skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I performed a two-minute manual query on a MySQL database I was told was a backup. What I didn't realize was that it was a live backup, and that it would stop the production database from responding to queries for those two minutes, meaning that authentications failed for two minutes. Several colleagues called for my employment to be terminated immediately, but luckily they got distracted by other issues.
You're welcome to join #nirc, it's a channel originally created for https://github.com/cjstewart88/nirc but its since turned into a hangout for old coworkers and friends. We are all developers. Sometimes we are helping each other and other times we are talking about random shit... or in the event someone has a nirc question, we talk about that!
Coding Stupid – the High Cost of Being a Smarty-Pants
I'm on Linux and have to disagree. I think there's too much going on on the page, and wrapping text is hard to read.

The concept, however, is much needed.
So what should software engineers who are "merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications respond? It's not like programmers can pick and choose difficult projects.
It's a good open-ended question that would bring the interviewee to the item on their resume that's actually the most indicative of their potential. This is a good tool for focusing the interview. The follow-up questions are OK, but for interviewing a coder I'd rather talk about a significant sample of their code.
I’m currently studying CS. Initially, I thought I wouldn’t be able to intellectually grasp it, but it turned out I could make it through it with a lot of effort (and Wolfram Alpha, Kahn Academy, Wikipedia …). I don’t think I’ll be capable of doing actual computer science research, but I could imagine working as a programmer one day. It’s really enjoyable filling in all these "conceptual holes" that remained after years of informal education as a teenager. Maybe I haven’t got deep enough into programming before college to develop that feeling of university being a waste of time that some seem to share in these comments.
A year ago, Microsoft needed to do this to inflate their app numbers because there were much fewer apps in the Windows Phone store.

But now I'm actually shocked how many apps/games are available on Windows Phone. Jetpack Joyride, Subway Surfers, Minion Rush are three popular games on other platforms that I recently installed for my youngest son while at my older son's basketball game recently.

...and as a former 6 year user of iPhones, the "Kids Corner" that is on Windows Phone totally separates kid-approved activities (games) from non-kid-approved activities (my email, twitter, facebook, etc). That feature alone is worth upgrading to Windows Phone if you have kids that occasionally use your phone.
Microsoft could take the opposite approach and ruthlessly purge garbage apps so they could market a high quality app store. It's 2014. Most people know by now that a smartphone only needs a dozen 4 and 5 star apps to be useful.
Odd I go to the page and there is no content. I guess it doesn't matter...
It's easy to forget how many missteps Apple made at the time and how easy it was for the company to push Steve Jobs out the door.
Yes. Please have 5+ years experience with Javascript ES6 specification.
if this means MS dominance of the consumer space is a dying legacy, I'm all for it. Let them force their outdated tech on the captive audience of enterprise while they slowly decay into a has-been company with a dwindling but servilely dependent user base.
And turning half-trolls into students like an Aikido move.
So Objective-C with an unpolluted syntax.

Otherwise known as Smalltalk.
Are there any smalltalk fans out here that can point out to the unenlightened the "interesting" aspects of Smalltalk? It seems to have quite the following.
GitNoDeploy
This slightly angers me coming from several attempts to upload legit WP8 apps.

Privacy policies not being "good" enough, no location tracking switch in a "location aware" app, little to no experiences from other developers(typical stackoverflow trouble shooting becoming impossible), worse app approval process than Apple.. the list goes on. This being in a platform which they're trying to push. :(
Uh, in no way shape or form are those results the same as the screenshots for the Windows App store. I don't see a single result where an official name is used to fake being the real thing.

I agree that the Windows App Store examples are way more egregious, but some of the apps in the Google store are nearly as bad. Top right among the Facebook examples is especially deceptive.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=facebook&c=apps
I can't tell you how many times I've sat down at someone elses computer back in the CRT monitor days, and had to up their refresh rate to something tolerable (it was always defaulted at 60Hz). Almost no one noticed the flicker at 60. This used to not be so bad, until most interfaces switched to black text on a white background. Argh, my eyes bled.
Imagine a Room full of Investors and Your Traction Slide says 0
Damn. Prior Art.
Criticizing a commercial from 1985 as being representative of anything Apple is doing today is a little much. Sure it sucked but it was memorably sucky. How many squeeze the charm in ads are still talked about?
Actually Apple's advertisers, Chiat/Day, pushed them into running "Lemmings": neither Jobs nor Sculley was particularly happy with it. And to be fair, when Chiat/Day made "1984" Jobs had loved it but the rest of the Apple board hadn't liked it and had wanted to cancel it. (Source: Isaacson's /Steve Jobs/.) Another example of what Nigel Tufnell observed about cleverness...
Similar experiences here. Our bog standard "write an Android application for an external client" had the strange requirement of "port to Windows 8 Phone" attached to it.
Joke told at a talk: there are 4 kinds of economies: rich economies, poor economies, Japan, and Argentina.

https://twitter.com/daschloz/status/427917763588677632
Interesting.

