skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEEKING FREELANCER -- REMOTE OK. OpenEdX Consultancy (Canada/France)

Consultancy specialized on the edX project, and hiring to handle increasing demand. edX is a free software project, used by various universities and companies to run online courses. See edx.org, class.stanford.edu, france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr or codecoalition.com for examples of edX instances.

It's a large Python/Django codebase, with good code standards and architecture (a lot of the edX engineers come from MIT). You would work on different clients contracts using the platform. The clients list/references include Harvard, edX themselves, the French government, and various startups & universities currently running their own instances, or looking to create one. Tasks are varied, from developing custom features for specific courses (XBlocks), customizing instances, developing generic platform features, deploying instances, working on both client/server sides, etc.

Most of your work would be published as free software (edX is released under the AGPL license, which requires clients to release modifications under the same license), and you would also contribute to the free software project, pushing some of your developments upstream through pull requests, contributing features, documentation or help on mailing-lists.

You would be able to work remotely from where you want, as long as you have a good internet connexion. : )

Stack: Python/Django, Ansible, AWS, Debian/Ubuntu, JS, HTML/CSS, MySQL, MongoDB

Applying: Email jobs@antoviaque.org with: your github account, a short explanation of why you're interested and a list of links to free software contributions you have made, if any.
Epidemiological studies likely overstate the risk. If you read the Australian study for example, they certainly could not determine with certainty how many CT scans an individual had, because they did not include CT scans performed in hospitals. I would say that MOST CT scans performed in children would happen in hospitals. Therefore, a person having one CT may simply be a marker of them having many more CTs which are not captured by the study.

There were also other unusual correlations in the data. For example, CT scans of the brain seemed to increase the risk of cancer elsewhere in the body, and scans of the abdomen increased the risk of brain cancer. This seems implausible, and implies to me that at least some of the correlation between CTs and cancer is likely to be explained by some third factor whereby people with an increased risk for cancer have more CT scans. The most telling correlations are probably for rare tumours, like soft tissue cancers eg sarcoma, which show an increased risk post CT. These cancers are rare and have few known risk factors, so this correlation is more believable. But these events were much rarer than all cancers in the cohort.
Definitely: I think the only real solution for the industry at this point is finding better ways to monetize with IAP that don't mix so heavily with the gameplay. And League of Legends is a great example of keeping the gameplay separate from the monetization.

No pay to win, no timers, no paywalls that ruin the experience: we need to go back to building games as entertainment experiences, and find ways to monetize with things like skins (purely aesthetic so they don't disrupt gameplay, but can make you look cool when you play with your friends).

Unfortunately the sad truth is that for the majority of mobile games if you charge up front you will not have enough sales volume. And a single $1.99 IAP has the same problem because while you might get 10x downloads from being free initially, you'll still only get your $2 from <10% of them, and $2 LTV is not nearly enough to support a game (+ some gamers like those here might be willing to support a great game with more than $2 but won't have the option to do so in this setup).

At the end of the day, when people invest in an entertainment experience they want to be entertained. And thinking about money and waiting for timers during the experience only reduces the amount of entertainment we get out of it. So we need to find ways to design IAP that is separate enough from the core experience, and yet still works well enough to fund the games we want to play.
Flat is inevitable. Flat is practical. But, yeah, you can not make money on it yet, because you know people love what they used to look at. They don't like change.

Kazimir Malevich 100 years ago tried to tell the world about it but the world is slow.
Way to show off on your side project :)
I would like to see some numbers on that. Is it as pervasive as it seems, or are the ones that get through just dramatic enough to set people on edge?
The amount of radiation you receive in one dental x-ray is approximately 1/8th the amount you receive in a single cross-country plane flight.

I mean, you still don't want to overdo it. All things being equal, you want to limit your exposure to ionizing radiation across the board. But dental x-rays generally aren't a public health menace, and they're seldom overprescribed to a dangerous degree. I'd much rather get a dental x-ray that prevents costly and dangerous dental disease in the proximate future, given the fairly low dosage involved.
you are probably right. I know several people who fought or died of cancer. None ever had a CT scan. Or that many X-rays to begin with.
A Content Strategy Checklist You Can't Miss
I am not sure your ideal of perfect authoritarianism is possible. If you want to torment someone it is always going to be possible to do invisibly to casual observation. Restrictions merely determine the language of what harassment consists off, but those who are less well adjusted socially, who are unable to participate as effectively in whatever social maneuvering exists, will always be targeted.
The standard defense of the safety of x-ray machines seems to be that you get more radiation from long haul flights. Well, there's a strong argument that flying isn't safe either. Pilots and stewards apparently have elevated cancer rates.
WebGL: webcam experiment
> rely on interesting features of Chrome... features that other browsers may or may not implement

