skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting rant. Some of the things the OP takes as disappointing, or as a design flaw, I see as a good thing.

I've no problems with string concatenation. In fact, I consider overloading + as a concatenation operator to be risky in a duck-type environment. You could, conceivably, concatenate two variables when you meant for a mathematical operation to occur just by the type of the first variable.

I find things like $var->$foo and $var->{'duck_' . $i}() to be very powerful and good. Dangerous in the hands of an amateur, yes, but very effective when you know what you're doing.
I like your site. Can we talk offline? You don't have an email address in your profile.
I think the best interview I ever had I was sat down in front of a computer and asked to complete two different classes and make the tests pass. This tests ability to write code under a deadline and shows that the candidate knows how to use some programming tools editor, testing framework etc.
2^14 columns * 2^20 rows * 8 bytes per cell = 128GB. Bang on.
> "For me it would be when people disappear..."

You don't necessarily need to 'disappear' people when (with enough information) you can string together a bunch of charges such that a compliant judicial system will put them away for you. Even if there isn't a conviction, the process may be sufficient to destroy someone's life.
TCPCopy: A Live Flow Reproduction Tool to Support Real Testing of Server Apps
Swedish article with more details: http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article16997376.ab
Well, what does a switch do? How does a physical switch work? Phones -- the old ones -- have big honking mechanical switches, but you can still listen through the things, with a little engineering.

A switch that just twiddles a bit on an input line can be ignored by software.

A switch that controls power might be interesting. But then there's a cable from the camera to the console itself, which could carry some power, and might be used to run a microphone, or maybe the camera electronics, a little bit.

Really, your recourse is to unplug the camera. Or not have one.

Others have pointed out that there are microphones on laptops and tablets (that appear to be off, but who knows?), and many celebrated cases in which reverse-spyware has been used to recover stolen hardware.

This stuff is all around us now. There's no coordinated plan for NSA-like folks to glue it together, or light it up without us knowing, and I think this would be hard, at least for the time being, and doubly hard to do without someone noticing.
> which leaves me with no other option...

That's not correct. There are options. The alternatives aren't always as capable, or may require more work on your part, or may just not be as convenient, but there are options that would allow you to do most or all of the things that can be done without pirating the Adobe stuff.

Recognition of Adobe's tactic, and the fact that the graphic arts industries have practically made Adobe products a de facto standard certainly increases the incentive for many to simply pirate the stuff. Adobe is counting on that.
> I commented to tell you my observance about your conversation in hopes that you wouldn't post more similar ones.

observance Noun

* The action or practice of fulfilling or respecting the requirements of law, morality, or ritual.

* An act performed for religious or ceremonial reasons.

> That is what my commented contributed towards.

Well, actually, you failed in your observance of the guidelines[1] of this website.

* Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

I doubt you'd have said that to me in person. You can claim on here you would, of course.

* If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

Your account is less than a year old, which is a threshold of some merit here.

* Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

I assume this applies to comments as well as submissions.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
how horribly culturally specific.
Big data is a misnomer. Complex data is a better description. Having a terabyte of simple data with 2 columns is really not that difficult to analyze and won't give you much information. Whereas having a few hundred mbs data with complex relationships and many dimensions can yield tons of information and is far more difficult to analyze.

Difficulty in "big data" should be about its horizontal breadth (covering many aspects of a system) rather than its vertical depth (covering one aspect of a system in great resolution).
I think you're misreading my comment. When I said "%" distinguishes proportions from quantities, I was implying there'd be both proportions and quantities (as his version has). Otherwise, they needn't be distinguished.

When I said I found his version clearer, I meant between the two versions originally given. The one you've just added is of course less clear because unlike the other two, it doesn't point out the issue.

BTW: But maybe it is clearer, for calculation rather than understanding, because I get 27.(27)%, not 26%...
https://www.google.com/search?q=%28.9*.04%29/%28.9*.04%2B.1*...
Yeah, but why? Nobody should be surprised that familiarity with Monopoly rules is a bad predictor for job performance (and I'm not only saying that because I suck at these).
As a Capita employee (we were acquired), I can empathise.
Adobe can never confirm such a strategy. It would destroy their standing to engage in any enforcement.
The charge on reusable glass bottles is 7ct in Germany for most bottles. No charge for one-way glass bottles which get recycled.
Nice work! This needs a lot more services, I think, but the concept is smart.
Non-sequitur, and the wrong website to argue for such subservience to employers.
It's back.

