skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very disappointed that Google were not fined by the UK body. Also disappointed that the US authorities fined Google such as paltry figure especially when it found that Google "deliberately impeded and delayed" the US investigation for months. A fine of $25,000 is pocket change to Google.

Inconsequential fines (and even worse, no fines) send the wrong message to companies about the severity of their wrongdoing.
I thought this might be a problem, but I was only asked for a return ticket in one place - Hong Kong.
For anyone wondering what relevance an estimation question could possibly have in real life, imagine it's 2004 and you're about to launch GMail. How many hard drives are you going to need?
I had a similar experience... At about age 11, I decided to swim across a river and 3/4 the way across I got cramp (or something) and panicked. While I was dipping below the surface, a motor boat even circled around me without doing anything. Luckily my older sister was nearby and called for help; two guys then dived in from bank and pulled me out.
McDonalds doesn't need any arrangement like that because nobody's interested in mail-ordering cheeseburgers from them, and if HQ wanted to put them in supermarkets and sell direct-to-consumer, it wouldn't affect the franchises anyway -- frozen burgers are not a substitute good for drive-thru fast-food meals.

Cars are different. If the manufacturers sell direct-to-consumer, then they can always undercut dealerships (no property/staff/service overhead); there will be no profit in buying new vehicles to resell on a lot. There either won't be "new car" dealerships anymore, or they'll essentially become showrooms earning a small commission referring orders to the manufacturer.

Either way, the current business model cannot persist without the dealership laws simply by "enforcing contract law". The dealers have no contracts prohibiting manufacturers from selling direct-to-consumer, and they have no leverage to get them to sign such contracts. The dealers need the manufacturers, while the manufacturers need far fewer dealers than there are for service centers.
Kutcher/Jobs Movie Trailer
The NSA often passes information to the FBI
PiMiner - Raspberry Pi USB Bitcoin Mining Control and Monitoring
I can't claim to be well-versed on this story, but I would like to point out that a couple weeks ago the author of this piece was accused of misrepresenting the issue in the local paper, The Star Tribune. In particular he was called out for glossing over the fact that there have already been several investigations of the matter, which I see he has again failed to mention in the piece linked here.

http://www.startribune.com/local/yourvoices/207993521.html
Yes, they did--just not recently.

According to Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, "We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time." How did they determine that without asking candidates any brainteasers? Clearly, they did at some point--probably before the author's direct experience.

This article is really just a means to promote the author's books and prevent readers of the original article from presuming that that her books are obsolete now (they're not).
I'm going to try to raise money to bring an IP-unrestricted anticancer compound up to the point of FDA clinical trials. (i.e. as far as you can go without involving humans). I'm pretty sure that I'll be using crowdhoster as the platform.
The Digital Photo Conundrum: A Manifesto
Thanks for writing this, Cracking the Coding Interview has been one of my go-to books these last few weeks. A must read for any new grad, and the coding problems / answers are very insightful.
How does your organization mount volumes found on another host?
Go to Japan. Gender roles are ingrained into the culture and women are naturally feminine.

A lot of MRA groups seem to fight the hate with more hate... maybe these guys just need a change of scenery.
I met another guy like this (who happened to be Indian too), when I was interning at a big 3-letter named company.

So, what are you focusing on for your grad studies?

"Quantum computing"

Oh neat, what exactly are you doing?

"Some quantum stuff, blah blah blah"

I don't remember the exact answer, it was a while ago. But it was clearly just some buzz words that did not contain any substance; and that he had no idea what was going on.

There is also another Indian guy at the company I presently work for. Fresh grad with an MS degree. We were writing a small internal web service, and he was all over the place about how "we must use a NoSQL data store", because "scalability", and "flexible and dynamic, no schema" etc.

Thankfully, the final call was not his, and we went with a plain RDBMS -- which naturally suited our purpose pretty well. We had no need for NoSQL just for the sake of using it.

Disclaimer, I hold an MS degree. I was privileged enough to get admitted to a top Canadian school with an excellent CS program. Almost all the people I met during my stay there were brilliant, and definitely did not go back to grad school because they were not able to get a job. Many of them did internships at top companies; and a couple of them even came back from the industry 20+ years later, because they wanted to work on something different. So definitely do not clump all MS/PhD degree holders together. I think the author here is making the classic correlation vs causation mistake.
How do you account for the Dunning-Kruger[1] effect when asking your "How do you rate yourself?" question? I would guess that answers in the range "6 or 7" could span a really wide range of actual knowledge. Does that agree with your experience?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I wish I thought this were a good idea. Successful sites I have participated in started with being aimed at a particular diagnosis. I wish I thought this would work because it is clear to me that different diagnoses with symptoms in common often have related underlying causes. Unfortunately, this looks too nebulous to me. I hope I am wrong and I am routinely accused of erring in the opposite direction and making sites that are "too niche." But that's what it looks like to me.

PS Arguing with people who have given you feedback is not a great idea. It is a super common thing, but it really isn't a great idea.

Best of luck.
I don't know about Google in particular but I've always been bothered by the market sizing question.

In part, it's because it seems to have come out of consulting, where a common task seems to be to size a market for which there is no commonly available data. So, understanding how someone might go about doing that seems reasonable on its surface.

But in fact, I've met too many consultants who seem inclined to build "castle in the air", spinning market details about theoretical markets without properly defining either the product or service or the buyer of that product or service. And since they are for markets for which there is by definition no solid data (since that is why the consultant was asked to size it in the first place), their estimate is never validated (or if it is, it is so long after they have left that they never hear about.)

At the same time, no one ever seems to mind if the answer to such questions is off by a country mile when the actually size of the market is known, so long as the thought process was rigorous and shows the right kind of logical decomposition of the problem. But this justification for the value of the question also bothers me, as it seems to be testing more whether you can come up with convincing-sounding bullshit than whether you can correctly estimate a given value. This, again, may be an accurate measure for whether someone can become a consultant, but I never liked the notion that we should judge people on how well they can spin bullshit.

Finally, the question seems to also be gauging the interviewees willingness to "play along" with what an interviewer is asking. The questions are often on seeming random topics (piano tuners in New York or gas stations in Wisconsin), and are often not directly related to the domain. In the real real world, you would actually probably find a list of such things on the internet, or conduct some basic research that can be done to answer such a question. Or the correct response might be something like, "We can make a rough estimate, but without more solid data than a few random facts which we've rubbed together to come up with a market size, maybe we shouldn't be pursuing this market". In which case, the contrived example serves to allow the interviewee to demonstrate that they are the type of person who will enthusiastically pursue whatever random intellectual exercise they have been assigned by the interviewer, so long as there is a chance of getting the interviewers approval.

All of the things that the question tests for, then, seem to not be characteristics you would actually want in someone if they were to answer the question in the real world. In the real world, you might do a back of the envelope calculation, sure, but you would also do a lot of research on the internet, conduct a lot of interviews and surveys, and/or conduct evaluations of competitors to understand and size a market.
the best part is when a man page has an entry like this, and then the info page is a copy of the man page...
Then stop complaining when other people read your beliefs into what you do deign to share with the community.
Also, that number seriously depends on market. I work in a place that's absolutely lousy for coders and 50k is pretty typical here. I'd move if I hadn't put down deep roots.
Not at all. This isn't "corporations" but a coalition of small businesses.
Yes, it can, but it won't. Congress controls the purse, and Congress said no way.
My point has been and continues to be that the 25000 bees of the referenced story are not indicative of a major catastrophe, they are indicative of a local anomaly.
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
Tinhattery: New Class of Laws Would Make Lobbyists Irrelevant
Link is to a 2012 article discussing protests against the proposed US SOPA law. Link does not mention France, link does not mention any web sites shutting down except temporarily as a form of protest.
Also, having thought about it slightly more, I think you're confusing "unwanted sex" with "non-consensual sex". Neither is a good thing, but there is a strong different, especially in terms of legality and trauma.

Men and women have unwanted sex all the time. They do it because they don't want to let their partner down, because they think it is their "job", because they want to get something, because they are bored, because they want to feel wanted, because they just want to feel loved, because they haven't in a long time, etc. -- not always the best reasons. Typically, those feelings can be resolved in other ways.

We, as lovers, should strive to reduce the number of unwanted sex events as possible, and to do so requires an open bidirectional communication channel. However, while it may be sad that women are more prone to agreeing to unwanted sex, this is not the same thing as //raping// someone. I think it's really important to make the difference, because for one we say that the relationship is a bit off, in the other, we lock a person up and mark them for life.
Calling It 'Metadata' Doesn't Make Surveillance Less Intrusive
Not now. But his arguments might tell you why the laws were created in the first place. Protection of consumers like you and me.

I honestly I can't see a good reason for labor unions to exist anymore either, but they're still around and have plenty of politicians on their side.
Does it bother anyone else that the online FOIA Request form [1] is not protected by SSL?

Edit: I attempted to submit a request via the online form, but it responded "An error occurred while processing your request." This makes the paper request seem much more reasonable now.

[1] http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/foia/submit_foia_request/foia...
2013:6/21 "It was because of the insecticide, we're still investigating whether the application was legal."

http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/Pages/news/130621bees.aspx
Ruby vs. Python is a frequent topic on HN [1] [2] [3] [4]. These discussions invariably focus on web development because of (a) the nature of HN, and (b) the fact that most Ruby applications are web applications.

I located all those references by my comment history, so I participated in all of the discussions. Generally I pointed out how painful Ruby's syntax is, how beginner-unfriendly the syntax plus the complexity of Rails is, how favorably Python contrasts, and then posed this Ask HN's very question.

The discussion thereafter often rapidly degenerated into a flame war, but one time I got some rather informative answers [5].

[1] Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular? -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5783967

[2] Python for Ruby programmers -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5294318

[3] Ask HN: Why do so many people hate Ruby? -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5157886

[4] Off-topic flamewar -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5784117
I'm a little surprised that all the comments thus far and the article itself never used the term "Fermi Problems". Whether or not someone calls them a brainteaser is up to them I guess. I too think of brainteasers as trick questions with some gotcha answer that you normally wouldn't think of based on how the question was phrased. Fermi problems aren't in that category for me either.
He muddies the water, and increases the signal/noise ratio.

Idiot may have been harsh as a judgement of character, but this post is idiotic.
"The civil servant that emailed you was doing what her employer told her to do so that she could continue to bring a paycheck home."

So she was just following orders, huh?
Also in Chrome:

Go to Settings -> Show advanced settings -> Manage saved passwords -> Click on a "hidden" password -> Click on "Show" button -> Voila, password shown in plain text
If you two think so, I'd be a fool to think differently!

I think people don't know how to think and evaluate. I tend to break it into Goals/strategies/tactics, though there are other useful breakdowns. I.e. start by asking yourself "what is my goal" - and it is not to ask graph algorithm questions, to use Django, or whatever. Once you have your goals, you can with hard work come up with strategies. From there flow tactics. Then, this gets communicated and everyone latches onto the strategies and tactics, never asking if the goals have changed, or are inappropriate for your use. Google wants to hire a bunch of young people that know graph theory and are willing to do anything to work for you (they have graph theory problems after all). Asking grad level CS questions is a way to get those people. So every start up follows suit even though they need something completely different, and Google persists even when they need something different.

OO solves some things well, and is an appropriate strategy for some situations. It does not follow that you should use OO for everything. But, non-thinkers learn 'OO good', or 'CS questions good', and just run with it, never thinking about why those things are good, and in what context.

Agile is everywhere these days. My company has adopted it wholesale, even though everything we do is extremely schedule oriented (due dates that are unchangable), and involves heavy coordination between many moving parts. But want to use a Gannt chart or a frigging calendar organizer? Get mocked, censored, and shot down for not being a team player. Agile, Jira, and all that has become the goal, and you are not allowed to think about whether it makes sense or not in a given situation. Decisions are judged on whether they are "agile", not on whether they are the best way to accomplish something. So we fumble about with a 'priority' list that makes no sense (everything must be done, there is no priority) and that completely obscures the very real relationships (scheduling and otherwise) between all the items. Utter, complete madness.
I could be wrong, but I don't think any of the recent PRISM brouhaha hinges on whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Everyone agrees that you do. Telephone calls (made in non-public places) explicitly enjoy this expectation.
http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Reasonable_expectation_of_privac...

Rather, the recent issue is a disagreement over what constitutes a violation of privacy, e.g. whether electronic collection of data (without a human listener) constitutes violation.
The linked post is not "great work". It's ignorance piled on indignation.
Like I said, I opt to use 1Password instead for cross platform usage.
It's not a simple "yes, it's valid". It's a "yes, I like it, and if you make it, I'm going to be among your first users." And suddenly, it's built, and 200+ users auto-appear.
In that case you are going to have to make your point explicit. My understanding is that you are trying to say that the media outlets are not influenced by the government because there exist significant critical stories of the government.

But as I said "The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does."
Aren't both of those a "something you have"?
So much this. People on this forum have consistently presented very compelling arguments that they don't have SSL keys and couldn't retroactively decrypt collected traffic even if they did. Unsettling then that people I generally considered trustworthy in the crypto community (say, Matt Blaze) previously were adamant to claim that large scale duplication and retention of backbone traffic was not only highly unlikely to be attempted, but technically unfeasible.

Because of this I'm almost ashamed of how much credit I've been doling out to other allegedly shady accusations that get made and dismissed as passing conspiracy theories.
The prequel to the social network.
What do you mean by 'difference the license plate numbers'?
I would argue that if one is unable to do the back of the envelope estimate, then they would have a difficult time doing the rigorous calculation / determination. The main difference between the two is the quality of the numbers that go into them, right?

I agree though, that overconfidence in one's ballpark estimate is not to be desired. But, that's more useful information gained from the question, not less.
Maybe there's a causal relationship but it's just not obvious. See for example http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-tru...
And are they able to break that encryption?
The users who are upboating. Do you want to be one of 5 supporters, and then get emailed to use a product with just the other 4? If it doesn't reach 200+, there's also somewhat more incentive for the author of the idea to use the emails for other purposes than the posted idea.
Men more than women? I'm not disagreeing or agreeing, but [citation needed]. I've never heard of that being true, so I'd like more information. I mean, the fact that we typical think of rape as man-on-woman kind of speaks to our perceived frequency, yes?
Ask HN: Which self-hosted RSS Reader have you switched to?
Like Christmas shopping, I have delayed the inevitable (switching my RSS from Google Reader) until the (nearly) last minute. Many of the hosted RSS services (feedly, old reader, etc.) seem OK, but my thoughts about re-investing this piece of my online life into another 3rd party proprietary system are overwhelmingly "meh". I'd rather just cough up the nominal money for an AWS micro and run it myself. Can anyone give some advice based on this want list?:

MUST-HAVES:
Open Source, hosted on GitHub
WANTS:
Minimalist UI (Folders, Starred Items...just the basics)...
Easy/Minimally dependent build/deploy...
Easy GoogleReader import...
Plays well on AWS...
Has a nice, featureful API...
Some kind of authentication...
WOULD BE EXTRA COOL:
NodeJS-based...
Allows single-serving articles in front of auth (i.e. all my articles in feed require auth by default, but if there is one I really like, I can "publish" it and share a link with my friends or something)
>Lack of realistic examples

So true.

I've frequently had the impression that writers are plain missing the point - with the most dense, clever self-satisfying examples as opposed to verbose, simple and instructive.
Ask HN: Presell Rails development to pay for Rails devolopment course?
Hi all,

I've been accepted into a Dev Bootcamp type-of training course and begin in August. During the course all students are to build their own fully functional web app. The course is rather expensive and I will be having a tough time paying for it and rent and food while in the class, so I am curious if you guys think that preselling the development of an MVP would be a good idea? I would have the help of multiple instructors and could guarantee the successful completion of said project.

Just throwing this idea out there for feedback- Very well may not do it.
I know you're probably dealing with 2 different systems, but I'd love it if Crowdhoster campaigns could also be hosted on Crowdtilt.com. I get that Crowdhoster is supposed to enable all types of cool group transactions way beyond the controlled scope of Crowdtilt, but even just generating a secondary Crowdtilt.com landing page for a Crowdhoster campaign would be cool.

I also get how this isn't a big issue for now. But as Crowdtilt grows, I would think it becomes a "brand" that people trust to handle transactions, and would tip a certain % of the market to then give up the CC digits. So for example, as a consumer, I might be more inclined to purchase something on crowdtilt.com, as opposed to xanga.com.

Just like how right now, your average consumer might be more inclined to support a Kickstarter project over a Crowdtilt project, due to inherent trust he feels in Kickstarter as a curator/brand. But since I'm bullish on Crowtilt, I think Crowdtilt eventually develops and trusted brand name.

As an campaign director/organizer, in and ideal world, I want both the flexibility of Crowdhoster and that brand stamp of "Crowdtilt". Just a suggest... otherwise, these updates are actually really cool, love where it's going!
His Web page commonly has 128 characters
per line. So, on a 17" monitor, the
page is just unreadable.
A useful program, 0 bytes long
Yes, civil servants who flout the oath they took should be just as respected as those who don't.

> I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same...
But if there is already malware on the user system, it just needs to wait until the user authenticates once in Firefox to get the master password, then it can fetch all the other passwords. Right?
I'm sure there are ways to do it legally. I only work for US based companies. I'll let my accountant handle it.
It's not me that failed to include a full address. It is the people who submitted their information and failed to fill out the form properly. The form is dead simple, but no matter what, there will always be a small % of people who do not follow instructions.

Furthermore, the NSA does not get to make "rules" about the form of FOIA requests. If they have enough information to reply, by law, they must reply.
I'm pretty sure a computer with no mic is unable to record sound...
Is Digg's very beta RSS reader enough to woo Google Reader users?
Depending on the country many of the workers there will have a legal duty to report that incident. They'll also have requirements from their professional registrations.
These people work in the FOIA compliance department. How did they violate their oath?
In a sense, it's too late.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/05/people-are-losing-trust...
But you have the option of unplugging the mic and camera, apparently that is not the case with the xbox.
My Visit With a Dominatrix
Huh? "Corporation" is merely a registration status. A small-time business/startup may very well be incorporated as a Delaware C Corp.
Is doing nothing better?
Docker Tutorials