skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article also mentions:

"It’s also giving much less weight to college grade point averages and SAT scores"

In 2004 I interviewed for a Creative Maximizer position. I received a glowing review from my brother who was a Googler. I studied all the ins-and-outs of adwords back then and the British interviewer confirmed: "You did very good on the assessment" (which was working through real ads that needs to be maximized). My opinionated experience has been that in these kinds of situations, Brits embellish less than Americans.

However, she told me that my college GPA was "a major question mark" because it was 2.99 and Google only hires people with 3.0 and above (I didn't know what I wanted to do in college). Looking back I'm glad I was never hired, but that burned me bad for a while.
What's the Big Deal with (ES6) Generators?
>> but I think it was on an encrypted partition on one of his computers

Do you by any chance know how they found it on an _encrypted_ partition? Did he give them the password voluntarily or did they somehow break it?
If Snowden has convincing evidence why is he not releasing it? I don't understand all the dancing around.
TL;DR: designing distributed systems is hard, so think carefully about your problem space, required invariants, and risk tolerance; then test your systems accordingly.
From http://www.peer1.com/infrastructure/datacenter-vancouver

"Canada's strict privacy laws provide a safe haven from numerous controversial laws including the US Patriot Act, and the political stability, security, and pro-business attitude helps conduct business operations"
If you need a control panel for the nifty new Zend Opcache in PHP 5.5, please steal my ugly hack and improve it: https://gist.github.com/ck-on/4959032
Swedish Court Jails Pirate Bay Founder for Hacking
"I ask them to demonstrate their strengths to me first"

Nice. That agrees with some of the other comments here. For example, about asking about past work or projects that they are proud of or that demonstrate their skills.

Another hard issue is what to do, as an interviewer, if things start to go downhill to the point where the candidate becomes flustered and you can tell they're not at their best.
Not all hours are created equal
Obama has supported NSA spying and USA PATRIOT Act since 2006
Over the last few weeks, bitstampUSD has moved from 6% to 14% on this chart. My guess is that only accelerates that process.

http://www.bitcoincharts.com/charts/volumepie/
Google remove 'Stop downloading' option from Youtube
I totally get your point that people often make fallacious comparisons. In the interest of making a concise point I omitted stating it myself. However just because some people do not debate with integrity, or they make mistakes in their reasoning, it should not prevent others making comparisons which are pertinent.

I disagree that with your last point, that people should make the argument purely on its own merits. "So what if people are monitoring our communications?" I might ask this question myself if I had never read any history books.

The worrying thing for me is that we've been here before. Hitler did not come to power via some dramatic coup. He tried that and it failed. Instead he took the long, slow, legal and democratic route. Many legitimate comparisons with early 1930's Germany are there. I'm not saying it's a facsimile, it never would be. But with each civil liberty we sacrifice in the name of security the state becomes more oppressive, more open to abuse, an evermore viable breeding ground for tyranny. Worst of all, it can all happen without a shot being fired and well meaning onlookers saying, 'It will never get that bad'.

I'm going on a bit now, but for me the really terrifying aspect is that with all our modern technology (which I do love) it is possible for the state to create an apparatus to suppress the population that which we could never extricate ourselves from.

To quote BoC, "Defend your constitutionally protected rights. No one else will do it for you."
I had continued reading it, and I maintain that single sentences must make (at least logical) sense by themselves. This is marketing jargon trash, and should not be encouraged in a web standards document!
Looking for people with high IQ's with the right background is basically a waste of time. There are plenty of ways to define IQ's but 160 is around 1 in 30,000 and there are only something like ~200 graduating highschool each year. If 5 percent of them study programming you looking a say 10 new genius programmers every year. And plenty of them avoid SV for reasons as simple as the limited dating pool.

The simple truth is large companies end up with a few geniuses randomly but there rare enough to not be worth optimizing for. What companies really want are people willing to work ridiculously hard for little reason and that's what 'hard' interviews are optimized for. O your willing to put up with hours of BS on the off chance we will higher you, great let's just see how you like 60h+ weeks.
The reason you feel that way is because I didn't offer much (or any) proof in my post. It's not even a pitch - I wrote it exactly like I would a craigslist ad.

When I try again, I'll add more candor to make my promise match up with my lack of proof.

But my promise is true and isn't made under the effect of Dunning-Kruger. The experts in CRO achieve results as much as 400% improvement in certain cases (to large million dollar companies, on stuff that could have come from any respectable designer). Mediocre ones have an average of 60%.
Off-topic.

>It's a great way to kick off the day, and I'm 3kg down.