And it's bad netiquette to link to a service that is down. Mention it if you must, but don't link to it.
I was contacted by a Google recruiter a few months ago, I had no intention of changing my day job at the time, but for shits and grins I went through a couple phone interviews. The position they were hiring for wasn't an area I have any experience in (the recruiter had made a mismatch), but I thought the questions were reasonable for somebody who works in that field and were kind of fun. They were quizzy, but could be practical. It was a management position so there weren't any coding questions, but things like basic cost estimating that sort of thing.

I had fun and wouldn't mind it again, it didn't feel like a bunch of stupid random brain teasers like I've experienced before (how many t-shirts would it take to make sea worthy sail? why are manholes round?) etc.
The PHP team does take speed seriously and just about every minor release gets a little bit faster, sometimes alot, like 20% faster. I'm not even including stuff like the opcode caches that are built in now like APC or Zend Optimizer+. Lots of times, minor releases also get more efficient with memory usage too. If you are not happy with the speed, PHP is an open source project and you can contribute patches to speed it up.

Documentation gets fixed all the time. PHP has been historically known as having one of the best docs and the docs have contributed to its success. As with the source code, the docs are open to contributions if you feel the need to modify or add something.

That's funny you say PHP can't scale. Facebook, Yahoo, Etsy and a whole lot of other big PHP shops get more traffic than most of us will ever see in a few life times. So, PHP scales. Even pre-Hiphop Facebook got more traffic than most of us will will ever see. Many times scaling is more about architecture design/implementation than language. App Engine is all about scaling and PHP runs on it. Oh by the way, at scale, every language is a data center toaster oven.

PHP people aren't mad that people are leaving. They are happy that it is still the #1 language used for web development.

The only valid argument you have is the mixed methods and stuff. It would be cool to fix, but it would mean seriously breaking the API and would cause a lot of confusion. Every minor release breaks the API a little bit and people are unhappy. So, this might never change. I don't see it as a big deal because if you are a great programmer, you know the quirks of your language and they don't throw you off. Also, there is auto-completion and docs for you to look up things if you don't know stuff off the top of your head.

It is true that lots of developers have left PHP, but it is a falsehood that everybody is moving away from PHP. If that was the case, PHP wouldn't be running on 75% of the public facing web hosts out there. There would be a business incentive (because they are using another language) to get PHP off their box. They could devote those resources to the new language they are using. The 75% number shows that their is no mass exodus, but definitely evidence not everybody is using PHP.

Oh, by the way, PHP is open source so you can help contribute to its continued success if you like. If somehow you have already contributed, don't stop till the work is done.
The only true way to tell if an interviewee will be a good employee is actual work/product output with the right amount of responsibility. Product focused people not just coders looking to code lots of tricks to compete.

Contract to hire is one way, another is what they have done previously as a good predictor. It is a risk for sure but that really is the only true way in the end.

Plenty can be gained from just letting the interviewee talk and maybe looking at some of their code they have done previously while they talk about it. Whiteboard coding should not apply as it is completely out of element for many coders.

The type of person they are can't really be detected correctly until they are in the team and delivering because everyone is selling themselves on an interview.
Nice, unsupported low blow to a competitor. Keep looking maybe you'll "find" some with your credit card info and home address.
Not necessarily (and actually that would be a terrible answer. The highest rent in Monopoly with a hotel is $2000, and I would hardly call that a "fortune".

The point of the question is to establish how well you gather additional information when the initial description is unsatisfactory. Anyone who's been an engineer knows you have to do this every single day.

(Not that it's a good interview question.)
Thanks for the feedback! We are now trying out USD with the .95 price point instead to see if there is any difference in conversion rates.
This looks like an interesting concept. How does it compare with LDAP/Active Directory/Google Apps integration?
It might be the case that people are just tinkering with this service for fun, but the "yay, unexpected socks" use case seems like a solved problem with Amazon Subscribe and Save lists (http://www.amazon.com/Subscribe/b/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&...). To each their own, but I just don't see myself reinventing the wheel with this API (not to mention paying an additional 5%) to buy socks/paper towels, when Amazon has already done that leg work for me.

I do, however, agree with meritt's sentiment above...zinc.io could be used to create some valuable services for existing businesses (rewards programs, et al), but as a user of this API, I think it'd be much more cost effective as a fixed per-order fee structure.
We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?
An uncrackable adobe copy protection is what the Gimp (d*mn that name) really needs to finally get usable.
Legions of creative students will improve upon Gimp as soon as they can no longer use Adobe for free.
Professionals already pay for Adobe.
Especially since I always picked the top-hat.
Pegatron CEO says ‘cheap’ new iPhone won’t be so cheap
FBI Admits That Obeying The Constitution Just Takes Too Much Time
Thanks! Yes, I definitely agree. For the first version, I picked the ones I felt could generate the most interest. I've had people mention Google Apps, the Atlassian suite, Campfire, and many more.
I always find the string concat operator argument a little hilarious. It's just '.=', one extra character that somehow merits 1000's of word written on how much it sucks.

