skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well it will be interesting when x265 (which is the only HEVC encoder I'm interested in as it seems poised to become the x264 equivalent) has had more time to improve, in the last tests I did (which were more than a month ago) it was worse than x264 (and consequently VP9) due to losing a lot of detail, but as stated the encoder is very young and also under heavy development, chances are I would already get very different results if I redid the tests today (currently keeping an eye out for some major improvements before I start testing again).
CreativeLive: Photoshop Week 2014 (Free five-day Photoshop training)
Despite all the bashing of Google's hiring process, I think Google's hiring process is very good. My experience was completely positive.

Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.”

No, that's not what Google is able to determine. The blanket claim is too broad. Predict anything? I don't think GPAs are worthless, but that's another discussion for another time. Regardless of whether they're useful, the only thing Google has is its own performance ("perf") data which represents political factors more than anything else.

If you find a zero correlation in junk data, you know... absolutely nothing more than you did beforehand. That's the thing about junk data. You can't trust it, so you can't use it to infer anything.
Though ... if anywhere uses Safari on a regular basis and thus trusts their SSL to it, that would be Apple, yes? ;-)
Would providing alternative art/music and not using the Mario trademark make this legally safe? If the project is serious about continuing, I am sure any number of people would be willing to help out with legally acceptable replacements.
Github link: https://github.com/joelgrus/hackernews
This is a scam. He's using scammers to scam other people. Maybe that's obvious to everyone here, but I think it's worth stating explicitly that while this behavior is being enabled by the state of advertising on Facebook, it's still unethical and dishonest.
I had just submitted the OLD link summarizing last summer's interview to HN today (to answer a question that came up overnight about Google's hiring practices), and I see that the author here was just as struck by the statement from last summer, "G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything." In more complete context, from last summer's interview by another New York Times writer,[1] that statement was "One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything." So, yes, if you have little work experience and were in full-time school recently, Google will ask you about your G.P.A. But if you have substantial industry experience, Google will ask you about that, or at least such is the claim here about current Google practice.

Some comments posted before this comment mentioned the confusing way that "general cognitive ability" is said not to be the same thing as IQ. No psychologist, and especially no psychologist specializing in industrial and organizational psychology, would speak that way. The universal statement in that branch of psychology is that IQ scores are a very good indicator of "general cognitive ability" indeed, the least expensive and most efficient indicator possible for most hiring situations. I think the Google executive interviewed in today's article and in last summer's article is just trying to be legally correct while eating his cake and having it. In the United States, there are tricky legal issues surrounding using IQ tests as a hiring criterion that grow out of the Griggs v. Duke Power case decision by the United States Supreme Court.[2] IQ tests are disfavored as a hiring criterion by that decisions (but the little known fact is that so are educational credentials disfavored as a hiring criterion[3] by the same case), so companies tend to try to use more expensive, less reliable proxies of IQ tests to get the results that IQ tests would give them more reliably and less expensively.

[1] "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal" 19 June 2013 by Adam Bryant

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

[2] http://www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-co

[3] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/iq_and_hiring_d....
How to safely use single-line if statements
Why do you want to see these things? These are adaptations to the platform that the original game was developed on (and its limitations). What would be the purpose of reproducing those limitations in a new implementation for a completely different platform?
And? I'm talking about innate rights, and you keep trying to find where the government gave you those rights. You are the worst American ever.
Who the hell just runs a $100K/day campaign without any testing?

Fool and his money are soon parted.
I think the point is is that even if you don't use mainstream services, than there's nothing stopping Facebook buying up whatever you were using at some point in the future.
The Unknown Unknowns of Learning to Code
Ask HN: Whats the most interesting and exciting field in computer science?
I agree on this point that with Facebook training you should have at least some experience but I guess he didn't learn that much :)

$6/400k is like a medium sized agency monthly budget. It's not something you learn to manage in 1 or 2 days training.

You never scale a campaign to that level until you've done weeks if not months of testing and fine tuning with every possible ad's creatives and demographic audience. Starting at $100k/days means whatever goes wrong it's already too late to fix it ... you don't have the time to do any serious testing and optimization.

Moreove it's not that easy to spend $100k/day in canada ... I deal with many Startups and Brands that get Facebook Ads right and their usual problem is they've found the right mix ads/audience to have a very good ROI but they cannot scale it to spend those amounts.

