skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What can I ask potential employers?
This question is specifically referring to startups, because startups generally have more risk involved.

I'm currently looking at job openings at startups. There's some that interest me, but I'm worried about some of the risk that comes with joining a startup. That's not to say that I'm not willing to take on any risk, but I at least want to know what I'm getting in to before I bet me and my families financial well-being on it.

That said, I'm never sure what I'm allowed to ask startups. Given that I haven't been hired yet, I would think some startups would prefer not to give out too much information about business plans or traction statisics.

Am I allowed to ask questions like:

- How much runway do you have left? What's your plan for extending that runway? If you're planning on new investments, are you actively seeking that?

- Why do you think this product will succeed?

- What's the end game? Are you hoping for an acquisition, or an IPO, or a lifestyle business? Something in between? Are you close to achieving that goal?

- (assuming I've found something the startup is currently struggling with, like churn... I mostly want to see that they're working towards smart solutions) What are you planning to do about your churn problem?
Timothy B Lee is the Rush Limbaugh of Hacker News. Saying things that could technically happen, in the sense that they wouldn't violate the laws of physics, in order to get people good and angry.
Can I request a text/plain version of this? I saw no option and while the confirmation email did contain both MIME types, Mail.app removed the functionality to prefer plaintext in Mavericks.
I worked at a place (but not on the team) where someone used the Ebonics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...) version of Lorem Ipsum to fill in a large amount of text on the app. They forgot about it and showed it to the client and it contained a lot f-bombs and n-words.

It seems like people need to learn the hard way to not put that stuff in. If it's there, it'll be accidentally shown to the wrong person.
If they do, that would go a long way to convincing me this is a tidbit more secure than any other random Android device.

They should really have released their code at the same time they released their phone though.
Also, the offending example is to block malicious API use, while I'm sure spammers have feelings too they will most likely survive this stinging automated reject message.
Judging code is important, but this article seems to be judging people too much.

When I see unwieldy legacy code at Fitbit, I assume it was written by an overworked early employee wearing five different software-engineer hats, two of which they were experienced in. I assume they were working as fast as they could to get their startup to take off before the end of the runway, and that they anticipated having enough money to hire a team of people to clean things up later if they succeeded.

They did succeed, and I'm part of the cleanup crew.

See also http://retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?title=The_Prime_Direc...
So in fewer words, your solution to state spying is "don't even try fighting it".
Firefox OS runs very smoothly, when being simulated on the computer.

On the $70 ZTE phone, it's less than stellar, mainly because the phone has issues registering touches. Also, there are some software bugs, like momentum being saved when it should have decayed, after you lift your finger 5s later in certain scrollable views.

If the newer phones have better touch screens, and the OS consistently gets improved, especially on UI front, I could really see this succeeding and taking a sizable market share.

Regardless, it'll change the game, and motivate Google & Apple to step up their support for HTML as a platform. It's already happening, with Android KitKat [1].

[1] http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-44-kitkat-browser-and
Uh huh. What if I have a deal with Intel and your TRESOR code compiled into the kernel is easily profiled by the microcode and the key is itself silently transmitted/stored by the CPU?

Same with your USB stick.

Go read up on how the CIA sabotaged the Iranian nuclear enrichment centrifuges by compromising the supply chain of the power supplies (not the computer controls).
UIUC's Advanced Distributed Systems (Spring 2014)
Full course schedule, and contents, for "Advanced Distributed Systems" (CS525) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, taught by Prof. Indranil Gupta.
Unfortunately external configuration is much more than just serialisation. For me, an ideal universal configuraion library will provide schemas, type checking, full structural validation, and externalised defaults so I can tell the difference between a value explicitly set (or reset) to the default by the user, and a value that has never actually been changed. Hardcoded defaults are evil, configuration is actually a stack of developer-set defaults, packager/distro set defaults, sysadmin-set defaults and user preferences.