The OP says he is in Australia. How widely is the metric system used there (in comparison to the imperial one)?
Fantastic in depth article. In my opinion, the tests he perform show not so much drawbacks of the tested systems, but more the fact that defining them in terms of the CAP theorem can be misleading. For example, a CP system should, in case of a partition, wait until the partition is resolved, potentially forever. This is not useful in practice, where almost always some timeout is used. This is why, if I'm interpreting the results correctly, not even a Postgres running on a single node can claim to be CP.
What classical music can learn from open source
>A huge chunk of XBox1 and PS4 "exclusives" are available on PC.

It depends on your definition of "huge", I guess. I know just a few games like Halo 1 (and 2 maybe), Alan Wake, which were exclusives on varios xboxes and became available on PC at later time. Don't know any playstation games like that, at least from the recent generations.

Your list (the second link is a video I did not watch) only shows multi-platform, some of which is available on PC. Also I will remind you that this is not the list of all the games. A transition between generations is usually covered with multiplatforms to compensate for the small installed base. Check out the list of exclusives for Wii, PS3 and 360 to make a more realistic picture.

>Nintendo Games however, have never really appeared on PC. No chance ever, especially because the WiiU gamepad is so unique. * Super Mario Bros 2 U * Pikmin 3 * Super Smash Bros. * MarioKart 8 * NintendoLand

Neither had Sony's games. * Infamous 2 * God of War 3 * Playstation All Star Battle Royale * GT 6 * Playstation Home

I don't question your tastes, some people like Nintendo games (otherwise Nintendo had been out of business long time ago). But there is a huge logical leap between "I like these games" and "there are objectively more games like these".
Show HN: Flippit, a minimal reddit client for the iPhone
It seems like calorie counting would be a good first-line treatment for difficulty controlling one's appetite. This requires a fair amount of discipline, but it's also free of side effects and tools already exist to help you. Do you think at least knowing A) what your basal metabolic rate is, and B) knowing how many calories you're eating (and consuming via exercise) is effective in combating this misfire in a body's signals?

I think a lot of the resistance to this is people are worried that the first-line treatment will be things like drugs, which can be expensive (to society, since costs are largely socialized even in the U.S. through the mechanism of health insurance) and have side effects. Look at, say, jrs235's comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5912203 ) elsewhere on this page. That's a valid concern. But obesity also comes with a lot of costs itself. If calorie counting is an effective approach, I think that it could address the problem in a cost-effective way. (And in a software way, too.)
These estimates are completely useless in real life

Oh yes they are, for getting a grasp on what real life entails and what's possible.

With all the NSA scandal/hysteria going around, lots of people are approaching the issue with the presumption "gee, they can't possibly record everyone's phone calls". With a quick estimate I figured recording everyone, all the time, in CD quality, would take just 5% of the federal budget - making it doable instead of improbable or impossible, and making subsets of the scenario (i.e.: just recording phone calls) likely. For those of us who remember 10MB hard drives and 5.25" floppies, such a data scale is staggering - but it's a current reality, and a little estimating provides a reality check.

Likewise grasping the concept of, or even implementing, high-res "eye in the sky" drones. Gigapixel cameras seem like a novel futuristic impractical concept ... but then a little estimating involving HD-quality cell phone cameras, you can realize that a 24/7 flying 30fps gigapixel camera drone is in fact quite possible for a relatively modest sum (speaking in jurisdictional law enforcement budget terms). (Takes less than 200 cell phone cameras and a suitable multiplexer & high-bandwidth downlink BTW.)

I had an epiphany about accounting (!) when touring a billion-dollar timeshare (hotel/condo) project. Wanna make a billion dollars? Pick some large expensive project, then estimate your way down to a plan for pulling a few dollars out of a LOT of wallets by dividing, dividing, dividing away into manageable chunks people are willing to shell out a few bucks for.

Such estimates are exercises in how to mentally manage very large scale money, personnel, opportunities, and processes. Wanna make a billion dollars? Charge a buck profit per window to wash a thousand windows for each of a thousand businesses every week for 20 years. Don't laugh, there's some really rich people who made a lot of money charging a buck at a time - because they estimated their way into a profitable vision.
Very nice! I'd love to have a link from each user's page back to their profile page on HN.
>> Let's not forget. Google is an international company, not "foreign".

No, it's an American company, subject to the whims of the US government.

>> Google has servers and offices in the UK.

Sure does. I have no idea where they process the data though and I doubt the gov.uk folks have. If they did have a guarantee that the data wasn't ever going to leave the UK then maybe they could say so?

>> If you read the first point, it says "Start with needs". They need to be relevant and appear in Google. Google Analytics is simply a tool that helps them do that.

Err, no, google analytics records and transmits site interaction data.
One step closer to launching mysql_query into the sun.
I'm fascinated by the psychology behind online rating systems.

Honestly, they are big motivators for me. I get a burst of endorphins when I receive many Facebook "likes" or upvotes on HackerNews. When I am ignored or downvoted, I feel as if I've been voted out of a digital democracy.

