skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(1) I was at Google when the study was done. It wasn't before my direct experience.

(2) I've confirmed with a bunch of people currently at Google that, indeed, nothing has changed. This study was done 5+ years ago.

(3) My books don't focus on brainteasers. Thus, if people believe these changes at Google are real, then this would actually make my books seem more relevant, not less.

(4) If brainteasers are banned, this doesn't mean that no one has even asked them. Some people break the rules (because they're unaware of them or because they don't feel that a particular question is a brainteaser). Thus, Google could, theoretically, study how effective brainteasers are even while they are banned.

(5) What Laszlo is saying is provably incorrect. He's saying estimation questions are brainteasers and that they no longer ask such questions. This is false. If he wants to define these questions as brainteasers, he's welcome to do that. However, he would then be wrong about Google continuing to ask brainteasers. By his definition, Google absolutely does ask these "brainteasers" frequently.

(6) What I really suspect is going on is that he misremembered the study (a reasonable thing to conclude, given #5). It was, after all, done 5+ years ago. I don't think the study ever actually looked at brainteasers. I read the results, and I don't remember anything about brainteasers. (They did look at interview scores and job review scores though.)

(7) Huh? It's "just" a means to promote my books? That's a huge leap. My books aren't even mentioned anywhere except for in my bio. You could argue that it indirectly promotes my books, but then basically everyone ever writing anything is promoting their stuff. And, even so, you couldn't say that it's just to promote their stuff. This article is a means to counter a lot of the myths around Google hiring practices. I don't like candidates walking into interviews misinformed.
I didn't really understood in which way this is a "portal". Is this a clear, magnetized path, like a sudden "highway" from sun to Earth; or are we talking about portals like Portal, the game?

Neither this nor the NASA article [1] really explains what's happening. I think it's more like a "highway" or flux tube [2] but I'm not sure at all.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals....
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_tube
Indeed. Once I manage to anonymously acquire some Bitcoins, I will be looking for a reputable VPS host based in Europe (that I can pay with Bitcoins) where I can run my own mail system.
What's the problem? All you have do is click on Edit, Preferences, Security, Passwords, Use a Master Password.

Easy as pie.
Actually, I believe this is how many public entities award contracts. My friend worked for the parks department in a major US city and when they needed to build something, the lowest bidder got the contract automatically as long as they were qualified/approved regardless of whether or not they were as competent as other vendors.
Oops, sorry!

Just dropped you a line. Thanks.
Isn't the private property thing a bit of a distraction anyway? Would things change if MIT was a public university?
A great example of how important it is for us as developers to recognize the value we provide to businesses/users instead of measuring it all solely in terms of algorithmic complexity and LOC.

Side note: Tatung makes some pretty amazing rice cookers. My family has used the same one for over 40 years now, and it still cooks as well as ever.
I don't see how I'm perpetuating the problem. I'm just explaining what Google actually does and what they don't do.
Internet Marketing – Developing The Perfect Niche Strategy
Not a bad idea. However, by letting sites opt in, economies of scale really kick in... we deliver a few thumbnails many times (on sites where it's especially useful, since they've opted in) instead of creating a bunch randomly scattered about the web.
And yet users have repeatedly flocked to software, including browsers, that "surface" less features.
That was exactly my first thought. They can hold until they have the computing power to crack it.
> Private company. They are free to cave in to demands from a vocal minority if they so choose.

And individuals are free to criticize them for their decision. If they indeed caved to the demands of a vocal subgroup of people, then it is only logical for people that didn't like this decision to voice their own opinions, perhaps inspiring another vocal subgroup: fighting fire with fire.
There's also the security factor (that many devs today like to ignore); using shared stuff simplifies it.
Maybe packagers don't know best, but neither does this guy.
It is itself a Javascript program. You can use Typescript in a browser. I once had it working on Windows RT via cscript.exe.
I guess I am part of 6 million since I got a message from Facebook regarding this.

The weird part of it is that email address they say to have been exposed is not even part of my facebook profile.
I think there's a lot more to pedagogy than you're delving into here. It sounds to me like your teachers in question are largely lecturing with a bit of question. There's all kinds of other things such as "differentiated learning" (how do you teach a visual learner vs a kinesthetic learner), "inquiry-based learning", etc.

I think the larger issue is that many of those who teach programming (specifically) have not had any formal training in teaching.
You are acting like the original suggestion was not 'judge people's ability to do the job by how they use the time they have outside of work'. If you don't give a fuck they have kids, don't ask about what they do outside of working hours.
Gisto GitHub Gists snippets management app Node-Webkit-AngularJS
Doctors using HIV virus to fight cancer [video]
For a time in college (and bit after) my "move" during make-outs was to grab a condom and hand it to her. What she did with that condom at that point made very clear her desired outcome. It also gave a little insight into the person. Does she know what to do with it? (not everybody knows how to put on a condom. or maybe knows TOO well.) Does she think we didn't need to use a condom? (uh... ya... WE DO!) Looking back, it seems a little un-suave but it was sufficiently effective for me.

