skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 4. contains no null bytes, so it can fit in any normal C string

This is false; the encoding of codepoint 0 is 0x00 per the standard; modified utf-8[1] makes 0 a special case with an over-long encoding: 0xC0 0x80.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Modified_UTF-8
Exceeded parking meter by 2 minutes? Instant fine.

^ This one is already a reality, there are digital meters in place in many cities that do just this.
That is a very old fashioned way to describing 'tribal' groups. One of the things that the internet has brought about is the aggregation of 'tribal' groups that cut across the old boundaries.

This is, IMO, one of the things that governments are having real problems dealing with.
Dumb questions. Good sys admin interview questions shouldn't ask about specifics like "what is the command that does x" or anything that can be easily looked up in a manual. Rather they should quiz depth of knowledge of the Linux (if that's what its for) ecosystem.

I had some good questions posed to me during a Google DevOps interview, though I have trouble remembering what specifically they were about, I do remember that they were of a much more "holistic" and general bent. Instead of asking me to provide irrelevant details (i.e what are the switches for ls that list time oldest to newest) that are easily forgotten, they would pose a problem that seemed to have an easy and obvious solution and then make the problem more and more esoteric and difficult to solve.

These were the sysadmin trouble shooting problems and I found them quite interesting because they directly related to my experience and opinion that sysadmin trouble shooting is unfortunately sometimes quite complex and involves less an understanding of command syntax and more of a problem solving mindset.

Another point to take away is that if the interview is about linux, it should test fundamental linux things linux things such as testing the candidate's understanding of linux process management and signals. Perhaps filesystems as well.

My take away point is not that I think the FB interview was overly easy, but rather that it asks useless questions. This interview isn't looking for the sysadmin mindset at all.
You give inspiration, but what are your sources? Are you a personal witness?
Hypotheticals are all fantasy. Calling mine that is a non-criticism.

Also, there are some exemplars that make my view slightly less fantastic than you might say. Chinese governance is better than plenty of places that have universal suffrage, for example.

> Instead what we have to rely on is the principal that given adequate individual freedoms society is mostly self-correcting.

This principle has not been proved to my satisfaction.
He was wrong. There's nothing about it.

Are you really going to sit their and say that he couldn't have been wrong? That he's perfect? That he can't have made a mistake.

The first test in that blog post was a bad test to start with. It's as simple as that. I'm sorry, but appealing to authority isn't going to work here.

He was wrong.
Plenty of people do, for example, anyone who chooses to work at a SaaS or proprietary packaged software company. They may not question it with their words, but they do with their actions.
> You write a tiny bit of test, then a tiny bit of implementation to satisfy the test. If you notice something you'd missed previously, you refactor BOTH tests and implementation.

Bingo! Exactly that. Right on the money, especially the part about refactoring both tests and implementation.
Wait, are you seriously saying that programmers should create artificial scarcities and not share their work in order to ensure the value of their profession?

You seem to think the profession is parasitic rather than creating value
> Read the literature. Kent Beck, the author of the idea and the book describing it, very clearly argues for test first.

No, you are misunderstanding the parent. He meant some people assume you write _all_ tests first. If you read his entire comment, you'll see how he describes exactly the process described by Kent Beck. A small test, a small implementation, followed by refactoring both test and implementation (the 3rd part being the part commonly forgotten).
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As a long time pinboard user, I devoutly hope not. It's a great service for antisocial people like me, and I'd be disappointed were it to develop that "social" layer of oily mucus.
UTF-8 is variable width using 8, 16, 24, or 32 bits per code point.

I wondered why you didn't write that "UTF-8 is variable width using 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, or 48 bits per code point", because that's how Prosser/Thompson/Pike's UTF-8 idea was proposed, as shown in the "most elegant hack" article.

And here's the answer from Wikipedia: In November 2003 UTF-8 was restricted by RFC 3629 to end at U+10FFFF, in order to match the constraints of the UTF-16 character encoding. This removed all 5- and 6-byte sequences, and about half of the 4-byte sequences.

Even though they eliminated the 5th and 6th bytes, UTF-8 can still represent all of Unicode's 1,114,112 code points.

I'm mentioning this because others probably are wondering the same thing.
This is what the parent said:

> You write a tiny bit of test, then a tiny bit of implementation to satisfy the test. If you notice something you'd missed previously, you refactor BOTH tests and implementation.

That's TDD.

