skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Seems like a real problem to me: either you discriminate against the religious person, or you discriminate against the homosexual, can't have them both.

A differentially-hostile work environment created by legal requirements of the job, e.g., working alongside people who you disapprove of because the employer is prohibited against discriminating against them to suit you, is not illegal discrimination.

> In fact if you think requiring drinking is discriminating, your are discriminating against the people who drink.

No, you wouldn't be, because not requiring drinking isn't discriminating against people who drink. (Not permitting drinking might be, but given alcohol's demonstrable effect on cognitive function, and the fact that a preference for drinking isn't a presumptively-illegal basis for discrimination in the first place, there are all kinds of reasons it almost certainly wouldn't be illegal discrimination in most cases.)

> What if the company owner is religious and doesn't want to hire people who drink for religious reasons - would that be better/OK?

Unless the "company" is a bona fide religious institution hiring people for a religious function, discrimination against employees (or potential employees) because they don't fit the company's (or owner's) religious preferences is textbook illegal discrimination, so, no, it wouldn't be "better".
I had similar thoughts when creating this, but in the end I felt like it would promote using GitHub as a place where you keep your toolboox / have fun - and less a place where recruiters will blindly look at your "streak" count to decide whether you are a good developer or not.
Hah! Cute part. I'm curious - do you just happen to know of this part or have you been involved with projects that use if?
>I switched to Sublime from Vim because it looked prettier

I find this to be a very curious reason to switch from Vim... were you a very experienced Vim user? Ever give MacVim a shot for the different color schemes? Don't get me wrong, I like my editor to look nice also, but Sublime isn't exactly a prettier version of Vim - they have very different strengths and weaknesses.
Says the guy with the username "mattgreenrocks".

It's not about being the best programmer. After all, most of us are not the best - yet :) It's important not to discourage each other by pretending that only the best programmers matter. The whole point of the post is that it's sometimes important to "signal" that we're not perfect.
> It's kind of an ironic comment from him, since he just invested in an artificial intelligence company, Vicarious

It's not ironic. His quote was taken directly from an interview where he was responding to the question of why he invested in Vicarious. He did it to keep an eye on AI tech because he was worried about the possibility of hostile AI. They must have known this when they wrote this article.

This is an awful article.
About a year ago a friend and I tried to build a social network for some niche and forums were one of the functions. It is pure LAMP code, written in Yii framework. Since the project failed, I'm trying to get all the rights to publish the code under GPL. My plan is to also run a small social site for programmers as a proof of concept and having a real-world website where the code works. Of course, there are some things specific to our project which I need to remove/refactor first, but it is not too much work.

If anyone is interested in beta-testing when I release the first public version on github, please drop me an e-mail and I'll let you know when it's ready (my e-mail is in my profile).
The discussion started by the OP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930069
That's actually what I'd expect. If someone rates themselves a 10, it means they don't know what they don't know.
My response would be see ya! thanks for interview(not really)
Integration with external editors/IDEs is a very important part of this project. A lot of what WebIDE brings to the party on top of normal editing is device/simulator management as well as the usual Developer Tools inspection and debugging.

So there are three layers of compatibility we expect to see with external IDEs:

0) No integration - Open a WebIDE window with editing turned off and use it (or command line tools that drive it) to manage device connections/pushing/etc.
1) Simple integration - Most of the basic device connection management will be available through command line tools, it should be incredibly easy to drive that through editor/IDE configuration.
2) The whole nine yards: Speak a remote debugging protocol and get full control over the debuggee.

As far as the whole nine yards, you can either use remotedebug's protocol and proxies (although development seems to have trailed off there?), speak each browser's protocol natively, or maybe down the road the protocol abstraction we're working on at Mozilla.
The thing you're missing is that Second Life isn't lacking any features, because any features that don't exist can be added by the users. If the owner of a region of land decides that they want to create enemies that can attack and kill other players, that's entirely within their power.

The only thing wrong with Second Life is that it was too ahead of its time. The typical person who's heard of it usually isn't aware of just how radically flexible and open-ended it is, and even if you explain it to them, they find it hard to believe that a game built over a decade ago can really do what it claims to do.

Heck, people have even built Minecraft in Second Life.
It's not possible to write a formal (non-PEG) grammar for Markdown. Hence, a spec, which is the next best thing (a la HTML5). Of course, vfmd is not a md-to-html converter, it's an md-to-parse-tree converter + a parse-tree-to-html converter.
Questions about AI asked from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. Wow... that is really big honor for Stephen Hawking.
Just a clarification: Bermuda is not really close to any major coastline, and certainly not the Canadian one.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bermuda/@31.2546129,-41.52...
Debug production exceptions with timeline graphs
Has anyone load-tested that hinge at 150° extension? I'm concerned the weight of my hand while drawing might destroy the kickstand, or at least the hinges.
There's a difference between each of these three things:
1) Drinking, and
2) Going to a bar of one's own choice, with one's chosen companions, socially, and
3) Being expected (even if not stricly required) to go to a bar "socially" with one's employer or potential employer as part of an activity which may have consequences for one's employment.
It wouldn't be within the UK, since a 'yes' vote implicitly causes the UK to cease to exist.

