skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Had some 'fun' with this in the UK a while back.

I needed a modem there and then so went to a high street electronics store. I got the empty box of the one I wanted down from the shelf, took it up front, paid and they went to get me a full box from the back. 10 minutes later and the assistant comes back. They have no modems.

This is mildly annoying, but fine, so I asked for my money back, which is when they started demanding my name and address. When I refused the assistant went to get the manager, who said they needed the details to process a refund. I said it wasn't a refund, you took my cash without giving me a product. I offered to call the police if this was giving them trouble and then it came down to "well the software won't open the till without an address".

So... it's some programmer's fault!
When I interviewed at Google 5 years ago they weren't using those brainteasers.

There are many posts online about the actual, CS-y questions that you can expect in a Google interview, I had just assumed that the mentions of brainteasers were merely urban legend.
Just reading this topic, turns out you can grab this for $11.99 + p&h from Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-WR-01-Pocket-Wikipedia/dp/B...

I'm actually considering getting one of these for that price, would be an interesting device to tinker with FORTH.
I understand that, but an application isn't an island; presumably a server that speaks JSON is easiest to deal with, and there are probably a number of gotchas on "how best to build a backend that works the way AngularJS works well". I've not found anything like that yet and I'd love someone to point me to it.
Unfortunately, http://www.xkcd.com/1217/ comes to mind...
Console sales are not that important. How many people have it plugged into their TV. How many people regularly play is a better sign of popularity.

This is 2011. Wii came in 3rd for number of games sold

http://www.vgchartz.com/yearly/2011/Global/

2012. A massive drop off for Wii

http://www.vgchartz.com/yearly/2012/Global/

The Wii was / is a big success but the 360 has had stunning longevity and a very passionate player base.
You have to inject it since it's part of the extracellular matrix. And the compound (Hyaluronan) is naturally synthesized by your body (or you'd be dead), it seems the anti-cancer properties of naked mole rat hyaluronan comes from it being much longer than it usually is in humans (the formula is (C14H21NO11)n).

IIRC hyaluronan is already used in cosmetics/skin care to "fill out" wrinkles or lips.
that's not the 90210 he was talking about
This is a terrible article, and most of the features the author is bemoaning the loss of are perfectly possible to have while allowing resale. The internet didn't 'make' MS do this, this is a panicked decision made by people without a clear vision.
> looks at task manager
New TeamCity 8 is here
You still have to wash the bottle, and that's done with hot water. They probably make the homeowner do that, otherwise they would have some very dirty and stinky bottles by the time they got to them.

That single action alone tips the energy balance, even before you go any further. (But of course the bottle maker doesn't pay for it....)

I bet the steam is not recaptured because it prevents continuous operation of the line (you would need a pressure chamber with some kind of airlock). They probably do a batch, then open it and let the steam escape.

So your steam is still very energy intensive, (and if you can recapture the heat energy in waste steam you can also do it for molten glass).

And even if you got the energy stuff settled (which isn't going to be easy) this might work (barely) for high volume daily deliveries (milk is the classic example), but it would be hugely labor intensive for any other purpose - and labor also costs energy.
I don't understand people's problem with estimating. It's a useful skill. Perhaps it would be better if the questions actually related to technology, rather than golf balls - but the principle is the same.

For instance - "how many hard drives does Gmail need?" requires a rough guess of how many users Gmail has (if you're interviewing at Google, you should know it's 1e8-1e9). How much space each one takes (probably nowhere near a gigabyte on average - let's say 1e8 bytes). And that the current capacity of hard drives is (1e12 bytes).

Then you can say that they probably need 1e5 hard drives, link it to redundancy, availability, deduplication, backups etc. You can comment that it's feasible to build a datacenter with that many hard drives.

No one cares that the actual number is 12,722 - but you've demonstrated a broad set of knowledge about the current state of technology. Saying "dunno - a billion?" is not going to get you anywhere, and with good reason.

The Monopoly question is crap, though.

I'd like to know how useful http://google-tale.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-billboard-puz... was.
Most likely nothing. It depends on what sort of test it is; if it's something non-intuitive like (say) a habit of writing sentences that always have a prime number of words in them, you'll get your false positives but most those people won't pass any other tests, whereas the actual terrorists will.

What Schneier is missing is that while you can't ID people that well from a single test, you can apply a bunch of them. In his example, one test improves the probability of correctly ID a sociopath from 4% to 24%. Apply another, different test of similar efficacy to that result set and you'll have a population of 21 true positives, and 8 or 9 false positives, increasing the probabiliy of a successful ID from 25% to ~70%. Sure, there's no single test that will give you reliable answers, but so what? It's OK to use a multi-pronged solution.
Work really hard on what they give you.
Be nice. If you can help out else where kindly ask to do so.
I have no idea how MS backpedaled so fast. Suddenly no region restrictions? Can't sell downloaded games? All the licensing deals with publishers & GameStop reneged? How the heck did they pivot to a completely different business model in just a few days?
Uhm... your link 404s, but I very much doubt that you were able to achieve 1.25GBps (thats GBps) reads with 3 Samsung spinning platter disks, right?