He was alluding to the fact that people might assume that they have to write all the tests first.
"All bugs are shallow given enough eyeballs". This can apply to intentional security exploits as well. Of course, a small free project may not have enough eyeballs, but at least in a bigger one that does generate some trust.
Wow it sure does. Only slightly more plausible than "one weird trick".
also, it's slow as shit when you drill down to a subselection of 'faces'
I think you are looking at it wrongly. Most would look at this and say "How wonderful it is that we can use these things to do X."

Honestly, no one put a gun to your head to use Matlab. No one prevented anyone from creating libre free Matlab.

For some reason I think someone was incentivized with something, not sure what it was, to create such a useful system for doing numerical analysis.

You say you've spent your "professional" life doing these migrations ... Do you regret the money you've made? =)

I mean working with proprietary formats has issues but I don't think it is always intentional vendor lockin.

As far as the integrating payment systems and github etc etc ... It makes wonder if you're under the impression that there are no integration issues with free software systems??
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LA schools give kids iPads; kids hack them
I don't understand much of it, but it looks interesting nonetheless.
"By all means, therefore, make mistakes. Break things." He should follow that.
Isn't it weird to refer to Github or any other company providing a service as "not open source" or "not free" in a libre software sense?

What is the alternative for you all? Charity? I'm being serious.
Anybody else wants to ignore 4 other comments already about the "linkbait title" and add his?
Unlikely, all social network websites have been full of fake profiles since day 1, and their overseers have grown brilliantly adept at distinguishing the real humans behind them.
OK,

Try baked Italian dishes. Clearly there's a limit to the thing's flexibility. Not all Chinese dishes was conventional wok cooking for example.

Also, most humans aren't reliable but generally, you "rent" them rather than buying them - your cook get truly unreliable, you can find another cook. You would almost certainly have to buy a specialize Chinese food (or Wok-cooking) machine and so you'd be providing not just "health insurance" but "health care" for it if it broke down.
Yes. It is the start of the next gen DevOps.
> Not 14 different things.
> 14 different approaches

So... if you are trying to take 14 different approaches... TDD isn't there to solve it for you. That's what I said.

But then that's planning. And when you've found your approach, you write it with TDD.
Is this article by any chance related to the pomo generator?[1]

[1] http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Anyone who talks about TDD as "two parts" doesn't know TDD.

Wouldn't worry about it.
Virtually every aspect of a gamepad is patented and fiercely protected.

The Achilles' Heel of the Xbox 360 gamepad is the wobbly directional disc. Nintendo uses a sensible cross, Sony's is in segments. Microsoft had to find an alternative which didn't involve paying a fee to a competitor for each unit sold.
I have some knowledge of the startup that angled for the $75M exit.

Transparency is why the engineers stuck around as long as they did. Options for the engineers were 0.05%, but the CEO managed to get them doubled to 0.10%, a tenth of a percent.

The engineers stayed in the hope that an aqui-hire would keep the team together. No one thought that an exit had any monetary value to anyone except the VCs and the founders.
I was very confused on this question as well. Seeing both kernel and filesystem there together with the word consistent made me think of a sort of general health. So my answer would have been `iostat`. That would show me the running kernel, cpu utilization, and disk utilization.
I think I get it. So, you are talking to a potential hookup at the bar and a small drone drops off a bottle of anti-biotics. Awkward! But thanks for the not so subtle warning!

Will the non-existent middle class get an ambient income to go with this ambient reality?

For anyone poor who hates seeing unexpected charges on their bank statements, this future sounds like hell. Or what about those people who see a future where they don't want to accumulate a bunch of junk?

Would retailers take advantage of this? Would I arrive home after the first day of opting into this system to an apartment filled with stupid gadgets that I didn't know I needed? Maybe my blood pressure sensor would realize that somebody screwed up and send a drone to take all that crap back. ;)

On the other hand. I'm hungry. I'll be expecting my cheeseburger to arrive any minute now.
I've worked as a handful of [very] startups in roles ranging from developer to CTO/Cofounder. My main reason for leaving has generally been a total lack of transparency. If times are tough the team needs to know and understand that; it will ultimately help motivate them. If there's a chance pay could be late people should be warned well in advance. Honesty and the value of a persons word are very important is small/tight knit environments.
> This interview isn't looking for the sysadmin mindset at all.

This is just the qualifying interview.
I tap faster than I swipe, although I use SwiftKey, so it makes tapping much much easier.

I do swipe on occasion, though. Depends if I am using two or one thumb.
It's rude? By what logic?
But it is important to mention these things. It's needed as a counter weight to the message that was spread not long ago by people like Gruber, "there is no tablet market, only the ipad market"
The illustrations are great. And, I learned a new word:

preternaturally - in a supernatural manner
If you go to https://starthq.com/ext we redirect you to the right store based on your user agent, or https://starthq.com failing a match, where you can sign up and start using the launcher without the extension.

