. . . ." If all else is equal than the candidates are equally qualified and the presence or absence of the degree made no difference. I don't see how having a degree by itself (which is the scenario you envision) can ever count against you.

If you hire someone without a degree, the most you can conclude is that there was probably at least one person with a degree that was inferior to that individual. The problem is that you don't know how many people with degrees are inferior to this individual. Exact numbers matter in this case; I think that the reason that people prefer people with degrees is because having the degree is more often associated with the required skills than not having the degree.
The data here is clear. 80% of clicks are from non JS clients. There's no getting around this. I run an ad network, a real-time analytics product and a WordPress security product that provides real-time traffic and we use JS vs non JS to distinguish between human and non-human for our customers and it is 95+% reliable.

As an ad network provider it's your responsibility to filter spam clients based on heuristics like click frequency from a geo location, JS support in clients, behavior of ISP IP blocks, etc.

It may be that this customer was specifically and exclusively targeted, but even so FB should have mechanisms in place to deal with and block this. This is not a good sign, but then as I've mentioned before I don't think ads is a viable model for FB, so perhaps their energy is being directed elsewhere.
The first guy wasn't having a problem, he was just overwhelmed by the footage he had. The "genius" helped him sort through it and add an effect because it's easy, painless, and quick.
Things don't have to be lethal to be undesirable. Porn, TV, junk food, all are not legal but still undesirable things.

I think smoking pot in the morning is as bad an habit as watching 3h/day TV. In the sense that I would shoot at him if my little brother did one of those. Ago the argument for decriminalization should be more in the line of: let people choose their bad habits.
Apple won't carry an ebook because it mentions Amazon
That's certainly a value of a 'project prep step' (whether it involves static export or not).

Not also, though, that a service like CloudFlare now puts some of these optimizations (minification, asset-combination, obfuscation, etc) into the cache layer, as optional cloud 'app' services to be enabled/disabled/paid-for as desired.

Not saying that way is better for all, but it has potential as a convenience for some, getting those same expert-level optimization benefits while retaining a simple project/deployment structure.
Well I do have at least some data to back that up. I know that they are a walled garden that keeps a ton of user data for every account (even the subset represented in Open Graph is significant). And it's with this knowledge that I make my conclusion.

* Accounts subsisting of an unusual proportion of ad clicking activity compared to their other activities are likely bots.

* New accounts with no history but high ad clicks are likely bots.

Before a click is counted, check the source account for it's human rank (activity-to-clicks). If it's below a certain threshold (tuned over time) than don't bill your customer for it.

The algo's to determine human rank can start fairly simple and become more complicated and accurate over time.

In terms of their current sophistication I would definitely call this an easy problem from a tech standpoint. Scaling to millions of concurrent users? Hard. Attracting and keeping millions of users? Hard.
Nope. Conjecture, sorry.

But there's a term for it, Ambush marketing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambush_marketing
Why The Open Cloud Wins And Oracle Loses When IT Gets Virtualized
If the bot spoofs a user-agent that is viable for the OS, then you need to rely on other signals. It only works as a component of a defense in depth strategy.
I use twitter heavily in the info sec world, mainly to keep abreast of new developments. There are always new hacks and exploits coming out, and they get posted on twitter first.

The trick is to follow your interests. If you don't care about world news, NASCAR, or celebrities, don't follow them.
2.7 for me. Mainly web apps and back-end scripting.
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Ask PG: What caused the downtime?
It looks like the site was down for a couple hours. What happened exactly?
Is Phoenix The Next Silicon Valley?
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This is a pretty interesting finding. Has your team considered acutally spinning off a consulting branch or creating a plugin that other companies can use to determin if they are paying for bot clicks? That would probably be pretty helpful for others and a great way to draw attention to the issue. I'm sure if they see a growing number of companies stop advertising on the site, they may start to pay attention.
Yep, I have the same question, lot's of frustrated tweets https://twitter.com/#!/search/hackernews%20down
Hi, CTO of Mashape here. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience when writing the docs, we'll definitely improve the workflow and make it easier to understand.

In the meanwhile, I documented your API with my account, and I would be happy to transfer it to yours if you like. Here it is: http://www.mashape.com/thefosk/heck-yes-markdown

The documentation it is really a documentation, not all the fields are mandatory by the system, except the endpoint URL, and the parameter's name (we need them to auto-generate the client libraries). All the other fields are optional and provided just for the sake of understandability when a third party needs to consume your API.
Two other hypotheses they don't seem to have ruled out:

- Their site is so awful that 80% of people click back before the page finishes loading, thus appearing to not have javascript

- Their ad is so awful that almost no people click it and a few bots make up 80% because the total is so low.
Twitter suspends journalist for tweeting NBC exec's email
You're right. It was an unproductive method of describing the behavior I was seeing (and was too easy to interpret as saying the person is schizophrenic rather than exhibiting behavior I associate with schizophrenia). It was also insensitive to schizophrenics.