Spending $100k per days probably means that he was targeting the whole canada. Whitout any specific targeting on interests, demographic informations etc. If that's the case and he was getting 150k clicks per day out of a $100k budget he should be pretty happy :)
It doesn't say where I can download it or try it out.
Does google pay significantly more than, say, any old rails job? Perks don't really impress me. 20% time sounds interesting, but I hear it's gone. Why would I want to deal with the interview process?
I like that, and hope to encourage the same in my kids (currently too young to "get it"). If you're making the same mistakes as everyone else, you're not learning by example. If you're not making mistakes at all, though, you're not learning by experience either.
Wow, you sound like me 20 years ago. And I am quiet surprised at "that's life, shape up" responses.

Knowing what I know now, I wish someone would've told me:
- Try to get into top schools like Stanford, Harvard, etc.
- If you don't have the financial means or the grades or whatever, don't get discouraged one bit!
- Since you enjoy "programming or researching", stop stressing over colleges. In my humble opinion, most colleges are overrated. They are designed for drones and will suck the passion out of what you are majoring in. (note: may not be true for all)
- In my opinion, typical educational institutions in our country is broken.
- Instead, start interning. Do small projects that you can showcase on your passion. Join programming groups, meet ups that are related, etc.
- In short, make a living in doing what you love (programming). When you find a job and love what you do, you are no longer "working".

Finally, watch this:
http://new.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_ha...
Hmm, not just my Nexus 7, then. Fortunately that's not very frequent.
"For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information."

The cognitive dissonance required to say "general cognitive ability... is not IQ" is astounding.

IQ testing bad! Hiring smart people good! Does not compute!
As a 2013 Ford Fiesta SE owner, I can attest to the poor quality of Microsoft's SYNC system. I was so frustrated that I even wrote a blog post about it some time ago. I would have even more negative commentary now.

The Sept. 2013 post, for anyone curious: http://oddshocks.com/2013/09/microsoft-ford-sync-review/
That's a good point.

It was missing from my list because I honestly never use G+ search and didn't know how to best assess it.
Indeed, a step involving more factors than simply whether the language has destructors.
I like Friedman's summary. If it is accurate, Google has a pretty forward-looking hiring philosophy; definitely better than the view espoused by Marissa Mayer sometime back about only hiring good students (or something along these lines). Working there sounds like it could be quite nice. It's too bad about the stacked ranking, which is a huge liability for a company in my view.
What I find interesting is that apparently YouTube can differentiate between fake and real views. But Facebook can not differentiate between fake and real likes. Difference, YouTube pays you, but you have to pay Facebook. Hmm...
Actually this is the one of the things that annoyed me about WhatsApp - when it is down or you don't have a connection you can't queue messages to be sent. I frequent places without phone coverage (e.g. the Tube in London) and this was one of my big gripes.

On iOS Facebook, iMessage and SMS allow you to queue messages and "Retry" sending them when you have a connection (often in the wrong order). Surprisingly the best app for this is Skype which automatically resends them.
Wonder what % of non-fleet Ford buyers have smart phones?

The transition away from bloated onboard software can't happen soon enough.
Mortal Kombat meets Violin meets Dubstep?
It may work ... and if you just want 200k fans no matter what you don't even need Facebook Ads, you can go directly to the like farms and get them for much cheaper.

But then how will he explain his investors that his 200k "Fans" are generating 0 revenues ? :)
Marijuana should be legal because the US is supposed to be a free country and there is no reason it should be illegal. Tax revenue is a dirty justification that only demonstrates the extreme hypocrisy. It should never be the justification for legality or illegality. The whole discussion about tax revenue allocation is nothing more than red herring. A 25% tax is nothing more than extreme government theft.
It's "fast enough" because you haven't tried the real life resolution. Now even the shittiest phones shoot at 720p minimum, 1080p standard.

I hate, absolutely hate, when youtube quality drops below 720p.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/google-salary-SRCH_KE0,6.h...
Uber and Lyft plan Houston invasion by offering services for free
As a counter opinion, I hate Chase. Ignoring their deep involvement in illegal activity during the mortgage crisis and manipulations of our economy through revolving door lobbying, and merely speaking from a customer perspective:

1. High fees for international bank wires.

2. Befuddled telephone support when money isn't where it's supposed to be (for whatever reason) with frequent transfers to other departments.

3. Bankers on-site often don't know anything about the more complicated aspects of business accounts.

4. International travel with a Chase card is...an adventure. It took me three or four phone calls to Chase after I was already deep in the rain forest in Chiapas, Mexico in order to free up money to simply buy gas and other stuff. I never got the Chase card working for directly buying gas (while other cards did work, most of my funds were in Chase). I would have to go to an ATM, pay exorbitant fees, and use cash for everything. This was incredibly stressful...being 1000 miles inside Mexico on a visitor visa in a motorhome that gets 10 MPG (so, I needed a pretty big chunk of change to get back home, just on the fuel front, not to mention all the other living expenses).

