skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes absolutely. They're all problems that we've solved in the process of building out our product. In addition to that, as I mentioned, we originally gave them as white board questions, so we're well aware of the issues that come up when solving the problems and the effort required to resolve the issues.

Our front-end test is a bit longer than the back-end test with a tradeoff of a shorter in person interview, but the front-end test shouldn't take more than 90 minutes.

One of our problems is a small matching algorithm. Another is a thread safety problem. The front-end test consists of pulling JSON data from a server, formatting it, and posting a single action back to the server. It sounds like we're in a minority though. Reading these other posts it seems like a lot of the tests are very onerous (build a small trading system? that is a ton of work).
Frankly, he's too talented to keep making mediocre shooters for twitch gamers. Heck, 3D game engines are practically commodities nowadays. No idea if the Oculus Rift will succeed, but I love it when people on his level take chances. I watch the Rift project very carefully, and really see a lot of potential there. It might not end up being what we expect it to be in the end. We assume it'll be this great little game accessory like a Kinect. It has the potential to be much more.
tl;dr: if companies know that they are going to miss quality candidates with a code challenge, and are ok with that, it's ok to have one. If candidates are ok with giving some companies the miss because they won't put up with a challenge, that's ok too. And code challenges are good for some types of positions and not others.

I agree that companies are excluding people such as yourself with these coding challenges. That's their right, just as it is your right to not apply to any companies that require such challenges.

If someone is finding good candidates with a coding challenge, that's great. If someone is finding good jobs while avoiding coding challenges, that's great too.

I will say that there's some nuance implied in your comment that simply isn't present in any of the github/coding challenge blog posts that have popped up on HN over the last few days.

Whether a coding challenge is appropriate doesn't just depend on the company or the candidate--it also depends on the position! It's far easier to test junior/mid level skills than senior skills in a 1-2 hour task. Geez, some of the skills you mention above would be hard to test in a 1-2 day task.

When you are looking for esoteric, softer, or more senior skills (requirements gathering, or architecture), you need other ways of evaluating candidates beyond a code challenge. Things like what you suggest: conversations, references, etc. Of course, there are some "senior" folks out there who aren't great coders even though they talk a good game, and if coding is what the position requires, a code challenge is fine.
Agreed. This reads like a polite way of informing the DOJ that if they don't get things in order, the Senators may be inclined to start up some hearings with teeth.
The problem with this isn't OO, it's a misuse of OO, which isn't supposed to be about metaphors but programming by difference.
I'm no Jony Ives either, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step right? I like your stuff.
You provided no proof that USD is stable, just a bunch of handwaving.

> He's the single person YOU rely on.

For security, no. The protocol is public. So I assume you mean only by market manipulation. But how so? Is this the same way I rely on Bill Gates not to trade all his money to a foreign currency?
False dichotomy about Excel vs. DSLs like R.
"90% of the world is using Excel and similar tools to analyze and visualize their data. [...] What’s the next step-up from the spreadsheet? Learning how to code. Learning stats. Leaving the comfort of a spreadsheet’s visual display for R, maybe?"
To make this statement would be ignoring that numerous non-free statistical packages have offered GUI front-ends for years. SAS/EG, JMP, Minitab, and SPSS instantly come to mind. Two out of those four are even marketed directly to people as statistical extensions of spreadsheets. Granted, the "long tail" will still need to learn a little bit of stats, but I fail to see how this is a problem that Excel solves (unless we're talking only about plots).

I don't think it's a hard leap to consider that if the big-box statistical package companies realized how much of their money came from industry, they'd do what they could to make their software seem like an alluring proposition. Statistical software costs an order of magnitude more than Excel, so they'd need pretty good arguments on how to sell upper management that the business team actually needed an 8000 dollar piece of software.

I'm not sold that there's nothing in between Excel and R. From my experience, they require a slight learning curve (nowhere near the learning curve of going from Excel to R), but not an insurmountable one. What these solutions lack is the name recognition that Excel has, or decent integration into a MS Office stack (exceptions, of course--I remember seeing a statistics toolbox for Excel once), or they cost too much.

I think part of the real problem is that for a lot of companies, Excel is "good enough". There's plenty of stuff it can't do well. It chokes on larger data sets, has limited statistical functionality, poor scripting capabilities, and shaky random number generators. But it's good enough for people who don't want to do much with their data.

