skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quality Assurance (QA) engineer. I do QA Tools specifically but still need to be on top of most QA stuff. Other QA engineers exist in the company for in depth QA.

My initial question starts with: "build a function that takes a string and produces an integer". About 30% of candidates fail to get anywhere. 50% produce an incorrect implementation. 20% produce an implementation that is mostly correct. 9% produce an implementation that is mostly correct and well tested. 1% actually produce a complete and correct response. Which, as of right now, translates to exactly 1 candidate in 2 years. Who was rejected due to culture fit. A complete and correct answer is not required to pass the screen. ;-)

The reason this question is so effective is due to how the question is asked and the details of the solution. There is a lot more than just the initial problem statement. The full script assess: the candidates ability to determine requirements; ability to produce complete set of unit tests; ability to handle the boundary conditions.

There is a sharp division that occurs between QA engineers and non-QA engineers on the requirements gathering. All but 1 non-QA engineer I've interviewed assumed they had all the requirements before writing code. A clever solution is almost useless if it solves the wrong problem. Sometimes even worse than useless if the code adds a maintenance cost for no value.

Covering all the critical cases in testing is the next part that most candidates fail at. Even if the requirements they assumed are correct, none of the non-QA engineers have succeeded in writing a complete and good set of tests. Many add too many tests.

After those two the other parts are just seeing how close they can get to building the correct implementation. The candidates typically pass if they do well in all parts; perfection is not required. Still, I think it's interesting to note that almost nobody has ever written a 100% correct solution. Even if they are given all the requirements in detail.

This question does not asses algorithm design ability. At all really. Well, I suppose there was somebody who immediately proposed "binary search!" and really wanted to stick with that idea. No clue why...
What are you going on about? I don't think you have the slightest idea about how Google's ranking algorithm, or for that matter any ranking algorithm, actually works.
I think I completely agree with you. As you point out, one expects that there is a small but finite probability to have Boltzmann brain-like things pop up in the universe. And if it did happen it would violate the second law, which is making a statistical statement.

So my problem with the article (perhaps your comment should help to clarify) is that it attempts to start a discussion, involving some kind of anthropic principle/natural selection to resolve a paradox that doesn't exist in the first place. The body of the article states:

>The usual resolution of the Boltzmann brain paradox is that we and our environment are the products of a long process of natural selection, which can produce complex and improbable outcomes without violating the laws of thermodynamics.

>The Boltzmann brain paradox is that any observers (self-aware brains with memories like we have, which includes our brains) are therefore far more likely to be Boltzmann brains than evolved brains, thereby at the same time also refuting the selection-bias argument. If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which only creates stand-alone self-aware entities.

The authors of this article somehow turn a correct argument of the expectation value of the number of Boltzmann brains in an ensemble of universes to a claim that most brains in these universes must be Boltzmann brains. They do this without mentioning at all how to calculate the probability of non-Boltzmann brains (assuming the distinction is even valid). TO deal with the feeling of existential anxiety that they are left with at the worry they might be Boltzmann brains they then invoke a natural selection+ anthropic principle argument.

As far as I can tell has very little to do with the concept as it was introduced by the cosmologists.
Show HN: ChimeBy's new app.  Get direct answers, Not comments.
Ah, that's the part I was missing. Thanks
I never thought that this might happen with so much negativity towards Unity.
I don't normally say "GNU/Linux", but I felt this was a case where the distinction is particularly important, because Android does run the Linux kernel, but is (IMO) a different OS from GNU/Linux.
Interesting comparison. By the way, do you still play sometimes or you quit completely?
If it is API data that needs to be protected I would hope to see some HTTP code saying unauthorized. If it is a public feed then I probably would expect a 201 when successfully called.

If someone subverts an authentication system to get authed, then they were clearly never authorized no matter the granted access to the data.

