skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Javascript interview question/exercise
The company I work is hiring a senior web developer with "strong" javascript skills. Our team develops websites using a popular enterprise CMS. During the interview, the coding quiz was about implementing a countdown.

I'm not sure it's a good exercise to test javascript skills... what do you think? Can you suggest a good 30min exercise where you can actually understand (if that) a javascript developer's skill level?

Thanks.
Perfect (suckless) Google Reader alternative
A much needed work, and I wish them all the luck in abolishing patents and any other kind of state enforced monopolies around plants, genetic material and other similar areas.

With some success in the EU, current food industries might feel inclined to stop trying exploiting state power for their businesses model, and just focus on creating superior products that are useful for the consumer. There will never be a lack of potential buyers for superior methods of farming, as the cost of biofuel are directly linked to the easy of farming. The army would love to throw money at more effective corn/soy/sugarcane production, if it would lower their cost in using biofuel. Animal fat is also used, so basically anything a farm produce could improve the biofuel industry.
Fox News shows hostility towards Swoden
For a gold standard election you should:

1) Be able to identify the correct people and allow them to vote.

2) Give them certainty that their vote is recorded correctly.

3) Give them privacy while voting so that they cannot be coerced or bribed (postal voting fails this one too).

4) Allow volunteers to audit the process. e.g. Observe polling stations, sealed ballot boxes, numbered, signed, counts open to observers, tallies checkable, votes recountable etc.

5) Allow wide access to the vote, short queues, local polling stations, physical access etc. Postal voting helps this but at a cost to points 3 and 4. This is manageable when postal voting is a small proportion of the total but gets riskier if it rises.

Online voting fails to allow for most of these requirements in ways that are not just hard they are impossible to fix. You can trade some for others like the ability to confirm your vote was correctly recorded but that gives a receipt and the possibility for coercion or bribery.

Now the US voting system also fails many of these at least in some locations but giving the power to run the elections to controllers of the computers is too dangerous. There are just too many opportunities to tamper with votes that way with almost no risk of detection.

I had not looked into the Estonian experience until now but this is one perspective on it:
https://www.verifiedvoting.org/report-on-the-estonian-intern...

The verifiedvoting.org website also has lots of other information about internet voting and voting machines generally. I did not look at it before compiling my list above.
Yeah, I know. But.... Im not sure its even that simple. But to have this conversation, in this direction, it all begins to get a bit foil hat and black helicopter. I appreciate your point though, I wont contradict it.
How could they deny landing when the plane encountered problems over Austria and turned back to land. Seriously, look at a map...
Just a quick background - that is the EU legislation that made the "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" in Germany appear on the political agenda. The comment shortly stating "not in Germany" however is partly right. The Data Retention Directive applies to Germany, too.

To explain this further, one needs to know how EU legislation works. As it is a supranational state conglomerate, a lot of its legislation is not immediately binding. This is how "EU Directives" differ from "EU Regulations". The latter are directly applicable, binding law. But the Directives need to be realized by EU member states doing legislation of their own. They have some degree of freedom for doing so.

Arguably, Germany didn't have the freedom to not push forward with its own realization of that Directive. However, it is disputed that the Data Retention Directive is actually conforming to EU law - and that was not checked in court yet to its full extent. So the matter is highly political in its nature. The EU Commission, which watches over the implementation of the Directives, is currently in a legal battle over sanctions regarding the non-implementation.

Germany is not alone here, however. Other EU member states postponed an implementation, too.
Yes, we indeed missed explaining why A/B simultaneously is how it should be done v/s A after B. Thanks for the inputs.
Yes I agree that it feels that the animation is not powerful enough.
Politician: Call Snowden to Germany as witness
Thanks for that link, I was able to download the 1.5MB .ps format of the manual using it. I was unable to download the 420k .pdf format, it crapped out after 128k.
The UK media is owned by people who have a vested interest in keeping the UK on the European fringes. The US-UK relationship will remain 'special'. Only a large amount of negative public opinion could change that and the UK media controls public opinion. QED...

Freedom to protest and demonstrate has been steadily eroded in the UK. The police have long term spies within pressure groups such as Occupy, green issues and animal well-fare.

Remember that an estimated 1 million UK citizens marched in the Stop the War anti-war protest [1]. Worldwide on Feb 15th 2003, millions more.

These protests had no effect.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti-war_prot...
This is pretty amazing – seems to just work. Probably quite dependant on the webcam though.

Remember to move your hand above/below the screen before swiping else you'll swipe back and forwards all the time!
Please note that this is not that the EU supports suspending data sharing agreements, this is simply that the parliament will support it if the EC supports, which it probably won't.
One mans verbosity is another's great literary detail.