If they wanted to do harder-core analysis, they'd outsource it to an analytics team. This perspective comes from a viewpoint inside BigCo. The prohibitive cost of some of these solutions might be a harder pill for a small firm to swallow.
Checkout http://startupchile.org they've made a lot of noise. There are quite a few cool (and successful) companies that have come out of there. My two favorites: Padlet (padlet.com) and Admetricks (admetricks.com). Padlet was also in YC and Imagine K-12 (after StartupChile)
I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?
Wrong. Just check the core language. It large and there is much more than repeated 'pattern matching'.
I should add that I hope we haven't seen the last of his Code God skills. The title of "CTO" kind of scares me in that regard, unless, of course, Oculus is still small enough that the CTO might still be expected to put his hands in the source.
Fully furnished House for rent 
Hello,

We have a fully furnished house for rent less than a mile from YCombinator office in the Whisman Station Community. The house is available starting Dec 9th, right on time for the YCombinator Jan - Mar 2014 Demo Day cycle.

The house is 3 beds, 2.5 baths, fully furnished, and can accommodate 4 to 5 individuals. Attached parking is included for up to 2 cars. The house includes most amenities such as refrigerator, microwave, kitchen utensils, washer, dryer, dish washer, coffee machine, TV, cable, internet, and more. We take care of all utilities (water/sewage/garage), cable, high-speed internet, wifi, hoa fees, etc. We even provide cleaning service and fresh linens.

You can find more details about the house here:

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We would love to accommodate YCombinators who are coming in for Jan - Mar 2014 cycle, preferably from Dec 9th or 16th. We would appreciate if you can forward this email to the YCombinator mailing lists / forums. Thanks much in advance!

Regards,

Ramana Lokanathan
Email: sequoiabay@gmail.com
Cell: 650-814-9237
http://clojurescriptkoans.com/#higher-order-functions/10 got me good. Why is it one needs to use `(count a) (count b)` instead of just `a b` like worked when comparing string lengths in a previous ClojureScript Koan?
It parses, thus it is legal.
Use Sassaparilla and quickstart with Sass and Compass
If you dig deep enough, you'll find that the hackathon was sponsored by Fox News and they kept it Fair and Balanced.
Android 4.4 ships without web browser, Google tells vendors to license Chrome
This is 2013. You gotta look out for Number One.
> If a President can pardon his- or herself, then why was Nixon pardoned by Gerald Ford?

Political optics, for one thing: they had the vote counts in and knew if he hung around the Senate was going to convict him and kick him out of office, so he was going to be out in any case. Resigning and having the new guy -- who had some credibility with people who had long ago lost any trust in Nixon -- say that a pardon was in the interest of the Nation looked better, while Nixon pardoning himself would have been even more divisive.

There's also, IIRC, at least some dispute about the extent of the scope of the exception to the pardon power that applies in cases of impeachment, and, while I'm not sure that it would have been resolved in a manner unfavorable to Nixon, pardoning himself while he was under an impeachment that had not yet been rendered moot by his resignation (as the impeachment power only extends against civil officers, not past officers) might have sparked an even longer and deeper crisis if someone thought to test the limits there.
No, backwards. Azure outages were caused by DNS problems.
http://gigaom.com/2013/11/21/another-bumpy-day-for-windows-a...

https://twitter.com/scottgu/statuses/403670409406468096
I'm confused, how can you break EC but not be able steal people's money?

Similarly, if you found had preimage attack for ripemd160(sha256(x)) (you can find a public key with the same hash as any other hash), how could you not steal people's money?
I've been watching AeroFS for quite a while. How does it compare to Citrix ShareFile? It sounds like they are both in the same problem space.
Frederick Mayer (spy)
If President Obama doesn't sufficiently share your outrage, fundraise, campaign and vote for someone who you think would.

Why, so you can stop President Obama being elected for a third term?

To me as an outsider, this is a puzzling part of the US political system. The President has a huge amount of concentrated power within one branch of government, yet approximately half the time, the President of the day is effectively a lame duck with nothing to lose by behaving almost any way they like. Other parts of the government can make that President's job harder, but short of impeachment everyone is basically stuck with whoever it is until their time is up.

I increasingly feel that giving the electorate an absolute power of recall if an elected representative angers enough people during their term would change politics for the better at almost any level. Otherwise, any term of office that is sufficient for reasonable medium- to long-term planning is also sufficient to allow serious damage to be done with relative impunity if the wrong person won the election but the voters only learn that after the fact.

As a side benefit, this also balances the tendency for major elections to be fought on a tiny number of headline issues, with little if any incentive to represent the electorate's interests in all the other significant-but-not-dominant areas, because if you annoy too many small groups of the population, collectively they can become powerful enough to trigger a vote.
That's a good answer. The only reasonable way to double your money is to buy something that you can resell in the short term for a profit of 20% or more. Do that two-three times and your money is doubled.

Alternatively, invest in something where you can act to increase the value in the short term and recoup your investment in a few months. Similar to buy and sell but you only invest in part of an existing business.

