skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"but the general consensus is that those 'B' candidates can't survive the break-neck pace of innovation and that they'd generally not be able to match up, let alone keep up with other performers and do the work that's expected of them exceptionally well. Since promotions are merit-based, and due to the stack-ranking employed by Amazon to rank the enggs, things only get diff for 'B' candidates."

This is probably completely wrong , unless all of your B candidates are being hired at very low levels only, and none of them ever get to participate in the promotion process.

Additionally, most tech companies are really bad at dealing with low performers in general (they tend to stay around too long).

In any case, my sources are completely empirical, having managed large numbers of people at a number of tech companies (and thus watching things like what happens to B candidates during cross-organization score calibrations, etc), as well as mentoring and helping managers with some of these issues.

I'd love to be wrong, but I have yet to see a company where the hiring of B candidates did not have significantly more impact that was expected.
People are just more and more not growing out of adolescence, I think.
I can see why you're linking credit unions with the non profit thing, but I think the non profit thing is there, for me at least, as more of a statement to show aims, so not nessecarily the same reason why a credit union is non profit. My experience with CU's here is that they are even worse than banks (almost impossible to withdraw, no current accounts, no atms, rarely open) is that similar in the US?
As other people mentioned, most of what you described is offered through credit unions. But most credit unions are small and don't have the capacity to offer great online/mobile experiences. I would be interested to see a project to open source a solution for credit unions to customize and use to offer a better user experience.
I worked for 5 years at Amazon, and bar raisers were carefully selected for their ability to ask questions that probed much more deeply than this. I'm shocked that such a trivial detail would be used to disqualify someone by a bar raiser, and guess that it's more the result of faulty reporting than faulty interviewing. Not that mistakes aren't made (what interview process is perfect?), but this is hardly typical.
To address the dilly dally issue you would more than likely have to only give the transitional aid to someone involved in Science, Engineering, and Math fields, much like current STEM¹ scholarships.

¹https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5257
It doesn't work that way. The whole idea of the Bar Raiser (this should be evident from the name) is that we want to raise the expectations for a particular level or job position over time. The goal is to keep improving the quality of our hires at a given level over time.
Ah hah! I actually think that HiDPI mode and retina mode are the same thing, but the issue you're getting at is that OS X doesn't yet have drivers for external 4K monitors that support HiDPI mode.[1]

Here's what's going on: on a retina MBP, the screen basically always runs in HiDPI mode. That means everything is rendered twice as large as it should be, for a screen twice as large as the virtual resolution you want, and then scaled down to native resolution. Icons that would be 32px are 64px, fonts that would be 12pt are 24pt, etc., and then they're shrunk down to their proper size.

This is really cool because it lets us run at _any_ resolution between 1x and 2x with minimal loss of quality, even though apps are only coded to run at one of the two extremes.

So, say I have a 2880x1800px screen on my rMBP, but I want a virtual extra-sharp 1920x1200px screen. I render the screen twice the size I want it (3840x2400) in HiDPI mode where everything is twice as large as it should be, and then I scale it _down_ in the graphics card to my native resolution of 2880x1800. This technique allows me to pick _any_ resolution between 1x (2880x1800) and 2x (1440x900) and have it look pretty good, because I'm only scaling down to my native resolution rather than up. Some stops along the way are nicer than others, and 1440x900 looks the best because it requires no scaling at all, but I have lots of options along the way that look good.

The first thing you need for this to work is, obviously, for your apps to know how to render at 1x or 2x. 95% of Mac apps seem to be there by now. (The ones that aren't fixed still work fine -- they just look obviously low-resolution because they've been scaled up and back down.)

Then you need your graphics card to be capable of rendering a screen with twice the virtual resolution you want, and scaling it down to your native resolution in realtime. That's a serious amount of processing, and apparently it's not supported so well yet for external 4K monitors. But importantly, it's something that only has to be solved at the driver level -- the OS and apps are already there.

[1] See http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/... and search for "HiDPI."
Isn't this the idea behind bitcoin?
WALL-E?
My issue with Credit Unions is that they don't offer stuff like current accounts, atms etc, are really open, are exceptionally slow at allowing you withdraw. That's just my experience, but I don't think you could actually bank with a credit union, which is what I'm trying to get at
It's possibly more than trivia. I expect a candidate to be able to have a conversation about whatever language they know best and have used the most. They should be able to speak about that language's strengths and limitations and mitigation strategies. If a candidate couldn't talk about languages they claimed to use, that would be a huge red flag for me.

