skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, there are plenty of local maxima, but this is a pretty nice look at the global picture - http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/12/19/dvcs-and-git-2013/ - and git definitely won the mindshare war by those numbers.
I guess that would be one motivation. But wouldn't they just do the searches in their present (our future) before travelling back to 2001?

And if they did prevent 9/11 then nobody would connect the searches anyway, because there'd be nothing to associate them.
I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. [1] I usually ask for a couple of major commas rules. Sometimes for semi-colon rules or for a description of passive voice. Chances are good that anyone who is zero for three isn't very good.

A lot of writers and would-be writers also have blogs; it only takes one to three paragraphs to figure out who can sling a coherent sentence and who can't.

Like FizzBuzz, being able to sling a coherent sentence doesn't mean that one can write a coherent 50-page document, but those who can't write a coherent sentence can't write a coherent 50-page document.

[1] Try http://blog.seliger.com if you're curious.
How often do you get people who apply but cannot pass that test? I always felt that CS gets a pretty large influx of people who are very fresh to programming (as isn't everyone!) but I would have thought a math fizz buzz would need to be harder to get signal.
Not so sure. According to Facebook I'm 6 years younger than I am, I live in Monaco and studied rocket science at Harvard. Most of my friends have similar distortions, and when the subject comes up we're surprised when someone tells us their profile uses real data.

I know that my experience is hardly indicative of anything, but I'd like to believe that it's happening more and more.
And Xorg, and Samba, and Wine, and a bunch of other projects. In retrospect, people overestimate github's impact, I think. "Fast enough for big projects like the kernel" was a big deal.
Not sysadmin specifically, but when I was working as a computer technician, questions we would ask to scope out the skills of people were along the lines of:

Q: "Something you have no experience with has broken and won't do a basic function, how will you go about fixing it?"
A: Research, ask someone else etc.

Q: "X is missing their password for a system we have no admin rights on. How are you going to fix this?"
A: Recovery Tools. Format device and set it up again. Use JS/Developer tools to get it in plain text from the browser.
There's a difference between marketing and product design. A marketer should know how to get qualified leads for lowest cost to your app, and then it's your product manager who should worry about making the best impression with new users.
I'm entirely ignorant of bzr, but I've got to say that this surprises me. We use svn, which certainly works well with patch.
A Web Developer's New Year's Resolutions
Here's a couple:

Grep a current running process.

Grep x file and copy it.

You'd be surprised how many "Sys Admins" I've interviewed who can't do basic things.
Do you have any example problem to share? I've taken a numerical analysis class and this interview-like questions are appealing.
I'm a software developer, but the code I work does a lot of DB access. I always ask a "two joins and an aggregate question."

Given three tables:

authors books sales
---------- ---------- ----------
id id id
name author_id book_id
title date
price

find the total sales by author in November 2013. The result set should have two columns: author's name and their total sales.
I would agree with the op here. SVD in particular is so fundamental to the idea of data analysis I couldn't imagine talking to someone who even flinched at hearing it. Most other things fit at roughly the same level in my mind.

I feel like the mechanics of test selection biases against people who've specialized in Bayesian stuff—which might be very interesting! It's definitely a make-or-break kind of thing as to whether you can correctly formulate all the various moving parts and relate them correctly.
Somebody seems to lack an appreciation for satire. Probably a B-School grad.
Anyone else deleted all of them?
Visualizing MCMC with PyMC and Matplotlib
You can never really know how the end result is going to appear to your users/readers because everyone has different types of monitors, resolutions, layouts. For example, I have 4 monitors at work that have all been rotated 90 degrees from the "norm" - in other words they're all in portrait mode. My browser window dimensions are thus longer than it is wide - which I think is not what most web developers expect. Furthermore, I really do enjoy small fonts and much prefer to see as much of a site on 1 page as possible. I had to zoom out of that page just to be able to read it comfortably without scrolling too much.
The Fifth problem: Math and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union
IMO different language versions of a site should not be based on TLD, but rather a subdomain: us.apple.com, ru.apple.com
>Now? It's A Big Deal to a lot of younger developers. It is almost totemic. If it's not Git and (ideally) Github then.. it isn't worth hacking on?

Do you really want those guys on your project?
Not to mention his insistence on GNU Hurd being based on Mach, which pretty much ended up killing the project.
I'm not a mathematician, but it looks to me like we know E(x,z) is false. The transitive property gives us

E(x,y) & E(y,z) => E(x,z)

but since we know !E(y,z), we can infer !E(x,z).

(I'm not a logician, either, so I hope you'll excuse what may be imprecise phrasing on my part.)
> No, it's a list of numbers:

Well, yes. Python chooses the decimal representation by default. So? It could be hex or octal and still be a byte.

