skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a very, very large difference between eyeballs on a person and wide-scale archived surveillance. The Supreme Court ruling against warrantless GPS trackers on cars (whereas warrantless 24-hour surveillance is okay) is an outstanding example, and that one ignores the fact that human memory is pretty crappy when it comes to evidence.

That being said, I think widespread cameras are simply something people are an inevitability that people are going to have to get used to, warts and all.
Agreed. I think it's the process that's the most important.
If you see a programming language as a tool like photoshop you certainly can see the renting car point.

I don't think every Java Coder would be able to tell how the internal mechanics of Java work. They aren't Java mechanics, they're just driving Java.
The name sucks. Makes me feel like cattle on the block.
Nah, this turned out to be interpretation error; the Street View driver acted ethically. See other comments on this page.
Great answer, the app / front page both look good, and congrats on the HN front page publicity =). (I don't have an iPhone or a HR monitor myself, sadly, or I'd give it a spin.)
This is not my crowdfunding project and I do not expect/hope that this project succeeds. I just thought it was pretty hilarious that this person wants my money to help fund a magazine all about crowdfunding even though I can see on his profile that he has failed at every crowdfunding attempt he has made.
Yeah, I should have been clearer, I mean activities that aren't relevant to the job - working on an open source project would be relevant to me. But you are right that some things could be positives, like a leadership position in an honor society.

"Snowboarding" would be neutral, whereas my brother says he considers it a positive (we both enjoy snowboarding/skiing). "President of the campus <insert political party here>" would be a negative for me, regardless of the political affiliation. My brother said he could see it as a positive or a negative, probably depending on the affiliation.
The initial offer could be finessed/streamlined/de-risked further with the investor offering to pay the 5k to an individual on the conditions that they are (a)customer No1 for the product and (b)a member of a community where they can (prior to receiving cash) or have (proof required) identified a demand for the product/idea among their peers. This lends from the theory of the deep and narrow well / 1000 true fans methodology for customer discovery/early adopter critical mass.
Punk Rock Politics?
As long as the interviewer treats it like that I'd be fine with it. If they are playing things the way you describe then answering a question with "why does it matter?" would be a viable response and you'd be open to discussion about it.

The real world problem is that too many interviews follow the model because that's what they know from past experience themselves. They may not know why they ask such baseless questions, all they know is the answer they want and damn you if you don't give it to them.
I came to the same idea. One of my New Years resolutions was to really learn a Lisp so I can finally see what the big deal is. I'm doing so by rewriting various utilities I use often (nc, ls, etc) in Scheme (Racket actually). It's great fun so far!
One of the responses, fourth from the bottom:

> Not sure if either of you guys are still looking for a lackey to build models and fetch coffee, but this kid could be worth a conversation

Does "build models" mean what I think it does - actually coming up with the mathematical method that projects risk, return, etc ? And if so, is the author being sarcastic, or do they really consider this to be unimportant work best passed off to an intern ?
> I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark.

Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?
From Foundation? NSDictionary, NSArray and NSOperation instantly jump to mind.
Point is that nobody asked him.

Would you prefer that I "assume" you might be interested in buying something from my close advisor and pass on your name and address to him as well if you buy something from me?
People are excited because many reports suggested that, "in the future", Google Glass might support all sorts of great augmented reality features.

People will be disappointed because, for the foreseeable future, Google Glass will be just an awkwardly-held standard mobile display with a camera.
The Effects of Education as an Institution
"could easily be tweaked slightly for any job/industry."

I disagree. This can work well for an intern position because whatever this guy wrote in the email, is a greaet pitch to be an intern. But if I am looking for a specialist in a particular niche/industry, at best I would be impressed by such email but will not hire him just because he talks straight.
"People are trying to hire him" seems like a bit of a stretch based on the article. I see a lot of "Haha, I might even give him a call," but no, "I want to hire this kid!"
The App Design Handbook now carried by PragProg
"This email is confidential and subject too... "

It's written right at the bottom of the original.
Looks like Shipping/Postage APIs are about to heat up:

https://www.postmaster.io/
This mirrors my experience almost exactly.

We focused on optimizing _signup_ conversions, succeeded and ended up in the same position as Kera.

I've been considering adding a "qualification form" during signup that evaluates whether the product is right for them, and even recommends competitors that might be more suitable for their specific situation.

Looking forward to hearing your results.
Everything We Know So Far About Drone Strikes
The criticism is laughable. It amounts to saying that because most people aren't Chomsky, and I am not Chomsky, Chomsky must not be Chomsky either. But the man is simply prodigious, as even his detractors routinely admit. There are countless examples.
How about changing the quote to "HelloSign for Gmail is awesome! I'm putting my bets on it!"
Hiring practices of Google and Amazon are very unrepresentative of smaller companies and more heavily emphasize general intelligence, prestigious background and background in computer science. As you say, it's about the process of working a problem more than experience with specific tools.

