skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crudely speaking, no code < bad code < good code. However, what I tend to be interested in is curiosity and improvement in the case of a junior programmer. One technique I've seen that's worked well with me is for the applicant to list their 3 favorite repos on their resume, which guides me towards looking at them, rather than just poking around randomly at the "bad stuff".

As an interviewer, I don't care that you've written bad code in the past (any developer who says he hasn't is lying). I do care that you have written code up to the standard of the job I'm hiring for (which is going to be quite lenient for a junior position), but I'm mostly going to be looking for cues demonstrating improvement and curiosity. The more technologies, languages, and concepts you touch, the better. To me, your Github profile is a showcase of your interests first and foremost.

I'm much less interested in hiring someone for their hard skills than I am for their potential. I can hire outsource hard skills for pennies on the dollar; what I want are people who can become proactive owners of the projects they're on, not just code monkeys who turn specs into code. For example, one guy I hired saw that we were looking for a dev with front-end chops, so he re-coded his resume with backbone.js just to show off a bit. This caught my attention, not because of his ability to write Javascript, but because his proactive solution to the question of "how do I get this company to hire me?" told me that he was the kind of person I wanted to work with, not just that he had a specific skillset that I could hire.
Just to explain "Silence":

Apparently, git does not allow you to alias default git commands (like "pull", "push", "commit", etc) to something else. In the given situation, a user is trying to alias the default "pull" command to "pull --ff-only" so that pull will not automatically merge changes and will only fast-forward.

However, since git does not allow you to alias default commands, when the Git Master runs "git pull" it ignores the alias entirely and does a normal pull, and in so doing merges changes. The student is confused, but eventually figures it out.
> So Bitcoin doesn't have fiscal stimuli like regular currencies, and therefore it will experience depressions and recessions, unlike regular currencies?

You missed the big problem; while one could make an argument that the lack of the capacity for monetary stimulus with Bitcoin is an issue, fiscal stimulus is quite possible with Bitcoin (there isn't any now, because no government uses Bitcoin as the currency in which its budget works), and the multiplier effect resulting from the velocity of money would conceptually work the same way as with any other currency (the inherently deflationary construction of Bitcoin makes the likely velocity lower, which might reduce the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus, but its still possible; and different forms of fiscal stimulus could address the velocity of money.)
michael_miller explained it adequately above:

1) IT departments are massively conservative (and this is not an intrinsically bad thing)

2) A lot of apps were built specifically for IE6. They still work with IE6. Many times they only work with IE6.

3) It hasn't been made worthwhile to upgrade.

> If you're still stuck on IE6/IE7 it really is your own fault.

A lot of us web developers have decided to just say, "Fuck it," and stop supporting IE6. If it works, cool; if it doesn't, we don't care. This is a luxury available to those of us who have clients who aren't supported by the aforementioned IT departments. Some of us are still required to support IE6 because we have clients who we can't drop and refuse to move off, and we don't have the leverage to persuade them otherwise.
I hope by the time we hit major problems with Bitcoin we will have several new digital currencies to chose from. Nobody ever said there needs to be only one, after all.
Recessions and depressions happen to economies. To critique Bitcoin for its potential to induce a recession or depression is ridiculous, because the USD -- and its influence on the economy -- isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
West should learn from India’s high patent standards
Bitcoin is certainly flawed for a number of reasons, but this article is quite poorly-written; we'd have been better off with just the list of references. Summary: Bitcoin is deflationary.
What Middle-earth has to do with our earth
The gateways provided by the cable ISPs here in Western Canada tend to have unique passwords. It would be prudent on the part of the device manufacturer to just create a scheme for creating default passwords based on the unique serial that the device has and then just print labels for each and have the default ROM just sort it out upon it being powered up for the first time.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Keep them coming!
Then Bitcoin increases in value, and you keep dividing a Bitcoin more. Nothing really changes.