If the interviewer is just throwing out questions about keywords and language implementation that are irrelevant to the candidate and the position, that counts as trivia. It's hard to say from the quote whether or not it was a trivial question.
Enter PaintCode
What is a 'current account'?
I've really liked simple.com.
Those are pretty much all untrue of the credit unions I have experience with in the US, but I don't doubt that things could be very different elsewhere.
Play the "walk" photosynth of the motorcycle in the alley, then press C and move around to see how the 3d model of the reflection in the puddle is a surface far underground where the reflected building appears to be! So cool! http://photosynth.net/preview/about
Well, a good example is that we literally had the golang generics conversation on HN yesterday. Forum goers are not machines; fatigue can easily set in. What can be perceived as hostility to those who desire debate can just as easily be people who are tired of the same "debate" over and over again.

That said, that's when a community should write up an faq[1] and then simply point to it in a polite way that avoids engaging in the same conversation again while still being welcoming to people thinking of joining that community. If people aren't doing that, it's somewhat understandable, but long term the acrimony can be poisonous.

[1] http://golang.org/doc/faq#generics
Imaging is going to be the next "big" ITAR battleground. I think the "Camera Wars" will stir up more public controversy than what we had with the Crypto Wars.

Crypto is not the only munition in disguise.
I guess I didn't see it as a straw man.

"Are you made of matter? Are you concious? If so then the matter you are made of is concious"... implying that if you are both made of matter and conscious then it is the matter that you are made of that makes you conscious. In other words, consciousness is caused by matter.

I don't believe that we have sufficient empirical evidence to determine a causal relationship, only a correlation.

EDIT: I realize I mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that the parent was implying matter caused consciousness when all that was said was that "conscious matter is conscious". I just wanted to further explain what I was thinking. Straw man or not, whether my argument was sound or not, I thought I had a valid point to make to contribute to the conversation and I don't feel that it should have been downvoted.
Wealth is imaginary points. Standard of living is the true measure. If most folks didn't have any money at all, but food housing and entertainment were a civil right, then who's to complain or revolt?
I would they rather use the Apache 2.0 license. Seems safer to the community.
Yes, you're probably right.

I'm glad I didn't heed the advice of my grade 12 computer science teacher in 1991. He was convinced that we wouldn't need programmers in the future because we'd have AI which could write software for us.
> One has to wonder: If CES attendees feel intimidated by a booth spokesperson, why is that spokesperson chosen to do the job? Why not let the models dress down, adopt girl-next door makeup, and actively demo the products instead of standing around in heels waiting for the next photo opp?

publicity != information. /thread

> their insights, namely that sexualizing them is bad for business.

Hmmm. Any chance their insights are .... wrong? What's my evidence? I dunno, models make $50-75/hour while the CEO of the company who hires them makes millions a year?

Actually, I suspect the author is putting her words into the models' mouths. Did the models really say they thought sexualization was bad for business? They said the men were shy and didn't approach them, but linking that to bad business practice requires several more conceptual leaps.

Just another woman-judges-women story.
Facebook Engineering Stack
OK Fomite, I think we are repeating ourselves, so agreement is highly unlikely although I'm sure civil coexistence is likely.

The author is a heck of a good writer about a topic I like, and also is female, and we can each be interested in one of those topics, its a big internet and we'll all fit in somehow with plenty of space.

Have a pleasant day, and I hope you enjoyed the article.
I think we're mostly in agreement as far as matter being the medium for information. But can information exist independent of matter? If not then does it make sense to reify information as if it is its own entity? Is it really helpful to decouple the two concepts?
When interviewing, I would love it if all the candidates' résumés could be preprocessed into this format. It would save so much time if I could simply PgUp/PgDn through them.
If you haven't watched "Bank Of Dave" you really should check it out. Basically this guy setup a 'bank' and the show documents all the troubles throughout the process and the hoops he had the jump through to open. Check it out.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/bank-of-dave
Drifting is suprisingly hard. I took a class and after two days was only able to do a little: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-lN_jhvpqQ

I am thinking about how to organize an autonomous race in 2015 so this is pretty exciting for me.
That's my impression, too.

And to be honest, it's one of the biggest reasons I don't dream of moving to the US anymore - even though nearly all of the interesting jobs in my niche are over there.
Being able to drive sideways may be tech that applies to recovering from an emergency situation like black ice.
Ask HN: If Politicians were selected by Random Lotto?
Instead of the current "I volunteer as tribute method, what if our elected officials were drawn from completely random lottery..." --

The approval rating of congress is abysmal, and idiot-rating through the roof, sure average americans may not know everything about running a country, neither did the author's of the constitution, they just knew they wanted something better.

I submit that if we picked all senators and congressmen via random lottery, w/ 1 term only. We would have a MUCH healthier political system than we have now.

