skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm fairly sure the reference points matter here. Business leaders, and policy makers, in the USA look at Germany and Japan as reference points. They don't look at Greece or Italy or Spain. Opinion makers in the USA tend to think that the USA should strive to be the best at everything. For them, being slightly better than the OECD average is a failure, not a triumph. Policy makers in the USA tend to worry about the trade deficit, and they wonder why the USA seems less competitive in international trade than Germany or Japan. This anxiety manifests in various ways, and one of those ways is the attitude toward the schools.
Of course, I totally disagree with this, which is what the premise of the article was. EmacsLisp is now a general purpose programming language that I think competes well with Python or Ruby.

But of course, it's not suited to every application.
> it's inexhaustible within the next few millennia

In case of uranium, you're off by an order of magnitude...
Earn 2 Die
I've had more than one situation where I was interviewed by someone to see if I was "proficiient in skill #2" where it was obvious to me that they were either incompetnat or unreasonable.

For example, I listed Win32 programming on my resume back when I would do windows work... and one guy would ask me the parameters for various functions in the API. When I said I always looked those things up while programming he seemed taken aback and said "well, have you used (some specific area of the API)"... and when I said yes, he asked me to list off the parameters.

Needless to say I didn't get an offer from that company, but have had trouble respecting them ever since (and am not surprised that they haven't amounted to much of anything and haven't been innovative.)

Its quite possible that he told the hiring manager I'd lied because I couldn't name a single API he asked.

I just sat and thought about a function I use a lot in my current programming. Cant' quite remember the name of the function itself or its parameters... because I haven't used it today. When I need it, its there, (and its autocompleted by the IDE anyway.)

I think the biggest problem with companies hiring is that they often have people who have no clue how to interview doing the interviews. Seen that a lot.
Making HTTP More Suitable for the 21st Century Web
"failure to load referenced CSS or image files" -- is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files?

"100% failure on Captcha challenges" -- are captchas generally deployed on click-through ads?
This reminds me of something I read the other day¹, the idea that complex fault tolerant systems tend to end up running with faults as a matter of course (and sheer probability). This elevates that notion to another level, get rid of the idea of operating without faults and maintain a low-level of faultiness artificially to ensure that resiliency to faults in the system is always working.

¹ http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/07/13/fault-tolerant-syst...
really cool stuff.. :)
Sorta. This seems Kickstarter-ish. https://secure.actblue.com/

So for example, when a GOP member does something like yell "You Lie!" they instantly have a money bomb setup for his opponent.
Blackout Leaves 300M Without Power in India
See now, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
When I ask questions like this in interviews, I am never expecting the interviewee to give the correct answer. In fact, if they could rattle it off right away it would be disappointing, and mean I'd have to try and figure out some other question I don't think they know the answer to.

The point of such questions is to test the person's problem-solving skills. What's being observed is how they go about trying to crack open the problem. As well as how they react to being thrown a curveball - do they roll up their sleeves and get to work, or do they stammer and freeze up under the pressure?

Secondarily, their working knowledge is also being tested, since if they pass the first two parts of the test then they should end up demonstrating some of that knowledge as they start working their way into the problem.

But I'm not interested in sitting around waiting for a correct solution. Just waiting long enough to get an answer to the questions I had. None of which are the same as the question I asked.
More about this very human bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Projectmanagementsoftware - Jamespot
I wish their post was a bit more technical. Show us the code you used to detect javascript, how did the analytics work? Did they test their code by using their own browser to click an ad and see if the code detected javascript, or their hit in the analytic software?

More technical info and data would be nice!
It won't promote transparency at all because there are alternatives that aren't transparent like super pacs, right? If you're worried about being spotted, you just wouldn't use that site at all.
His biggest argument for Microsoft not having a lost decade is the things that Microsoft plans on releasing in the next year?
Zombie Games
New Rumor Claims Sept 12 New iPhone, iPad mini Announcement
My impression was since he didn't have any college degrees, he was being turned away from jobs. He contemplated the idea of simply lying, but instead, thought of another way to draw attention to his credentials that would help people overlook the fact he hadn't gone to college. Rather than make up a degree, he highlighted the fact that he was in Mensa, which ended up working
As a practical matter, you should pay it. 20k isn't a huge student debt.

There are some occasions when it may be ok, with great regret, to fail to pay yor debts. There is a reason we allow bankruptcy. Sometimes circumstance or just very poor judgement (often both) means a person will be impoverished for the rest of his or her life trying to pay off a debt. In this case, we do allow a clean start, after a period of credit purgatory. Creditors do need to be careful too.

This is one reason I'm not a big fan of the student loan system. No way would a creditor loan 160k to a mucis major
with no assets under normal circmstances. But the govt guarantees the loan, by taking away the option of ordinary bankruptcy. This can be very harmful.