And being able to do $myvar(), or $$myvar(), or $$myvar[0](), etc is absolutely awesome.

Programming in general is dangerous in the hands of an amateur; I'm just happy that I have the freedom to make these mistakes.

In regards to the require/ include operation... spl_autoload, and additionally PSR-0, exists for a reason.
Show HN: an interactive map of the Paris Metro
Is een smoothie écht gezond? | Leef Nu Gezonder | Leef Nu Gezonder
It's more like a hazing, not a hiring interview.

It seems like a hazing but perhaps it's a bias on the part of the person interviewing. Meaning, the interviewer wants to work with people very much like themselves, instead of hiring the best candidate.

I think one of the best interview strategies was a recent posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779406

...or anything similar to the FizzBuzz problem.
Show HN: New Google Reader alternative: FeedReader Online starts soon
FeedReader Online is a free RSS aggregation service that will be available soon for all Google Reader users who seek a decent alternative to migrate to. Since June 24, 2013 you can switch to FeedReader Online in one click - this includes transferring your Google Reader feed subscriptions to the new platform. This service follows all the best traditions of the good old Google’s product: it won’t cost you a penny, it has every well-liked feedreading features that Google is going to take away soon and a renewed intuitive interface to make your user experience even more pleasant.
Another person who knows nothing about PHP, yet still has an opinion on it? Color me shocked.
Adobe Photoshop CC Has Already Been Pirated In Just One Day
What a tool. He just opened his mouth and removed all doubt.

Excellent programmers can write excellent code in any language.
Run a Small Team? Don’t Just Look to the Big Guys for Advice
Otherwise known as a petabyte?
He leaked (or someone else with access) some 10k personal identification numbers of people with hidden identities (cops, domestic abuse victims etc).

As far as I can remember form the investigation protocol, he hacked the company/ies when he was in Cambodia. He used one of his computers there if memory serves. He also talked on IRC about the hack when connecting from Cambodia if I recall correctly.

My memory is a bit hazy on where the logs were found, but I think it was on an encrypted partition on one of his computers, IRC logs and putty logs. Or something along those lines. The putty logs matched the connection logs from the hack.

The investigation protocol was 'leaked' on Wikileaks in the begin of the trial. It is in Swedish but the logs are, imo, pretty convincing, suggesting that he was the one/one of the people behind the hack.

This will with all likelihood get appealed to a higher instance.
> "antisocial" and "sociopathy" are roughly the same thing.

When you look them up in the DSM (the big book of psychological disorders), it will seem that way. However, you can be antisocial or possess sociopathic traits without having a disorder. In general dictionaries, ’antisocial’ is synonymous to ’unsociable’. That’s how it’s most often used and that’s how I meant it.

> Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social?

I had never heard of that word. After Duckducking it, it seems to me that no one uses it. If I were to use another word, I’d probably go for ’asocial’.
http://confluence-networks.com/:

Important Notice [20th June, 2013]

Confluence Networks is a Colocation & Network service provider having tie-ups with data centers across various geographical regions. We don't host any services ourselves. Starting few hours ago, we received reports about some sites (including linkedin.com) pointing to IPs allotted to our ranges. We are in touch with the affected parties & our customer to identify the root cause of this event.

Note that it has already been verified that this issue was caused due to a human error and there was NO security related issue caused by the same. More details will be provided shortly.
My dear,

Have you noticed how those who move, move fast? And those who don’t, just stand still; motionless?

Yes, you can go ahead and rant to me about how an object in motion stays in motion, and how an object at rest stays at rest. But, I think there’s more to this than physics.

I think those in motion have seen something the others have not; their imprisonment.

While those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Truly yours,
Rosa Luxemburg
It's basically like SAT prep. With a little prep work a person can greatly raise their chances at getting a great score. Google's hiring practices are well known so a little prep can get vanilla engineers over the hump.