Seems unauthorized or not is baked into the web already. It is the humans behind corporations and their lawyers trying to stretch the definition or create new mechanics. The AT&T case shows this for sure.
No kidding? I know at least one extremely large company which has its headquarters in that city, and I have recently been hearing good things about the modernity of their IT infrastructure.
Likewise. My alarm was a playlist that would play through my speakers under the room's deck. My computer was in top, with the audio and power cables zip secured to prevent easy power loss.

Dang thing would go off, start getting louder (scripted for "gentle" wake-up), and I had to crawl out and onto the deck, log into my computer, and shut it off. ... And it was set to lock itself and start again in 10 minutes.

TL;DR: sleep inertia sucks.
You opened your door by putting something through your letterbox? That's awesome. Did you catch the doorknob or the lock turner? Was the door handle flat instead of round, or...? Hard to imagine the logistics.
> make a working modern package manager

M-x packages-list-packages

> and integrate the browser like lighttable does.

M-x eww

> and perhaps rewrite emacs from scratch

Would you like a pony, too?

> so that the source code makes sense in today's world not in 1980's world.

I've actually found that Emacs's source it very readable (even the C lisp engine stuff). Do you object to the lisp or to the C?
meta-note: this is a great real-world example of the Lawful vs. Chaotic arguments.
mikeselectricstuff did a hack playing around with this concept <http://youtu.be/qy1w6rTpC2g>.

Not nearly as sophisticated as the linked post, but still pretty neat (especially seeing how he messes around with it).
> Are you denying that antisemitism continued under the Soviet Union

Yes I do. There were so many Jews in soviet party, there is even "theory" that soviet revolution was Jewish conspiracy. [1]. Stalin initially supported Israel state with weapons.

Antisemitism started in 60ties, after Israel becomed US oriented and several people from soviet union emigrated there. After that several soviet jews had relatives on west and were perceived as 'politically unreliable' and potential spies. There were mainly political reasons for discrimination, it really turned into antisemitism in 90ties after soviet union.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism#Jews_in_the_B...
This kind of reply has become such a meme. Of course, it's always some "bigger" problem that are at the heart of disfunction. The problem is the _people_ who are often at the heart of such disfunction are usually the ones that judge their "reports" by how often they say "no, because" vs. "yes, if", typically because of some quote they read paraphrased in some internet discussion.

We typically call this middle management.

Regardless I'm not really interested in the blame game on who's responsible management or engineering. Both are irrelevant to this discussion. "Can" or "can't", as the article discusses, is an issue of leadership in a business. If it isn't there, it isn't going to matter whether the engineer says "how high?" whenever their asked to jump.
Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047

Top thread points out that the US obviously does the same thing.
That's not a question I've ever had cause to ask on either side of an interview, to say the least.
I'm not sure as a general observation the "s-curve" turns out to work that well. E.g. futurists have (with Kurzweil and his crowd a notable exception) consistently underestimated progress in computer capabilities even in the 80s and 90s when progress was insanely rapid, while over-estimating advances in AI (which is, optimistically, at the beginning of its s-curve). You could almost include Asimov in that. Similarly, Arthur C. Clarke was oblivious to miniaturization while living in the thick of it.

I think one of the factors is romance -- SF writers want certain things to happen and just wish it into being, regardless of how plausible it really is (faster than light travel, time travel, anti-gravity, artificial gravity, laser pistols).

On the reverse side they tend to ignore technologies that are either unromantic or make stories more complicated or seem to fight against cliched dramatic opportunities. (Fast travel adds to romance and drama, but fast communications detract from romance and drama.)
GPUs are still the best for scrypt.
> it appeared they thought this was something that required no concealment.

Exactly so. It seems they were doing it in the open because they didn't understand that anyone would object.
5-6 years ago I was a teen too :)

Actually, I'm still a teen for some months.
I have been using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sygel.goob... for about a year now and it has drastically increased my ability to get out of bed on time.

It works via wifi signal strength; I have to walk right up to my router in another room in order to shut it off (or you can reverse the trigger if you sleep near your router).