However, most companies are smaller than Google and Amazon and have different practices. Sometimes, stupid practices, because the interviewers don't really know how to do it, just want to get it over with, or really care about things which aren't important.

But since they are in the hiring position and assume they and their company are awesome, they are not so likely to question their own technical or interviewing abilities and certainly don't want to hear what interviewees have to say about it.

You need additional insights beyond just doing the job to understand what makes someone else useful in that job. And if you don't even have that much, you are guaranteed to ask stupid questions and end up with people selected for how good they are at selling and how much you think they're cool.
So sue me.
I love Gravatar... as user.

But maybe because I'm a developer.
You missed the point of the article. It's not what version of Python he's using or what libraries already exist. It's about creating an understanding of simple methods for numerically solving equations.

> Isn't Python 2.7 the version usually used

Yes. But because the 2.x series is backward compatible, you will be able to run 2.6 code on 2.7. Honestly, if he was writing on 2.7 the code probably would look identical. For that matter, it would probably look identical on Python 3, except for print statements.

> using the R language

I'm not familiar with R, I always thought it was more for statistics like curve fitting or ANOVA. (I actually am not really sure what ANOVA is, but stats people seem to like that word, so I'll toss it out there.) Sage [1] would be the tool I'd turn to for symbolic equation solving.

[1] http://sagemath.org
How Counterfeit iPhones are dealt with in Russia
Yeah, I'm confused as to why this was so shocking to the point where it was circulated and warranted a blog post. I've written equally as innocent "just looking to be around talented folks even if it means.." cover letters to companies I respected. In fact, that's what a lot of the design agencies I've worked for got the most of.
The only thing that matters about a landing page is how successful it is at converting.

Who cares if it has blinking text and a giant animated under construction sign? If it converts, it's good.
School is a filter you apply before you take the effort to figure out whether someone is a "good candidate." The uphill battle for people from no-name schools is to give hiring managers an alternative reason to put in that effort.

That seems to be exactly what this kid did. He knew he wouldn't get past the hiring filter, so he went out of his way to make a contact in real life and then follow up with an eye-catching e-mail.
It really depends on where you are. In NYC it's actually pretty hot.
I think some comments mention how this could be useful to track the heart rate (Athletes?Babies?Elderly people?) and surely that seems like a great idea.

And of course I don't think any harm can come to someone using your app. It's certainly 'something' on a wishy washy path to some enlightenment through external means ...

The mindset that a person must acquire in order to meditate and truly benefit from it, cannot be attained with an App, as the very 'thing' is yet another obstacle to detachment.

In any event I wish you all the luck in the world on your own path ...
Ordinarily I'd brush off comments about a site's name. Rarely does it matter enough to actually care. But in this case, yeah, it gives me a radically negative connotation.
Recent HN discussion on the parallels here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5051164 (admittedly, not a strong discussion)
I am sorry. It is true, didn't think of it at the time of writing.
Being unemployed doesn't mean you have no rights. It's just basic politeness to respect that.
If the only hiring companies are early-stage VC-backed startups in the Bay Area, that's not very interesting to me. That's the impression I got.
We love Python and it makes for easy-to-read code snippets! Internally we do make use of the fact that LevelDB sorts objects by key.
If an app designed to help you meditate is getting you really excited, is it a success or a failure?
I can't seem to find the "San Francisco" option. Am I overlooking something?
>But when positions do gain support, things really do change. We've passed constitutional amendments outlawing slavery, giving women the vote, and instituting civil rights. Jesus Christ, do you understand just how hard getting each of those things passed was? Do you understand how many entrenched and powerful interests had to be overcome? Do you understand just how little shouting that democracy doesn't work would have accomplished when faced with moral injustices like that?

People often forget that the fact that the US moves slowly (glacially, I often feel) is frustrating but a GOOD THING. As much as things may be unfortunate right now, they are unfortunate situations we can live with. Far more worrying (to me, anyway) are radical motions that change our country drastically without much debate. Want some examples? Look at post 9/11/01 us government. We passed the patriot act exactly a month and a half later and started two wars.

Yea, I really wish that we could have tax reform, gay marriage, regulated cannabis, etc etc, but not without extensive debate: generally, a conservative (in the rate-of-change sense) country is far more stable than one that is purely held sway to public opinion.

