skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get that HN doesn't do Gawker, but I find something distasteful about taking Kotaku's content and putting it up on another site. If HN is too good for Gawker Media, then it should stick to that.
I was actually expecting this to look terrible (low expectations) but this is great!

Going to star this and try to contribute.
Very good point. QA doesn't get respect.

As a result, QA does provide one thing earlier than other areas: management responsibility. Because churn is so high, it's important to put in good processes. Additionally, very few people stay. As a result, it isn't uncommon for QA managers (in any part of tech, not just games) to be in their mid-20s. This is demonstrated in the story, with the managers being in their mid 20s.

That said, as you say, it can be detrimental for software development careers.
> Though there are QA positions that require a higher level of expertise and knowledge, the people doing regression testing on a game are not them.

I suspect that's a self fulfilling prophecy there.

> The difference between a really great QA tester and an okay QA tester is probably less than 2x.

If you're going to treat people like QA people like they're low skilled, and that they really make no difference as people, then you're going to get wind up with people like that. QA can be more than just kitty on the keyboard button pushing. Customer service has been thought of this way, and unsurprisingly, companies got lots of mediocre and bad outcomes. Zappos shows that this doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
Animated diagrams of (some of the) 507 Mechanical Movements
Who said anything about foreign operations or foreign terrorists? Domestic terrorists, the ones actually here, are very much under the purview of the FBI.

I asked in my previous comment, "Do you further, or alternatively deny that alerting those people to the fact that the FBI knows about them would harm the FBI's ability to stop them from harming people in the US?" Can you answer this?

I have another question: do you believe your/the public's judgement is going to be the best method by which to determine the efficacy of a counter-terrorism strategy, even assuming the program can be communicated in such a way so as to not compromise it's ability to be effective?
That shiploads are held back is actually a _great_ thing, maybe one of the best things capitalism does.

Yes it means you get to pay more (in some cases a lot more) for your bread. It also means that farmers make more money and enable them to sell their wheat _now_ when they need the money and not after they have been foreclosed and it puts a price floor on the market for wheat, insuring that the crops we need to prevent starvation will not rot on the fields.
What an absolutely retarded argument.

As someone mentioned above, apparently this is the same amount of money that Google offers for security exploits. How is it any different?

Also how much money do you expect? You should expect NO money for doing the right thing. Rewards like these are simply gestures of goodwill and you should thank Facebook for even offering something like that.

Giving such exploits to the black market is WRONG. It's morally unjust. Money shouldn't change the situation any more.
In our experience, and with companies that have large teams of teachers training is the most important piece of all this.

Pointing out freelancer rates in major cities is also not representative: Lower cost of living cities have lower market rates for freelancers. When you're delivering the service over the web as we do with http://www.thinkful.com/ each party (the freelancer and the hirer) can split the cost savings.
Backbone Marionette/Require Boilerplate for your SPA
What's silly about it? The distinction is one that transcends "digital versus physical": information a third party collects about you versus information you yourself communicate. The relevant differences don't stop being relevant simply because everything is stored as bits instead of say paper records. If the government can ask a shopkeeper at a brick and mortar store what you bought there, it makes sense that it can ask a digital retailer what you bought there. That's not because we analogize from brick and mortar stores to digital retailers, but because in both cases we're dealing with information third parties have collected about you, based on your voluntary dealings with them.

Lawmakers use analogies because they're conceptually very powerful. Say you have two things: 1 and 2. 1 has characteristics X, Y, and Z, and 2 has characteristics X, U, and V. A rule applies to 1 because of characteristic X. Analogizing from 1 to 2 on the basis of the shared characteristic X is an intuitive (and logically valid!) way to argue that the rule should also apply to 2. Not because 1 and 2 are identical or even very similar, but because the animating force behind the rule is the shared characteristic X that is present in both 1 and 2.
Thanks Ben. Didn't realize it was against rules to not disclose that I'm affiliated with Moz. Will correct in the future.
Massive 167Gbps DDoS attacks against Banking and Financial Institutions
I'm blown away that you can load up and run with this. Isn't SABnzbd pretty RAM intensive? Are you doing this with local storage or networked storage? Does this handle 1080p, or are you running mostly 480 media?

I'm full of questions on this subject mainly because I've been holding out on purchasing a Pi for this exact application until they come with a bit more power.
I'm sorry to hear you couldn't find a model to make it work – would love to learn more! You can email me directly darrell@thinkful.com
As I've pointed out elsewhere, this is what results when you discount experience and treat personnel like they're just mindless button pushers.
Personally, I'm just not sure what the association with monads is supposed to be.

