skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My trial was to add a drag/drop file upload UX to their (or now our) internal yammer-like communication system (basically a very customized WordPress site). It wasn't a big time commitment, was pretty low-stress, and I didn't mind it. Was nice to get a taste for working at what is a very unique company (everyone is remote, nobody uses email, no product managers). I didn't think of it as a crappy paid gig. If anything I thought of the payment as a little perk. Basically a way to make this little project approach legal. On the other hand I already had some good insight into the company, having a couple of good friends work there, and having chatted with Matt a couple times. So I was predisposed to think this is a good place to work and worth the effort. I was also really intrigued with the idea of a fully remote workforce and was very interested to learn how they manage that. So I actually saw value in doing the project beyond the payment or the whole "get a job" thing.

I think the other key part is that they're not just evaluating you on the bit of work that you're doing. It's largely about your communication during the project. If you just took the project and banged out a perfect feature without talking to anyone or asking questions, I'm guessing you wouldn't get an offer. In order to make an all-remote workforce work, communication is incredibly important. "Communication is oxygen" is the mantra at Automattic. And the channels we use for it are IRC and our yammer-like system. We rarely talk to each other and almost never use email. That's really non-standard, and you can't easily get a feel for that in an interview or with pair-programmed fizzbuzz.

In many ways, I think working at Automattic is somewhat similar to contributing to an open source project (to be fair, I haven't done a ton of this). And that makes sense, given its roots in and continued investment in open source. In fact when one developer asked if we could open source a particular component, Matt's response was that he was pretty much ok with open sourcing everything except our passwords. Given how open source works -- your voice in a project basically equals your investment and contribution to it -- I think the paid-project interview makes some sense in that light.

Anyway, I'm kinda responding to a few posts here, but I hope that gives a little more background into the process.
Cant say I actually use the API myself but its the job of the consumer of the API to read and understand it properly and test as well :)
All my realtime 'pings' (phone/text/im) inevitably start with some form of the question: "Hi, how busy are you?" IMHO, this is a sneaky way to get the person to be honest about their immediate availability. By acknowledging straightaway that they might be busy, I give them a polite 'out', of sorts.

If I urgently need something done, my openings are usually of the form, "Listen, I have a(n urgent) favor to ask. How busy are you?" Almost always works for me regardless of the communication medium used.

Email, by its very nature, is supposed to be asynchronous. I wouldn't rely on email to convey anything more than delayed request/response conversation.
The ultimate gamer food just hit the shelf in Japan
Am I the only person for whom that many pixels in a 28" display sounds like overkill?

Maybe I'm just getting old, but the resolution on a cinema display is more than sufficient to make things unreasonably small. And getting closer to my desktop screen isn't really appealing either (again, maybe I'm getting old, but to see the pixels on my current screen I have to get my nose almost right up to the display, which I'm never going to do).

Retina displays on mobile devices are more understandable because you tend to be closer to them, or because it's useful to render really tiny text on a small screen, sometimes. But on a desktop display? Seems like the display version of clock-speed fetish.
Quick check suggests £3.75 vs £57.29 a month there. I'd pay up to £12/month for FreeBSD as a privilege.
I used to use it for Stack Overflow but a little while ago I switched it over to use my Google account for log in.

Just went into myOpenId and deleted my account for good..
One possible solution to introduce threads to JS is to isolate threads from each other and use only message-passing:

https://github.com/audreyt/node-webworker-threads/
How do you separate tasks? If your current setup is 2x then I would suggest staying with it unless you have identified why one display is better, other obvious size.

The only issue with two or more monitor setups is I have found that unless they are identical its never possible to color match which can be disconcerting.
I agree actually. It's easy to agree with confirmation bias sometimes though, lol.
I agree; provided that your eyesight is good. I have 24" 1080P screen and higher resolution would definitely be better but without my glasses 27" might even be preferable.

And this is assuming the distance to the monitor is a little over an arm's length, if the monitor is further away you would want bigger for a given resolution.
Define "serious". TransIP offers a similar plan to DO's $10/mo, with 1 core, 1GB RAM, 50GB disk (not SSD), 1TB transfer, and they let you use OpenBSD or FreeBSD, besides Linux, for ~$14.

Their 2 core, 4GB, 150GB, 5TB plan is actually cheaper than DO's (~$27 vs $40).

Not affiliated, I just have a (personal) VPS with them for a couple of years, and it's been fine.
I like your "Hi, how busy are you?" approach.
Νέα ιστοσελίδα tautotitapolis.gr -
Why would you assume it needed to be done without anybody knowing?

It would seem far easier to compromise/blackmail or bribe the right people.
Consistent Hashing, Danny Lewin, and the Creation of Akamai
There are more reasons. For example http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/03/04/1550231/red-hat-sto...
Product Manager/Lead Dev(RoR)? Come improve the way teams collaborate
Siasto, a YC backed company, is looking for a product manager/lead developer to improve the way companies manage content and collaborate on work.

