skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, how would you test database software?

This reminds me of an old Google(?) interview question.

"How do you test a Calculator after dropping it?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILkT_HV9DVU&t=46m50s

For all the possible things that could go wrong in a fancy graphing calculator, what should you do to ensure it works properly?
There should be an XKCD about this...
Trade secrets from Gilad Shalit's negotiating team
if you don't need backtracking, re2 [1] should be faster.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/re2/
Podcast: What America Can't Admit About the 'Millennial' Generation
I can't find the reference now, but in the 1980's, there was a study done on honors physics students -- undergraduates IIRC -- at Johns Hopkins. They were asked questions that they had the physics training to answer, but that were not problem set or exam questions. For instance: Coil a garden hose in a spiral, then force a ping pong ball out through the hose from the center to the periphery with a blast of air; how does it move once it leaves the hose: (a) continues in spiral (b) straight out - the tangent of the spiral where the hose ends (c) bending outward, away from the spiral.

Some large percentage of the students got it wrong. Explanations: (i) students limited their "physics know-how" to the textbook context, and this was something different; (ii) textbook problem sets are, over time, edited to weed out confusing problems, even if they're valid.

I've encountered something similar in teaching basic financial present value analysis to engineers - even the students who do well in the class go back to "folk" thinking when we discuss their mortgages and credit cards.

To me, it says that the cue of the classroom, or the awareness that "this is part of Physics 101" is critical to getting some people to apply a particular frame, and without that cue, they go back to "common sense". That does explain what happened (in the blog post) in the Philosophy class, and in the phone poll, but not as well what happened when the blog author tested her physics students.
An observation I have been wondering:

Whenever a Windows phone is presented, there are pictures of phones that have more square corners than other phones, and flashy colors like yellow and orange.

It seems to be almost a requirement of a phone with the Windows software, to have colorful and squary hardware.

Is that a coincidence, or a sort of design convention or requirement?

EDIT: Oops, apparently it does not run Windows. I saw the tiles in the screenshot and flashy colors, so thought it was Windows phone... Sorry...
SpaceX prepares for milestone SES-8 launch, 2nd attempt today at 5:39pm EST
This is my personal 2013 activity report for the Thanksgiving occasion.

Spoiler - it's mostly failures, but with a glimmer of hope! :)
I never had any of these problems, nor does anyone I know have them. My and everyone's applications at Mt.Gox and Bitstamp and elsewhere have always been accepted, as far as I know. And there are of course alternatives like Localbitcoins or in the Netherlands you can pay using iDeal (e.g. at bitonic.nl) which is extremely easy. A 5 minute deal the first time around. I also never encountered any trouble buying Bitcoin simply for being European. So far I actually thought the people in the US would be having a harder time with the MtGox trouble.
Canada's top spy won't answer questions about G20 surveillance
"That people should be forced into wage slavery to keep them from becoming lazy or alcoholic or drug addicts."

No. People should be forced to do something useful, because the goods don't come out of the blue. This is not the same as "wage slavery".
Bot or Not: Hacker News
Wow, that is a long (if sometimes repetitive) list! Hopefully Richard had help putting that list together. I have two general comments:

1. I am surprised how many non tech Saavy people I talk with are starting to understand privacy issues.

2. I had dinner last night with some Silicon Valley residents who were talking about what a horrible investment Facebook would be long term. New things will replace Facebook, and they will eventually have fewer active users.

A bit off topic, but advice I like to give people is to use one specific web browser for social media connected sites like Facebook, GMail + Google+, Twitter, etc. and another web browser with locked down security for all other browsing. This is easy to do, lets people enjoy the social media stuff if they like, and still maintain some degree of privacy.
It's issued by StartSSL and is valid on all the browsers I have tried the site on. Can you tell me what browser (and version) are you using?
Just threw something together for this: http://botornot.nathan.ca/
The Wheel of Hardware Reincarnation
Got this one:

>No, I still don't want to download your bullshit app

Thinking it was too good to not already be a headline, I searched and found this:

>No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app

Pure gold.
> 2) lots of homeless people
> 3) urine smell every where

As a recent visitor to your city, the large number of people sleeping rough was a shock. I am from a small social-liberal democracy though, so we typically have less homelessness in general, but yeah, it was confronting.