What's interesting, though, is that many online rating systems aren't democracies; they're dictatorships. In other words, it's unclear to the user how the process of ranking / rating actually works. (HN is pretty transparent, I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this regard.)
It's good to see more data backing the "more active == longer life" anecdote.
That's true, my mistake.
I am currently taking a course from Coursera. In the discussion forum karma/reputation is the sum of the square roots of comment scores - thus the scores are closely tied to consistent and less skewed by homeruns.

Then again, as part of YC, encouraging homeruns on HN implements symmetry.
Bank Run Halted on Largest Bitcoin Exchange
Youth in Programming
Of course it's personally identifiable. AOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak and more recently Netflix http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf tried to anonymize datasets and failed. With a website, you can geo-locate the IP, cross-reference with timestamps, and probably ID more than half the users. Someone tested how hard it is: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/de-anonymize-cellphone-da... With 4 location datapoints + timestamps, you can differentiate 95% of people.
I wonder if they were just punning on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_and_the_Dead_%28idiom...

> Walking faster now.

Joke there, I suppose, since the authors did seem to find it applied for diagnosis (poor health slows people down, news at 11 ...).
Odd, never seen a comment from Lightning.
That's short-term thinking. If students don't use your products, they won't when they turn into tomorrow's professionals. Lots of successful companies have been doing this for many years. $60+ per month is way too expensive. Thankfully for them, piracy is widespread enough to ensure that GIMP's ugly interface keeps students from switching to it.
Which part is unacceptable - the fobbing off part, or the some data gets sent to a country that tortures people, spies on all its citizens indiscriminately and has not signed up to common international treaties.

I think that before Snowden most people, myself included, would have thought not using google analytics for the above reasons was paranoia.

Now, I think that all digital data should be treated as public and until we change the law to have a public / private demarcation, we need to accept it and deal.

(I see this as a pollution issue, until we get a clean air act, everyone will walk around with cloths across their mouths)

edit: little less troll like:

We have no framework for digital privacy, and until we see an emergent consensus there will not be one.
Here, on this site, we have informed, reasonable people disagree on fundamental definitions of online privacy.
So the first step here is to ask, "privacy in the US is based on two things, actions in ones own home are protected by default, and written communications between yourself and others are protected, and publishing is an explicit act"

What do those things now mean in a world of mobile phones, internet and metadata?
Just noticed this the other day - is it an estimation?
Hate to quote myself, but see the P.S. here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5568610

If I were a gambling man, I'd say this is quite likely to be shoe #1.
I'm pretty sure that was mostly hyperbole, with the intention being "we hire smart, clever people" however you choose to qualify that.
> What strikes me as odd is people wanting to write things that traditionally written in C/C++

I should note I know people who make this choice. They can write these things in C, and in the past, they have. But they are choosing Node.js. So it's not just a "what you know" affect.
>Exceptions can be thrown into the generator using the Generator::throw() method.

>Rewinding a generator

...wut
Science education is so damaged in the United States now that a survey of people on the street would probably find a worryingly high percentage of people believed either a) the "Cambrian explosion" was an asteroid impact, b) involved explosives, or c) took place over a matter of hours or days.
Not true: A new transaction in the bitcoin network isn't linked to any IP address, since transactions diffuse through the network haphazardly: There's nothing to distinguish between a transaction coming from elsewhere and a new transaction originating in the client. The only way to figure out the originating IP address would be to collect all data on close to 100% of the network and analyse the data in a sophisticated way.

Hunting down a money trail through the block chain by getting user data from exchanges or points of purchases without trying to determine the raw IP for a particular transaction is much more tractable, as others have pointed out.

EDIT: User "sneak" has changed the wording of his original comment, so this reply now doesn't make as much sense)
The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value (2011)
World's top 100 universities under 50: ranked by Times Higher Education
Is there a reason other than aesthetics that glass needs to be sorted? Do the chemical colorants not work well together, or is the glass types incompatible with each other?
Wouldn't multi-colored glass that looks obviously recycled be a product that would be attractive to "green-conscious" companies?
It's important to note that in geologic terms, the Cambrian Explosion really refers to the proliferation of hard-bodied organisms. There's almost definitely a sudden increase in global biodiversity, but it's an increase in fossil preservation that gives it the name "Cambrian Explosion".

Fairly complex lifeforms were around well before the Cambrian (e.g. the Ediacaran Fauna [1]), and even some hard-bodied organisms were around before (the "small shelly fauna" [2]).

At the start of the Cambrian, though, hard body parts (i.e. biomineralization) really took off. It's often hypothesized to be an "evolutionary arms race" with armor and teeth.