We are looking for a technical lead to help manage an existing development team, take on hard development and design problems, and help take our company to the next level.

The role will involve some programming and product management of an existing product with a large user base (~10k teams) in a SaaS B2B market. You'll interact with our existing user base to better understand their needs and guide the Siasto's genesis.

You should have proven startup or team leadership experience, with a willingness to wear many hats (front-end design, integrate with 3rd party APIs, or even consider server design) enjoy new challenges, and be comfortable contributing to design and product development.

Siasto is used by thousands of companies to manage their daily work and tasks, and is recognized for it's unique design. Come join us and let's revolutionize the way people work together!

Required skills:

- HTML/CSS, Javascript, Jquery, Ruby on Rails
- experience with Amazon Web Services
- experience in a programming role at either a startup, or experience at a larger organization in a team leader/manager role

Desired skills:

- Objective-C, Java, UI/UX experience

Compensation:

- Highly competitive salary
- Significant stock in a recently funded startup
- Opportunity to move to Silicon Valley

For more information please contact:

contact [at] siasto dot com

We don't mind where you are based, although London is preferable.
Of course, you'll have to buy another one then.
From my experience, there's a tremendous lack of decent network engineer in those companies (mechanical industry, family business, ...).

Devil advocate: people in charge of IT stuff there are project or support guys, almost never network engineers. Either they don't care about serious security or they simply have no clue on how they should do it. And when they outsource their IT security, they're so bad at choosing that the solution implemented is worst than doing nothing.

When I have the chance to chat with them about those subjects, the common position is almost always "we don't get why the machine manufacturer don't sells us a secured solution".
Here's a partial answer: You gain some, you lose some, but in different things. There's a tradeoff, e.g. automatons can do things a lot faster/cheaper, at the expense of "creativity". The nature of society changes in a multi-dimensional way, so it's hard to say whether it has become more or less "mindless".
The client (UAE) discovered it, the builder (France) put the tech into the satellite. I don't think anyone is really thinking the USA put these systems in behind their backs. France was in on this the whole time and they were hoping UAE's engineers would not be completely thorough in analysing their designs.

EDIT:

Have a read of:
http://www.space.com/12996-secret-spy-satellites-declassifie...

These are older satellites and it sounds like the cameras could move slightly independently so that they may be able to compensate for the entire satellite being off a little bit.
xkcd: Photos
Zappos Holocracy: Hot Trend or Hollow Dream?
What is the solution of this quandary?
TED isn't a recipe for 'civilisational disaster'. It's like Wikipedia
The art of pricing your products [2004]
Top 5 startups to watch out in 2014
Yeah, the video starts automatically. I didn't get a popup window at all. I have no blocking mechanisms activated besides what's already in stock Mozilla Firefox.
Fly into Guangzhou (or train in from Hongkong).

Flying I've never had my bag even run through a scanner (8-9 times flying in) - unless they are doing it between plane and baggage collect, in which case they are really fast!.

Train, you run your bags through scanners, but no one seems to care (I've bought HEAPS of electronics in from Hong Kong ($2-4k worth at different times).

Beijing and Shanghai - I would say you are right, they seem to be a bit more uptight there.
France could be using US components which contain a backdoor and never notice it. Seems perfect plausible.

The other theory that a competitor planted a spy device and nobody noticed is even more troublesome. So my satellite supplier has shaky security procedures and I might end up getting compromised products? Not good.

While I was reading the article one question that kept coming back was who is this unnamed source. It looks much more like a power play than anything else... but given the recent NSA disaster, anything seems possible.
Why do you assume it's hardware. I imagine the hardware to send the signal is already there, they just need to add some software to proxy it to https://goodies.nsa.gov

If they are building the ground station tech, then there could be nothing at all on the satellite.
It sounds as if either your laptop's wifi card is old or your router is. 5mb is nothing, 802.11n can easily handle that (its about 20) and dual band connections can push it a bit higher.

Where WiFi at home is breaking down is some cable companies are offering 30, 50, or more down. Then there is Fiber which just blows past what most people will get out of home WiFi networks.
C# has enough functional capabilities (for typical development needs like mine), so I never felt the need of using F#. Scala, on the other hand, looked quite neat.
Sadly it's not as simple as that. Facebook has HTTPS support, but TCP connections on port 443 just time out.

The GFW is sophisticated. It would be trivial to stop all obvious VPN traffic (obvious = PPTP and L2TP/ipsec on default ports) without affecting other things, but this isn't done, unless many people connect to the same server over some period of time.

