skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Riddles, logic puzzles, "write some code on the whiteboard" ....

It took me years to realize that these are not tests of technical ability, they are tests of submissiveness.

For example, if you are being interviewed by someone at the same level as you for some position -- and they pull such crap -- now you know how low their expectations of the employer are.

And if you are being interviewed by someone fairly senior relative to the position -- and they ask you such BS interview questions -- you can be damn sure that they themselves would laugh at and walk away from any interviewer that did that to them.

So when you give the clever answer and wait for your gold star... you've established your place in the order of things.
How I feel about things like this: If you're interested in doing the programming challenge, you should do it, because it's interesting to you (and so that company tries to give its employees problems that are interesting/has employees that find the same problems interesting as you do). If not, then you're right, it's a lot of time to spend on it. But learning how to go about programming that is certainly not, in my view, a waste of time, or at least no more a waste of time than doing an edifying class assignment. So, in essence, they're filtering for people that enjoy solving interesting coding challenges in their free time. If I'm a company, that is probably a reasonably good filtering mechanism, and if I'm a potential employee, I likely want to be around people who like solving these sorts of things on their own.

Also, this isn't as tough a challenge as you make it out to be: writing the game of life is, at most, a 2-hour assignment. So writing a game-of-life-reverser might tack on an extra 30 min. to hour. Then, you just hand-code in the gif into a game of life board, and run it through your reverser. Unless your gif is really large, in which case it might be a little more annoying, but probably not drastically so.
I think a great title for the security chapter should be Django Unchained.

I look forward to reading this- Thanks.
Why Larry Page Argues That Thinking About Competition Is Silly
As someone in a long distance relationship, it would be awesome to be able to visit my SO over a weekend spontaneously if the flight price were below a certain threshold. I currently have to manually search Kayak which is a bit suboptimal.

Equally awesome would be the ability to query something like "Show me all round trips in the next three months that take off Friday at 8 and return Sunday at 8, and that are below 100$ for this destination". I haven't been able to find this kind of feature yet, and it looks like a simple MySQL query.
I guess it depends on what you are raising the cash for and how much you need to raise. If it is mostly to give you and/or your team a living stipend while you develop the product full-time, there are a number of tech incubators you could choose from or you could try to raise a few months salary from angel investors like me.

If you are using the cash more to buy an asset or equipment ( e.g. a food truck ), then you could try pitching it to a bank. I don't think they would go for it, but at least they would have collateral. If you have a personal car, you could try offering that for collateral as well.

- Part-time consulting. If you are able to consult 20 hours a week, that should be enough cash to cover a modest cost of living and maybe some extra to invest in your start-up. A lot of companies start this way. They build specific products for their clients and eventually develop a product/service of their own. Check out 37Signals story on how Basecamp came along.

- If you are developing an enterprise-level tool, you could try to pre-sell it to a large firm first and have them pay an advance. This is tricky, but possible if you are building a certain type of product and have the right experience/connections.

- Build an MVP in your spare time and start charging for it. You may be able to skip the financing step altogether. Either way, you'll have more luck raising funds if you already have some, but maybe not enough to be profitable, paying customers.

- Personal Savings

Some riskier ways to get cash:

- Cash in a portion of your 401k ( you'll pay a 10% early withdrawal penalty + taxes )

- Home Equity Line if you have enough equity in your home. Careful with this because you are gambling your home. Make sure that if the start-up fails, you'd be able to get a job making enough cash to cover the additional debt service on the equity line.

- Personal line of credit. You pay high interest rates and won't be able to borrow that much ( ~25k or so ). You've probably gotten offers like this in the mail before. Your credit card company sends you a blank check and says 6 months no interest loan. Same as above, if the startup doesn't make it, make sure you'll be able to handle the additional finance charge ( which will be crazy high ). Please don't do this one.
How to Animate Transitions Between Multiple Charts
It's a common misconception that ruby developers think that predicates must return a boolean value. It's still a misconception. This blog post linked elsewhere in the discussion is a good summary: http://blog.leshill.org/blog/2012/03/25/a-question-of-truth....

Another notable example is nonzero? which returns the value of the number if nonzero and nil otherwise:

jruby-1.6.8 :097 > 1.nonzero?
=> 1
jruby-1.6.8 :098 > 0.nonzero?
=> nil

See also File#world_writable? [1], File#world_readable? [2], File#size? [3], Kernel#autoload? [4], Encoding#compatible? [5]

If you rely on predicates always returning true/false you're in for a nasty surprise.

