skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've created an eloquent plea for advice on how to answer the question, and I guess my answer is that you need to be that eloquent when explaining why you want a particular job.

There is something in your favor ... none of the good jobs (i.e. the ones you want) are going to be filled by people that only fill out the job application. My last three jobs included me filling the job application out (for the HR drones to say it was complete) after the interviews were done and a hiring agreement was reached. So my advice is to network, push your way into the minds and hearts of the employers you'd like to work for, then let them hire you. Make sure the person making the hiring decision hears this story and assure them it's ancient history.

When you finally get around to filling out the job application, be honest and when you get to the conviction question, don't check either box. If it's a paper form, write "see attachment" and affix a copy of the letter you just posted. For an on-line application, ask to meet with HR instead of filling out the on-line form. In both cases, let HR know that the hiring manager knows the details of the story and is unconcerned.

So the bigger question is where do you live (or where would you like to live?)... you can start building your network on HN today!
Thanks for the feedback.

When I think about it, I guess my reaction was mostly because the title says Super Mario was completed "by Corrupting the RAM" (the keyword being "by"). To me, that sounds like the exploit was done by corrupting the memory outside of the game. Like an external program that would modify the RAM or by going in on the physical layer somehow.

This feels more like it was completed "by exploiting corrupted memory". So I was a bit confused when reading the article at first. But I'm fine now :)
Lawmaker seeks to ban Google Glass use while driving
I'm east coast, have extra work (not security unfort), and won't run a background check on you. Are you trying to stick with security? Or does any development work suit you?
That is a very good point. It used to be that you had to keep your computer on to serve as your own cloud. If your electricity prices were high, this didn't make sense.

But now, the smartphone is the always-on computer. And it uses minimal power -- possibly even less power than cloud computing, which is deliberately oversized in order to handle peak loads.

I suspect it's too complicated for non-geeks to figure out, though. There are also certain drawbacks-- for example, your phone has real storage limits, while the cloud can expand without user intervention.
Thank you, I'm going to check that book out. Like you, I'd like to learn more but the religious aspects are a turnoff.

When I think about it, it's hard to believe that improving one's state of mind and mood wouldn't have a number of benefits.
> Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men?

The reverse of this situation would be a company that sells largely to men but is comprised of 3 male engineers and 47 female engineers making an effort to recruit or train new male engineers, while women continue to make up 70% of their new engineering hires.
Someone got their childhood dream!

Mine was shattered when I found out that my dad didn't drive trains (An electrical engineer is apparently not the same thing). Since then, I've ridden on many trains, but I haven't driven one (yet).
I saw the thread created about it here in hnews, but they're only ycombinator startups and there's little/none description about what they do.

Maybe parsing the crunchbase site I can create the spreadsheet myself.
I find sleepiness the hardest thing to meditate on, since it removes the very faculty you're trying to use. I can't speak for all but getting interested enough in sleepiness to stay awake and watch it is hard.

Another suggestion: switch to standing meditation if you're sleepy.
The article omits an important fact:

The public's gold was exchanged at $20.67 per troy ounce, but months later, the official price of gold was raised to $35.00 per troy ounce. Essentially, the public were not properly compensated for turning in their gold.

"In 1934, the government price of gold was increased to $35 per ounce, effectively increasing the gold on the Federal Reserve's balance sheets by 69 percent. This increase in assets allowed the Federal Reserve to further inflate the money supply."[1]

[1] http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-takes-united-...

EDIT: The article also fails to mention that "violation of the order was punishable by fine up to $10,000 or up to ten years in prison, or both." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
Yes. Everything old is new again, it seems. Many old OSes were VM hypervisors in today's parlance--- VM/370 comes to mind; several of the first Unix and other systems I got to play with were virtual machines running on IBM big iron--- and it was also reasonably common to run programs directly in the VM without a guest OS.

When I was in school, a common formalism for talking about operating system design was that they provided a virtual machine abstraction to each process. As time went on the "devices" looked less and less like actual hardware devices, so instead of having an emulated punchcard reader and emulated interrupts, you'd have a read(2) syscall. But that's a relatively unimportant detail.

And with paravirtualization the cycle continues: the abstraction the guest sees is no longer that of a bare metal machine, but one with an increasing number of syscall-like hypervisor calls...
10-15 minutes? You were doing great!
> Most apps have error handling code taking up what? 20-30% of the code at the most? For some reason I imagine this stuff being almost 70% error handling but I am not sure if that is realistic.

I work in a FreeBSD-derived kernel in areas related to the buf / caching subsystem, which probably has a lot of similarities to pre-2.6 linux (they have diverged more since the 90s). I don't know that I can quantify it, but 20-30% feels like a low number.

> So, assuming there are shed loads of error handling that knocks on to everything else about the system. How do they test it?