Examples.
Buying web businesses that are sad because the builder was cheap and hired an incompetent. You buy it cheap, fix all the problems and sell a shiny new bulletproof site to a promoter/marketing person who knows that they can use it to earn ongoing revenue. Idea guy botched the job by outsourcing, you the tech guy fix the tech problems (and maybe some design UI UX stuff) then sell to the sales/marketing business guy who has a long term plan.

Another example. A waitress quits her job and invests her savings at a grimy sad restaurant across town. She also takes a waitressing job at minimum wage there. Every night after closing time she cleans and decorates. And working in the daytime she wears flirty clothes, keeps up her best smile and cheerful manner. Word gets out and new customers come to see what's happening. Business doubles and triples. After 4 months, the owner pays her back her investment plus 40% and gives her a regular job as manager/waitress at a normal wage. She works there for another year, keeps building the business and hires the right replacements. Then on the basis of this transformation she gets a job as catering manager at a small regional motel chain and gets into renewing their restaurants. With the money she saves up, she quits after two years and buys a small restaurant. After a year she sells it for double what she paid and goes on to the next. People actually do this kind of thing. It works, but it requires guts, intelligence and hard work.
This is essentially what we do.

Write a program to fetch some data from S3 using these credentials we made you, perform some analysis on them (algorithm question, generally with recursion) and then display the final output. And write a test for it.

We provide a stubbed-out Rails project on Github so they don't have to know all the details about S3.

With this we test three things:

1) Can they quickly find missing info on Google/Stack Overflow (S3 stubs)

2) Can they handle recursion? (Algorithm question)

3) Can they write a test?

Then we go over their submission on Skype. It's worked pretty well for us.
Wow plug.dj is everything I hoped tt.com would become. The ability to play videos is awesome. Thanks for tip.
That depends on the value of the Bitcoins held in the MtGox account. If it was worth more than $10,000, which is very possible considering the meteoric rise of Bitcoins this year, you could have an FBAR reporting requirement.

A FBAR reporting requirement means that next year you would need to file a Form TD-F 90.22-1, electronically, by June 30th. The form itself is for the most part simple and self-explanatory.

As for the Coinbase coins, for the most part, "foreign" in "foreign currency" means issued by a foreign government. The government generally refers to Bitcoin and other digital currencies as "virtual" currencies.

EDIT: Followup. FATCA, the other foreign reporting requirement, only kicks in if the value of total foreign financial assets exceeds $50,000 at the end of the taxable year. If total foreign financial assets aren't worth $50,000 at the end of the year, FATCA shouldn't apply.
It definitely doesn't sound like they're happy he's gone, it sounds as if bridges were burned and they're pissed.
I agree that cash prizes should be eliminated from Hackathons.

I'm not sure about Team Selection, whether to have random, pre-determined, or 'quick pitch' style.

Sometimes Hackathons can be a great experience for the participants. Sometimes, however, the evaluation criteria can ruin. We had one of the only functioning projects, but were docked points for using Twilio instead of AT&T's shitty API. (One of the Sensei's even told us to use Twilio.)
Not a bug, it was a feature.
Great job. I also really like Capo for OS X: http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/Capo/index.html

Edit: can anyone recommend a good, free chord dictionary for Android?
Take Risks, Shake Things Up, Be Happier
Good point, the minimum security of Bitcoin is that of gold; i.e. a safe guarded by people with weapons.

But since Bitcoin is digital, its maximum security is far, far higher. Your private keys can be encrypted and safely stored with any desired level of redundancy. Paper wallets are a big step backwards.

Also, if secret sharing is used, Bitcoins cannot be stolen unless the attacker gets to k of the n involved parties.
The camera is actually looking at a mirror facing the scene, and in the mirror the image is flipped, so it records 'flipped'.

He's writing forwards, and if you look closely at the hackaday shot with the scene + lighting it appears backwards from that perspective.
cheers. thanks.
well, it is called intelligence fusion centers and license plates is just a minor piece. Pretty spotty. Face recognition info from surveilance cams pretty spotty as well. Credit card transactions - similar. Cell phone position is much better... Once taken together ("fused" dare i say :) - works like a charm i guess.

Guys from Palantir would know better i guess what Suspicious Activity Reports are cooked there:

http://www.palantir.com/_ptwp_live_ect0/wp-content/uploads/2...

"...many Fusion Centers have gradually shifted to a
broader mission of providing general criminal intelligence and all-crimes, all-hazards analysis support for constituent agencies."
The problem is that many people in our industry lie or stretch the truth a bit. Some of them are even good at bullshitting about it.

