skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This one is a matter of perspective. It's really not all that difficult to parse, but it feels icky depending on how you view the scope of "appropriate" behavior in method argument definitions.

Like many viewpoints, the "wrongness" of this example is not black & white; it's shades of gray. On one hand, you have the "anything that will eval is valid Ruby" view, and on the other you have the "If it's not immediately obvious to a beginner, you shouldn't do it" view. There may be better ways to express those two sides of the matter, but that's the general idea.

The problem with this code (from the latter viewpoint) is that it crams too much program logic in to the argument definitions. This example uses parenthesis to force the evaluation of default_given = true; nil` in the argument definition list. That's only two statements, but it violates some common expectations:

A) We generally expect argument definitions to be clear and readable, so that method definitions are self documenting (to some degree); this approach clutters the argument definitions

B) We expect argument definitions to sometimes assign default values

C) We expect program logic to appear in the body of a method, or to be DRY'd up in separate methods

In this way, the example is not "incorrect" but awkward. To borrow an idea from the literate programming camp, I'd say that just because you can write awkward sentences with valid grammar, it doesn't mean you should.
> The fact that it's a fee instead of tax means that the government cannot change how much money SVT should receive.

What do you mean? Politicians can change any law they wish. Unless it's in violation of the constitution. And I don't think withdrawing mandatory financial support to public broadcasting is prohibited in many constitutions.
pirate radio stations have a long history especially in London, they frequently try to take them down, but so do rival radio stations try to take out their competitors radio stations too.

Anyway, the FM band is still in use, see the furore over iTrip or similar devices that were at a time banned in the UK as the law said you needed a license to broadcast on FM.

The FM band is still in use and even when radio goes digital AFAIK the idea is that the FM band would be available for alternative use once radio stations no longer require it.
Your data is already out there on the open Internet. I could probably find your blood type based off your HN account.
The DTO Pattern: How to Generate PHP DTOs Quickly With DTOx
Hiring a competent and qualified security consultant/company to evaluate their services/processes, maybe?

The really good hackers are likely out getting paid good money for their work, and won't necessarily have time to poke at this for uncertain reward. There might be sufficient value in the publicity associated with finding flaws (especially while it's getting lots of media attention right now), but a competition/challenge is rarely a good economic choice for the potential entrants.

A bug bounty programme might be useful as a supplement to a rigorous security audit, but the issues discovered so far seem to be things that could have been identified by reasonably competent netsec people, indicating that such an audit either didn't happen, or wasn't acted upon.
Clinton's persuasive genius was on display in the last Democratic National Convention where he made clear what Obama had achieved, and the tactics the Republicans were using to try to stop him, in very clear, simple language everyone could understand.

I think Clinton and Jobs are more alike than different, in that respect.
I'm doing active work for a couple of companies that sell equipment to McD's and other fast foot joints. But we'll focus on McD's for the sake of this reply.

McDonald's is heavily invested in new technologies, but they are very conservative about deployment. If something like this did appeal to them, it would take a lot of field trials and monitoring before it went out. Remember that the corporation can specify certain equipment to produce their products, but in franchised stores those store owners need to do the actual purchase and maintenance of the equipment. They need buyin as well.

McDonald's also second-sources everything. If they say "this is the shake machine we recommend", there will be two competing companies making that type of machine. This is good business for a number of reasons. So something like this mega robot would never make it to the field without a duplicate style of machine being made by someone else.

As far as this robot goes, it's just too complex and too critical to base an entire restaurant upon. If it goes down, your entire operation is stalled for the duration of the repair. Doesn't matter if a technician is seated on a stool next to it 24 hours a day, you still can't guarantee when it will be running again. This type of technology just won't be able to compete with semi-skilled labor and simpler cooking devices for the mid to long-term.
Of course you're not. But that's not an objective assessment, and neither is the opposite view.

Jobs still managed to create products that a significant chunk of humanity subjectively enjoys. That's not easy.
This thing sounds almost purpose-built to enable a gourmet burger food truck business -- a restaurant niche where revenue is largely tied to how quickly a fixed number of staff can churn out food.

There's also plenty of inherent down time for that same small staff, technical entrepreneur or centralized maintenance crew, to clean/maintain the machines.

One could set up a 'fleet' of such trucks and a centralized 'headquarters' with cleaning, stocking, and technical staff to handle any necessary maintenance and repair, as well as centralized and scalable data-driven inventory management and routing.
Or perhaps don't like things you don't want other people to know about? Seems like the simplest solution.
(principally because most media companies start from and focus on the question: how do we serve advertising efficiently and profitably? It's not a side project.)