or chrome 36 may implement differently.
I cannot agree more. Bought it once, never again.
It is interesting how most of the games look like ports of old PC games (not a critique, just noticing). I suppose this underscores the sad state into which the "modern" game developer studios have maneuvered themselves.
How long does a work-sample test take? I'm typically hiring people to work on on-going projects over a period of months or years; the fact that candidate A does better on a 2-hour or 2-day task than candidate B may not give me that much information about things like how effective they will be at sharing their own knowledge with the rest of the team (or taking guidance from more senior members of the team), developing a good working rapport with their QA teammates so they can get to the root of any problems as efficiently as possible, convincing the sysadmins that the candidate's proposed deployment tool is the right way to do it (or gracefully agreeing to use the sysadmins' tool of choice, either because it's actually better, or just because the benefit of the sysadmins' familiarity with it outweighs any technical benefits of the other tool), etc. Unless I'm hiring someone to sit off in a corner developing their own solo project, I'm not convinced that "work sample" tests are that informative.

I don't agree that this question is a silver bullet, but I think it's valuable to see what sort of achievment the candidate considers significant, to ask follow-up questions about how they handled problems along the way to that achievment, etc.

The question helps reduce the power assymetry of the interview, by letting the candidate choose something they're interested in talking about and presumably familiar with. I find that people seem more relaxed when they get into the flow of describing something they're interested in, which lets me explore various aspects of their working style with as little stress to them as possible.

Job interviews do suck, but the alternatives I've seen proposed suck at least as bad, though in different ways.
until it updates to something that break that prototype that is now used by the sales team.

Do you really think IE6 is here because people don't want to upgrade to IE7,8,9,10? It is there because the lame code fail on anything but IE6. Just like 10yrs from now several applications will fail on anything but chrome32 or something.
I'm not very good at math, but I'm reading that as a 0.7% increase in your chance of getting cancer.

From 'Physics for Future Presidents', they say it is commonly accepted that we have a 20% chance of DYING from cancer before calculating for outside influences. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=6DBnS2g-KrQC&pg=PA98&lpg...

Let's say the average person does not get a CT scan every year for 20 years, but rather gets 5 scans over their lifetime.
Those scans may detect an early stage of cancer, therefore saving the persons life.

They're risk of dying from cancer is approximately 20.2%. I suggest with the CT scan, their still coming out on top.
> Isn't Windows 8.1 already out?

Yes.

> It seems like this article is a little bit behind the times.

No.
that was exactly what i said.

the editors called them on the bluff that it was to prevent extra leaks, when everyone knows the gov wants the data to further prosecute leakers.
RailsBricks 2 released: create Rails 4 apps. Faster.
Moving Past Digital Hate
No, but that link is definitely intriguing.
The problem with Windows 7 snap is it's still tied to the overlapping window model, so when you snap a window it just goes on top of whatever was on screen and doesn't automatically manage the remaining space.
Microsoft’s Super Bowl ad reminds the world why its software matters
Not here (Australia). iTunes can take anywhere up to 40 minutes to download enough of a high res movie to start watching. And can then randomly stop the movie as it fails to keep up enough bandwidth over the 1:30 or so run duration.

Torrents are normally half an hour from start to finish.
Lowest common denominator is a phrase with different meanings in different contexts. It means the LCD in maths (used for simplifying fractional arithmetic) and it also means the "basest form of something which all members of a population are able to comprehend/use".

There is a loose commonality in the usage but the term "lowest common denominator" as used here is not the mathematical term. GCF is a mathematical analogy but doesn't work as a direct usage as it would be unclear what the "factor" is that the people are to hold in common whilst in the original phrase it's clear that the denominator (standard) to be held in common is the sum of language understood [and used correctly] by all. It is lowest because greater ones can be achieved by excluding proportions of the population that has been used to establish the standard.

Whilst I couldn't care less the real meaning I've always assumed that "I could care less" is a shorthand for something along the lines of "I could care less but that's too much effort given how little I care about it". YMMV.

All language can be misunderstood by those who wish to misunderstand it.

E&OE.
we're going to fund this research on microryza
We need a rule on hacker news. If you submit another "this is how you do interviews" article, it needs to be backed up with testing and facts.
I don't understand the use of the "would have been" tense. It's not a hypothetical thing, they are in the process of doing exactly that right now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156630
I love Buffer. I use it everyday to share interesting links to friends and family :)

Sounds like a great job! I don't really have much experience with the tech you're using though. Plus I'm currently half-way through a CS degree.

EDIT: The weekend warrior positions sound really interesting. I would be totally on that if it could be flexible around my studies.