One thing we use to test error-case handling is "fail points" — sysctls usable from unit tests that trigger some fault condition. These aren't perfect — they are manually added to code, and because of this, coverage is fairly low — but they're a start.

> How do they spec out all the possible conditions? What do they do differently to someone writing a SaaS, Desktop app or IOS app?

Good questions :-).
Encode Email Addresses With PHP
One caveat though: the Coursera ML course is CS229A(pplied), which focuses on applying machine learning, rather than the mathematics behind it. The "real" CS229 lectures are on YouTube [1], and go much more in depth.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E
I still want an office in a light industrial area with a concrete wall/bollards/ditch, and a roller gate, behind which I could park a 5 ton truck and/or unimog or fire truck or something (so as to make it impossible to drive through the gate). I had no idea fire trucks were even cheaper than old 2.5 or 5 ton military trucks.
Definitely. But the thing that convinced me that this driver meant it was that he previously was dispatched by both radio and Uber, and then chose to go Uber-only. As a sample, it's prone to survivor bias, but it definitely argues that my particular driver wasn't just putting up a front.
"Buddhism without beliefs" is a bit oxymoronic, no? :) Any doctrine must start with some assumptions (i.e, beliefs). Perhaps the title means "Buddhism without the obviously wacko beliefs". That doesn't mean it excludes the more subtle ones. Plus, the full title includes "a guide to awakening". That last word comes with a lot of bundled metaphysical assumptions.

Edit: It looks like a quick read, and it was a best seller. Thanks, I'll give it a try. I am interested in refreshing my understanding of the current "western buddhism" discourse (your contention that I'm not familiar with the Buddhist doctrine at all was incorrect).
so this is my favorite thing, ever.
It's a good question. We (a large-scale website serving 250,000 pages/day) use Python+CherryPy for our "application server", but that's sitting behind an nginx reverse proxy.

The main reason is that nginx is much better and faster at handling certain things than Python:

* handling HTTPS and serving plain old HTTP to the application server so Python doesn't have to worry about it

* doing the gzipping of content before it goes out

* routing requests to different places/ports based on various elements matched in the URL or HTTP headers

* virtual hosts, i.e., "Host" header matching and routing things to the right place based on that

* various request sanitization, like setting client_max_body_size, ignore_invalid_headers, timeouts, etc.

Historically we've also had multiple types of application servers, some Python and some C++, and nginx routes requests to the right app server (based mainly on URL prefix).

We also use nginx to do GeoIP with the GeoIP nginx module (though arguably that would be just as simple in Python).

Edit: Note that we don't use it because our "application server is slow" (it's not). Also, I know some people use nginx to serve static content, because it's usually much faster/better than say Python at doing that -- we serve static content via Amazon S3 and a CDN, so that's a non-issue for us.
Indeed; smaller companies are willing to overlook stuff like this if they think you're good. You'll find a lot less nonsense on small teams.
I thought you guys might like this hack.
Missing an option: I've never tried it, but would be open to it.

If someone could give a rational (non-mystical) explanation of how and why to do it.

Or point me to an existing one.
Extortion? You're just full of great advice, now aren't you?

Lying on your application and extorting people risks torching an already damaged reputation, not to mention potentially huge civil and even criminal liabilities.

To the OP, I recommend ditching the Machiavellian stuff. The best bet in my opinion is to network and contribute to projects where possible (such as through OSS, freelance, etc.). If people actually know you and your story and you have a track record with them, the chances of them putting enough trust in you are much greater. I don't think you should leave the CS world. You're going to find the same issues in any line of work, so you might as well stay in the field where your skills lie.
I'd guess that he means relative to other vehicles on the road.

He follows that with "it looks like a modern fire truck." Apart from things like GPS and maybe improved radio communication, I'm curious as to what design and feature improvements have come along, considering those in nearly all other modes of transportation over the same period, and the importance they serve. E.g. do firetrucks really need to be that huge? It seems like a huge disadvantage, especially in cities.
Uh, the economy was producing for war in many areas by 1938. Those Naval battleships at Pearl Harbor didn't simply build themselves, the Army didn't create millions of rifles out of thin air in 1941, etc.

Rationing was required because the government was directing available resources to war production, not because the economy was shit. People could afford food just fine throughout much of WWII, if only the shops had been allowed to sell it to them.
Proposal: One day of HN without flagging and moderators
I'm curious to see what the content would look like on HN without the flagging mechanisms and HN moderators interfering. I realize that both of these control mechansims are probably very beneficial as a whole, but I'm still a little curious to see an upvote-only HN frontpage.

If nothing else, it might make us appreciate the work of the moderators/flaggers even more.
Darn, why couldn't this have happened to the Gnome 3 repos instead?
Ask HN: Why was my link dead on submission?
I created https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433393 and it was dead immediately when I submitted it. What triggered the dead tag so quickly? Are slashgear submissions banned?
I just couldn't concentrate.
Lots of things would come to mind. Revenge, sex, regret,
frustrations, hope, plans and a lot just used to happen in
mind at that time. More than usual. More than it would
usually come to my mind.

I'm only just beginning to learn about meditation but in most forms of meditation these thoughts are perfectly normal. Mindfulness meditation stresses that these thoughts are okay. One of the first things you learn is to accept these thoughts without judging them or judging yourself.

If you ever give it another try, give your mind permission to go wherever it likes. What will your mind feel like when you're not fighting with it and trying to make it think (or not think) about particular things? It may be rewarding to find out, or at least relaxing.

Best wishes!
Yoga is essentially a 90 minute meditation. If you breath properly, anyway.

So I guess I meditate 5 days/week.
Wow. Lit with Nabokov is like taking Algorithms with Knuth. I was filled with jealousy reading that article.
Also, if there is a list of banned sites, is there a place to see what these list of sites are so we can avoid submitting them?
From the datatype wish list, these look like a bad idea actually:

- url - If all schemes are allowed, this is almost equivalent to "does it include :// after the first word". I'm not sure why it should be included.

- phone - Around the world this is equivalent to: does it contain digits. And maybe also + # and star. And maybe also letters for internal voip phones. And....

- zip - Every country has its own. There is no common format. It can have letters, numbers, symbols, ... anything.

- email - This actually could work if it allowed all possible formats.
This is not really true. This tells me you have not worked in or gone through the hiring process in at least the last decade for mid-level management or below?

A criminal background check has become routine and commonplace. An industry survey I saw was something like 93% of all respondents said they executed criminal checks [0].

Alot of HR people are even pulling credit reports. This requires your permission per the Fair Credit Reporting Act, of course. A criminal background check does not although it is "courteous" to provide a consent form. The legality requiring consent probably varies by state but by providing a name, address, and SSN you have probably already given implicit consent. Criminal justice records are a matter of public record. Opening sealed records, (such as divorce proceedings, convictions as a minor, etc) is something else entirely.

In some states workers have the right to request a copy of the information and the company that provided it if it is used as the basis for denial for hire or promotion. If the company uses inhouse staff to do the background check there is no such obligation; kind of a loophole if you ask me.

In the past year some clients have even asked for a drug test.

I don't mind criminal record checks. Credit reports I draw the line because it has a negative impact on my life and unless I have some fiduciary duty it is simply irrelevant. However, if I'm bankrupt, in dire financial straits, etc I could see having some hesitation in letting me run the books. Still, I quite simply will not tolerate health checks and I suggest no one reading this does either.

[0] http://www.shrm.org/research/surveyfindings/articles/pages/b...
True. Correct me if I am wrong but I am not sure if streams work for general text pages (like blogs, eCommerce, etc). It is better suited for chat-style applications (comet).
Two comments, one actual and one meta :-)

So your statement is that you'd take 'rich' so that you could work on 'king.' (trust me working full time on "real work" has King written all over it). Tom Lyon (emp #7 at Sun) told me early on in my years there that you really needed 3 startups, one paid for by VC's that taught you about what startups were all about. Then you need one that you founded but was VC funded that let you exit with enough money so that you could fund #3 without any outside investment and run it the way you wanted to run it. Sort of the three step plan to becoming a "king." Of course that middle one needs a "successful" (aka lucrative) exit :-)

The meta-comment is on the term you've coined "VC-istan" which seems to characterizes VC funded companies as a dysfunctional collection of feudal enterprises in the way that the various former provinces of the USSR were in many ways dysfunctional feudal states (and now nation states). I bugs me. I cannot help but read it as a put down on both groups and like other generalizations I find that by grating on my sensibilities it makes it more difficult for me to see the points you are trying to make (which are generally reasonable, well argued points). I can fully accept that I'm the only person who gets that vibe from the term but I don't really have any way to test that (except by calling it out :-)
Coming off the gold standard was probably the correct monetary policy at the time. But one cannot correlate the ending of deflation with a 'recovery', especially one that is sustainable and not at the expense of others (i.e. those who left the gold standard later; if a country devalues its currency it would see an 'immediate recovery', but really it's a case of taking from one hand and giving to another).

Furthermore, it may be that looser monetary policy went hand in hand with war production in leading a recovery. Convertibility was often suspended in previous wars to help finance them.

There's no consensus on this matter.
Bang with friends is on sale for 550,000$
HTML and Computer Science
I've always wondered about how they calculated that.

If they just taught people how to use a condom and then sent them off to their merry romps, and then checked how many of them got pregnant after a few months, then the statistic is highly suspicious - after all, it could just be from misuse (put it on the wrong way, then remembered how to use a condom and put it on the right way) or just omitting to use them (and then lying about it).

