skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been fighting with audio on my Debian Squeeze system for a while,
but I now think I've finally gotten everything to work. One caveat --
I've yet to try a lot of music listening, so perhaps the addition of the
dmix-module does criple the sound a bit -- hard to tell as long as my
only other audio source is record player -- if my hi-fi cd player hadn't
died a while back an a/b test would've been easier.

Anyway, no pulseaudio, simple usb soundcard/dac based on Burr-Brown from
TI[1] - and now (software) mixing of audio works across youtube/html5
audio in iceweasel (21.0~b6-1 from
"deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ experimental iceweasel-beta"), vlc and
flash audio in chromium[2]. All that was needed in the end, was the
following ~/.asoundrc:

# Aliases for the devices. I don't use the onboard audio -
# terribly noisy. The names (after card) come from
# /proc/asound/cards - see [1]
pcm.nvidia { type hw; card NVidia; }
ctl.nvidia { type hw; card NVidia; }
pcm.usb { type hw; card DAC; }
ctl.usb { type hw; card DAC; }

# If all you want is use usb as default,
# uncomment this, and ignore the rest.
#pcm.!default pcm.usb
ctl.!default ctl.usb

# For software mixing - allowing several programs to play audio
# at the same time:
#dmix for software mixing - http://alsa.opensrc.org/Dmix
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024 # must be unique!
slave {
pcm "hw:DAC"
}
}

Now, I've also realized that the main reason I started fighting with
this, was the delay introduced by pulsaudio, which is only a problem for
me in vlc -- and that could've been fixed (probably) by using the
tools->Track synchronization menu options. Just in case anyone else has
synchronization issues.

I currently don't do any gaming (except for Angband...) -- or other
synchronization-sensitive multimedia.

[1] according to /proc/asound/cards:
0 [DAC ]: USB-Audio - USB Audio DAC
Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC at usb-0000:00:0b.0-3, full speed

[2] Apparently html5 audio (at least in videostreams) is broken in
chromiumr. Flash video (from eg regular non-html5-youtube) works
fine for me with this set up. Some more details at:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178626

[edit: minor corrections]
Many countries in EU, for example. In Poland you can have new smartphone every year for $0.5. Because you pay for calls the same amount whether you get new phone or not it's stupid not to get one. Many people sell the previous, still perfectly fine device.
But here's the thing, the author (if that is you Colin)
and I have both created things that people use.

I'm not the author, it's just something that I thought would resonate with the HN crowd, and about which they might be able to offer some thoughts and possible solutions.

... can the system be so wrong as to consistently overlook
a good developer even if they are bad at interviews?

Yes, it can. I'm sure that when I've been hiring I've overlooked or even actively passed on candidates that would have been excellent employees. The system is not set up to find the best programmers, or even the best employees. I do know what it is optimised for, but certainly good, and even excellent, programmers can easily be overlooked.

Especially if they are bad at interviews.
The US tends to use anything but passive gathering in more focused ways -- specifically against government targets or in actual shooting wars (e.g. killing power plants during airstrikes to support SEAD missions). China seems to use active attacks against purely commercial entities, as well as government entities, when not engaged in a shooting war.
Seems about right to me. St. Louis has a distinct accent from the rest of the state of MO and I've usually noticed that they have a bit of a twang that reminds me of Chicago.
I think there is a lot of negative bias here, because people who do badly in algorithms and data structure questions, or dislike them for some other reason, are more likely to speak on the issue.

I think that these questions are good because they are difficult, and a smarter more capable person is much more likely to get them right. Notice that big tech companies have stopped with the "brainteaser" style questions like how many potholes in Manhatten, but there is no move away from algorithms and data structures questions. And I don't consider the format to be high pressure. Apart from the pressure inherent in having to answer the question on the spot, I never felt any pressure from the interviewer, they tended to be very polite and mild mannered. At worst they didn't understand or agree with my solution.

Telling people that these interview questions suck and they should look for jobs where they don't have to answer them, is really bad advice. Some of the best jobs (for most people) require them. If you face such an interview, the very best thing you can do is study. I probably did 100 interview questions in preparation for my job interviews.
Can't really see how this is Paypal's fault directly - this is just Paypal bowing to regulations - and if they didn't, they'd be in serious trouble. Chargebacks are a requirement by law. No keeping money out of a bank in India is Indian law. The two of these terrible laws fit together to create an awful experience, I agree, but the solution is to fix the laws. Any competitor to Paypal would be forced to do the exact same thing in India.
HTML5 input tags module for Play Framework
Play2-HTML5Tags brings client side validation attributes (required, max|min length, ...) and formats support (date, number, email, ...) to Play 2 templates.

The provided tags can also display forms with special input controls, like a numeric keypad to enter numbers on a smartphone, a calendar for date selection and so on.