That right there is why a lot of programmers these days fail tomake any money with advertising. They see it as an add-on, rather than the product itself. Advertising is the product.
I do work in a (very) large company. I also managed to be fairly successful in ignoring the politics and just doing the job, raising issues with processes and problems in my and other teams when I saw them. If I'm ever punished for doing that, I'll start sending out my resume to other companies most likely.
That's my perception and experience, too.
As I stated on another comment, one of the main barriers to entry for me is the money to pay tuition while I am studying, with no guaranteed return, the question then is where to go from here, I don't want to let myself stagnate academically, so I want to at least do something to self improve and I feel that learning yet another language can only teach me so much, I've been toying with the though of an ICS course or something similar but none of the courses they offer are really any good.

(Disclaimer: I have already tried the Coursera courses and thought they were great but didn't really enjoy the format, I would however recommend the Dan Boneh Cryptography class, it taught me more than any other!)
As usual, read the paper instead [0]. It's short, clear, and easy to read. In particular, it applies only to plants, so the article's musings about jellyfish and elephants is off the mark and even addressed in the paper [1]. So is the irrelevant discussion of "pulse", which is oddly supported with video that is just played forward and backward.

The paper just claims to support some known, quantifiable correlations with some data. The correlations pertain to mortality rates and birth rates, and certainly suggests no formula for when to die, or causation of any sort for that matter. E.g, is it that bigger plants die less often, or that plants that die less often can get bigger? Does it matter?

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/104/40/15777.full

[1] "Whereas the action of selective processes on animal lifespan cannot extend through their entire lifespan because many lose reproductive capacity with age, this is not the case in plants, which generally remain reproductive throughout their lifespan, suggesting that lifespan could be under greater selective pressure in plants."
Something in the JS on the individual gallery pages is mauling my CPU. Bad carousel implementation?
I'm a firm believer in talent dilution being a huge problem, so if this is the standard that you set for full time hires then keep it. Although it may be a good idea to think about wether or not this problem is representative of someones abilities to fill the position. You don't want to fall into the trap of asking an interview question (albeit a fairly easy on in my opinion) that may not tell you how good someone would be at filling the postion your hiring for.
Email exhibits in Silicon Valley no-hire case
You left after 7 months at your first industry job, and you're talking about leaving your second industry job 2 months later. To be honest, if I saw that on a resume it would be a much bigger concern to me than your educational background.
Are you asking them to do this in a particular language, or just to come up with an algorithm? This might work better as the sort of problem you ask an interviewee to talk you through, rather than an "I'll check on you in 10 minutes" kind of exercise. But in general, no, this kind of thing isn't out of bounds, and I'd say if 10% of your candidates are passing it, you're in the right sort of neighborhood.
I am desperate for a good contacts solution

Your page does nothing to focus on my pain or tell me how you can fix it

I (and I am guessing My pain is pretty common) want

1. The same contact list on my email, Skype, mobile
2. That's it

Tell me how you solve that - iPhone and android integration, outlook and gmail will capture what 75% of the market?

I will leap through fire if you can then give me reports on who I talked to, who I skyped and rang and emailed Nd for how long.

But really I do not know what you do, what of my problems you solve and how you do it - even after glancing at the how page.

Sorry for the Downer but there is a big market out there with pretty simple requirements.
OK - here's my input. I work at a 95K+ employee company, not much into the CS as more of an IT service provider - we do some coding, but not a lot. When I've been hiring, I would generally, cut at the first pass people who don't have degrees. It is more about the formal education process then the knowledge you get - shows me ambition and commitment.

Also - you've already jumped once in the past year, another red flag.

Put applications in at 10 companies you want to work for, and see if you make it to the interview.

If you want to advance your career, go to college.