Across the room was never enough for me but walking to another room of the house wakes me up every time.
Who says it's a choice between publishing the price on a public webpage and forcing the user to make the call?

The "Get free trial/demo/brochure" link to a contact form works fine: that way the company gets to decide whether they want to call you or send a form email with pricing/signup information. In theory a service like Eloqua could even automate who gets a link to the pricing page and who gets a call from the sales rep, although I suspect salespeople generally have better judgement on what looks like a good lead.

And in the mid-high priced B2B market, if you move on without leaving an email/telephone number your enquiry probably wasn't serious enough to warrant giving you a price.
Quite a few reasons: http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf
The Sugar Addiction Taboo
"John Aldridge fell overboard in the middle of the night, 40 miles from shore"
Developer Spams Google Play With Ripoffs Of Well-Known Apps…Again
I played in the World Series of Poker in 2010 (the worst experience ever) and then quit completely. I was sick of the whole thing.
it is pretty cool how you use the revision history for something unique, but this needs to be simplified greatly. It seems like if you made an app that automatically changes the list and updates git, it would be extremely efficient. I would put a create today's list link in that gives you a popup that you can fill out with just a task per line that turns into a checklist.
Burner - Los Angeles, CA - is looking for mobile engineers, a quantitative growth person, and a "startup" assistant. Passionate hackers with generally relevant experience are always welcome.

Our app (burnerapp.com) was named a top app of 2013 by TIME. We are a small startup with a big vision -- to empower consumers with tools to manage and control their mobile privacy and identity. We're backed by Venrock, Founder Collective, 500 Startups, and lots of great silicon valley angels.

Please send links, opinions, and resumes to jobs@adhoclabs.co.
Because building and maintaining a competitive OS is a huge effort, and FreeBSD has lots of cool stuff which they can't use...
I've managed to open a lot of unlocked doors (most I've tried) but wouldn't consider myself "skilled" at it, since it's a pretty easy task. I think the definition of "skill" implies something that isn't easy, thus being able to do something isn't automatically proof of skill.
For those of you playing along at home, Rust currently manually interoperates with C structures. This[1] is one of the struct stat structures:

pub struct stat {
st_dev: dev_t,
__pad1: c_short,
st_ino: ino_t,
st_mode: mode_t,
st_nlink: nlink_t,
st_uid: uid_t,
st_gid: gid_t,
st_rdev: dev_t,
__pad2: c_short,
st_size: off_t,

Note the __pad elements.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/libc....
> After watching some videos that showed just how easy it is to simply kick a door in, another thing I did was replace my strike plate with a heavier duty one, and replace the worthless 3/4" screws that "hold" most strike plates in with 4" screws that actually go into the 2x4's of the house frame.

This is good advice. I did this on my own door frame after being broken into on the first day where the door had simply been kicked in. I can not kick the door in now - I tried. Although the quality of the door is important too - mine bends really quite far before breaking. :)

If you are really security conscious and you don't have them already - I suggest brushes at the door frame edge and the letterbox to prevent approaches other than picking.
+1 to this too. Not mentioning this very clearly somewhere at the top automatically leads me to believe (perhaps wrongly) that you haven't addressed this problem.
As luck would have it, I just bought and read "Writing Idiomatic Python" earlier today.

It's a quick read and seems to be a nice shortcut to avoid a few newbie pitfalls (I'm a Python newbie myself).
Reasons Your Startup Will Suffer Without DevOps
There's more to it. When you say: No, because ..., you are pointing out SOME of the dependencies that must be resolved before you can get to the final goal. When you say: Yes, if ..., you are enumerating ALL of the dependencies, that when overcome, you can achieve the final goals. In addition to the negative/positive connotations, the former implies that you might have stopped thinking about the problems half way, whereas the latter shows that you've thought about ALL the details.