But in your case? 20k of student loan isn't a terrible burden. it makes sense to loan this amount and to pay it.
I'm bothered that that blog doesn't distinguish between sites that (A) email generated passwords for new accounts and sites that (B) email plaintext passwords for existing accounts.
Now you can buy a $1.3 million Japanese mech over the internet
Books for entry level C programmers
After you raised the kids (first things first). So late 40s early 50s.
This should be exactly the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that these questions find. But something tells me the person who asked this question would not have been impressed, which is sad. They probably just want someone who memorized a division implementation in assembly.
The TENMA 72-8730 IR Thermometer
Get Your Blog on Google Fast
How does this differ from Django's CachedStaticFileStorage backend? https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/staticfile...
It is interesting to note that Brazil uses renewable energy sources in the majority of the cars/trucks. So it is not only because of being luck of having hydroelectric power, it was a society/government decision/strategy to use bi-fuel cars.
There goes most of my afternoon. I'll be looking at Google Maps for the next few hours. Maybe its an affliction, rather than addiction, but I really enjoy looking at aerial & satellite photos.

This is the link for the updated lists of locations:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/imagery-update-...
One of Apple’s Best Ideas Ever — Made Worse
I assume you are referring to electrical energy, and not energy usage in general?
The current RasPi community is not the community it was really intended for. It's primary audience is kids and youngsters and allowing them to get a feeling for a computer.

And kids today are way smarter than I was at their age. They catch on very quickly and their curiosity as well as thirst to learn allows them to quickly adapt the RasPi to their wishes.
The term you are looking for is Coordinated Disclosure.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/22/microsoft_coordinate...

Many believe it is irresponsible to delay informing users that they have a major backdoor exposing them.
The Internet is product of the post-industrial age
Groupon was generating revenues, not profits. They also lied about their revenue declaring their gross billings as their revenue, but they should have declared their net revenue (the amount groupon keeps after paying the merchant) before going IPO ..
Absolutely correct. I'm excited about the Pi because I can see a number of low-end industrial applications that are now economically feasible. Once they get popular, competitors will arise and drive the price down even further.

Add a cheap touch screen and suddenly applications that could only be done with high $$$ interfaces suddenly come downmarket where there is (I hope!) a hungrily waiting audience with their wallets open :-)
It's not renewable, but it is essentially zero-impact as far as atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are concerned. I'm hedging only because someone will come along and cite fossil-fuel based ancillary activities related to nuclear fuel mining, processing, transport, and disposal if I say "zero". But for all intents, zero.

There are breeder reactor designs which convert far more abundant non-fissile isotopes to fuel-grade fissible isotopes, usually starting with U-238 or Th-232. While not technically "renewable", these do off a theoretically sustainable energy supply, with projections suggesting over 5 billion years' supply at forseable energy consumption rates (that's long enough for solar stability to be the principle limiting factor).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
I didn't know Facebook charges businesses for changing the name of Facebook Page. Is this a well known fact?
I'll add a couple of things I didn't originally.

First, the operations around fracking do involve risk and the potential for contamination, the same way as drilling any other hole (sealed or unsealed) in the ground, through a water table; and there are already numerous regulations and licenses (and rights issues) involved with these, but typically the fracking injection process itself is fairly well insulated from causing widespread surface damage.

Lode-changing stresses on pre-existing faults should probably be the most pressing area of reasearch, and as always, deliberate malfeasance via oversight and enforcement of existing clean-air and water laws is important regardless of the science behind the fracking operation itself.
Day 50 - Super Affiliate Marketing 202 - John Divramis Internet Business Blog
I'm pretty sad it is just PapaJohns :(

Otherwise I love the idea. It reminds me of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/retailmenot/
I guess you are living in one of the rare places on earth where google maps works for public transit.

It's sometimes really frustrating to use technology in a place that is not the San Francisco...
Check out Foxygram: Free Secure Messaging & Vault App - No Central Servers
What benefit could a 3rd party conceivably get out of faking clicks on Facebook ads? Is there a rev share at all with publishers, like with adsense?
How do you tell if it's a bot? Just by user-agent string or repeated slamming by IP address, or is there some other technique?

A combination of things. Off the top of my head:

* IP address ranges. Are they all from, e.g., EC2 instances?

* Are images and other content (e.g. CSS) linked from the page loaded? How long does the client take to do so? Are other pages being viewed in line with what you've seen from other users?

* What combinations of user agents are you seeing?

* What's in the headers being sent by the browser? Any foreign language support, or oddities when it comes to not accepting compressed content? Is the referer header always the same? Does it always vary?

* Do you see "normal" user behaviour that indicates activity such as clicking the back button, then clicking the ad again a few seconds later once their brain has kicked in? (nb: not sure if this is possible for Facebook with the way their site works).

