skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was interesting if nothing else.

Maybe its just because I just woke up, but I didn't even realise why Q1 was interesting until after I read the HN comments. Those that are saying these are all useless for practical work are wrong in my opinion. Some of them are, but not all.

If you saw Q2 and didn't realise the possibility of it being false, the reasons for that are something you need to learn when dealing with any language that uses floating points. Q3 is something every JS programmer should know, as is Q4.

Q5 is more interesting, because the correct answer is "what version of javascript?" Protected terms cannot be used as object properties without being put in quote marks in earlier versions of JS. Doing something like this in an older browser would throw an error.

Q6 could have been better, it would be pretty hard to get it wrong. Something like "5" + 2 would have been more interesting because + is overloaded so you would have to know how javascript treated it in different situations, which is close to essential knowledge.

Q7 is definitely just trivia. No sane person writes code like that. Q8 is trivia too; easy if youre familiar with JS but not hugely useful. Q9 is easily guessable; I didn't know what the param for toString did but I guessed it correctly.

Q10 is important, if you dont know how JS treats numbers with a leading 0 you can get yourself into trouble and have no idea why.

Q11 I learned something new, I didn't know about the ~ operator, I wouldn't use it in regular code though.

Q12 is regex. Either you knew it or you didn't. If you didn't, you learned about \b, which can be rather useful.
Give Hackerful a try https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackerful-ycombinators-hacke... . It's free and it supports voting as well as submitting comments and stories.

Disclaimer: I'm the developer
Passwords ID you to the entity.
Images ID the entity to you.

While not a perfect system, it works to some degree IMO.
I still prefer two-fold auth.
Or a SAP installation, for that matter.
The enter to start and s to skip is very poorly thought out. I find myself forgetting enter literally every time and I've been though 20 or so lessons, and when the lesson starts with s, I press it (forgetting the enter) and skip the lesson. I don't know how to go back to the last example (undo the skip), and now I have to fucking pick a different lesson in the drop down, then reselect the one I was doing, then skip over every example I did, then fucking press S again because I forgot enter, and have to do that shit again.

If you're going to design something, free or not, do it fucking right.

Your product made me mad enough to actually post this.
Always mask rather than deleting if possible!
I've had this happen to me. I agree it's presumptuous and toeing the line but just so you know I've always been able call them and have the data plan turned off for good on that line.

One of the arguments I make with them is that if I have kids on my family plan who go off to school and pop their feature phone SIM card into their friends smartphone, I can't be expected to deal with that headache - and if AT&T isn't going to recognize that the person who pays the bill should have the final say in the matter, and they don't offer basic parental controls, I'll take my business elsewhere.

It's worked at least three times on three different lines off the top of my head.
Cool! Thanks for that link.

That's very close to the ideas floating round in my head right now. Something very similar to that, a super efficient "kite" (think more like the SailRocket sail or a glider wing), "tethered" underwater using this 50+knot cavitation tolerant foil technology. I'm guessing it'd need a fair bit of "stuff" to get it up to the speed where the wing and foil start to operate effectively, wich might either be jettison-able floats/spars, or perhaps some technique where it gets launched/towed up to speed - kind of like how big wave surfers use jetski tow-ins to get on to big waves at speed - I wonder what the world record rules would say about a 70+knot "sailboat" that need to be towed up to 50_knots to work at all?
A substantial percentage of SAPs revenue is from consulting, and if you're going to include that then why not Accenture who has twice the revenue of SAP and is HQ'd in Ireland. Or Erricson who might primarily do hardware, but make $8bn/year from software revenue.
While you may not agree with static_typed (his name suggests he's probably not a huge Ruby fan), the Rails community (& to some degree the Ruby community) should listen to folks like him. This is because more and more people would agree with static_type's statements.