[1] http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/File.html#method-c-world_writable-3F
[2] http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/FileTest.html#method-i-world_readable-3F
[3] http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/File.html#method-c-size-3F
[4] http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Kernel.html#method-i-autoload-3F
[5] http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Encoding.html#method-c-compatible-3F
You're talking retrograde change (a change back to a prior state). But yes... the demographics obviously favor the Dems when it comes to Tech.
What about Cisco ... oh wait.
In terms of performance, wouldn't it be far faster to use strings and turn those into document fragments or setting innerHTML? I've been looking at ways to make crate much faster and it seems that would be the fastest solution by far.
I'm asking why they refuse to return the broken motherboards; they belong to the people having the laptop repaired.
What ClojureScript libraries are you using?

What other "regular" JS framework/libs do you use with ClojureScript (thinking about jQuery, Backbone, angular and the likes)?

About dommy, what made you choose DOM vs String generation (knowing the later could be faster in some situations/setups)?

And the last one, did you consider EDN? I'd guess you choose json for obvious performance reasons.
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland
This looks fantastic and the timing couldn't have been better for me. It's been a while that I started a new Django project and I was looking for exactly this type of best practices just this afternoon.
I've been looking for django books that use 1.4 but didn't find anything, so great news for me. Purchased it right away and can't wait to give it a read this weekend. Thanks!
If an interviewee said they'd do something, and then didn't do it, it would be regarded as an integrity problem.
> prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges.

The original charges or the pile of wire fraud charges added at a later time to make for good press? She used her discretion to add piles of charges on him and then claims she didn't want a long prison sentence. At the very least what she said is inconsistent.
I guess I consider tablets mobile devices. But even so, my other examples still hold and there are lots more out there who focus only on smartphones and usually only iPhones.
World is moving towards a de facto Gold Standard
People who have any kind of trouble communicating verbally with normal native speakers of the language in which business is to be transacted, are not a great choice for jobs which require clear communication.
I think the sign that the VC-istan technology world is terminally fucked is that we even have "celebrities" in the first place.

Aaron Swartz may not have been a technological heavyweight. Nor am I. Nor are 99.x percent of the people reading this. That's not so bad. What is bad is that there's so much complete nonsense in our so-called "scene" that no one seems to give a rat's ass about actual technology anymore. It's poorly understood, not rewarded, and the arena is so full of bike-shedding narcissists it's impossible not to get enraged.

Also, -1 for mentioning Brian Behlendorf. I looked him up on Wikipedia and he works for the World Economic Forum, which is more commonly known for Davos Fascism.
You need to lighten up..I bet you're a blast at parties.
I agree that her role, and the role of her office, in Aaron's prosecution suggests the exact opposite, but that's an entirely different question.

It isn't, though. That she comes out with this attitude afterwards is absolutely self-serving and cannot be relied on as an accurate description of her motivations. The "hey, well, that was just the press release" claptrap should be completely disregarded as a mitigating rationale for the ass-covering bullshit that it is.

This leaves us with the "hey, Congress passed these laws, don't look at me," attitude that, as Jacques astutely points out, removes her agency from her actions.

The concept and practice of prosecutorial discretion, however, casts the lie to that position. Barthes and Derrida's "death of the author" is not a force in the law, so Ortiz attempting to play The Cog role should be seen as nothing more than sarcasm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author
I'm sure there are plenty of regional PBR equivalents. In Austin, it's Lone Star. I rarely see PBR, but I see plenty of hipsters.
How Google will let you control your Google Glass
> The negative is ChromeOS itself for an educational environment. It's a fine machine for doing Internet research and light writing, but more traditional OSes allow for more experimentation and learning. You won't be messing around with video editing on these in any significant way.

A video editing course would be better served by a computer lab. 99% of students aren't going to need to install Final Cut on their school computer and it would be a huge waste to make sure that was possible.
Moved from SF to Manhattan 6 months ago, this characterization is no longer entirely accurate. Manhattan now is barely more expensive than SF, and most of SF is more expensive than most of Brooklyn.

People aren't really aware of just how fast cost of living is going up in SF. Manhattan averaged, what, 5-6% year over year, and we think that's high. Some neighborhoods in SF have experienced >100% YoY rent growth, but more typically in the 30-50% range (seriously!).

It's really insane out there, to an extent most people outside of SF don't know.

Right now in any of the "cool" neighborhoods of SF a studio would be cost comparable to one in the Upper East Side or Chelsea, though you'd probably get a bit more space for your money (not by that much though). It'll be a lot more expensive than any of the gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods, but probably slightly cheaper than the real gentrified bastions like Park Slope or Dumbo.

SF is fucking nuts, that's all I can say.
Most of vendors are on aliexpress.