Down by the ferry terminal (on the Embarcadero I think?) there was two homeless people sleeping under a tarpaulin at the base of a flagpole proudly bearing the American flag. The juxtaposition was so ironic that I wonder if they were part-time performance artists when they weren't sleeping outdoors.

How do Americans reconcile the homeless to their place as the wealthiest nation?
Conversely, Why GNU grep is slow (and how to make it not-slow): http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/12/08/2000x-performance...
>Is my liquidity assumption mistaken?

You're absolute (and obviously) correct about Bitcoin's volatility, but you're mistaken about its liquidity.

Bitcoin is quite liquid if you're in the U.S. and many other countries around the world. The only delay is the time required by the legacy banking system to wire or ACH funds in/out of your exchange account.
Jolla means "light boat" in Finnish. I guess it's a tongue in cheek for the Elop's burning platform speech, where Jolla is the light boat getting a away from it.

(Agree that for global products, people should prefer names that are easier to pronounce)
> Limousine NIMBY Leftism

Are you able to elaborate on this one?
Still a private API. I can imagine finding an unusual account like mine is quite simple and wouldn't need automating.
He's a graphic designer first and foremost, not a programmer. His website seems like the product of a very ambitious person.
UPDATE: See this: http://piratepad.net/JollaSoftwareState
I don't follow the kernel discussions, but since scheduling algorithms always create winners and losers, you can imagine why there'd be resistance to change.
Expanding the Cloud: Enabling Globally Distributed Applications
RMS is an atheist
Looks like I found my weekend project:

"Show HN: Game where you write Python robots to fight crime"
At least at the Washington border, there are large signs telling you to turn off your engine while in line. Presumably this is for environmental reasons, but there maybe additional benefits.
Listening devices in people's cars is what I think is taking it too far. I am from from calling anything conspiratorial.
It's pronounced Yolla. Like they say it in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64ja7WBHU8
God damn there are some stoopit niggers, fighting God.

Fucken hilarious -- niggers picking a fight with God.

God says...
C:\TAD\Text\Words\AUGUST.TXT

west in the same
way.

What then takes place in the soul, when it is more delighted at
finding or recovering the things it loves, than if it had ever had
them? yea, and other things witness hereunto; and all things are
full of witnesses, crying out, "So is it." The conquering commander
triumpheth; yet had he not conquered unless he had fought; and the
more peril there was in the battle, so much the more joy is there in
the triumph. The storm tosses the sailors, threatens shipwreck; all
wax pale
It's always a balance between the value you get out of FB vs your privacy concerns. For most people, they value the features of FB (e.g. photo tagging) more than they value their own privacy, so they continue to share and use FB. For Stallman obviously the opposite is true.
I feel like he could reduce the crazy vibe by hiring a web designer to overhaul this page. Well-designed crazy usually looks a little more sane than poorly designed crazy.
41 People This Startup CEO is Thankful For
This is awesome because it takes the webcam's story full circle. This is why the webcam was invented (kinda): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
> What's the worst that can happen

Someone else might post something (wrong) that gets you in trouble because it's taken seriously.
Why You Should Hustle Every Day (And How Jerry Seinfeld Did it)
I don't know if this was just a random comment or if you missed that this phone does not run windows? :)
I guess I should've said "of Jewish ancestry".
This is not a windows phone. It uses SailfishOS[0] which is basically a continuation of Maemo/Meego.

[0] https://sailfishos.org/
Well, it becomes simpler if we note that:

Most reasonably informed people should agree that the [software] world is a better place because rms is in it. And not only for gcc, emacs, etc.

