skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't something I would recommend using for everyone. But it does have use cases that make it appealing and useful. The same thing could be said about VerbalExpressions.

While it's true `[:alpha:]|[:lower:]` (even better `([:alpha:]|[:lower:])` or just `[:alpha:]`) would work to match "foo", "bar", "baz", etc.; it would also match "turduken" or epsilon (""). This isn't always what you want.

One nice thing about generating a regular expression in this manor, is it's arguably much easier to maintain. Instead of having a heavy pattern to refactor or, god help you, append to, you simply add another string to your list and be on your way. Plus you get the potential memory savings and performance benefits.

In the case of VerbalExpressions, the `or` method could use the same technique as frak to improve the quality of the expressions it emits. While on the subject, VerbalExpressions could also borrow some good ideas from is Christophe Grand's regex library: https://github.com/cgrand/regex.

Edit: Forgot some colons.
Javascript is the functional programming community's secret weapon! Sure ES6 will add classes, but they're just syntactic sugar. Wrappers around the truly functional language underneath. Everyone is slowly being soothed into using a lisp. And when you realise this, it's the funniest thing to watch!
Star Citizen - Bringing back the space sim
Compared to what other companies?
The Good Web
Are you afraid they are using you for market verification?
Crowdery (YC S13) Provides A/B Testing for a Brand’s Physical Products
You joke, but in military contract world that is totally fine. Everyone already got paid and bugs will certainly not stop the acquisition process in the future. It is all about who knows who and more about jumping around red tape certifications, ATOs, ATCs, rubber stamps and so on.

That is often why soldiers on the ground end up with overpriced yet crappy tools and weapons.
Incentives.

If she wants that label (which has become really popular over the past few years), she can shop around until she finds a psychologist willing to give her the diagnosis she wants. Of course she pays them for their time. (Not to mention, antisocial behavior + narcicissm = not a stretch.)

It's not like her publisher or news organizations are going to show any skepticism.
That's the fundamental problem. The function of the finance system in a healthy economy is to ensure efficient allocation of capital. Playing poker has a neutral to negative effect on the system.
How to add Google+ to your Facebook integration
Great project! :)
Native Client

1) Is Chrome only.
2) Can't spawn processes or subprocesses.
3) Can't open raw UDP or TCP sockets.
4) Requires apps be ported.
Previously submitted with discussion on front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6212326

Using the canonical URL with each submission helps avoid duplicate submissions.
6 tips from Apple on creating great app icons
Yes, I just tried it. The first screen on the downloaded installer says it will download & install Virtualbox, and run Virtualbox + Arc upon system startup.
But they are not disallowing GMO projects. You just can't give out any GMO rewards. I still think it is a stupid addition to the rules but I just wanted to make sure we understood what they are limiting.
> At least I hope it isn't, but I could be wrong.

I used to work at Facebook, and this is most definitely not the internal audit. A lot of Facebook engineers are former Googlers, and bring a lot of the culture and practices with them. You can rest assured that people are hunkering down in a conference room as we speak.

That said, Google's postmortems are a thing of awe and distributed widely within the company.
Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible. ~Doug Larson
I think that is perhaps telling. Google doesn't interview you on your experience, but whether you can can solve network/graph algorithms taken from Knuth exercises. I would expect a random mess from that. It sounds like this person actually drilled down into what the candidate actually knew.

I think it is far more useful to ask somebody about what they actually did. Are they excited and engaged by it, did they come up with novel thoughts about it, do they understand the CS literature in relation to it, and so on. Program a hash table on the whiteboard when you have been just fine using the built in one in your favorite library or language? I'm not sure what that predicts about my on job performance. If I had to do that I'd reread the literature and then whip one up, easy peasy. I can state that with confidence because I read the literature on other topics and do that every day. Have me explain the new numerical filtering technique I just implemented and I'll give you good interview. Ask me to implement a smart pointer? Not so much.
You don't happen to have a contact there do you? Can't find much online about it. So long I don't have to move other accounts that would work fine.
We see what we want to see. Look for the good, it'll change your pov almost immediately.
I understand that this is probably wrong somehow, but what about a system wherein there is sufficient capacity to take a "partitioned" datacenter out of the loop entirely and serve web traffic from your other locations, then bring it back up to speed while still offline after the disruption ends?

Again, I accept that that's probably bad, but why?
Can someone who ditched MongoDB for RethinkDB share his/her experiences?
now theres a label for the type of working i am doing..
"indie web", despite im doing something completely different, but with the same basic intentions..
Arc the language hasn't been officially updated in 4 years. All names have been used at some point - it's not realistic to expect them to be truly unique.
> If I have a VM in the browser can I run.. vim in the browser? My customized
instance and all that? Or maybe this wouldn't be too feasible for io-heavy uses?

vim, emacs, anything that runs on Linux.
They already approved AudioBus[1], something similar for music apps. In fact, the iOS version of GarageBand supports it now, which was unexpected.