In my defense, schizophrenia runs in my family, and I'm very familiar with it...I don't think of it as an insult. But that's a local custom in my family that I shouldn't think follows in the rest of the world.
This line would've been much better in a traditional Shatner voice:

"But! Which Will. Will win!? The competition!"
I haven't been this productive in MONTHS ;-)
blog post coming.
Future foods: What will we be eating in 20 years' time?
Hey, I like Winger!!! :-)
God, it seemed like an eternity!
Links to create startup pre-launch page
Original Womens Adidas Originals JS Panda Shoes
Original Womens Adidas Originals JS Panda Shoes
Wow, I got a surprising amount of work done in the last few hours. I had to check isup.me to make sure it was really down, else I would have found a proxy server :)
> "The lies are over now," he said. "I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers."

This reads as "I am so so sorry that I got caught."
Another great way of detecting bots is to redirect the visitor through an SSL connection and sniff their cipher suite. By comparing the list of ciphers the bot presents with a list of known ciphers of major browsers, you can accurately detect a majority of bots. Many bot authors use the same few libraries which never change their cipher suite.
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It is very interesting how..eh..addictive this site is. It's like a habit to do CMD + T and start typing in news.y..etc. And while it was down I was refreshing every few minutes. I think personally I do get a lot out of this site, I definitely wouldn't be where I am today without it. I've learned a lot, asked a lot, and tried to give back as much as I could. I landed a couple jobs from here that have now set me on a very successful path at such a young age. I'm very thankful for the community here. Sorry for turning this into an emotional post, but I really owe a lot to HN.

EDIT: I do just do CMD + T and then n for everyone who thought I did otherwise. Sometimes it happens so quickly I do new..or whatever, but you get the idea. This is a trivial point.
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Glad y'all got some work done, I just didn't do work elsewhere :).
Defcon Day 3 Talk Notes – Sploitego
I have to agree. Part of my family was exiled from Spain for being heavily involved in the ETA, the spanish consider us terrorists for blowing up cars and refusing to speak spanish. In Mexico another part of my family lost many, many young men during the Mexican Revolution. We still have pictures of ancestors standing side by side with Pancho Villa and call them heroes like the rest of the nation does.

The winners write the history books as they say.
I don't know how useful the clients in different languages are when all the client code returns is a JSON object.

I would have thought that the whole point of a custom client would be that it would expose objects and methods that had represented the request and response data for the API.

If I have to interpret and parse the JSON myself then the client code they provide isn't very useful IMHO.
I think that people are way overreacting to these ads. They're not great - I don't like them. I didn't like Mac vs. PC ads either.

Apple has made mistakes while Steve Jobs was there too. Think of the cube, of antennagate, of all the cracks and discoloring and recalls of early MacBooks. Think of Ping, and MobileMe.

Not every misstep is a signal that Apple is in decline without Steve Jobs; I'm not even convinced that these ads wouldn't have come out with if Jobs was still with us.
same question, noticed after i got sent two bogus password reset attempts...
On linux Empathy, Gajim, Jitsi, and Pidgin all support audio and video chat. I believe they're all interoperable with each other and with the video chat in gmail.

I think that Jitsi (formerly named SIP Communicator) supports audio and video chat on Windows and OS X as well.

https://jitsi.org/
I have to agree there. I got to a certain point and quit because I had to go to the help forums for each question. There are certain problems that only accept one solution even though there are multiple paths. For example, the isOdd and !isEven problem. I wrote down isEven and !isOdd, but it would only accept the opposite of that. Same result, but only one gets you a passing grade.

I thought I left the guessing what the teacher was looking for behind when I finished college philosophy.
Inability to work with computers is not seen as 'stupidity' by members of the intended audience. It is viewed sympathetically.

Imagine if the product being sold were math courses on DVD, instead of computers.
> It's like a habit to do CMD + T and start typing in news.y

I think you're a real addict if you don't even get past typing ne before the autocomplete comes up :D
I actually found that I didn't get as much done. I kept checking to see if the site had come back up and wondering if there was a status page hiding somewhere I didn't know about. Sheesh!