We actually made sure StartHQ works pretty well on the iPad - you can add it to the homescreen etc.
Yeah, I'd be interested. I'm in New Zealand though so timing would be a bit off.
I hope that these questions were from the author's memory and not worded exactly as typed. Because the questions used for first round filtering of interview candidates should be clear cut and not open to interpretation.

Namely, question 14 is odd,

What Signal does a child send to a parent when it is finished.

The child doesn't send signals in this event, the kernel sends signals to the parent when the child's state changes, and one of those states is the child exiting. Although, the default action of SIGCHLD is ignore, and can a signal that is ignored be considered to be sent at all?
Where is the news?
> and all the effort you will do is configure and glue stuff together

I've been assigned to my first Java project at work, and during training they would show how much you could do without 'coding'. I guess editing XML files and inserting program code in the strings of said XML files isn't technically 'coding', where I guess 'coding' means writing scary Java code with, you know, type checking and relvant error messages and stuff. Why I need to be able to redefine the class name of our 'beans' internal to the working of our system using a user editable configuration file is beyond me.

/rant
I am constantly amazed by and grateful for free software. I write with vi, code in python, work with data in MySQL and Postgres, grapple with text with sed and awk and a host of utilities. I teach courses on MySQL, I think the Windows / closed approach has unnecessarily deadened the average user's ability to appreciate and explore and use their computers. Open source, as idea and software, is great.

But.

"When you use proprietary programs or SaaSS, first of all you do wrong to yourself, because it gives some entity unjust power over you. . . . It also wrongs others if you make a promise not to share."

Yeah, why? Because RMS says so? There is NO possibility of a closed source usage that is "just"? Is there anything like an argument for this, outside of some Marxist-derivative account of the inevitability of economic structures? That closed source might be bad is possible -- that it is so bad that no reasonable person of good will can possibly hold some other opinion really isn't.

Freedom is the right to make decisions, and some times bad decisions. Claiming authority to judge the bad, and thus invalid, decisions, really lays the foundations for some serious power moves. Maybe RMS thinks corporations and free contract and market forces are some kind of sham, and maybe he's right, but it isn't as if there isn't another point of view. Why do I have to sign up with a core ideology to be supportive of open source? Actually, why do I have to sign up with an ideology that sounds positively hostile to a lot of what I think and believe?

The technical arguments for open source are tremendous. The ethical arguments for it aren't bad. But setting the whole debate in terms agreement with one man's morality is a non-starter for me.

Now I can use and support open software without signing up for the whole ideology. And I do. But the two are so associated that I often feel my own integrity requires using some bandwidth expressing disagreement with large chunks of the "open source philosophy". That's a poor use of time, and it diffuses the best arguments. Insisting on open source as some moral imperative is poor philosphy, and poor rhetoric.
That's an exciting model when it works.

But it's worth warning founders that choosing where to draw the line between free and paid is the life-or-death tricky part, and it's not always obvious.

I wrote a fairly popular article about this: http://wensing.tumblr.com/post/25167979206/the-anatomy-of-pr...
Sure, and I can eat Ramen noodles instead prime rib but I don't see how that's relevant. Github provides a service: hosting, a "community," etc.

This isn't the same kind tyranny as presumably binary distributed software. Right? That should be obvious, unless I am losing my mind.
The author of the above comment do not understand software licenses, and the whole commented is constructed around that confusion.

> You're not allowed to ... or remove the license agreement

No license agreement allows you as a recipient to ignore the license. At best, you can redistribute a "all right reserved" copyrighted work, while you yourself follows the license. At no point can you actually remove a license and then use it in a way that require authorized permission under copyright law.

You would also have a hard time finding such copyright license. Both BSD and MIT requires that the license are kept in all copies. Removing the license there would be as illegal as it would be to remove the GPL.

Simply put: if you get sued for copyright violation, its the license that the accused must raise in defense. Removing it is guarantied to be illegal except in rare situations such as wtfpl.
I don't understand what you think GNU has to apologize for.

GNU is limited by the amount of resources that people into them. In these days of NSA spying and such, the usefulness to society of GNU's having enough resource is becoming clear. But the people most to blame for GNU not having those are ... everyone who haven't contributed (which I'll admit includes me). Those to blame for GNU not having resources probably wouldn't include GNU itself.
It's libre vs gratis.