Unidentifiable TCP/UDP traffic on other ports (e.g. OpenVPN on a port number in the 1000s) again isn't blocked. However, if the same TCP/UDP port on the same server is accessed for long enough, and often enough, it will get blocked. Switching to a different port on the same server will probably fix it, until the next time.
Erm, yes, it really kind of is.
If I was an entrepreneur, I might, but as an individual developer, I couldn't afford it...

It's a real pity that Google didn't go with C# as their language of choice for Android development. The world would suck less. And they actually considered it...

"If Sun doesn't want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language - or - 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way"

http://www.fosspatents.com/2011/07/judge-orders-overhaul-of-...
I doubt this is possible. Every item that goes up is assembled and signed off piecemeal so every bit of hardware will be checked by multiple eyes. The buyer will have people on site checking this. From a software perspective, things are a little more uncertain but the workflows are tightly locked down. It would be extremely difficult to get anything shipped which isn't known about by everyone. Even attempting this is illogical.

I agree with the assertion that this is to secure a better deal.

(I wrote software to manage assembly and versioning of components on space and military equipment).
<meta-comment on meta-golf>

Judging by the amount of fawning here, this guy must be a HN celebrity. Interesting post nevertheless!

I can only hope, one day, I'd be writing and publishing joyful little hacks like this, to such general applause, instead of eking out a living. I have to say I'm a bit envious here!

Well done to the dude. An inspirational post, in many ways.
Isn't this deal symptomatic of the typically impatient Indian venture capital investor ? From what I understand based off conversations with friends in Bangalore and Pune, Indians VCs want to either see a company delivering profits almost immediately or be ready for a quick sale to bigger companies. There seems to be almost no appetite to nurture a tech start-up with the kind runway typical of american start-ups. As a result , several Indian tech start-ups are forced into becoming an offshore outsourcing providers.
Well don't I feel like an idiot for saying any of that. Why were you running a "computer simulation" of the problem? Were you, even?

>"The two" ?? What "two"? Your "explanations" are very unclear.

The only two there are: the two children. The sex of one is independent from the sex of the other.

>You will find many things difficult if you don't learn how to slow down, take time, be precise, and explain clearly. Be more like Feynman - take time to explain things clearly and precisely.

Okay, I'll try, good buddy. Monty Hall is different because it precludes upfront the possibility of there being any ratio other than 1:2. If we were, however, to say that any door could have either a goat or a car, then Monty's elimination of some other door would not inform you on the odds of your door YOUR door. Yea or nay?

The only way for Monty to give you any information at all about whether to switch is if the rule binds him to tell you something about the odds of the unchosen doors. In the original problem, this happens, because the ratio is bound 1:2. In our revised problem, this does not happen - unless he tells you he can't remove a door because neither is a goat. But! Using this as an analogue to our children problem, we've already precluded that possibility upfront by eliminating GG, thus Monty can't provide us any information because his B-G choice is unbound by any rule.
Yes plus a lot of these networks fail pretty hard... with Gtalk/Hangouts for example it's not rare to miss notifications because you got them on the laptop but not on your phone, or the opposite.

Also Whatsapp stupidly doesn't provide a web or desktop interface.

Skype on mobile devices uses way more power than it should.

In the end I hate Facebook for a number of reasons but it's the only reliable solution I have found so far: fast, reliable, (nearly) everyone is there.
should work with a decent window manager, also i dont like bezels and more vertical space to put console/logs on the top end would be good.
That and the total scifi looks of it :D
I use both for different purposes. It should be noted that Digital Ocean machines seem a lot slower. As a real world example, rake assets:precompile on my linode takes about a minute, whereas on a similarly specced digital ocean box it takes over 10 minutes. YMMV of course, but I was very disappointed by real world DO performance and only use it for lightweight stuff – it's great as a cheap VPN host for example.
I thought about Scala (+ Android Studio), but from what I googled it's not clear if setting it up is smooth
I'm looking to park a few low-traffic charity sites there and 'Set it and forget it' (like Ron Popeil). I think having both with and without the www working is a higher priority than SEO, so I'll have to compromise and set A records for example.com and CNAME for www.

If anyone figures out a better practice please leave a comment. My preference is no www (with www 301-ing) plus the CDN benefit, but this probably isn't possible.
> Hey, when you have a sec, I need blah blah blah blah...

Yes please. This even works well when you're working with colleagues in the same office: it's real-time but it doesn't interrupt your thought flow.
Are you getting your megabytes and your megabits the right way round? Either way, your wifi is so very slow and you probably have a fault.
I think there's two really great things about retina screens on desktops/laptops:

- Firstly, I definitely notice the difference. The higher res screen is noticeably nicer to read. Sure, you don't need to go to the crazy extremes of some newer high res phones, but standard desktop monitors are noticeably ugly by comparison.