Attributes are generated from the constraints defined in the model or in a form mapping.
The car is brilliant, especially in terms of design and engine, but it's a small scale production and they don't have the means of Porsche, Mercedes, Audi (great but not perfect though) or Ferrari and therefore aren't state of the art when it comes to gearbox, transmission and brakes.

The worst part is the gearbox who is notoriously unreliable and many models have issues around 20,000 km.

It's really upsetting to put 100 k€ in a car to have the reliability of a 80' Lancia.

That being said I love Aston Martin, they make awesome cars. Probably the best car body there is to date.

But if you're looking for engineering perfection, get a Porsche 911 Turbo.
There are not a lot: https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list
Go1.1rc1 was issued on May 1, unfortunately I can't see the tag but all changes since May 1 till go1.1rc2 tag fit to one web page so it's not hard to click all of them to have a vision.
It's official: Microsoft's Windows Blue is coming later this year
Regarding the "cleaned up" version, perhaps, it just won't be profitable? From judge's order:

"Further, Plaintiffs cannot conclude whether that person spoofed the IP address, is the
subscriber of that IP address, or is someone else using that subscriber’s Internet
access. Without better technology, prosecuting illegal BitTorrent activity requires
substantial effort in order to make a case. It is simply not economically viable to
properly prosecute the illegal download of a single copyrighted video."
He isn't complaining about the chargeback policy. He's complaining that paypal double dips on the currency conversion, even if the money never reaches his bank account.

Paypal could just send the USD directly to his bank, and the bank would convert the currency before crediting his account, so it is an unnecessary burden and loss of money for him.
Its a shame Hollywood has vilified certain animals and insects like sharks, snakes, spiders and bats. Now we are unreasonably fearful of them.
When I first saw this on Reddit I though a similar thing. It (unsurprisingly) was getting a disproportionate amount of coverage compared to similar things the other way round. Reddit is quite dark when you read between the lines on many of the things and issues they take up.
One other use-case I could suggest: I once got caught in the middle of a contract negotiation between our in-house lawyers, and one at a service provider. This negotiation mostly consisted of sending back and forth Word documents with "Track Changes" turned on.
Hiring the wrong person is potentially dangerous for your business, there's no denying that. However, the tendency today is the demand for hiring 'rockstar' programmers for essentially pretty mundane jobs. This poses two problems: an artificial shortage of qualified programmers, and if you manage to find one, you hire an overqualified programmer who is likely to get bored and unmotivated within a couple of weeks.
The Road To Business Success: A Talk To Young Men (1885)
So it's all about the 2500 € licensing fee. That didn't take long, the ink on the Trademark registration is barely dry. Trademarking a common term and then extorting licensing fees is a disgusting business practice, but I can see how they'll get away with it since "Hackathons" are such a niche thing.

As I said in the thread where the registration was discovered, it's a real shame nobody discovered this during the (long) period where we could still have filed an objection to the Trademark. Now it's too late.

Someone will have to try and fight this in court.
Google blew it with Checkout a long time ago, and they mostly gave up on it until a year or so ago when they launched Wallet. But they wasted 5 years on by not even moving the needle in the payment processing market.

Not having Checkout/Wallet as a popular payment system has also been (and still is) a major obstacle in getting people to buy apps and content from the Play Store. If Checkout accounts were as popular as iTunes or Amazon accounts at least, things would've gone a lot more smoothly, and I'm sure more merchants would've preferred it over Paypal, too.
I have also encountered this while interviewing for the couple of jobs. I thought I did not study well and that's why could not solve the problems in front of the interviewer! In fact, when I am able to solve bigger problems while developing live projects. Nice post and it echoes something which has happened to all of us at some point in time.
Sensible folks put together their eCommerce platforms in such a fashion that enacting this legislation is a single config flag.

US sales tax is a pain in the ass, however, largely because you end up with (after state, county and city tax) percentages like 4.568398%, and you end up in rounding hell, particularly if you sell items which cost $0.05.

Either way, it's moot. It'll never make it into law, house republicans will block it.
> "well, it can be solved by doing $NAIVE_SOLUTION, just to get that out there, and I know you're looking for a better one."

I'm at the very beginning of my career, having just accepted a new grad position, but I thought I'd offer my opinion on this: just implement the naive solution. If you're really unsure, ask them if they're OK with you doing that. In my very first interview I took the approach you just described and the interviewer actually stopped me as I was brainstorming other ideas and said, "Just work on the basic solution and we can talk about ways of improving it later." In subsequent interviews I've implemented the basic solution first then talked about the drawbacks of that approach with the interviewer, possible improvements that could be made, etc.

