skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting link, and much more informative than the other Lavabit news articles.

It's a shame the government didn't work with Levison to either allow Levison to add the requested intercept himself (which, yes, would have required Uncle Sam to trust him) or to allow a third-party (or even a third party requested from both sides) to audit the proposed interception code.

The judge is correct in stating that if Levison doesn't trust the government, then why should the government trust Levison, but Levison is clearly correct when he notes that giving up his SSL private keys would destroy the security of his whole infrastructure.

The government would have been far better off by allowing a service like Lavabit to exist with the cooperation of an activist citizen than to force him to either harm all of his customers or shutdown the service. Somehow I don't think the D.A. here realized how serious many civil libertarians are.

Props on Levison for trying to stick it out in the U.S. and make things better from within!
Am I missing something here? The title says 1 hour hire but the problem listed says 7.5 (rails test: 0.5, backend: 3, frontend: 4). That seems anything but efficient and somewhat strange.

Why not provide the potential candidate with some actual work that you need done?
Peter Magnusson from the App Engine team recently wrote about the lock-in argument: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/25/google-app-engine-lock-in-...
I came here to say the same thing about Michigan where I lived before moving to California. When I moved to California I was under the impression that it was a very environmentally focused state and that they surely would have as good of a system as Michigan but I was quite surprised when it turned out not to be true.

> almost every major grocery store has machines that process can returns - completely self service, at almost every grocery store. The grocery stores use it to get customers in the store

I was under the impression that any store that sold a returnable was actually required to accept them. Stores that didn't have automated machines counted them manually and gave you a cash refund.

When I first moved from California from Michigan I dutifully saved my cans and eventually asked someone how to turn them in since I hadn't seen any bottle returns in the store. When I found how you actually redeemed the deposit I was quite upset. Not only is it hard to find a recycling center but they are often not even open. It is a good example of the implementation of the same thing having vastly different outcomes in unexpected ways.

As a side note, Michigan is quite interesting in general when it comes to taking care of the environment. In many respects the people care a great deal about keeping the endless lakes and streams clean and keeping nature healthy. Unfortunately there are still a lot of remote areas where it is very difficult to do the best things. I once lived in an area that had no garbage service and the nearest garbage and recycling center was over an hour away. Most people in that situation end up burning their garbage. And, of course, air pollution in general is nearly ignored due to the love affair with large, old automobiles.
This is the warp core idling.

I'm trying to add a slow warp to it, and after some experiment I got something. That's the first time I've used sox to generate audio, didn't even know it could. I'll play with it some more.

play -c2 -n synth whitenoise band -n 100 24 band -n 300 100 gain +20 phaser 0.5 0.3 2 0.8 0.5 -t
How Japanese Pupils Learn to Multiply. A must share
A friend of mine has an MVC library where each component fits in a tweet: https://github.com/jeremeamia/tweetmvc-core/blob/master/twee...
China Has More Internet Monitors Than Soldiers
Wow, what a douchebaggy post. I had good impression of Instacart as a product, but clearly Instacart as a company doesn't deserve that level of respect. They've completely failed to assess their potential hires on what actually matters.
This one looks like they at least asked about sitting specifically, which is better than most ("watching television" is a standard survey question, so often it is just assumed that "watching television" == sitting and look for correlations from there). There are a few limited studies that do direct experimental manipulation of sitting without breaks vs. sitting occasionally interrupted and suggest that further study might be useful. I would be surprised (but maybe not too suprised) if there weren't more detailed longer term studies in progress involving hardware monitoring devices and other clever setups that could make more detailed correlations that could be useful.

So far, studies are just saying "here is some evidence that activity level does not have an extremely simplistic correlation with health." Puting it like that, it doesn't seem that surprising (or useful).
Aussie start-up brings 'try before you buy' to apps
Please work on supporting Ruby now.
On the other hand, do you want anybody who is interested to be able to dress up like a hobo and sift through your trash with impunity any time they feel like? Of course the actual hobos aren't interested in your old credit cards and such, but allowing that behavior is not without risks.
Construction & Building Fails (40 Photos)
This is shortsighted. Why not just give them money? We already spend money on waste management to collect the stuff.

But no, we can't, then it'd be a handout. And we, even community-minded people like Eric Dunn, can't stomach the thought of just giving people money. So we make them do pointless make-work, like collecting bottles.

