skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whiteboard coding is just an inexpensive tool to verify person's claims made during face-to-face interview. When I'm interviewing people, I ask them to solve a very simple algorithmic problem just to check my gut feeling after a conversation. I could care less about any fancy framework you might use by googling, or how you put your braces on the whiteboard - it's all unimportant, you'll get you dose of instructions about our process, coding style, etc., if you hired. Same goes for time constraints: I specifically give a very simple task (granted, I didn't do interviews for Google or Palantir) to make it easier for everybody. In the end I'd expect to see that person actually knows coding, uses chosen language properly and doesn't do obviously stupid things. Resulting code simply supports or rebutts my opinion I form during my conversations with a candidate.
I'm so glad we've moved past that boring old money. Remember the kind that could be used anywhere and for anything?

Now my money tells me what I can and can't spend it on!
Blurring of the lines - should Microsoft distinguish between tablet & PC?
If the internet was clearly winning this fight I would agree. I still partly do since if you had to pick something to do a trial run, this is a decent fit.

The legislators and pro-censorship international treaty writers are also getting a lot of practice. And they seem to be innovating faster and winning more battles than the internet.
we're looking into booking options now so that you don't have spend time trying to book yourself

This is the pain point which has prevented me from recommending flightfox to anyone else yet: When I tried it, I was pointed towards orbitz for flights which it turned out that they were advertising but (after I provided my credit card details) they didn't actually have. I'm still glad that I used flightfox, because the expert advice I got saved me $300 by pointing out that returning to Canada from Germany was much cheaper than returning from Austria -- but the booking instructions were completely useless.

If you can add a "book via flightfox" mechanism which guarantees that the flights actually exist, I'll tell everybody I know to use flightfox every time they travel.
I believe in using a black background for talk slides.

Example:
http://new.livestream.com/gigaom/gigaomroadmap/videos/579403...

I would prefer dark gray from an aesthetic perspective. But the reason I choose black is simple:

Often, the LCD projector is not pointed straight at the backdrop or maximized correctly. If your slide background is not black, there is a perceptible margin, and your slide area is shaped like a trapezoid, not a rectangle. Using a black slide background minimizes this margin, and makes it look like your slides correctly fill the backdrop.

Just my two cents. I'm curious if people feel strongly against this approach.
> Just like 1/3 in decimal system can't be written down accurately.

Or like integers in base pi! ;)
Hanging With The Hyenas: Lessons From My First Side Project (Last Thanksgiving)
> person A is engineering solutions, (...) person B is solving problems.

This. You managed to highlight a difference that is often forgot.

I used to think mostly like person A, but the longer I stay on HN, the more I feel I start to think like person B.
What constraints do you imagine I'm inventing? That it's practical?

Musk's pauses indicate to me that he was internally asking himself whether his proposal is somehow like the Jetsons tubes. That doesn't necessarily mean he was looking for literal parallels. And if he were, I don't see why "pneumatic tube that sucks a single person up" would turn into just "tube" to a layman, either. He's also mentioned the Concorde and a railgun. How do those fit into your vision? Will a layperson see those in your car/tunnel system?

I'm not just saying "pointless complexity". I'm telling you why it's pointless. Your system is certainly more complex than an evacuated tube, and without a compelling reason to embrace such complexity, then it is indeed pointless.

Let's step back a bit, though. You're saying that your system is easier to implement than an evacuated tube. Let's assume that's true (though I don't think it is). Is it also easier to implement than a partially evacuated tube? Those are expected to travel at or past Mach I, and don't need the car to move nearly 100% of the air in the tunnel. How is your proposal superior? You talk about using the plungers to evacuate air, but the energy cost to remove the air must still be paid. Your 70 ton slugs might carry more momentum, but a car in a partially evacuated tube wouldn't need to displace all the air it encounters, and so wouldn't need as much momentum. You're constantly paying the cost to push around a bunch of air. That cost is largely avoided with a more traditional design.

I'm not certain about your idea that you don't need a tight seal. Yes, at Mach I a gust would blow pretty hard. But in a near-vacuum you'll not be blowing much air. Remember that you're going to have to blow with >1 atmosphere of pressure to push anything out and past the flaps. Also remember that this "gust" is the result of resistance caused by the giant plug you're pushing down the tube, resistance that another design might just avoid or at least minimize. And any air not evacuated by the "gust" will contribute to further drag as the plunger pushes past it.
I'm not sure why people can't fit both perspectives in their brains at once.

