skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... but they would serve as a GREAT way to indicate whatever a person answering these questions is well educated and well oriented in the world surrounding them."

So then you have to decide, is having a person that is "well educated" and well oriented preferable to one that isn't?
To be sort of fair, Mr Edison was an engineer, and it was back in a time when there was more 'empirical' methods rather than predictive theories of why such and such happened. So, when there's an emphasis on building things, knowing all of this can be helpful. There's also a business type question in there, perhaps to keep an engineer's awareness of business needs in mind.

For example, as Engineering Guy Bill explains, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo, the method for discovering light bulb filaments was very much a search problem, so knowing as much seemingly distant facts about barrel wood, cork, optical facets might actually be important.

Questions about Cleopatra and so forth may have been to see how educated an applicant was. I wonder if those helped or hurt a candidate. I.e., did this person learn this on their own through curiosity or did they pick it up at school...

Disclaimer: I am not qualified to give opinions on any topic.
> (not sure why I couldn't reply to your comment)

FYI, this is probably because you saw his comment at around 0-1 minutes. If you click on "link", you'll get the Reply form... or refresh after a minute or two and the "reply" link will be available.
What would you pay for a service like that?
> Can anyone translate what they are saying in the first one?

You probably don't want to know. Lots of cussing :)

He actually has no idea what's going on. At one point he jokes about artillery strikes and then starts calming down his friends ("Don't be afraid, nothing's happened yet.")

Then he urges his friends to go grab their jackets (apparently they ran out to the street without them). While running, he exclaims "now, that's some serious shit!" and then urges his friends to be calm once more.

"The most interesting stuff is about to begin."

The guard at the entrance tells them they can't come in to take their jackets.

"That thing flew by, there was a flash and it crashed in the woods."

"What an adventure!"

"It entered the atmosphere and started burning. The remaining stuff then crashed."

"I thought a war's underway."

"Don't cower. But I didn't get what the explosions were about."

"The windows are all smashed."

"I love it!!!"

....

It must be some kind of college. The kids must be students.
Which shows how usefull is the dash-cam. I will mount one for sure.
The Ultimate Startup Guide - StartitUp
I agree with this. Also if he's then worried about performance/etc... he could sign up for the free setup at cloudflare for CDN and should be golden.
Henry Ford was notoriously ill-informed. He sued a newspaper for libel after they said he was an idiot. In the trial they asked him in what year the revolution that founded the country took place. "1812?" facepalm

edit: unfortunate typo
A visualisation of asteroid discovery between 1980 and 2012
I think this conversation already does...
I do not use Google Now that much but I've got to say that I am surprised how well it predicts what I am going to do based on patterns.

First it knew all by itself where my home and where my workplace is (it named both correctly) and when I am leaving the house - then it suggested that I give that new place I am visiting more and more often a name. (my girlfriend)
And then it knew before I knew it myself that I will go to my girlfriend on a monday because I've apparently been there the last 3 or 4 mondays.
It's not that hard to see such a pattern if you are actively looking for it, but I wasn't really thinking that much about when I visit someone and if there is some kind of pattern.

I am pretty sure that such a tool can be amazingly predictive and helpful given enough time and data.
Switzerland is about the size of West Virginia.
Wow! thats amazing/horrifying.

Though i would have to imagine a meteor over New York(same strength earlier today) would be much worse, probably even a worse case scenario?(again for same strength).

Meteors of this size your probably right, no easy way to prevent them. But i would not say that its impossible.
The prune question must be very important; it's on there twice.
PaaS? BaaS? What?
What happened with javascript in pypy? I thought they were working on the restricted subset suitable for static analysis.
Fast Train to... Quincy? A Mirage Map of U.S. High Speed Rail | Strange Maps
We had a problem with a Windows server on RS cloud. It was running very slow, but it was a host issue. We complained to RS, and they moved us off the host to another host. It's been fine since then.
Do note that Mozilla is not a hive-mind, and people disagree with Brendan on a regular basis. I haven't heard of anyone within Mozilla who was actually interested in NaCL/PNaCL/dart.
I'd love to see all those dashcam videos stitched together to make a tracking movie of the meteors whole route.

Like NASCAR stationary cameras around a track can be stitched to appear to track with the cars.
There is such a thing as gun violence. It is distinguished as violence involving at least one gun.
I have mixed feelings over this.

On the one hand, knowledge is different than education. Knowledge is the possession of information. Whereas education is the ability to find information quickly and efficiently, and pass it through a filter of critical thinking. Questions like the ones on Edison's list measure knowledge, but not education.

