skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Did you work on Madden at EA (since you mention it in the intro)?

I did, though I didn't really touch gameplay. I was a UI programmer on Madden PC 2002 (Oh God that's over a decade ago now, what happened to time?) and I worked on the first version of Madden for the X360 doing mostly animation and tool pipeline stuff.

I'm not the best person to ask about it, but the part that blows my mind is that the "AI" for the game is deeply tied into the animation system. Madden has hundreds (thousands?) of individual player animations: runs, tackling, blocking, catching, you name it. The AI works roughly by searching for an animation that lines up with what it wants to do.

For example, if the ball is coming towards a receiver, it looks for a catch animation that will put his arms in about the right place and that stitches together well with the animation he's currently playing. If it finds one, then it transitions to that animation and makes the catch.

This means the producers who are building and tuning the gameplay do much of it by tweaking animation: changing timing, deciding to add more animations of certain types, etc.

As far as I know there is no holistic set of data or code that says, "this is the AI of Madden". Instead, it's just the sum of all of these animations.
seems ethical.. on a serious note, why?
My guess is to have an in-house team that can help out the companies they fund. I know that Netflix's cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, left to join a venture capital firm to advise on scaling issues for companies that firm funded[0].

0 - http://gigaom.com/2014/01/07/netflixs-cloud-architect-adrian...
The Smule music apps (Ocarina, Leaf Trombone, etc.) are all written using ChucK, IIRC.

Outside of that, you're right -- it's not widely used -- although, at CalArts (where I currently go to college, http://www.calarts.edu), it's extremely popular in the Music Technology department. We use it mainly for handling MIDI->OSC translation to control robotic instruments (http://www.karmetik.com/media) and interfacing other electronics, like custom built musical interfaces and controllers, with music software.
Doesn't accept my (NZ) mobile number as valid :(
While Chrome is a very popular browser, I wonder if you can still call this editor "general" if it doesn't work cross-platform?!
TapTalk Is A New Video Messaging App That Adds Location
Sure. @chris-martin explained the math in another comment, so I imagine you're wondering how we do refunds in bitcoin? The only easy / customer-friendly way we could see to do that was to request an email address, and send that email bitcoin via Coinbase. We didn't think BIPS-70 or any other solutions would work for this, since most people aren't familiar, and the whole purpose of the refund is to cement trust.
1:30 am on the night before a physics test - why must this challenge be so tempting! There goes that studying :)
Ask HN: Would any code analysis tools have caught have caught heartbleed? 
If not, why not? Is this kind of issue something that a language feature could avoid?
I don't see many job offers for his skillset in the Bay Area. (I've looked).
Detecting hosting providers
These 18 Tech and Startups Trends Will Emerge in 2014
In the world of natural selection, it’s not the biggest, the strongest, the fastest, or even the smartest that wins. It’s those who can best adapt to their environment.
I wonder if this could act as a negative filter for good programmers. Who worth their salt is going to invest 3 hours of their time just to submit a resume? Wouldn't you want to talk to the employer first to see if they're a good fit?

In a tight labor market, people willing to do this are more desperate than others. So it's going to filter for desperate developers who passed a 3 hour basic skills test.

Old fashioned prior experience and education is probably still a better first filter. This would probably make more sense specifically for junior hires right out of school or with no experience.
wow that's great. sounds like maybe i am out of touch. i'd consider all that "widely used", considering it's application. :)

aren't there better tools for MIDI/OSC translation though?
If you're a large business or "enterprise", Microsoft will be happy to let you customize the system to your heart's content.
The doc mentions this among the cons of NSS: "Certificate path building is C code designed to emulate Java code, through indirection of an average of 7 layers of macros, two platform abstraction layers, and then the remaining NSS abstraction layers (listed above)".
A step-by-step guide to install openstack network service Neutron.
Fluent Java HTTP Client
Seems like the obvious (if dishonest) thing would be to use a throwaway phone # to get the test, then spend a day or so solving it, then type it in (with plausible delays) using your real number a day later. Assuming the test is roughly the same each time (even if details are different, it's probably of the same general class).

In grading, the results of 6-8h of work entered in 2h would look more impressive than 3h of work in 3h, I suspect.

(Sometimes I hate that whenever someone gives me a situation, my first thought is "how can this be cheated or gamed", followed by "what controls can I put in place to prevent that, and and what costs"; it's basically automatic.)
As an employer, I would seriously hope this does become the norm.

If some employers want to implement recruiting processes that require developers to complete tasks that don't reflect real-world development, it makes it that much easier for other employers to differentiate themselves and attract competent developers who aren't interested or desperate enough to play these games.