* Are there any patterns in the page access times? Is there anything to indicate a cron job is kicking off once an hour at the same time?
I've run a significant amount of traffic with Facebook Ads and never saw click fraud anywhere close to these kinds of numbers. By estimates it was somewhere between 3-5%, which is pretty typical across major ad networks.

It's also worth noting that Facebook has given refunds for click fraud in the past. That is if you can actually get a hold of someone in support who will talk to you, which isn't easy.
Sure, I'm just saying the article seemed a little hyperbolic. That the true figure is surely less than $40 billion, and that it's not like this is some shell game where all the smart people involved already cashed out.
>But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable.

I'd love to see someone try and find out though. Any IP doing automated requests of that nature is fair game for a bit of probing IMO.
How come, everytime some company does (or seems to be doing) something shady, there is always a bunch of people like this saying "not as bad as Y doing something else that might or might not be true or related". This is not middle school anymore, pointing the finger at other kids is not proper discussion ...
"failure to load referenced CSS or image files" -- is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files?

Very much so, after all your browser does without you having to tell it to do so. It all depends on whether the hassle is worth it for the bot writer.
After some thinking, I'll go ahead. "On Happiness" addresses some life/purpose/possibly religious issues, so "your mileage may vary". That was the only section of my graduation speech that addressed happiness, but you're welcome to read the rest.

On Happiness:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11gFKnGCqW_vfp-vG_raj768Q...

Graduation speech:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1JYKJkEPp_ib6aB4sS_Os-z...
Furthermore, facebook users in specific I would say have javascript enabled, even though its possible to control per site, I would assume most facebook users would not be aware how it works - and facebook without javascript seems rather impossible or at least, very discomforting.
I've been using that site for the past few months... thanks for building it. I like how clean and easy it is to use. The only problem I have is that it's only for papa johns.

BTW: how are you making any $ off this site?
Guchex - Social blogging platform for Geeks in general.
Goes to show what it takes to achieve excellence: lots of trial and error. Produce at least 3 alternatives for every design decision (Bill Buxton agrees).
Nexus 7 Review - An Amazingly Good Tablet for an Amazingly Good Price
You make a valid point.
Should Facebook acquire Kickstarter?
Driving up costs for competitors?
Real Life Japanese Mech Robot Fires BBs With A Smile
The ones with the Sony and "Jony" logos are missing?

http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone-...
Looking at the illumination of the craters it looks like the Sun is on the right hand side of the picture in the BBC article (craters are dark on the right hand side, light on the left hand side). The shadow of the flag appears on the left hand side of the flag itself so it looks correct to me.
Of course they could -- all they need to do is parse the HTML, look for the img and link and other tags, and then request the URL. If they were trying to act more like a browser, they would. If they are just trying to click ads, they wouldn't.
Tons! Charge their competitors to run out of budget and/or give up advertising on FB.

A lot of people also have bots to see who/what is advertising on FB to see what is working, what ad text people are trying, etc. Mostly aff marketers trying to stay ahead of the game. There are also SaaS companies scraping ads and landing pages and selling that data.

I'm sure there are other reasons as well...
According to the FAQ, one cannot change the name of the page once it is set. This can be a real problem that I run into quite a few times, even with a couple of small pages, and even more as every website that has "like this page on facebook" has an automatic facebook page, where the name is determined by them, automatically, once, by the <title> element at that time. Talk about stupid.

Anyways, I don't mind since I'm a small fish, but the longer this goes on, the more it will (hopefully, i might say) blow up into their face(book).
Possibly not that much, as long as their security is good enough that they don't get sued.

At the point where you are worrying about hashed passwords, your system has already been owned.

It also depends on public reaction to the incident, people won't necessarily blame tesco either and blame the "1337 chinese super h4x0rs"
Take this with a grain of salt. The "company" has 400 likes. Not exactly GM leaving Facebook (and then quietly returning to Facebook).
The other thing to keep in mind is if their page has any "accelerated fans" (read : purchased bot page likes), any time they promote a post, they would be promoting to the same bots that liked the page in the first place.

No accusations, but, just food for thought.
Michael Anti: Behind the Great Firewall of China
> "100% failure on Captcha challenges" -- are captchas generally deployed on click-through ads?

Cloudflare has a mode (used in general for DDOS protection) which you can turn on and get stats on how many users pass a Captcha test.
He had changed the "fluent in Spanish" to something like "basic Spanish".

OK, there's no doubt you're right about this one poor fellow. But as a minor point of detail:

Maybe a border guard speaking broken Spanish...

The border guard in this case was a native Latin American speaker. I don't speak either version of Spanish, so I'm just going by what my acquaintance said.
Yes but only in certain US demographics. Most of these bots are ad scrapers/landing page scrapers run by people gathering and stealing the ads/landing pages of their competition. Facebook has known about the problem for a while (years), and have gone so far as to ban some accounts that the scrapers were running out of, but lately it seems the scrapers have been given free reign.