Shouldn't Joe Armstrong know what function composition is when he sees it? (Although it is really weird that it slots into the first argument position.)
Thanks for the full source.

This is also why banning by domain is crap.
I think it would be good for you to realize that what gives your life fulfillment (mortgages, shorter average commutes than SF) might not mean anything to other people.
That antagonistic behavior being what? I ask because there's a commonly-held belief about Monsanto that they, in effect, wait for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields and then sue the farmers who manage those fields for royalties.

The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup on non-Monsanto crops, you kill the crop.

If there's a case where Monsanto sued a farmer simply for having Roundup-Ready seeds or plants on their farms, I haven't seen it, and I've (a) looked and (b) asked around a lot.

If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that. Although again note that the problem with software patents is that you can implement some obvious piece of functionality and get sued by someone with a ridiculous patent. Like I said, nobody accidentally uses the whole Roundup system on a farm.
What are structures that make up our society that were not creations of kings? (i.e. things created in the last hundred or two years, under democracy). Are these any less difficult to change?

Fiat-money Central Banks mostly were created under democracies, and seem quite resistant to change. Social-welfare programs. Anything related to lobbying.

I think the razor points to "institutions are highly resistant to change", not anything specific to monarchy vs. democracy.
Yahoo Mail reportedly loses key customer following mass hack attack
> but not over government regulations

That's a scary thought no? Isn't that why we elect officials to represent us?
I'm not well versed in either language, but from the examples provided in the TFA it looks to me like the capability/mechanism of the operator appears to exist in Erlang and Prolog, while the operator syntax itself is only in Elixir.
Wow - that's great to hear. I'm too embarrassed to put our company's URL in this comment because it'd be too obviously advertising. But man, are we doing exactly what you're asking for!
Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years (2012)
Balanced is looking for Python Engineers
As primarily a Python shop, we are looking for strong Python engineers who are familiar with the Python eco-system. Tools like SQLAlchemy and Flask should be very familiar. You should generally know how to properly model domains and you understand how to design classes, etc. You should have a strong product sense as well as communicate effectively. Bonus points if you're extremely passionate about Hypermedia REST APIs and distributed systems.

If this intriguing and you want to find out more about Balanced, shoot us a message: jobs+python@balancedpayments.com
Looks like it doesn't require PhP, for one.
The point is that you don't need to round up. 2.7 volts is pretty close to 3, so you need pretty close to 2x2=4. Bump it to five to compensate for the rounding and look it matches the actual math. Half of your initial suggestion.
I realize that. I just meant that, without the condescension, the way you summed it up actually sounded like a marketing statement I could connect with.
Are you talking about credentialing for the student or for the mentors?
There Is No Gene for Finishing College
I'd say we're not trying to "look any better" we just want to be sure both sides of the situation are out there.
> from what I've seen, the increased pay more than offsets the increased cost of living

Only if you're willing to downsize. Some people are, but it's a tough sell to lots of people.
Well, if you have only one client, and no money, you do indeed have no power. This is why you try not to get into that situation...
A M 7 earhquake in California is bearly newsworthy and far from a significant threat. A low to mid 8 would cause significant property dammamge but few deaths. Even a 9 would only cause local problems. The Yellowstone Calder on the other hand would easily kill 50+% of everyone in the US with a low end eruption. Or put another way it's a significant threat to people livening in India.

PS: A great way of comparing threats is to multiply risk times death totals over a decade. On that scale terrorists and eathquakes are a joke.
You are correct, I did. Thanks for the reminder, though a statement like "Why not disclose that?" is, most of the time, taken as accusatory and not friendly. But this is not the place for such debates. Let's talk about copyright legalities :-)
Check out all the variations on http://?oz.com. Will you sue all of them for confusion? 3 letter word trademark arguments are pretty lame.

Actually some of the ?oz.com sites are pretty bizarre.
Very interesting. If Moz and (D)oz are close, how about Moz and Moz(illa)? Lets start out as SEOmoz and when we become big enough, we can change our name to Moz so that Mozilla doesn't come after us when we are small. As SEOMoz has changed the name to Moz, may be Doz want to rename to SEODoz. What a racket!
Doesn't work in Chrome 27 on Win 7 x64.
The problem isn't the start button or the 'start screen' per se it is the combining two entirely separate user interfaces into one product.

I personally think that Microsoft should put up a firewall between the desktop and the metro environment. Just run metro apps in a windowed environment and give up trying to do everything through the metro interface. Microsoft is committed to Metro and its new UI Toolkit but the very poor discoverability of the Metro layer when used from the desktop is ironically hurting metro adoption for desktop users making app developers deal with a massive segment of windows that doesn't have any desire to use Metro apps.

