skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that there certainly are problems that would make a good "code challenge" question, but I'd argue that there are better tools for weeding out poor candidates. I also think that there's a big difference between on-site challenges and "here's what we'd like to have you do, call us back when you've got something" challenges.
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Right now the artists have to go to their studio in NY to perform. You can't just cast from your bedroom.
No. I specifically stated it has not been updated for a year and a half. I guess if you only care about "can I download a version from the web page" you are technically correct as you quote me using the word "distributed", but it is the kind of technically correct that isn't very constructive ;P.
1) You pay them! Gain is measured the same way it is with any other asset (including any non-USD currency): sale price less acquisition cost (aka "cost basis" in tax parlance) and certain maintenance expenses. There are other adjustments which probably aren't applicable to digital currency. In this case, it doesn't appear that w was entirely y or z coins, and probably includes coins from both groups. Since the z have a different acquisition cost, generally the calculation is split into smaller sub-calculations to the extent the data is available (gain on sale of the y coins sold, and gain on sale of the z coins sold). The cost basis of goods acquired as compensation is generally the amount treated as income for other tax purposes, usually the fair market value.

If a = y coins sold and b = z coins sold, then gain should be...

=[sales price allocable to a coins - purchase purchase allocable to a coins] + [sales price allocable to b coins - purchase purchase allocable to b coins]

=[[a/w * w sales price - [a/y* y purchase price]] + [b/w * w sales price - [b/z* z purchase price]

2) It should be possible to add the cost of the cracker into the "cost basis" of the xxx-w coins, which should affect the amount of taxable gain on a later sale of some or all of those coins. However, there should not be any immediate or current year tax implications.

3) There are some write-offs for lost or stolen goods. Don't know how applicable they would be to digital goods like Bitcoin since nobody has actually gotten to that point yet! It's not really been established whether digital goods can be "lost" for tax purposes. If analogizing the tangible property, its likely that a court would eventually say they can be lost and thus written-off, but no courts actually gone out and said it...yet. (There have been cases dealing with this on non-tax grounds.) However, in this situation, the tax from #1 is still there, at best there could be a deduction for the losses incurred in #3.
If anyone considers this, please us tempered glass. This says 'tabletop' so I assume it is. It's not a whole lot more expensive but it's much less deadly.
I think it's naive because NO investment offers that kind of return. People looked like absolute fools for trusting Madoff to give 5 or 10% or whatever it was, now theyre expecting 1000% just because this is "computers.... the future!!!"
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I'm not really surprised, they didn't exactly have a plan to make money from turntable.fm. I loved the concept, but I find it a bit too distracting to listen to most of the time anyway.
sqlite! (love this http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html)
> Pretty sure no interviewer ever asked for a production ready site, this is just hyperbole from you and the author of this article.

I'm sad to say that this is untrue, and that in writing this article I have not exaggerated the requirements in the least. I'm not going to name the company, but the requirements of the challenge indicate that it should be something you would be comfortable putting in production.

The "challenge" is a repo on the company's github. I'm sure you could probably easily find it with a bit of sleuthing.
Ask HN: Who uses Sublime Text in Vintage Mode?
I sure love it. But I feel like I'm alone in this. Anyone else?
If you're being hired to code, expect to be asked to code in an interview process.
What do you mean? Didn't you see they have a drum and bass channel :p
Large releases in the US come with the Play Store, but there are tons of lesser-known devices, especially in countries like China, that do not.
- I play chess
You could try Filosync (I'm the founder).
You can run the server on any Linux box: https://www.filosync.com/#get-started
That's more specific SQL than a simple gag would require... story?
Germany to introduce minimum wage
Wow that seems like a lot for angel funding. Even 20% seems like a lot for an angel round.
Bicycle. New problem created.
Many years ago (wow...almost 10 now...I'm so old...) I was given a phone screen and at the end of the screen I was given a question to code a solution to and email it in. Since this was for a job across the country, I figure what the hell.

The problem was -
A man has to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river.
He has a rowboat, and it can only carry him and one other thing.
If the fox and the chicken are left together, the fox will eat the chicken.
If the chicken and the corn is left together, the chicken will eat the corn.
Write a program that will help the man make the correct decision and explain the operational complexity.

I was given an hour to come up with a solution. I worked on it about half-an-hour coming up with the algorithm. And then for some reason my brain keyed in on the "write a program" part of the question. So I wrote the following in C++ (from memory so may not be exact) -

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
std::cout
<< "Man takes chicken, leaves fox and corn, and returns" << std::endl
<< "Man takes fox, leaves corn, and returns with chicken" << std::endl
<< "Man leaves chicken and takes corn, leaves corn with fox, and returns" << std::endl
<< "Man takes chicken back across" << std::endl;
return 0;
}

It was a program that would tell the man the correct way to get everything across the river.

Must have been an OK answer because I got flown up and ended up working for them for 4 years (before a series of bad jobs that have finally lead back to something good).
I've played Dominion, it's kind of interesting. Magic has 'Draft' and 'Cube' formats where deckbuilding with whatever you end up with is important, but it is indeed expensive.
It was personally strange to start programming in earnest with Python, and think namedtuples (or classes with __slots__) were so cool and efficient, and then learn C and just think "oh yeah. Structs."
- No it doesn't suck.
If I was a mod, I would relabel these submissions to "extend your e-penis in 0 lines of JS."
Or they could just installed FF
Macro or Micro? Test Your Sense of Scale
Keep forgetting about Black Friday. You can buy a PokerStars account from people in Bolivia/Germany/etc. and use a VPN to connect. I know a few people doing this. There's a new online site in Nevada right now, only for Nevada residents, but I hear it's a pretty big failure. New Jersey is very close to releasing it's own online poker site as well.

On top of that I think most US players play on iPoker skins (black chip poker, cake poker, etc.) which allow US players.

But yeah, all of them (apart from the Nevada/New Jersey sites) are technically illegal down there. Most professionals who didn't quit poker altogether and didn't transition to live either moved to Canada or some third world country with no taxes and cheap living to grind.
No, I'm saying that when people realised that there is a hypothetical attack that undermines bitcoin, if you have 51% of the power, that realisation didn't kill bitcoin.
I was always in the chillout rooms. They were generally a great place to hangout. I could even drop some original content. T.fm will be missed.
Rather than saying the fundamentals are more similar than given credit for, perhaps I should say the fundamentals overlap more than given credit for.

I'm having a hard time finding a concrete example at the moment, but I've seen fragments in Java codebases that, if you squint a little, seem almost functional. Of course, the code was very, very ugly, but semantically was quite functional.

I'm not trying to defend OOP. My view is that the benefits of FP outweigh the benefits of OOP. If we could find a way to import the benefits of each into the other, we'd have the best of both worlds. (Of course, then everyone would find something new to argue about ;) ).
1. Learning to code (not me, but guy who started the project)

2. Making sense of feedback from playtesters who were not always in our target audience

3. Importance of having beautiful art

4. Making natural-sounding effects

5. Writing music to go along with an existing theme

Long version:

Well, my friend learned to code by starting this project, so that was the first big obstacle. That meant that the development cycle of the game was much longer than lean-startup, rapid-iteration ideas floating around here would have it.

Related to that was the difficulty of making sense of the feedback we got from playtesters. It would have been easier if we were still in college, but we had a hard time getting feedback from people who were in our target audience, namely people who play mobile games at all. We asked everyone we knew to play the game, and it was psychologically difficult to separate out feedback that was probably not relevant because it came from someone who would never buy the game in the first place. For example, many people thought it was too hard, but they were often not really people who play games in the first place. This was made doubly hard by the fact that we've played the game so much, so we couldn't trust ourselves to know what was too hard or too easy. We didn't do anything special to solve this — no "7 Ways To Get Out of Your Own Way" blog post is coming out of this. Essentially we did the best we could.

Another interesting thing was just how central it is to have beautiful art. It sounds obvious but it's one of those things you don't completely grok until it happens to you. Before the artist came on board, we had a well-designed protoype, and we retained the majority of the original design (enormously to the founder's credit). But perfect execution by a talented artist makes for an incredible difference in emotional appeal. I wouldn't call this a difficulty, since the art came out so well. But it was a lesson.

I was in charge of the sound and music, and that ended up being surprisingly difficult too. You would never know without trying to do it yourself how hard it is to come up with sounds that feel natural in context and aren't distracting or annoying. I'd say we ended up with fewer sound effects than I would have liked for that reason.

The music was hard too. I had experience with rock music, but I had never written any piece of music to go along with a pre-existing theme and mood. So writing the main theme to have a French feel but with the right amount of levity took a lot of iteration. And the level background music has to be catchy enough to be fun and motivating, but not so catchy that it prevents the player from concentrating on the game. Furthermore, I'm not a great keyboard player, but I used a keyboard to record all the tracks and in order to get the timing right I had to do literally hundreds of takes and slice and dice the music pretty finely.
Hahaha good going. Interesting story, thanks for sharing.
Sorry Zuck, Entrepreneurs Deserve Better Role Models
I never claimed this happened to me, I was speaking hypothetically to the authors situation.