It would be more like Norwegians crossing the border to Sweden to stock up on cheap beer - which already happens. I believe you sometimes see similar things in Ireland at the Northern Ireland/EIRE border, depending on VAT and currency exchange rates.
On the other hand, if an accident does occur, the police are already nearby. :P
I don't think Mozilla cares about the file size anymore. 10 years ago they cared about the file size of Firefox, the mandate was that it could not be greater than ~5mb, the stable download is now almost 6 times that size.
I'd like a slightly improved Siri, and almost no one wants to screw around with one device to dictate to another device. I simply want to say "Siri|Google|Cortana..." then start dictating.

With iPhone sitting on my coffee table:
"Siri, display on Apple TV... open Evernote.. New Note ... "
> All of those non-work things you told yourself you want to do? Now is the time to do them.

No. Now it the time to do what you actually want to do, and not what you always thought you should do if you only had the time.

Have the courage to have no goals (says the grasshopper to the ant), at least for a while. Let tomorrow look after itself
unrelated to the ISS but might be interesting to some people http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

The fact that we can talk to something 15 billion km away is mind-blowing.

It makes light (at 1 billion km per hour) seem slow.
Thank you @noso.
'Why-Fi' or 'Wiffy'? How Americans Pronounce Common Tech Terms
It took me awhile too, it's Europe.
The point is that religion, sexual orientation, etc., aren't supposed to be criteria in your hiring process, one way or the other. It doesn't matter if you prefer atheists or devout Christians. You are welcome to hold personal beliefs about religion -- but the topic itself shouldn't come up in the interview. And unless you're a religious organization, I can think of few reasons why it should ever come up in the workplace at all.

Same thing with sexual orientation, or any other protected status. In a professional work environment, these things aren't factors.

Surely there's a way to test for "cultural fit" that doesn't involve directly, or indirectly, testing for protected status. And if your company's culture can't find a way to test for fit without testing for protected status, then your culture needs serious work.
"If we're talking about bad AI, shouldn't we ask why it would want to kill us?"

I think the folks mentioned in the article were talking about the broad threads posed by AI. I agree we have little basis besides movies for autonomous AI just deciding to attack for no reason or for human-equivalent reasons. But we have every reason to think that neutral AI, AI that still follows orders, could be used by humans to continue all the conflicts that they already pursue with horrific consequences.

The other thing is, it's hard to imagine something qualifying as AI without it understanding things like ethics

Depends what you mean by "understand". Many highly intelligent humans acts unethically but even more highly intelligent humans have gleefully followed unethical orders given them by their superiors. Consider you'd be designing your mind rather than just finding it after millions of years of social evolution, it seems like you could create an intelligent mind quite capable of following orders nearly blindly.

If anything, the whole "it might go insane and kill us" schema is implausible enough to detract from the immediately obvious danger - "it might sanely follow the insane orders of humans in the fashion that human society has seen over and over again but this time with superhuman power".
>you only need to worry about the Earth's atmosphere

I assume you're meaning this is the main source of attenuation (signal loss) if we assume the space between Earth and Mars is an empty vacuum. This (technically called scattering) is not the main source of loss for such a system.

Coherent just means the light is all in phase, it doesn't mean it doesn't spread out as it travels. If it didn't spread out at all, your receiver on earth would be just as wide as the laser transmitter (about the size of a coin), and you'd have to be locked on the entire time... not very practical. It looks like NASA has intentionally focussed their LASER into a wide cone for precisely this reason.

The distance from Mars would cause the beam (cone) to spread out too much, thereby reducing the power received on earth. You would have to increase your laser power on Mars to compensate for this or make the beam more directional with some focusing optics.
I'm not suggesting that the cause is unimportant, but maybe the increased respectability has nothing to do with MIRI, and more to do with the increased obviousness in the public sphere of both rapid technological advancement, and increased awareness that there is no guarantee that any given technology produces a net benefit.

It's still a credit to MIRI/SIAI to have identified and taken this risk seriously.
I think he means you get an 80k refresher every year that vests over 4 years (20k/year). After 4 years, you have a full pipeline and 4 tranches (80k/year total) vest every year.
The new monthly prices will be $1.99 for 100 GB (previously $7.49) and $3.99 for 200 GB (previously $11.49).

You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation?