My example was merely meant to be illustrative and not an example of real code. The byte object is simply not a str; so I don't understand where this frustration with them not being str is coming from. If you use the unicode objects in Python 3 you get the same API as before. The difference is now you can't rely on Python implicitly converting up ASCII byte strings to unicode objects and have to explicitly encode/decode from one to the other. It removes a lot of subtle encoding bugs.

Perhaps it's just that encoding is tricky for developers who never learned it in the first place when they started learning the string APIs in popular dynamic languages? I don't know. It makes a lot of sense to me since I've spent years fixing Python 2 code-bases that got unicode wrong.
Hey, I'm the author here. My web host is having some problems right now, and I'd always intended to post a link to the demo instead, so I've put up a Cloudflare redirect straight to the demo.
Article assumes that the hyperloop can/would follow existing highways. Considering the cost of diverting traffic during construction, it seems unlikely you could build it for anything close to the advertised $6 billion while following existing highways.

Also, the structure would need to be tall (or short) enough to bypass highway bridges and overpasses...
Information security. Our most basic interview demonstration question at my job is to hand the candidate a couple pages of tcpdump output and ask them to describe what was going on.

We don't use tcpdump all that often as we have more advanced tools, but if you can't understand a pretty raw representation of network traffic, you're probably not qualified to administer those advanced tools.
I've been a contract sysadmin for a long time. In a former "life" part of my work was doing phone screens and job interviews for contract sysadmin candidates.

If a candidate's answer to a nonspecific troubleshooting scenario didn't begin with (or contain very close to the beginning of the answer) "look at the logs" I'd bump them. Anybody whose problem-solving methodology doesn't including gathering pertinent data early in the process isn't somebody I want "solving" problems for me.
I love this comment; it so beautifully and unintentionally proves the OPs point. It's like the perfect comment to represent Hacker News.

In an article about Can Do vs Can't Do culture, it piggybacks on an insightful top comment that takes an optimistic approach and provides the kind of cynical pessimism and tries to shoot down the Can Do nature of the OP's comment. But the best part of it, the most beautiful part, is that it places the blame on the cause of all problems for hackers: the manager. Literally, managers are the only reason the world isn't amazing, they're the ones that shoot down all my brilliant ideas.
Replacing MyOpenID
It's also fun to imagine someone 50 years from now looking back on us. I wonder which of our societal trends will survive 50 years? It's an interesting game to try to figure out which of our current beliefs are crazy even though no one presently thinks so.

I think our current focus and bias will drive much of it. A lot of our worldview is apps, internet, computers and mobile devices. Most predictions will extrapolate this, perhaps with Moore's law. We'll probably miss the 1 or 2 huge leaps that will redefine society.
Bzr certainly isn't dead.

git has won the mindshare war for mainstream developers, but I've found it to be a useful FOSS alternative for developers forced to use a Windows environment [for business-related reasons, don't laugh..it pays the bills]. Their UI is a bit more intuitive than git's for new users.

Now, if you're a hardcore Linux-stack career dev...get onto git ASAP... but for lesser folks...bzr works just fine...
They have the Venue 11 pro for that: http://www.engadget.com/products/dell/venue/11-pro/
I Was Quite Surprised by Some Things on This LifeSpan Treadmill Desk
InkMark - A Simple and Powerful Markdown Editor for iPad
Really? Apart from the odd few who use "Full time mummy" as their job description, everyone I know uses real information.
It looks to me like what happens is exactly what you'd expect, i.e., you end up with a function defined under the name "func", just as you would with any other function name. Is there something I'm missing?
Years ago I've been asked: There is a file named "-foo", how do you delete it?
One of the reasons I chose GNU Emacs over XEmacs was a feeling that GNU Emacs will be maintained, even advanced, for as long as RMS has the strength to type. It's his baby.

(There were other reasons, the big one being momentum. XEmacs didn't run on the platform I was on for a long time, so it would have been a switch.)
Well if you're really interested in time travel fiction, nothing beats Doctor Who.
The future of occupational hunting
Ludophile I would think of as a (pretentious) board gamer rather than videogamer.
I'd rather not have link-bait titles as I'm less likely to click those.
I've seen a good one -- actually got asked it in a phone screen I did last year:

"How would you recursively delete all files with extension 'mp3' in a given directory tree?"

The (simplest) correct answer (I know) is

find /path/to/wherever -name "*.mp3" -exec rm -fv {} \;

Maybe that's more of a pons asinorum, I suppose, but then isn't a pons asinorum precisely what a fizzbuzz question is meant to be?
Does it matter if you call your self gamer or not?
California More Than Doubles Solar Power Market In 2013
SVO?
Being from the enterprise world I concur.