I had a quick look, but I don't see any mention about memory management. Because it must have fully deterministic realtime aware architecture to replace or complement Objective-C, and memory management strategy is one of the most important stuff. If it's based on typical (non-deterministic) GC, then it won't be that much interesting anymore.

Also, I think using `<-` instead of `:=` would be better for a new Smalltalk dialect. With proper editor support, the arrow sign will look far better then colon-equal sign.
You're right, the Play results are mostly of the form "Facebook $FOO" or "$FOO for Facebook" and many have goofy icons.

Apple seems to have done a good job hiding the cruft, at least for "top-100" searches of "companies you hear about on the nightly news" (Facebook, Vine, Snapchat, etc.). When my mom searches Facebook on her iPhone, she's absolutely going to get the right app. Based on these results, I'm not at all convinced of that if she were an Android or WP user.
Harriet Tubman As Google's Doodle For The Day
I don't like this question - I do a lot of things, answering this question doesn't say a lot about me. It gives a vastly incomplete picture of me. I would say that it is one of those bad generic questions.
This is great, I've put together some examples/tests pretty easily - can't wait to dive in deeper.

Any plans to integrate with Grunt.js?
#irssi on freenode, really helpful people
It's always amazing to me that people continue to think they can cover up a failing economy by insisting everything is fine. For hundreds of years people have tried this. In the end it never succeeds. Money goes where it wants and eventually it eats your lunch and your cake.
I followed you until you shifted the blame from the tech press to consumers.
They literally don't have one thing that was a significant accomplishment? Something from school? From outside work?

That wouldn't be a deal breaker for me, but for someone who supposedly has a bit of experience it's a red flag.
Http://www.h2o-h2o.com/
Awesome but blatant and shameless name drop. (I'd do it too, if I could.)
There are a whole bunch of "Perfect Interview Questions" that merely filter out people who have never heard them before. This is the latest on the list.

I'm in job-hunt mode so I guess I'm going to sit down and prepare an answer for this one, too.
I trust Google more than most websites small enough not to have their own CDN, it's probably much easier and more likely to compromise them than Google's CDN even if of course Google is a more attractive attack surface. I guess theoretically it is, but practically I doubt it's anywhere near the most practical attack vector.
True, but I don't think quality is an MS KPI.
What an interesting discussion. It should be noted that no matter how much evidence you can provide to your payment company about legitimate chargebacks, it's all useless if any one of the following is true:

(A) the person/s fighting the chargeback for you are incompetent / don't care / don't actually file the chargeback;
(B) the person/s fighting the chargeback for you are bullied into minimizing or hiding or not reporting evidence that can prove things like recurring fraud, identity theft, or bogus accounts; ultimately, this evidence exposes weaknesses in the payment company's systems that the payments company doesn't want "out there";
(C) the company is just plain unethical and will actually go out of its way to get rid of employees who do care and are willing to spend time and resources fighting chargebacks at an individual level -- such companies do this because they value company "image" in the eyes of investors / VCs > "the little guys".

As the person who filed and fought -- with a decent success rate -- almost 100 percent of the chargebacks for competitorofStripe but who was let go for reasons (B) and (C) above, I would gladly testify that this is a real problem that cannot be solved without employees who know right from wrong. A little over a week ago I wrote to Patrick after reading another thread criticizing Stripe's customer support and turnaround.

Clearly Stripe needs help in this area.

Ultimately, payments companies need technical people who care, but it's a weird combination, and those people are few and far between. Those people need to be allowed to make their own decisions and spend time on individual cases, even when the cost:benefit math tells the managers or CEOs it's not "worth it". I'm recently coming off a year of independent projects, and would like to get back into the team environment. It really doesn't make sense for experience and specialization to go to waste. If you hire me, Stripe, I will help build the best and most customer-focused chargeback-fighting machine in the industry, enabling you to run circles around your not-so-ethical competitors.
As an iOS programmer and long time Objective-C fan, I like the direction it is going. How is the memory management done? Since ARC is basically done by the compiler I wonder if that can be leveraged?
You have to remember that consoles are very limited devices, especially if core code was developed 25 years ago. Even in the late 90s, developing for the original Sony PSX, we were carrying flags in high bits, removing file names from our file systems for prod builds (relying on known sectors and offsets instead), making sure that no unnecessary strings were in the final build, etc.