In that context, weathering of the continents influencing the chemical composition of the seas and therefore making it easier for organisms to grow hard body parts starts to make a lot more sense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacara_biota
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_shelly_fauna

Also, I just noticed that the article links to something in New Scientist. The paper it refers to was published earlier in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7394/abs/nature10... Google Scholar tells me there's a pdf here, if anyone is interested: http://211.144.68.84:9998/91keshi/Public/File/34/484-7394/pd...
Most of the arguments i've heard against PHP (not all, but most) seem to amount to 'PHP is doesn't semantically resemble this other language I prefer and therefore it needs to die.'

Meanwhile the arguments for tend to resemble 'it works better than that language at deploying html anyway.'
Quite so. Having been raised by the BBC World Service I actually do have a somewhat received pronunciation, albeit gently deflected by many years abroad.

The disposition of my pinky, however, shall remain a mystery.
One other thing - Send us announcements, blog posts, news etc and we'll include them
The goal in this particular case is to have all your code in a single language for easy distribution. If you write and distribute a Node.js webapp or Node Webkit app (which I guess you don't since you don't like JS!), needing your users to also install whichever DB you use is a pain for them (esp. for desktop apps with Node Webkit, users may not be developers). That's the reason I built this.
I don't know of this feature either. Maybe it's a reference to demos?
Sure, but their system of delivey is entirely unfit for purpose, and even the police agrees.
This is something that it would be interesting for these guys to separate out. There are clearly a number of accounts which just submit everything from various 'known to hit' blogs/sites, there are some that submit what ever was a high scoring article a year ago, Etc etc.

What I find amusing is that since they are essentially playing a game "karma scoring for fun" they complain about it when someone else's submission of the same story gets more karma than they got.

That said the use of a mechanism like karma points to drive user engagement and participation is pretty classic. You could ask someone to spend hours day scouring the internet for interesting stories but they would want you to pay them. Offer up karma points to the people who find the cool stories and suddenly they are competing for free to populate the news feed for your site.
Why should one part of the UK government be informed about your interactions with another part?

We have no framework for digital privacy, and until we see an emergent consensus there will not be one.

Here, on this site, we have informed, reasonable people disagree on fundamental definitions of online privacy.

I am unsure where to begin.
People like making knee-jerk arguments that the only way Skype could implement anti-phishing is to have no security.
I think you're all missing the point. His post is the 'story' behind the app. This post is the marketing.
Exactly. Simply look at the user in 7th place. 1 submission and two comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=emingo
What about "your children will not be allowed to attend a university" or "no matter how hard you work or how good you are, your path is blocked" or "people just do not want to do business with you any more"?

Unlike during the time of the Nazis, what most people in East Germany dreaded was not to disappear, but to have the few possibilities to achieve something taken from them.
Please don't poison the well by arguing that anyone who might disagree with you on any particular point is an astroturfing sockpuppet. If you have evidence or a hunch about a specific trend of postings, that's one thing. Assuming universal bad faith is another entirely, and something HN is better off without. Unless we're talking about SEO hucksters[1].

[1](a joke. mostly.)
That choice was removed because the company felt that too many people would do exactly that.
It's complicated in Germany, I don't know about Sweden.

In Germany a list of lay judges is generated. Either by random, by committees, churches, unions etc. This is not defined. Then the municipal assembly takes this list and filters those of the list that should not become lay judges. The list goes to the court and the court then votes with a committee the lay judges (two third majority).

It might be subject to discussion, to me this is not identical to "Appointed by politicians".
The Xbox One Just Got Way Worse, And It's Our Fault
JM is the honey badger of the tech world. If you don't know the story of his self-led espionage, check this out:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/the-bizarre-tale-...
That's quite a bit of hyperbole.

My view is quite different. The Human body evolved to survive in certain ecological niches. And, very quickly, those environments changed. So, it's not surprising that the body hasn't kept up.

Your moral angle has a good ring to it, but I think it's misguided. From a moral standpoint, I think it's much better to use our evolutionary strengths (big brains, etc.) to let us invent technology to overcome the slowness of evolution. What benefit is there in forcing people to tough it out when their biology simply wasn't made to cope?

Plus, it's actually probably cheaper to invent new drugs to treat obesity (curbing appetite) than the more intensive, invasive treatments for diabetes, heart disease, etc.
These guys are doing an incredible job. Liam Maxwell is smart and has a background in startups. I got the privilege of listening to him speak a couple months ago. Wrote up the experience here: http://peebs.org/2013/03/29/evening-united-kingdom-cto/
Swedish non-tabloid article with more details: http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/fangelse-for-svartholm-war...
You should put this into a regular repository so that people can send pull requests.
It's true, if you're lucky enough to have someone who can write organized code that replaces the original clever junk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756 (ignore the top comment)