The high chance that more catastrophic rails exploits will be found in the next month (if all of the paths to YAML.load have been found, I'll eat my hat) will increase the number of people making or agreeing with statements like static_typed's. After an exploit or two have been found in February or March, people will be pointing at Rails and saying 'I told you so'.
It's not clear if he's referring to a prepaid plan here. Prepaid definitely is the safest bet - essentially no surprises, and little ability for them to rip you off. I use prepaid AT&T (T-Mobile seems to have less coverage where I go) when I'm in the States, and the data is optional.

On prepaid it used to be that the available/required plans depended on the IMEI used to activate the SIM. So if you bring a crapphone and activate then switch the SIM into your iPhone you should be set and not need an upgrade. Not sure if that's still the case and they only periodically audit or what.
I think the author of this article is mistaken between what pivoting is and what sales is.

Pivoting is what owners and senior stakeholders do to a company, to change it's future direction. The Concur example is a good example of this. Sure it may have happened after being enlightened by a sales call and competitive situation, but it was primarily a one-off change. You can't enable your sales reps to "pivot" during each sales opportunity, it impacts too many systems.

In enterprise, the role of ISV reps has been created to try to do this within a defined scope - ie get ISV partners to add new capabilities that help you reach a different vertical.

Enterprise sales is pretty close to what Roman Stanek's article the author linked to. It's not fun or sexy, it's about finding real problems in companies, convincing their stakeholders you're the lowest risk and highest return option, then working hard to identify and hold them to a compelling event to move the discussion along from concept to signature to implementation.

Just my 2c.
Craigslist launches visual browsing
I'm using T-Mobile in much the manner the author describes and not having any problems. This is exactly the kind of reason why their attempt to buy T-Mobile failed.
That people will pay money for things.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2012/06/15/one-of-ap...

Apple memorabilia and items connected to Steve Jobs continue to be hot items, with a working model of the company's first computer selling at auction Friday for $374,500.
The image does not ID the system to you, that's the whole point of the article! A spoofer site would simply go to the spoofed site, fetch the image, and give it to you.
This started happening about 1.5 years ago on AT&T. Any smart phone that AT&T "knows about" will get a ~$30/mo smartphone data plan added the moment you insert your SIM card into it. You'll get a text message ~30 minutes later saying so.

You can get around this by using a phone that hasn't previously been on AT&T's network. For example, I have a Galaxy Nexus, iPhone 2G, and Nexus One that have all gotten past this check and I've kept my $10/mo data plan. My iPhone 3G, 4 and Atrix 4G were all previously locked to AT&T and so have caused this message previously.

Once you do this you can put your SIM card back in a "dumb phone" and ~24 hours later you should be able to remove the smart phone data plan from your account via the AT&T web interface.
iPhones in vibrate mode make no shutter sound.
My first job as an "Internet software engineer" I was billed out to IBM for approx $50 an hour and I was paid $25 an hour with no benefits. Late in the death march my salaried manager told me I was paid more than he was. I replied 'It isn't going to me!' But that was early 90s. I don't worry about being cheated by recruiters any more. Thank you for posting your insights.
Omg this is so bad, we have great paintings at http://piazzaart.com/
> Everything you said is necessary for generating the most accurate model, but - and correct me if I am wrong here - they are all there to support that final goal.

I don't want to sound like I'm arguing solely to argue, but if your thesis was correct, the Ptolemaic system could have been tuned repeatedly for greater and greater agreement with reality, but without ever reconsidering the basis of the model, the underlying theory.

History records that we instead abandoned the Ptolematic theory, even though it "worked" and would have been perfectly satisfactory by way of refinements, to support modern astrodynamics. But instead we stopped generating more and more accurate (and complex) models and replaced the entire structure.

It was the same with the ether theory -- after difficulties with the theory arose in the late 19th century, instead of "saving the ether" (an actual expression used at the time), we abandoned the entire structure -- this time 20 years in advance of any plausible replacement, which turned out to be relativity. And relativity turned out to be a much better theory in all respects, even though that wasn't obvious at the time.