Does it really matter if you have 20 million Bitcoins that are worth $1 trillion or if you have 10 million Bitcoins that are worth as much? No, it doesn't. The 21 million number was pretty arbitrarily chosen to begin with.

This would be a problem if say half of available Bitcoins would be wiped out overnight - somehow. But the chances of that happening as getting lower and lower as more people start using Bitcoins, and the value gets spread out across many more people.
>When you hear people throwing around terms like "humanely slaughtered beef", you know that we've hit a point of exceptional self deception as a society.

I disagree; I think there are in fact humane meat processors, like the one shown in this video: https://vimeo.com/22077752
All solar efficiency breakthroughs on a single chart
Responsible for 323 lives:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_General_Belgrano
Hah, half right and a good guess. Since we're on the topic, I always read your name as 'Max Payne'.
A few do, RenCap is a good example, though good luck getting your money into them.

Most don't, Most measure themselves against an index and then mark their P/L accordingly, ie if your index is the Nasdaq and you return -10% in 2001 then you did really well, you just didn't get a bonus:)
If Bioshock Infinite were a 2D isometric game
How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite
What I find especially powerful is when reviewing files in the commit window you can stage and commit subsection of files.

It allows you to really quickly separate out different change into unique commits and gets rid of the need to make messy I-did-A-and-then-did-B commits.

Select the lines you want in the commit window -> Right Click -> Stage Lines.

You can also revert selected lines, but for some reason it's grayed out half the time... I'm not sure what black magic controls that feature.

You can do all of that in the CLI but it's a lot more clunky and time consuming.
Love this:

http://www.metasploit.com/about/penetration-testing-basics/

"You can become a penetration tester at home by testing your own server and later make a career out of it."

Sounds like the old style correspondence school ads - a bit hokey.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/correspondence+school

I would have rewritten that as:

"Many people have actually made a career out of being a penetration tester by first testing their own home server"
Ask HN: Micro Startups?
I've been wondering if anyone has tried starting a 'micro' startup. By which I mean a startup that's manageable by one person and won't require outside investments. If you have a simple and useful idea that's not too complicated, is it worth going for?
Too late, Microsoft already own the term SQL Server. Not that it matters because everyone knows SQL server as being the MS product anyway.
"but if the rate of return on investments is greater than growth of the currency price that wouldn't be an issue either and one would expect it to stabilize over time."

Well, for last couple weeks, bitcoin is the best investment, just saying ....
Is that a dick in the comfort zone?
2140? I'd expect the "new hotness" in cryptocurrencies to hit in 2014, not 2140.
"Lost" bitcoins would just cause all of the other bitcoins to effectively increase in value. It's really only a problem for the person losing the bitcoins and a (small) positive for the rest of the bitcoin community.

It's conceivable that most lost coins will only be lost until the keys can be cracked. Bitcoin keys are extraordinarily difficult to crack right now, but at some distant point in the future, it's conceivable they could be cracked.

IIRC, there are some bitcoins that have been irretrievably lost because it was sent to an invalid key. It's a very small number however.
AirPlaying music and video from iPad to Raspberry Pi—it’s as easy as…
Pacman lists ca-certificates as an optional requirement of wget: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/wget/

But the point halfasleep is making is important: Don't assume either wget or curl will validate your SSL connection because it may not have been set up by your OS/distribution.
I also don't agree with this argument.

Dividing $100 into 100 x $1 bills makes sense if yesterday an orange cost $100, but one week later it costs $1 ( because of changing the value of money ).
Mohawke's Best of the Best Free and Open Source Software Collection
The reason I said that is because, there are two reasons to own Bitcoin - either to derive indirect utility through purchasing goods with Bitcoin in the future (therefore Bitcoins are being treated as if it’s a currency) OR the expectation that Bitcoin will rise in monetary value which means that, Bitcoin is a speculative digital asset – however, it’s not tied to anything in the way a stock or bond is for example. Currently, Bitcoin can be considered elastic (to some extent) although it’s subject to future diminishing elasticity meaning that, in the long run there will be a finite supply of Bitcoins and an inelastic supply.