For hardware acceleration only GK802 has it currently. You can purchase it from this thread - http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2044045

If you don't need hardware acceleration there is an Ubuntu version for UG802 and MK808 - code.google.com/p/rk3066-linux/wiki/PicUntu.
1. Using recent django (1.4+) will get you _very good_ password storing security. Use HTTPS and you're "as good as anybody else". no persona/openid needed
2. Django has signed cookie sessions (optional to be used) and a solid signing library. This ensures that the data that is returned is the same as the data that was stored. This doesn't mean that a cookie can't be hijacked, so you should take care to have acceptable timeouts and such.

These two things are the building blocks of secure sessions and passwords that work well in distributed systems.
FYI to folks considering this, there are absolutely laws that can impact you should you attempt this.

It's called FAA FAR 101 (FAR101):
http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&rgn=div5&...

You should be aware of the risks and proper handling of something that would be dangerous for commercial aircraft or people below.

I know the whole "Big Sky" theory, but eventually if enough people do this, it's gonna get hit by a jet.

Ingestion of this at 30,000 ft will wreck an engine or wrap around control surfaces, potentially rendering them inoperable. Those would probably be recoverable, but if it sheared off pitot tubes in just the right way - it could be a disaster.

I hate to be a wet blanket but - although these images are stunning - it's not something we should be doing without serious consideration of the possible risks or taking the appropriate precautions.
Incredible: Post by Aaron Swartz describes exactly his prosecutor's reaction.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis
It is not clear that whitespace sensitivity has ever been a good idea in any language. In jade, it is often just encourages the antipattern of hardcoded hierarchy and throwaway templates rather than reusable abstraction. We like actual abstraction more than trivial syntactic suger.
I have a son in 6th grade, and this year marked the start of him getting a limited google account via the school that he uses to do homework. I don't know the extent to which the teachers can see what the students do, but they do presentations, writing and web research all in the confines of their google account. My son uses the Chromebook we have at home to access his account and do homework.
Not my area of expertise, but from my understanding fog is a "local" phenomena, not large enough to dramatically effect temperatures the way that atmospheric pressure / humidity can.
It boils down to whether or not internet apps will completely replace desktop apps. Since the majority of higher-ups at Google stem from the internet era, they're in position to heavily push Chrome OS as internet-as-desktop and undermine Android's potential.
This is great. As a new Django developer one of my most frequent Google queries is "best practices about x in django". I am thrilled to finally have so much of that stuff in one place.
I grew up outside of DC, and people would say it there as well.
As someone who lives around and deals with these people every day, let's call a spade a spade and not cover it up. Have you seen a zombie movie lately? These people basically ARE zombies - they hobble around, mutter to themselves, smell like shit, randomly attack people, and will infect you with disease if you touch them.

Whether they scream at/spit on/push around my sister or female employees because they are on crack, mentally ill, or just in a bad mood, I could care less. They need to be removed from the area because they are a real and present threat to public safety.

I would happily donate money to move them all to a camp outside the city where they can scream at trees and smoke tea leaves all day but for whatever reason the powers that be seem content to leave them where they are, which directly places the rest of us in harm's way.
I'm getting one for a monitoring dashboard. It's unfortunate that it doesn't have a VGA or DVI port (for me preferably VGA) and only has video output over HDMI. It would seem that if you were creating a cheap computer to be used to tinker and learn it would support video output that would be used to connect it to inexpensive computer monitors.

Thankfully adapters aren't that expensive.
The only reason she brought up Congress was to shift blame.
I'm also amazed how well they are doing. Do they have some kinda online survey patent or do competitors just suck that much?
Introducing Immutant Pipelines
Obviously it's a generalization that only describes statistical aggregates (much like your claim about diminishing marginal utility).
I don't understand why we keep us in the word "democratize" when it comes to increasing individual freedom with technology. Democracy is the tyranny of the majority; we aren't voting to see who gets to produce or consume what. It's a pet peeve of mine because it's simply used as a buzzword and makes no sense in a technological context.
Oops, Hipmunk does IP tracking in the email, but I pasted in a link that was prepopulated for San Francisco. Sorry about that :)
Tarsnap [1] does that too.

[1] http://www.tarsnap.com/
Considering purchasing since I was thinking of diving into django for my next project..

If I buy the PDF now, and you eventually release an EPUB or other format, will I get access to those files (with updates) as well?
I'm not totally sure what you're asking. I've never seen a change made to one desktop made automatically to the others. The problem I do run in to is that when I open a program for the first time it seems to appear in one of my desktops at random. When that happens I just three finger swipe up and drag the window to the desktop it belongs in. I never limit a program to one desktop, I just move its window there if it gets out of place.

These things really aren't too much of an issue for me though, mostly because I am loath to ever close a window or restart a program, which leads to everything happily sitting where I placed it.
It weakens it but it certainly doesn't defeat it. Guessing entire files is generally much harder than guessing encryption keys, and we don't exactly think of brute force as defeating the purpose of encryption.
I guess I shouldn't write HN comments and have a meeting at the same time :) Rewrote it; hope it's clearer now. I'm just curious if anyone saw this behavior.