Frankly, in today's market I feel sorry for any experienced developer who is going to complete a "programming test" in which referencing a website or book other than language documentation is forbidden. I reference websites and books all the time, and I don't know a single developer who doesn't.
I left Google apps when they started to charge and started the free custom live outlook , Now that Microsoft was unable to find a way to be innovative and different from Google, and find a way to profit off of their free email service, I will be going back to Google Apps and signing up for their paid product.
Probably to build internal tools. A lot of VCs firms are trying to apply more data to their investment decisions and that requires internal tools to handle it all. Also makes sense given the qualifications they are asking for.
I disagree mostly because counter culture is much easier for the powers that be to hinder if it needs to declare all it's activities.
Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it! :) Three hours is pretty lenient (you could blaze through it in less time), though the last question is challenging. We think the questions are kind of fun as well.

Without something like this we'd just have 100s-1000s of unstructured resumes in different formats to rank against each other. This process is more fair and (IMO) allows someone without a college degree, or from outside the US, to compete on a level playing field.
Will this be an ongoing opportunity or is there a deadline to submit this by?
Did you include the country code prefix? Otherwise please try emailing vivek at hackerrank dot com with the bug to see if he can reproduce.
"My guess is to have an in-house team that can help out the companies they fund."

Nope.
> machine learning (scatterplots & histograms, logistic/linear regression, R/Matlab)

So, someone taking Statistics 101 is considered to know machine learning in the startup circus? (Not that this would really surprise me, given the tendency to appropriate terms that had a certain meaning for purposes that have only a passing similarity to the original meaning.)
Does this mean Mattermark https://mattermark.com/ have started a tech arms war amongst the larger VC firms to create their own toolsets to differentiate their deal flow from others?

Mattermark has gone some way to provide proof that data can make a difference, at least at highlighting opportunities that might not have been visible before. I wondered whether this would result in herding investors towards some companies, which means differentation and opportunity comes from spotting things the others miss... finding the outliers that Mattermark miss.

Interesting that the test is "make a dashboard", well into the standard skillset for most analyst programmers who work for financial institutions (I built a lot of this stuff for the finance sector in London).
Do you mind if people do the test with no interest in the job?
It's an ongoing opportunity, but we will be hiring the first set of people soon. So it will be to your advantage to apply sooner rather than later.
You can also email test-help AT a16z DOT com and we can send you a direct link (where you won't need to receive credentials by phone)
This blog post demonstrates how OpenSSL's unsafe C code can be migrated to a safe programming language called ATS (Applied Type System):

http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2014/04/11/preventing-heartbleed-bu...
Was Heartbleed a fuzzing success or failure?
Presumably both Google and Codenomicon found this by fuzzing. They're probably pretty good at it.

So this critical part of net infrastructure software was getting so little fuzzing attention from third parties, that it went undiscovered for 2 years. Even though this bug was trivial to trigger.

I'll argue that fuzzing is an laborious but only semi-effective way to mitigate bugs made catastrophic by use of memory-unsafe languages. In the larger scheme of things it does more harm than good, by delaying a real solution.
How can we get developers to keep it simple, and stop introducing new "features"? [This applies to OPENSSL as well as most software out there that has a new "release" all the time]
Sure, go ahead! We just ask that you not share the questions with others after completing it.
On the contrary. I'm happy to let Dropbox add a smart, talented, and connected person to their board. I'll keep using them and the others mentioned.

That's really the point though. This only shows that Dropbox is easily replaceable, and the others aren't. It doesn't show that people suddenly become more principled.
"Will You Take $100 Now or $200 in a Month?"

I suppose it depends who you are, on the value of $1, and how many other people you're making the same offer to...

Definitely take the $200 in a month if you're my bank.
Sites which have had and patched Heartbleed
We could certainly rattle off more terms :) Kernel density estimation? Deep learning? Semi-supervised learning?

But it's amazing how far you can get with some simple scatterplots, histograms and linear/logistic regressions.

a) Most of the time, more data beats better algorithms:
http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.h...

b) Even those seemingly simple things get complicated when you have a lot of data:
http://komarix.org/ac/lr
Want to see my royalty statement showing payments from Pandora, Spotify, etc?
you may be right but you are wrong
> There is no investment in human history that works like that.

Satoshi may disagree with you
I'm really curious... a hint?
Credentials through phone # is more of a deterrent. We're also going to have an in-person coding exercise as a next step, which would be much harder to game :)
Someone with a bar in SF/Oakland start booking live coding please.
I like the set in this article: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/algorave-is-the-future-of-dan...
Why not think outside the box. (I apologize for the overused cliché.) Reading is only a means for learning something which is the outcome that you want.

Like you I like reading books (and still do), but I found out that I can learn much faster and efficiently through programming courses offered in sites like tutsplus, treehouse, infiniteskills, etc.

That doesn't mean that you should stop reading books, for all I know those video courses are an effective learning companion. You can subscribe to any learning sites that you want, but if you ask me tutsplus is a good one.
happy employees --->more productive employees---> happy customers---->$$$
It's a real shame that Microsoft dropped it on the floor, because Outlook.com itself is very nice. I even prefer it to Exchange, because it syncs better with Outlook.

Outlook connects to Outlook.com using Exchange ActiveSync, a push protocol that sends changes out instantaneously. Outlook connects to Exchange using RPC-over-HTTP, using a cached model that delays the sync.

Many an Outlook user has triaged a bunch of messages in Outlook, closed Outlook a bit too quickly, gone home for the day, and then discovered that none of the changes had made it to Exchange. This scenario simply doesn't happen with Outlook.com because Exchange ActiveSync is instant.
3 hours is upper bound and extremely friendly one to allow for all but hopelessly incompetent candidates. I did the test in less than 90 min. First 27 questions should take a competent hacker less than 20 min; rest of the time is for last 3 coding assignments.
A person being hired as an employee where we probably know nothing about their work quality unless an existing employee has worked with them prior at another job is not a consultant.

I understand they are not an actual consultant and won't likely perform as one. I'm saying that because you want them to take on much of the risk of being a consultant you should pay them accordingly. Anything less is shifting the majority of the risk to the employee which is IMO incredibly immoral.

At least with a 1-2 week trial it is possible to keep your existing job which greatly reduces the risk.
What's Really Scary About Heartbleed
Vehicle registration in Australia alone is about $700/year, then there's insurance, parking and so on. For anyone a short drive from work or who could avoid a second bus, a powered board might be a great option.
They have $4.2bn under management, and a very smart team. I am sure there is a lot that can be done...
That's great! Note that the going board weight now is 14 pounds (they are claiming 6.3 kg)! We should say our thanks to BoostedBoards for paving the way and setting the target weight number to 14 pounds, down from 40.

As a BoostedBoards kickstarter backer and a rider of both 40 pound bords and 14 pound ones, I can tell that we've got to the point when they are actually finally usable!

And I'm looking forward to a 8 pound carbon fiber board with electronics and battery integrated inside the board and 4-weel drive brush-less out-runner motors integrated into the wheels. (BTW, if anyone is interested, no promises, but say 500k and 1 year of time and I can try making you a prototype of a board like that ;) )
Varnish is extremely configurable regarding that. Not only can you cache certain paths and leave others dynamic, but you can actually cache pages while leaving certain HTML elements on the page dynamic. E.g., let's say you have a mostly static page, but with the username on top ("you are logged in as brunoqc"). You can tell Varnish to cache the page and leave the HTML element containing the username dynamic.
My brain space is limited, so I use it sparingly. Memorizing which header file provides which function is something I've left out. That's what IDEs and Google are for. ;)
The OpenSSL code library on which so many companies rely for their Web security only has one dude working on the project full-time.

[...]

Steve Marquess, president of the OpenSSL Software Foundation, a separate entity that solicits funding for the team that manages the code, said its 2013 budget was less than $1 million.

That’s despite the fact that up to two-thirds of the Web relies on it.

[...]

“Large portions of the software infrastructure of the Internet are built and maintained by volunteers, who get little reward when their code works well but are blamed, and sometimes savagely derided, when it fails,” writes Foster in the New Yorker.

[...]

[!!! ->] Anyone who gave OpenSSL $20,000 or more got its logo on their website according to their donation page. There are no logos on their website. This week, its most famous week ever, the organization has received a paltry $841.70 in donations.
> Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it!

> Without something like this we'd just have 100s-1000s of unstructured resumes in different formats to rank against each other.

So instead of hundreds or thousands of unstructured resumes in different formats, you have hundreds or thousands of completed programming tests. Even assuming that you automatically filter out submissions that fail testing, given that there are a lot of ways to solve a problem, you'd still be stuck evaluating potentially hundreds of correct submissions.

More importantly, a test doesn't seem to be aligned with your top priority:

> ...but the most important requirement is significant independent programming experience as demonstrated by your GitHub account, personal projects, academic publications, or startup success.

Are you assuming that all of the folks most accomplished in the real world are going to complete your programming test successfully?

Since you ultimately seem to be interested in folks who can build dashboards, I would think you'd be far better off asking candidates to build a dashboard prototype using sample data you provide. There are lot of really smart developers out there with advanced degrees who could solve programming quizzes all day long but couldn't design and implement a useful dashboard application.
How Boosted Boards f***ed its Early Adopters
Probably not, If they did they would have raised these security flaws to the general public in the interest of security.
every belgian citizen is issued a pkcs e-id, not supporting it means they all need another browser to do their taxes and log in to healthcare websites...
Ahem... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H

... speaking of flying nuclear reactors
While Resig's dedication is admirable, I'd caution against applying his advice too broadly. He is doing it because he has side projects that he wants to complete. There's no reason to force yourself to code every day for coding's sake.

I've been doing a lot of side-project hacking the past three months, as evidenced by my Github activity graph (https://github.com/zhemao), which, admittedly, is not as impressive as Resig's. However, this week, I finished up my latest side project and found myself at a loss for new ideas. At first, I did feel a bit guilty about not doing any coding, since it had been a long time since I had nothing to work on. But then I realized that there's more to productivity than a nice contribution graph and sometimes it's good to take a step back in order to think, reflect, and get inspiration.

I'm currently reading through Patterson and Hennessy's "Computer Organization and Design" to learn more about computer architecture. I'd also like to practice my saxophone some more, start learning how to draw, help a friend who is still in college find a job, and expand my social life a bit. My Github account will still be there when I am ready to get back into it.
> For Office 365 you actually have to change your nameservers over to Microsoft and they handle your DNS.

No, you don't. That is just an option. The other option is to use a third-party nameserver.

See: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-365-domain...
Some great stories there. Wasn't sure on the Apple stores presentation joke though, can anyone explain the reference?
Would answering "Yes" get me a $100 now and $200 in a month?
Efectos nocivos del teléfono inalámbrico en ratas (Nuevo estudio)
Yeah, one interpretation of what a quantum computer does is that it performs all computations in parallel. However... you run into problems when you try to read the output of this computer. In order to read the output you must measure a quantum state, and when this happens you only get to see one answer at random, not all of them. And that's not really useful. But if you can design an algorithm so that all of the parallel computations add together to form one answer (i.e., get all the wrong answer's probabilities to cancel out), you can get an exponential speed up. The key takeway is that quantum computers are not faster for general problems - quantum computers are only faster for problems where a special algorithm exists (like Shor's algorithm for factoring).
> The idea is only slightly more appealing than having the reactor fly around under it's own power.

That was a pretty fun one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
This is great, thanks!

I can't think of too many projects I've worked on that needed delay-tolerant interplanetary communications software though, hopefully in the future.
Libertarian Charles Murray: The welfare state has denuded our civic culture
Lol, some of it seems a bit stockholm syndrome-y, but hilarious nonetheless.
Turns out Yahoo offers a business mail plan to Indian users which provides 1000 email accounts (!) for ~ $5 / month

Link: https://in.business.yahoo.com/business-email/features/
What is your hourly rate, and what qualifies you for such a high rate? I'm asking honestly, as a person who's actually interested in being an agent. Basically, help me help you.
Tesla fights back against "lemon law" king
HN policy for years has been to allow two kinds of job ad: (1) job posts by YC startups, and (2) the Who's Hiring threads. We kill job ads that are neither of these.

(Incidentally, PG designed the /jobs posts to be the one privilege that YC startups get on HN. Other than that, the site policy is to treat them the same way as everybody else.)

It's not uncommon for posts to be in a grey area between job ad and story. A programming test for an interview process doesn't seem all that grey, though, so I've been killing these. Sorry to be a hard-ass about this, but I don't want to be accused of enforcing the policy erratically.

Edit: I'll unkill the post (but otherwise leave it demoted) so the discussion can remain open.

Edit 2: The argument has been put to me that this is newsworthy because A16Z are doing it. Since that's corroborated by external sources (e.g. Twitter), and the post has gotten a lot of upvotes even while it was buried, that's reasonable—so we'll restore it as news rather than as an ad. Besides which, HN is one of the few places where a programming test counts as interesting.
Different rules have different punishments. It's in the nature of rules. I very much doubt that anyone at Hacker School has been kicked out for feigning surprise.
hey, this is actually a good idea. this actually seems like a genuinely good idea! Congrats :P
What about the radioactive waste? All nuclear reactors produce waste (finally when disassembled after the reactors' end of life). I find it strange to search for more efficient reactor styles, while the waste problem is not solved.
DDoS Attacks – Inconviniences or Threats?
Yes! I'd second you here. And I think there should be a third setting actually. With the same acceleration and braking (to not loose the fun factor), but with the speed limit.

Currently, in the expert mode it is pretty scary at the top speed. It is definitely a lot faster then one can run and I can imagine it picking up a rock and blocking a wheel with pretty nasty consequences. Especially if one is riding without knee protection (BTW, in my opinion D3O armored jeans should be a standard option of protection gear, and an option to be sold with the board)...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say nearly everyone reading programming blogs don't need to be told this, but a large fraction of them do need to be told to "get shit done"
but that is effectively irrational isn't it?

if mining 1 bitcoin costs you 500 dollars and they are sold on the market at 400 why don't you switch off your gear for a while and just buy them ?

Maybe the point is people are merge-mining multiple bitcoins, or the electricity bill for them is way lower than we think it is.