I have had companies ask for an idea or some sort of feature to develop for the company and refused because it was essentially a "do some work for us and we might hire you" deal.
Really? With both sitting idle on Mavericks right now, BitTorrent Sync is using 1.4% of CPU, Dropbox 0.1. Energy Impact 4.1, and 0.1 respectively. And BTSync is managing 5MB with no more than 3 peers, while Dropbox is keeping eyes over 36GB. That's pretty consistent with what I've always seen from them. Maybe the windows client is better optimized?

I wish this wasn't the case because I would love to switch to something free and distributed, as it is I disable BTSync unless I'm plugged in.
Awesome! Thank you, I was hoping someone else would have had the same idea.
Swedish to Give Authorities Realtime Access to Citizens' Phone, Mail, more
Plus, Firefox still supports Froyo and Gingerbread. Chrome only supports Ice Cream Sandwich and later. Android users with older phones have been abandoned by Google, but at least they can download a modern web browser.
The perfect vehicle for someone who has a 60 mile commute in New England during storm weather.
You're missing my point, which is that high school students are capable of this kind of thing, and it would be perfectly possible to push yet more of them along that route given the right environment and attitude.
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Here's what the police in my town are doing:
http://www.almanacnews.com/news/2013/06/04/the-unfiring-of-a...
>You don't indicate how long your "newly hired grad" was working there, whether the "SDK" was an in-house SDK or a third-party one, what the candidate's resume skills were in comparison to the kind of programming around the SDK your test was designed for, etc.

I wanted to avoid writing a novel, so I left out some of those details you're interested in. Trust me, when this "test" was first suggested, I was wary of it myself and did everything in my power to make it very achievable. That's why I considered it a joke, it was not nearly difficult enough to assess the level of seniority this candidate was claiming. This was someone with 10+ years of development experience, in the same field, experience with the language and environment we used. On paper and even on the phone, he made himself sound like the perfect candidate. In fact, before the on-site interview, I thought he had it in the bag and was excited to get some help on the team.

The SDKs in question were for a camera (to get images from the camera) and OpenCV, which is well known in imaging circles. The test was to receive a video stream from the camera (there was an example showing how to do this and I made it clear I didn't mind if he made that example his starting point) and to subtract consecutive images to create an image representing the "difference" between the two images. Not a meaningful result and one could barely call it image processing, but it would show us the candidates abilities to interact with multiple well-documented SDKs to accomplish a very simple task. If someone who claims to have years of experience with image processing can't accomplish subtracting two consecutive images and drawing the result to the screen, given all the tools to do this, there's a big problem.

Our new grad was mostly a tester and an occasional developer. He had less than a year of experience. He completed in 20 minutes without supervision.

>Instead, what I gather from your story is that your company prefers candidates who practice cowboy, shoot-from-the-hip programming instead of thoughtfully approaching a new, unfamiliar SDK and pondering how it might be used to solve problems related to the domain it was built for, then applying this thoughtful process to provide a solution to a problem. In fact, if I'm given a non-trivial SDK and told "write a program that does X using this SDK; you have one hour", my response might be something very similar to the above, directed at the person giving the "assignment" out, followed by a polite but firm indication that the company doesn't meet my requirements.

While I am fully aware that there are severe limitations to the usefulness of a test like this, in this situation, it saved us from a terrible hire (this test wasn't the only indication that he wasn't who he claimed to be).

In all honesty, you sound like a fairly thorny/difficult person to work with and in your hypothetical scenario where the test caused you spurn the position, it would have inadvertently done its job.
Hmmn that sucks then. If you could do it from home, would be so much better. It kinda defeats the purpose then if you have to goto a studio. From home you could just do it on Justin.tv or YouTube but these are for general purposes. If It was a site dedicated to live music where artists could sell merchandise, MP3 etc or collect tips, would be a winner.
"The "china explosion" of btc price won't last imho"

You might be wrong ;) This week, Yi Gang (a very high-ranked chinese government official: no less than the Director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and Deputy Governor of the People's Bank of China), said he would personally adopt a long-term perspective on the currency! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782870
In the early days of PC gaming John Carmack was a genius, and Quake 3 was his masterpiece. I guess he is still a genius, but from an outsider's perspective the advancements he has made since then don't seem to changed the world in the same way.

Graphics get prettier, but gameplay stays the same, or even gets worse because the prettier graphics require higher budgets which require lowest-common-denominator appeal to recoup.