You've already said it - you're a good coder, time to become a good developer. If you want to advance, it is not all about the coding.
Or, it just goes to show how little CEOs and companies (particularly at this level) have to fear anymore about actually being prosecuted.
The point wasn't really "we're doing better than you" but rather that Apple could easily afford to throw away a lot of money so that Steve could get his way.
Spam - new account, porn links. No way this is legit.
My take after reading the two emails, was how many words it took for Colligan express himself, compared to how succinctly Jobs was able to make his position understood. I find the latter approach more eloquent (disregarding how distasteful the actual content was).
Thanks for the reply, this is probably the kind of contact I was looking for when I posted this, the question is, without a degree (and to be perfectly honest, no real interest in open source) what do I do to make myself stand out, to say hey, maybe we could have a chat over some coffee? to the recruiters at these companies?
JoinPublic is now available for free
You need to take the bare minimum ten seconds or so to go into some actual detail in order for a comment like that to be useful. This is why you also have a reply from the creator prompting you for further detail. If you're really busy, at least give some impression of your screen size. If you have more time, maybe link to a screenshot. Vague criticism alone is worthless though.

Personally I'd say that the font weights are far too low on much of the text. Thin text is in vogue and often looks great, but it's a bit overdone in this example. The phrase "Address book storage you can trust" at the top practically bleeds into its own red background. The sentence below is less readable still. And the text in the two buttons below that isn't vertically centered at all.

(http://i.imgur.com/U9N3hLo.png)
Yeah, but here's the only sentence that really talks about "what it's like working with Steve":

"Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we'd go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we'd iterate, again and again and again. "
The only true credit cards I see regularly in France are the Carte Pass (Carrefour hypermarkets) and Galeries Lafayette (department stores)
Sick of your job?
Hacker News effect
Oh, sorry, I should have explained, I already refused an offer this year from a university when I took this job due to my financial situation being pretty dire and getting both of the offers at the same time, I wouldn't be planning on starting university until the summer of next year, when I would have been in my current job nearly 2 years.

I should probably have included that information in my post, my apologies.
Interesting. I agree that the title is a bit awkward - I like your alternative better.
> My quick guess is that no matter how much work goes into Elixir it is not going to replace all the libs written for Erlang, in Erlang - and so basic knowledge of Erlang is still needed to use Elixir to it's full capabilities, even if just for reading Erlang docs.

This is correct.

Syntax wise, you can learn about Elixir and not worry about learning Erlang syntax at all. However Erlang ships with OTP which, as the blog post says, is a design methodology and a set of libraries for building robust systems.

Elixir does not intend to replace OTP (at all). For example, the next Elixir version that will ship in a week contains docs and guides on how to write OTP applications. We explain most of the Erlang API required to do so, but eventually you will want to call OTP modules and read their docs, for example:

http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/application.html

Keep in mind that calling Erlang modules from Elixir is straight-forward and I believe you will find reading the docs too. You mostly need to know how the literals look like, for example:

What | Elixir | Erlang
atoms | :foo | foo
modules | Foo | foo
variables | foo | Foo
tuples | { 1, 2 } | { 1, 2 }
lists | [1, 2] | [1, 2]
binaries | << 1, 2 >> | << 1, 2 >>

You can find more information in the Elixir/Erlang crash course:

http://elixir-lang.org/crash-course.html
Fixed link: http://om-language.org
I can't help but feel that even the "good" example makes things unnecessarily complicated for the sake of saving one line of code.

# original
start_date, end_date = ["24 Dec 2011", "23 Jan 2013"].map {|d| Date.parse(d) }

# better
start = Date.parse("24 Dec 2011")
end = Date.parse("23 Jan 2013")
Plans that people rigidly adher to even though the information they were based on is completely outdated are pretty bad.

But know what's even worse? Having no plan at all, or just a vague mission statement. Because then you have no way to answer the question "what do I do next and how do I know it's finished?", and you end up yak shaving, turd polishing, working at cross purposes and just plain killing time, often way past the point where the project cannot achieve its goals any more and just lacks someone with the courage to kill it.

To be useful, a plan has to be updated regularly.
Avoiding Agile Development Disaster
I wish the world was that simple.

It really depend where you are. Here in France companies wont even look at you if you don't have 3 years of experience. It's ridiculous.

And the salary it not even competitive.
An unreplied comment on a previous submission on HN was questioning the remote feasibility of running TCP over FM with the Raspberry Pi. I too am curious about the state of the art in general, if any, and how it might possibly be exploited for long-range networking between small computers like the Pi.
Second preimage has no practical attacks though, which is what is happening here.
I don't have a degree and have been in the industry for 12 years. I did, however, take community college classes that interested me when I had the time. You might want to see if you could keep a full time job and take a class at night at a local community college. If you love it and want more, quit and go to school full time. If you think you can fill in the gaps by taking more classes, then keep going at night. If learning in classes really drives you nuts, then quit and keep going the way you're going.
How can an organization be impartial if the members of its board are appointed by the government and its funding is renegotiated every year?

