skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That happens because of the "old shoe or glass bottle?" question.[1] When newbies (or even oldbies) ask how to do something, often the real question could be solved much better by taking a completely different tack. This has also been called the "XY problem".[2]

The best answers would ideally answer the question as asked (or explain why it can't be done) and also show a still more excellent way.

[1]: http://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/archive/2005/05/25/...

[2]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy...
Why in hell is anyone so pissed with GitHub?
You misunderstood the part about println. The implementation of println() uses synchronized internally. You can't see it without downloading the Java source code, but it's there.
Despite how much computer people love Eric Raymond's "how to ask questions" thing[1], it really isn't the best way to get your question answered. It's the way that people who get asked questions wish the universe would work.

One thing I've found is that, beyond a pretty low floor, more details often means less answers. If you, forex, post your C code and ask why it doesn't work on IRIX, people will say "it must be something weird about IRIX, I don't care about that" and ignore you. If you post it without mentioning the OS, you can get some good answers.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Combine the two:

const tail = [, ...xs] => xs;
Chronology of [some]Events Post Independence in India
Google Releases Android Patches After Bitcoin Theft
I'm not saying you can't get value out of it. If your website is very simple, or not very valuable, then use whatever gets it done nicely.

However, if you are doing anything serious or valuable or even moderately complex, locking into a single vendor like this is a bad decision. You can go along fine, but sooner or later you will need to do something that is just not possible inside of the proprietary system. At that point, you are either going to have to jump ship and reimplement features (introducing regressions and wasting development time), or try to convince the vendor to make changes to enable you, or give up. You are handing over a lot of power to someone and in exchange paying them a lot of money. I'm not saying it's never a good decision, I'm saying if there were something my company depended on to function, I would think very hard before I chose a solution that permanently locked me into a single vendor.
I've found that oddly enough, reddit has a kind of honesty that facebook doesn't, which you wouldn't think, since the former is full of people you don't know, and the latter full of people you do.
Ultimate Guide to Funnel Optimization (video)
WebKit: Fourth Tier LLVM JIT
I didn't know "just" was a verb. Is that when we do something but only barely competently?
What you're describing is not progressive enhancement. It's a mental exercise in re-implementing a website with workflows designed for heavy JavaScript usage without using JavaScripts. Which is silly.

For example, if you ever tried PE for real you would know that there is no point in implementing collapsible comments in pure HTML. That's exactly the kind of functionality you "enhance" via JavaScript. Of course, like most modern developers you've never really tried the practice, so you don't have any experience with such things.
For immutable collections, guava is helpful.
Short video tutorial - using JavaScript to access Google Cloud Storage
Yes, but you can still write to the port registers directly. Using the Arduino libraries doesn't lock you out of anything. There's a smooth, continuous path from high-level C++ abstractions built on the Arduino primitives down to the bit-twiddling low-level C world.

If you're walled off in a Javascript VM, you can never have that kind of transparent access to the hardware - which seems like a big problem when you are building electronics, and controlling the hardware is the entire point of the job.
Taiwan bought Google ads to silence anti-nuclear activists
Rosetta Stone employs hundreds of Coaches that teach several different languages to learners around the world. I am an English Coach. A few days ago a fellow Coach, Andrea Crew, was allegedly killed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/slain-mother-wante...

The Coaches and the company have been very supportive for her two young daughters so far. Really great to see.
RethinkDB 1.8: date support, querying nested objects, 8x disk usage improvements
> From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant

This is absolutely true. It's a socialist entity acting within a broader capitalist economy. That's how it starts.

By the way, with your focus on markets, you might enjoy Kevin Carson and mutualism.

> And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition

Ehhh, the USSR went from a backwards farm country to being the first country to putting someone in space in the span of 80 years. Don't forget that imperialism played a huge factor, and has in other cases as well.

> with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property

There isn't really a need for anyone to 'figure out' what's personal vs. private property. It's not as if you must stand before a worker's council to defend your right to keep your toothbrush. It's simply that without an organization (the police) upholding private property law, absentee ownership is impossible.
Students in AP English in the US get to analyze rhetoric like this. I remember this as one of my favorite passages.
Designer and ex-founder weighing in. One thing I felt was that we had conflicting advice and incentives.

On one hand, incubator advisors, investors, and startup writers would say:

(1) "You should read pg's essays. You have to spend more time finding a market fit. Study your users. Make that your priority."

Frequently, from the same crowd, we'd also something along the lines of:

(2) "Make decisions faster. Ship it. Execution."