The rest is just a question of how many years before today he is, this time. (And yes, sometimes the world he is years before isn't our planet. But his hit statistics isn't bad.)
The thing is that employers are looking for more than just fitting requirements - they are also being influenced by subjectives (how you act, look etc) and even by pure luck. Their excuse may be that you are not qualified, but it is just as likely in my opinion that it could have been a change in market conditions, or their opinion of you as a person, or even the job description may have slightly changed during the process. You can always ask for specifics.

A long time ago I used to work in recruitment, and the two biggest things I learnt was that the requirements mean almost nothing, and that apart from entry level jobs (grad positions), how you frame your experience to what they are looking for is the most important part of applying.

I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties, but the fact you passed i) the resume screen, ii) multiple technical tests and iii) some interviews is a good sign - I would be positive and just look for another company that feels you fit better.
I'm not trying to minimize your pain, nor am I trying to defend the company in question. However, in my experience, the probability of being given an honest answer for why you didn't get the job is almost zero.

Looking for a job is an all around horrible experience and flippant answers that in no way match your interview experience make the process all that much worse. If you need someone to talk to, I've been exactly where you are and my email address is on my profile. I don't know if I can be of much help, but I'd be glad to commiserate with you. Or, alternately, if by some stroke of luck, you're located somewhere near me, the first few rounds are on me.
Hints for computer system design (1983)
What if goods are produced by automation and where we cannot automate we have people that want to work. What kind of task would you give to all the other people?

Edit: I am alluding to the fact that we are way past full employment.
Getting a little bored of RMS now. He's becoming increasingly like chicken little rather that the boy that tells the emperor he's naked.
What scams have you ever heard of that made it hard to get your money into them?

The reason it's a pain to get into Bitcoin is because of all the regulations that the "shady" exchanges are complying with (and again, how many "shady" operations do you know that comply with government regulations?).

By the way, I do agree that it can be inconvenient to get everything set up initially in an exchange like Coinbase or Bitstamp, but no more challenging than establishing a checking account at a local bank. Both are equally inconvenient to set up now due to onerous government regulation.
What do you mean by"open allocation"?
Amos here from Uber. First of all, this was a very cool app Will. I love your passion for technology and your interest in Uber. For some pretty obvious reasons (many of which are mentioned in the comments), we didn't have a choice to but to suspend your account. That said, there's no hard feelings. We've re-activated your account and would love to chat with you about an internship this summer. I hope you continue creating and exploring!
> 3. Finally, show me that unicorn high-level language with strong, automatically provable invariants and one piece of widely used, reliable software that was written in it.

Not implying that this is true now, but this is the specific goal of Rust, with Servo.
Web designers aren't free software......
Here is a related question that has bothered me for some time: in Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865), he writes the travelers as only achieving weightlessness for a small moment, at just the point where the moon's gravity exactly cancels out the earths gravity.

This makes an intuitive kind of sense: you would gradually lose weight as you get farther from earth, then after a moment of weightlessness gradually 'gain' weight as you approach the moon.

Obviously this is wrong, but why?
The best thing about fecesbook is the UX. They have done such a great job even illiterate people can use it.

Its a great tool to get UX ideas.

Old timers will remember bbs, irc. And after Okrut was created, many people left the old services. Now, many of them migrated to fecesbook.

That same people also are not interested in NSA or privacy. They just want to make noise, search and be found by other people like them.
Don't forget "who can trust anyone with that hair?"
The Earth and the Sun both revolve around a separate point that is roughly in between them (ignoring pesky other planets). However this additional point in space happens to be located inside of the sun, so unless you are going to throw in non-inertial reference frames for some unstated reason, "the earth revolves around the sun" is rather unambiguously the 'correct' answer.
Honestly I think 'you' computer programmers love useless challenges too much. Why can't you adopt lessons from Q?

If it isn't easy to get some languages working with Unicode properly then fix the languages and leave Unicode alone. Remove all the language characteristics that makes working with Unicode difficult. If Unicode will not go to the language then the language must go to Unicode, or opt out of the computer era, or die!!