The online experience has finally gotten better in the past few years, but it used to be pretty awful. One still had to call for almost everything interesting; I used to have to pay them for old statements, to boot!

I didn't choose Chase. My first bank was Texas Commerce. Chase acquired them. I stuck with them for a while after, despite my discontent (it's a lot of trouble to move banks, especially for a business that has incoming credit card payments, and outgoing payroll, among other things). When I moved to California, and formed a new corporation for my company, I opened an account at Washington Mutual. A year later, Chase acquired WaMu as part of the mortgage bailouts. So, Chase has been following me around all my damned adult life. I've given up on getting away from them, though I do have a credit union account for my personal money.

Also, they don't treat their employees very well (an ex-girlfriend worked there for a while in college, before going on to work at Google, and she hated it, especially after uniforms became required).

In short, if I were starting anew, Chase would not be on the list of banks I would consider.
Valgrind is dynamic analysis, not static analysis.
...and when did some glorified clock radio need a RTOS?

Or, put another way, what happened to Americans to go from normal people to these obese things that spend an inordinate amount of time 'sitting in traffic' every day, trashing the planet with their vehicle emissions? Is that trip to Burger King so mission critical from a glorified clock radio perspective that they need to listen to something really important on their iPhone connected wirelessly to the vehicle's 'Real Time Operating System'? Or will plain Android/Linux suffice?

Maybe 'Peak Oil' will bring back the street car, bicycles, conversation, buskers and things like bird song and we won't have these quandaries!
Gross. If you analyze ideas for a living, perhaps reconsider how you've phrased and presented this one.
I had same experience with Apple. An interviewer insisted that frequency can never be negative. (He was clueless about something called the Fourier transform where the integral for frequency runs from -infinity to +infinity.)
Don't know why this is being downvoted, because it's probably true. Maybe not for the crowed of HN, but outside of that a lot of people use phones/tablets a lot more than laptops - especially younger people.
Poo
poo
1. The section on matrices should start (not end) with the orthogonal length preserving co-ordinate transformation. It's the easiest geometry/trig connection, the elements can be worked out by hand, demonstrates unitary property, and makes a nice segue into inverse.
2. The section on linear system response could make a mention of Fourier series (even Fourier integral).
3. It's still a mystery to me why linear algebra is not taught using the Dirac notation.
WhatsApp had (depending on who you talk to) about 55 employees at the time of the acquisition. We learned from Techcrunch that the only investor, Sequoia had about 20% of the outstanding stock (with everything converted to Commmon).

So 55 people are splitting 12.8 billion dollars of value. Assuming a power log function (the founders have a big chunk and only 10% of the stock was owned by the 'rest' of the employees, 53 people, 10% of the 16Billion, is 1.6B$. That is roughly $30M per person.

How much attention do you think they are paying to their job, walking around in shock thinking "Holy shit, I'm freakin' rich now!" And trying to let that settle into their brains. Think about how it must feel, you're some employee and you're sitting there "worth" enough money that you can buy a house in California for cash and still retire easily with more "income" just from the interest than your current salary. So you're in a state of shock, and someone says "Hey, the site is down." and you say "Really? Oh look, I could buy that jet, its like only $5M. Hey look at this we could spend a week at this camp in Africa, or this I am so thinking it would be cool to hire a sailboat and crew to ferry us around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, ..."

It will wear off, but the folks who experience it for the first time will never be the same.
Could it be that it's something he is (if he brings up the subject at all) politically or legally required to say irrespective of its truth value? (Not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know the answer.)
> Not in my experience. People buy them because they are dirt cheap.

My experiences are similar. Your average person in Michigan wants to walk into Best Buy/Wal-Mart and buy a $300 computer that does everything they want. Any more than that and the think you are trying to rip them off.
No, but after my experiments I would hope to be able to make some pretty definitive statements about that :-)
Why do you think that if Ford used Linux, your car would not be used for "roving wiretaps." Do you think that if a company uses open source code, they, therefore, make all their uses of it public as well?

Also ... I think "podunk" is a bit much.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
An interesting aspect is that someone could be essentially perpetrating this scam while legitimately being innocent of malevolent intent. I don't know if that's the case in the story recounted above (I suspect not), but I have met a small business that ran a "successful" Facebook ad campaign to get more likes, and who are happy with the result, where I strongly suspect the quality of the likes is really low. They genuinely think they ran a successful ad campaign with good ROI, and I don't think the intent was to puff up their profile. Afaict they haven't used the number for anything either, but it could well lead to unintentionally misrepresenting their popularity to future potential investors/clients/etc.