EDIT2: I've sent you an email
great idea, looks nice; consider adding a faceted search, or just general category filtering.
All developers I know of, including myself, do have this unawareness of simple things, but I prefer to call it for what it is: simple human laziness.
It's a useful insight given his experience although more hard data backing up the claim would have been useful. A better title would have been something along the lines of how that's a great interview opener though. As the article goes on to elaborate, you need to follow up with many other questions after that first one.
If you decide to build a house, would you start by asking, "What are the best construction tools?" Probably not.

Start by defining what it is you're trying to do. Are you trying to get more visitors to sign up for a trial? Are you trying to lower the bounce rate on your homepage? Are you trying to get more lifetime value from your existing SaaS users? ...

A list of tools won't help if you don't know (or don't specify) what you want to do.
The article is terrible and you've done a good job of explaining why. But there are two ways to look at this:

1. From an individual's perspective

2. From society's perspective

Let's make up some numbers for illustration. If getting a CT scan gives someone 0.01% chance of getting cancer, the risk to any individual is negligible. But to society, that means 100 extra cases of cancer.
We also eat a lot more crap today.
SEEKING WORK

Full-stack developer from Sydney, Australia. I'm a Javascript (Node.js), Python and C expert.

http://github.com/chriso

cohara87 (at) gmail.com
>"We need access to your camera and microphone to get started.

>"No, I'm in my underwear. Please take me back." //

Lol, nice tone.

Dialog to enable webcam didn't appear for me though.

Kubuntu 13.10, FF 26.0
Given all the information at their disposal, much of which comes from articles printed in the Times itself, I find it shockingly irresponsible of them to print these accusations.
> I'm confused. Why does it take you longer to find something on the Metro desktop? At least in my usage, it functions exactly like the old start menu did: I either start typing to find a program (most of the time) or I hit all programs and look around for it. What slows you down?

Yeah I never got why people complained about this. We're running Windows 8 and now 8.1 at work on our development machines (not for "now I can develop Metro apps!"). It's good because we get the latest RDS protocol improvements so remote access works just that little bit better and Windows 8 comes with other technical improvements.

My workflow for launching applications never changed: if it's not pinned to my taskbar then it's WinKey + Type "Fi" (say for Firefox) + Enter.

All that said, I did install ClassicShell a fortnight ago just to try it out (after using the Start Screen since Windows 8 RC) and not having to leave my desktop for the Metro interface just works that leeeeeeeeetle bit better in unquantifiable ways. Now it's on my home + work PCs.
SEEKING WORK - SF Bay Area - Remote or Local

Software Developer specializing in Web and Data Engineering, freelancing while I build my startup. I spent three years as a Data Analyst, then quit and taught myself to code. I've only been freelancing for six months, so I'm willing to work at a discount while I build up my portfolio. I'm also open to bartering.

Skills: Ruby/Rails, TDD, SQL, Redis, ElasticSearch, Python, R, Machine Learning, Project Management, Git, Linux/Unix, AWS, Heroku

Production experience: Everything associated with large Rails projects, web crawling, data pipelines, APIs, data analysis, product management

Side projects: I've built some apps in Node (Express, Meteor), and I compete in Kaggle Data Science competitions when I have time (http://www.kaggle.com/users/30845/dpmehta02). I am particularly interested in NLP.

dpmehta02[at]gmail[dot]com
https://github.com/dpmehta02
You're old enough to know better. The problem is that for younger kids, this kind of stuff is normal. There are even IAP for fully paid games on consoles/PC (are DLC considered IAP?). IAP are everywhere now.
I don't think so.

When I say better off, I'm talking about quality of life, not money. Surely many of the American poor would want to live in Sweden if they knew how high the quality of life is for low-income earners in comparison to theirs -- but because they are poor they have very little chance of ever getting emigrating to Europe.

Conversely, someone who's fairly successful in Sweden might realize that they could be earning much more money in the United States--because of the income inequality--and thus might want to emigrate to the U.S. Chances are they'd have a much better chance of getting there, too.

I live in the U.S., but grew up in Europe. If I didn't have skills that were highly sought after, I wouldn't want to live here. (FWIW, the bigger reason I do live here is that I have immediate family in the states.) I'll bet you that's the case for most people emigrating here from Western Europe.
Stripe. We're hiring engineers in San Francisco and remotely within US timezones. INTERN, REMOTE, H1B all welcome.

See http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/What-engineering-problem... for an overview of what challenges we're working on.

If you're interested, you can apply through the email links on https://stripe.com/jobs. If you have any questions, feel free to ping me directly at gdb@stripe.com.
http://letsworkshop.com/blog/the-email-line/ The email line that's client repellent
All Hail Matt Cutts!
I see your point.

I wonder though if there should be a cutoff somewhere, below which you stop caring? I used background cancer rates as an anchor to judge if the cutoff has been reached, without getting specific about benefits of treatment in each particular case. Would you suggest another cutoff level that is broadly applicable?
> told them to try and close Internet Explorer and shut down the computer

I've found Windows 8 actually works quite well if you use the keyboard exclusively for navigation.

