skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward white men"... not sure what to say.

OSS as a hiring filter biases your selection process toward people who are either paid to do it at their current job, or who have few enough prior commitments in the rest of their life to be able to afford to do it outside of work.

I'm not sure whether it biases towards white men or not, but I'm pretty sure it biases towards younger people and against people who are in enterprisey companies (or who work on private contracts).
Is anyone else amazed by this? Imagine you told yourself you could buy a fully functional portable computer with a easy to use capacitive touch screen for ~$100 just five years ago? Amazing.
NameError: name 'start_game' is not defined
they have an FAQ item for that. But I would submit that the answer seems to be skirting around the issue of an actual (accidental or not) "finger" press.... Especially like when the cashier takes takes your coin out of the check presenter? Grab it by the edges, you say? Suure....

Q. Can someone accidentally change which card is selected on my Coin?

A. We’ve designed the button to toggle cards in a way that makes it difficult to trigger a "press" unintentionally. Dropping a Coin, holding a Coin, sitting on a Coin, or putting the Coin in a check presenter at a restaurant will not inadvertently toggle the card that is selected.
For certain aspects, you are correct - instead of sending in 75 infantrymen to hold a ridge, you can send in a few tanks and mechanized infantry using fewer people.

However, the somewhat perverse reality is that the logistics and support requirements of the two scenarios are equal if not higher for the latter. The more technology/mechanization, the more replacement parts, ground and support staff, fuel distribution, and so on are required.

On top of that, many of the very "high-tech" aspects of modern warfare that replace people have very limited utility. High tech aircraft, drones, and cruise missles can be used for tactical strikes to disrupt enemy operations, but they can't be used to hold ground.
Multi-format RESTful APIs with Python and Cornice
Show HN: Toogles, a faster & cleaner YouTube
Static analysis, although it only fixes your own code, not third party libraries.
China to ease one child policy
HipChat also has a free tier (for teams of 5 or smaller). https://www.hipchat.com/pricing
Take a look at our current product, it's not directly tied to GitHub, but has webhook integration (with BitBucket, Travis, Jenkins too).

www.trou.pe

We'll need to sweat some details on Gitter, so hard to say on the timing. We may fuse the two concepts together, so it will be more about product-related decisions than development time as we have a lot of the code already.

Feel free to give us feedback on Troupe so we can loop that into the future direction of this product.
Why spend unnecessary resources? People trying to cheat will find ways that are very hard to prevent.

Which brings us to another question - besides hackers, who is interested in cheating these kinds of games? Probably people who want to impress their group of friends who also play the game. I smell a market opportunity here.
Yes in a way, but actually no, it is hashed with some other values.
Not really. Plenty of people have a site like http://kybernetikos.github.io/ which just tells a story about some of the projects they've got on github.

I just threw that together quickly a while back and haven't updated it, but github whould make a fantastic site for a portfolio.
If you are working with the same technology stack we work and are not finding bugs or implementing new features you are not playing in the same league.

We don't contribute to FOSS because we are hobbyists or good Samaritans, we do it because we need the features or fixes. We do it because in the long term it is cheaper and more efficient than maintaining a fork or developing a closed source component.
I recently found myself needing to use "with", and hating myself for it. Does anyone know a better way to do this in JavaScript?

// Take an array of context dictionaries, and return a
// function that evaluates a string in those contexts.
// I fully realize how horrible this code is, and that
// it only supports up to ten contexts. I feel terrible
// about it, as I should, but I would feel even worse
// if it were impossible to do this. But isn't there
// a simpler way to do this is JavaScript? Maybe I
// could use __proto__ inheritence, but I was hoping
// to avoid.
function evalInContextsFunction(_contexts) {
var _contextCount = _contexts.length;
if (_contextCount == 0) {
return function evalInContexts(_text) {return eval(_text)};
}
with (_contexts[0] || {}) {
if (_contextCount == 1) {
return function evalInContexts(_text) {return eval(_text)};
}
with (_contexts[1] || {}) {
if (_contextCount == 2) {
return function evalInContexts(_text) {return eval(_text)};
}

[...and so on...]
> And while, theoretically, it could be possible to create a ton of fake transactions to boost the sale price, it'd sure be a heck of a lot of work for little payoff. You'd need legitimate transactions, otherwise you'd simply be returning the motors and reducing revenue.

It'd also likely be fraud.
Statistically speaking, which one has spent more time coding? OSS is a lot of work - the suggestion that a rich slacker is your typical OSS contributor is really stretching my imagine.
> Sockets are just as portable, more so on UNIX descendants where one can rely on relatively consistent socket APIs. Beyond that, almost every single language and runtime (Python, Ruby, Java, OCaml ...) provides a portable socket API.

You've got to be kidding me. The BSD socket API is only "portable" for basic things. Do any kind of advanced thing and you will notice the limitations of the "portability".