However, a long-run inelastic and fixed supply currency is not useful for a real world economy which is why, Bitcoin is useful as a speculative digital asset rather than a currency.
When the whitepaper and subsequent code for the Bitcoin system was drafted, they created a set limit of 21 million bitcoins. After this limit is reached (designed to happen in 2140) there will be no new coins introduced into the network.

The concern then, is that when there is a fixed amount of coins available, people will begin to hoard them because they will appreciate in value. The system avoids this by allowing coins to be subdivided to 8 decimal places (the smallest unit is called a Satoshi). This results in 21 * 10^48 possible Satoshis available to the economy. It is expected that this will be a sufficient amount of currency for the network to avoid hoarding. If hoarding is still an issue, the code can be changed to further subdivide a coin.

The mistake Nicholas makes in this article is confusing the comparison between the dollar and the bitcoin. If you divide a $100 bill into 100 $1 bills, you will not feel any richer because the value of a single dollar bill does not change. If you divide a bitcoin into 100,000,000 Satoshis, the demand for more currency will cause an inflation in the value of an individual Satoshi.
I guess you could call http://notlate.co.uk/ that. It is a simple service to provide decent timetable files to students at my university. Hoping to monetise it starting next semester by selling advertising space in the calendar files.
Show HN: Bootstrap for Native iOS Apps
The potential for destruction of bitcoins is actually reassuring to me. It painfully demonstrates that there is a limited supply of the digital "material" that makes bitcoin possible. It also encourages us to not hoard too much bitcoin, and to actually spend some of it from time to time.
My point was that the context of this article is important. SQL Server has its place, and it does what its meant to fairly well. I really just despise these giant sweeping statements without context, so I wanted to add context. I also imagine that many HN readers are probably not very well versed on SQL Server. After all, it's not free (well, BizSpark makes it free for a while), and it's rarely used outside of the enterprise (for good reason).

To answer your questions, SSRS pre-2012 didn't work for non-IE users. In 2012, it works like a charm, though. As for debugging in SSIS, if you're talking about script tasks, again, they fixed it in 2012. Debugging data flows is pretty easy, too--I've never really had a trouble except for the script tasks.

As with any Microsoft product, there are a plethora of quirks that you just have to know about (or a quick googling will tell you), but I've never felt my dev time was stunted because I was using SSIS instead of Informatica or Talend or something else. These things all have their quirks, so none really bother me over the next.

Anyway, I'm not here to fly the banner of SQL Server. Microsoft, sadly, doesn't pay me royalties. I use it, it's a decent tool that does what I need it to do, but I do work on too many different platforms to really care about one or the other. My point was to give context and other info about what SQL Server is.

It's a good list for web apps, though. Certainly things you want to think about when building a web application. Especially pessimistic concurrency. I think a lot of web devs have no clue what concurrency models are. I cannot tell you the amount of `with (nolock)` arguments I've seen over the years.
"I can't imagine Microsoft ever being given a fine in the US for monopolistic practices"
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

"Well, in most of the EU you need to guarantee decent working conditions"
You also do in the US. See OSHA safety standards. Also US has much stricter anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws and rules than much of the EU. Comments that would be acceptable jokes in the workplace in Denmark could get you fired for creating a hostile work environment in the US.

Maybe instead of just slandering the US, you should learn a bit more about it.
That's how all communities work though. As a community grows and attracts new members, the old guard moan about how it was better when they were noobs.

In fact this is true for real -"offline"- life as well.
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Sure, but who wants to read the FAQ section of a manual whose every answer is "Because fuck you, that's why. Wanna fight about it?"
I was wondering if this has to do with the Great Firewall of China and Packet Shaping in some way.