Of course, this starts to some extent from Facebook: the small businesses reporting their "successful ad campaign" are more or less passing on the low-quality metrics that Facebook gives to them. Some businesses are aware that these metrics are crap, but then Facebook itself is also aware...
Beware of Vulnerable Anti-Theft Applications
What is Generation C?

Born sometime between the launch of the VCR and the commercialization of the Internet, Americans 18-34 are redefining media consumption with their unique embrace of all things digital. According to Nielsen and NM Incite's U.S. Digital Consumer Report, this group—dubbed “Generation C” by Nielsen—is taking their personal connection—with each other and content—to new levels, new devices and new experiences like no other age group.

The latest Census reports that Americans 18-34 make up 23 percent of the U.S. population, yet they represent an outsized portion of consumers watching online video (27%), visiting social networking/blog sites (27%), owning tablets (33%) and using a smartphone (39%). Their ownership and use of connected devices makes them incredibly unique consumers, representing both a challenge and opportunity for marketers and content providers alike. Generation C is engaging in new ways and there are more touch points for marketers to reach them.

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2012/introducing-gener...
At what point did you think this comment contributed in any way?
Allee effect
Yes, this is a much better description of the problem.

FB is a really bad ad platform. Yes, you can use it & get good results, but that takes more luck & skill than other platforms.

From the article: "FB estimates that ~1% of their users are fake generating fake likes". But, if those accounts have 10-100 times more likes than real accounts, you can see that the polluting effect can dominate the overall activity.
DogeCoin client for Node.js
> It solves a different problem than LaTeX anyway.

There's a fair bit of overlap though. I know people who typeset books with Word :-(
Nintendo seems to be pretty lenient about non-profit fangames, actually. Mari0 (http://stabyourself.net/mari0/) and Super Mario Bros. Crossover (http://www.explodingrabbit.com/games/super-mario-bros-crosso...) have both gotten a lot of media attention without any legal issues I'm aware of.
Yes, Google Docs was still the whiteboard for screening less than a year ago.

Thankfully, the person I dealt with was generally pleasant and made for one of the better interview experiences I've had.
"Clearly, the vast majority of businesses that use Facebook for marketing are pleased with the experience. Facebook's growing revenues, up 63% last quarter, indicate it is only getting more successful at selling advertising, not less."

Clearly? Just because they're getting better at selling doesn't mean the people are actually pleased with the experience. And as this article points out, "selling" is the same as "collecting payment".
Yeah, if we were banning things because of allergies, lets go after the oak trees first. Those things are absolute menaces: http://www.joelgarver.com/imgs/pollen.jpg
Apollonian and Dionysian
There's a big (and common) error in statistical reasoning Google is making with the decision to down-weight GPA based on their data: That GPAs do not predict performance among those it hired does not imply that Google should not use GPA when hiring any more. Rather, it means that Google used GPA to exactly the right extent among those it hired under its old policy - there was no information left in GPA they didn't use, and therefore they should leave whatever policy they have in place as is.

Explanation: suppose there are only two things Google observes, GPA and coding ability, and that Google uses some correct decision rule to only hire those people where the sum GPA + coding ability > some threshold. Those who have lower GPAs will thus tend to have higher coding ability, otherwise they wouldn't have met the threshold to make it into the pool of hires they're analyzing - and, therefore, comparing "those with low GPAs that Google hired" and "those with high GPAs that Google hired" is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

In order to assess whether GPA should be used at all, they would need to look at how the people they didn't hire because of their existing policy would have performed.

More reading: http://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-subtle-joys-of-s... and http://www.jamesmahoney.org/articles/Insights%20and%20Pitfal...
If the code hasn't been linted, expect lots of false positives. I usually have to disable entire classes of less serious warnings to notice the errors, then slowly work through to the less serious stuff.
No, please educate me; this sounds interesting
Well poor zucky has to make his money in some way! Especially after the big dent in the budget due to WhatsApp .
How do you get pagination with markdown?
I would like to switch to markdown instead of using latex, because my needs are simple. But how can I convert markdown into something with support for pagination?
Generally the highly paid coaches are at schools where the athletic departments fund themselves (Texas, Ohio State, etc.)
Mine eventually came through, but it took 10 or 15 minutes.
Unboxing Water Pipes – 7MM Thick Glass
No African countries have applied or been accepted, but we've accepted several people from them. IIRC none were making things for specifically African markets though.

We're certainly willing to fund companies building stuff for their home country and that will return to it after YC. GoCardless is probably the most prominent.
I could be misunderstanding, but are you responding to the point made by the timing of the NSA's "Announcement" of their abilities with Apple products? Jon himself admits his evidence leads him to believe #3 on his list. Is that silly?