Just as people say Guaranteed Basic Income will fail-- Let me ask 2 questions: 1: Is what we have now working, e.g. is there still homelessness, and poverty in America? 2: If our system is already failed, how does trying something new that may fail, hurt anything?

Same goes for anything. Why can't we change things, shake things up a bit, push the envelope? Wasn't America's founding principles on shaking things up?
I don't see why DTMF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_sign... couldn't have solved this pretty easily without adding too much complexity. I've seen those remotes before and they usually only had about three buttons on them. Still pointless, but I think this would have worked.
They appear to be using the BLS categorizations[1][2]. Essentially, the difference is that Computer Programmers do none of the planning or design that Software Developers do; they only do routine coding. Since Computer Programmers only do routine coding and none of the more intellectually challenging parts of software development, they can more easily be replaced by using higher-level languages or better tools. It's worth noting that Software Developers are already 3x more common than Computer Programmers and the number of Software Developers is increasing 10x as fast, so even many of the people who call themselves programmers are probably classified as Software Developers.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c...

[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...
I'll one up you on that. . . the common approach of treating the database as if it were an API that you shove string arguments into is wrong.

Imagine if you developed your website without ever editing a *.js file directly, and instead just programmatically mashed together strings of JavaScript code and emitted them inline in the HTML wherever necessary. You'd probably end up generating much crummier JavaScript code, too. But should you blame JavaScript or your Web application framework for the fact that your client-side scripting is crummy? No, of course not. The real problem is that you're horribly misusing your tools.
Good point. Cost of 4G Linode = 8G Droplet. I was more thinking 4G Linode to 4G Droplet comparison. Hypothetically, you run out of "buffer pool" and everything slows to a crawl. Maybe w/ SSD the swapping (or whatever MySQL does on disk) is less noticable. But in that comparison, maybe the 4G Linode CPU is a little faster so it might be a close contest. Granted I'm no MySQL guru and every application is different. BTW I have no affiliation with either company.
And the font, yo, shit, the fuck, the font, fix the fuck font, font the fuck. No shit!
current account = checking account in US terms :)
I find your claim that most new research in concurrency happens in Java strange. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with academic research in concurrency and parallelism? A way to get a small taste is to look at recent papers from the conference Practice and Principles of Parallel Programming (PPoPP).
Somewhat offtopic but I think there's a chance someone here might be able to help.

I had applied through Amazon's website for a graduate position nearly 2 months ago and according to the dashboard, my application is still under review but I have never heard from anyone. I think my application has been stuck in some limbo and is now invisible to HR. I tried looking for a relevant email so that I can follow-up but this has been impossible. Granted, I found a graduate email I had written down 1 year ago but so far haven't had any reply and the email seems deprecated because its not advertised on the website anymore. Even on on-campus events, Amazon recruiters would give only the website address, no emails.

Could anyone perhaps point me to someone I could ask to have a look?

edit: To clarify, I am certain the application has not been rejected. I also do believe I am at least worth looking into hehe ;)
Perhaps its the legislation or financial overseer institutions that make banking pure hell?

Banks are required to for example know their customers before giving them accounts, and can be held responsible for money or shady laundering.

Im all for the idea anyway but lets talk real, how would it work? It has to be for profit else its not a business but a welfare whixh the banks will go to for bailouts next. Owned by all members?

We had such discussions before on hn conclusio was that current laws and requirements dont make that possible.
Built by a company with the time, money, and motivation to train new hires on an esoteric language that happens to be specifically designed for their unique application.

(Incidentally, my mobile phone calls are quite rare. Voice communication sucks. If your intent was to show that Erlang is important to me, you chose a poor example.)
Easy, but it has to be an object that is processing information in complex ways. From the first page:

"I have long contended that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways "
I have to wonder if there's any level of compatibility between Firefox OS and webOS. The app development process for both would be pretty similar, I'd imagine.
also can't go wrong with Brian Tracy on such topics

http://www.amazon.com/Eat-That-Frog-Great-Procrastinating/dp...
How, for instance, is the average high schooler going to do anything beyond the most basic research in Aerospace Engineering before getting to college? They may have studied physics and calculus, but without access to the tools of a decent shop they can't build much, and most of the worthwhile texts are written assuming a level of understanding of math (specifically calculus and differential equations) and physics (fluid dynamics, statics, dynamics) that they are unlikely to have encountered. Should they not go into AE as a result and stick with the math or physics that they do have some background in?
I suspect people looking for a "leisure drive" abhor traffic as much as you. They're probably on quieter roads with fewer people, cars, and cops.
I don't understand what you mean by "bank with", then. I put my money in and take it out as needed with my credit union. I have direct deposit, a credit card, checking, and savings. I have web-based tools where I can immediately shuffle money between accounts.

What is missing from that set of use cases?