The other explanation is that China just pirates really old versions of windows for everything.
I think the idea is that it's a classic supply/demand equation: With a fixed supply of Bitcoin available to transact with, each individual Bitcoin will become more expensive as demand goes up.

If you sub-divide Bitcoins further to purchase the same items then it's still a deflation: What you used to be able to sell for 1 BTC now you can only get 0.1 BTC for. If all prices drop proportionally at the same time that's not really so bad, but it is bad for any kind of delayed payment agreements (e.g. credit, loans, etc.) as your ability to repay, say, a 40 BTC loan continually gets less and less.

If you don't sub-divide then you make it more and more difficult for currency exchange to happen at all; i.e. the BTC becomes more valuable, which is also deflationary.

In a deflationary economy it's better to hoard your money (which is growing in value without action on your part), which reduces the pool of BTC available to spend, which leads to more deflation, etc. etc.

Of course this is a disaster only if BTC becomes the only currency, but it would seem to put a hamper on the idea that BTC could completely supplant our current currencies. I'd certainly never take out a loan in BTC at this point; even if the lender agreed to "deflate" the principal at a certain APR, the volatility of the BTC value is too high to be sure I wouldn't get taken to the cleaners on the loan.
Two issues:

Firstly, the mining allocation rate isn't meaningfully part of the bitcoin protocol; it's just a setting. Any portion of the network large enough to survive as a detached economy can choose to change the (batty) monetary policy whenever it likes.

Secondly, this probably won't be necessary, as nothing really prevents bitcoin holders from forming banks and issuing inflationary/debased/pegged notes to beat the price down to sanity, using the existing transaction ledger for accounting.
Great work! Which JPEG stego algorithm do you use (if you don't mind sharing)?

Edit: Found the linked paper. Thanks!
I hear so many disparate opinions about Bitcoin economy that I don't consider them anymore. The classic counter argument to this one is that hardware is constantly improving and still people buy hardware even though everyone knows that in 6 months with the same money you can buy something better. And another one is that Bitcoin is so divisible that deflation is not a problem.

In the end, Economics involves the behavior of people acting on free will. How anyone can attempt how people are going to behave with respect to something? If anyone could predict what society is going to value in the future, or how people will react to some new technology would he be writing blog posts about what is going to fail? Has there been anything remotely similar to the Bitcoin now in history?

I don't know whether deflation is good or bad but I consider the potential advantages of a deflationary currency, if it works, worth trying it. Why not, nobody is being forced to get into Bitcoins. If you don't like it, ignore it and move along.
My question is more meta: why 4 podcasts in 2 years?

Basically, I want to know where producing a podcast ranks among the various ways to build a professional brand on the interwebs.
I use the CLI for everything except merges and glancing at history of a particular file. For merges I use opendiff (simple merges I'll just drop into vim and do it quickly by hand) and history/diffs between versions I use SourceTree.

Honestly, the GUIs are more confusing to me than using the CLI. Git does a pretty good job at pushing the user in the right direction.
This fundamental flaw is absolutely glaring to anyone who has any understanding of economic history -- and it's amazing to me how many technologists willfully disregard several centuries of accumulated experience. Because of their built-in deflationary spiral, Bitcoins can never meaningfully be used as a medium of exchange: it will always be tempting to keep your Bitcoins in your pocket and let them appreciate instead of using them for needed goods and services. (And certainly, no one will take on debt denominated in Bitcoins. Can you imagine if you had taken out a Bitcoin-denominated mortgage a year ago?) All of this looks a lot like the 19th century in terms of economics, which suffered from manic booms and absolutely devastating depressions on a regular basis.[1] It took the mother of all depressions -- a decade-long monster that casted a generations-long shadow -- to permanently shift thinking. While economists still debate the precise causes of the Great Depression (and why so many attempts to right the economy in the 1930s failed), there is broad consensus on one key element: deflation is an economic carcinogen, and must be avoided at all costs. As such, Bitcoin is macroeconomic cancer -- no matter how breathless its techno-utopian proponents may be.