On the other hand, in my personal experience people who possess seemingly "random" pieces of information such as the location of countries on a world map or the birthday of a jazz singer tend to be much more productive. Not because the random bits of knowledge they possess are related to the work they are doing, but because information like that gives them a wider perspective on everything and allows them to be better at "pattern-matching", i.e. drawing connections between seemingly unrelated fields and subjects. This is a very, very important skill for any knowledge worker.
Madness! ;) http://www.hanselman.com/blog/JavaScriptIsAssemblyLanguageFo...
Data viz: A study of 10,000 porn stars and their careers
There is no line. There's just fad and fashion. What's the disease-of-the-year? Pour money into that! Never mind obesity etc. Or meteors.
Elm and Roy are quite different in that they abandon normal js semantics.. as far as going to a more blub language, please do report your experimental results!
You could use the extra hour to exercise. Go to the gym, or go for a bike ride, if your office has a shower. Exercise is almost as important as sleep for health and creativity. Lunch is included in normal 9-5 hours.
I think the mere fact that someone would feel the need to "stand up for themselves" in the face of a simple question says a lot about them.
You mean this: http://www.formal-methods.de/mediawiki/images/e/e5/Bachelor_... ?
Hah, just go on youtube and search for "Russian driving".

Those dash cams have been there for years, they're the gift that keeps on giving!
@damoncali does the setup you describe work even if the user bcc's their special address? Will mailgun still give you the recipient as hard_to_guess74623@taskbox.kanban2go.com ?
Not to mention Loadbalancers for dirt cheap. Less known fact if you add the LB the jump your BW to 1Gb/s
Electromagnetic Harvester
>I don't recall this approach ever working

yes, failure in the past is definitely an indication that this concept will never work.

The linked article takes a very narrow view of google now, trying to shoehorn it into windows phone terms. It's way more than a live tile. It's a homescreen widget, a lockscreen widget, an app that is a scrollable list of cards, and it integrates with notifications. Essentially, it is predictive google search - instead of having to search for something, it provides you with the results you were about to search for.

The future that you talk about for personal assistants has already been surpassed by google now.
Meteors have wiped out 90+% of the planet's life on several occasions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_ex...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_eve...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_bo...
Github is cool but with all the cheapskate web devs (no offense, I am one of them) I don't think it is _that_ profitable.

It must be. Github raised 100m from investors led by Andreesen Horowitz in 2012. You don't get that kind of funding from that level of quality investors without a seriously good financial trajectory.
You're trying to make a technical argument and referencing MNG and XForms. I'm really not sure where you're going with that.
http://drop.sc

Rails, Postgres, Passenger/Nginx, Redis, Java, Memcached

JQuery, Haml, Sass, Bootstrap, Compass

Started with EC2, now on Linode.

Yet to be announced food ordering app:

Rails (purely as API), PostgreSQL

AngularJS, Bootstrap, Scss, Compass, Yeoman

Nginx as static assets server (serving everything frontend related) and as reverse proxy for the backend. Probably Passenger or Puma for the application server.

Planning to try DigitalOcean.
Simulating a line-following robot in R
I've become increasingly convinced that a standardized VM in the browser that other languages could target would be the best idea. And we could forget that the whole JS thing ever happened.
Sequoia’s Bryan Schreier Says It’s Time For The Ivy Leagues To Embrace Startups
A killer feature of Google Now that was actually helpful (no, baseball scores don't count) is when it detects you are traveling.

I had a receipt from EventBrite in my Gmail for a conference in Chicago. The day I drove up there, Google Now knew about the trip (I didn't even add it to my calendar) and had downloaded the trip directions. When I lost 4G on the way, it was pretty awesome to have the map available offline. I usually print off directions as a backup, but I had forgotten this time and Google Now really helped me.

Just one anecdote, but it completely sold me on Google Now.
Here is a quick story about Russian police from a few years ago. This should give you an idea why a dashboard camera is not an option, but a necessity. My mother was in Russia visiting my uncle (her brother) in Krasnodar 3 years ago. He picked her up at the airport and they started their drive back -- about 2 hours away from the city. As soon as they got on the highway, they noticed a civilian sedan on the side of the road. The car started moving as they were approaching it and when they were within a few yards it veered right in front of them, causing them to chaotically cut into the adjacent lane. A few moments later a police car comes out of some corner and pulls them over. By this time the other car that cut into their lane is obviously gone. They cops out of the car and tell them that they've stopped them for reckless driving. My uncle explains the situation and tells them that he's meeting his sister for first time in years and would like to just safely get her home. The cops tell him that he can pay them an X amount of rubles now without worrying about making the drive back to the city to pay the ticket. When he agrees, they give him an outrageous bribe amount. He quickly gives them a number significantly lower. The cops tell him, literally - "let's flip a coin." Both picked a side of a coin and they ended up paying the smaller part of the bribe.
This whole situation sounds more humorous than anything. They used pull better stunts back in early 90s. Now the situation with police is slightly more regulated, but it's still just as corrupt as it's been since the collapse of Soviet Union.
as if "gun violence" is so distinguishable