This is not a case of Facebook using bots to deliberately drive up ad spending. It's merely scummy internet marketers at work, with Facebook failing to detect and prevent them. The phenomenon is mostly present in the US 18-30 male demographic (where all the dating ads are, and where creatives can make or break you).
Seeking Mediocre Ruby Developers
Amen. I just guided my manager through the install and only then realised how much of it was muscle memory for me. The script tells you to install XCode 4.1 because it doesn't work with 4.2... but XCode is up to 4.4 now, and I know 4.3 works because that's what I have installed! It also advises you to install "latest stable" but has references to 1.9.2 in several places... it is, overall, a mess.
I'm tired of "Stocks are gambling" nonsense like this. Some companies are valued on the fundamentals. In fact the best investment in the world right now is AAPL, which trades generally between 12-14 times its trailing EPS. This recent "miss" was a "bad earnings quarter" and even then it grew at %20 year over year. (The lowest in the past 4 quarters by far).... but if Apple was a company that only and always grew at %20 year over year, then "on the fundamentals" Apple should be trading at 20 times EPS.

This makes Apple a screaming deal. There are other good stocks out there, and if you decide to trade on the fundamentals, you can make great returns. Its not very difficult.

The thing is, part of the reasons it is so easy is that almost the whole world has convinced themselves that its impossible and instead doesn't invest or puts their money into index funds.
tl;dr The NSA boss would prefer a more "centralized" Internet, on which they'd have full oversight.

Scary stuff. The solution should be a more secure and stronger infrastructure, protected against both the Government and attackers, not to "allow the NSA to get full control of it so we can 'prevent' the attacks".

They'd never be able to prevent all the attacks anyway, and the overall outcome would be horrible for normal citizens because the Government could control the Internet and monitor their communications.
The Boston Globe gets a look at a DB of every bomb the US has ever dropped
Cool! As soon as i come home i'm going to try it
Burning Man-friendly disc for night play
Handmade disc with LED lights. Perfect for Dead concerts, Burning Man, camping, office disc golf, rambunctious kids.
We dropped the Google Display Network about a year back out of very heavy suspicion of bot malfeasance... lots of clicks from frivolous, consumer-oriented, no-name sites with obviously nothing to do with our somewhat technical, LDAP-focused product.
For Facebook PPC, it's 1848. Hitch your wagon
If the people who put their data into CL wanted their data in the other apps, they'd put it there.

If you photocopied my rolodex, and started calling all of my contacts, I'd come after you too.
They are talking about ads, not "likes".
I don't see what their number of likes has to do with bots clicking on their ads.

If true, Facebook should really have anti-fraud measures in place for this kind of thing already, and if they don't, the size of the company in question has no relevance to that.
India power grid down - 370 million people left in darkness and heat
Agreed, HomeAway does NOT own realestate.com.au (so says my friends at homeaway when I forwarded them this comment).
I'm with you 100% right up to your last point, which sounds just wrong to me. The whole idea of "attention to detail" is that it's a personality trait that allows a person to see small details and defects even in areas where they aren't expert. And most of us believe it exists.

So yes: if you submit a resume with clear spelling errors (i.e. ones caught by a spel chkr) most of us would take that as evidence of a lack of attention to detail. And we'd generalize to you skipping a test case before pushing code, or making sure all your stock photos are licensed before deploying the site, or...
Very nice. Hopefully there's a simple way to take the serialized position array and parse out an order. Would be nice to use this plug-in to allow users to easily rank and group objects.
I had no idea it was an issue until I started to search around about how to send the device back. At first it was just the left side was a bit above the edging, but after another day it was so bad that when I push the left 1/4 of the device it discolors the screen. I thought it was just shoddy hardware so I was really thinking about returning it for a refund, but then I read the reports about it happening to other people. I called support and they said they're going to ship out a replacement.
Because clearly input matters, not output!
> "failure to load referenced CSS or image files" -- is there a way for bots (in particular, mechanize in perl/python) to also download those files?

Use http://phantomjs.org/ and the page will loaded by webkit.
Battlestar Galactica fan, by any chance?

These are pictures of case studies. Don't know if they were turned into prototypes ever or not, and probably won't know because it's not relevant to the court case (I believe.)
The mentality that lying is one of the worst things you can do in the workplace is either there or it's not. If I learn a candidate is casually dishonest in just an hour, the red flags are too obvious. Sure, it's a proxy for his character, but it's a really good one.
Works great in Seattle as well.
Your last line is interesting and seems like a useful line of discussion to come out of this otherwise PR-laden exercise. Is there somewhere that you could elaborate on the evidence and suggest alternatives? You'd have at least one reader.