Anyway, petitions really have nothing to do with democracy. It's just a way of people getting their voice heard at the White House, and if you think it's anything more, you're delusional.
So is replying to emails with the original message intact :(
As just the kind of 100% no person I need to convince, does our explanation of our model http://forum.jgraph.com/questions/4323/is-draw-io-here-to-st... not sway you at all?
If you hire someone who is boring and has no obvious problem but isn't very productive, you have your ass covered. His lack of productivity is his fault. If you hire someone exceptionally useful with some notable problem, or even just some notable flavor someone doesn't like, it is something you should have noticed and you are liable. A lot of companies want an unblemished calf more than they want a Zed Shaw.
I'm wondering if it's possible to determine the authorship of the letter as well as the identity of several people mentioned, based on the pixel widths of characters in the font used.
From looking the petition page, this petition may have been grandfathered-in. (It says "SIGNATURES NEEDED BY FEBRUARY 11, 2013 TO REACH GOAL OF 25,000: 0")

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...
This is starting to look like some horrible regex nightmare!
Proportional web design
Regarding passive candidates...I think curation really helps but the product also needs to be focused on quality over quantity and easy to turn on/off. Pitchbox was built more to be a low-commitment & simple private way for developers to tell us their goals around compensation/tech/team/product and then passively monitor what interesting opportunities might be out there...basically "Here is what I'm looking for, let me know only once you find it."
Yeah, if I were looking for an internship, I'd hate to have my cover letter and resume circulated on personal emails where it's sure to be read closely.

Exactly, in this specific case it is a net positive! That's plenty of reason to ignore the implications of the underlying behavior.
Why no one asks questions that show deep understanding of the work and not technical details that can be googled in a second.

Like - can you land Curiosity with off the shelf java and JVM? Why or why not?
maybe it really, really is that rare to these guys
I suspect that footer got added by the first person who forwarded the email, not by the original sender. Random people sending cover letters don't tend to add crazy confidentiality footers to email; business email systems do that.
Wouldn't you consider that a very extreme situation? Also, I am not aware of a MAX_INT in python. As far as I know it is the limits of your memory. If you are trying to work with such big numbers you should really use something a little more than Python and Bisection.
No, I'll have to disagree here. I've spent around 10 years in several universities both in Europe and the US and most of them are closed during weekends and you can't walk around and touch experiments when no one is around.

MIT is special in its openness, or at least the Medialab is (you can't really walk in any lab of the Physics department).
Yes, it is worth reading this about how Tiger Style got their target market wrong:

http://www.edge-online.com/features/success-on-greenlight-is...
Why are we ignoring Aaron Swartz's mental illness in this whole conversation?
Why is everyone ignoring the fact that Aaron struggled with depression long before his prosecution? I genuinely want to understand why everyone has taken this lens and minimized what appears to be a very important underlying issue.
I summarized the essence of why I disagree with the article, and with what Chomsky said. I cannot address all the low-level details here and give a precise rebuttal to everything.

So I acknowledge that I have taken it out of context, but in a more neutral sense. That's just the nature of taking a very detailed point of view, and trying to discuss it on HN with people who have totally different underlying assumptions.

I do want to thank you for explaining why you downvoted me, and for standing up against the person who called me an "imbecile" in a different comment. I really value this community and even when we disagree on philosophy, it's really good when we can all be civil to each other.
I'd argue your brothers approach is just as valid as yours for either industry. You both hire for "cultural fit", just your ideas of what "culture" is differs.
Yes, sorry, I'm not trying to step on any spiritual toes.

I'm just trying to build a platform for people who are already completely lost in the distractedness of our digital culture.

For instance, I initially purchased a heart rate monitor to track my running, to make sure I was getting to 60-80% maximum heart rate for 20 minutes.

After my initial 30 runs or so, I didn't need the monitor anymore, and I no longer run with it.

In the same way, I just view this as a tool, not a path to enlightenment or anything else. Just a tool for people to become more conscious of the way their body and mind works.

And thanks for the wishes of luck. The same to you.
I kind of agrees with the above.
Car Mechanics dont build the car parts or research into how to build the most efficient engine, but do need to know how to apply the knowledge of those parts. The best car mechanics can apply the science but may not be the best car researchers. Thats why in my opinion, some questions do make sense for a car mechanic.

If you were using the photoshop analogy, then I think to interview someone, you need to ask them how different features of Photoshop work, not how Photoshop was built but also not how they draw in general, IMO. You may be a great artist, but if you can't understand Photoshop features and what they mean you will fail to create a great digital painting.
mostly accurate?
No, that's not the only one I'm referring to. By downvoting I mean general downvoting, not just reaching <= 0. It happened in some cases, that the score of a comment kept going up and down for a while, without anyone replying.
Would you consider writing a post that explains the high-level (conceptual) differences between CSS, DSSL, FOSI and Word?
You don't need all machines in the same data center. Latency between machines does have effects on performance, so it is faster in a single data center.
The issue is the author openly admitted to them sending these letters out for laughs when they are from people trying to blow themselves out of proportion.
He wants to work for a summer in finance (sounds like a trading floor rather than the investment bank), is mastering in accounting and taking the LSAT to go to law school... Sounds focused. I can think of more direct paths into corporate law...
Why would you scrap your work?
"Now this is not our first mobile apps, we’ve made some in the past that got after a few months (without any advertisement) 30k downloads"

Quick tip. Cross promote your new app to your established audience.
This must be the most effective and efficient example of outsourcing I've ever heard. Normally it costs 60-80% of salary to get an equivalently productive team and you still need to hire a full time PM to manage them.

