skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess that proposed interview is supposed to get people out of their comfort zone and test whether how quickly they can adapt and learn from a manual and simple examples and then at least be able to write simple programs.
Norfolk / Virginia Beach area here.
This is sarcasm, I'm guessing. The suggestion being RMS wasn't a crackpot at all. We were (well, most of us were) just naïve and didn't think much of his advice back then.
Sorry, was just following the original suggestion and as I'm not too familiar with the US thought their must be some reason for Austin and Ann Arbor. Austin I've seen in discussions about tech centres, Ann Arbor I know nothing about.
Using SimpleWebRTC to show and control an electron microscope
Ok, thanks for the answer. So "Western Europe excl UK" is actually "Western Europe excl UK and Southern Europe" :)
I see the present in Go. It's a language that's highly useful for solving server software problems today.

The future may not be particularly interested in Go. It doesn't open interesting new research avenues. If it becomes a proverbial "100-year language", it's going to be the legacy mess that some poor soul will hate to maintain in 2110.

I'm not going to be around in 2110 and I'm not a researcher, so I like using Go.
Aren't we forgetting about the closed-source elephant in the room - Google Play Services - the "platform behind the platform"?

>> Play Services has system-level powers, but it's updatable. It's part of the Google apps package, so it's not open source. OEMs are not allowed to modify it, making it completely under Google's control. Play Services basically acts as a shim between the normal apps and the installed Android OS. Right now Play Services handles the Google Maps API, Google Account syncing, remote wipe, push messages, the Play Games back end, and many other duties. If you ever question the power of Google Play Services, try disabling it. Nearly every Google App on your device will break. [Source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...]
Sure, it's valuable. But deeply?

If the person wrote the code in such a way that no one else could understand that it was a breath-first search, is that valuable? If they didn't even leave comments when they write code? If they didn't realise that you're using some slightly arcane feature of your language to keep a library of useful tree operations, and was expected to use the pre-existing function through macros/generics? Or was expected never to use such a technique because half the team wouldn't understand the code?

Hey, I know the theory on how to bake a large amount of cakes, breads, cookies, etc. I learned it by watching it on TV, and from cookery books. But actually it turns out that I'm a pretty crap baker, because I lack experience to know when I'm over-working/under-working dough, how to adjust cooking time with an unknown oven, etc. And I make a huge mess when I'm doing this, and take a lot longer than anyone with basically any experience of doing it at all.
Everything is he wrote is true, expect the bit about pizza. Swedish pizza is a culinary abomination and the people responsible for the kebab pizza should stand trial for crimes against humanity.

If I could improve one thing about Sweden it would definitely be the pizza.
If you have never lived outside your native culture before, then moving and immersing yourself in a different culture will be mind expanding. Even if you don't like the experience, you will learn who you are better. That knowledge will strengthen you for the rest of your life.
No its not.

Its saying "we" treated him like a nut job foil hat man, but were wrong.

Its basically an apology.
Agreed. Freelancers and small business although backbone of the economy, the are not receiving much love from the Government... It's a shame.
In Scandinavia the immigration laws are incredibly relaxed. However, you may run into issues if you have European ancestry - it will be more difficult to get in.
Snowden leaks: France summons US envoy over spying claims
Funny. Just made a hire and this story made me think of it.

The position I was filling is a part-time position for a CS major, sort of like an internship. I devote time to develop his/her skills, s/he would get real-world experience, and a little money to help with cost of living. If everything works out, a position could open up for full employment.

I had a pretty good idea what I was looking for. Someone that had good grasp on theory but had no experience coding. Preferably enrolled in Uni. I had 5 applicants but the only candidate I interviewed is enrolled in Math-CS.

I basically tried to gauge if he had deep interests and asked him to code a bit, solve a simple control (find me the article with the highest hitcount from the day a week ago, gave him 10 minutes).

He failed the coding test but I made the hire regardless. Reason why was 2 things out of the 4 hours we spent together: When I asked him who he considered the father of CS he rattled off von Neuman, Djikstra and Knuth. Yeah, you can make that argument I suppose, but he knew who the influential people were. The other thing was: even if he failed the coding test he failed it by not reading the code examples quite right, he was using my code to try to help himself solve the problem. I'm sure he'll work out.

We as a field should employ internships a lot more than we do, get the college kids and undergrads working on real-world problems a lot more than we do.
FWIW, Stockholm is a very pleasant place to live. I had a chance to live in many countries and Sweden has this very unique calm, balanced and relaxed vibe to it. It is bloody obvious compared to Moscow, but it is also evident compared to Finland for example.

Also, I know a couple of Russians who went from no Swedish to conversational level in just 3 months. It's a simple language to pick up.