Now, most of the problems I was given were far simpler than what was described in the OP. I do think I was very fortunate to get interviewers who weren't just looking for an outside-the-box solution to some brainteaser they'd concocted. Nonetheless, I think it might be worth considering just taking the naive approach (and telling them what you're doing any why) rather than spending a lot of time trying to come up with a perfect solution.
> It is much better to filter out some perfectly good candidates than accidentally hire the wrong candidate.

If the companies OP cites were operating under that principle, they should be able to say Hire or No Hire after the last interview. Waiting over 1 month to decide won't make the candidate improve; the only reason to do so is to look for a better candidate, or hire OP if no better candidate is found, but in that case they aren't exactly using the principle above.
Just refer them to the reply of the case Arkell v. Pressdram in 1971.

http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/arkell.htm
html 5, css
javascript
jquery

on the server side either
java or
ruby on raily
or groovy on grails
or node.js
or whatever makes sense for you there

security issues (client side, server side)
accessibility

ux (user experience) - you need an expert for thast

web design
graphics

good operations team

experts for performance and scalability
Depends on the application, In broadcasting for example bandwidth is painfully expensive, hence the shift from MPEG2 to h.264 for consumers (although in the US its much more complicated as everyone seems to recompress everything badly on TV. Its like watch a pirated copy.)

It just takes a long time to get from approval to acceptance. The other problem with JPEG2000 is that its not really a motion codec, so it doesn't degrade well over lossy links without special sauce. All of which is non standard.
Yeah the huntsmans are very welcome in my home, they can eat all the cockroaches and mozzies they like! Geckos too, because they're cute :)
I always wanted "eie.io" for a site for childrens nursery rhymes :-)

Another suggestion:

A list of actual words that end in "io" that are still available (based on this list, for instance: http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/io/)
The Socialist Millionaire Problem and Secure Multi-Party Computation
Caveat worth keeping in mind, since you mention SVG, is that Fabric is still rather picky about the SVG it handles. I was playing around with it for some very simple SVG symbols that rendered fine using built in SVG support in both Chrome, Firefox and rendered to PNG via rsvg, and loaded fine in Inkscape, and had to manually tweak the svg quite a bit before Fabric would handle it. (I don't remember the exact problem, but think it was an issue with stacking transformations including "translate"). I'm sure that will improve over time, but it was a bit of a nuisance.

Other than that, it seems to work great.
Because PayPal is the only one that actually works in 150+ countries worldwide. No service offering US or US+CA+UK only service could compete with PayPal effectively, even if it were 1000 times better in technical, UX or business terms, because something that works with a lot of pain is still infinitely better than someone that doesn't support your country.
I doubt that. Hollywood probably used them as villains because people were already scared of them. The fear of spiders, ... is believed to be a primal fear, an evolutionary safeguard, because some of them are indeed dangerous (and especially there were mankind is believed to have started).

Don't know how much of that is proven. And I wasn't aware of a typical fear of bats (maybe I watched to much batman).
Tail -f is dead, long live tail -f
Yeah, I heard about sites like those before, often one is welcome to pay to have their info removed, similar to those "check to see if a registered criminal lives in this neighbourhood" sites.

I wanted to check if this was the case--they usually hint at it pretty clearly, as it's their main source of income--but it appears the domein is currently parked (or perhaps the news article listed it wrong and it's spelled differently, I don't care to figure it out).
Fair enough. I live in Asia also and haven't seen this practiced much even in Europe. I haven't lived with these subsidies in a long time, and I always pay full price for my phones (unless my employer gives me one). No idea about the Japanese market; it is very unique in too many ways that isn't generalize-able to the rest of the world.

We've (in unsubsidized China) been upgrading smartphones because (a) they are incredibly useful, and (b) the hardware is advancing at a rapid clip like PCs used to...the phone I had 2-3 years ago is a relic compared to the one I have now.

How many iPads have you seen at Starbucks recently with those keyboard cases used by those kids...writing reports? Much of the under 10 crowd hasn't even used a PC yet, they are just used to doing everything on the tablet (now mostly iPad). There is your PC future.
This article, "Real Programmers don't use Pascal", is the article that prompted the "Story of Mel"

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html

That has a Wikipedia article giving lots of additional information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

It's believed that Mel was a real person, Mel Kay - here's a photo of the first class of LGB-30 programmers and instructors, including Mel Kaye:

http://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png

Many people prefer the "free verse" version:

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

That's the first version I came across when visiting Stanford in 1985. With no access to printers, and no way to transfer the file, I copied it by hand. I may still have that copy somewhere, although after 5 jobs and four house moves it's probably lost forever.

It's been discussed on HN before - here's one link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678999

There are 13 submission of Mel on HN so far, including one just 4 days ago:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%2...
See link and discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4290797
The fact is that the companies failed to communicate when he explicitly asked for feedback. That has nothing to do with his performance in the interviews, unless these are people who simply don't reply because they thing the candidate is bad.
Essentially, because Paypal has the best anti-fraud measures in the world, by a factor of lots. Every payment processor in the world is in a four way footrace: their opponents are organized crime, individual scammers, and their local government (who will want to shut them down to prevent scams and moneylaundering). The prize for second place is your business imploding.
Interesting point of view, which I don't share by the way. I think the right person for the job is not per definition the smartest or the best at solving equations during an interview.