Yes, Microsoft will have to make substantial changes and backtrack a bit but the alternative will be to maintain in perpetuity the Metro toolkit and environment for both touch and mouse environments.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/13/sharp_begins_product...
I'm starting to think this is a really great idea - to have somewhere to keep a private personal history - particularly for checking in to keep a track of where I've been without appearing to be a self-important moron. You know who you are FB friends!
> What about Elixir? This gets closures right:

I can't say I agree with his analysis of closures. My understanding is that closures close around variable scope. If the variable changes (something that can't happen in a pure functional language) then the closure sees the change.

Elixir closes around the value instead of the variable. While that may be more convenient/obvious in some places, it removes functionality in others. Specifically the old adage about closure's being a poor man's object and vice versa isn't true if the closure doesn't close around the variables themselves.
Buying new seeds every season began with hybrid crops in the 1920s.

"Today, hybrid seed production is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize. All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will be the same hybrid while the seeds from the hybrids planted will not consistently have the desired characteristics. This is why hybrid seed is constantly repurchased by growers for each planting season."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
I don't think there's a conflict at all, and I hope the trademark office and/or the courts get it right. If you want to protect against indirect competitors rhyming with you, please pick a name that's longer than one syllable.
Ask HN: Are startups biased towards devs from finance?
I'm a software developer working on software for banks in London. I graduated in december last year. I've got 2 internships (one of top 5 inv. banks and engineering company). I've got a few opensource projects (GitHub, Codeplex) and substantial web presence (Stackoverflow, blog, coderwall). Almost everyday I hack something for fun(phone app, webapp on AWs). I do my CodeKata, recently in Scala and yet I don't know how to land a job in a startup.

I always wanted work in a startup. The tipping point was when I was working on a Imagine Cup project with friends. I really enjoyed that experience. Even after all-night coding I felt happy and productive. I struggled if this is right for me. Maybe it was the influence of environment that having a job is the right way? I don't know, but finally I know what I want to do in my life.

I tried to pitch a few startup, but no interview invite. Is my lack of startup experience a problem (chicken or egg dilemma)? Maybe working in finance is not hot?
I thought there was pretty much a whole movie (Food Inc) documenting that very thing (i.e. cross contamination). Please don't try and say that the hatred going towards Monsanto isn't deserved because it most assuredly is.

http://www.damemagazine.com/2013/04/03/monsanto-six-truths-a...
I will cancel our SEOmoz account tomorrow.
> that's why he didn't make any progress.

If you are employed by a temp agency, I don't think there is much progress to be made. The company needed a QA, temp agency forwarded the resume, there was a match, and that's that. There is no defined career path. I believe anyone who does contracting knows that. There might be a small carrot about full time hiring, but it happens very rarely. If the company hires all of its contractors, what will be the point of having contractors in the first place. Besides some temp agencies have no-hire contracts with their clients.

> "Once, I worked an entire weekend on a voluntary basis." As a contractor, this is the surest way to lose everyone's respect.

Contractor or not, working weekends is appreciated either when it's actually needed or you are a recognized workaholic who connects from home a lot(nothing out of ordinary when you work over the weekend). If you are doing it so that you get a better review, you are bumped up the promotion ladder, you are hired full time...it's going to be frowned upon, and rightfully so.

Side note: This "Once I worked a weekend" irks me more than it should. I can only imagine the reactions he will get from game devs who are notorious for their inhumane schedule when he mentions "once" he worked over the weekend.
That's pretty cool!

As an engineer, I crave data. As much as anything, this process would force me to organize that data into some archivable, more useful form.
If you exclude age and gender discrimination, that is.
There are many situations where your only choice is to take it up the rear or go elsewhere. If you are bad or unfit for the job, that's fair. If it's based on anything else, it's something that needs organizing.

If you are male, between 20 and 30 and fresh out of Stanford, you obviously see things very differently.
Behind every great startup is a Startup Admin
There aren't two competing implementations of Flash or iOS, but some people made millions developing on those platforms.
The video game industry is very different, with terrible compensation and working conditions.
I've heard that if you're a "good" developer it shouldn't be too hard to get at least 100k a year if you try. Seems like a pretty good amount to me. Depends where you live, I guess - that might only go as far in SF as 80 would go elsewhere, or something like that.
India lives in a hostile neighborhood. And those programs also employ thousands of engineers and scientists. I know it is tough to reconcile, but progress has to happen all fronts simultaneously. Like USA couldn't wait to go to the moon in 1969 even though they had millions of poor.
Were every violation of the law punished with a prison sentence, you would not see disproportionate numbers of black people in prison. The problem is that the law is not uniformly enforced, but it is so broad that eventually any normal person will have broken it.