An official Apple partner repair shop close to Utrecht actually repaired my macbook which got over drenched because of a cat jumping in a bucket accident :) No questions asked and within the Apple care warranty, but they too refused to return the motherboard upon request.
I always pre-amble a quiz

I dunno. That sort of defeats the objective of assessing that person's natural reaction to a little interview pressure. It's not water boarding, it's a simple programming or logic puzzle that requires most people to think.
Test them more directly on tasks similar to what you will need them to do?
Actually, we do our numerical work in clojure too and make heavy use of mutable java data structures - and it's a joy to program in Clojure for these tasks.
> Just a few months ago AAPL had a similar 15x P/E ratio.

Exactly, and what has substantially changed in their business since then? Nothing, which is why the depression in the share price is weird/suspicious.
>These two links will clear up a lot of misconceptions you seem to have about this case.

Do they? The first analyses the law given a stated set of assumptions about the facts. If Swartz was able to successfully dispute some of those alleged facts (many of which came from the indictment), it could completely change the outcome. And the second basically punts on the specific issue of whether the plea offered was appropriate or not, describing the legal standard but declining to apply it to the case.

Both posts are excellent if you want to get a feel for the law surrounding this case from someone who legitimately knows what he's talking about, but whether what the prosecutors did was appropriate depends substantially on the actual facts, which Kerr has no better access to than the rest of us.

To hear Aaron's defense counsel tell it, the facts show that he was completely innocent. And if you accept that version of the facts rather than the one in the indictment, it seems especially difficult to conclude that what prosecutors did was appropriate.
Thank you - my thoughts too

I cannot trust anything returned from a client so it seems best to Only return one thing from the client

As for a carefully vetted security pro - that's great but I am looking for basic generic best practises (we know that has evolved from md5 hashes to bcrypt but what else is there?)

It seems either a hole in my education or a hole in general common knowledge
Glad to see that you're using Gumroad, but here's an alternative place to sell "previews" of the book -- http://timebx.com/.

Might be worth a shot later down the road when you are trying to sell to a less captive audience (as compared to the HN crowd).
Yeah, I think this was explained in a confusing way. Other articles have said that for every product Apple ships, there are two alternative designs and 17 prototypes that don't ship. But sure, every product that passes the "ready to ship" internal milestone ships.

If I was going to complain about Apple's competitors, I'd complain that they ship too many products, including half-baked ones like Kin and the TouchPad.
The project layout structure is great. All Django developers should follow this.
Any thoughts on commuting the other direction? I.e., living towards Palo Alto and commuting by train to SOMA?
Yes, when you're young people make all sorts of hype about your minor accomplishments.

Isn't that what VC-istan and acq-hire welfare checks are for, though? To make phony celebrities then tear them down? With a few notable and impressive exceptions, that whole machine stopped doing technology some time ago. Most of these "startups" (at least in NYC, which may be a different scene) are hare-brained marketing experiments and treat engineers poorly.
> Because in some situations, this is literally the only means you have to get someone off your network. I'm arguing that it is possible and fairly straightforward to tell why your MAC address got banned

Of course that might be the only means to remove someone from layer2 of your network. I don't disagree. I think there are reasons for spoofing MAC addresses (like having it randomized on startup) are complete legitimate and indicate nothing about intent.

> If this happened on my company's network, the next step would be tracking the person down with physical security and letting them know the police would be enforcing the ban next time.

Absolutely. I just don't think wire fraud should be tacked on to their other crimes on your network just because their MAC address changed.
OpenStack 101: What Is OpenStack?
Yes I agree, they are a pretty amazing idea.
I saw PBR in wholefoods the other day here in Portland, OR. I was kind of shocked. I always considered PBR to be on par with Milwaukee's Best... In other words, nasty cheap beer that people only drink to get drunk.

So I'm wrong?
The Everywhereelse.co Conference - A Conference for Startups Everywhere Else
With all respect, I think your's is the "maker idealist" position on this movement. There are many reasons why economies of scale (which are due to physics / engineering problems) will continue to exist in manufacturing - even if many methods are democratized and available locally (a la TechShop today).

I've written on this recently: http://www.nickpinkston.com/2013/01/some-thoughts-on-digital...
A startup.... charity organization?

I mean, I suppose that could technically be considered a thing, but I don't think it is really in the spirit of most startups considered in HN. It's not like they are a profit driven enterprise.
You have to do a marginal analysis, looking at the incremental benefit as you go from "no government" to "government."

That's not a marginal analysis. A marginal analysis would be going from "slightly lower taxes, slightly less government" to "slightly higher taxes, slightly more government".

You seem to want to debate (all by yourself) primitive tribal society vs civilization.