My design training was well-suited to (1), and completely undermined in (2). The problem was that we heard (2) a lot more because the main people we were talking to were investors and incubator staff, and their overriding priority was having a functional product with paying customers.

Of course design processes can move faster and balance planning with execution at a startup pace. But that doesn't happen much. The more common scenario is for a designer to be shown a working prototype and then make it prettier / more usable. And maybe that's the most reliable way for startups to get off the ground? I have no idea.
Surprise and Joy
Compare this with Google's "API infrastructure outage incident report" from earlier this year [1], you'll notice many headings, like a Summary, Timeline, Root Cause, Resolution and recovery, Corrective and Preventative Measures, which have detailed times and numbers.

Maybe we (the IT community) need a framework for incident reports or postmortems, or just use Google's as a model?

[1] http://googledevelopers.blogspot.ca/2013/05/google-api-infra...
Just as impressive is the new material’s strength. Liu and co calculate that it takes around 10 nanoNewtons to break a single strand of carbyne. “This force translates into a specific strength of 6.0–7.5×10^7 N∙m/kg, again significantly outperforming every known material including graphene (4.7–5.5×10^7 N∙m/ kg), carbon nanotubes (4.3–5.0×10^7 N∙m/ kg), and diamond (2.5–6.5×10”7 N∙m/kg4),” they say.
> You're making a number of baseless assumptions about the quality of my job... We work very closely with designers.

Unless you disagree with my earlier premise that the skills see some atrophy if not used, then you most certainly do not have an environment that fosters designer/developer skills. If you have specialized roles, and you are handing the majority of the design work over to a dedicated designer, then you are left with a developer seeing an emphasis on developing code. I do not have to make any assumptions, that is just basic mathematics.

Jumping into Photoshop every once in a while to help out does not lead to a "senior level designer" as you already attested to yourself. You have to have intense focus on both almost every day if you want to see senior level quality on both sides. It can be done, but the jobs are quite rare, so few people ever have the opportunity to reach that level. It goes without saying that finding such people then becomes a challenge, but not because of it being some fundamental truth.

Programming itself requires design skills, so we know all (good) programmers have what it takes to be good designers by default, they just need an environment to frequently practice those skills in contexts other than the text editor.
The inefficiency, she is fierce.
I'm guessing you were using Firebase before our security and validation rules were released. We now have a very powerful method for controlling data access and validation that can secure your data.

There's a screencast on our website that explains how this works here:
https://www.firebase.com/docs/security-quickstart.html
It's a hard call. The problem is that while in some cases it seems completely ridiculous, in others it really could lead to customer confusion, and that's bad for both the original company and the consumer.

"Just do it", for example, is extremely recognizable as Nike, whose brand is associated (deservedly or not) with high quality. If you put "Just do it" on a shoe ad, people will assume (reasonably) that it's made by Nike. Without trademark protection, it would be easy for another business to exploit Nike's reputation to pass off shoddy goods.
Honestly, you're armchair psychology-ing from your Cabal of Elite Designers, Lords of Silicon Valley, which is the WORST part of HN - apart from the subconscious need to upvote walls of text they haven't read, because well, whatever, it's long it must be smarter!)

Your argument has absolutely no weight, and it offended me. "Yeah, the thing about designers is that they're failed artists and they're so neurotic. Always worried about what people think so they can't be good founders. That's for people like ME."

Pffft. Whatever. Thanks for ruining my morning again HN.
I appreciate the notion of having the whole team prepared for the interview process. I think this is a best practice. But, when I interview, I am looking for completely different things than the author.

I really don't care about what you did at your last company or if you raised this by 50% or that by 30%. Rather, I want three things in a candidate: smart, talented and hungry. If I get someone who is smart, talented and hungry and I drop them into a situation where there is unlimited upside, my job then becomes to guide them to greatness.

I also strongly disagree with the notion of not asking questions you do not know the answer to. Anyone can read an obscure section of the C++ language spec or a chapter on some data structure 5 minutes before an interview and make themselves feel superior to the candidate. What does this prove? Nothing. I often ask questions I don't know the answer to in order to determine whether or not the candidate can teach me something. I love having people on my team that have the ability to teach others.

The author's point is very well taken -- interviewing is an important process and it should be conducted in a way that results in the best possible outcome. But, he's looking at the situation far too rigidly for my taste.
The "Syrian Electronic Army" is just rented Iranian hackers. They also have a large propaganda chorus you'll see in newspaper article comments just like Gaddafi did to give the illusion of popular support. They also steal citizen journalist videos of atrocities in Syria and then make up fake translations for them to paint the regime in the best light possible. Since most people never fact check anything they see on youtube largely this strategy works. It's too late when the Guardian or Al Jazeera reveal the true translation weeks later damage has already been done.