In this case, that would mean that the 2% statistic just indicates that 2% of the participants were not capable or willing to use a condom.

If that's not the way they did it - then how did they do it? Because beyond having every participant followed around by a man with a clipboard, I don't see any ways to reduce the chance of misuse or lying...
Hello World 0.0
Do you mean mod_wsgi or mod_python?
Ideally you use meditation as a tool to quiet those thoughts.
Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can drive the most impractical gas guzzler?

First it was stretch limos, then Hummers, then Hummer stretch limos. I wonder if we're gonna see stretch limo fire trucks…

Edit (since I'm being downvoted): The story is cool, I just find the fact that he's driving it daily to work completely retarded. What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be hardly justifiable at all in our trade, but a 31 year old fire truck is sending a giant fuck you to anyone else trying to reduce their carbon emissions.
Using pstore to debug awkward kernel crashes
Proxy servers aren't just useful for load balancing. I'd say that this isn't the average use case for Internet-facing HTTP reverse proxies at all (people get all worked up by the big boys, but that's not what most Internet applications are about).

In most cases reverse proxies are useful as application firewalls, where you control what passes and what doesn't in an application-independent way (i.e. your systems administrators can do this without the need to touch applications - which in many enterprise settings can't be easily touched by developers, much less by operations).

This is why I have yet to use nginx, and stay with good-old apache. Apache is extremely configurable (not only is mod_rewrite very powerful, but you can insert your own request mangling scripts for that weird edge case).

Apache is also good enough for most cases. For applications with a few thousand users hanging on the site all day, apache can handle it just fine in a 5-year old, low-end Celeron rack server, with just 5% CPU usage even with all connections being SSL for both Internet and application server traffic.

Caching and load-balancing are nice things to have, but not the reason for having a reverse proxy in most cases.
Some technology can be crippling to the art of thinking. When an answer you seek is moments away at the end of an internet connection, for how long can you resist its siren song before succumbing, surrendering your own cognitive processes for the already completed thoughts of someone else? :)
It's amazing how the newcomers to tech seem to ignore 'proven' databases like PostgreSQL so easily that have actually stood the test of time and actually have the real capacity to scale enormously on demand (which when done right). What is more disappointing is how the newcomers seem to trade in for beta-quality NoSQL databases that promise them of better reliability and scalability out of the box, which is simply not true[1]. For instance, databases like MongoDB promise the developer to not worry about scalability and focus just on their code, while it does some things under the hood in a terrible way [2].

PostgreSQL is one of the few databases that supports SQL and can actually be less painful to scale than MySQL. Also, the recent versions have enormous performance boost that can silence the SQL critics, IMO.

If you are interested in testing out PostgreSQL for your project, you might want to develop on the WAPP stack and give it a shot:

http://bitnami.com/stack/wapp

Disclaimer:

I was a mongoDB developer too and I loved it so much. I loved the fact that I could skip running db migrations on my rails app and I can focus on just coding, instead of worrying about scaling. But, it was a terrible trade off. First of all, you can't use NoSQL for everything. It was a very painful lesson that I learned the wrong way. 99% of the time, you want to use SQL, because most use cases can be executed perfectly with SQL db's. Next, some db's have a terrible architecture and design decisions under the hood, mainly to improve their benchmarks (seriously!). For example, turning off write-safe by default... :cough: :cough:
Last but not the least, SQL for the wrong use case complicates things and ends up adding redundancy into the database (like storing User details inside multiple collections, un-avoidable, especially when you are against embedding documents). The worst trade-off using a NoSQL database is the analytics part - "Hey db, show me the list of users who are from the United States and who have subscribed to Plan X and who are the highest paying customers and who love chocolate pie"
SQL - "Here you go." NoSQL - "Sorry sir, not possible. Possible, but possibly a nightmare."

If you want to build a 'scalable' app for your next big thing and don't want the scaling hassles of MySQL, which actually scales extremely well already[3], you can use PostgreSQL.

Cheers

[1]Scaling is hard. Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise!

[2] http://blog.engineering.kiip.me/post/20988881092/a-year-with...

[3] http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-does-Quora-use...
I liked calm.com's landing page back before they launched. I bought their iPhone app for $4 or $5 and it has different settings (raining, ocean, open field, etc.). It's nice and calming. I used to do the whole 10 minutes with my eyes closed thing at night, but sometimes the app or an equivalent YouTube meditation video can be soothing at work even when you're doing something else.
Actually, I thought your writing was consistent with someone who's familiar with the doctrine, but lacks the direct experience. It's akin to confusing the menu with the meal.

I used to do exactly that (I read books on meditation for years before I finally started sitting in earnest). Somewhere on kuro5hin.org are some similar comments from my 11-years-younger self. :)