The middle class people you illogically rage against are the ones funding the poor indirectly (and convolutedly) through their waste. Why not cut out the misery and give them the money directly? IMO it's less respectful, more demeaning, to insist a street person dig through trash to collect a bunch of cans before we give them their daily bread.
Yeah, I would definitely appreciate a free edition to try out. It would have to be pretty impressive to switch me away from emacs (and vim), and I'd have to try it first to know.
7.5 hours of candidate time, one hour of the hiring engineer time.
You are going to hate me for this, but: I guess you switch to PayPal ;P. The DoCapture API has a field CompleteType that can be set to NotComplete (as opposed to Complete) that lets you implement partial capture functionality.
Travel writer Rick Steves has an interesting article on the history of Roman Jews http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/italy/jewish_leg...
So, then, 100 billion dollars would not be considered a lot of money either.

Although, to put things in perspective, the FBI budget it 8 billion per year.
Looks like the data is only up-to-date as of July 2012 (judging from the zip compression times).
Raspberry Pi Microcomputer Racks Up 1.75M Global Sales
The challenges are all real projects that we've already built (and thus have a baseline for).

We don't agree with brainteaser interviews. Having someone build a made up project would be just as bad as a brainteaser. We wouldn't do that to a candidate.
Google gives away 1000 Chromebooks
AWS is an IaaS ??
$10K for a custom, liquid-cooled PC? The hot rods of 4K gaming
So they expect me to put in 7.5 hours of my time but they only want to spend an hour of their time. Got it. Sounds like a great company to work for...
It clearly says they can do anything they want, but must give you 90 days of warning.
Collecting bottles is hardly pointless. Recycling is a positive, both for "recycle" and "clean up bottle trash" and clearly some people are not motivated enough by the current CRV taxes. You could think of it as specialization.
You are a 40 year old mother of three children that has just been divorced and has been out of the labor market for 15 years. You have only a high school diploma and no marketable job skills. To make matters worse, you don't live near any major population centers, and without savings you can't afford to move. What do you do? It's important to recognize the extremely difficult situations people get stuck in when every disadvantage is compounding. There's only so much a stiff upper lip can do. The competition for regular employment at this level is fierce, and compensation is just enough to keep you from improving your situation. You can reasonably argue that this person has made a lifetime of poor decisions, but suggesting that people should simply "not settle for it" is not a solution.
How Will Google Hummingbird Impact Links? Here Are 6 Ways
Can't upvote this enough.

Last I checked, one were restricted to Paypal, if using a Brazilian checking account.
So basically they are keeping "my" money to:

a) use it in case of emegencies

b) make more money (interest)

Maybe a good business idea but still shady practice.
Google's AdWords does the same.
OPD is also very expensive compared to other police departments: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/throwing-more-money-at...
Fully agreed. We look at code cleanliness as part of the review. And, the algorithmic questions are not problems that you'd normally find online. They are custom problem that we've had to solve at Instacart
That doesn't mean much. When google deprecates something, it might as well already be shut off. http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/feedburner-experiencing-sta...
This. As a company, you miss out on the best candidates by implementing an interview process that serves your needs almost exclusively (at the expense of the candidate's desires).

Why didn't the engineers sit around the room and say, "Why do only 1 of 100 candidates that we interview meet our bar? Are we sourcing the right people?" or "Why does it take us 8 hours of someones engineering time to figure out if we want them to meet the team?".

Asking the best candidates–the ones you really want to hire–to do a full day of work just to be able to meet the team is insanity.

Full disclosure: Founder of Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com) — we're solving exactly these sorts of problems (for both companies and candidates) by turning a truly great recruiting interaction into a web service. Invites are sent out regularly.
So you believe in 8 hours * 99 applications (792 hours total - 4 months of work) of wasted time (not even your time) per hire?
On Heroes and Mentors in the Web Industry
"fixing everybody else's code that comes across your desk because they didn't do it the way you would"

that's the real world of design and collaborative environments. Branding, code quality, standards they all start with setting a direction that makes sense in order to improve efficiency across multiple disciplines and experience levels.

Hackey fixes have always been available. Instead of using h3 tags you can use b tags and scale them up to a particular font size.

Even when something works, you have collaboration and reputation to operate by. Case in point: Somebody actually had to create an animation to explain what the hell is going on with this hack to people who already know html and css, whereas with a unicode character or SVG you wouldn't have to have meta instructions. You could say good code or technique often requires no explanation.

that's what I'm trying to get it.
One day for a several year investment seems pretty logical to us.
Agreed. Maybe their next step can be a 1-800 number style menu system for doing the initial phone screenings :)
You've just added information that will alter the probability. The prior can still be 0.00006% and the addition of new evidence (in the bayesian sense) of being admitted into YC could result in a posterior probability of 0.5%. (Sorta like using Series A as a filter.)
Young People Are Not as Digitally Native as You Think
Traditional view (promoted by Ashkenazi themselves and almost considered a hard fact) on their origin says that Ashkenazi appeared as a nation somewhere in 3th..5th centuries A.D. in what is now west Germany, around what is now Rhine-Main. Their original language (Yiddish) is so much like German that it seems to confirm this view.