KISS!!
Sure. New York and San Francisco have a lot of people that are total assholes to everyone (especially their subordinates and colleagues at work) but consider it OK because, after all, they're Democrats. They're not "those people" who overtly espouse economic inequality; they're couth enough to covertly support it. They also tend to be the people who (a) keep housing prices high in places like San Francisco and New York by pushing NIMBY regulations that block housing deveopment, and (b) choose not to vaccinate their kids on pseudoscientific grounds and are singularly responsible for the resurgence of third-world childhood diseases in places like the Bay Area. It's all OK, though, if you're working on a "world changing product" and promise God to "help Africa" (price discriminate with said product) once you've made it to the top.

You know how potheads lose motivation because when you're high, even goofy stuff feels like real accomplishment, and some eventually lose that need to experience substantial achievement? That's why limousine liberals are poisonous. They and their acolytes and their inefficient nonprofits (often with top executives making $350k on a 10-to-3 workday) give a bunch of people the satisfaction that comes from helping people-- the feeling of having done something-- without actually helping people much.

We need real liberalism and real environmental protection and a real social safety net, not fuckheads using phony environmental arguments to push NIMBY policies that keep their houses overvalued.
How to Build a Niche Site That Brings in at Least $500/Month
This page [1] nicely demonstrates differences between KMP and BM.

[1]: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/best-ideas/string-searc...
I don't know. Most of the stuff on the page is factually correct, although a number of entries are sensationalized. If it's crazy, I'd argue it's 2nd-amendment-advocate-crazy, not timecube-crazy.
Is there a web framework for Clojure similar to Play for Scala?
The Lean Hardware Startup: Financing
Sounds like a poor choice of wording from ooyala. You are clearly qualified for this position on a technical level, but there are a multitude of other things you are evaluated on for most positions. Perhaps you didn't meet their requirements in one of these non-technical areas. If this was the case, they would have been better off using the "not a fit" wording or something similar.
I think they wanted to go pretty low-end with their first device and also be forward thinking about it, because that resolution is half of 1080p.
Wow. Impressive!

But what bugs me about sqlite is

a) suppressing errors giving surprising results (hint: try opening a misspelt database file)

b) "syntax error near 'as'": almost impossible to find errors in longer sql statements (are other engines better, giving line numbers?)

c) no full outer join https://www.sqlite.org/omitted.html which can be worked around by writing about the double code, thus giving chance for twice as much errors

I really love the simplicity of using it, though!
General advice: the reason given for a rejection is almost never the real reason.
> hulu.com

> pandora.com

That seems superfluous.
>I agree, and I'll be hugely surprised if some enterprising individual doesn't solve the friction soon.

Well, unfortunately, it's not a lack of innovation. It's government regulations. Hundreds of people are capable of setting up and marketing quick and easy ways to buy/sell Bitcoins, but they can't do it without risking jail time for breaking money transmission laws.

Entrepreneurs are eager to take risks, but not the kind of risk that can land you in prison.
Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
Disclaimer: I work for Disconnect

https://disconnect.me/ is designed to allow people to protect themselves from being spied on across the internet by Facebook, Google, et al without the inconvenience of using a separate browser or similar methods.

Anecdotally, I've also experienced a growth in non-techie interest in online privacy - in the pre Snowden era, I would have to explain myself and justify what I do every time I was asked where I worked. Nowadays, I get asked for a download link.
2 Teens Arrested After Using Facebook To Set Up An Armed Robbery
Here's my top10 as of now:

- Ask HN: What's the best place to aim on a Porn Website
- The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Kindle
- John Resig's ‘Secrets of the HBGary hack
- Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for SOPA.
- A new way of writing unmaintainable code.
- Redesigning the country of Liechtenstein for $70,000 a night with Airbnb
- Build a house for $5
- Iranian Web Programmer’s Death Sentence to Be Successful
- Show HN: Pick a number from 1 to 1000 in C
- Greplin (YC W10) open sources key piece of shit startup I hate to love
Is that just this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282
Deep-sea bottom trawling [facts & petition]
They do, OP's rate is now limited to zero.
I think you might be getting bored of him because society has accepted that the emperor is naked and doesn't care.
Holiday Hangover Helper
Worst. Comet of the Century. Ever.
Israeli start-up Silentium puts 'silence in a chip'
By even going to the site, you are giving them data.
They have your IP address, the unique attributes of your browser, etc. etc.