Want to write an evented server that handles a large number of sockets? Choose your favorite platform-specific API: epoll, kqueue, whatever Solaris is using, etc.

Error handling? Each platform behaves in a subtly different manner. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2974021/what-does-econnre... for an example.

Windows support? I hope you don't mind the #ifdefs and typedefs in code. The WinSock API is still OKish... it doesn't differ from the basic BSD socket API too much. But good luck trying to handle more than 1024 sockets in a non-blocking/async manner. I hope select() on Windows serves you well.

> Length-prefixed message framing winds up being 10-100 lines of code in almost any language/environment.

Only if you're writing blocking code. If your code is evented, good luck with writing 2-3 times more code. Oh, and don't you dare getting that code wrong and introduce bugs. And of course you have to write this code every single time. And you didn't forget to unit test all that, did you?
Is the TPP treaty the next great threat to net freedom?
Chiming in with some more appreciation! Great stuff!
How? You're saying they let you buy (say) your first bitcoin instantly, without giving up your identity? As far as I knew, Bitcoin was the fastest way to transact, and if you're competent you're waiting an hour to confirm a transaction.

So, with Bitfloor you could just instantly hook up your account number without giving up your identity and drain your bank account into bitcoins? If I sound cynical, please know I'm genuinely curious how that could work without turning into a bitcoin faucet! I'm just ignorant, I was not a Bitfloor user and I don't know how it worked.
GitHub is not your CV, but I think it should be on your CV. If you're an artist when you interview they usually want to see a portfolio of your work, GitHub is a pretty handy way to portfolio code for others to view.

There's many good things about it, and reasonably few downsides to trade off against, but overall if you've got a GitHub I'd be more interested in seeing that than knowing what grades you got at school 15 years ago.
> You're telling me that a country that uses the death penalty for people shipping contaminated milk can't keep regional bureaucrats from murdering newborns?

What kind of comparison is that? Even you should know that rules don't apply equally to people in positions of power.
My phone being able to do those things would be fine (battery issues excepted)
> The demographic make-up of open source contributors is even more skewed toward white men than the software industry is

What the fuck am I reading? Is this asshole author trying to inject racism into something that is inherently race-, age-, gender-, wealth- and location-agnostic? Github doesn't care who you are, what you code or in what language you code it. And yet here we are with a dumbfuck author who, for the sake of clicks, just absolutely needs to shit on white men, that have been the bane of all tech-interested non-white men since the dawn of time.

When I hire I ask for code samples first and the person's name last. Shit, I'd hire the person based purely on code, put up anywhere on the net, and an anonymous chat, conducted fucking anywhere, and only require their name and social security number when signing the contract.

Shit I'm pissed off now. Some people just can't accept that technology is the ultimate equalizer and instead have to project their white guilt into everything.
"Please insert your stolen credit card now."
Guys, chill out, I am perfectly able to carry more than one credit card in my wallet.
Isn't that how Candy Crush makes money now? You spend money to buy your way to new levels, through the use of special items and bonuses. Or are you targeting the subset of people who want to pay to cheat, but want it to be secret.
T-Mobile rolls out free global data to existing plans
No, your question is loaded because of the use of the word "still", not its content.
Better would be to use your whole house as the weight. And store the energy in angular momentum.. That's limitless energy storage :D
Serving Life for This?
feels like i've been waiting for an eternity to use this app!
What makes you happy?

When I was in college if someone had offered to pay me $100k inflation adjusted for life to play with computers, coding, and networking, I would probably have signed in blood - even having has some success at consulting and with entrepreneur role models in my family.

So when I get frustrated at people or with circumstances, I find it helpful to remember enjoying reading books, playing with technology, teaching people and getting positive feedback, being part of productive teams, and the other firsts which were all new, novel, impressive, and profound at the time and now I just assume are the state of my universe.

Yes, there's a lot I don't enjoy about working at big companies, and ditto for smaller companies where you have to do more of things you don't like. But have less BS of others' making. But it's still awesome to be paid to do fundamentally fun stuff!

So anyway, just a thought - maybe try to find the things that make you happy and do them and embrace them and maybe suffer to work in a constraining day job which is still stuff you sort of enjoy, and tinker as a hobbyist to have your own space for pure fun? And who knows, companies are still being born that way...
I have a debit card for my personal account, a debit card for a joint account I share with my SO, a general purpose credit card and 4 store credit cards. All of which use magnetic strips and could be replaced by coin. Yes, I have to carry my ID and insurance card as well, but coin would drastically reduce the bulk of what I carry and make that minimalist wallet I ordered off kickstarter all the more useful. I think it's brilliant, even if it is a stop-gap until we get proper NFC adoption.
Yeah, that doesn't seem very efficient. I see why this works at larger scales, such as water reservoirs and such, but there's no way this would be worth the cost to install in one's backyard. Especially when the price of equivalent battery-backup systems are only a few thousand dollars.
Surely there's a big market for cheats? You could sell Candy Crush powerups for half price to all those people who are buying them now...
My mirth was audible.
'I know that it's rare to find a true indication of someones ability from just their github contributions but for example, it can help me discern whether a ruby candidate adheres to ruby best practices or not.'

The problem with this is that you can't really make a logical decision when the code (on Github/bitbucket) is removed from its context. Maybe none of the code follows best practice, but there is a compelling reason why this is so. If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an integral piece of the puzzle.
Yeah, having fewer banks and heavier regulation definitely helps.

Also, as other people have pointed out, the US is moving to chip cards in a couple of years (2015). So this product already has a very short shelf-life.
Weekdone wins Slush contest, announces $200K investment
No, it doesn't. The IRS is very good at taxing corporate transfers to individuals (e.g., the company paying for your house, clothes and food) as income.

If this wasn't already a solved problem, we wouldn't even need to eliminate corporate taxes to engage in the scheme you propose. Just book revenue, book your personal expenses as corporate expenses, and the company made no profit and hence needs to pay no taxes.

This is why your company generally only provides you benefits in a very narrow set of categories that happen to be tax deductible (health insurance, 401k).
It doesn't sound like they were trying to get away from it all, but instead was an unburdening from the physical hindrances that weight down travel. A smartphone/tablet helps in such a pursuit, replacing maps and cameras and phones and books and itineraries, etc. It also enables them modern agility because they can find a place to eat/stay/wash/etc with ease virtually anywhere -- this used to be a major problem of travel, and was the reasons we made fixed plans in advance.

It sounds fantastic to me. I despise travel generally for all of the stuff that goes along with it (fixed plans, fixed times, loads of luggage), so this sounds simply brilliant to me.

And for all of the talk about clothes, note that clothes are something you can buy with ease and little expense anywhere, if the situation demanded.
Even better, for a modern day example look at the true story behind the movie Puncture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puncture_%28film%29
He has another post about making the webpage:

http://acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/
The not-so craziest viral marketing ever
(a) if someone I am interviewing has no idea what github is, that's a negative sign. this is completely unrelated to whether the person has time to contribute to projects
(b) many great engineers have small forks of other projects. This shows me that:
(i) they know how to find and adopt open source projects into their workflow, which will save me money
(ii) when there is a bug or something that does not fit how they want to use the project, they are able to make that 15-line change or fix.
(iii) if their fork is merged back into the original project, that can indicate quality of patches, ability to work with a community, explain benefits to their changes, etc.

Honestly, those skills are very valuable indicators and do not require someone to be giving up their nights and weekends to OSS.
I've been able to get through my career without LinkedIn or GitHub accounts as proof of my skills. I've pored my time and energy into the jobs I hold and hadn't gotten inspired to start contributing to OSS until just this week[1], so I have no publicly available proof of my skills. However, I can give in depth descriptions of interesting algorithms and data structures I developed and deployed related to:

1) Motion detection algorithms for security cameras in outdoor environments with a lot of ambient noise that needed to be ignored.

2) Medical informatics data model with a recommendation engine component for predicting which ICD/CPT/SNOMED code to use for optimal chance of insurance coverage.

3) R&D, implementation, and deployment of an EAV/CR [2] open schema based analytics platform using the neo4j graph database for persistence

So far I've had the luxury of only using meatspace networking to find interesting jobs to work at, but I stress over suddenly finding myself unemployed in the future and having to face the modern interviewing process with social networking activity used as a screen.

Can anyone describe how one's GitHub is used in an interview? Is a candidate with an interesting, non-trivial personal project on GitHub considered, or are candidates judged on their contribution to others' projects?

[1]Started working on a neo4j data science project involving gathering, refining, and translating film, actor, and director data into a graph data model for efficiently answering deeply recursive queries.

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...
I suspect that the big problem with this concept (vs. the hydroelectric example) is going to be the amounts of energy involved. Let's suppose the shaft is 500m deep and a 100kg battery -- potential energy is simply F * z, so F = 980N and z is 500, which gives you 490kJ. A wH is 3.6 kJ (you'll need ~10-20 of these to run an iPad for an hour). You're going to need a really big weight and a really big shaft.

This shouldn't be surprising -- with a fairly small motor and good gearing you could raise a remarkably large weight a remarkably long distance with relatively little energy.

Also note that with a hydroelectric dam, the storage mechanism also happens to be the power generation mechanism (dam + turbine) so you aren't incurring huge additional construction and maintenance costs relative to just building the power source, so even if you replaced the weights with a giant tank of water, the entire storage mechanism is extra capital investment and maintenance on top of the solar panels.