Jews are not so much about ethnicity than about religion. Jews are the nation of Torah, not blood. So don't spend too much time looking for their ethnic roots, this isn't very important to themselves in the first place.
I totally agree. Chris and his team do an amazing job. What you didn't mention is the assistance they give to our open source projects (like Go, AngularJS, Dart, Chrome and many more) and how they have assist teams in releasing parts of Google's source as open source.
Yeah, and in those 90 days if things break, they may not work as hard to get it back online, as they would have if there wasn't a deprecation.
I love my Nest thermostat but don't feel the need to buy this product. Speaking for myself, my smoke detector and I already have a great relationship. It stays out of the way and blares its siren when it thinks my house is in danger. Those of us in newer homes often have hardwired detectors that rarely require battery replacement. And I don't want or need yet another app that simply tells me that my house isn't on fire.

I think the disappointing part about this product is that I feel like on a priority list of classic household items that Nest would be wise to reinvent, the home smoke detector isn't high on my list. One thing I'd love for them to create and sell to me is a build-your-own home alarm system that uses my home internet connection as a means to connect to a monitoring center and provides a good mobile app experience. I've been shopping for an alarm for a while and all of the current products out there are terrible and archaic compared to what a company like Nest could provide.
12 hour shifts are too long for people making life and death decisions.
Uggghhh....why can't Amazon make something simple.

I want to know basic things like how would I - as a developer - get my money when people pay me.

Why is that so hard to find?
I thought Google Reader was too big to be shut down too. It had a small % of all users but a large % of power users.
These "one-liners" are cryptic because they are complex, it's a what can you do in the smallest form possible. It doesn't require code readability. Obviously you wouldn't use a 120 character dependency injector. That's just silly. But you can make one in 120 characters.
Is this sarcasm? I see no shortage of non-mainstream pop bands achieving more than their fair amount of success.

edit: a quick example off hand, The Arcade Fire
They'll never make it illegal to be poor without a major overhaul of our financial system. The economy absolutely relies on people taking on more debt than they can handle, look what happened the last time that issue was addressed. Yes, I'm equating poor with "unmanageable debt burden".
Paul Graham's book 'On Lisp' is free here
I assumed there was, but I googled it and there isn't. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=panta+f...
That statement is pretty much antithesis to everything anyone has ever said about hiring amazing engineers...What's ironic is, a Rails interview test is actually best for people who are willing to learn Rails and demonstrate that they can solve your problem with your tools. It's not really great (and potentially offensive) for people who will most likely be able to pass those tests in their sleep.
Considering the extreme relative rarity of false negatives, this question isn't as rhetorical as you think.
That just sounds like fearmongering. I can't see any way that helping to fund someone's court case can be considering a crime, even if he were completely in the wrong.

I strongly suspect that there are favourable legal precedents, even.
and brainfuck
Well this is annoying.
I understand why you got that impression.

We've automated the technical skills part of it. Hiring at Instacart isn't a completely automated, no personal interaction, process.

In between the candidate applying and the technical challenges is usually a phone call where we talk to the candidate to make sure we're on the same page. We find out what their goals are and if we can help. We explain how we work, and see if they'll like it. We explain the hiring process. We answer questions they have about us.

If we're both happy at the end of the call then we move them into the automated process.
From that same thread, the issue isn't with Ember, it's with V8. Ember itself is looking for a workaround to the issue.

http://meta.discourse.org/t/why-is-discourse-so-slow-on-andr...
How PGP or S/MIME would help you if any provider could be required to turn over all the traffic it gets, unencrypted? The only way you could securely communicate is peer-to-peer with the trusted party, but the email doesn't work this way. Unless you always send mail directly to your target's SMTP server which is hosted by the recipient himself (which kind of defies the whole idea of having email as a service and turns it into just a peer-to-peer chat with funny headers), the adversary would have access at least to the envelope information.

>>> Then it was not meant to deal with the evil hacker who takes control of the server and grabs valuable information.

Indeed, it is not. If the hacker gets full control of your mailserver, at least your envelope information is completely compromised.