While it was annoying at times to be so worried about bits and cycles, it was also a very rewarding type of puzzle, figuring out how to squeeze just a little more performance out of the limited system we had to work with.
It's hard to talk about a lot of things in an interview so the question focuses on one thing... that you get to pick.

Agree that this post has a terrible title and making a hire/no hire on one question is insane, but it's a good question.
Thank you for the answer!

The issue here is that my product is definitely better designed, and can match (perhaps even slightly bypass) the technical capabilities of the rival product!

But It'd be safe to say the following — The "rival" has established a (4-5k people) community around the product, and my better designed version aims to build a larger community of users. I'm not going to be charging, and neither is he.
Basically a plausible sounding mechanic for "thrusters" from Larry Niven's Known Space. Lots of Sci-Fi ships as portrayed in media would be implausible if they actually had to carry reaction mass. Even antimatter fueled ships need mass fractions over 50% for intra-solar system missions. (Up to 80%, but for some reason, never over 80%. Robert Forward covered this in Mirror Matter)

One thing I'm confused over, however, is what happens to the momentum? Is this like magically creating particles that carry momentum? (So you can carry momentum in the opposite direction.)
I have a similar problem. I'm working on a static site generator. It improves on some ideas other people had, but it isn't exactly unique. With several hundred similar projects out there thats almost impossible anyway. It serves my needs, but it isn't exactly mature.

I'm always seeking for a new one that solved the annoyances other projects had so I can just use that one instead. But there is always something off. I could improve the code or give the author a suggestion. Problem is, I'm in dire need of a portfolio. A whole project is far more impressive than one or two patches or a mere suggestion in someones issue tracker.

In the end I would be releasing code I don't really intend to use as soon as something else has all I need. One that probably no one would be using. Perfectionism and pride suddenly come into play.
Mars Curiosity Rover model
Typo - try http://www.dozeo.com
We implemented owncloud in our company of about 500 users spread out in 33 countries last year, and besides some minor glitches with some users ( mostly user errors ) the implementation has been very successful. our original purpose of owncloud was for people to have a backup of their working files in our server ( because they travel a lot and equipment loss rate is high ) but they are now using owncloud for file sharing and work collaboration...we use server version 5 with the latest client which right now is 1.5. some teams in our company were using dropbox, but now are using owncloud...I guess for security reasons.
Expanded model of OSM's roads lets Dijkstra’s Algorithm heed turn restrictions
What does "significant" mean?

I've worked on many great projects that have ended up going nowhere, sometimes because the market simply didn't materialize, sometimes because management pulled the plug just before shipping, sometimes because the whole company went bankrupt because funding dried up because our lead investor was on a plane that some terrorists blew into a building.

These "how to hire the best people!" articles are worse than "Cosmo" giving dating advice to teenage girls.
I prefer the second one and its a line less code.
I don't see an oversimplification here. If a programmer, business person, whoever cant answer that question well I can definitely see how they might not be the kind of person I want to work with.
It's still on Netflix and well worth the watch. He's arguably the best Sushi maker in the world, but his desire to still practice and improve is amazing. I found the mentorship and training of his employees very interesting as well. His standards are so high that it takes 10 years to train. The passion of all the staff as well as himself to do the same repetitive task in the real inspiration to me.
Offering a choice between service provided by local government and a private business isn't really the kind of competition most people have in mind when they think of healthy markets.

Is the sort of choice that has been available in markets going back as long as governments and markets have existed though, so given there has never been a complete market that fulfils your definition of a healthy market, can we just look at whether there is some general economic benefit here rather than worrying about whether it is healthy, as if it is sick, it has managed fine so far for a good few thousand years, so it can't be too bad.
I've been a pro for nearly 15 years and the project that I'm most proud of was something i did as an undergrad. Now I'm sad.
I can confirm this, having interned at MSFT. There were a lot of deals where developers would get free devices if they published x apps. The only thing that mattered was the amount of apps, they didn't really look at the quality. Management had yearly goals that described how many new apps they needed in one year, but as far as I know, nothing was written about quality.
"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?"

If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.
Was the commercial shown inside the stadium?
Eventually might be a long time. How long have the Kim dynasty held power in North Korea? Or Castro in Cuba?

Britain fought a war to free Argentina from Fascist dictatorship (and, err, get our islands back), they had a chance for a clean slate then, and they blew it.
Obvious Western propaganda piece is propaganda. And like the best sort of propaganda has enough kernels of truth to be dangerous.

China's military is optimized for maintaining internal stability and national unity. A civil war is the worst case scenario for China's leadership. You don't need a deep water navy, or a massive air force to achieve this goal. You need a massive tier-2 riot police force with some heavy hardware to augment when things really get out of control.