The same is true for programming languages, the fact some languages make you two say 2 lines, to achieve what another language does with one, can itself be a benefit or not. It might force the developer to make the same mistake twice, otherwise resulting in a compiler error. Or it might allow extra space for a mistake to creep in.

It is the perspective of the users and the context that determine if something is right or not. This project has apparently 14,000 classes, with about 3,500,000 lines of code. It is verbose, but it is also very manageable. A smaller more 'intelligent' less static language would make working with this a lot harder.
It's also important to note that this shift in wording predates the whole Snowden/NSA story. It is conveniently interpret in its light, now that the NSA in political discourse. Also note that Germany is facing federal elections in just a few months...
State Dept. Bureau Spent $630k On Facebook 'Likes'
> I think scrolling is better in the way that it does not aquire audio

That's a good point. There is a general expectation that playing a video also means playing audio, and some environments – like offices – aren't great for that.

> ...user can control the speed of information. ... Video has no way for that.

I frequently skim through video by dragging the head in the progress bar, or skip three or four minutes ahead in longer videos. With scrollmation, the default scroll speed is normally much slower than the equivalent video speed of 30fps, it results in jerky movement, and the speed of the video is directly proportional to how hard I am prepared to work to make it go faster. Good UX designers don't make users do shit work.
Thanks for the explanation, I had thought it was enforced throughout the EU.
I'm not sure it could covertly replace Gmail as you describe without being granted super user rights.
"Can you suggest a good 30min exercise where you can actually understand (if that) a javascript developer's skill level?"

Read their CV, follow their links, study their code.

Stop trying to replace good recruitment processes with gimics.
> some kids find them too irresistible to let go of. It undermines real education in the end.

Teaching is not my cup of tea but isn't an important life lesson teaching kids how to smell bullshit? If they can do that, surely they will know what books to pick and what to learn.
Yeah, overshare can work both ways. All your friends are either having a fantastic time, or their life is ruined. Both can be a bit depressing to watch.
I suggest Switzerland. It's not part of the EU (therefor not subject to EU laws), it's politically neutral (it never goes to war), it's one of the best examples of healthy democratic systems and it values privacy very much.
Russia is more like 11%, not 0.01 ;)

scnr
Perhaps you should do a split test.

I've seen great results from the signup forms that http://wistia.com allows you to embed anywhere in a video. I'm not affiliated, but am impressed with the product; check out their "Call to action" and "Turnstile email capture" features in the embed builder on this page: http://wistia.com/product/superembeds
It seems to be "organized" by a radio station. This radio station is organizing a Comic Sans day and KLM joined the Comic Sans day. In addition to using Comnic Sans KLM is also giving away tickets to Paris and back to the NL for people whose name is C. Sans. Neat idea...

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&h...
Wow, this is pretty awesome. If I look at mine, you can clearly see links between certain groups of friends / family.
Fellow cyclist here. I can confirm what you said. In my experience as well, cycling has proven to be an activity that would bring me more happiness and well-being than any other. I sometimes suffer from mild depression, and when I go on a cycling trip (150-200km), through forests, on mountain paths, my mood changes significantly for the better. The effect can last more than a week.

Obviously, your sleeping habits and appetite improve significantly as well.

I used to portray cycling as a extraordinary (even magical) activity, the bike as a magical device to my mates, but I realise now that indeed, there's nothing unusual about it. It's more of a placebo effect. I would say that spending time in nature, away from the destructive urban environment, has the biggest calming effects.
+1. I think it is definitely valuable to allow the user to control the speed of information.
You should be aware of this when considering Sweden for hosting: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/New_Swedish_law_draft_for_centrali...
I fully agree. While I can see that the original intention with patents are good, the current implementation is beyond salvaging.

Mostly this comes from the patent system being made from 19th century administrative standards. Its basically the oldest type of administrative process that hasn't been fundamentally updated in the last 200 years, and it shows.

*See more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5563289
Who is the "you" that you are referring to? I don't use CryptoCat at all. I merely pointed out that the usage stories are presented on the home page without needing a click, but the warnings are hidden behind a click and don't even refer to the crypto.

Not sure what the relevance of your final paragraph is.
I'd usually agree with the scrolling mechanism comment, but this time it's very well done. The initial page clearly explains that you can scroll down for more content, or click play, or click a button to get to the next page. The story and graphics are fun and keeps me interested.
I can suggest Hetzner. Their plans are the best in terms of performance/price ratio.
UKIP got over 25% of the vote in the last local elections -
Calling them "nasty UKIP bunch" just shows how far out of touch with popular opinion you are.

What we should do, is get out of Europe, and stop pretending there is a "special relationship" with the US. The reality is we're the US's lapdog who does exactly what they tell us to.

FWIW I would absolutely love the EU to wade into this. It will just convince more and more people that we should leave the EU.