Because that's what Apple says the 2013 Mac Pro SSD is capable of.
If you use the same zip code every time, they still know who you are.
The first iOS 7 app is live on the App Store
Macromedia started selling Flash 16 years a go, in December 1996.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#History
Adding Stripe mobile payments to your iOS application
What payment options are available for mobile commerce applications built for Apple iOS platform? I did a technical review with the example integration for one of the most flexible mobile payment libraries out there
1. We've invested a significant amount of time and capital into our Anycast network. There are both up front and ongoing costs for this. We could make due with the revenue we have now but it would leave little margin.

2. We want to hire additional developers so we can get our ICANN accreditation and add new functionality to the system. I won't go into specifics, but we have a long backlog of things we want to make. We're still going to hire slowly and deliberately, however we want to grow none-the-less.

3. We feel that the value to customers is higher than what we are charging now, and thus we are adjusting the prices for that reason as well.
I have no real idea. I was just saying this, as in, I don't think criminal hang around facebook.

If that'd be the case, would facebook just be some sort of crime catching tool ?

I wonder though, is sociopathy a crime, or some trait that will turn people into criminal ?

> I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths.

I doubt the people you are talking about can be criminal.

Crime and psychology, sigh
NEVER underestimate the perversity of developers of restaurant sites.
People working near are likely to be wearing suits something like [1]. I'm not sure if there are any fundamental constraints to putting a camera inside a similar shielded enclosure, but I imagine it could be possible that the camera lenses might focus the light sufficiently to damage the CCD. Then again, the bulk of energy is presumably in the IR, which isn't particularly well transmitted through glass (and hence, would be absorbed instead, maybe damaging it or any expensive coatings it has)

[1] http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml
This reply to monster seems a lot more productive than the one from the OP. It got me to look up blue jeans cables and I found a youtube video[1] where Kurt Denke (the person who wrote the C&D reply) talks about the difference between a $17 and a $150 HDMI cable. It's quite long but it's refreshing to see information about cables being spread without the usual marketing lies.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHjkb1m7Y7s
True. Provisioning a new test VM for me usually entails something like this:
ssh in;
visudo;
wtf, this is nano! Boo!;
ctrl-x;
update-alternatives --config editor... :)
I agree. Don't try to help anyone understand my comments either.
What browser do you use? An app isn’t supposed to freeze the entire system.
If you don't like the command line approach, you can use GUIs [1] like GNU Privacy Assistant or Cryptophane.

[1] http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html#gui
LinkedIn was not Hacked, suffered outage due to DNS issue
In the UK, the rail network is similar - cost to the taxpayer is huge, and since we allowed private firms to operate the trains and collect/set fares, it's actually much more expensive (compared to gas/petrol price for a single trip, at least) to take the train than to drive, especially if you're going a long way (a few hundred miles is a long way in the UK, for reference.)

Of course, the choice is less stark than that because car tax, insurance, and cost of maintenance make trains cheaper for the journey patterns of many people, especially young people and students - who make a few long journeys a year, and also get discounted tickets (1/2 under 16, 1/3 off under 25.)
> I sometimes play games that are many decades old

Thats one thing steam is actually pretty good for, its got lots of older games (some from the early 80s!) that generally just work on pretty much any modern PC.
Factor is another interesting concatenative programming language (inspired by Forth): http://concatenative.org/ I've been playing around with it for the past few days and found it to be very well documented. Well worth a look if you're looking for something to bend you mind in new ways!
there is one in chrome too
not at all possible
This article has about one good paragraph (the first one), then descends into mindless internet-hating drivel. The internet didn't make Microsoft do anything - Microsoft, for better or worse, capitulated to popular demand.

Maybe Microsoft's problem was a marketing problem. It's not the fault of the general public that a multi-billion dollar organisation can't communicate its vision. As the article states, Apple managed to push its vision of the iPhone and iPad through in spite of the vocal opposition.
I have 100mbit, and while steam can fully saturate it there is definitely a (not too long of) wait for the larger games from 20-40 min.
I fixed the link for you: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-227-724&T...

But I don't understand. That card alone is $3,500.

Here are two links which come to a different conclusion from you.

http://www.barefeats.com/mba13a.html

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/11/macbook-airs-pcie-based-...
> I would imagine they would allow you to play parts of the game without needing to install the whole game, similar to Steam.

afaik steam does not do this, is it a recent feature?
They certainly aren't at the Lego shop.
Mid-Year 2013 Marketing Blog Metrics, Do You Know Your #Blogging Goals?
Amazon is staffing up for its $600 million cloud for spooks
Have you tried MAB ? It seems like the best way to do A/B testing on small-traffic pages, let it run forever without losing much due to the reduced frequency of poorly performing variantes.