If the fundamental problem you're trying to solve is baseline power, it's probably more efficient to bring power in from somewhere the sun is shining (8000 miles away, say):

"As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for Direct Current transmission was determined to be 7,000 km (4,300 mi). For Alternating Current it was 4,000 km (2,500 mi), though all transmission lines in use today are substantially shorter than this." (Wikipedia)
Yup, they should log / e-mail themselves the error messages when in production rather than displaying them, sensitive info might leak plus stacktrace aren't very friendly.

Looks like they might have left the connect.errorHandler() dev middleware (http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/errorHandler.html) plugged into their app.
Actually, it's a reference to a Pink Floyd song. :)
If you're still reading print magazines in the year 2013, you must not be that interested in technology.
I actually thought this story was a link to:

http://hintjens.com/blog:42
("A Web Server in 30 Lines of C")

before I clicked through. Salient quote:

"ØMQ Is Just Like BSD Sockets, But Better

The other essential ingredients of a creation myth are lies and deception. ØMQ is nothing at all like BSD sockets despite very insistent attempts from its early designers to make that. Yes, the API is vaguely socket-like. APIs are not the same as semantics. ØMQ patterns are weird and wonderful and delicate but they are not, and I'll repeat this, even marginally close to the BSD "stream of bytes from sender to recipient" pattern."
Also why, after flirting with the idea for one hiring cycle, I stopped asking people if they had Stack Overflow accounts. Yes, if they had one, it provided useful information about their interests and communication ability. But it has a demographic skew that could have led me to rejecting other candidates unfairly.

That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another form of bias!
Happy to take suggestions! Let me know what I've missed.
I've been comparing services in this space for a bit, and I've always felt unsure of inserting this into our CS workflow.

One immediate question that comes to mind is, how well does this support something like eBay's email support system? I know that Zen Desk was inconsistent with these emails: https://support.zendesk.com/entries/21305048-eBay-integratio...
> I didn't even know they still had these things. I figured they went away in the 1980's or 1990's.

I thought it was common knowledge. You could use the Hanlon's razor right about now: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity [or some other non-significant chance reason].

Many American news companies do report on China's one-child policies with all the gory details. I saw a documentary on it on PBS just last year. There are lots of places where you can read up about that, just don't expect honest journalism from Rupert Murdoch's WSJ.

One other point is, you probably see all the Malthusian theories on HN? This is not limited to HN, you won't believe how many people in elite colleges and institutions -- once you warm them up -- will confess that they think it's a good thing that China has these policies. It's like a more extreme version of family planning in their view, it's actually arguably a good thing in a lot of people's thoughts. It's not as lurid and extreme as women being thrown acid to their faces in Pakistan, or little girls being married at young ages against their will -- there is no argument here that it's a bad thing. It's easy to do journalism in these cases, and the extreme nature of the content comes in such a far-out way that journalists don't even need to sensationalize it to package it for selling! In other words, lazy journalists will find easy content first.
If you are working with the same technology stack we work you will fix bugs and implement new features in your PAID time, not in your free time.

This is what we are looking for in your github profile. If you don't have it, may be you are fit for the work, but clearly you are not playing the same game yet.
Hey, thanks for asking.

It's a minimalist implementation of the ancient count and capture game Oware.

http://luciangames.itch.io/oware

http://luciangames.com/oware
Amazed? vs. 5 years ago? Dang! 30+ years ago I got a computer for $100: a ZX80 kit (you solder it), with 1KB total RAM and no display or storage. Now, for an inflation-adjusted cost of just 38% that price, you get a tablet capable of wirelessly taking & editing & publishing video to the world. OK, these cheap tablets suck compared to good modern hardware, but they're still a million times the computer I started on.
Can't wait for this project! It's going to be amazing! http://www.myyogapro.com/00407
Also: is there a law that stops women from buying tech magazines? I don't think there is, and I wager that women who are interested in tech do buy them.

Isn't it demeaning to perscribe adult women which magazines and which content to like?
This is great, looking forward for the alpha release.
That made my Firefox crash.
Ah no, that was just shotted off my local development environment.
Nice site - it has the potential to be easier to use than the github graph. It would be nice to see how many commits the forks have ahead of their parent, or something like that.
> You're telling me that a country that uses the death penalty for people shipping contaminated milk can't keep regional bureaucrats from murdering newborns?

That's actually very coherent: the weaker your grip, the more brutal you want to be. Mao was very fond of the Latin "Unum castigabis, centum emendates".
If your decision on whether to pursue a candidate or not does not include a discussion with the candidate about their available code, you are missing an integral piece of the puzzle.

You are absolutely right. I can honestly only ever think of one circumstance where I dismissed someone based exclusively on what I saw in their github repo. I felt guilty so I phoned them a week later to discuss my thoughts and it turns out my suspicions were correct but that was categorically an edge case.