skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you explain how that's a plausible explanation? I don't see this being the kind of thing a vandal would do.

Is external (hacker/SK) influence even possible? I know Apple releases the source, but do they actually take patches from the community?
I would love to hear the story.
Going the opposite direction would be much more deserving IMHO; e.g. trying to fit a Flappy Birds clone in a few hundred bytes or something like that.
Ugh, these popups are getting out of hand. "DO YOU AGREE THAT OUR GENERATION NEEDS A VOICE? [FB Like button] [Twitter Follow button]"

Immediate Ctrl + W.
Given the text of the article, which entails only a single incident of a legitimate transaction being stopped based on automatic keyword filtering, we should conclude that it is entirely reasonable to state that the whole US government -- every single branch and agency -- is incapable of carrying out any action competently, at every level all the way to the very top?

Yes, that's a hyperbolic statement.
You can pay users to join your service and download your app, but that doesn't mean they'll become monthly active users, which is the metric your business will be valued on.

This is a user acquisition tactic like any other - it doesn't get around the network effect that WhatsApp and others capitalize on to stay in the lead.
So stoked for you guys. I watched you guys apply and get rejected each time. And then emerge more determined. It felt obvious to me not only that you would get in, but that you would be one of the startups most likely to succeed.

And now you're proving me right. Which rocks.
How do you write a privacy policy for an app?
I have an app the runs on the user's desktop but sends identifying information on my server. Is it best to hire a lawyer to write it or are there services that someone can recommend to do this?
Yeah, same experience. I interviewed a long time ago (something like 5-6 years ago), and the interviewer sounded bored and grumpy the whole time. I told them before I interviewed that I didn't know of any of their core languages well enough to interview in them (Python being the only one I could possibly perform well enough with), but they said doing it in Ruby was fine since I was going for a testing position where they used Selenium and Ruby (no clue if that was true since the guy who interviewed me said it wasn't). The interviewer was just severely adversarial the whole time, constantly pointing out "you can't do that" syntactically or "that won't work" even though I'd step through and show them links or irb runs that proved otherwise.

And what's the deal with doing code interviews in Google Docs? I don't know if that's how it's done now, but it was extremely high-pressure. Given that he could see every keystroke and was pretty un-cooperative, it made for a super unpleasant interview with the constant feeling that I couldn't think or explore the problem given.

Needless to say, I didn't progress.
Knowing when to lead and when to "let" someone else lead may be important (just as, say, delegating is), but I don't think it settles for a different definition of leadership. Knowing when to lead or not has always been considered a good criteria.

> Nothing < anecdotes < more anecdotes < data?

Well, I'm apprehensive about writing about an odd interview it because I don't want people to think ill of Google merely because I had what might be an uncommon interview process.
I had a rough time getting through my Computer Science degree, despite loving software. I still find things I hate. Currently, I've done web apps for a few years and now I'm fucking sick of them. Time to move on to a new area of CS that challenges me. That's pretty much how it goes. You'll do stuff you hate, but you have to use that as a foundation to do the things you love.
Good! We'll be doing it again. To anyone that gets an interview invitation, contact me at @jasonfreedman and we'll be happy to do a mock-interview. Several alumni did mocks for us when we were applying and we found it massively helpful.
I don't think Hacker News is any place for this level of discourse. Voice your arguments, but there is no need for personal attacks.
After seeing a few stories like this, it seems facebook advertising makes sense for one thing: buying likes. When one of us sees a site with 11.2K likes, we would know better. But the average user might not.

Fake it until you make it.
There's plenty of room for improvement. For example: if you run the same regex many times in a row, Vim rebuilds the DFA on each run. A cache of recently-used DFAs would avoid tons of wasted computation. Also, Vim doesn't free many regex-related data structures until you close the buffer they were invoked on. I had to work-around that bug when writing a plugin, since it caused Vim to use gigabytes of memory.

The best solution would probably be to switch to PCRE. Some Vim-specific stuff[1] would have to be special-cased, but Vim could get an order of magnitude speedup (and fix quite a few bugs) by using a modern, optimized, well-tested regex library.

1. Vim abuses regexes like nothing I've ever seen. You can even match line and column numbers with the regex engine: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html#/\%l
http://www.iubenda.com/en
I'd like to concur. I've been banking with Chase in some form or another since their Bank One merger, and they are easily the best large bank I've been a customer of. They even beat most regional banks I've used.