I used to be in the No, because ... camp when I first got out of college, until I met a mentor who led by example with a "Yes, if ..." attitudes, and I am now firmly in the second camp. Usually comprises and trade off needs to be made, but stop thinking about the problem definitely doesn't help.
Hmmm. It really depends on the product/customer. The big thing here is that you don't have to have a perfect pricing strategy out of the gate (or ever); it's iterative.

Look at the Hootsuite example for instance - at this point with 8 million users they should really have more than one plan because there are several different personas in the mix.

Buffer on the other hand had a mono-price schema for a long time, because they wanted the simplicity while they were getting traction (to your point). Now that they're solid, they've been iterating the product and the pricing into their business plan.

Big points:

- Each customer persona = a pricing tier
- Price based on the customer willingness to pay = talk to them about pricing
- Iterate - your pricing should change as your product and customer do
> WTF is moral progress? How do you measure morality and put it on a graph? What the fuck is this guy even talking about?

I'm sure you could begin to answer this if you tried harder. Global decrease in violence would be a good start at a proxy to measure, see e.g. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405311190410670...

A more subtle example involves measuring the "expanding circle" -- the degree with which we're willing to empathize with people who are not like us. We've made clear recent advances towards showing empathy and consideration for e.g. black people, women, gay people, in relative recency in human history.
"Revealing details of legitimate practices does no good"

Seriously? Excuse me for being harsh, but that statement is preposterous and shows a contempt for civil liberties, freedom of speech in particular, and ignorance of security principles.

There is no such thing as technical practices being intrinsically "legitimate" or not without reference to who's doing them and for what reason. If by some fluke a government someday used a technique to pursue a person suspected of a crime, did so legally, and with moral justification (not a victimless crime), then it is legitimate on that occasion - but how would you propose to assure us that the same tehcnique can never be used by anyone else or in any other situation? There is no basis for any such assumption; the same knowledge, skills, devices and so on will also be used by illegal, immoral and other actors at any opportunity (notably including NSA and LEAs). Therefore it is legitimate to expose, and discuss how to defeat these and anything else that might compromise anyone's security.

Saying "shut up about it because someone might have a legitimate use for it" is like saying that science should stop because there are bombs, or that lock picking techniques should still be kept from the public. Such fallacies have been debunked at least since the 19th century.

"To the extent that revealing them encourages the NSA to resort to less legitimate practices, it's harmful"

Another fallacy. If we stop would-be terrorists from bringing guns into a building, are we then responsible for their resorting to mortars? How about, the NSA and other state actors should restrain their conduct to respect people's rights, regardless of their tricks being revealed.
Rogue-Cop Viral Plague Tearjerkers Based on Real Life Set in the Edwardian Era
There are sound arguments towards it. But Better Upgrading scares me.
Ah, thanks. Wasn't aware of that.
Do many people drop out of code schools or drop off after completion, like poor poker players would after finding out it's harder than it looked?
I wonder how much power it drains. The RaspPi uses "only" 3 Watt, but that is a way too much for many interesting applications. There are some hacks to reduce to the power usage (by replacing the voltage regulators for example) but i wonder how much this board will use.
It may be a useful sanity check to simulate the experiment multiple times to see the result:

def choose_coin
rand < 0.001 ? 1 : 0.5
end

def flip_coin(coin)
rand < coin ? :heads : :tails
end

def all_10_heads?(coin)
10.times { return false if flip_coin(coin) == :tails }
true
end

next_flip = { :heads => 0, :tails => 0 }

1000000.times do
coin = choose_coin
next unless all_10_heads? coin
next_flip[flip_coin(coin)] += 1
end

puts next_flip[:heads].to_f / (next_flip[:heads] + next_flip[:tails])
I recommend using gistbox [0]. It allows tagging and other features that make gist convenient as a todo list.

[0]- http://www.gistboxapp.com/
Nice! We're big fans. :)

Tell Brendan to stop grinding his coffee so loudly.

- Patrick
None of the complaints in this thread consider the utility of creating sharable checklists.