- The Metro "start menu" (that's really all it is) works great if you use it mostly by searching (press Windows key, type, arrow keys, enter to launch.)

- The Win+X accelerator menu has made me faster maintenance tasks than I ever was in W7.

- Your puzzle: focus the Desktop; press Alt+F4. (This has always worked, if you're curious.)

I think this might be why people within Microsoft don't "feel the pain" of Windows 8: it works great with a tablet, or with a keyboard... just not with a mouse.
It's significantly slower than doing it by hand because of how .bind() is implemented in v8 and spidermonkey. It messes with the type information the engines use to optimize and it often sends you through C++ to do the function call.
The best Android games without in-app purchases/paywalls
I think the parent's point was not that modern games are not worth preserving, but that the way they are implemented requires an enormous effort to preserve them far beyond the cost of just copying media, that may not be warranted for anything but the most important and well-loved of games.

Most of these mobile games are continuously upgraded, and more importantly, reliant on an external service to implement purchases and access restrictions and such. You cannot just load such a game up in an emulator if the server containing half the code (yes that's hyperbole, it's a smaller but no less important amount) no longer exists.

People have reimplemented the servers for very important online games in the past. Off the top of my head, Phantasy Star Online (one of the first MMOs) and Vanilla World of Warcraft both have fanmade reverse-engineered recreations of their server software that allow people to play the original game as it was when they were released, even though Sega and Blizzard respectively have long since shut down their official servers. To reiterate, they did this with only information from the game client, neither the source nor binaries of these games' server software were ever made available. I can only imagine how tremendous of an effort this must have been for the fans, but they did it out of love for these games and the time they spent playing them.

Now imagine that one of the various free to play IAP games gets shut down tomorrow. Game binaries that worked fine yesterday are now useless. Chances are, no one cares nearly as much as the aforementioned MMO fans (it's a hell of a lot of work, and I'm going out on a limb and saying that skilled reverse engineers are more likely to be interested in MMOs than cow clickers), and the reverse engineered replacement never gets started. The game disappears from history, except as a Youtube video and a memory.
See my reply to tptacek: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7164350
Aren't there 3 or 4 scenarios that you need to pay for access to?
Posts from Webdesigntuts  for 02/02/2014
Great MMORPGs?

A friend sent me a video of MMORPG 'gameplay' a while ago. I don't play these things, she does and is aware of my opinion of them and chose this as the best sample she could possibly find as a way to try to change my mind about them. It was a major boss battle, something that should've been the highlight of what the game had to offer.

There was no gameplay. The boss monster was rendered as a hundred foot tall demon, but it didn't fight in any meaningful sense of the word. It stepped back and forth over and over again, executing some canned move the same way every time. The two dozen players did the same thing, wasting half an hour of their lives mindlessly pressing the same buttons over and over again until the boss monster 'died' (scare quotes because obviously it popped up again later for the next batch of victims).

MMORPGs aren't games. They're Skinner boxes, exploits for security flaws in the human motivation system. The real challenge is at the meta-game level: the developers win if they successfully exploit you, and you win if you successfully prevent yourself being exploited. And the way to achieve the latter is to stop playing.
To www or not to www?
WWW or not WWW, What should I choose as my site name?
I greatly admire Kubrick's use of typography in his films, and share his love for Futura, the only typeface on the moon.
This is an excellent article, thank you for sharing.
EnergyHub - http://www.energyhub.com/ - Brooklyn, NY

You will have the opportunity to work on all aspects of our software: predictive analytics, communicating with embedded devices, the back end distributed system, and web and mobile applications.

The ideal candidate:
- Is fluent in a modern programming language (almost any!).
- Knows their way around computers because they like knowing how things work.
- Plays around with embedded systems.
- Has built cool web or mobile applications.
- Has worked on a distributed, fault-tolerant, and scalable system.

As a team, we:
- Like the JVM, but love Python.
- Juggle data using the right tool for the job — SQL, NoSQL, and a mixture of Pandas/SciPy/IPython.
- Scale horizontally.
- Are open to trying out new technologies, languages, and ideas.

EnergyHub is a Brooklyn-based startup located in an old factory near the scenic Gowanus Canal. We provide a cloud-hosted software platform for managing energy use in homes and small businesses. Together, our partners have sold over 100,000 EnergyHub-powered devices, and we will be managing 1 million devices in the next few years.

To apply, send the following to jobs@energyhub.com:
- Your resumé.
- Why you’re excited to work at EnergyHub.
- Some code. This can take the form of a link to any of your open source projects, your github username, a code sample, or an app you wrote.