Your last line is tosh. The UK has history.
Seconded, I've used their dedicated server options for a while, great value for money.
They took their sweet time i was beginning to think their all a bunch of pussies.
I'm all in favor of this even if it puts European citizens in a slightly difficult situation with some potential jobs on the line.
Europe needs to have boundaries and spying on its citizens should be unacceptable.
I am (by some definition) a politician. (approved parliamentary candidate, political blogger, what have you. never actually won, mind.)

I am happy for anyone who seeks power over others as absolute as political power (and military power, since they can also commit war crimes which are international crimes) to be subject to the death penalty if they misuse that power. Including me.

I am not gambling the life of my "loved ones" on such a system, nor am I defending the death penalty in 99.99% of the cases where it is used today (I am just as appalled as you at the way it, and the prison system in general, are used to subjugate ethnic minorities in America.)

EDIT: some more clarifications.

I hugely respect alan_cx's position, which was mine for many years.

I also want to point out that I don't want to change UK law - I want to augment the powers of the ICC (international criminal court) to allow it to punish crimes by death, where the current maximum is life imprisonment. I actually thought they already used the death penalty, but I've just checked and I was wrong.
Show HN: Simple productivity and motivation log book for teams
Oktawave (http://www.oktawave.com/) - based in Poland, very fast hardware.
e24cloud (http://www.e24cloud.com/) - from Poland too, second availability zone soon.
30 days of Medium
http://www.brightbox.co.uk

I asked them about their policies regarding plans to expand to the US or hold any US interests, and also specifically asked about a mention in their policy documents on defamatory content (as I deal with user generated content) and received this good response:

we're based in the UK, both co-founders are UK residents and we have no plans to
become a US company. All our datacentres are in the UK, and expansion plans are
for the EU only.

We believe strongly in data protection and obey all the relevant laws. I agree
that ISPs really *should* be considered "mere conduits" but unfortunately there
is legal precedent that means we can be held responsible for defamatory content
if we're notified and do nothing about it.

Usually, solicitors for the allegedly defamed contacts both us and our customer.
If our customer is unresponsive or uncooperative and the alleged defamation
continues, then we get held responsible.

So our AUP considers defamation abuse to enable us to take action to protect
ourselves if we have to. The only other option available to us would be to have
customers indemnify us against any legal action (most likely in the form of
a large deposit :).

But we're not interested in suspending accounts or servers any time a
solicitor writes to us. If you deal with the reports in a timely fashion (usually
within 48 hours) then you shouldn't expect any problems.

And for what it's worth, we've never actually had to suspend anyone for this
(though we've come close enough to feel the need to put it in our AUP).

I also plan to utilise Jump Networks:
http://www.jump.net.uk/ which is about as close to http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html as you're going to find in London. Remember... if you're going CoLo it's all about power consumption.

Finally, other sites I checked out included http://www.cloudsigma.com/ and http://www.prometeus.net/sito/
The Answer is a Click Away
Things I Found in my Childhood Notebook
I want to be right, but I may be deluding myself. Hopefully the need to choose will not arise, and I won't have to be wrong.
Isn't this a major difference between core.async and go?

If you perform a blocking operation (Thread/sleep there, but could be, for example, a socket read?) will you run the risk of exhausting the thread pool?

The go runtime handles this by detecting how many threads are in blocking syscalls and spawning more as needed (which I guess could be undesirable).

If I've understood correctly, this is perhaps best summarised as "go makes your sync code run well in goroutines, with core.async you can block everything with sync syscalls in your go block"?

Or perhaps just "go will adjust the size of your thread pool dynamically, core.async requires it to be big enough"
Additionally, 'not implemented in Germany' is not entirely correct. It was implemented by the Great Coalition a couple of years ago, then declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court shortly after. So all upcoming formulations of data retention will have to comply with those constitutional requirements.
One big difference, though, is that this does not happen in secret. Everybody knows about it, and the member states can decide to implement it. Thus the voter could even (in theory) vote for a party that pleads to not implement said directive.

Though I think, again, the biggest difference is that it did not happen in secrecy but in a open and more democratic manner.
Bytemark are superb. I've been using them for a decade also. Their new Cloud offering is bloody good, fairly cheap, and remarkably fast for a cloud service.

Plus, they've got their Symbiosis Linux distro, which makes setting up servers considerably easier (although you can also use Debian, Ubuntu, etc), they actively work to support the Open Source community, and generally they kick ass.
Hopefully this will make it easy for the US to stop paying for defense of the EU and spend that money at home.
In the RSA cryptosystem there are three really important numbers N (which is the product of two large primes N=pq), e (the public exponent) and d (the private exponent). The public key in an RSA scheme is <N,e> and the private key is <N,d>. The only bit of the private key that's private is d.

A large part of the security of RSA relies on you not being able to figure out d from N and e. Now the key element of RSA is that

de = 1 mod (p-1)(q-1)

So what happens if e = 1? You get

d = 1 mod (p-1)(q-1)

So you know the value of d. So you know the private key. So you can decrypt everything.