Their online and mobile tools are a big part of that. Their military support is also pretty good (my daughter is USCG) with true cost free banking and low activity military accounts. In fact, they beat USAA on almost every gauge (the exception being USAA makes pay and allowances available a few days early).
$6 Billion? Think of all the prisons we could build!!
App installs and updates are still subject to code signing, and unless you jailbroke the device by some other means, any code that would be able to mess with the OS' public keys used to to authenticate the signatures would have to be signed itself and presumably would have to come in the form of a signed OS update.
The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena is well regarded, has war stories, case studies, homework assignments. - Find it at http://www.algorist.com/
Working in a big company is inherently "high stress"

The NFL is high stress, but there are home games and away games. And playing local rivals you know well, and distant teams you know less well. Much BigCo work is done "on the inside", amid familiar faces; or with cultural reference points you have in common {etc}. Interviewing with a new company can be a hit-or-miss affair because it requirese the establishment of common ground. That's in part why many people short-list resume's with applicants who went to the same or similar schools, or who have worked with common colleagues/products/platforms etc. It all becaus the over-head to process and place context around the applicant is much cheaper (efficient) in the sense of less mantally taxing for the Inverviewer (and if lucky, the interviewee). So in short, that's why new contexts themselves can be more stressful than what might otherwise appear to be "higher" stress from the outside.
Now do this for the coaches.
Happy Birthday Tom. I think this is a fantastic idea, as I also like to help people out and get involved with interesting products.

I can see myself doing something similar one day, so I have sent an e-mail over hoping that we can talk further.
Despite the fact that Laszlo is the head of HR, engineering is in charge of its own hiring procedures. I would take all of this with a giant grain of salt.
Batons.
Sorry, that was a typo on my part, honest. Got back to HN only when it was too late to change :(

My point stands though: Whiner lamenting the demise of RSS and OPML is not news. Every time he makes HN, he's found some new way to lament that RSS was killed/sabotaged/forgotten. It's funny (and sad) to see how he's now added OPML to the list of grievances.
Just speculation, but could this have anything to do with what's happening in Ukraine at the moment?
QNX has been owned by other companies in the past (e.g. Harman Intl.). There is no reason the believe that it will go anywhere regardless of what happens to BlackBerry. QNX just happens to be operating as a subsidiary of its biggest customer for the time being.
Yamaha's Latest Silent Brass
Seems odd that Facebook didn't pursue the huge bill he wouldn't pay. Is it too much to assume they wouldn't want the details to come out in court?
FYI, the new Hacker News API allows easy programmatic access of story/comments and infinite chronological paging. You could download every Hacker News story in less than 2 hours without breaking the API request limit.

https://hn.algolia.com/api
You can highlight multiple lines:
https://github.com/justinmeister/Mario-Level-1/blob/master/d...
I'm shocked and find that hard to believe; even without separate commits, it's not a huge single diff and it should really not be too much to ask for a proper review.

You'd think one would be a little less sloppy when hacking on the very core of the SSL libraries being deployed on hundreds of million of devices.
Especially since the bulk of WhatsApp users are reported to be in other countries. US $1 a month is likely to be a bigger incentive than it seems at first.
People seem to be misreading your question.

You seem fully aware that the subjects you're studying are very important and you need to do well at them.

As someone once told me most motivational speakers just lend you motivation. Once you've left the room pumped you quickly go back to square one.

So it's hard to know what works, there's a lot of crap out there.

I've had moderate success with the Pomodoro Technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

But if it doesn't work for you, or as often happens it only works for a while, make sure you go on to something else.
Are you saying they should have extra people doing code review - requires two instead of 1 (I don't know the number, but assume that's the norm). Or more rigorous testing technique? I am all for it. Is this something they can easily discover through automated testing?
What is the policy on applications for businesses that compete with existing YC companies?

Do you accept them? Do you have conflict of interest or confidentiality policies?

Do you ever have conversations with existing YC companies along the lines of "We had an application recently for product X, you should do that."?
There's one part of this I still don't get, though. Where's the motive in running Facebook "like" farms?
The kind of BASIC he was referring to matters little: his point that learning one bad language can forever ruin a developer is absurd.
thank you. I was on the way to making a virtual environment and pip installing it
I would prefer to hire people I know than those who don't, but if you have worked on successful, related projects then I would ask for references including co-worker/developer references.
I found studying the hjstory of mathematics gave a lot more depth about how things came about and why ie delta epsilon limit proofs and the centuries long journey to give a theoretical basis to calculus.
The motive for running the farm is because some people will pay for the likes.

The motive for someone running a farm to also send likes to non-customer pages is to make it harder for Facebook to detect the fraudulent likes.
Why would the NSA put a backdoor in an open source component of iOS and OSX when presumably, it would have been just as easy to put it in the closed source part, where it would be much less likely to be found and even less likely to ever be publicly exposed?
But VP9 is supposed to beat H.264. It should be significantly better.

Because at the end of the day it is competing with H.265.
Funny, I never thought I would see my alma mater on the front page of Hacker News.