Setup your test with 3 or 4 colors, the programm will automatically pick the best one over time, so it doesn't matter how long you let it run, be it weeks months or years, and when you don't want to test it anymore you pick the one that performed the best out of the many visitors you've had over a large period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
This issue has nothing to do with the efficacy of the tests. In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers (for various definitions of trouble-maker) would be an enormous benefit and allow resources to be targeted more efficiently. The real problem is what happens in the imperfect world where law enforcement, government, self-imposed officers of authority get lazy or down-right malevolent. Do you really want to live in a world where your family members might be carted off, never to return, because their name came up on a list generated by a computer. Try asking the folks in North Korea, for example, whether this type of test is a good idea or not.
The machines I've seen are essentially autoclaves, so sealed high pressure chambers.

What you've expanded on is correct. The point I was trying to make was that at an industrial scale, the back of the envelope calculation you first presented isn't particularly useful in working out the energy delta between reusing vs recycling.
I’m not talking about crime. Most sociopaths never commit any crimes and it’s not illegal to be a sociopath. That would be silly, like jailing someone for having red hair. Also, it’s quite possible that there are more sociopaths than there are people with red hair – estimates range from 1% to 4% of the population.

> I don't think criminal hang around facebook.

Are you sure about that?
Yeah HN once was more fun without all those naysayers and naggers that more often than not seem to just be uncreative and ingenious.
Indian PRISM
It’s the product that makes you a designer
Ask HN: Has anyone done a cross vendor cloud for Higher Availability?
What I mean is, suppose you are apprehensive about trusting Amazon with all prod, has any one created a DR on Azure (or any other vendor) to improve availability? What challenges did you face (specific to web\db servers)?
But how Google's "control" over Dart (meaning: "leading the development"), maximize their "control" over the Web (meaning: "currently providing the best suite of applications")? It's a language. If it takes off, it will be self-sustaining. Has IBM's "control" over Eclipse given IBM dominance over the Java ecosystem?

I read a lot of criticism of Google's centralized incubation of Dart, that it has not been developed by some standards committee. How would this prevent the nightmare scenario of a Google overlord (it's a _language_, for Pete's sake)? What was the last successful committee designed language you've used?

tl;dr Hate Google for all kinds of reasons, but judge the language on its merits.
>> The revelations that have emerged will undoubtedly trigger a reaction abroad as policymakers and ordinary users realize the huge disadvantages of their dependence on U.S.-controlled networks in social media, cloud computing, and telecommunications, and of the formidable resources that are deployed by U.S. national security agencies to mine and monitor those networks. <<

I think the author doesn't go far enough, and it should read "users realize the huge disadvantages of their dependence on ANY PUBLIC networks". It doesn't matter if it is [directly] U.S.-controlled or not, since other networks are controlled by their respective gov. agencies in that particular countries [or soon will be], and the data can be traded/exchanged.

It seems to me this is a trouble for the whole Internet [or soon will be]; it's not U.S.-specific problem.
They also suck up a lot of the "profits" in the PC market. So even if their marketshare is 5%, their profit share is like 30%.
but they use git as well, so you could easily set up a mirror on github.
Microsoft reverses Xbox One DRM policy
Biggest change?
- Drop Windows XP and 2003 support
Since GWT is open source, Google 'dropping' it (many largish Google projects use GWT and they still commit code) is not the death knell for GWT based projects. For the same reason it is being actively developed and has a steering committee and regular participation of googlers. It is also 'probably the best cross-compiled JS framework in the world', to borrow a phrase from the beer industry. Full-featured and works today, not 'maybe in five years' which is what Dart promises (I'll be the first to jump onto it when/if that time comes).
Pirate Bay cofounder sentenced to 2 years in prison for ‘hacking’
same as for JavaScript
Did they benefit from fighting the creeping police state in 2009? -Apparently not, because they didn't.

Do they benefit from fighting the creeping police state in 2013? -Apparently not, because they didn't - at least until there was that massive shitstorm blowing their way.

Again, if they considered fighting the police state to be in their interests, all of those companies would have done it long ago. Since they haven't, we can conclude that they don't, and therefore, if a massive shitstorm prompts them into doing damage control and pretending they give a fuck, that still doesn't amount to Doing The Right Thing. It only amounts to bullshitting us some more.
A point that a lot of people don't see with WP8 is that it runs great (compared to Android) on low-end devices. You can get a Lumia 520 for ~150€ where I live and it offers (theoretically) pretty much everything a Lumia 820 or 920 does, except Games.
Geekbench doesn’t use the GPU; Geekbench also doesn’t use AVX, so half of the floating-point performance of recent cores is left on the table.

Actually, looking at disassembly of Geekbench, they barely even use SSE vectors, so it’s really nearly 3/4 of the floating-point performance that goes unmeasured by the benchmark.

One could perhaps argue in the defense of the benchmark that many consumer applications don’t take advantage of these ISA extensions, but you definitely cannot argue that pro apps don’t use them; this alone makes Geekbench (and in fairness, most benchmarks, which tend to be pretty naive) extremely misleading for evaluation of “pro” hardware. Ultimately there’s only one benchmark that’s useful for such evaluation: actually exercising the workload that you intend to run on the machine.

Geekbench also doesn’t use available libraries that offer high-performance implementations of the computations in question (of which any serious application developer would avail themselves). Looking at numbers for released hardware, the “LU decomposition” results in Geekbench make clear that they are either using far too small of a problem size or using a naive C implementation of the operation and measuring the performance of whatever code their compiler generated. If they wanted to show the performance of the system, they would use one of the available library implementations.

Such benchmarks tell you something, but it isn’t really how good hardware is; it’s closer to a measure of how well a compiler can salvage naive C code when it isn’t allowed to take advantage of the available hardware features. I’m not sure what that’s representative of, but I know that it’s not representative of professional workloads.
Doesn't apply here since it's observed in-vivo and hyaluronan had already been linked to cancer:

> In the early days of hyaluronan research, scientists were confused by the fact that the molecule seemed to both prevent and cause cancer (the Daily Mail would have loved it).

> Since then, we’ve discovered that the sugar’s size is responsible for its dual nature. Bryan Toole from the Medical University of South Carolina, who studies hyaluronan, says that high concentrations of the large versions can stop cells from turning cancerous, while smaller versions can actually promote cancer. In a similar way, the large forms tamp down inflammation while the small ones exacerbate it, which may relevant to cancer since inflammation is tied to several tumours.

finally, as far as I understand long hyaluronan doesn't kill cancer, it prevents cancerous growth.
Waiting until someone actually commits a crime provides a list that is 100% accurate.
fair point :) I guess I work in an industry (design engineering) where my interviews have only ever consisted of a "nice chat"
"We can't fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don't see the contradiction, the rest of the world does."

Er, how is unregulated spying on non-Americans, fighting for internet freedom around the world?

I take internet freedom to mean the USA has the world wide freedom to spy on non people.... sorry, non Americans.

The blow back I would start worrying about is if the countries or the likes of the EU start walling off the internet, sort of like China, to keep American spying out. I now wonder if the Chinese firewall is as much about internal control as it is defensive.

American actually risks the break up of the internet as one single thing, unless it begins to respect people who are not American.
They do ask those sorts of questions still, but I wouldn't call them brainteasers.
What a terrible article.

First, the analogy is completely wrong.

Second, Microsoft is realizing people are getting seriously tired of the bullshit "always on" concept. It's hard to justify and is widely rejected as a valid technical limitation on platforms where you expect to always have an internet connection (and is only accepted when the gameplay itself REQUIRES a connection, unlike the late SimCity). It's completely unacceptable in a device that historically has been played without an internet connection, and in the best case, that scenario becomes like the PC, in that it's only acceptable when the user wants to play some form of internet-based multiplayer.

There is no valid technical justification for "it has to either be all physical CDs or you have to have to connect to our servers every 24 hours". With a properly secured console, it should be fairly trivial to support shared digital games without requiring a ping.

I, surely less intelligent than the entirety of the xbox team, came up with this in about 10 seconds:

Person A informs server of intent to share game G with person B.

Server sends a message to person A: "game G disabled for period X hours". This message is signed for authenticity, with public key crypto, verifiable by a public key stored in secured memory on the console.

Server sends a message to person B: "game G activated and enabled for period X hours". This message signed identically to #2.

Person B starts game G, console verifies signed access card, if valid, downloads game. Once download/install is complete, console again verifies access card. If valid, runs it. Periodically, every 30 minutes, console checks running processes against associated access cards. If an access card becomes invalid, the process is terminated gracefully (save progress, notify user why).

Person A tries to start game G. Console verifies signed access card, if valid. Access is restricted, so console informs user G is temporarily unavailable due to being shard with Person B.

Surely this isn't that difficult to implement? And now you don't have to be online except to download the digital game.

I seriously HATE it when companies try to impose nonsensical, unjustifiable, technically wrong "limitations" on me just because it suits them. Stop it.
Well, it's probably not equivalent, but it's a good hint (aka : you can't express clearly something that isn't well structured in your mind).
Plus, it also let me test verbal skills themselves, which is extremely important as soon as you're working in a team.

Another way of looking at it is that "finding the right word" often means find the good "fit" between abstract concepts shapes or feelings, and a construct of known language items. That's precisely what you're doing as a developer.
Government Digital Service Design Principles