[1]: http://audiob.us
Everyone publishes the awesome shit they do. Nobody publishes constantly things they suck at, things they failed at, things they won't attain.
Same expectation here. Deploying a customized VM to the browser (with networking included) will be very interesting.

I am not sure about the real use cases. For learning development will be useful since you don't need to do a more complex interaction between the browser and your server.
Ask HN: health insurance at small tech companies
I was wondering what kind of health insurance are offered at small tech companies most commonly.

I am considering to work for a small startup (10~20 employees with couple million funding from investors). Salary is not great (say $5k~$10k less than what I have right now), but health insurance is top notch (UHC with very low deductible), and it will only cost me $60 per month. Since I do have some medical conditions (and new health insurance would save me $4k~$8k a year), a company with good health insurance benefits would be great.

My question is: do small tech SaaS startups usually offer good health insurance with low cost for employees? I want to work for small tech company (10~20 employees), and I dont know what to expect health insurance wise.

Maybe people who work for small tech companies can post about their experience and what kind of health insurance benefits they get at their jobs?

Thanks
I think iOS does just that see the function SecRandomCopyBytes in http://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-55179.1... it just wraps /dev/random
Small guys can run away when they need to though. Just keep it cheap and disposable and abandon-able, like a image of your system you can spool up on plug n play commodity servers / free hosts and let the bullies spend their resources.
> No support for bidirectionality. There's no sense of "I'm done with this action, take the results and send it back" -

Doesn't startActivityForResult fit this use case?

> No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown.

I agree here, it can be annoying to pair down the list of applications which will handle an intent. If one wants specific applications one can use the package manager to check its existence and then use that.
"Perhaps today is a good day to die!" - Lieutenant Commander Worf
Watch out for that Hashpipe - Fun with Linux Magic Numbers
Could you lazyweb me in the direction of the "unless you run it through WebKit" clause?
> how much more dangerous alcohol can be than marijuana or many other drugs.

That may be true but is irrelevant. The original claim was that someone talking about the dangers of marijuana while drinking is an idiot.

My claim is that talking about one says nothing about their knowledge of the other since they are different things. I can talk about the dangers of bear attacks while driving a car. I can talk about the dangers of flying while using a ladder.

That doesn't make me a hypocrite, it just means I'm not spending every waking moment sorting my activities and discussion points by aggregate danger level.
How to pick the best MOOCs: 6 tips from a Coursera junkie
browsers are essentially virtual machines themselves, so to be highly redundant (i.e. java already does this), why have VM's in the browser, which is already interpreting code on its own. The next guy is going to come along and make a VM inside of a VM inside of a VM and lets see how slow we can make the browser when its 5 levels deep in abstraction.
By the way, I've added an "How To:" announcement just for you. Thought it might be helpful to those that don't understand the concept off the bat. So, thanks!
I was always under the impression that developers are also problem solvers, hence their ease of also coming up with an awesome enough idea to start a company.

Designers are artists. Once a designer does more than drawing and photoshop, they become a front-end developer. Using their primary craft of drawing, where is there to really go after that?

Developers have the advantage of being able to throw together a prototype of their web application and see if it's viable. Developers can also tackle the very difficult coding problems that can give a startup a competitive advantage.
Keeping it in-house: iOS design & development at 37signals
> They cobbled it together using a Raspberry Pi, a portable hard drive, and the Camlistore software built by Fitzpatrick and Slatkin.

Do tell, how could something be less black-boxy than that?
I'm going to call Poe's law on your comment - the one before was pretty clearly joking.
Very interesting. I feel like I've been seeing a major trend towards Javascript-based-everything the past few months!

I wasn't sure if I should link this here, but this article really sparked a train of thought that brought me to write this:
http://blog.mcdougle.net/?p=54
Are you saying that there is a non-arbitrary criterion to when '-beta' is removed from a product's logo?

If not, then it is arbitrary, and acting like it is a milestone is purely a PR move, an attempt to make noise and create interest without any substantive event which would justify calling renewed attention to the thing, all for personal financial gain.

In other words, it is an attempt to manipulate people for money.

I'm all for manipulating people to make money, but I hardly think you can fault me for pointing it out.
Never is a challenging word to say. Once upon a time, banners were only images.

On at least one site I frequent, the served advertising images are gifs.
That's how you get the best talent. There is no secret question you can ask to find great talent.