- Secondly, the res is high enough that you can finally change (apparent) resolution. My parents are in their late 60s and have bad-ish eyesight, so they lower the resolution on their screen. The result is incredibly ugly. Unfortunately resolution independent display seems to be a forgotten goal in modern OSes, so having screens that can change res is definitely worthwhile.
Study On Search Trends: Social Media Analytics More Important Than Ever
Can Upward Mobility Cost You Your Health?
Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. Is anyone aware of the technologies or behaviours at the time that inspired the novel?

I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that culture was very different then and have been always been curious as to how he came to his prediction.
In theory stuff should be the same size but alot sharper. That being said, i don't really feel alot of difference when looking at my 24" monitor and on my 5inch phone which has almost the same resolution.

For me a huge 40inch 4K monitor would be more useful as the DPI would be roughly the same to my setup now (2x 1920x1200) but more vertical space and no bezels.
I'd probably bet a dollar that there was nothing at all on the satellite and the current political climate re: NSA is simply being taken advantage of.
I use both (Linode for five years, big sites, 100m+ pageviews), DO one year (smaller and personal sites).

Both have been great, but Linode's support and response time to issues has always been excellent.
Java vs. Native Agents – The Powerful Things They Do
Meanwhile heads are rolling in the French Ministry of Defence, as it slowly dawns on them that they have used the same US spy components in their own satellite systems, and replacing them would cost billions of Euros.
Right, so I'm guessing that there are two possible explanations:

1) There is something (HW or SW) on the satellite and it was installed with full knowledge of the assembly group.

2) There's nothing unusual on the satellite and something else, politics perhaps, are at play here. I wouldn't count out a desire to not have U.S. sourced parts on a military bird. Just like the U.S. doesn't want to have Chinese sourced hardware (even if it's just door handles).
How can a server in NYC be as responsive from London as one in your house? Laws of physics still apply...
I loved Aardvark. :(

Best of all, it had a really good matching algorithm and would almost always get me a good 'connection'. The moment Google bought Aardvark, I knew that that was its death-knell.

As for your food questions, a few friends and I have been working on an app called "DishoomIt!"[0] but it is currently only available for Pune, India. Plans are underway for adding more cities, menus and ratings.

You have an interesting idea about geo-located question/answers. I have been thinking/working on an app along similar lines. However, my biggest obstacle is the fear that users might perceive the app's location requests to be potentially privacy-infringing - especially, given the recent uproar over 'spying' and what not. :(

Jelly's emphasis on pictures probably stems from the recent success of Instagram and Snapchat. Not sure if it was a right move but it might at least get them the initial traction and maybe that's what they are/were hoping for?

[0] http://dishoomit.com/
IIRC there was not any animosity between the firefox an dDebian teams though (there was plenty reported by people who saw the matter and misreported it, and Stallman waded in as is his style which didn't help the mis reporting ("RMS ponders whether Firefox is truly free" was reported as "entire open source community vs Firefox, fight at 11" by some)).

They started user the trademark thing to force some distributors who were adding patches they did not want to be associated with (either because they were just plain malicious or because they didn't want thie bug tracker filled with reports about code they had nothing to do with), the Debian people scanned the relevant legal details and decided that they either needed to stop using hte name or work put together an agreement that covered them. The latter would have been easy enough but was against their preferred WayOfThings(tm) as it would mean downstream of them would (legally speaking) need to make changes or separately arrange an agreement, so they chose a new branding instead.

Neither the Firefox team protecting their name or the Debian team stucking to their mission statement is wrong IMO (though of course some may desagree, depending on definitions of "free" and so forth, so they could be said to be wrong), but without the branding change the two are incompatible on a legal point that was only enforce to stop the malicious.

With the branding change the "conflict" is resolved, and no one is really unhappy or otherwise reasonably put out.

The RedHat/CentOS case is a bit different: the way CentOS were using the name in no way implied that RedHat was responsible for CentOS but did accurately represent how CentOS was built, so CentOS were probably on good legal ground but capitulated because they didn't want that particular fight. This, IMO, made RadHat somewhat bully-like in this case - though to be honest it takes more than one iffy commercial/legal wrangle to undo the pile of good that Redhat has (directly and otherwise) done for Linux and related projects over the years (and continues to do).
In California plates stay with the vehicle. Not sure how it works in other places in North America.

And sentinel values aren't just a problem of the system, but there would also be a human element. Even if you had a "no plate" option some would likely continue to write noplate. The current system might even support null values for all we know.
In Beijing, they scan bags right before you get out to meet your loved ones. They appear to select people at random, and from my observation you have 5%-10% chance of being selected.

I'm not sure what they're looking for, though, as I've never seen them open a bag after it went through the scanner.

I was quizzed about my road bike (which was obvious as it was packed separately) but after I explained it was old, and 'just a normal bicycle' and not 'for competitions', they let me through without a fuss.