Libre is free as in speech. Free to adjust and modify.
Gratis is free as in beer. Free to consume.
Most Chinese takeaways are not well equipped for baked Italian dishes either. As for who owns it, I don't see why you wouldn't lease something like this in the same way that you can currently lease things like posh coffee machines when running a cafe so that if it breaks down it gets replaced by the leasing company.
TIL that 'operating system' has more than one definition
But you are free to modify and distribute.

You just aren't free change the terms under which you distribute.

> "freedom for end users but not free to modify and distribute"

That would be: "freedom for end users, freedom to modify and distribute - but not freedom to change terms under which (re)distribution happens".

Which I think is pretty much what they are already saying?
Unfortunately many variable length integer encodings aren't well thought out. The integer encoding used in Protocol Buffers for instance allows for multiple valid encodings of any particular integer (there's no one true canonical form)... which can make the format difficult for use with things like hashing and digital signatures
I don't think they had any shot at building a high end Android phone. They just didn't have the culture and I don't think they had the time to get it. Look at the Playbook, it was a business / culture decision that made it suck.

They probably should have realized their service had value and if they could have undercut the iPhone price, go after the texters, and hit the pay as you go market ; they could have bought themselves the time to think about what a Blackberry should be as opposed to a iPhone killer.
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Would you care to cite a case where someone bought a logo on 99designs and was then sued for thousands of dollars in damages when that logo turned out to have been stolen? I couldn't find one. You'd think, if that had ever once actually happened, it would be easy to find.

I wish you and your wife the best. Believe it or not, I have very similar experiences working with startups! They reach out to us all the time for security work, and I'm always happy to talk to them; I like hearing about what they're doing. Most new startups are nowhere near ready to pay the going rate for software security assessments. When they get on the phone with me, I don't explain to them how they need to forget about buying that next server or renting their first office so they can make room in their budget for an assessment. I give them advice and point them to options for getting some kind of baseline coverage in advance of driving serious revenue through their system, at which point maybe it would make sense for an assessment.

My experience with all sorts of professional services practices mirrors this. Lawyers, for instance, will often do consults for free as a form of speculative work in anticipation of a client eventually being big enough to do real business with.

So... as a (perhaps inadvertent) spokesperson for your profession, why don't you tell us what someone like Colin should do in this situation? Hope he runs into a designer who will take his $500 and throw him a bone for the fun of it, as a change of pace from corporate work?
Yeah, it doesn't have a whole lot to do with postmodernism. On the other hand, it is a useful and practical guide to refactoring imperative code to declarative form, with all the associated benefits.
"Freedom is the right to make decisions, and some times bad decisions. Claiming authority to judge the bad, and thus invalid, decisions, really lays the foundations for some serious power moves."

Uh, having the technical means to make unilateral decisions for someone else (often secretly) is what lays the basis for "serious power moves" as we've seen with the NSA. "Judging someone" is also known as "expressing your opinion". Stallman expressing his opinion hardly gives him the serious power that, say, NSA arrogates to itself by installing backdoors in people's computer, using secret laws to seize private keys from service providers and so-forth.
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This seems like a strawman. You aren't disagreeing with the specific points, you're saying that because you don't agree with everything in the essay that you're ... somehow offended by it. And I understand that, because I lived for years in that same "RMS is a unrealistic pinko commie idealist whose ideas don't work in the real world" camp. The thing is, he was right. He was right about pretty much everything.

So sure: you don't like his tone, and I understand that. But I don't think you're completely clear on his points.
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Forgot to mention, I was a UAV Pilot of the Shadow 200 TUAV in the US Army and logged about 480 combat flying hours. Here is a pic of me in a Shadow Ground Control Station in 2002ish. As a result, I know a good bit more than most about UAVs, which most people refer to as simply "drones".

On Wikipedia, I'm Enigmasoldier.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_control_station
.... i absolutely read this as "US states" .... now i feel really dumb
An oft repeated phrase, but I need only point to the Debian OpenSSL keygen debacle -- and how long it went uncaught -- to note just how easily extremely serious bugs in code known to be extremely security critical can go uncaught despite the "number of eyeballs".

Bigger projects lead to bigger attack surfaces -- I'd trust the small free project more than I would the bigger one. Less code to review, fewer contributors one must simultaneously trust (I'd model project trust as each contributor being a potential single point of failure) and -- all other things being equal -- the same number of eyeballs per LOC.

I'd qualify neither Firefox nor Chrome as small projects.
This is discussed frequently.

The BSD license grants you the freedom to restrict the freedoms of others.

The GPL license restricts your freedom to restrict the freedoms of others.

> It's not right to call GPL software free, it should rather be "no cost and slightly restricted use".

Is there anything that meets this definition of free? The BSD license doesn't grant this; software under it can have unlimited cost and no source code available.