I've interviewed persons that did very very well during the interview process, but failed miserably on a day-to-day basis.
As the article points out, the main driver of all the big kickstarter campaigns is a reward. So in large part this decision prevents GMO work from being funded.
> [he] believes every phase of the process needs to be meticulously designed to drill deep into skill sets, ... and leadership potential

Ugh. I hate this. For a technical interview, why is leadership potential a priority? Speaking for myself, I've done the leadership thing and don't care for it. People tell me I'm good at it, but I still prefer dealing with algorithms over humans, and I actively decline offers for "promotion". (I already have my very own batch of little humans of to deal with, thank you very much.)

Unfortunately, no matter where you go, there's always the deep-seated cultural mindset that manager > worker. In terms of the corporate efficiency calculation of effectiveness/hour, I suppose that's still true. But for me, personally, that's not the equation that I care to maximize.
0. Thou Shalt minimize and reduce shared mutable data as much as possible, in the design stage.

Sometimes just making new copy and passing that around might not cause that much of a performance penalty vs the time spent debugging synchronization problems.
What do you mean by "users"? A business has to have customers, at least in the long run. Those customers may or may not be the people who actually use the products (Google/Facebook/Yahoo/etc - you're not the customer, you're the product). But whether you're making tires or milk or websites or religious experiences or whatever, you have a product, and someone is using it.
Is this the Yelp killer everyone has been waiting for?
I disagree with the hungry part (if you are referring to someone that needs the money). Being "hungry" just means that they will be stuck with a company but will not love what they do.
Our total fees for all of the admittedly less than transparent charges never amount to more than 1% each month, and they are proportional to the number of transactions not revenue so that will decrease as we grow.
Hackathon to Help the Elderly Coming to Dallas
There was a post a couple weeks ago about an nginx module atop PosgreSQL providing a REST interface[1]. This is a similar idea but for Datomic and using a REST server that comes bundled with it. Compared to the PG ngnix module, this one has proper handling of bind variables built into the REST api. With a loose CORS policy (the "-o '*') this can be used directly in a user's browser via AJAX requests.

There's obviously a lot of security issues to think about here, the primary one is that without authentication anybody that is network accessible to the server can execute anything. As such, I don't see much production use in exposing something like this though it does look like it could be fun to use.

Funny thing for me was when I first saw the headline I thought it was web browser database client for Datomic, which is what our company does[2] (though for other databases; we don't support Datomic yet). It'd be possible to build something similar atop this API and have it run entirely client side though it'd have the same security issues mentioned above (vs our setup where DB access is done authenticated and done server to server).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6109069

[2]: http://www.jackdb.com/
I think I'd rather use my tech skills to play multi-million dollar poker on Wall Street then create yet another beautiful, responsive, flexible, tweet-able, location-based, modular MVC library API component framework backbone architecture.js.
There's one thing this article misses, and one thing I totally disagree on.

Hiring for prior experience - the author emphasizes this, and based on my experience this should be de-weighted. The issue is that as soon as you start to define an area of experience, your hiring pool shrinks dramatically. Consequently you are more likely to pick a less powerful engineer. Another, bigger downside here is that companies are terrible at figuring out what they really need. Consequently you've hired someone who can do A and B but one month in you realize that the thing you were missing is really C. A less powerful engineer will have a harder time transitioning over to doing C work, and you'll be worse off. Moreover they might be upset - they came in with the expectation of doing A & B, and they're sitting here doing something unrelated instead. Can't count the number of times I've seen this happen, to both the employee's and company's detriment.

The thing that this article misses is how to avoid hiring jerks. Terrible employees can be a net negative to a company. Jerks, particularly those in senior positions, are the thermonuclear version of terrible employees. They can demotivate and destroy the productivity of entire teams and cause your best engineers to rage-quit. The best interviewing tactic I've seen to weed out these people is watching how someone behaves when you "play dumb" in an interview. See if they're happy to explain something to you, or if they get impatient with your lack of knowledge. A related trick is challenging them on something that is obviously correct - see if they carefully prove why their answer is correct, or become antagonistic. Really smart people are good, but much more effective are those that can help bring everyone else up to their level.
Not particularly. In a sense larger, established companies are always looking at startups for market verification; the startups that succeed are the ones that can out-pace the established companies.

In addition, there are market dynamics that preclude any of the larger players truly building a platform for interoperability. See for example the recent Google/Microsoft turf wars, that Mailbox only supports attachments from Dropbox, iOS native composer only works with Mail and not gmail, etc.
Google DNS is currently down
Google DNS appears to be having problems and has been going up and down for the last hour. So if you rely on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 it could be the cause of some problems for you today.
Fix Problems That Aren't Your Fault
The point is that you can load a webpage in an embedded webkit view, which constitutes running arbitrary downloaded code.
I would not use this as a replacement to test the membership of a string in a collection of strings. That's a terrible use case. I've done benchmarks comparing membership checking and regular expression testing and the former is almost always significantly faster and requires less overhead.

With regard to ranges, it's another one of the areas I have yet to look in to. The question you have to answer is: will [r-z] generate fewer states?

As far as case insensitivity, well, that's usually just an optional flag.
Since two chains of carbine coming in contact would explode, should the activation barrier be crossed, does this mean we can only use one chain at a time...i.e. no stringing together multiple chains to make something like say...the cable for a space elevator?
Google, Google Maps, Google Street View.

Those are experiences.

Free to the world, paid for by advertising.
They are also technical words with specific meanings.

Unfortunately the words "psycho" & "psychopath" are close to "psychotic", but very different forms of illness. Most people with psychotic illnesses pose little or no risk to others.

This happens a lot with psychiatric terms. Addiction and *aholic are often used for "really liking something"; schizophrenic is a really nice word for 'in two minds' and a lousy word for the illness; and many examples.
> Why not railguns? Or laser beams?

But at the price of $1T they better be thinking of the future and think about opponents who are also willing to spend around that order of magnitude on defense.
I barely even have time for the 3-6 technical interviews most companies want to do, let alone multiple days/WEEKS of "try out" period.
That sounds absolutely insane. We would charge less than that per column inch for full color, and our _circulation_ is over 15k.
This is an excellent use case.
Another scriptable text editor that's on iOS: Vim! [1] Although is quite impossible to use without a keyboard. Still, it's there!

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vim/id492668168?mt=8
> How does one try out this beta?

Documentation for Arc and arc.js will be available shortly.

> Is this going to be open source?

Arc will not be.

Perhaps Peggo once Arc has cooled.
Apparently the Perl community has been doing this for years. :)
https://unhosted.org/ is also interesting
Do you have a link? I'd be interested to read what the Node.js lead developer has to say on this, thanks
> For a technical interview, why is leadership potential a priority?

Probably because in many modern ways of organizing knowledge work, distributing leadership roles is an important part of the way organizations operate.

> Unfortunately, no matter where you go, there's always the deep-seated cultural mindset that manager > worker.

The places where that is least true are also the places where evaluating leadership potential in technical workers is the most relevant to immediate job performance.
Great point about not hiring jerks, and those are some excellent ideas about how to avoid it. Having worked with, and currently working with, that kind of jerk I've seen how destructive they can be.
Minor iOS 7 gems
> All names have been used at some point

I'm pretty sure the heat death of the universe will occur before all names are used.
Interesting that Braintree went to the whole EU at once while Stripe seems to take it country by country.

Not sure if it's related but at around that time Braintree changed the pricing to add Interchange fee that depends on the card used, service offered etc. Making the final pricing somewhat confusing but maybe more affordable as a result.

Does anyone know if Stripe account setup&approval for UK is just as straightforward as for US? With Braintree they ask for financial (turnover & EBIT) and shareholder information when applying as an EU company, no idea if it's also the case for US companies.
> There is no room in the Amazon interview process to "try out" a candidate for a week or two in a real world setting

Are you seriously proposing that any serious applicant would be willing to take a week off from their current job just to interview for a possible job at Amazon?
Interesting, I don't normally think of Facebook as being about conspicuous consumption and provider guilt. Now I worry that when I post pictures of doing awesome (often expensive) things with my kids that I'm making people feel worse about themselves.
This looks good. But I do have some doubts regarding its querying abilities. As far as I can tell, you can only define a range of data to be fetched (limit). If I want to query for a particular value, i.e. fetch all users matching name - that doesn't seem possible. Or am I missing something?
Dates and times in RethinkDB
Apart from the ethical (i.e. review boards) objections that would arise from that idea, that's actually a really good way to run a study.

When I still worked in academia, that was something I wanted to do. Amusingly enough, that research is probably easier to do as an independent researcher, especially if you don't plan on publishing in the peer-reviewed literature.
They fixed my bug - yay.
We've been developing custom software for over a decade. GitHub's pricing model counts every private repo, active or not, while others let you put repos into R/W or archive mode, or don't count repos at all and only count against your storage quota.

The difference in annual cost is significant when you have 20 active independent projects, and hundreds of archived projects, not to mention all the customers needing accounts and access.
without any data and careful analysis of that data, his opinion on how to hire is worthless.

it's somewhat disturbing that he likes to use the STAR framework, which normally leads candidates into artificial responses. is there any reason to believe that this framework leads to better results?
Im surprise that nobody has mentioned that the author here is being sarcastic. The author is clearly being facetious.

"How to apply to your own life: When in need, seek sociopathic counsel," do you really think the author means that? sociopaths are known for their deceit and predatory nature.