>>> The security of the system depends not on technology, math, or physical laws, but on the whims of just one man

This is completely false. Security depended on adversary not having full access to the Lavabit servers, not on Ladar's "whim". As soon as Ladar realized there's no possibility of legally providing it in the US, he closed the service. Assuming your adversary doesn't have full access to your service is kind of a precondition of using the service as means of security. That's like using lock is assuming the adversary does not have the key, if he does, the lock is useless as a security measure. As soon as Lavabit became essentially useless for the purpose it was created, it was shut down.
If there are limited choices for resources and YC gets to choose the best options, then how much is actually attributed to being in YC vs. those startups having received mentorship? Out of the companies that will become or are billion dollar companies, how many already had their direction/focus and business model decided before joining YC? Correlation != causation, right?
Study finds majority of Americans play browser-based games
Someone else posted this elsewhere, but it's also relevant here. Statistics from the National Fire Protection Association support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors over nuisance alarms:

Smoke alarm failures usually result from missing, disconnected, or dead batteries. When smoke alarms should have operated but did not do so, it was usually because batteries are missing, disconnected or dead. People are most likely to remove or disconnect batteries because of nuisance activations. Sometimes the chirping to warn of a low battery is interpreted as a nuisance alarm.

http://www.nfpa.org/research/statistical-reports/fire-protec...
That's present in Nightly (FF27). Not sure when it was introduced though.
Tech Is NYC's Second Largest Job Sector
Steam Box, Oculus Rift will define next-gen, says Bleszinski
Far and away the most stunning thing I saw when I visited London as a tourist in 1979 was the wall around The City of London. This is the ancient wall that at one point protected the city from attack. Why was it stunning? Because we walk up to the wall and look down a deep ditch of about twenty(?) feet to view the top of the wall. From the go go American point of view where things are transient and everything is new, to realize I was standing on the results of two thousand plus(?) years of human habitation, which had slowly raised the level of the earth all around that much, gave me a visceral sense of my connection with human history.
Employment is a two-way street, especially for someone in-demand as a Rails engineer.
"A rejected candidate should know unambiguously why they didn’t get the job."

I'd have to say that's my favorite thing about this process. All too often applicants go away with no idea about what exactly why they weren't a good fit. If someone gets rejected, the least you can do for them is to tell them how, so they can improve themselves.
The mere fact Snowden was talking to someone in Guardian would be quite damning even if the contents of the messages were not known. The problem in catching the leak is knowing who's talking, not what they're saying - finding out what is the easy part, who is the hard one. Access to envelope info solves the who part, and full access to mail server gives full access to envelope.
There's no shared risk here, it's all on the candidate. Bad form.

Only something along the commitment of the 0.5-1hr "weed out" question can/should be done remotely.

If you're going to require people to do ~7 hrs of tests, that had better be at the office, pairing, with other folks (and at least give them a free breakfast/lunch/dinner!). 7 hrs while working a 40hr (or more!) week is a pretty hefty commitment, and I see no reason why that should be solely the burden of the candidate.

You should be able to trust one or two short, simple weed-out conversations (I tend to do one 30 minute "deal-breaker" discussion on non-tech stuff {make sure their and our deal-breakers are met}, then one about 1hr tech screen {fizzbuzz-sorts of things, but more diagnostic}).

After that, you should have a general sense of whether or not they are a) smart and b) can get stuff done. From there, you need to take a risk and bring them in. What is proposed is not fair to the candidate.
As a recovering hardcore Joke Engine user, I suggest not getting too tied up on TOS minutia as arguments against App Engine when there are plenty technical reasons to avoid it like the plague, e.g.:

- Behavioural changes as a result of unannounced internal release process. Go to bed, wake in morning to app serving 500s (happened twice)

- Design flaw that ran so deep they had to redesign the datastore, insisting on people start migrating before they even had migration tools ready. Prior to that, at least one outage event required running the Google equivalent of fsck and leaving "/lost+found" folders in everyone's datastore (WTF?!?!? Not even once, dude!)

- Latency that varies according to the phase of the moon, and you're billed for it anyway.

- Continually changing architectural story around apps. Last year: Memcache is cheap, free, and shared! This year: Dedicated memcache, only $66/gb/month! 2 years ago: elasticly spun up processes! Last year: dedicated hardware thread, only $100/thread/month!

- Let's not forget the wild pricing changes depending on how much the App Engine team had packed in their crackpipes the night before

- Service characteristics you won't see on any other platform (e.g. DB query latency). So regardless of abstraction layers, your app inevitably ends up designed for a single platform

It's a platform that succeeds only at exposing users with RAM-sized datasets to planetary scale problems, all the while charged handsomely for the privilege of the self-delusion that some edge was gained through all the suffering. Seriously fuck all that. I could turn this into an essay but why bother.
yea, but you still need $360k or so to be able to withdraw $1200/month forever without worry. That's still a decent chunk of change. I guess you can save it in 5 years, but if you don't like working those 5 years will be hellaciously long
The way you described the anti-poor contingent is bigoted and inaccurate. Please think and edit.