A few things about the current situation. For various reasons, including mistakes made by the last president, the college was severely under-enrolled in this years freshman class. This is the cause of the major financial problems the college is facing and caused the previous president to ask the Board of Trustees not to renew his contract. The current president is an interim president and the college is currently conducting a search for a permanent replacement.

From what I have heard the current search is not going well. They are having a heard time finding suitable candidates that want to face the challenges the college is currently facing, which includes an underpaid faculty. I can't help but think that this will make it even harder to recruit a suitable candidate. I know several of the professors involved with this (I still live near the campus) and I know their hearts are in the right place and they want what is best for the college. I also know many of them disdain administrators and people with money. Especially people with money.

I will be following this with interest to see how this plays out.
> 8th century nothing. It was known in ancient times.

I was referring specifically to the pattern of how long it took in the Middle Ages for literature folks to get ahold of the idea. The fact is those 8th century monks got the idea from classical sources.

The subtext of the paper would be "you English teachers can't expect to know about scientific discoveries of the last couple hundred years, can you?"
The motive is that with these farms they then sell dumb users "100.000" likes for 10$ ... and people actually buy them.

Nowadays I receive more FbLikes spam than Viagra's
I had this long diatribe pounded out and ready to submit, but, why bother? It's going to fall on deaf ears. People have bought into the "hard work" lie so fully. I'll just leave it at this:

While there are notable exceptions, hard work is not a reliable predictor of success. Do you really think those multi-million dollar penthouses in Manhattan and those huge estates in the hills on the SF Bay peninsula are inhabited by people who simply "muscled through it"? Being (or knowing) the right people is a reliable predictor of success. By and large, those guys are the ones making it big.

My advice to someone going off to college would be: 1. Go to the most prestigious one you can afford/luck into and 2. Make friends with the richest/most well connected kids you meet.
This music video is AWESOME! Check it out
My Number One by WE
Here's a good (but long) video that goes in depth into why they believe this happens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

The theory is pay-for-likes click farms click everything they see, including legitimate "like" ads to avoid detection. This increases the number of fake profiles liking your page, which decreases the percentage of users liking your posts, which decreases the number of users posts are shown to (unless you also pay to promote your post...)
having extra people doing code review risks something that happens with physical products.

You take the experienced people off the shop floor, and call them inspectors. So now the quality of product coming off the shop floor is worse.

Ann is the first inspector in the chain. When she's busy (and remember, she will be because quality has dropped) she might be tempted to let a few things go because Bob, the second inspector in the chain, is bound to catch them. That's what he's there for.

Bob is the second inspector in the chain. Sometimes Ann really churns the product through. Luckily during those busy times he knows she's already inspected the stuff, so he only needs to give a 10% inspection.

So you have worse product with more errors and leaky inspection.

Ideally you'd have a system with skilled workers and self inspection. That's okay for aerospace (which pays well) but not so great for lower cost product.

Not quite sure how this transfers to coding.
The last Ford I rented I could only get my iphone to play out through the speakers about one out of every three tries, and only if it was all plugged in and ready to go when I put the key in (and forget doing anything other than listening to songs in alphabetical order).
The problem is that Google is not just a developer, it's the platform owner, i.e. the company who has to sell the platform to manufacturers and carriers.

Carriers don't want features like Hangouts because they eat into their margins for crappy but expensive features like video-calls. If carriers don't want something, manufacturers (who have to sell to carriers) don't want it either, so Google (who have to sell to manufacturers) has to downplay it as well. Same goes for IM: carriers would prefer that you used their metered SMS services rather than ubiquitous GTalk or something equivalent.

Third-party developers like WhatsApp don't have to maintain a relationship with carriers, so they can push anything they want as hard as they want.
Show HN: JavaScript based clone of TwitchPlaysPokemon
Got a zombie startup? Find out with a marketing kickstart
ISTR the Knight Foundation generally knew what they were doing tho.
Where is the patch for OSX Mavericks Apple? Patches aplenty for iOS yet it appears Safari is still vulnerable.
He's using the logo, trademark and strongly implying that this is either (a) created by Google or (b) sanctioned by Google.

The disclaimer is a waste of time. The guy is acting like an idiot and can expect a cease and desist pretty swiftly.
"A sneaky bug? Only the NSA could have pulled that off! An obvious bug? Only the NSA would be so brazen in trying to throw us off their track!"

If the witch had led an evil and improper life, she was guilty; if she had led a good and proper life, this too was a proof, for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous. After the woman was put in prison: if she was afraid, this proved her guilt; if she was not afraid, this proved her guilt, for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front. Or on hearing of a denunciation of witchcraft against her, she might seek flight or remain; if she ran, that proved her guilt; if she remained, the devil had detained her so she could not get away.[1]

If you argue that an obvious bug is evidence of NSA involvement, then you must also believe a subtle bug would be evidence against NSA involvement. You can't have it both ways.