The last time I pulled that move, it was met with "uh... we don't need this... yet." Fair enough... we hit the brakes a bit. She's my wife now. :)
did you transmit your entire hard drive contents over the internet at some point?
The Dragnet at the Edge of Forever
Can you elaborate on why you feel that way? Are you mostly concerned about being unable to gauge the remaining life of a "used" battery that's been in someone else's car, or do you see it as a pride-of-ownership sort of thing?
My favorite interesting packaging choice is TeX Live in Fedora 18 [1]. There are about 4500 texlive-* packages (out of around 35000 binary packages in Fedora total). The packagers split up the packages based on upstream metadata.

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=949626
If there's a layoff, no justification is needed with regard to who ends up on the list. The company's downsizing, and no other justification is needed. They don't have to say why you were on the list.

If they try to claim that it's "for cause", then they have to say what the cause is. If you're the only person fired that day, it's not really a layoff.

Many companies will give you a decent severance and not get into specifics, though. In that case, you should take the deal and move on.

This stuff's really complicated, with a lot of variation by state, company, and circumstance. However, the "can fire for any reason" claim is blatantly incorrect. Companies don't pay severance or run "performance improvement plans" because they're nice; they do it because at-will employment is very complicated and firms are risk-averse.
We were talking about the expenses of running the service, and not the legal space around hosting user generated content.

The legal questions are interesting, through it highly depend on the country and political tendencies from one year to the next. In theory, I could run this kind of service in Sweden, and only remove content on order by a judge. In theory. In practice, there might not be any difference between hosting user generated content and simply having a website up hosting in ones own name.
Changing the wording of a question can dramatically change the outcome, and which skills are tested.

"how many gas stations are there in Manhattan" actually makes sense as a question for a venture capitalist firm employee expected to make investment decisions, as the leap from "statement" to "this is something I need to estimate" is absolutely key to the role, and hence something you'd want to test for. I'm sure others can think of much better examples of this kind of thing.

Rather than massive re-wording of the question, you can instead change the framing of the question. The most scary aspect of such questions is that they might come out of the blue, or immediately after a number of completely different questions. Mental inertia will then dictate you stall massively and find the question completely confusing.

Imagine instead that the interviewer stated "We are going to ask some questions that will test for reasoning and deductive skills that you will use on a regular basis in the role". This is similar to changing the wording, but more like real situations. You know you have a meeting with clients (so you're prepared), but they'll ask questions in a difficult and something obtuse manner.
-1 for not re-implementing <blink> tag
English-language ones I could easily find are e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17009190 and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1748-0361.1999.... (both first page Google results for 'depression in rural areas'). I was specifically thinking about a study in the Netherlands who showed the same, but there have been a lot of studies on this subject so it's quite easy to find literature.
I don't see how that's fair use. You're not authorized to use something just because you think it should exist but doesn't. It also baffles me that Marcus is asserting a fair use right while refusing to even give the original artist credit, notwithstanding the work-for-hire aspect of his argument.
Tipbit CEO Gordon Mangione explains the "Smart Mobile Inbox"
Why not use the same model as the gas bottles of the BBQ? :)

You pay a fee to change the battery; The charging station then recharges it and swaps it to another tesla, and so on.
Thank you for posting this, OP. I've run across references to it but never took the time to read it.

This part blows my mind. The NSA has no legal oversight and it claims that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to it:

NSA does not have a statutory charter; its operational responsibilities are set forth exclusively in executive directives first issued in the 1950s. One of the questions which the Senate asked the Committee to consider was the "need for specific legislative authority to govern the operations of...the National Security Agency."

According to NSA's General Counsel, no existing statutes control, limit, or define the signals intelligence activities of NSA. Further, the General Counsel asserts that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to NSA's interception of Americans' international communications for foreign intelligence purposes.
"BTW, I've been to Manhattan and noticed that there are remarkably few gas stations there for a city of its size, so whatever estimate you come up with will probably be very, very wrong."

Yes, and that's precisely the sort of thing you're supposed to take into account. Again, you're looking to get in the right ballpark. They're not looking for precision.

Asking "what steps would you take" wouldn't be quite the same question. They want you to actually take those steps to come up with a number.