We saw in 2003 what happens when the BBC disagrees with the government. The government wins. A minor mistake by a single reporter was excuse enough to get the entire BBC leadership fired for its criticism of the Iraq war.

Apparently impartiality means to shut up when the Prime Minister lies to parliament and to the nation.
Would a spammer go over the technology they built the site with in detail?
Hi lifeisstillgood,

We obviously haven't made it clear enough on our site.

1. I would need to know a bit more about your setup - but if you are on a Mac, we have integration with your email, the Skype app and syncing to iPhone/Android.

If you are on Windows, then it's a bit more complicated and depends on what you use.

Drop me an email at hi@useadd.com if you want with your setup and I'll see if it will work, now or in the future.

Regards
I'll bite. Whatever's Steve Jobs' state of mind was, it was still wrong.

What if you were looking to change jobs or would have jumped jobs given the offer proposed. Is it right to limit your recruitment because Steve Jobs was sick or worried about a project? What if the project wasn't the iPhone, but the Apple Newton? What if the destination company wasn't Palm, but Google?

The circumstances surrounding the situation don't absolve Steve Jobs of what he tried to do.
You seem to be trying to build a path to an end goal without having an end goal. Figure out your end goal and then figure out the best path to get there. A college degree may or may not be part of the path, but nobody can give you their opinion w/o knowing your end goal. You should also consider your location when considering your path (something I did not do for a long time).

Also, I think it is fair to say that most 'job requirements' are more accurately described as 'job guidelines'.
Java for iphone
No, client-side encryption makes sense even if you have to trust the server. When Mega's server gets compromised, the attackers cannot get a user's private keys until he visits Mega's site. Without client-side encryption, attackers could get all the user's keys and thus all their data immediately.
On Site SEO Checklist
The Number Code. Crack It If You Can?
> There needs to be a way for developers to provide distribution agnostic binaries. Distros can choose to provide whatever package management tools that consume the developer-produced raw data.

What prevents developers from providing statically linked binaries in PPAs right now?
If you want to be a great* developer, you can skip the degree if you want to but _not_ the work it represents. The higher up the chain you go, the more "pattern" problems you will run into; What I mean by that is that you will encounter more and more problems where someone who "did the work" will recognize that "Oh! That's just a semaphore." or "Oh! That's just a b-tree." where someone who hasn't will think they have to invent something new to handle it or pay someone a million dollars to implement it for them. I've seen this happen to non-CS bosses of mine several times (and yes, I tried to warn them and explain) with disastrous results for their careers.

So you have to put the work in either way. If you're going to put the work and time in any way, why not get the degree? That's not a rhetorical question..there may be several valid answers to that for you, including but not limited to money, time constraints, etc.

*You can be an "okay" developer and not do any of this...you might even end up happier in the long run...that's something you have to decide for yourself.
Consider school in the evening and online options through accredited institutions. It may take longer, but you're already employed in the field and it shouldn't hurt your career for a while.

It hurts your career when you want to work on harder problems. As a CS minor, the only way I'll work on certain classes of problems is if I start the company myself.
Well ... I had this idea few years back. I am no encryption specialist.

1. I will get as many backblaze pods as I can.

2. Client will mostly be the same with few differences - the encryption will be symmetrical (AES probably), with randomly generated key from high quality entropy. This key will never leave the client. File names will be encrypted too. It will be bundled with the file and uploaded in some blob For directories - they can be tared first before encrypted.
So the only thing that I will see as a host is file size.

3. There will be some more keys that will be generated and uploaded - keep alive and kill switch. keep alive must be given on regular intervals or content expires. The kill key will delete the file on the server and as many of the logs as legally possible, end of story.

4. The server returns the unique url.

5. You get some text on your screen that will give 3 urls
- kill url
- keep alive url
- decrypt key
- safe download url (http://something/url) will be asked by the page to give key. Decrypt will be on the client too.
- unsafe download url (http://something/url#key)the javascript will begin decryption immediately but if someone intercepts the url - he will have the key.

5. Premium accounts will be given on scratch cards or bought with bitcoins. Donations will be accepted anyway but won't give benefits.

6. .onion address for upload

7. Outgoing bandwidth - the speed of the downloads for all but premium accounts will be function of the donations received the previous day.

8. Everything will be open , and the community will be allowed to audit the systems.

That is in general details.