This is getting into a complex area, one having to do with the law of parsimony (a.k.a Occam's razor) and theoretical elegance, but science isn't about the most accurate model, it is also about beauty and parsimony alongside accurate modeling.
That's a huge red flag. You don't want those logs showing in production. Someone should notify them.
> It's that GTK, or the rest of GNOME for that matter, doesn't seem like a good fit for GNU.

Why?

I vaguely agree about GNOME, who are often rather insular and sometimes do things that are of dubious wisdom for the GNU project (e.g., their on-and-off love affair for MS "standards").

However, GTK is something very different indeed. Even if GNOME has grabbed control (or tried to, I dunno the details) of GTK, GTK predates GNOME, was created by different people, is used by a far wider community, and even has a very different feel. At its core, GTK really is just a good UI toolkit; GNU needs a good UI toolkit, and GTK seems to serve that purpose very well.

Indeed, to the extent that GNOME has taken over GTK development, it reflects GNOME's good points (and do I think technically GNOME is often fairly good).

So if there's going to be some sort of distancing of GNU and GNOME, I'd rather see this accompanied by GTK becoming more independent of GNOME as well—not to "screw GNOME" or anything, but to ensure that it continues to serve all its users well (by "users" here, I mean "projects which use GTK", of which there are many, most of which have no connection with GNOME at all).

[It would be fine it the same people continue to work on GTK, but there should be a clear line between it and GNOME.]
I think only mods can edit submissions, maybe they'll notice if this stays on the homepage long enough
Internet Explorer still growing as Windows 7 starts its decline
Well they linked to Barrett Brown stating that many of them (Anonymous) would not hesitate to employ the same amoral "might makes right" tactics that they deplore from the government, if they found it necessary:

http://pastebin.com/WPE73rhy

I guess he thinks "might makes right" is OK as long as the dictator is benevolent enough?
The Firefox version appears broken to me?

http://i.imgur.com/9eeSvlU.png

Firefox 19/OSX Lion
Let me refresh that for you.
I agree the iPod was important to Apple's financial history, but I don't think it was particularly important to Steve (I understand I can't know this for sure), nor does it fit the narrative of what Apple brought to this world. I'm not saying that the iPod announcement should be left out, just that it shouldn't end with it. If the movie's point is that this was the beginning of the turnaround for Apple's financial woes, then it misses the point of what Apple (and Steve) have been trying to do for computing since the beginning. I think this is a common mistake, and could be done even worse by ending the story with the announcement of the iMac for example. If the story focuses on the iPod as the "comeback", then it is really a laymen's interpretation of Apple history, and will be quite disappointing (of course I haven't seen the movie so for all I know there is a completely separate point they want to make which will be great for other reasons). However, if the point is to analyze Steve the man behind Apple, then leaving out the iPhone is a bad start.

In a lot of ways, the iPod is the antithesis of the battle Steve and Apple have been metaphorically fighting. The software on the iPod was junk, it was very much a device in the spirit of the way things "used to be done", a product that would have felt equally at home under the Sony brand as the Apple brand. From the Mac to the iPhone and finally the iPad, you can see a clear vision of not having computers be generic hardware with forgettable software, but rather finely crafted hardware in the service of amazing software. Apple's treatment of the iPod post-iPhone (and Fidel's subsequent leaving of the company shortly thereafter) are very telling.

I have to disagree whole heartedly that the iPod was a "step" towards the iPhone. The iPhone is very much in the "family tree" of the Mac, and not the iPod. The iPod was ultimately just a toy. Everyone at Apple knew this as well. The iPhone was the next step. Ending the story with the iPod is telling it through the eyes of a financier and not as a technologist or a philosopher or a student of Mr. Jobs. And under any interpretation its hard to argue that it is simply missing the end of the story.
Joel, you said "They can opt me into a contract that I didn't agree to", but are you sure that you didn't implicitly/legally agree to something that says they can do that? Maybe their Terms of Service?
T-Mobile is my favorite cellular provider in the US by far and I used them for years before starting work (company pays for phone and Verizon has the best network).