All in all, just go, talk to them and have a look around. Even if you accept and end up regretting it, you still will end up with a bit of immersion living in another (comfortable and interesting) country and that never hurts ;)
I live just outside of London England (Essex for anyone that knows) and I don't think I'll be moving a while. Apart from the weather it's pretty good!
This one sentence:

"If you're building a house, you'll need solid foundations. But you don't design the foundations first and then ask, "What can I build on top of this?"

is brilliant. So simple, so obvious, but so right.
I suggest replacing Austin with "Texas". It isn't one unified community, but neither is the SF Bay Area.
I don't need concurrency, and my app (which is a fairly simple "munge some data from backends, apply some algorithms, and template it" webapp) seems easier to reason about without introducing them.
You're partially right here. But for software engineering or general tech/science, English is sufficient. You don't need Swedish. We got a couple of English speakers at my current place of employment and there are no issues here.

But yeah, regarding other types of job, without Swedish, you'll have it tough. My partner speaks fluent Mandarin and English and has a Bachelors degree with honours. Will probably have an incredible tough time finding a job in "Communications". Ugh... Shit degree but you didn't hear that from me.
Anti trust is the legislation policing monopolies, at least in the US, and it is such legislation which I consider bunk.
Yeah, but the email app on iOS is pretty polished and nowadays people expect the stock browser and the stock email app to be pretty good, especially on mobile devices. I'm not saying that Android's out of the box functionality should encompass everything, just the basic necessities, like email and web browsing. And I don't want people without an Android to get the wrong idea - Android does come with a standard email client, it's just that it's much, much less polished than the GMail app, which is a shame.
HI! Indian here :)

You can come with us lol
The AWS Activate initiative for startups appears to give self-starters (boostrappers, I think) a free lab credit, amongst other things: https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
Most people here seem to complain that their champion lost a benchmark, or that Mongodb does not follow their ideology.

I've used Mongodb for the last 18 months, never lost any data, and it made it obvious that "enough durability" is sometimes... enough.
When I switched to MongoDB from MySQL, performance rose 10+ times and I switched from "don't hit the db too much" to "give it more work, 'cause it's idle".

I know it's an ideology problem: otherwise, I can't see why people would complain about a tool they don't use.
The defence of the value of his work was that "people enjoy looking at" it. Is that compromised by covering it? No.

(Any measure of art preservation is an inconvenience to viewing it, but we generally consider this a worthwhile tradeoff)
OK, done. Thanks. 3 people in Austin are now part of Texas. Hopefully not too many Texans in "other" are missing from "Texas".
Funny, I am a fan of the kebab pizza. The place on the corner of Götgatan and Ölandsgatan was my favorite.
Anyone seeking power to "lead" people, never done it for the benefit of people.

When you outlaw "leaders" then you might get somewhere.
I live in:

[ ] SF / Bay Area

[ ] New York City

[ ] Seattle/Redmond area

[ ] Random city in Michigan

[ ] First house to the left after you run into the cow

[ ] Vegas, baby!

[ ] Somewhere on the coast

[ ] Somewhere not on the coast

[ ] Not in the US
You and me, we got beef. What the hell man, the Kebab pizza is the future.
my impression of nexus devices is that you are tied to the package of google services. is this so, or can a nexus-user break free from google's domain and enjoy the benefits of a quality low-cost device without being beholden to the google ecosystem?
Is $10k per month considered a normal salary for a developer in Russia? Where I live (not Sweden but close, also a far higher GDP per capita than Russia) you'd have to be among the best in your field to expect to be paid even half that much.
In the 70s, 80s, there are few computers and few people know what to do with computers and the Internet. It was fine. But today's hacking (or cracking) is driven primarily by the black market. So you can't just let anyone to log into your shell and do things. Back then you may be able to trace the person who logged into your account but today this is getting difficult (even for NSA this can be difficult in some situations).

Today hacking into anyone's /etc/passwd and decrypt all the password is a crime and your best friend will be more careful when handling secrets with you if you do that to him for "change your 123 to something more complicated".
This whole trend of 'Must.Fail.Harder' (the page tag) looks very nice in almost all motivational posts. It misses a very important point though. Success moves you one step forward, failure keeps you at the same step. Sure, now you know more about that particular step, but really you are not "saving cost and time". Should failure be looked as a disaster? Of course not, learn from it and move forward. But let us not act as if failing was the best thing that could happen. The best case scenario was Winning!
What's interesting is how having a mobile OS is now only one part of the offering needed to be successful, and is arguably the easiest part.

To be successful on mobile you also need a fairly extensive layer of services. Some of those (web, mail and so on) are easy to bolt together but others such as maps and app stores are far harder and are about data and commercial deals as much as they are about software. While it would be wrong to say that these services can't be opened up, in many cases doing so isn't as straight forward as sharing source code.