Finding the right person for the job is more about getting a good fit with the rest of the team. Being the smartest guy/girl on earth doesn't help you when you have a shitty personality or can't work together with the rest of the team. If I were to recruit a programmer, I'd look for past work (Github repos, online projects), accomplishments and personality, rather than test results that don't reflect the reality of the job in any way.
How Silicon Valley is Hollowing Out the Economy (And Stealing From You To Boot)
You should add a <title> to your page. I bookmarked it and had to copy/paste from content to title.
Try changing fonts often on Firefox. That's ludicrously slow. To the point where anyone doing lots of text on a canvas that might need to support Firefox will need to take special measures to get decent performance (caching, lots of caching, and ordering updates to minimize font changes)
It definitely isn't easier to raise money than to get a job. People just expect it to be nigh-impossible to raise money, and that everybody deserves a job, because that's how it used to be.

Also, there is a massive demand for code that works, but most people seem aware that just hiring whatever the cat drags in seems not to result in code that works, so they make these barriers.

I honestly have no idea whether said barriers do a good job, and it seems like basically nobody is trying to measure it. You'd have to record the outcomes for hires and no-hires, i.e. admitting that you wish you never hired someone, or that you wish you had because they went on to invent sliced bread, and that requires testicles of carbon fiber.
I... don't actually understand most of what they wrote there.
Ah clippy, how do we miss thee!

I hardly work in product development but from what I've seen, innovation is very focused and extremely thought out within the company. The "rogue innovator" in it for career points would hardly survive very long.
Morto Giulio Andreotti. I suoi più celebri aforismi, per riflettere…
I've seen things like 8-to-7 quite often.
slight problem--how would they reap the PR? it'd have to be an anonymous testimonial from the guy, nor is it a great success story you'd tell many people about and recommend them ...
Seems quite interesting.
Twitter-hacking Syrian Electronic Army: How much state support does it have?
What do you need ammunition for when you aren't allowed to have weapons?

Besides, what non-authoritarian country considers cryptography to be ammunition?

Edit: Looked it up, if you got a license (for either hunting or a shooting club) you can legally have and buy weapons and munition.
> multimedia collection

How many people really want to do that ? You just better send it through mail honestly.

Most people care about text data, which is very small if you handle it well.
What the f***? Google Glass censors foul language
Google Glass Picks Up Early Signal - Keep Out
Yes. But O(2N) = O(N) :D
Well it's hard to quantify the relative importance of personality and cultural fit vs intelligence and programming ability. You can turn what you said around, and say that you can be the nicest, coolest person in the world, but if you are a fucking moron who can't code, you won't be very useful.

But the big tech companies seem to have settled on the current process, and are therefore probably fairly happy with the people their interview process is giving them. As to looking at previous projects, that makes sense but it might be more time consuming to properly evaluate someone like that.
evil maid attack wouldn't have worked in this situation, since she broke in and stole the laptop. I also doubt she has the know-how to perform an evil maid attack. Enabling a BIOS boot password would make it more difficult to stealthily perform an evil maid attack. Finally, "no security is perfect" is not an excuse for having no security.
Got CFF?
MS biggest cash cows since years are not their operating systems, but their office suite(s), server licences, corporate service programs and potentially also their IP revenues (including other OS like e.g. Android HW manufacturers) - key to that might be their OS dominance in the corporate PC / desktop world.

To see / visualize that this is changing and to make these numbers more useful, they need to be combined with e.g. device numbers to get to a level of market penetration / share (might also need to be broken into corporate / personal). It's quite a different situation for a company selling your closely OS-linked solutions to almost every company / PC user when you're holding >75% market share in the OS segment or when your market share has dropped to 40%+ overall. This effect might intensify over the next years with BYO, more powerful handheld devices etc.

There are also major gaps in the data - you might also want to check Wikipedia and MS annual reports for references to more sales data (e.g. http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/9/3146777/windows-7-630-milli...)
One Linux over all: Mark Shuttleworth’s ambitious post-PC plans for Ubuntu
I really like the in-depth research that went into the creation of the map. An interactive version could save some clutter, which isn't to say that I didn't find this version thoroughly interesting!
I keep seeing a billion alternatives suggested, but as a non-professional - and with the poor demonstrations of what they can on the websites - it's really hard to determine which does what, and which is better.

Are there any good side-by-side comparisons anywhere, because there are so many options out there (at least for Mac) that I I feel that the daunting array of options is actually going to deter people like me from getting one of those programs.