[1] Kindleberger, Charles P. and Aliber, Robert (2005 [1978]), Manias, Panics and Crashes. A History of Financial Crises, New York, ISBN 0-465-04380-1
Affirmative. I've been using Google "Dorks" for years.
To suggest there is even a such a thing as being "like a man" is as inherently sexist as suggesting that all women are "too emotional" for any real position of power.

Seriously?

Maybe I misunderstand you, but it sounds like the following:

Woman stands up: "All the positions of power are held by men, who promote other men into positions of power. It is obvious that men are sexist!"

To which you reply: "To suggest that men are something-something is as inherently sexist as suggesting that women are too emotional to hold power. You are a sexist!!!!!"

Black person stands up: "And another thing, all the men in power are white!"

Somebody else replies, "Possibly, but the fact is that we are colour-blind and never noticed it. You are a racist!"

:-)
Bigvis - tools for exploratory data analysis of large datasets
This deflation argument seems to me it's an argument for the status quo, so if you are say Warren Buffet it is a vary valid concern. If on the other hand you just graduated undergrad and had a huge debt and your wage was actually set in bitcoins this would be great for you because the cost of paying off your dept would be from your bitcoin point of view spiraling to zero, as would the cost of everything else. That sounds like a pretty awesome situation to be in.

Be wary of financial explanations, because in most cases when a business person or economist says its good, they either mean its good for keeping things stable, its good for the elite, or its good for the average person, all of which might not be you. For example, you might see someone on CNBC saying they need to make sure they don't have a disorderly default, but really if you are in a position to take advantage of that temporary disorderly market you could gain from that.
You can absolutely learn to do penetration testing on your own time with your own servers. We have a script we give people to do the same thing. If you feel like you have a knack for systems programming, being a good systems programmer is 1/2 the hard part of appsec; the other 1/2 is literally "taking pleasure in finding creative ways to break things", and you can find out if you have that personality streak in just a couple hours of trying attacks.
> If a physical currency like physical gold or paper experienced the kind of deflation bitcoin currently is, it would be problematic because those things are difficult to subdivide into (effectively) arbitrarily small pieces.

Its actually pretty trivial to issue new paper currency in smaller denominations and exchange existing currency for it; the problem with deflation is that it creates a disincentive to spend or invest, not that there is a logistical difficulty in subdividing currency.
Well, that's far better-sounding than the reality, so please continue to do so!
Given that Google offered repeatedly on the mailing lists to help remove any code/features that webkit no longer wanted, i don't see how it's like that at all?
The best definition for what distinguishes a startup from, say, a small business chain of 4 barber shops managed by one person is the massive growth a startup sees. I very much subscribe to the notions in http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
You're confusing two points just like the author. First you're saying that controlling your currency doesn't help (hurts?). Look at how many recessions the US had when it was pegged to gold vs now, then get back to me on that one.

But, that doesn't really matter because Bitcoin is _not_ a national currency. It really is more like gold in that it's not really a currency in itself, but a way to store/transfer other currencies. No one buys something with gold without first doing the conversion to their local currency and I don't see that ever changing with Bitcoin either. And, it doesn't have to.
`git add -p` splits your changes into logical chunks and lets you choose whether to stage each on.
I agree with you that this is not a good thing, but I don't think changes in language like this ever reverse (similar to generic trademarks).
Why are they trying to get people to stop using Mach 3? Is it just to get more sales on the new razor or is there some kind of issue with the Mach 3?
Indeed. Did Tolstoy have to live off his royalties?
Comments like this show a complete lack of understanding about economics and the positive impact government spending and lending can have on the economy. Just because recent monetary policy hasn't improved the economy as much as we would like is no excuse to give up all control over the monetary policy.
Probably true, but I just used the same number that was in the article.