It doesn't feel as if Google has changed so much as what it means be a mobile OS has.
Champaign, IL here as well.
What is the point in this poll?
The author asks how much surveillance can democraty withstand. Not society. Society can withstand loads more surveillance but the resulting regime cannot be called a democracy.
The letter Q was illegal in Turkey from 1928 until last month
Fuck yeah ozzies.
Changed it to Michigan rather than Ann Arbor, although I realise this is still pretty arbitrary.
It was built with a JavaScript framework called SproutCore.

http://sproutcore.com/
You'd have to eat it first, and servers can be crunchy.
I see it being useful for server utility apps. The sort of thing you might in the past have done using Bash, Python, Perl etc. The barebones nature of the language and the ability to package everything into a single executable is incredibly handy for these use cases.

For everything else no. The JVM is going to continue to dominate for medium to large apps with Scala and Clojure offering something new and original whilst allowing for existing code to be reused. And for smaller apps it's hard to look past Javascript.
Easy to use and learn, good standard library, it gets the work done.

Does it have a future outside google? I'd say yes, even in the enterprise world, mostly in mixed architectures where it could be used to build a lower layer that handles networking/transaction processing/jobs handling (replacing python,ruby,etc...) while upper layers could be built with a functional language (based on the jvm? clojure?).
I think the next major adjustment would be to add Atlanta/Florida and DC/Baltimore/Philadelphia. There are already some "other east coast", but I think this will stay on the front page long enough to get many more votes than it has now, so the mixup will become smaller as votes come in.

Edit: I'd also make Michigan into "Michigan/Ohio/Pittsburgh", add "Mountain States (Arizona/Utah/Colorado/NM/ID)", and add Other Midwest, and Other South. Then I'd leave it alone. :)
Not surprisingly it follows English language spread quite closely. The top 5 consists of English speaking countries and Scandinavia (where everybody speaks English as a second language). If the Netherlands had been singled out from Western Europe I would expect to see the density high there as well.
DC/Baltimore/Philadelphia
It's not young Democrats blocking social security reform, it's old Republicans. When Republicans talk entitlement reform, they mean reform of welfare and medicaid, not social security and medicare. Or, if they do intend to reform the latter, it's not for current or near-future beneficiaries: it's for young people.

The Republican platform is heavily tilted towards their core demographics: the old, white, and rich. Until that changes, their demographics will remain as they are.
Atlanta/Florida
How does GNU and free software justifies his claim that we can be in control of our software? I think RMS doesn't like Linux but being an open source software it still can be injected with potential backdoors. What makes him think his software won't? We still review code but your average Joe cannot code and he won't code. So he's going to use a software someone packaged. How can you tell if no one will ever inject a backdoor?

edit

This is a major point he always makes about security. I am not buying his total obsession with GNU because that can't be prevented.
What are you talking about?

I’m talking about definitions and the argument about definitions that’s happening here. Arguing about definitions is foolish, it’s point- and meaningless. Who cares what vandalism is? The important thing is how one views a certain act, not how one defines vandalism. That only clouds the issue.

Also, I find people who think there are absolutes when it comes to this issue extremely funny.
I don't think i've evern seen an article so badly written. It has the right research, but it is pointless. The whole thing is sumarized in the last two paragraphs. With zero information lost:

"""

Says Woodman: “When we try to tighten things up, our measured performance goes down. There is an incentive among buyers to let the floodgates open. And publishers need more money, so they ignore.” So the bad traffic persists. “We need to fix this as an industry,” he adds. “Somebody needs to give a shit.”

The IAB seems to. Per Sullivan, the organization is working on devising a standard for publishers akin to the Good Housekeeping Seal. He’d like to see the biggest stakeholders get more aggressive about the problem, including brands and agencies. “If buyers came out and said, ‘I will only buy from certified vendors,’ that would change things,” he says.

"""

so basically, the industry measures clicks. and bots delivers clicks. fraudulents, but clicks. and everyone is trying to fix it with black/white-lists so they get a promotion for getting the clicks, but not looking bad with their boss when some known scam site shows up in the report.

The whole industry is based on allowing only the 'clean' bots of the week inflate your numbers.
Non-continental US including Hawaii
...but none of that makes much difference:

"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT?
For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching
seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the
average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is
smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of
coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."

http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...
Stockholm is lovely but the housing market is a mess. Decades of idiotic policies have halted the construction of new apartments shot the prices through the roof. Just this week I was talking to someone who was renting out his one-room apartment for more than USD 1800/month. If you want to live centrally, prepare to pay for it.
The "Yelp of Weed"
OK I've added them, although they don't appear in order unfortunately so people might get confused. The other east coast is only about 10 at the moment.

This looks like it might have been flagged down so might need a new poll in the morning.