EDIT: Oxford comma
In the UK a Current Account is basically equivalent to a US checking account. So your average day-to-day account normally with a debit card, cheque book and easy access. It might also offer an overdraft facility. Typically you'll get zero or very little interest on any money in the account.
...dozens or hundreds of interviews...

When does a "bar raiser", like, work? I've never been part of an org large enough to afford this sort of distraction.
If you wrote the software you can do whatever you want with it, including releasing it under the GPL.

Nope. Gamedevs are covered under both non-disclosure and non-compete agreements. There's a lot of red tape to cut through to release something as open source. Even if you've written it at home on your own time, companies have made a big deal about employees open-sourcing code before.

This is doubly true in the finance industry.

Without MIT licensing, there would be an extra hurdle of "GPL? We cannot under any circumstances be associated with GPL." It's absolutely silly, but absolutely true. I'm speaking as someone with firsthand, I've-been-there-in-person-and-dealt-with-this experience.

Also, by releasing it as GPL, no other gamedevs can use it. We gamedevs like to release code that other gamedevs can use.
With the know your customer laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer it's increasingly the bank's responsibility to do the job of regulators. This is not new. It might be dumb, but it's how the system works(or doesn't work) right now.
Security experts boycott prominent security conference over NSA ties
Childhood amnesia kicks in around age 7
I would LOVE to have the car drive me autonomously to the track and back. Highway driving is tiring/dangerous/boring.
There are so-called "sustainable banks". The largest in Europe is Triodos, they also have a British subsidiary. Globally they are networked through the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (http://gabv.org). Key features of those banks are transparency as to how much money is lent to whom (there's a Google Maps based tool on Triodos' website to discover their borrowers), non-financing of certain industries (e.g. weapons), non-participation in food speculation, etc.
With fluxspaces, San Francisco is using shadow real estate to grow inward
So, after puzzling around with the macro for swap a bit, it seems like macros are like functions, except without the scoping rules, which suggests to me that we now have two kinds of functions, to keep track of in the code, each of which look identical, but behave differently. swap(a,b) looks like a function, but can interact with all the variables in the same scope (or above) as when it's called (is this the same for global functions?). Maybe I'm missing something big, but that seems dangerous when the macro is declared in another file, and I have to go figure out how it behaves.
Yes!
If my work can generate wealth for other it makes me happy. It's not a zero sum game.
No, I began by saying that the SC can declare something "constitutional" when it (the "something") is obviously not.

(Funnily enough, I was implying that your original judgment of constitutionality was irrelevant as to what could happen. A point which you then went on to make hard about others' judgments of constitutionality, but mostly restricted to post-SC-decision disagreement)

I said nothing about morality specifically, just that the phenomenon of conflating it with legality is an analog of what you seem to be doing: assuming that the truth of something (in this case: "constitutionality") is fully captured by how the government judges it.
> If you're on a leisurely ride through the country or are looking for a place with no address, you can't use automated navigation.

I don't think those are impossible problems to solve. For the leisurely ride, define a radius or area and let the car do a 'random' walk (or ride on only small roads), or visit beautiful spots where g+ users have shared pictures, etc. For a place with no address, give a lng,lat or drop a pin on a map.
Things like this make me rethink my decision to stay in academia.
The Golden Shield Project is an internal police network. The "Great Firewall of China" is several systems of very lengthy official names, but basically a dual-use firewall of CNCERT. CNCERT does not report to any police.
What Americans call a 'checking account'
See how simple do it in the US? They've a partner bank, which handles that side of things. I'd be optimistic the same could work.
According to the view which puts information as primary, it not only can exist independent of matter, it defines the matter.
My credit union is in the US and I have 2 checking accounts, savings accounts, auto loans, etc through them. I can use any shared branch ATM for no fee too. I have had several credit unions in the past and they have all offered everything you said they dont in your posting.
What distances is something like this accurate to?

I just ordered a 3DRobotics Iris and I'm interested in mounting some thermal/IR/multi-spectral imaging to it ... could something like this work from the sky?
Isn't Bitcoin already addressing most of your concerns? I think the solution is not open centralization (Open source Banking) but de-centralization, which is what Bitcoin addresses by giving the power and money of the people back to people.
I have a CU in USA an it's pretty good to me so far so I'm satisfy with it.

I can get cash from any participating atm or just cash back at a groceries. I have a saving and a checking account. I had two loans with them. First loan was a 15k one I paid off and currently I have a 25k loan with them. The interest rate is pretty low.

I usually just pay via credit card to get points and use my CU to pay the credit card bill.

I think my CU addresses every single point on your bullet list except for mobile first. But I usually just use a credit card by proxy.

One negative thing about CU is just the fact that they're selective on membership.