It sucks, and it's not that bad.
That's true. "Good enough" can range from "it runs" to "written in a well-structured, maintainable manner". Most people choose to stop at #1, and that's fine. Until you have to fix the damn thing.
I would say that a lot of the rationale would come from:

1) Availability of the 2.4GHz band in other established countries
2) Propagation characteristics of 2.4GHz (this would also explain why the 900MHz ISM band exists given the better coverage) being relatively well known at the time
3) Separation, at least originally, from heavily populated bands at the time

Note that the $500 funding goal would only allow for 10 hours of discovery (exc. email & per-page costs), which may not be a lot if the investigator needs to find meeting minutes, memos and communications with other regulatory bodies from over half a century ago.
Is it really true that microwaves would work on that whole range of frequencies? I thought there was a water resonance at 2.4 GHz that they were designed to excite.
Ww3 peace, 4 how long
This has been discussed to death, but... it's not the arrest warrant that caused the large police presence, it was the fact that someone that is trying to avoid deportation was using embassy soil to do so, while flaunting it and being in the centre of a large amount of controversy.

If Assange had just gone to Sweden like he was expected to then nothing would have happened with the police, if any high value media personality was wanted on an international arrest warrant and sought refuge in an embassy like Assange has done it would have warranted the same media attention and thus the same police presence.

The Assange case may be full of suspicious circumstances, but I don't think the heavy police presence at the embassy is anything other than the result of the media circus surrounding the situation (which is of Assange's own creation).
If I do an interview, I'll say step 8 and expect &7.

I would only hire someone who didn't do modulo, but steps. Division is expensive.

http://www.sparrowos.com/Wb/Demo/Asm/BuzzFizz.html

Fucken I gotta get God to kill someone, it looks like.

God says...

C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT

46:7 The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Selah.

46:8 Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made
in the earth.

46:9 He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh
the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in
the fire.

46:10 Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the
heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

46:11 The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Selah.
What Every Web Programmer Should Know About Floating Point:

0. Do not calculate monetary amounts in FP. Businesses don't react well to being told about acceptable imprecision.

1. Javascript is floating point.

2. Do not calculate money amounts in Javascript.

There are decimal libraries for Javascript (eg [1][2]). Use those if you need to calculate monetary amounts.

[1] https://github.com/whatgoodisaroad/Big-js

[2] https://github.com/dtrebbien/BigDecimal.js
Same way we determine what constitutes obscenities: "I know it when I see it".
> Consider: is it harder to push your hand through the air or a tub of water?

Consider a tub of water moving at the desired speed...
Just take a look at Eben Moglen[0], he is a very brilliant speaker and a brilliant man in general. Or Jérémie Zimmermann[1] for the European side. Or Benjamin Bayart for the French side.

[0] http://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY
[1] http://youtu.be/qRiY9tkdkV8
[2] http://youtu.be/i7JVzN3dM34 (in french)
Also SOA allows to "use different toolboxes".
Mental stagnation
Reward early payments.
A myth! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Principles - second paragraph.
Are you talking about friction between carriage and liquid or walls and (moving) liquid?

The liquid will move at the desired travel velocity, so I believe the latter will be important.
thanks avis. and yeah totally agree with making unique landing pages based on traffic. good tip :)
When is software speech for purposes of the First Amendment?
payment up front, like a deposit. No money, no work. That simple. No promises either. Listen to Randall for a bit, http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/36071144342/episode-23-as-...
"For example, what business gets free press 24-7 for months?"

There may be PR, but the media is making a KILLING off these campaigns.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/...
I just googled around for that, and here's a brutish one in Ruby: https://gist.github.com/3230825

And because I had to fiddle around manually to understand it (not good at Ruby's inbuilt methods) here's how it works: It generates two long arrays, one containing "Fizz" every third element, and one containing "Buzz" every five elements, the rest is filled up with nils.

Then it iterates over 1 to 100 and zips the two arrays at that position together - if the "zipped together" sum of both arrays is nil, that number is printed, else the concatenated string of both arrays at that position is printed (example: "Fizz" + nil = "Fizz"). Neat!

Edit: I also found a great one using flip-flops: https://gist.github.com/3230984
Spending time up front to understand payment terms, calmly, carefully, contractually, means that both sides understand what they are getting into. Nobody would have dared break that word, on both sides. Nobody broke that word. So it sounds like the upfront handshake was either rushed or nonexistent.
Ever looked at Angular?
Milestones. For example, half up front and half at delivery. 25% up front, 25% at a reasonable halfway point, 50% at the end. That kind of thing.
hats off. superb work.
French magazine: Élysée Palace hacked by American government
Oh, you're associated with Circa.

As a digital publisher myself, I'm curious as to how you obtain the rights to the images you're using in the app.
Kiva was actually part of Adam's inspiration!
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680490/making-medical-care-affor...

Members of the Watsi team work for Kiva too (at least as of several months ago):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424745
that was never going to happen. I have no idea why anybody would think it would. He is far too public for that.
Making Medical Care Affordable In Developing Countries, With Help From The Crowd
"Simply put, he cannot be criticized without risk of those who do so being branded bigots or racist"

If you can't speak without making people feel uncomfortable or appealing to certain dogwhistles ( http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwate... ), that isn't Obama's fault.

"He has never faced a truly critical press."

His centrist policies haven't, certainly. His liberal policies have been attacked and rolled back consistently to match the media narratives.
As I said, this is purely my direct experience. Based on it, I hypothesise that the idea of gorilla arm arose from people using touch screens as if they were regular screens, i.e. inappropriately. I have certainly never heard of gorilla arm from iPads/Android tablets.
"one of the most anti-business administrations in a long time"

Simple, it wasn't and isn't. It's very pro-big business.

As with the Republicans, you privatize profits, socialize losses. Nobody shakes that system up, they just say that "the other guy" is to blame.
I wish i could understand why anybody would defend Assange for anything.
The .NET CLI takes the same approach. Any implementation is allowed to use a higher precision if it wants. The stated rational is for performance:

"This design allows the CLI to choose a platform-specific high-performance representation for floating-point numbers until they are placed in storage locations. For example, it might be able to leave floating-point variables in hardware registers that provide more precision than a user has requested. "

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...
You were the one who made a wildly unsubstantiated claim that the common man's attitude about science has more effect on the human race than the insights of actual scientists. None of what you've said since then has justified this wild claim of yours and you can't because it's just patently absurd.

What's clear is that you haven't actually provided enough evidence to support your claim, that your original attack on me is pure hypocrisy, and that you now wish to cover your tracks by pretending that I just don't understand you.
i5 notebook (ex: MBA) is 3 times faster. (222ms vs 711ms)

http://liliputing.com/2012/10/benchmarking-the-249-samsung-c...
Use a contract and set your payment terms clearly; bill at defined regular intervals (with a partial up-front payment).

Make sure there's a late fee, and enforce it! You will almost certainly find clients that don't pay on time, and letting them essentially get away with it will only make it worse.

The one measure I've found that puts honest but lazy clients on the ball, though, is stopping work as soon as payment is overdue and not continuing until they're current (including the late fee).
Warranty is valid only if invoice paid on time.
In general when you book flights you don't have to pay for a day or two. This is in part to solve the problem you mention.
"Had he lost, people would say the oposite, declaring him 'professorial' 'aloof' or 'elitist'"

People in the media have been saying that regardless of his performance.
I think they're just teaching a lesson that the internet has until recently been slow to learn. Centralization is bad. Single-pass bottle-necks like Paypal are worse.

Bitcoin is crazy until it isn't. Its a lot of effort and risk to buy access to a forum that has a few silly TV shows. Not so much when its a patented drug you need to survive that's only available in rich countries to the "right" people.
That is actually a rather clever solution. I guess you could do the same in Python, using itertools.

That said, I guess I should rephrase my question: Is there a simple programming test that can help weed out fakers quickly, which does not involve mathematics? Sort of like "Deploy a simple CRUD app in 15 mins" or something?

This is to address the parent's concern that a lot of web apps out there don't actually require much mathematics.
Of course it would have. It was pretty much inevitable once Internet access became wide-spread.
The Battle Between Muscle and Fat
Are you implying that the police presence was demanded by the media so that they could have a better story, because there was "controversy?" I'm not sure that's a good justification for the use of public resources.
We use deliverables, milestones, a work breakdown structure (WBS), and statement of work (SOW) contract.

These describe the scope, schedule, cost, payment agreement, refund policy, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statement_of_work

When we reach a milestone, we invoice the client for the amount we agreed to in the statement of work.
I think (or hope) we're learning to compartmentalize our information consumption. As someone who's been involved in "user generated digital content" since before the web, I've had a front row seat for the evolutionary process that, to me, is logical but to others feels accelerated if not sudden.

I see it as our brains adapting to the information overburden that we feel is being imposed on us. As a result, those learning to adapt are creating four categories of information:
(1) Stuff I need to know
(2) Stuff I should know
(3) Stuff I'd like to know
(4) Stuff I don't care about

Content shortening/summarization helps augment our ability to quantify what fits into 2, 3, and 4. If I read the first paragraph of a traditionally written journalistic piece, I know where it fits before the second paragraph. But a precious small percentage of online content is written in that manner -- first paragraph giving the reader enough information to know what to do next. (There's a whole rant on our lost ability to write, but that's for later.) So since a smaller and smaller percentage of potentially viable information is written traditionally, automated summaries (should) help us decide sooner where something fits.

Does that make sense or am I just spewing madness?
I always assumed those were set aside as unlicensed spectrum and that was why so many things existed along those bands. Probably also some propagation characteristics?
2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me.
http://vimeo.com/22053820 <-- Watch it!
Fifty percent upfront. Unless it's a smaller project. Then, it's 100% payment upfront. No exceptions.
"Bush Sr. is the weakest point of the theory. He's pretty flat however you look at him."

Words tossed around when he started his campaign were "efette", "wimp", and "unmanly". Obvious slurs, but he had a lot of public perception to get over.
I think Freshbooks makes it easier to bill (it sends the invoice in an email), easier to pay (they can click on a link and use their credit card) and provides a 3rd party record. Also since its completely online, there is no excuse related to waiting for things to go back and forth in the mail.

Usually if they don't pay right away I explain to them that I need them to always pay within a day or two. If they forget to pay after that, one extra email or IM is usually enough.

You might have to actually call them.

I also tend to not work on a project between the time that an invoice goes out and when it is paid.

From my experience once they are actually aware of the bill they usually pay within 0-3 days. If it takes longer than that, maybe you can get better clients.
Does anyone use a payment escrow? Like what some market places like Elance provide?
What price range are the projects? If you don't mind me asking.
Building visual workflows for Openshift
This is a pet project I have been working on for some time. It's a NodeJS/HTML5 web app that lets you connect to any OpenShift PaaS deployment and define workflows for the deployment of your app.

The project is still under development. I would love to hear what you guys think. So I can incorporate your comments and suggestions in the projects!
I can't help feeling that there's some of the ingredients needed to create an entirely new form of health insurance in here.

I'm ridiculously glad its working as well as it is. Its like watching the start of an avalanche. You don't really know what exactly is going to happen, but the ground is rumbling and you're sure its going to be huge and exciting.
Ghosts of WW2 Blended Into Present Day Pictures
I feel totally stupid for not knowing this. That's counteracted by what I now know is possible, though:

"Additionally, microwaves can melt certain types of rocks, producing small quantities of synthetic lava"

I know what I'm making for Thanksgiving.
As a primarily CRUD developer, I use mod all the time. Primarily for zebra striping in browsers that don't support :even or related CSS.
I'm a little confused because your original statement seems to contradict your preferences here. You originally made a claim to know what morality is (or at least, where it comes from) and what is moral, without indicating your source for this knowledge in any way. And of course, this conversation is predicated on an implied agreement that morality exists, which is not necessarily a given.
Ajmal Kasab 26/11 terrorist who attacked Mumbai hanged
How can I get in contact with you? No email in your profile.
At the time there was very little going on that high up in the band, it seems that the US rep at the ITU Atlantic City conference was pushing for it to be a worldwide standard because of the possibility that the then fridge sized ovens (raytheon radarrange) would be used on ships, which would of course travel to other regulatory domains.

I don't think propagation was a factor at the time, as there doesn't seem to be anything special about that frequency. The S-band is also around there which works fine for long distance.

You're right, 500 won't go very far, but I was sceptical that anyone would care enough for it to get going at all! Great to see the response so far though. Happy to answer any questions - Hugh
Not that big a deal. Most floating point numbers are imprecise rounded values to the degree of precision that is being used. An imprecise binary representation of an already imprecise rounded value at the edge of precision really doesn't matter - and if it does the problem is that you probably needed more precision in the first place.
This is what I do. I only have one main client, and it's a more-or-less ongoing arrangement, but I invoice on the 1st & 16th and give a percentage discount if they pay within 10 days.
First thing is the payment schedule. I usually do 45% deposit, 45% at the end of the work, 10% when the site goes live. This ensure that I get at least 90% of the contract.

Also, have complete Terms and conditions.
One important point is all the intellectual property that goes with your work => until complete payment, the work is yours, and usage of it is illegal. With final payment, I usually issue a letter transferring the intellectual property to the client.

An other important point is all the payment and refund policy. My policy is simple : no refund, projects started are to be paid in full. If the clients needs an explanation for that, explain that while you dedicate yourself to his project, you have to say no to other projects.

Make it easy to get paid. Set up an online payment system or anything that makes the relation frictionless. Even if it cost you a bit, it makes payment way faster to arrive (no need to go to the bank or post office, find the checkbook...).

One saying I like : Until you sign the contract, you have to be the mum of your clients, reassuring him, explaining things, understanding him. Once signed, you are his father : you are here to reminds him the terms of the contract. It means that you have to be thorough on revisions, delivery dates for contents, and of course, payments.

Trust your guts with clients. Usually, in my experience, clients who are hard to get payments from are the one hard to handle from the start. Usually individuals pr small companies, who try to get more for less. And know also that you have the right to fire a client if you feel that things go bad.

But the best way to get paid : make outstanding work, be nice and understanding. Know when you have to charge for a request and when it can be free. Little treats are always nice if it cost you close to nothing and it has value for the client.

I love this one : http://vimeo.com/22053820