The short-term advancement I am looking forward is having my ipad mini and macbook air be a single core that can be docked a la Atrix and also become a full blown desktop on a dock a la surface 2 with gaming capabilities. Having it on a phone-size would be the next step but the 7 inch screen is so much better for reading.
This is really a false dichotomy. Many apps can market themselves by 'baking in' sharing, and I don't mean just a 'tweet/like/pin' button on every other page.

These two functions are not separate.
Any one else notice the self-justification of the comments?

> Cherrypicking. A great majority of startups fail and their ideas are proven as unworkable or impractical, so it is not unreasonable to summarily dismiss most of them.

Clearly read the article but is trying to justify his own negativity in the past and undoubtedly.

>Would love to see a post on how you define "great" in this context, Ben.

Who the fck, address someone they don't know by their first name like that?? Ending the statement with his name also seems a bit passive aggressive.

Enlightening check out the comments and see how many people actually respond to the article. All too often when reading articles or listening to other people, instead of listening or understanding, the goal is: 'let me read until I think think of something I can say'. This really hurts that person and just isolates people in their own point of view

(note this post could be ironic. Its not though, the article was freakin awesome! I will try to change my mindset towards a more positive one after reading and rethink what it means to innovate)
I wonder about the predictability of this. There are 100s of millions of sharks out there. (Maybe more?) How much can the location of 300 predict? Is it that sharks travel in packs, so where there is one, there is many?

To the extent that this moves us away from viewing sharks as monsters, it will be useful.

We kill 100s of thousands of them (maybe even millions?) for every one of us that they get, despite their natural advantage in water. Killing them is a shame.
When I saw this change in the beta builds of Mavericks I submitted a bug report since the ability to change the power button's behavior was also removed from `pmset`. They responded with a "this was intentional." This is the biggest thing that angers me about the way Apple handles software changes. This could have been switched as the default, but having to go to this much trouble to change it back to the functionality the button has had for years is just ridiculous.
Pretty interesting, even though after a minute, you realize the article can be summed up as, "exponential growth is exponential".
On/off producer + audio engineer. A good discriminator might be "it's squaring out; what do you do?". A good answer would lead to an argument about the compression war.
I was a mathematician, and now work in finance (systematic trading). I've found a reasonable negative filter is

A jar has 1000 coins, of which 999 are fair and 1 is double
headed. Pick a coin at random, and toss it 10 times. Given
that you see 10 heads, what is the probability that the next
toss of that coin is also a head?

That tests their ability to turn a problem into mathematics, and some very basic conditional probability. Another common question (that I don't use myself) is to ask what happens to bond prices if interest rates go up.
Yes, I'm sure a customer market of around a billion (iOS) and hundreds of millions (OS X) is because of "fanboys"? Perhaps also throw "reality distortion field" and/or fad in for good measure.

Because, clearly, the other possibility, that a specific PC company just makes better products in areas that tons of consumers value is clearly absurd, right?
For news reporters, there's the AP Style test, which gives you text/headlines that you have to translate to the AP style, which is its own kind of grammar (e.g. for state abbreviations, Calif. instead of CA; always use [numerical-age]-[old] in describing ages: 15-year-old). It's a test more geared toward editors though.

In terms of reporting...there's no litmus test for how well you can report an event. The education beat, however, is pretty common for new reporters (it was my first), which is ironic considering how ridiculously complicated education is as a topic (same kind of financial/budgetary documents as any business, government bureaucracy, board politics, and of course, dealing with children)
Does this make the issue a critique of RMS's management style, or of the FSF licensing that is unable to back out of a failed project?
Subject Verb Object.
"You need shell access to a remote system using ssh. What file would email to the admin to grant you access using ssh?"

You'd be surprised of how many supposed Linux admins have no idea how to setup ssh logins, which says a lot about the depth of their experience.
I'm trying to see how changing the name will in any way change the culture. You can call gamers whatever you want. You might even be able to convince them to use a different word. But they'll still misuse the "crouch" command.
Marijuana tourism already beginning in Colorado
Microsoft released a git plugin for VS.
Here is Dweck's book. Have heard great things about it, but still sitting in my inbox.