I work with several people who have over a decade of experience with "mission critical" applications and do not have the commensurate skills.
There are companies which accept bitcoins, for instance Foodler lets you pay with bitcoins.
This kind of seemed inevitable, no? I can't imagine a field more ripe for automation.
NYC Office Space for Startups - hackpad
My work speaks for itself and I am more than happy to share working codes samples.

I had someone offer me a paid test. I refused because I am too busy.

By requiring coding tests, employers and managers may be accidentally selecting only desperate candidates.
Show HN: My first iOS game, Hungry Henri
> You provided no proof that USD is stable

Inflation figures for USD are readily available. That it is more stable when considered against most goods and services than bitcoin is not something about which there is any room for serious dispute.
right, but in those cases you can just go to the documentation, which is pretty clear in the various ways you can use functions. for example: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Map.html
This makes me happy. I have a feeling that iD were dragging John down. He could always make a brilliant tech that they somehow always failed to makes decent game of after q3 arena.

I really hope that he will be able to push the limits of possible about graphics technology once again.
>Chile will probably stop being third-world soon enough

Sorry, I don't think so. Chile is doing good nowadays but basically their only export is copper. Copper is a semi-precious metal right now and thats why that country suddenly has so much wealth, but the difference between rich and poor is abysmal and their economy is tied to the price a single non-renewable resource.

Compared to Chile, Argentina still has a huge tech industry capable of exporting value-added products like cars.
Democracy is all about giving the people what they want, good and hard. I'm sorry they got it "wrong" from your point of view last year, but in three years they get to try again.

I don't think your version of "serious damage" from this issue matches most voters. Even if this were a parliamentary system where sufficient public outcry could force new elections, or a "do over" recall was available (a terrible flaw in the state constitutions where it exists, IMHO), you'd still not be getting the U.S. administration you seem to want. You need to convince the public and then win elections, that's how change happens.
So much for an "open" handset alliance. What a misnomer :(
These bootcamps can pretty much fund themselves if put together properly. Putting together a curriculum, finding a space, in a nutshell just putting together a business plan.

From there I would set a price for the class and start doing pre-registration, do a limited 10 seat first class and have people sign up if interested. An instructor you can bring on board for a contract price for the duration of the bootcamp.

I have seen this work out successful many times in the recent 6 months. Also if your looking for something that is more for the community and less for the profit, take a look at http://www.meetup.com/codecrewny/. These guys do meetups to go through the JS in 6-8 weeks curriculum (http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly)

Since Rails is not prevalent, it's a great time to seize the opportunity of building that following.
Just caught a showing of "The real Inglorious Basteurds" on Channel 5 - including this guy, Fred Mayer - a Jew from Brooklyn who disguised as a Nazi officer sends back intelligence to OSS, infiltrates Messerschmitt factories, and finally accepts the surrender of Innsbruck.

WTF ! See the documentary on UK channel 5.

edit: there is a part in the Wikipedia article where he is tortured by two Gestapo agents, one notices he is circumcised, but they cannot believe a Jew would parachute in and pretend to be a Nazi. You're telling me ...

and I'm wondering if I am doing enough Open Source work as if that will make the world a better place
Poorly optimized 3d engines are a commodity. Quake 3, Painkiller and Serious Sam 1 were a piece of great engineering. Also there was nothing mediocre in the twitch based era of id. Their decline began with Doom 3.
“‘Dog Bites a Man’ Is Not News. ‘Man Bites a Dog’ Is News”
Bitcoin is in Washington[1]. Washington will try to tax bitcoin if it gets accepted as an asset/currency. Moving the discussed amount of money, means that maybe someone (inside?) the USA has a huge amount of money not taxed. This is something regulatory authorities might want to change, as soon as possible.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/video/can-the-senate-help-to-legiti...
Also, he didn't say it had to be bitcoin.
Forward Secrecy at Twitter
According to Joel Fuhrman, MD, it is not nuts that are healthy, but seeds that are eaten raw. This includes things like sunflower, sesame and chia seeds. Peanuts is a bit different because it is a legume, but Fuhrman does include beans and lentils on his healthy list.

He even promotes healthy eating using the acronym GOMBBS: Greens, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, Beans, and Seeds which you should eat every day.

But roasted peanuts, like any roasted nuts, have acrylamides which are bad. Better to boil the raw peanuts in a stew.
There are a lot of jobs going around these days. Employers no longer have the luxury to treat prospective hires poorly. This is the employer's problem, not the candidates.

Personally, I've asked potential hires for work product demonstrations. However, two crucial differences: 1) I paid them for their time, and 2) the task was on a real part of our infrastructure, the code they produced eventually being used in production. Everyone was happy with this situation.
OTOH, its hard to make redundant copies of a gold bar that retain the full value of the original so that if the original is damaged, nothing is lost.
https://www.facebook.com/tsovinar.soferre?fref=ts