When the police presence is higher in black neighborhoods, you are going to see more arrests. When the law is so broad that anyone can be arrested, the effect will be magnified. Eventually you get to the situation we are in today, where in some black communities one in four black men has been to prison. This is not merely a measurement error or some kind of mistake; our approach to law and law enforcement right now is disproportionately affecting black people, especially black men.
More Privacy Vulnerabilities in Bitcoin
Wow, Moz does not come out looking good here. Doz and Moz are not the same word, don't mean the same thing (I'm not even sure either word actually means anything) and are only similar in the most superficial possible way.

Moz should quit fvcking around with lawyers and filings and trademarks and whatever legal bullshit and just focus on innovating and being better at what they do.
There are a lot of benefits to organization beyond simple salary negotiations. Other professions in very high demand like doctors organize themselves to an incredible extent, and are able to have significant pull with both employers and governments as a consequence. They have meaningful input into the laws and regulations that apply to their craft. Doctors don't have organizations with the word "union" in the title, but the AMA, essentially the doctors' trade association, was maybe the second most powerful player who opposed meaningful healthcare reform (and they won).

An equivalent association of developers could basically dictate terms for software patents/licensing/ownership issues and software-related IP regulations in the US. They could secure absolute limits on the length of their work week. They could easily block Zuckerberg, et al.'s H1B visa expansion garbage.

And yeah, on top of all that, they could include QA in their little club and maybe get them some health insurance or job security or literally anything approaching just and fair employment terms.
Game industry QA is a little perverse. It's where dreamers who can't get into a dev position go to hopefully get into a dev position eventually.

Management knows this, and exploit this. It's always suggested that QA is a valid track to move into actual development, but this rarely/never happens. Nonetheless, companies perpetuate this myth to keep the seats filled with starry-eyed folks who dream of building games rather than testing them.
Beautiful Women Eat for Free at Fast Food Restaurant
Hi - I built Facebook's Bug Bounty program with a few other FB folks. There's a couple things I want to add to the conversation about how we look at rewards.

(Also, in 2009 it was just myself and a couple others running our disclosure program. It wasn't even bounties at that point. We'll get you a shirt, you can pretty much just blame me for that.)

1. We don't compete with the bug market, so our rewards will not look like market prices. It's true that "Bad Guys" would pay enormous amounts for a bug. They also pay a premium for the criminal risk being taken, and for the opportunity to exploit it which will theoretically make them a lot of money. However, we're good guys and we don't plan on profiting from bugs.

2. You, the researcher, are safe to post and talk about the vulnerability you found when Facebook is held to the disclosure policy. If your bug is extra-awesome, we'll sometimes send a bunch of reader traffic your way from our bug bounty page. This has shown to be worth a lot to researchers. Several of our bounty hunters have started companies, gotten jobs, became internet famous from this program and value this more than any bounty.

3. We are pretty lenient on what qualifies as a bug, which means we have a higher volume of payments to researchers than you might expect. If a researcher showed amazing skill in finding something that didn't actually turn out to be a bug, we'll probably reward them anyway because we want them to keep trying. We are pretty lenient on duplicates as well. If we see that someone truly discovered a bug independently (and also showed significant skill discovering it) then they'll probably get a reward too. The theory here is that we want more responsible disclosures instead of pissed off researchers.

Overall I don't want to argue with the amount we rewarded here, but show that we're doing a lot of stuff that's benefiting a lot of researchers. We're one of the first companies to launch a bounty program, and most of the researchers you have listed would probably say they think we're doing pretty well. Not too many companies have a bug bounty program, and I'm really proud of ours! :)
Thanks for being the voice of reason around here.
This is a tautological claim. Of course with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the biggest successes were those significantly changed the world... No way!? That's why they're successes! Lots, and lots of examples of people who similarly dreamed of changing the world with BIG ideas that completely failed. The bigger idea, the lower your probability of success, but with a larger potential return (both personal wealth and impact). I've never seen any data to support that your risk adjusted return on big ideas is better than for smaller ideas.

Massive vividness bias here.
Motorola: Password Pill for Once-Daily Authentication and a Tattoo, Too
The molecules they were touching were perfectly flat, and must have been pretty well adhered to the silver surface. Now that I think about it, silver is used as a catalyst, and they had to heat it to 90C to cause the reaction. So it sounds like it was more of a problem of overcoming the inherent stability of the molecule to get it to do anything at all.
Mozilla could give the same obvious confusion and brand dilution argument you're making for Moz, but they're not.
Right, and you are denying the outcome of applying that method.
There's a particular irony that the Moz folks think that the Doz name is too similar to be allowed, when they're using an abbreviation for Mozilla that has been around for years and years.