Imho these are much more tiresome problems than serialisation imho. If I were going to build a configuration library I'd probably use Apache Avro[1] as a base. It has a lot of these ingredients already.

For parsing atm, since I write mostly C++, I'm prone to just using Boost Property Tree[2], which exploits the fact that most of these formats (even XML) are just trees of key-value pairs. There are parsers for XML, JSON, INI and INFO formats[3]

With regard to this project, it'd be nice if the author would write a complete grammar for his UCL format. The advantage of JSON is it's really well documented[1] and I can always go and grab another implementation. There's nothing in this repo except the hand-written C code. Other than that, the cleanups to the syntax look nice and friendly.

[0] https://avro.apache.org/docs/current/

[1] http://www.json.org/

[2] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/property_tree....

[3] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/boost_property...
That's not necessary. A transaction with a modified id is not a problem unless you falsely rely on the id for payment verification instead of tracking the inputs and outputs by a custom hash.

The biggest flaw here is probably the name "transaction id", because it suggests that a transaction can only have one valid id. The normalized id fixes this issue for most transaction types.
Ok, I'm an idiot but how would you rewrite getDayOfWeek?
Legacy code... that's the stuff that solved business problems well enough to provide you with a job fixing it, right?
There is no way a phone that can run firefox os won't also be suitable for android and visa versa.

And free OS is free OS ? How does either add to the cost of the phone?

Am I missing something?

Not that more competition is not a better thing, I mean I love my firefox browser and only grudgingly use chrome.
President of the YCombinator.
I think most people need some fear about state spying. Most are still treating it like it's no big deal. It's like the Stasi are here and no one gives a damn. That should scare people. Maybe we're deeper into Huxley's world than we thought.
>It'd be equivalent to Oracle releasing their DB server for Linux way back in the day

I think Microsoft should look less to Apple and Google for inspiration and more to Oracle. There are a lot of similarities between the two companies: enterprise focus, pure software company, lots of legacy applications to support, etc...
Scientiﬁc Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds (2008)
No. It's UNDERSTAND YOUR ADVERSARY.

If I'm trying to protect myself from hackers, I choose one route. From my ISP, another. From FB/Google, another.

And from my government or your government, yet another.

What's missing here is honest dialogue about the limits of the technology. The best technology has yet to save people from their own foolishness.
The same was true for the OLPC, so netcan's argument is still valid.
React Demystified (by HN's haberman)
https://github.com/operasoftware/ucss/
Why? I believe that sentence refers to extra software/services that’d normally be paid.
The best managers I've had aren't the kind of controlling, micromanaging people who could reasonably prevent it.

Informal design sketch review, peer code review, pair programming to mentor and induct. All processes that could be mandated by the manager, but work better from peers than down from on high.
FTC: Broker the Comcast-TWC deal like the Verizion-Alltel one
It's funny but I think that's the way to go if you can't get your content first, if something slips through, it might be weird to the customer, but not insulting.
if only ios would allow background processes like a real computer. we could have perfect free and open source communications via or based on xmpp.
I have to get this operation done once every 2-5 months, and I've heard several times from nurses and doctors that it's their favorite operation, for exactly that reason :) As a common 'sufferer,' let me say I enjoy it, too.
Maybe if you speak in code the whole time, and never reveal the identities of both of you. The contents of the conversation will not be secure, so you have to assume they are hearing it, but don't understand what you're talking about. That may be a little difficult.
The Myth of the Flying Car
Show HN: Convert your casual connections into meaningful follow-ups
I withdrew my money a couple of weeks ago to a European bank account, shortly before the news of their issues broke. It wasn't a fortune but it was a large enough amount to care about. Still hasn't made it onto my account. I doubt it ever will at this point.
I am not sure why do anyone needs that.

You can have basically secure messaging on the phone today. You can use Replicant (libre software) on many phones where there probably are no backdoors, you can use OTR with Xabber (you can build it yourself), there are probably applications for PGP too.