They made having a smartphone affordable and made it easy to upgrade by reselling your unlocked phone online (recouping most of the unsubsidized cost).
Experience Dante's Inferno, one tercina at a time
Is the site down for everybody else?
Vote for (then drink) your favorite beer for the Rackspace/AppFog Happy Hour
The article fails to recognize the value of the "security images" to the banks. The banks have used these images to satisfy the requirements of the FFIEC guidance "Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment"[1].

Any complaints about the value of the security images should not be addressed to banks. You should direct your complaints to the FFIEC and/or to your banks regulator (OTS, OCC or NCUA).

[1] http://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/Auth-ITS-Final%206-22-11%20%28FFIEC...
I've never heard of this before, but it's absolute crap. I'd take five minutes and fill out the the FCC complaint form at http://www.fcc.gov/complaints (choose Wireless Telephone > Billing, Service, Privacy ... > Online Form). Send them back a letter with the bill (including the reference number that the FCC gave you). The correspondence will be handy if they ever try to cut you off or send you to collections.

It's amazing how Slamming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_slamming) refuses to die.
Microsoft Dell deal would restore PC makers' confidence
IDK, if you want to run WebGL games you probably don't use IE anyway.
If I hadn't read this comment, I'd twitch for hours—thank you.
Remember reading in a memoir of someone who had access to the NKVD (then KGB) archives from that era.

The log would go something like this:

-- Dec, 14 : Found and eliminated Ivan X.

-- Dec, 17 : Turns out that was the wrong Ivan X.

-- Dec, 20 : Found and eliminated the real Ivan X.
Well it is a known QA practice: never base incentive on metrics or people will cheat one way or another with the metrics.
If your dev have a prime based on SLA or tickets solved guess what? You are giving them an incentive to cheat. You will have nice figures to show your investors, ypur stock options' values will raise and coder will be better paid. Everyone is happy, who cares about the truth, the unfairness, the lie. This is just mis placed moral.
Stats that can be tricked are the prozac of our society. It make the metrics describing a situation improve with mutual benefits for (almost) all the stakeholders.

Who cares about the customers or minorities anyway? I mean not on the paper but honestly?
And yet Europe near-universally has lower fertility than the US. Whilst I have the same experience, not just with America but with English countries in general, something does not add up.

Even though childcare is free or very cheap in most of western Europe, fertility is 1.23 in some locations, now. That means only 1 in 5 couples have children at all on average. Replacement fertility levers are nowhere to be seen, inside or outside of the EU, and even amongst fresh immigrants fertility is very low.

And when I am there, I have to say, I miss my country when it had lots of children, and I was one of them. There was much more activity everywhere. There were much better playgrounds and more of them. There was constant presence of children in every village, and as an American you probably can't imagine just how many villages there are everywhere in Europe. You could get into pretty much any house for dinner, and yes, it did mean that you had to go to church on sunday (that was actually possible, nobody, and I mean nobody, ever worked on sunday), and afterwards the adults would dine in groups with the children playing in the gardens, or going out into the village or to the YMCA. Sport events would mostly be between neighbouring villages, and they were as much about getting together for a beer and a show as about sport, and pretty much everyone participated at some point. Now many villages look deserted, but they aren't, not yet. There's old people locking themselves into their houses watching TV. The central cities are expanding, and the bigger they get, the more hostile they are.

Realistically, it won't be long before we're artificially breeding humans. Japan has researched this option, generally called "ectogenesis" and they have controversially produced a 14 days old feutus before stopping the program (getting it to survive after 7 days is apparently difficult because it requires blood flow to the feutus to start). We could present this option as "we allow gay couples to have real children of their own" "treatment".