Once they figure out the profile is fake, they list you in the "trouble maker" category and step up monitoring that IP/browser combination until they know who you are, then they link that with everything they have on the real you (bank account, property, job, etc.)

Eventually, one day, you're trying to board a plane and you get denied because you've been known to disseminate "false or misleading information".

Playing their game validates it. Just don't play.
I think he has thoughts along the lines of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Not really related, more like a curiosity: "jola" is (give or take) the cheap Portuguese word for beer.
I think I may have gotten the best one, on my second try:

"Zynga Shuts Down LucasArts"
This makes me curious of his thought on Google+
9) Clouds of second-hand drug smoke. And I don't mean cigarettes.
Sure, there may be times when you may have very good reasons for screwing up the architecture of your application, and there will be times when you need to restructure existing code. But this should be the exception, not the norm.

I'd argue that OOP, particularly OOP involving mutable state, exacerbates the problem immensely. It's extremely difficult to build robust systems in languages that have few constraints and little emphasis on isolating functionality.
No where did I suggest that mining bitcoin was for the general public. What I was pointing out was that the generalization of the article ("it's hard for me, so it must be hard for everybody") was incorrect and if the author had framed the article better then it would have made a much more valid point.

I totally agree that exchanging cash for bitcoin should be no different to exchanging cash for another currency, but given bitcoins decentralized nature and the fact that none of the major currency exchange companies haven't had the balls to do this means unless you change the regulation so that new companies can move into the space then not much is going to change.
This should amuse you a bit.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Lost an stupidly large amount of time laughing so hard I cried. Some of the best:

Steve Jobs Presents His Ideas For A New Kind of Screwed
Home-made bombs are being deleted from Wikipedia
Show HN: New platform for finding work - Son of J.R.R. Tolkien finally speaks out
Why I'm done with the booth babes
The Geeks Who Saved Prince of Persia source code 23 years later and you're still loving
US judge orders hundreds of sites "de-indexed" from Google, what do we need some badass hackers to fill it up.
Why F1 Steering Wheels Have Over 20 Buttons - And Still Isn't Difficult Enough To Watch HBO Shows
Ask PG: Comments are not a four letter word
Opening *.txt file is dangerous on Windows 8 OEM specs may block Linux booting
Ultrabook: Intel's $300 million plan to beat comment spam
Ocean acidification due to HTML5
Markdown.css – make HTML look like Microsoft made their own company
Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a return of the universe
Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
Parsley.js: never write a single JavaScript line to validate 50 cancer studies
L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists found guilty of aiding the enemy, but convicted of multiple other counts
The New iPad's Screen Under the hood of Windows to test older versions of VLC
How Carrots Became the new Opus audio format
Please learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
An analysis of an unknown compression format
Why must you laugh at you, then they laugh at my desk
Fastest-growing YC S11 startup (3M monthly uniques) YC S11 startup (3M monthly uniques) YC S11 startup looking for people to talk to restaurants.
Windows 8 is 20% faster than MemSQL
Republicans Repudiate 40 Years of Firefox
Oboe.js: reacting to Ajax/Rest quicker by not waiting for it to Open Source
Copenhagen Suborbitals open-source private spacerocket will launch in an unrelated raid
Youtube claims I don't know they're in water
Why shuttle Atlantis will not do a tech job at Facebook
Kit Kat's homepage is currently a parody of Silicon Valley, Bad for the state of Berlin