Sure it's distinguishable. It's scarier, so it's easier to get people upset about it. People seem to be orders of magnitude more afraid that they will be gunned down as opposed to, say, killed with a knife or a hammer.
And you're willing to admit that a webcomic convinced you of that?
I've a question - are these cards programmable? As in, can we create our own cards and push notifications etc to these?
We just have to live with it

Or, alternatively, not.
Indeed. The fact that guns save lives around the country on a regular basis is almost completely ignored by the media:

Guns Save Lives
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/guns_save_...

"If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body. But they can't get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you."

http://gunssavelives.net/ has a huge collection of articles like these:

Son Uses Dad’s AR-15 To Defend Home
http://gunssavelives.net/self-defense/video/son-uses-dads-ar...

Armed Citizen in TX Stops Shooting Spree and Saves Cop
http://gunssavelives.net/self-defense/armed-citizen-in-tx-st...

GA Woman Kills Would Be Rapist With .22 Pistol
http://gunssavelives.net/self-defense/video/ga-woman-kills-w...
I used it for a while, it's cute but my life is not that complicated. And I don't want to sell my digital soul to a company in exchange for "suggestions" and tips. That's me though.

I predict that in a year or two, Google's top engineer Patrick Pichette, will ruin this by stuffing it with ads. Ads everywhere.
Or Tesla's weird experiments! There's speculation he somehow anticipated the event anyway.
> Yea I find this curious as well, what are the odds of that happening?

About '1' apparently.
They aren't good questions for, say, a software engineer, but they might be useful for executives, which is how the Times article says they were used. If you're going to be analyzing potential business opportunities you probably should have a sense of different markets, their size, their relative strengths and weaknesses, etc. You should probably have a basic idea of where we get products and materials from and a basic sense of what different types of materials do. In our post-industrial society we don't care so much about sulphur and rubber and borax, but would you hire a tech executive who didn't know where electronics are manufactured? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify the regions of the US where the tech industry has a large presence? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify "six big businessmen in the United States"? If you can't answer these questions than you don't know anything about the industry and you probably aren't curious or engaged enough to keep yourself well informed.

If we updated this list to include things that are relevant to today's world, I would expect that a well-educated, well-informed person would be able to answer most of these questions.
I don't recall the origin of this, but it's also true of most Apple screenshots.
Man I want this car badly.
> I think I have demonstrated that Mozilla's insistence on JS and other standards is not holding back the Web as an application platform by any means.

I don't really believe that you have. As simple aggregate counter-evidence, I will point to the popularity, performance, consumer, and developer adoption of mobile platforms.

More specifically:

> To claim that LLVM bitcode is a better target, you need to show that some JIT compilation technique implemented by LLVM/PNaCl is made impossible by JavaScript the language. JS typed arrays provide a C-friendly memory model; I don't know of anything else that's missing. I'd be happy to be educated though.

In the earlier days of Java, a common refrain was that the JVM could get better-than-native performance because it could make runtime decisions about JIT optimization. In reality, the complexity of performing this task generally outweighs the benefits compared to native code, and the JVM hasn't really succeeded outside of specific micro-optimizations. As a whole, the JVM is still slower than most native code.

Your argument seems to be predicated on a similar fallacy. The notion that since you can, in _theory_, optimize JS down to an efficient byte-code (or even AOT compile it), it is as good as an efficient and well-defined byte-code to begin with.

Yet, we have numerous historical examples of how adding more complexity between you and your intended target (eg, performance, versatility) doesn't help you achieve it. JS is an expensive and complicated intermediate.

This is equivalent to selling something at a loss and claiming you'll make it up in volume. You're adding complexity and challenge to an already challenging problem.

> You also assume that Mozilla's insistence on the DOM and other existing standards, rather than PNaCl + Pepper ...

Actually, NaCL and Pepper have nothing to do with the DOM argument. The DOM argument is just an example of where rigorious adherence to what worked for documents is not working for applications.

> Finally, you may be unaware of some limitations in NaCl. Specifically, because of the way NaCl validates code, you can't run a JIT compiler on top of NaCl. So, if you thought that NaCl would be a better target for Java/Python/Ruby/pick your favorite than JS, think again.

You are aware that Mono AOT compiles C#, correct? As does RubyMotion. JIT is not strictly necessary here.
If this happened during the winter I imagine many would die of exposure.
It does. You can BCC your special address and the 'recipient' param is set properly.
I don't think you know what the word "discriminatory" means:

Adjective
Making or showing an unfair or prejudicial distinction between different categories of people or things.