But you don't actually need to do that because what is RSA encryption? It's computing the following (c is the cipher text you'll transmit, m is the message being sent which is to be encrypted with the public key <N,e>)

c = m^e (mod N)

If e = 1 then that's

c = m (mod N)

but, oh wait, m is always < N so m (mod N) is just m, i.e.

c = m

i.e. the encryption does nothing.

Looking on the bright side an exponent of 1 does make RSA quite fast :-)

PS Test code for those interested showing the same N with exponents 1 and 65537 and effect of encryption: https://gist.github.com/jgrahamc/5933984
I recommend Coursera's Crypto 1 course - it walks you through the internals of a lot of the crypto stuff, hammers "Don't do it yourself!" into you and there are programming challenges that involve breaking crypto constructions, finding hash collisions etc etc.

I'm really hoping crypto 2 actually starts in about 10 days as it seems to have been put back a lot.

--edit-- Just to sell it further, it also goes into padding oracles, timing attacks and a variety of clever stuff to show you just how easy it is to screw up :)
Ford drives in the right direction with big data
> in my country (UK)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/16/facebook-riot-calls...
Serverlove (http://www.serverlove.com/) are based in the UK, and offer a comprehensive API, plus CLI tool.
Cool, thanks for the explanations!
50 Reasons Your Website Deserves to Be Penalized By Google
Agree. Debunking this sort of thing would be a fabulous way of describing all manner of genetic principles, particularly the structure of chromosomes, recombination hotspots and haplotypes.
Form a new country? Speaking as amateur cartographer, I support all independence movements, because it will give cartographers new borders to draw on maps and thus a reason for people to buy new maps.

Declare the East Coast US States independent and be done with it; I am tired of waiting.
This is good, but not always available, and can't always be judged.

For example, I write javascript and have used it in a bunch of project, but none of those projects have been successful so over time, they've been taken offline.

Over the last few months, I've been working for a national brand on their mobile apps. Written in HTML and Javascript served by Phonegap. Only available through the app stores, so you can't look at the code.

I write my resume/cover letter and put all my references into a website, customised for each job I'm applying for and host it on github pages. It's ok, but doesn't necessarily show my best work as I'm not building an actual tool that gets something accomplished. I'm just putting words on a page and using Backbone or Angular for presentation and navigation.
I think the point that was being made is that when you make the rules you have to assume that there will occasionally be mistakes in the application of those rules and sometimes the whole purpose and intent will be corrupted given enough power and opportunity.

Given that, even if you support the death penalty for certain crimes or kinds of individuals (crimes against civilians during war or prisoner abuses can test my own anti-death penalty stance) it can still make sense not to support the death penalty as an institution.
>> This shows crypto is much too hard.

Crypto is hard, and you shouldn't really be making these choices.

>> I shouldn't have to know about the chinese remainder theorem to use crypto properly.

Then stay out of it. Choose a library/framework that is popular, well tested and high level enough that you don't have to make these choices.
We've been using their VPSes for a couple of months and are happy with them so far, even if the management interface is a bit clunky. They also have a good selection of data centers if location/latency is important.
You are right, and it is demoralizing for any future leaker.

Something can be done about the whole mess, its not all lost, but not unless a majority is on board, and it doesnt seem to be, majority seems to be fine with it and seem to be fine with living in fear or threats of fear.

Its like, if a few officers or groups of soldiers in Whermacht or SS begin to question and disobey their orders to run the Einsatz-gruppe or concetratipn camps... some few tried, they got killed or their lives destroyed.

What we can learn from Snowden is that he is one of the few heroes among us, and that we are already too deep in the shit to do anything about it, as is obvious to the lengths the USA would go just to catch him, a sysadmin who showed a few powerpoints to a a few journalists.

Its DDR all over again.
Thx for that huge info! I only read about meteor and their informations on the webpage, i want to use it in some weeks for a smaller project, but now i will look closer at meteor before i use it.
I couldn't get a gesture recognised with my MacBook Air. (Maybe the lighting is a little bad with a window behind me.)
I dunno, maybe the factories would have relocated had the route not been there. Minmax finds a way.

However, the general point about creativity remains, and I find myself relying every day on free software projects which would not have been engaged in by an economically rational individual.
Is a countdown in any way related to your business?

I don't think a countdown is a bad way to start, but it is probably a bit basic.

I'd get them to do something that shows a level of understanding of OOP. Maybe just expand on the countdown.

Can they build a clock which would countdown, then countup either at the click of a button or if it reached a certain digit?
Can they reset the clock, pause it?? Those sorts of things.

I think any programmer worth their weight should be able to do that in 30 minutes. In fact, I'm going to give it a try right now and see how long it takes.