Other interesting pricing tidbits:

OneDrive will come with 15 GB for free (up from 7 GB). Office 365 Personal ($7/month) will come with 1 TB of OneDrive storage.

For the first time I'm rethinking my $8.25/month subscription to Dropbox for 100 GB, particularly as I only have about 10 GB of data...
>I just think it is a good idea to judge people by what you know.

Do you know how to do your job, how to stick to a deadline, and how to work with other people?

>It's nice that you don't care about your coworkers as people (having dinner with them or becoming friends). I am sure there are loads of companies that are perfect for you, because they only require blue collar programming drones.

So if I don't drink with you, I must be a terrible, low-end uncreative programmer?
I think the counting cash is more on the merchant side. Managing, securing and depositing cash in your account isn't free(and the cost does often change with the amount).

The fact that you haven't needed to do a chargeback doesn't mean you haven't benefited from the existence of them. The fear of a chargeback forces merchants to act in your best interest.

What hassle did your brother experience with the breach did he not just have a replacement card mailed out?
New Email Solution?
Hey guys! I'm working on an awesome new app to handle your email. I know, there's been a lot of such claims lately! I'm doing a little market research. It would be great if you could fill out this small (takes hardly a minute) survey.

Here's the link : https://arvindamirtaa.typeform.com/to/REXm3G

P.S. Fill in the email in the end to receive early access when we release.
i've had this thought for quite some time about a lot of the standards/features being implemented into the core. many of these cool things can/should be done as addons. it may make sense to bake them in for Firefox OS, but not for the standalone browser.
I vaguely agree with you but I think comparisons with media players and text editors sell short how central web browsers are to computer use these days.
As someone who is no longer a beginner: consider listening to this guy. It can be a net win for some of us.

I've lived a sometimes extreme version this for the past 8 years, mostly on the pacific coast of South America. My first few years were rough because I didn't know what I was doing, and it's a powerful experience that may not be for everyone, but I wish everyone had the opportunity to test it out.

In my beginner years, I was waaaay worse at networking than anyone reading this. The jobs I picked up were so bad, and so badly paid, and in such a bad market for software, that I dropped programming for money and spent the first three years of my funemployment doing union carpentry and union meat packing in the United States -- for 3 months a year. It turns out that 9 months surfing and 3 months of hard, enjoyable physical labor is a pretty winning combination, so I was pretty happy, but I eventually got into Ruby contracting for agencies.

During my funemployment in South America, I kept my love affair with code alive in a big way. I learned Ruby and its massive standard library pretty well, and also learned a new framework called Merb (which together with DataMapper made a heck of a lot more sense to me than Rails); I worked my way through 'On Lisp' for the second time; I saw the release of Arc and, giddy with excitement, took it apart from the comfort of a hammock; I experimented with Ruby metaprogramming by writing a program to play workout music and call out station changes for Crossfit workouts; I wrote an app for a friend's document translation business; I wrote a simple call-forwarding SaaS to teach myself Twilio and Paypal integration; I worked through the EMYCIN examples in Norvig's PAIP in Ruby ... all way less than part-time.

Most important to me personally, I finally ended up with a passion project that I actually cared a lot about.

A few years ago I fell utterly in love with CoffeeScript, and while walking along a road that leads to Liguiqui, in Manabì, I realized that I knew enough about the CoffeeScript AST that I could add Lisp-style macros to it, without even forking the language. I quickly sketched it out in a notebook, and for the next month or so I spent at least a few hours each week exploring the idea, which I got down to 100 lines (http://mrluc.github.io/macros.coffee/docs/macros.html) and eventually presented to Ruby.mn when I came back to the States.

I'm not an expert on 'funemployment' -- but I'm not a beginner anymore, and it's been remarkably good to me, and I sing its praises to people who have the means to try it out. I just turned 31 and though my retirement savings are quite meager, I have some land and a house in South America now, and a great network of friends and family in both the US and abroad, and coupled with my ability to work remotely (even on connections as small as 5k/s), well, I feel pretty thankful.
So you just presume I'm exaggerating? On the basis of what exactly?

There is nothing robust about mountains of spaghetti code. If anything these businesses are spending countless dollars paying the interest on the technical debt left here. What's worse is it impacts their long term competitiveness as it resists even incremental improvements. Besides, there is nothing fancy about basic practices like solid design, proper planning or even just the appropriate use of tools for source control and build processes.
It's sort of like the Trolley Problem - would you push a guy off a bridge to block an oncoming train, if the train would otherwise kill two other people? Maybe an AI would, or maybe not, but in either case humans are going to want to ask why.
Top 3 open source business intelligence and reporting tools
I don't think the author is looking at it from the point of view of a disgruntled interviewee, rather from the point of view of the company.

This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins.