You may say that it is not practical to not be discriminatory. You can also say that it is not immoral to be discriminatory. Both of those may or may not be true.

However, it is certainly discriminatory to use a test that is biased towards educated white men with college degrees and access and time to read newspapers.
Because the executive branch is totally responsible for introducing things into legislation. Basic truth. Yes. Right.
The point is not 'the perceived ease of development' or something technical like that.

The issue is commercial. The mere existence of PS3 games proves that, as the PS3 was very hard to develop for, but it was worth it because the games would sell.

Steam makes possible for developers to target Linux and sell the games there, in an easy convenient way that is easier to use than pirating games via torrents, but with some DRM to prevent uploading the purchased game to torrents just after the purchase. Ubuntu also has a store that sells games, I can see at the very least: Bastion, World of Goo, Amnesia, Braid, Space Pirates and Zombies. I don't know if they use any DRM, I guess the answer is no.

The final success of this endeavor is also of commercial nature. The number of games sold in Linux will determine the future of Linux gaming, and nothing else will, no matter what the technical merits of Steam in Ubuntu are.
Eh, porn is the least of my concerns. Google's probably smart enough to filter that out when making decisions anyway, I assume.

Maybe I'm strange, but there's a fairly broad array of stuff I'd rather keep off the record. Anything that could possibly imply illegal activity, for example.
sued a newspaper for liberal? he really was an idiot.
Those numbers are of practical importance to programmers in particular. They directly affect nearly everything we do to some degree. On the other hand, without knowing anything about you, I can pretty confidently guess that the identity of Leonidas and the process of tanning leather are not practical concerns for you at all.

Also, I would argue that memorizing those numbers themselves is unimportant and putting too much stock in them is a mistake (some are very likely a bit different on the computer you're working with than they were on the one used to compile the list — for example, hitting L2 cache is slightly faster than a branch misprediction on the i7 IIRC). The important takeaway IMO is the orders of magnitude at work.
I have a Galaxy Nexus and don't allow it to search history and still get a lot of info I consider useful. I think the only thing I allow it access to is email and location. Stuff like having a card for every package I get shipped or flight res saves me a lot of time. I've never seen outdated information on it.
"There is such a thing as gun violence" I'm not convinced.

"It is distinguished as violence involving at least one gun."

re-read my post, i said

>> "so distinguishable that it should be focused on above "violence""

I'm not saying that it cant be distinguished (as others describe it), I am saying is there a big enough difference that we should focus on it over violence in general.

IN MY OPINION! focusing on "gun violence" takes away from the more important discussion on "violence" in general and diverts the discussion to matters non conducive to stowing violence in general. BUT this is not what this post is about.
I think your misreading the comment. It's a classic case of rule 34 somewhere someone is into this crap and it you don't need a lot of customers to make money with porn. I mean being eaten by alive is a fetish vore. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vore
First one,yes.
Second one - I actually used to work in a wolframium mine in Panasqueira, Portugal,when I was 17 and learned A LOT about mines in general in my spare time. Kerosene has been used a lot in mining lamps,so yes, I did read about it.
I did research about one of the first electric cars in the UK,that was used widely as a milk delivery truck - back from the same period, so I happen to know the voltage.
Why did I need to be near Spitsbergen to know where it is? I used to know a guy who was a fisherman on the Barents Sea - he would tell stories of where they went, hence Spitsbergen. Also, I live in Europe, so I am fairly comfortable with pointing out where stuff it.
I mentioned before, we had all the subjects at school, there was no choice like you get now. Write a couple of essays about WW1,you will come across random stuff like the war material exported from chile, guaranteed.
Highest rise of tide I remember from looking up the tides when I was wondering as a kid how comes that Netherlands is not flooded by tides constantly, so I read a lot about it.
No, I don't know which state has the largest amethyst mine, one of those 3 I didn't know from the top of my head.
I know what is used in the white paint nowadays - I guess that counts,since I have no way of knowing what could be the best answer in the 1920. The same goes to population - but again, living in the middle of Europe helps with that. And toys are easy if you live in a country that imports loads of things from Germany,having a border with it.

And no, I am not interested in Jeopardy.
The HKID index: service suspended (due to HK Government pressure on founder)
You could say it came up regularly...
We defend against it by improving early detection. If you detect early enough, deflection is very easy.
LLVM byte code in an OS secured jail/sandbox? The JIT is already there and BSD licensed so all the players can use it. You'd really have to trust your sandbox though.

The API for what you what you can do out of your sandbox would be the hard part. Every capability you add to the API is also a lurking attack vector in each implementation.
Harrison Ford Will Return As Han Solo In 'Star Wars: Episode VII'