Then again, are there vanilla engineers who would prep in this manner? Just the simple fact that someone preps at all puts them above the 'can't complete fizzbuzz person' ~100% of the time.
PHP is simultaneously the worst and best language I've ever used. I think of it as the c++ of the web. It excels in leaps and bounds at doing the one thing I need to do (getting my idea prototyped in real time as I think about it) so much so that I can overlook the warts that really bother me (like not being able to use [] notation after a function that returns an array?!) The numerous other problems with operators and true/false don't really bother me so much because most languages fall down in one way or another. And people are completely mistaken about the @ operator. I wish more languages had a simple way to bypass errors and just do what I want them to do (or not). The Go language seems to be on the right track about this and I imagine someday we'll think of the @ approach as running a function without examining its error code, in an environment free of exceptions.

I can sympathize with his sentiment though. I hate objective-c more than any other language I've ever used (except visual basic), partly because it's so popular. I see so many problems with objc that I'm flabbergasted people can get so emotionally attached to it, to the point of becoming defensive if I criticize it.

Perhaps some of the vitriol is due to these languages pretending to be something they're not - low level - when really they are just glue between more powerful components. In that sense, I wish they would just be full blown liaisons and do more work for me, instead of rigidly forcing me to fall into the conventions that handcuff me in more "formal" languages. PHP is not so much a language as a preprocessor. If it only had macros.. that's the one failing that really stings, although if it did, it would quickly devolve into something unreadable like perl, so perhaps it's for the best..
NSW parliament passes controversial laws over childcare vaccinations
I'm still trying to learn more about Active Directory everyday. Companies like Okta and OneLogin offer user provisioning (what Onboarder is doing) and they integrate with Active Directory.

Onboarder is definitely not that complex yet, but I'm still learning about this space. My goal was to make it simple. Connect with OAuth or give us an API key, and we're good to go.
Write With Dedication Or Don't Write At All
Accuracy is known to be a unreliable metric to measure the quality of a test (classifier). One paradox is that tests of higher accuracy might have less predictive power than the one with lower accuracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_paradox
Show HN: Real-time Twitter sentiments, visualized.
Since when is being required to know a piece of software "subservience to employers?" Come on.
Gov.uk is an excellent example to follow in e-government. Here in Portugal the last few years we've had great advances in it, but what we got is still laughably bad in comparison to this.
Very true. So much of the day to day job is everything except solving the very hard algorithms. But it does help to have that person around.

A separate thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911017) discusses Google giving up on some of the insanity. In the original NY Times (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin...) article, Question 3 covers doing away with brainteasers.
Well for starters, there is a huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar. If you are trying to read the page in a windows that is not maximised, then you really lose a lot of real estate.
Google Chrome + Google services + Google's Public DNS = Fail
I don't know why as I don't have time to investigate, but as soon as we changed our router's DNS servers to default to those provided by our ISP, we immediately noticed improvements over using Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Could this be a problem caused by our ISP interfering?

It was really only affecting Google Chrome when using Google services as far as we could tell. Having said that, network access in general seems faster and full Chrome use has restored... XD yay!
From the original New York Times article that Quartz has linkspammed

No, this is Linkspan:

Link spam is defined as links between pages that are present for
reasons other than merit.[9] Link spam takes advantage of
link-based ranking algorithms, which gives websites higher
rankings the more other highly ranked websites link to it.
These techniques also aim at influencing other link-based
ranking techniques such as the HITS algorithm.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkspam#Link_spam

Lets be clear, there is link-spam and then there is writing an original piece based on information from elsewhere.

The NYT article is about 8 questions and answers from a HR person at Google.

The "puzzle" aspect is 1 of those 8 questions.

From that Quartz references that, links directly to the piece and then expands upon it and links out to other relevant and related information.
This report started it all: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/digital-by-default-propos...
Ha! I could imagine all the hiring managers who have been trying to follow in the footsteps of Google by asking these questions.
Show HN: Easily convert blogs to ebooks
Goodbye Flickr, hello Trovebox
I wonder if this is also true if you are a foreigner visiting the US.

And I wonder if this also works for the Dutch police.
Massive kudos to whoever it is in a position of authority, be a politician or a senior civil servant for allowing a modern dev team to grow and cultivate a culture that works. Too many people in authority are motivated by fear of failure, blame apportioning and self-interest meaning their aversion to risk is so high, nothing happens, so nothing goes wrong.

I really hope that because this is associated with the cabinet office other teams elsewhere in govt. can draw encouragement from this team and use it as an example.

Excellent to see the source open and hosted on github. Such code is rarely made publicly despite it not being confidential.

Will the govt. sit up and notice that small focused team with a remit can deliver. Or will the next system change mean a complicated procurment process for a large consultancy who will hive the work off shore to the cheapest sub-contractor and deliver nothing but spend millions of tax payers pounds.