http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/...
They were of course found the first time the study ran but the time travelers just kept going back in time and cleaning up traces of themselves until the tests stopped finding the evidence.
Marketing takes all sorts - there are plenty of people who do a great job by just doing SEO, or by just buying adwords, etc.
Looks like this will hopefully be installable via Homebrew soon: https://github.com/binchewer/power_fixer/pull/3
The best question I have is "Describe the power on of a RHEL x86 system in as much detail as possible from beginning to end, each step of what happens". It is open ended but can tell you a lot. You can get very fine grained, down to the hardware signals which take place before FFFF0000 is executed.
One of my several life principles is that the only real sin one can commit is not utilizing the full potential of the resources one was granted. Squandering a gift or privilege or resource is the only true failure in life, whether it is an inheritance or simply time.
This notion is difficult to engender in a world of standardized tests and public education, where, the same bars are set at the same height for all students. If clearing a 5' high bar earns an A, what is the reward for clearing 6'? This implies a homogeneous intelligence that does not exist, and the output is akin to the blandness of mass-produced foods. Yes, honors and advanced placement courses and special education are injected into the curriculum, but do not adequately address the greatly varied minds that pass through.
Internet education has the opportunity to 'mass-customize' education and tailor the challenge of learning to individual minds. I see this as greatly promising. There are many efforts from Khan Academy to open lecture series' sponsored by top schools. But in my community, the learning behavior of high school students is primarily aligned with entrance to a top university, a conforming effect (one very high bar for all) that moves in the opposite direction to the point that learning has far more to do with disappointment than achievement.
So where do we stand? Can in-person plus Internet education be mass-customized on a public school scale to better effect and if so, what is the path?
I tried it on my desktop for a few weeks but I just couldn't handle it. It was really a terrible experience for me. I could see how it would work on tablets though. I went back to Windows 7 and probably won't upgrade again.
I love "tweet about us and we'll give you an extra month for free"!
Another article of the blog is about the modelisation of the Hyperloop vehicule (+environment): http://blogs.mathworks.com/seth/2013/11/07/hyperloop-model-a...
It can be read as an introduction to Model Based Design. It shows for instance the interest of handling variants to test either different hardware concepts or different level of representativity.
Would the answer of the inverse question be interesting? Taking our successful landing page, how would you reduce downloads?
nothing? What answer are you looking for here? either a) there's something I'm totally missing or b) this is a really silly "trick" question.
For a data scientist I ask "what's a p-value?" Both Junior and senior candidates often get this wrong. The only difference is that senior people bristle at such a simple question before also getting it wrong.
By "total sales", do you mean number sold or revenue?
This is pretty much flamebait, but I'll chime in anyway.

I'm all for every sexual orientation, but if someone makes a tame joke about transgenders, who the f * * k cares? We make jokes about straight people all the time. My friends who are gay make jokes about gay people. Stop treating everything like its holy ground, and learn to laugh at a joke, whether or not it targets your minority or majority class. Do you really want to live in a perfectly politically correct world where nobody can make a joke about anything because they might offend somebody? As George Carlin said:

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."

That said, dissociating yourself with gamers because many of them have a juvenile sense of humor is kind of silly. It is like saying "I am going to stop calling myself a movie watcher because half of all movie watchers like straight male-oriented action movies."

Edit: Uh oh, hit the beehive. To clarify, there is a very clear difference between hatred and joking, most people can make the distinction. I understand the trauma that a lot of orientations go through (I have watched my friend's parents disown him for being gay and read the countless stories of people being murdered for being whatever orientation). Nonetheless, I do not believe at all in censorship and I never will. I do believe in being polite and respecting others. Humor is a way of bridging gaps, hatred or making fun of somebody cruelly is a different beast.
Shown HN: Online Markdown Code Editor
My Math "FizzBuzz" question is: prove Fermat's Little Theorem and Wilson's Theorem. Even those with very rudimentary understanding of modular arithmetic (coming from non-math backgrounds) can prove both with some pointers (obviously the process is interactive)
It's great, although I only ever use the kickstand on a desk. The most frustrating things with the Pro 2? The continuous oscillation between needing the keyboard attached and needing to take it off again, which is difficult with one hand. Also while the type keyboard is excellent in use, my two-year old managed to pry a key loose in seconds. Said key is lost in the meantime.

Other than that it's the best non-desktop device I've ever owned.
There wasn't a demand for Git repos any more than there was a demand for Hg repos. For instance, open source projects moving away from SVN seemed to be pretty evenly distributed between Git and Hg.

The real demand was for a way to publish code and collaborate, and GitHub provided a truly innovative approach (the social aspects, encouraging forking and pull requests) that was miles better than the alternatives (SourceForge was already in decline, Google Code didn't have the social/forking/pull request aspects). I think they would have been successful with any distributed VCS. I always preferred Git, so I'm happy they chose Git, but I think that if they had chosen Hg, we'd be talking about how Hg won the popularity war instead of Git.
Technical support analyst in the online advertising biz.

Our Fizzbuzz equivalent would be to mess with some HTML / JS and ask the interviewee to spot what's the issue.
Or playing with a spreadsheet software to highlight stuff (pivot table, filters, duplicates, whatnot).
To the extent that svn works with patch, so does bzr, and so does git.

What I'm talking about is lossless integration with entire patch sets in the form that git does it with format-patch, send-email and am.
Or maybe Emacs can't run in a home machine of 1990

Remember? Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping