skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java is actually very good at backwards compatibility - sometimes IMHO going annoyingly far, like type erasure on collections. Java 6 bytecode will run on the Java 7 JVM, and Java 6 source will compile with the Java 7 JDK, modulo one or two incompatibilities [1]. Oracle 'highly recommend' you uninstall old versions [2].

On the other hand, when I install the Google App Engine Python SDK on Ubuntu it causes my hex editor to stop working. And I use some Ruby software where getting it working meant a nasty fight with xcode and rvm, which left me fearful that if I ever upgrade, reinstall or switch computers I'll never get it working again :) admittedly my knowledge of ruby is pretty weak.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/compatibility-...
[2] http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/remove_olderversions.xml
this "API" is just a fancy way to query a table.
I helped develop a PHP application used by about 30,000,000 people. It consisted of well-organized objects that followed proper design patterns. Our API was easy to use and understand.

Although PHP was an effective, decent language, it wasn't the best tool for our project. It lacked certain functional features, brevity and syntactic sugar that one might find in Python.

The Web is full of emotional, profanity-laden debates pitting one language against another. I don't think those are interesting or useful. But it is productive to critique the languages' relative strengths and weakness based on how they can be applied to a business problem.

Like the engineer from Coursera, I determined that PHP was, indeed, a "cake in the face," considering my needs and circumstances at the time.
Again, in the linked slides....

The article itself was basic and didn't really talk to the specific Toyota case, but the linked slides did... if you're going to speculate about the trial, look at Barr's slides, not that article..

http://i.imgur.com/IGWUXAS.png

http://i.imgur.com/1ZiVJRC.png
From my vantage point in academia they're definitely the norm. I'd say the only one that's mostly false is #2, but that could be the norm outside of my particular field (computer science).

I've seen fantastic research sunk and forced through resubmission time and again because of reviewers that either don't understand the work (and why would they? they have zero incentive) or have pre-existing biases based on their own work (and are called in as expert reviewers, effectively functioning as gatekeepers in a subfield).

Bad deans/department chairs can make life suck pretty hard. This is usually not the case because they (in my experience) don't have that much power, but over some things like hiring they can definitely be as capricious as they want. The real killer are the people outside the department, on IRBs, grant review boards, etc.. In a good research-focused school they can be great; in worse schools they can be tinpot despots.

Reproducibility in particular is insane. In computer science virtually no systems are released at the time of a paper submission, so papers describe things that may or may not exist. I'd say this is less due to untrained/inexperienced grad students and more due to a combination of constantly rushing to publish, unclear institutional regulations regarding releasing artifacts such as source, and inability to focus on cleaning things up for a release.

Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it. I think this comes down to an incentive problem -- when there's no incentive to build things that work, you tend to build broken things.
http://tmate.io/ solves that problem, and does it a little better since it goes through firewalls :)
It's a crowd-sourced fuzzer for Pokemon Red!
What's up with the cliff anyway? You're already asking me to take a much higher level of risk and a much lower level of liquidity than I'd like in my compensation, by giving me stock options. In addition to that you want me to take on 100% of the risk of our working arrangement not working out, and in fact you insist on giving yourself a strong incentive to fire me before the first year is out? It seems ridiculously exploitative.
Good catch. :) Our production code actually does handle the relationship correctly, I just wanted to simplify in my example.
Baseimage-docker does not imply that your container becomes stateful. Using services like cron and SSH do not imply statefulness.

I also think that the container should be as stateless as possible. When state is necessary, it can be saved at a bind mounted directory.

The point of baseimage-docker is to ensure that the system works correctly. See its description about the role of PID 1. It has got nothing to do with the statefulness discussion.
Edward Snowden elected rector of Glasgow University
Actually, SHA-1 has several security flaws, SHA-2 fixed some of those issues. With a salt SHA-2 should be fine, double salt would be better...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2
> Since anyone planning to use their car to get away from the police would disable this device/software, only honest folks would have it enabled

Since anyone planning to use their car to get away from the police would install run-flat tyres, spike strips would only be used against the innocent.

Your logic doesn't seem to work.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/are-you-an-expert.h...
You seem to be expecting them to act rationally, or something.
CouchDB, CouchBase, TouchDB, PouchDB...

How is anyone supposed to figure out who/what to use for the long-term? CouchDB? CouchBase?
Or, y'know, maybe locate outside of the Valley?
Email still rocks at conversions. Social, surprisingly, stinks.
> It doesn't take a whole lot of doing to push the Scala collections library into weird and terrifying behaviour

I'm genuinely curious to see examples you've seen in production code. I've used the collections for years coding full-time and haven't encountered anything like that.
Sadly with 15 years in the academia spent in three different fields of science (at multiple universities in roles that support dozens of researchers) - I found it to be the norm. Time and again I am surprised just how bad it is and that with time it is getting worse, more people are writing more and more research papers that are worse than ever before.

It is a race with very strange incentives this is the world where a Nature paper makes your career but publishing nonsense has no negative effect (in fact there is a positive one, you now have more publications padding your resume). You have to go out of your way like manufacture data and get caught to experience any negative consequence. Doing sloppy work is the norm.

I wish it weren't true and it could be that the problem is my perception.

As for the comparison with the industry: you can always go and try to work for a different company that does things your way, but guess what, science is all the same. You'll get the same reviewers, same grant application process, same publication process, same ranking methods no matter where you work etc. You are stuck with the system and you can't reform it.
This is a bad idea even if the technology could be implemented perfectly. The advantage of violence in the context of law enforcement is that it is violent, and hence something which is (in a functioning state) used only as a last-resort measure. This is important since it helps maintain the balance of power.

Remote-shutdown is nonviolent and there is hence a very good opportunity for a slippery-slope situation where this power will be abused. Who would possibly believe that a capability like this will only be used in the situations where spikes would be used to stop a lethal car chase?

Implementing systems like this is yet another step on the road towards the capability to implement the most oppressive police state in world history. Not a good route to take.
No, but Scala encourages FP, so when you:

val fooList = List(1,2,3)
fooList.map(...)

you'll _never_ hit the types of bugs you're referring to.

If you fooList(3), then of course you're hosed, but that's not the type checker's fault ;-)
Play out the numbers (assumptions completely speculative):

- How much more would this person make at a big company? ($50k?)

- What's the time frame for success? (4 years vesting?)

- What's the distribution of possible exits? (5% chance of $100M, 30% chance of $10M acquihire, 0.1% chance of $1B)

Under these assumptions, you hit about 2.3% to make the expected values match assuming absolutely no investor preferences (which is itself silly).

It would be interesting to use real seed fund data to generate the distribution and proper salary comparisons.
Which is why I said "Scala's tradeoffs" would become unacceptable. Java 8 is basically "close enough" to "The Good Parts" of Scala that most people probably won't be willing to tolerate all of Scala's warts.
Worth noting is the constant weight [1] free-diving record is currently 128m (~420 feet)[2] - the human body is also capable of incredible things.

[1] The athlete has to dive to the depth following (but not using) a guide line. The ‘Constant Weight’ refers to the fact that the athlete is not allowed to drop any diving weights during the dive.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-diving#Depth_disciplines
1 in 20 complains??? That is actually a great number. My assumption for my products is really really not a 1/20 thing. My estimates are rather that a crash bug will be reported by 1/100. The others will just down-vote my android-app and uninstall. My estimation is based on broken design on square displays and on Thai font issues that I was made aware of far too late.

On the other hand I give instant feedback and keep a relationship to any complainers that are my happiest customers now.
Since I can go to target and buy moustache-emblazoned pajamas, I have to ask: what is creative about this?
Video Processing at Dropbox
> You can have a REPL in a statically typed language too---Haskell has one.

And so does Scala...
I agree with most of what you've said. But point out that you didn't go with the worst case example, loss of steering / brakes on ice.

Unwanted acceleration on ice would be worse though. I can't imagine, in rush hour conditions, being unable to control my acceleration. At best, you'd rear-end someone, and their car would stop you.
Show HN: Impress – Open Source Ghost Theme
Not a biologist or chemist (but have worked a lot of them). I was very suspicious of "acid bath" being a secret sauce. Chemists and biologists always work through PH range studies early and often. It is one of the things that is very easy to control and measure, so they all hope it will have a useful effect (and check for it).
Most programming puzzles aren't real work-sample tests. A work-sample test has to be representative of the actual stuff you'd do on the job.

The trick is, to work in a recruiting context, you also want those tests to be standardized and repeatable. A lot of companies fall down on this. They have candidates do "real work", often in a pair-programming context. There a bunch of problems with this:

(1) "Real work" usually isn't standardizable, so you can't compare candidates

(2) Signal quality from the test is intensely dependent on who is doing the work with the candidate

(3) Two different candidates might end up getting "tests" that are wildly different in terms of predictive power

I have a bunch of ideas for pure software development work-sample tests, but I'm not ready to share them. The idea is simple, though:

* It's a realistic exercise that approximates actual day-to-day work as much as possible

* Every candidate gets the same exercises

* The exercises have objective (preferably gradable) outcomes
I was about to simply repost this sentence as its the HEAVY substantial bit of the post.

What does it mean? Throw engineering problems your CURRENT team has solved in the past at new candidates. I have seen only ONE startup ( even among the nastiest of hard problem seekers ) GET how substantial this is. So many of these companies are too busy to think about smart sourcing, at their own peril.

Test new engineers off past solved problems. End of story.
Net Present Value is always an interesting calculation... You can run the math on YC companies relatively easily:

http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-...

"37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million."
Hey guys, I thought I'd release this theme for anyone who wants to use it on their ghost blog – just got mine set up and am loving it. This baby works particularly well on mobile. Here's a demo on my blog: http://www.zach.sh/
>Standard numbers are that 7% of the communication is in the words, 38% is in the tone of voice, and 55% is in the body language.

Source? I'm pretty skeptical of these kinds of numbers. If you say 100 bits worth of words face-to-face, what is exactly the content of the remaining 1428 bits?
Why do you think it isn't outlined? The website explains exactly what the modifications are, what they do, and what they are good for. The Dockerfile is on Github for everyone to see. The website makes explicit mention that the init system is /sbin/my_init, for which the full source is available on Github. It's trivial to take the my_init script and integrate it into your non-Ubuntu container. You can even write your own init system based on the website description if you so choose.
I cant forgive them for tribes vengeance.
Clarkson did not publish his credit card number afaik, he published his bank account number and is a public personality where his personal details are easy to find.

That's not really relevant, and you don't check statements, you phone them and they send you an entirely new card and deactivate the old one.
I will add that people are also very uneven in how they receive feedback. As John Scalzi writes, "[...] there are a lot of people who, when they say, 'I’d love feedback,' actually mean 'I want a hug.'" [1]

Even those who actually want feedback are often unprepared to hear it. Thinking back, some of the biggest things I struggled with were things that were invisible to me. If I try to imagine explaining some thing to my younger self, my options are a) explain it politely but in a way that I wouldn't get, or b) being so blunt that I get upset or defensive. E.g., what I once saw as being passionate about getting at the truth is something I now see as me acting like an arrogant, argumentative, know-it-all jerk.

Plus, feedback is much harder when it isn't interactive. When I do give feedback, it's always at the interviewee's request, it's always right after the interview, and it's always in person. Then it's pretty easy to gauge their emotional state, give them the feedback that's useful to them, and refer to specific examples that are fresh in our minds. Doing that a couple weeks later in print would be a nightmare.

[1] http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/01/23/what-to-know-before-yo...
Our public challenges are part of outreach, not qualification. We are very worried about drawing conclusions from them in our hiring process, because those challenges are public and people often work together on them.
> Would you kindly pay them your respect?

No, simply because Bioshock, while being wildly entertaining to many people, was so at the cost of many of the good design choices made in the System Shock games. Just see for example your note about the bright environments and contrast with Bioshock.

(It also irks me a little that your post is missing just enough detail to make it seem as if they made SS2, instead of being co-creators under the lead of Looking Glass.)
> startups are also probably rejecting a lot of engineering candidates that would perform as well or better than anyone on their existing team, because tech industry hiring processes are folkloric and irrational.

That sounds right to me, but I'm wondering if there's any evidence to support the claim.
Working Smarter
Perhaps we are talking about different things. There are no "laws against capital investment by anyone", if you want to invest go down to pretty much any bank or financial institution and open an investment account. Go out and buy shares or bonds and have fun. Back in the dot.com days people did this all day long and got the notion of a 'day trader' was born.

The laws that are in place are around liability and more importantly personal liability in the event that the investment goes south. If you are soliciting investment from accredited investors you can put in place some limits on your liability with respect to that investment, I do not believe that is the case if they are not accredited.
Assuming you mean that it only supports GET requests against the existing data. it's amazing though that something as simple as querying a table of olympics data wasn't possible without this (without a whole bunch of manual work). if we did support transactions what would you have in mind?
Your single process might spawn child processes that double fork, resulting in zombies. Unless you've read every source code single line in the app, plus every single source code line in all its dependencies (and all dependencies of all dependencies), you really can't be sure that that won't happen. And when it does happen, your system is not behaving correctly.

And what if your single process spawns a child process that encounters an error, and logs only to syslog? If your syslog daemon is not running, you will never know that there has been an error. Again, if you've read every single line and know that this does not happen, then that's fine. But the point of baseimage-docker is to provide a good and safe default so that these edge cases are already taken care of for you.
What is the very specialized niche that is especially demanding of software development skills?
How are they worth nothing?
I don't agree even with the sentiment of the original post, but there is an argument that while you can't get rid of array indexing bugs with a type checker (contracts might help here) you can design your collection types such that things like indexing above or below an array are compile time caught, as is indexing into the "wrong" array location.

Whether it is worth the trouble to do this in the type system probably depends on how good your language's type system is and how expensive array indexing bugs are to catch/fix.
> Humans are the only species where the grandmother hypothesis is supported by data, but the dearth of corresponding data in whales suggests the dramatic disparity in our somatic-reproductive senescence might be more strongly selected for by factors we are not yet aware of.

I thought average life expectancy of per-agrecultural, pre-technological humans was less than 40 years? It doesn't really seem like the grandmother hypothosis would enter into our evolutionary history then, as there would be very few post-menopause grandmothers around...
I wish Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, NASA, Boening, Goldman Sachs, et, etc were from Poland. Only 1 st world economy can dominate economically rest of the world. That the voters don't agree on free lunch doesn't make them automatically 2nd world country.
This is similar to the practice of "hellbanning" but I think it is a more friendly solution. Valve's VAC system is similar because VAC-banned players are still able to play on non-VAC servers (with other cheaters and pirates.)
Also just wanted to mention: if you run a Rails app it's worth subscribing to the rubyonrails-security google group. Low traffic except for blasts like these to alert you to urgent patches.
To me, the smoking gun is the fact that there is near-universal agreement that we're in a talent crunch, but at the same time successful startups are demanding that candidates accept temp contracting roles to mitigate the risks of bad decisions.
> create massive wealth

On paper, they do.

What really matters in life is being able to satisfy your needs. Everything else is luxury. If you have clean air, food, water, sex, sleep, sanitary waste removal, housing, electricity...

You're just talking about companies accumulating small pieces of green cloth / paper with numbers written on them. Or just numbers in some bank computer somewhere. Or worse, piles of the element gold. None of things INHERENTLY satisfy your needs. But since satisfying your needs requires resources that used to be scarce, then currency used to be the best way to allocate those resources, and also direct labor. Yay, capitalism!

When you have a division of labor, how do you decide how many chickens a farmer needs to give a doctor for performing an appendectomy? Well, that's an economy.

But when there is no shortage of resources, and there's essentially no labor that needs to be directed, strictly in order to satisfy your basic needs... Then we're just negotiating for our own luxury, and getting people to create luxury goods and services for us.

So, yes, to a degree, those jobs are just bullshit. And when your bullshit, luxury job allows you to acquire luxury amounts of food and water making those resources even more scarce, at the expense of people who actually NEED that food and water to live, yes, it is at least somewhat rational to begin questioning the entire system.
What? How? Huh?

How is this about not telling the truth?

Do you walk around telling everyone everything?
Obamacare has many plans in it to choose from. I don't save on "these things" and get as expensive as I can.
Apparently, people disagreed with that notion.
Introducing Shodan Maps – A Map Interface for Searching Shodan
If you're referring to new cars (not pre-owned) then generally, the cheapest, smallest engine models tend to have minimal technology. Often cars built in India tend to be quite basic such as Tata. I'm not aware of any mass market vehicle that doesn't at least have an ECU (Engine Control Unit). ECU's tend to regulate everything from emissions, fuel usage, air intake, etc.
I certainly missed that in my first pass through. Thanks for pointing it out.

It definitely reads like the employees have to re-apply and re-interview for any of those jobs. That's different from what you'd expect at companies in virtually any other industry or category of tech.
English is not my mother tongue maybe I was unclear : the bashing was from the journalist ;-)
I would trade the ability to mount an SD card over UMS for the changes in kitkat in a heartbeat. MTP sucks, but this change sucks more.
I think you could interview, accept a job, and put off the start date for 4-6 weeks. Just tell them in the interview process your intentions.
Cool List B-)
Capital One can show up at cardholders' homes, workplaces
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