The ability to quickly slam a checklist into a gist and share it with others is very handy.
Gate Tower Building
What about your windows?
Oh cool! I did not know that. I'll still be sticking to Arch Linux though. I'd have a hard time adapting to using a non-tiling window manager full time.
How is their ranking method broke? Most searches you make probably give you what you want within the top five results (excluding lyrics, as you've shown a weird need to have RapGenius be the source of your lyrics).

How can you prove RapGenius is the "best result"? Especially considering that courts have ruled that ranking algorithms are just opinions. You can be of the opinion that RapGenius is better, but that's your opinion. Multiple people can also be of the same opinion, which is a huge factor involved in Google's ranking algorithm. Another huge factor involved in their ranking algorithm is dissuading blackhat SEO techniques, which can make it appear like lots of people are of the opinion something is good.

So, again, while you are of the opinion RapGenius is the best lyrics site, I'm not, even before all this brouhaha started I didn't really like their site, especially the annotations, which to me seemed like a bunch of bored English majors who didn't really have any insights on the annotations they were making, but wanted you to think they were really smart. I also don't listen to rap music, which might also affect my view on the annotations.
Mars One Announces Lockheed Martin Partnership
tl;dr: When you have plenty of something, you can rationally plan how best to use it, perhaps entertaining and evaluating multiple scenarios - but when something is scarce, you tend to conserve it, doling it out piecemeal for only the most urgent needs.

If that thing is time, you spend it - you spend your time - on the urgent only, foregoing the important but not urgent. Eventually, important items left undone become emergencies themselves.

Moral of the story: No matter how little time you have, always take some time to plan, to prioritize. Breath. Relax. Make haste slowly. Tend to the important emergencies, and the important non-emergencies, and try to ignore the unimportant emergencies, if you can. And take the time to know the difference.
> In my industry - insurance - I've seen 6 figure sales consultants involved in week long sales processes that make us $200 in revenue a year. That's not "smart" at all.

And that's exactly how GEICO and Progressive were able to come out of nowhere to capture 18% of the automobile insurance market. By using direct sales, they can replace the insurance agent's 10% commission with hourly call-center employees in low-wage states.

In fact, GEICO is now getting very close to knocking Allstate out of its perennial #2 position. Who would've thought, ten years ago?

Private passenger automobile premiums written in 2012:

1. State Farm $32.10 billion 18.37% share
2. Allstate $17.48 billion 10.00%
3. GEICO $16.75 billion 9.58%
4. Progressive $14.44 billion 8.26%

http://www.naic.org/documents/research_top_25_market_share_p...
Sounds like there's a market for me to employ people in the third world to call/email companies who don't publish their prices and then for me to publish that info (Think Glassdoor.com for SaaS services without transparent pricing).
Ah yeah. The "why" with a lot of the porcelain stuff probably tends to be an unsatisfying "Because somebody didn't think it through very much a few years ago." git-reset would probably be better if it defaulted to --soft, and possibly left the other options to other commands.
I disagree. If you were to add 10 million Africans, 5 million Arabs, 3 million Jews, 20 Million Europeans to Japan over the next 20 years you can bet your arm and leg that "racism and antisemitism" will sprout in Japan. People feel threatened when someone different starts moving in on their space.

I've seen documentaries on a tiny community of Africans living in Beijing and how they are "stopped by police constantly" http://youtu.be/GURLHAM-KoI, and treated the same way in Israel by Jews. http://youtu.be/rYwvGHY1nAI. You think it's a "white people" problem because that's all you've seen your whole life. As multi-racial/multi-culturalism increases worldwide you'll realize it's something prevalent throughout humanity.

That's the compromise, without diversity a society might become stale but diversity brings up problems on it's own as one culture feels it's future is threatened by another.
Executing an idea and following through to completion is hard enough. I think anyone who has made an app whether it is 1 quality app or 30 mediocre apps should pat themselves on the back for breaking through a barrier that not many people actually go through.