Ultimately, I'm not necessarily defending estimation questions. I'm just saying that they are, in fact, asked because interviewers don't consider them to be brainteasers.
You can request a FOIA request for the brainscans of the alien found inside of FDR's skull. Of course you won't get anything back, but that is another matter...
I'm aware that the court has interpreted it that way. That doesn't make it any less wrong.

To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional
questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would
place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. - Thomas Jefferson,1820

I will also note that the data in question was within the United States, where all property, whether owned by foreigners or not, is protected from unlawful search and seizure.
Yeah, you're missing a very important historical event in the fight against government surveillance in the USA.
> McDonalds doesn't need any arrangement like that because nobody's interested in mail-ordering cheeseburgers from them

Mail-order isn't the issue. McDonalds can own their own restaurants right now if they want to, instead of franchising. This is similar to how Tesla wants to operate.

> If the manufacturers sell direct-to-consumer, then they can always undercut dealerships...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.

Good? If they can't add value and only exist because a law creates a cartel, then good riddance. If they actually add value, I'm sure we'll see that represented by people choosing to buy through dealers anyway.

> The dealers have no contracts prohibiting manufacturers from selling direct-to-consumer, and they have no leverage to get them to sign such contracts.

If they have no leverage, why is it acceptable to force them via the law? They could draw up fair contracts where both parties are happy and if they aren't they can walk away from it. It sounds like you are saying it's unfair because the dealers don't have to worry about the value they add to the manufacturers. You readily admit that the current arrangement is inefficient.
I've hacked a little script together[1] for uploading all the files in a directory into NeoCities. Handy if you are working on your site and want to upload everything in one go.

Set your username and password at the beginning of the script and run it with the path to the directory as an argument:

./neocities-uploader.php /path/to/my/site

[1] https://github.com/pwlin/neocities-uploader
Small PDO for MongoDB.
It's hard to tell what your startup is from your description, but it sounds as if you're some kind of content/event play in niche markets. It's very hard to raise VC money if your business will only scale with number of employees (i.e. to produce more content).

It can be done (Groupon and General Assembly are examples) but it's an order of magnitude rare than pure pure product startups because scaling people-based businesses is super hard.

Generally VCs look for something that's in a potential billion dollar market and can return 10x growth in the 3-5 year range.

It seems under any of these criteria that your business probably isn't a good match for VC funding.
That's why the free superchargers are not located along your commute.
How do we build a better government? Our protests started with the bus fare rise, and we won this challenge, of if you will, we put this card in the Done column.
If we could allocate all our efforts on the various protests to each cause at a time, we will definitely succeed at many of them, and Trello is the perfect tool for this organization.
U.S. charges Snowden with espionage
Just as a point of order, Windows has dynamic library versioning and multiple loading at least as good as sonames. This was first introduced in Windows 2000, 13 years ago.
Plenty of data isn't part of the web, so really doesn't belong in browsers. It would also make syncing data across devices more difficult as all devices would nee to be on at the same time and have sufficient storage capacity. You certainly couldn't store Dropbox-scale data in the current generation of web browsers.
Morality is a very complex topic that possibly can't be proven by logic anyway. Why is racism immoral, other than the fact that we, as a society, have decided that it's immoral?

I think seduction manuals are immoral because they essentially treat women like min-maxers do video games--do this, and your chance of success is raised by X%, follow this procedure to succeed, etc. It makes women into vending machines that, if the buttons are properly pressed in the right succession, will theoretically result in a prize--sex--being dispensed. I think that treating people like that is immoral. Can I prove this logically? Can I claim that this is a universal truth? Of course not, but the same is true for every moral stance.
I'm not sure: did they lie? I'm not sure how the revealed procedures fit in, or fail to fit in, with the exceptions permitted under FISA http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-92-Pg178... and the FISA Amendments Act http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr6304/text , which of course were public knowledge already. (IANAL, and FISA + FAA is an ugly tangle of legal spaghetti.) One thing that certainly is countenanced in FISA is sharing information about criminal activity with US law enforcement (though it's far from obvious to me that the procedures for this laid out in the documents fully comply with FISA 101). And I mean, imagine if it were otherwise? If in the course of accidentally overhearing some US domestic communications the NSA comes across information about, say, a huge massacre planned on US soil, wouldn't it be pretty perverse and unreasonable if the law prohibited them from letting US law enforcement know anything about it?
Absolutely, I'm one of the protocol designers. Happy to answer any questions
It depends on the group certifying you. The two that I know are common in my area (Chicago) are Red Cross and Ellis and Associates (EA). I worked for a group that did EA, thus why most of the lifeguards I know are trained not to touch victims without tubes (I actually was a trainer for Starfish Aquatics, which was kind of a spit of EA).

I know Red Cross teaches releases, I think EA might have a small paragraph in the book devoted to it, but a large section on the importance of the lifeguard tube.

I've saved > 10 kids over the years I guarded and never had an issue with grabby victims, but 90% of my victims were kids in 5ft of water. I did have a coworker get grabbed in a 12ft diving well once though. Thankfully she was able to get free.
Printing is Broken on Mac OS X with Java 7
Jake is kind of a human warrant canary; I suspect any service on which has has an account gets secret search warrants, so any major service which hasn't publicly pushed back on warrants (or warrants about him) is secretly complying.
Ask for code. TALK about algorithms at a high level. I have an aptitude for reading people, but my day two impressions of coding with a new person tend to lead to valid assumptions about them months later.
That's a complicated question with a complicated, nuanced, business-driven answer.
Tangent: just to give an idea how popular WordStar was, my Apple ][ had a CP/M coprocessor card [1] just so we could run WordStar.

[1] manufactured by Microsoft - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard
It's alan_cx, so it is definitely sarcasm. He isn't foolish enough to believe such a thing.
Thank you for bringing a voice of reason to an otherwise frantic and hysterical thread.
U.S. charges Edward Snowden with espionage
Fully Open Hardware+Software Toolchain "Die Datenkrake"
Same here, I had three e-mails listed: my personal email I used for Facebook, my @facebook.com email, and a work e-mail that I don't appear to have listed in my profile or settings anywhere and don't recall even giving to Facebook.

Perhaps the "merged" contact information that got leaked included e-mails for you that your acquaintance had that you perhaps never told Facebook about?

EDIT: that would seem to be supported by this line:

"This contact information was provided by other people on Facebook and was not necessarily accurate, but was inadvertently included with the contacts of the person using the DYI tool."
People are using HTTP as a transport layer, e.g., websockets.
The NSA is heavily Mormon? Where did you get that information? I've been looking around online, and the only thing I'm coming across is conspiracy theory websites about the new Utah compound they're building.
Laptops.
Very well articulated. Thank $deity this is the top comment. I was about to turn away from HN in disgust. Agreed with every word.
> In instances of sexual assault, this is not at all true and there are a variety of complicating factors that go into sexual assault situations that negate this statement.

Well, yeah, you it is possible do a lightning move. My whole point is that you shouldn't do that. That would indeed be sexual assault.

So if I may ask, do you have personal experience with dating/sex? You don't have to answer if you don't want to. I agree with your position in theory, and I actually did what you suggest at first. The problem is that it doesn't work in practice, which is why I stopped doing that.
I thought differentiated learning was starting to go out of style in pedagogy. The last I heard is that all (self-identified) types actually learn all three ways roughly the same speed, but that combining the three methods (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) was the key.

(Source: my Teaching English as a Foreign Language class a year and a half ago.)

That said, I'd agree with you that learning a bit about pedagogy is important. I'd argue that learning to program combines elements of natural language learning (grammar, syntax, vocabulary) and mathematics.

Natural language learning has plenty of resources on how we learn -- there's an entire field on second language acquisition theory. Perhaps it's time to start leveraging this foundation.
So, tell me - did Google start encrypting so many services just to give the NSA a better excuse for siphoning all data, including SSL encrypted communication, E-Mails etc.?
It is great that they really published their work!

Too sad that their (fully open) hardware specs still require proprietary tools to use them and to work on them: http://datenkrake.org/

Nevertheless, they seems to be closer to Stallman's dream than many other projects.
Socks for Nerds: Ministry of Supply Reengineers Dress Socks
This implies that the petitions that don't follow the provisions are actually useful.
What a lot of unintelligible gibberish. It mixes some real science with science fiction and other physical phenomena that are completely unrelated.

The magnetic portal is a "hole" in the magnetic field. The particles of the solar wind can are not deflected. This is not related to "wormholes", "Casinir effect", "faster than light travel", teletransportation, "tunels", ...

If you are interested in reading the real science and experiments, go to http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals....
Companies with large advertising costs is probably a larger group than you think.

Many businesses with high customer lifetime value spread over a prolonged period (SaaS, Gaming, etc) have the problem that they need to spend the money on customer acquisition upfront but may need 12+ of revenue from that customer before they make that acquisition cost back. Hence it makes sense to use external money to for marketing.
Mass. man who ordered tie gets SS numbers instead
It's perfectly alright, what you cited was dated to 1901, but the United States did have a longstanding tradition beyond that (up until 1957) of not upholding constitutional rights for citizens abroad. So, it's very reasonable to think this is still the case due to the abundance of cases which reinforced that precedent.

That's why Reid v. Covert was such a landmark case, it completely overturned the precedent. IANAL either, however :)