Shouldn't the Washington Post and other news agencies be running honeypots to catch these guys?
It's a Lisp way of quoting (i.e. preventing from being evaluated) symbols :).
My guess turned out to be completely wrong, it's something else entirely
Building Twelve Factor Apps on Heroku
Would you like to respond to Bloomberg's argument for stop-and-frisk?
Paid more than one standard deviation higher than average for that level of competency, scarcity, and bargaining power.
Pivotal’s tc Server Gains Common Criteria Certification
Title: "Researchers develop acoustic based data transfer system for phones"

When I first saw the title, I thought it was an Onion parody -- acoustic modems are hardly a technological breakthrough.

"Technology employs 'self-jamming' for security and could be an alternative to NFC. No word on whether it sounds like the squeal of a 56k modem."

Also not a new feature -- my acoustic modems were perfectly self-jamming, most of the time.

All kidding aside, as described the project could piggyback a secure, low-data-rate connection on top of a cellular voice connection.
Does this mean exposing the DB server directly to the browser e.g. lan or even internet? This does not sound like a good idea! I must have missed something...
> I remember grepping the source for pthread_mutex or pthread_cond and slowly realizing that whoever wrote the code didn't even see the need for locks. To be fair, I later heard it was some poor hardware guy who knew some C who got roped into writing the software as an afterthought to show off the awesome hardware, a common problem with hardware companies.

"Oh, you wrote a quick demo for the sales people? Well, now it's a product sold for some ten thousand!"
It's Free to watch any of the first 3 episodes. They are always free
Eh, sometimes you fire the guy.

There are two philosophies of justice: retributive and utilitarian. Retributive justice is about punishing the guilty. If you destroy a $12 million machine, you deserve to have $12 million taken away from you. Most people don't have $12 million, so the retributive boss will take away as much as he can: fire you and file suit if he can and badmouth you to other companies so you never work again.

Utilitarian justice is about preventing future harm. It's not about punishing the guy who pushed the button on destroying $12 million of hardware, it's about preventing future hardware losses. You fire the guy if you think he's likely to destroy more hardware in the future, because maybe he was negligent and careless or even malicious. You keep the guy if he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and any other competent employee would have made the same call and inflicted the same loss.

So while the "$12 million in training" line is a great ice-breaker for making the poor guy feel better, if someone broke a $1 million machine, then a $2 million machine (after all, he has $1 million of training now), then a $3 million machine, then a $6 million machine, would you say, "Great, he's got $12 million of training! Let's put him in charge of our $12 million machine!"?
A Startup for Michigan's Manufacturing Industry
Recently, security researchers say the group has also started to engage in more sophisticated attacks,
including using Trojans and and targeting Voice over IP (VOIP) services. Those attacks and this week’s Socialflow and Outbrain compromises suggest the SEA may just be getting started.

Fear mongering at its finest. These people aren't doing anything that isn't already being done by others.

I'm expecting a lot more "cyber warfare" and terrorism-related fear mongering in the following months.
We already saw an increase in politicians complaining about Chinese cyber attacks, but the leaks put an end to that. Let's see who they'll focus on next.
Don't let the quality of this (admittedly poor) article turn you off from the Economist as a whole. They tend to produce a wide variety of well-researched, insightful articles. They tend to have an opinion on nearly every article, but these are usually defended by data.
[Firebase Founder] Hi Justin, we're pretty excited about leaving beta and think it's fairly significant. Building robust infrastructure isn't an easy task and this change is meant to signal that we're ready for primetime. I hope that comes across!

If you're worried about lock-in, I'd first try Firebase along with our AngularJS[1] or Backbone[2] bindings. You don't have to change the way you write your app and can switch Firebase our for another backend easily. We recognize that we're only going to win a developer's trust by building a reliable service with the best tools and fair pricing -- so this is what we're going to do

I'd love to dispel any concerns, please feel free to email me anytime (james at firebase)

[1] https://github.com/firebase/angularFire

[2] https://github.com/firebase/backfire
PHP has this available as list[1] in a slightly more limited form.

1. http://php.net/list
The article is from 2008, so it applies to Python 2. I don't know enough about threading to say whether the same code will work in Python 3.
Bars or clubs.
The point still stands. Just because you studied it at university does not make you an engineer in the field or necessarily any good at it. We don't need parrots, we need thinkers and sometimes that means drawing on experience from different fields.