1. From Conservation of Expected Evidence http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence...
And this is why I can't understand why people don't use matching braces in my control structures. Not using them is asking for this kind of error.
Reading this story honestly I would summarize it like this: "User don't know anything about Facebook Ads. Decide to test them. Test with $400k in 4 days. Totally waste his money".

Facebook is not perfect ... and click fraud is a huge problem. This does not means that Fb Ads does not work or return a negative ROI. You simply need to know the medium you are advertising on and use it wisely.

Thanks god we live in 2014 ... we can track everything ... real things like sales, leads, subscriptions. WHY people keep advertising to go after vanity metrics such as Number of likes or clicks. Who cares about the clicks.

Part of them are fake? Sure! Facebook should do more? Sure! Can you still earn money tracking you Facebook Ads overall Cost per sale instead of the cpc? Damn sure!
The vp of engineering should have invested in a good static analysis tool which would have spotted this section in about five seconds. Failing that turning on a sensible set of defaults in the compiler (warning about unreachable code) would have also drawn attention to it.

There are many many ways this should have been caught before it even left the building by numerous automated tools. Heck most modern IDEs will flag unreachable code in the editor so there is no real excuse for this. (Adding -Wunreachable-code to a sample project in Xcode immediately flags the next line).

The programmer is human which is why automated verification tools exist.

(AppCode's default inspections will also flag the issue providing you run them)
That's the thing - with an indentation-based syntax, the code would have been okay! The second goto would have been part of the if statement, so it would have had no effect beyond the aesthetic.
@wtracy, I think your computer is hacked ^_^ CraigsList works normal here.
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1971)
This is neat!

FYI, they have had "practice mutes" on the market for a very long time now! http://www.wwbw.com/Trumpet---Cornet-Mutes-Brass-Mutes,Mute-...
I'm under the impression that Apple prides itself on having a smaller number of very dedicated employees that are perfectionists.

I can totally see this being "innocent 2AM mis-judgement call by a single employee", judging from what my peers tell me of Apple's corporate culture. I do think that Adam Langley's suggestion that code review would help is plausible, but it merely just means that more than one person has to make the same mistake in a judgement call. (It reduces the probability of such an error happening; it doesn't theoretically eliminate it.)
Yay, I sent an email for my current startup BeeplApp ( http://beeplapp.com/ ) ^_^

Love the idea of giving back mate annnndd Happy birthday!
They have been trying. The problem is the first version was the overpriced and missing key features (the playbook had no email at launch). The next attempts were years late and after the brand already had a rep for being boring old tech.
I know of a developer that did this. They purchased the cheapest possible Facebook ads and targeted them towards the largest audience. They received hundreds of thousands of "likes" for a relatively small investment ($1000 or so). Most of the people who liked their page had profiles from developing countries.

They then used the number of likes they had amassed (~200k) to get funding for their new product. It worked. Everyone took them much more seriously when they mentioned how many fans they had on Facebook. They were even able to attract licensing deals from some fairly big brands because their Facebook page looked so impressive.
When did linux become a real time OS?
Introduction to Docker and more at LSPE meetup Sunnyvale
Well, GPA shouldn't be tricky at all if you have what it takes to work at Google.

This means, unless you were fed up with the educational system like I was and you purposely did a mediocre performance, you probably aced them.
Don't compare aniracetam or oxi to amphetamines (or ritalin) - the former is legal and safe enough, and the latter is much more dangerous and ineffective (in terms of concentration enhancing). I would never ever recommend amphetamines nor ritalin, cannabis or other "useful" drugs, that always make you want to take more of them. All what they can give is faster burnout of your brain and state of lack of energy (also, problems with your skin, thanks to amphetamine overdose).

What OP was talking about was not psychostimulation, but concentration enhancer, something that would just reduce effects of "mind wandering" and let him do tasks that he doesn't want to otherwise.

Aniracetam and oxi do greatly reduce effects of "mind wandering", large amounts of grains and fruits give your brain very much glucose, i.e. energy to use to, coffee increases your metabolism and blood flow, and gives a slight stimulation, so you can force yourself to do task more easily.

Don't overuse coffee, though, it's effects can last from 1 to 3 days (or even more).
Right, so the protests of the 60s prove your theory right? It's not like Nixon started the war on drugs for the exact opposite reason, right?
I'd agree right up until the point where he went to Facebook HQ in Toronto for training on the ads. If it were someone wasting a few grand, I'd understand. Once someone is actually trained in a certain product by the company selling it, wastes half a million, and sees this kind of result, it crosses over to the realm of fraudulent.