He's not the guy looking for a job, he's the guy hiring, looking at all of his peers and scratching his head over their insular hiring practices.
Maybe the correct view is that no one, whether users or designers, is always right or always wrong. The important thing is to try things out, see what happens, then adapt and try again. To generalise based on the past successes or failures of users or designers is probably a mistake.
Framer – Innovative Prototyping
I'll look into this, definitely saw the Penny Arcade articles so hopefully they'll be as receptive =)
I often leave languages off of my resume for exactly that reason. I've used Scala before, and I'd feel comfortable using it again, but I certainly don't know it well enough to handle on-the-spot Scala questions.
The title is fine. It just says image resizing. Image/GraphicsMagick are a whole different ballgame.
Yes but they don't all need to be exactly a single tool, a single process! Just like I really don't want a web browser in my file manager / operating system / text editor.... wait all of that already happened. sigh.
> We’re working on a protocol adapter that will allow
> clients using the Firefox Remote Debugging Protocol –
> including the Developer Tools and WebIDE – talk to all
> mobile browsers, regardless of rendering engine or
> runtime. Our first targets are Chrome for Android and
> Safari on iOS.

My company expects all of our internal web applications to function on the executives' iPads, but they refuse to purchase Macs on which to debug issues that manifest only on mobile Safari. And since the mobile Safari developer console was disabled in iOS 6, I haven't come up with anything better than alert-based debugging techniques (Firebug Lite was broken the last time that I tried, though admittedly that was a while ago). If Mozilla truly reverse-engineers Apple's remote debugging protocol it would be a godsend for us.

(And if I'm just an idiot who's overlooking some simple way of debugging mobile Safari, please let me know.)
A List of Resources for Server-Side Image Resizing
I strongly disagree. Just because economics have temporarily separated the means of creation from the means of consumption in some domains, there is no reason that they should not be recombined now that it can be done freely.

Why shouldn't all systems be programmable?
Every browser already ships "developer tools" for inspecting and debugging webpages. And you can already use those tools to rewrite the pages. I see this as the next step of that. And audio or word processing tools are less related to the web than this IDE. I agree that I don't see the harm in making this an Add-on instead. Anyhow browsers are the new operating systems, and Firefox has a development IDE bundled.
> Wouldn't that depend on the choice of bar? There's a big difference between a nightclub at midnight and a gastropub during lunch time

Typically, one does not refer to a gastropub or other restaurant (even one which, as most do and as a gastropub does by definition, includes a bar) as "a bar". When one refers to an institution as "a bar", that generally implies that one is referring to an institution that is solely a bar, not a restaurant with a bar.

Having part of an interview at a restaurant (even one which serves drinks) is a very different environment than doing so at a bar.
Never said it was. But hotels are good snapshots of particular demographics whom the hotel chains target.

The people spending $250/night at the particular urban center hotel made the choice that I observed on that one occasion. If that's a trend vs. a datapoint, it could be very meaningful for somebody trying to sell products.

Personally, the next time I find myself in a cheap roadside place, I'm going to make a similar comparison.
Will try this tonight. I do understand it just released, thankfully a lot of things can be updated.

Thanks for the helpful advice, steps included! I'll give that a try tonight.
> EDIT: Also, when using infinite scroll, do not put anything in the page footer. Now when the pages have copyright info and couple links in there, I can see those only for a split of a second before new content appears. Makes me go crazy.

This sort of design element occurs way too often. I call them Tantalus footers, because they're always just out of reach. It also makes me wonder if the people who designed these things actually tried using them under real-life conditions.
"Artists daydream about having created great work" - Art and Fear
Link to the JPL project page with more detail

<http://phaeton.jpl.nasa.gov/external/projects/optical.cfm>

Interestingly this is a Phaeton project. Phaeton projects are designed for early career engineers to jumpstart their experience. Very cool.

<http://phaeton.jpl.nasa.gov/external/ProgramOverview/home.cf...
This is the 'atheism is just another religion' argument, or the 'not being racist is just another racial preference' argument. You can't see the difference?
> Surely there's a way to test for "cultural fit" that doesn't involve directly, or indirectly, testing for protected status.

I'm not sure that's the case -- a major part of "cultural fit" in many cases seems to be selecting along protected axis of discrimination by other names. (Heck, phrases very similar to that have been used to cover covert discrimination on protected axis since legal protections against discrimination were first adopted.)
It's true that most people use browsers as opposed to working with them for development.

The question is, do you want this state of affairs to be built into the design of our systems, or do you think that it would be good if, over time, a greater proportion of people are able to express themselves through code?
Interactive semi-automated package review (by abusing Travis-CI)
This is one of the things SETI struggles with. Their entire system is designed around the assumption that radio waves are going to be the way these advanced civilizations communicate. It might just be likely they use lasers or other methods and maybe treat radio as an antiquated backup.