Yeah, Replicant will fail to work on many phones and on those that work, half of the functionality is missing ( http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Replican... ) - but trying to sell non-free phone as "secure" is snake-oil anyway. In my humble opinion.
> I hate to break it to you, but this is not going to keep you safe from a state-level adversary.

I don't really like this kind of anti-crypto argument. At this point I think making normal communications between normal people less embarrassingly mass-snoopable is a very worthy goal. For the time being, people who really, really have something to hide need to be extra careful (as has always been the case).

Which is not to say I'm feeling particularly enthusiastic about this device.
How compatible is the OS with 'normal' android apps?

Since 4.4 I have been able to, at least to some level, revoke some basic rights that apps have, like seeing my contacts (through app shield or whatever). If I am able to download apps from the 'normal' Android store, is access that those apps have somehow controlled as well? Some sort of sandbox mode would be nice.
The Soviets used to have a custom of taking long walks in the park when they wanted to have a private conversation.

It had the notable benefit of avoiding the hidden listening devices in their places of work/rest/play.
Air Force cadets create stroke-therapy system using an Xbox
We have helicopters, which are similar to flying cars.
Hi. Long time lurker. I built Feem to enable chat and local file transfers within a LAN, without passing through the Internet.

Feem works natively on Android, iOS, Windows Desktop, Linux, and Mac OSX.

Trivia: I am based in Buea; a small city in Cameroon, Africa.
iOS allows VoIP apps to be backgrounded.
Quanttus Dives Into Personal Health With $22M From Khosla, Matrix
So if my site has 10k hits/month and I don't have a year, am I left to "stick with my gut" and qualitative user tests?
I just fired this up, it looks and works great! If you did implement last.fm scrobbling (currently I just use a tampermonkey script that works well) I'd start using it primarily.
So it would overflow, right, dependent on how much of the cubes extend above the surface?
Press release: http://jolla.com/media/documents/MWC_Jolla_announcement_FINA...
I hate this circlejerk around privacy.

Not as a concept though. It seems like every geek-oriented app or device is "private and secure" with "state-of-the-art encryption capabilities" nowadays, even though they continue to use pretty much same software and hardware as they did a year ago, before Snowden.

As for this phone -- they don't even have exact specifications and they plan to ship it in June, just four months away. Come on, ">2GHz Quad Core CPU" is a placeholder and not a real deal, especially with a "certain specifications are subject to change" in small font. I do not think that it will be released in June, and, if it will actually be released, I don't really think it will get popular enough to break the "friends and relatives of the developer" barrier.

I may be a little too tough (sorry!), but I got really tired of all these startups that propose nothing new besides illusive security with a bad implementation.
Facebook Massively Overpaid for WhatsApp
It's fairly useless: If an attacker can sniff your connection he can just submit the encrypted password he sniffed to the server. The only win you have is that the attacker can't see the password itself, a potential bonus when people reuse passwords.

However, if you can sniff the connection you can probably alter it and inject javascript that submits the clear-text password to the attacker.
Chrome developer tools profiling flame charts
All of this engineering and technical analysis is wonderful and interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that Lucas Arts sold this game for a big chunk of change to my teenage self (I did farm work to earn my money) and it was a HUGE, DISAPPOINTING RIPOFF. The single player AND multi-player aspects of the game were shit. It was rushed to production by the publisher and it showed.

I realize that it was a huge technological leap for early 1997, I really do. But the product was shit and we paid good money for it.

Edit: I meant to add something. 11 months after XvT was released, Volition Software released Descent: Freespace. It was everything that XvT should have been. Nobody noticed it but whatever. (I admit I'm probably being unfair since the internet was changing so fast back then)
Setting a 90% power target is a way to decide when you have something significant.
Asha did well in developing markets, and Nokia has an attractive app/ecosystem suite for low-end phones. But Series 40 OS is not competitive with Android. Nokia X goes straight at that problem. If you are careful about the apps, especially the browser, Android will run well on VERY cheap hardware.
Parent was talking about all-Nokia product.
Ok, I give up. Where is the placeholder text on the first newspaper? The 4th picture down, has "A Push To Let Ryan Be Ryan" as a heading.
It's not anti-crypto. It's PRO-tradecraft.