Along with almost no practical combat experience beyond internal stability operations, the PLA is simply not optimized for engagements outside of the national borders. There's pitifully few deployable logistics units.

However, on the few times China has chosen to mobilize against neighbors, the PLA has shown an ability to move truly unbelievable number of soldiers moderate distances away from the border.

There's also some debate if the PLA acquitted themselves better during the Korean War than during the later Sino-Vietnamese war. I think there's something to that, the end of the Chinese Civil War wasn't all that long before that, and it's likely that veterans of that conflict were in field command positions during the Korean War, but were not in the Sino-Vietnamese war. The outcome of the Sino-Indian war (1962) also probably falls at the career end of the same veteran commanders. In fact, China was at it's most muscular directly following the end of the Civil war (Tibet, Korea, India all between 1950 and 1962). The Soviet border conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese war, which were almost a decade later were not great victories for the PLA.

If that trend is true, the modern non-combat honed PLA may be lacking in critical modern battlefield experience. But it doesn't take a terribly long time for a military to gain that experience and capture it for a few years. Any conflict with the PLA, even if it started poorly for the PLA, would likely turn around not long after.

A friend of mine says that China is historically does not psychologically act in an outwardly facing expansionist way. It simply looks inward to admire itself, and sometimes to get a better view of the Middle Kingdom, steps backwards a few steps into somebody else's territory.

What remains to be seen, is if China's new economic policy creates a golden period of internal stability, if that gives military planners more time to regear and reoptimize the PLA for external conflicts rather than internal peace keeping. Right now, it's too distracted by domestic issues to really do this whole heartedly. But with a massive industrial capacity, I would predict that if such a shift were to occur, the world would be blindsided with how quickly that shift would happen.
>In the end it never succeeds.

Yeah, but the first part of that sentence, "In the end", is the key. Delaying the collapse gives the current office holders time to finish out their terms and it gives people with money time to move it offshore.
So their First Amendment right isn't worth defending? The right to speak has to include the corresponding right to transmit silence.
If anything varies between compilers in C/C++ then you're using undefined behavior. Not the language's fault. The edge cases of these languages are less jarring then Javascript's and make more sense.
Try http://vidless.com. We've had up to 40 people in a room there, and it's free, no accounts, plugins or anything.
Yeah, if I had to answer "what project did you work on that most changed the life of your customers" it would be my first post-college job where I created a market space that didn't exist before.

But, like you, what does that say about the next 15 years of my career? I'm a waaaaay better developer than I was at the end of my first job.
I was recently writing a JSON un/serializing component in TypeScript, which is much nearer to JavaScript than Dart I believe, and even though I just had to make it work with a few certain types I knew in advance, it was still a PITA. I don't think there's a good way to JSON-to-anything-serializing, you always end up with some type related "tags" which shouldn't really be in the JSON data.
This reference looks interesting:

"A net unidirectional and reversible force on the order of ± 3.14 milli‐Newton or 0.069% of the suspended test article mass was recorded by us in our first high frequency 2.2 MHz test article. The authors also developed a W‐E model that integrates the various engineering parameters affecting the design, construction, and performance of W‐E based MLTs for the next generation of systems. When Woodward’s (2004a, 2004b, 2005) and our test results were compared with the model’s predictions, the test results exceeded predictions by one to two orders of magnitude. Efforts are underway to understand the discrepancies and update the model. The test results imply that these devices, when fully developed, could be competitive with ion engines intended for use on satellite station keeping and/or orbital transfers."

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/proceeding/aipcp/10.106...
Yeah, but it is more of a snitch than a condom.
Go Telenor!
Picking a code formatting style at work
Seriously secure file transfer for your mobile
Maybe. Members of the US military generally enjoy the same rights and protections as civilians, but there are limits on their speech and they are subject to different laws/regulations (UCMJ).

Military officers in the US are barred from speaking contemptuous words against the President and VP. (article 88 UCMJ). There is a parallel article that applies to enlisted members. Calling the Pres a "fascist pig" is a no-no.

Army regulation 600-20 limits members ability to campaign on behalf of candidates for public office and partisan political causes.

I'm not aware of anything like this that applies to civilian government employees.
The Only Interview Question Followed By 18 Other Questions That Matter
I think you have hit the nail on the head regarding the purpose of the question. The question is used to find stars. That is, someone who is 50x more productive than programmers:

"merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications
Similar to the above poster, I think you have to determine what your goals are for your own side project. Is it mostly a learning exercise for yourself? Was it your lottery ticket? Were you just simply trying to build a product that solved your own problem that you didn't think existed at the time?

If you both aren't going to be charging for it, is the other one open source? Is there some kind of arrangement you two can make to work together?
China's Deceptively Weak (and Dangerous) Military.