The numbers seem to dictate that unless some massive change in fertility occurs, mass-production of humans should start in about 8 years to keep population numbers from declining rapidly. That's an outcome nobody wants, but the question is if people are sufficiently convinced that they really, really don't want this to start programs like this. Also it won't be like children with real parents at all. Still, it probably beats the crap out of no children at all. I shudder to think what effect government policies will have on people who have no parents to defend them though.
Story about people lying is exclusively based on interviewing a few people and trusting that they are telling the truth about people lying.

I'm sure it happens, I'm sure it's terrible, but I'm sure interviewing people isn't a useful means of doing anything about it. The whole premise is that people lie and are incentivized to do so, but somehow this is magically not true of the people telling you about the lies?
Another possible way of looking at things:

Everyone has access to all of your data if it would be problematic for you.
Using Haskell in Production at Standard Chartered, we are seeing Applicatives crop up everywhere. For example, almost all of the time, our parsers (and even IO) need to be used only as Applicative, or at most as Alternative.

Applicatives also compose in interesting ways as opposed to Monads.
The value of artwork (or other non-utilitarian object) is very much subjective. Human value judgements can become absurdly skewed (e.g. [1]) by our interpretation of an object as a status symbol, which can lead us to value in the extreme otherwise useless objects.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
At this point it isn't even about the data anymore, it's the simple fact that they're "choosing a plan" for me, without any input from me. Absolutely baffling.

I'll check out those options. Thanks.
Excellent observation! To me the picture evokes Byron rather than, Kant - solitude, reflection on the state of the world from a distance, from a subjective higher ground. Ultimately, growing up and away from being one with peers, to being an independent being, defining your own person by rejecting what it is not.
I've been giving them shit online for years for not making the archive publicly accessible. They even responded a couple times defending themselves. Great to see they finally did it.
If Ruby has had a bad time lately, then surely PHP has had a bad decade? It just seems odd to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire, is all.
Running answers right away is fairly useful; a bit of a challenge in that problem domain is with multichannel sensors ("cameras" with multiple frequency bands, satellites like MODIS, radiometric spectrometers, etc.) where the sharpest "image" is produced by using an SVD (singular value decomposition) type transform to reduce (say) 256 input channels to (say) 6 major dimensions and using those to recreate an enhanced image. Producing branchless code to generate basic running stats (min, mean, max, variance, trends) on multiple input channels is a bit of puzzle, generating an efficient rolling SVD enhancement (best image based on most recent observations) is a bit trickier.

The application areas are continuous processing of continuously arriving data, infinite unbounded sequences.
Crazy Patents
I spent about 60 minutes on the phone with them today and they didn't back down (they'll take it off if I use a dumb phone, but they'll still charge me for this month).

I'll try your line of thought. Thanks.
20 years ago I (and many others) had shareware registration systems that did this kind of thing. ShareIt ring a bell with anyone?

There's absolutely no way that there isn't prior art for this.
Exactly, really it's not that hard, but as this blog article shows some people still just don't get art and/or how it's valued.

And it's ok not to understand things, but it's not ok to ridicule things just because you don't understand them.
Nothing in that explanation is incompatible with the view that science is a "search for truth", at least taken in a suitably weak sense that does not claim to have "found" it. Falsificationism is simply a methodology, not any kind of end goal. The whole point of following such a methodology is to come up with theories that are in some way "better"; the thing we actually want is the positive content of the theories, which can be used as models, make predictions, etc. If we weren't interested in the positive content of theories at all, there would be no point in trying to falsify them.

That said, I think Popperian falsificationism is rather questionable as a philosophy of science, once you prod at it more than a little.
Neat, You and I had similar things in mind when building our HN apps. What prompted you to build one too? In my case, it was the lack of login and vote support in every other app I'd tried.
Simplicity. Stripe Connect allows us to integrate that processing layer in a really customer friendly way. Putting more balls in the air introduces more complexity into the service and the underlying software.

Nothing against Spreedly Core though, it looks fantastic.