This smells too good to be true.
I think in this and many other industries, people that are otherwise talented and intelligent individuals write these types of "trumped up" resumes only because they know that everyone else is doing it. If they don't also exaggerate the truth and try to talk up their strengths, then they fear being overlooked. It's not necessarily that anyone is being "fooled" by the exaggerated resumes, it just means that everyone sounds the same and it's just a game that both parties are forced to play. It's hard to distinguish on a cover letter whether "led a team of..." means one other person or twenty other people, for instance.
> I'm sure there are more on each side. So did you do any of those?

Well, technically, how the hell would I know? :)

But, thanks for the comprehensive lists! I'm fairly new here!
MatterNet
That's a disingenuous argument and you know it. Shame on you for even pretending you believe that.
So is reading them.
A new kind of hackathon
WTF! Thousands of popups start coming out of the screen. I never asked for that...
Does this mean Hipache is likely to be dead in a couple of years?
How are metaphors processed in Kurzweil's PRTM?
For those of you interested in Ray Kurzweil's new Pattern Recognition Theory of the Mind, and metaphors in AI:<p>In "How to Create a Mind", Ray says:<p>“The third and most powerful method is the ability to combine two lists. One list can have a set of transformations that we have learned may apply to a certain category of pattern; the cortex will apply this same list of possible changes to another pattern. That is how we understand such language phenomena as metaphors and similes.”<p>How are these transformations encoded, how do they process other patterns?<p>One of Kurzweil's examples on this model of combining two lists follows:<p>“[...] certain phonemes may be missing in spoken speech (for example, “goin”). If we then learn a new spoken word (for example, “driving”), we will be able to recognize that word if one of its phonemes is missing even if we have never experienced that word in that form before."<p>How does this help us understand metaphors and similes? Here is my own example: “The guitar was made of air”. Here is a possible interpretation using Ray's model:<p>- list1 is a pattern encoding a transformation which converts a pattern into one of its defining characteristics, ie. list1(air) = lightness, list1(whale)=big, etc.
- list2 here is a pattern representing air<p>list1(list2) = lightness<p>In other words, the source of the metaphor is air and the target is X in “The guitar was made of X”. Through this metaphor, information is transferred from the source to the target.<p>All of this is hand-waving without an understanding of exactly how, in the examples given by Kurzweil, list1 makes its transformations in list2, within the PRTM.<p>Your thoughts are welcome!
Javier
The presence of other security holes doesn't invalidate the existence of this one.
I've spent some time thinking about this myself, and about time vs money tradeoffs. Depends on what you think prison is for. If it's rehab, rehabbing a group of friends doesn't seem to work. If it's a safe place to keep bad people, you're not keeping them there. If it's about punishment, then maybe.

But prison sucks not just because you have to eat crappy food. It's because you have to eat crappy food everyday. If a rotating crew each serves one day, what's that? I can go a day without eating. This is a sum of the parts less than the whole situation. And the key is that people in jail aren't free to pick their schedule. You don't get to swap out with a buddy so you can attend your sister's wedding. If you're stuck in a shitty place unless you get someone to cover your shift, you're not in prison. You're working at walmart.

Incidentally, I've read that hiring prison doubles is a thing in China. It's illegal, so you're effectively under house arrest for the duration to avoid detection, but you're also not in prison. The guy you hired to show up and say your name is.

If a sentence is outrageous, you get a crowd of people to march around and protest until the governor or president grants a pardon. That's the existing process to deal with exceptional circumstances.
I was expecting something more blunt. Pretty boring if you ask me.
Magazine restrictions are a separate law in most states. California has an assault weapon ban which restricts features such a pistol grips, collapsible stocks, and flash hiders. They have another law restricting the possession of magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds. Old magazines are grandfathered in, so you can use them in legal rifles.

It looks like the law is similar in DC. Possession of a magazine with >10 round capacity is a crime. Other firearm laws are irrelevant to the case you linked to.
I am even more confused why this is on top of HN receiving so many votes in the past hour.

Is the email really that unique? It seems pretty standard to me and even looks like boilerplate from one of those "how to write a cover letter for internships" articles out there.
I'm skeptical they've made me a better python progammer.

Maybe it hasn't, the whole idea is basically acquiring tacit knowledge and understanding through osmosis. That's why its hard to quantify how it should work.