I know plenty of software engineers that never went to university, and one of the best dev's a know studied Russian. Undoubtedly mathematics is the underpinning for programming, if someone held that degree would they be any less of an engineer, esp given a lot of work relies heavily on algorithms?
I wonder if Apple will approve this, as it seems to allow the iPhone to do something that Apple doesn't want it to do?

If Apple wanted apps to talk to each other in the (IMO very sensible) way that Android does, wouldn't they have done so?
I think there should be something in science called the 'reindeer effect.' I don't know what it would be, but I think it'd be good to hear someone say, 'Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.'
- Jack Handey
Introducing PagerDuty Webhooks: Better Alerting Through Extensibility
Ah, thanks. I don't do much Java.

So "println() uses synchronized internally" means two println statements will never overlap each other, but still says nothing about their interaction with other objects, right? Does nothing to prevent switching threads in the middle of the println and getting two different values?
Personal Homepage: Flatiron School Job Fair Edition
I think that's 3 commandments ;-).
Ask HN: What quote most inspires you?
I'm looking to compile some amazing quotes... please share one :)

and please vote up! Thanks!
I think the problem is that Stripe is not a very well known brand yet (outside devs). So I can see your point where it's a global brand like PayPal or a well known bank/payment gateway in a country. But I'm not sure if you're nervous about putting your card details in that going to something called "Stripe" makes it seem much more trustworthy?
Kotaku is link bait shitposting. Don't click for the sake of a clean internets.
Thank you,
the entire internet.
We've been working with apple since WWDC, they know what we're doing and are fine with it.
My wife has a merchant account. It's not that the published "fees" are high -- I think she pays something like 20p / transaction. It's the crazy confusing other charges she has to put up with, like monthly fees which seem to me to be random, bogus insurance changes, hire of the terminal etc etc. It ends up costing a lot, and it's highly opaque.

If stripe has a transparent charging structure, that would be a massive plus to me.
Okay. I mean, I agree. But sustainable does need to be defined. I think the common definition is that sustainable means that it will work for the next hundred years, at which point conditions will have changed sufficiently that decisions made now will be poor.

But yes, point taken that work to decrease population in a humane way is very important and underrated by technology driven people.
Oh Lisp
Why would you think people you know would be brutally honest with you about how bad your posts are? That's exactly what internet anonymity allows. Since I don't have to see you face-to-face, I feel extremely comfortable with making fun of your irrelevant HN post.
Kiip Welcomes American Express Ventures
Just curious, what are your minor quibbles?
Hasn't this already been done with Java applets? Would the difference here be that instead of running Java, you could run almost any language?
Well to be fair I was in negative territory when I posted that
Another great update. Keep it going!
It's hard to browse the content. I didn't understand the categories. Nonetheless it's a cool idea, check out this site dedicated to Colombian bands: http://www.radiolem.com/

Update: I visited at ones with my monitor on portrait mode, I didn't see the thumbnails on the side. Now navigation makes more sense.
> I think Amazon's interview process is fatally flawed.

The topic of interviewing comes up often here, and this sentiment is overwhelmingly the top sentiment for every single company's interview process. Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., have all been pilloried here about the interview process.

I suspect the real problem is the implication that this is even a solvable problem.
Congrats! Firebase is awesome.
Ask HN: What would you do - content creation?
Recommendations from friends carry a lot of weight in product buying decisions. We picked up on this and created a prototype for our idea and released it to friends, family and select set of users.

Everyone loves the idea and declares that they would definitely use it. However, to this date we have been unsuccessful at getting people to write reviews to be shared with their friends.

Do you have any suggestions on how to tackle the problem?

You can check out the site at http://alpha.kritk.com
No, I do that myself. This is like writing a plugin to integrate WinSCP with Azure. Who the fuck cares except Microsoft?
Yes. Now if only the standard Java collections were immutable...
I uploaded a new version with the fixed PDF. Just click the download link in your receipt email and you should be good to go.
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?
There seems to be a lot of criticism of the suggestions here, but I think they are good ones. It seems to pretty much boil down to:

(1) Spend a lot of time discussing accomplishments at their current / previous employers. If you drill down on particular projects they should be able to explain, in great detail, exactly what their contribution was and how they worked with the rest of the team to get that done.

(2) Pick a technical question that has a lot of depth so that you avoid false positives because people have just looked up the answer on the internet. I would also add that in my view the best questions have no tricks and require no "aha!" moments. It should be something the candidate can be reasoned through step by step so you can see their thought process. When they come up with an initial solution, then you can dive deeper by expanding the problem or adding additional constraints.