So it's good that he is trying something truly new now, where he has a chance to make a difference again.
Carmack is going full-time and the company is doing a lot of hiring...

https://careers.oculusvr.com/jobs/

I'm not into VR, but this could be one of those "this changes everything" moments.
I actually always thought the tt.fm model was a bit broken in that respect. Only five people got to DJ, and there was next to no rotation. I enjoyed using it in a small room with friends, but in a room of any size there was a very low chance that I would ever influence the playlist.

In any case, the simple fact of the matter is that there was no way tt.fm was making money. They have to change.
High adversarial costs + increased uncertainty = ineffective regulation.

But it's not like that won't stop them from trying. Probably via a bunch of high-profile "busts" to keep the law enforcement agencies financed.
thanks. what would it take to go from "not sucking" to you wanting to recommending it to someone... what do you think is missing?
This is truly the end of an era. John's work has given me countless hours of joy and I look forward to seeing what he produces next.
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Agreed remove the member only stuff. I went to your site, clicked and found only member stuff and that I needed to signup and bounced.
If there is one area that I've never been able to understand about Web Developers is the endless pursuit of making web "win" over native, you allude to it with your comment "That's why native is kicking mobile web's ass". Who cares? use the correct tool for the job, you don't see websites modern being written in Objective C and I can't remember meeting a mobile developer who was preoccupied with beating "web" tech.

/me - Runs and ducks as all the WebDevs throw fireballs my way.
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Agreed.

He and the rest of iD seemed to have lost themselves once Bethesda came into the picture, but these types of things are almost a certainty after a big M/A event. Good luck to John!
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Obamacare Website Glitches, Healthcare Policy Cancellations, Grandfathering
In view of Medicare’s Part D rollout, Obamacare’s glitches are not new. Anticipations were wrong, since no matter how much you like something, if it’s illegal one should not expect to be able to keep it, therefore there should not be exceptions and fixes
heh so then how come when Bitcoiners are quoting the price of the ecosystem they always take the number of BTC * the highest standing OTB...

i know thats kindof a tangent but.... seriously, i'm curious
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The other scary part of this is that all three signatories are Democrats, the same party as the President. If this becomes a partisan issue - and I fear it will despite occasional work by Issa and others in the GOP House delegation - then we're just royally screwed.
they have been illegal for years. stop light and speeding cameras.
Yep.

I love both my Republican and Democratic friends (the two main political parties in the states), but I find their memory of how the political system actually works highly fluid.

I'm all for Rand Paul doing similar grandstanding. He's written letters, made speeches, and generally mucked about. Not much has changed though. He gets away with this because 1) His party is weakly held together so party discipline is light, 2) His party is out of power so they can really throw whatever mud they want and it doesn't matter, and 3)He can do his own thing and party leaders can kind of shrug and say "Well. There goes Rand!" while winking and smiling -- the message being: he's not actually doing anything.

Most of these statements are not true about the Democratic senators involved here, so they're on a shorter leash. Right now, as long as folks like raynier gush on about how great they are and the rest of the party pays little attention, there's little downside. But if this were to get anywhere near seriously damaging the administration, the party whip would politely take them aside and have a word with them about committee appointments. (That's his job). So right now, just like with Paul, I'm applauding and thinking this is great. But just like with Paul, I'm not naive enough to think this amounts to much more than the Democrats trying to take both sides of the issue at the same time.

Side note: if you'd like to have a fun history lesson, spend a day googling various senators and the letters they've sent. Now look at what they actually accomplished.
how did you get 7,000 people that fast though?

Legitimately curious
I failed to mention that the expression problem, as originally formulated by Wadler[1], is in the context of typed languages. One of the arguments in favor of untyped languages is that they are indeed more flexible that way, but at the expense of type safety. As the science of type systems advances, typed languages are slowly becoming more and more flexible (and, sadly, difficult to learn).

[1]: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/expression/expre...
No, no, no. You want to use a hash function that's going to keep it at a length already. In fact just use BCrypt, and don't do anything funky yourself.
This is so cool. I realize that it doesn't look quite that cool in person but am definitely interested in seeing about building one.

I'm now wondering if we could add LED lighting to the top of our sliding glass door by drilling holes down to the edge of the glass and installing 1W LEDs.
> The worst thing about code-challenges, is they never give feed back. We're sorry, but what you produced is not good enough. We're not going to tell you what you missed.

This is most interviews in general, and I hate that. When interviewing candidates I try to give actionable feedback to each of them, regardless of whether it results in whiny emails back (and it often does). There was only one case in recent memory where I couldn't because he'd gotten literally nothing right while bragging about how fun it was to write thousand-line functions. Eek.