Introducing technology into a system can WEAKEN your security. Knowing that is almost 90% of the battle.
calendar.getDisplayName(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK, Calendar.LONG, Locale.US)

I guess.

Not that it's necessarily nicer, but generally I'd say duplicating functionality of the standard libraries or frameworks should be avoided if possible.
I think he's saying he likes the type inference in addition to the static typing (no inference in Java).
Ruby 1.9.3-p545 was also released today with the following:

"This release is dedicated to the memory of our best comrade, Jim Weirich. Thank you, Jim. Rest in peace."
The complete guide to fixed divs
Show HN: Android Dash Camera app featuring timestamped recording screen captures
This is really cool, but I doubt it'll do much to the market.

If the Firefox OS runs a browser brilliantly on this device, it might be a disruptor in the more developed world actually. But I find it unlikely that a low-cost smartphone with the level of power one can expect could do that (even my Nexus5 still chokes on loading some pages, chews battery running the browser, etc), so

> "You're talking about a clumsy smartphone that's a little bit better than a feature phone - still primarily for voice and text."

will probably remain true.

Keep in mind that the "rest of the world" on average still runs on 2G with spotty 3G coverage, and uses little more of smartphone (or feature phone) functionality than Whatsapp (because that's all that can effectively function as intended on those networks).

The phone itself being cheaper does little to change their usage patterns: In India, before the iOS/Android smartphone era (~2006), even middle class schoolkids or the working class in oppressed areas who didn't have a solid roof over their head still had Sony Ericsson Walkman phones ($200 then) and Nokia N66s ($150-$300 over its lifetime). People like fancy phones in the developing world, and lowering the price will make the tiniest of dents in that space.
What is Archimedes' principle? How does it relate to density? What is the association of density to volume? What happens to ice as it melts (or water as it freezes)?
There can be mikes in the park too, of course. In 1984 there are, IIRC.
Sending Jimmy Fallon 1000 handwritten cards from iPads.
Dataset (https://dataset.readthedocs.org/) is a similar project that provides ad-hoc SQL querying of structured data - example usage:

import dataset

db = dataset.connect('sqlite:///:memory:')

table = db['sometable']
table.insert(dict(name='John Doe', age=37))
table.insert(dict(name='Jane Doe', age=34, gender='female'))

john = table.find_one(name='John Doe')
Name collision with Q/kdb+.
Why Startups with Families Can Better Accomplish Missions that Matter
But that seems a little like saying "the Internet is a spying machine - don't use it if you want privacy". I just think that's way too defeatist for my taste. If the Internet is a spying machine, then we need to find a way to communicate securely on it. I feel the same way about the phones.

Both the Internet and mobile phones are here to stay, and billions use them. You can't just say "don't use them". That's a big cop-out.

You can choose not to use certain providers, like using DDG instead of Google, or using Blackphone instead of the iPhone 5S. But you can't just use blanket statements like "don't use anything that's a big part of everyone's lives today."

Security is never a guaranteed thing - with or without NSA. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do your best to secure yourself. I feel the same about Blackphone. Granted, I'd prefer something that's fully open source, and I think those solutions are coming (perhaps an even more secure version of CyanogenMod with TextSecure v2 and RedPhone integrated into it), but I think every little bit helps, and I do think we're moving in the right direction - securing our conversations and networks. It's a process, not a goal.
Holder calls for  national data breach alert requirement for retailers
Procrastination plays a part too.
It's a big effort to,
1.Find a good doctor (not all of them are equal)
2.Call to make an appointment
3.Take time off work/classes
4.Get there and wait, wait, wait

Really, all this could be solved if more medical school were allowed to be opened and get rid of the arbitrary ceiling on the number of students med school are allowed to accept .