---

Edit: OK did all of that. I think this won't make it to morning on the front page so perhaps someone else can submit a new poll based on this in the morning, maybe with some more options for SF and we can get a fuller picture.
Value in art comes from excess of money in too few hands. Much too rich people need investment vehicles, and because of this sad state of the matter art, collectible cars, London flats and many other rich toys get ridiculously expensive, completely disconnected from any sense of utility or real value of any sort.
When was this written, both Silk Road and Liberty Reserve have been closed rendering this rather useless
Well, I did nothing to conceal the fact that I ran the mail command. I was only a teenager, knew nothing about Unix nor internet mail, and so I was looking at shell history and trying commands at random exploring. The system was regularly backed up and restored, so for example, if you installed something like a MUD server on RMS's account, the next day it would be reverted.

From what I could tell, the GNU accounts were held nothing more than mailing lists, there was never any private correspondence that I could see.

I'm pretty sure RMS was aware his email and everything he did on the account could be seen by everyone. In fact, his mbox file wasn't even protected, you could grep the /var/spool/mail directory.
I actually checked Wikipedia and went for South Europe, that's what it says.
Google Play Services are not (currently) required for developing and running apps, unless those apps integrate with Google's services, like Google Accounts and Google Maps. Of course nearly every Google App will break if you disable it, since every Google App is proprietary and Google's Play Services is their common framework.

The question is - do third-party apps break if you disable Google Play Services? And the answer is that it depends. If the app needs Google's services then it will stop working. However, making Play Services open-source, at least for the functionality provided right now, wouldn't do any good. Because those services rely on Google's server-side infrastructure, so you're still at their mercy.

The only thing that bothers me is the Wifi-based location tracking. Google collects info about nearby Wifi networks and so the phone is able to give a pretty good estimate of latitude/longitude coordinates, even without turning the GPS on. Turning Google Play Services off means that Wifi-based location tracking stops working. And this is a pain, given that many apps these days (Facebook, Twitter) want to get your current city and so Facebook for example is accessing my GPS every time I open the app, with no way to turn this functionality off and it's consuming my battery and the GPS status notifier is annoying. In case you're wondering I had to turn Wifi-based location tracking because of a bug in the latest Android 4.3, as it is preventing my Nexus 4 to go to sleep, thus draining my battery.
This is precisely the problem we're solving with http://www.decalcms.com/ ... I'd love to hear your feedback!
Yeah. As a European, I had to look the city up. Heck, seeing it only has 100k souls or so, I'd wager most US natives can't place it on a map either.
Finding a rental apartment in Stockholm can be a nightmare unless you're happy commuting from the distant suburbs. It can take many years (even decades) of queuing to get something within the central city ("inom tullarna"), and there is a large black market where rental contracts are sold. You might be able to find sublets, which tend to be for short times only (typically less than 2 years) and even then, competition can be tough unless you know someone looking for a tenant. If you're not in a position to buy, I'd strongly suggest you get your employer to help you find a place to live, or perhaps even rent it for you.

That said, Stockholm is a great city and I'd jump at the opportunity.
kansas city kansas
I don't understand the point of this article especially the bit about being an evil genius by ways of making excellent best in business cross OS api's. Really? being competitive is being an evil genius? If amazon is willing it can open there api's to none FireOS apps they have the infrastructure and money to support it, but they don't.

As a user I'm happy that Google is making sure that I can hop device manufactures without loosing my apps or functionality, if everybody would roll out there own app store and removed Google's you would be locked in with the OEM. Now you can safely change to a different phone, also they don't mind you downloading the Google apps when using an alternative ROM.

Android is open source but does that mean that you are not aloud to make money of it by providing closed source apps and service, many open source companies do that. The work that went in to Android if freely available for competitors. Lots of kernel enchantments went back in to Linux and now you have Ubuntu touch and Firefox OS both based on the Android kernel which in turn is based on Linux, how cool is that.
If Google were to provide an Android SDK for Go I bet the usage would grow exponentially and that would assure a bright future.
Power demands transparency. Lack of power should give you some privacy.

An individual has right to privacy and to waive said privacy when it considers appropriate. The case with Stallman you mention was waiving some of his rights to give his colleagues easier access.

Powerful organization should be forced to be transparent to maximum extent that is reasonable - you shouldn't be forced to give out your trade/state secrets, but classifying everything as such and hiding is a worse transgression. They don't have the right to waive their transparency when it suits them.
Yeah it's a nightmare, but you can wrangle it with enough work... try the demo here and see what you think: http://www.decalcms.com/tour/
> The author asks ho much surveillance can
> democraty withstand.

In this case does question even makes sense?
How many tranzistors can a cow withstand?
US system is not a democracy anyway (it is a repulic).
holds up hand

This totally confused me for a minute until I started reading the comments, what on earth does that say about my intellect?!

frets madly