This is only the easy part. If you don't have insurance, it's a nightmare.

In the case of my father, he went to a general doctor. Got referred to another specialist. Who then referred him to another specialist. $600 later (a huge amount of money to most normal people) and no diagnosis, he decided to just "deal with it".
The lawn mower has a private key that is uses to sign messages with. There are several solutions to the problem of verifying whether or not it's a lawn mower.

One solution is to use a reputation system, you see others have borrowed that lawn mower and have given it a good rating, or the owner has a good rating.

Another solution is by certificate authority that guarantees that it at one point was a lawn mower. Of course someone might try to rebuild the lawnmower into a fake one by removing the engine and feeding it fake gps coordinates etc. Maybe this problem can be solved also, but it will be much more difficult, that's why I think reputation will be the main way at first, just like in ebay or alibaba.

Obviously you can not prevent someone from stealing the lawn mower, just like you can not prevent a drunk driver from crashing into Amazon's data centers. In this case however, the lawn mower will not report that it has completed its task and the renter will not pay, so the owner of the lawn mower takes all the cost.

In general such a cryptocontract would work like this:
First money is put in escrow, then the lawn mower goes to its destination, mowes the lawn and then returns to its owner. The code for the lawn mower could be verified and maybe signed by a third party so it can be more trusted.
When the lawn mower has returned to its owner, the money will be released from escrow.

If there is any kind of dispute, yeah sure, you might need dispute mediators. For example the lawn mower didn't do the job well enough, because of a software bug. Even cases like this could eventually be in the contracts though, so the contract might have a clause that says the owner is not responsible for poor lawn mowing caused by software bugs, and you have to decide if you are okay with that or not.
> 2) When you copy-paste Perl (or C, or Java, etc) code, do you not reformat that code anyways?

Yes, with Perl::Tidy and one keyboard shortcut bound to it. With Python I have to manually and very carefully block-indent the pasted fragment and then figure out how it fits into existing code. Even if there were a proper Python code formatter (hint: there isn't anything even close in functionality to Perl::Tidy) it wouldn't be able to figure out the code, since whitespace is significant. No such thing in Perl -- paste, tidy, rinse and repeat.
No way. A year ago there were plenty of articles about the latest MtGox hacking or whatever.
Carl Icahn Calls Out Marc Andreessen In A New Letter To eBay Shareholders
Definitely. I just hope they bring it to flagship phones as well. I could see a lot of developers and open source advocates jumping on it. Especially if it had granular permission controls, which I believe Google had to bail on for backwards compatibility reasons [1].

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/google-removes-apps-ops-p...
Overwhelming Gratitude
"How does introducing an extra layer make things faster? Doesn't that imply that the browsers have sub-optimal DOM implementations, if adding a layer on top of them can speed them up?"

A great little meta insight on how to think about stuff.
Writing good code in any language is remarkably time-intensive to learn. There are any number of ways to mess up code and the coding patterns and antipatterns are different in any language.

It takes struggling with the ways of doing things in the language and seeing what works and what does not. Perl is no exception, except that there is no One True Perl way. Every Perl programmer finds his or her won way.
But that's not really a flying car, at least not the kind that's been imagined in sci-fi movies.
I tried to withdraw at the start of January. Their site says it should take 4 weeks. It's been almost 2 months and I still haven't gotten it. Not that I'm surprised or anything, but I wouldn't expect to be able to withdraw any time soon.
CVE-ID Syntax Change
We really need to rewrite the entire stack, carefully and with the intent of security, from open-source-DIY hardware up, to have any trust in technology.
I'd say so.

See comments from previous post about a month ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062748
Gem found in Australia is the "Oldest known piece of Earth"
Fries and A Shake
> Looking forward to many more years with Ruby as my primary language.

Beware of complacency or you will find yourself unemployable when Ruby will be old news.

I didn't learn any new language since I started C# 4 years ago and I mightily regret it.