skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comes up a lot in the skeptic community: we know X is not actually psychic/finding ghosts/healing people, but are they an outright, knowing fraud, or do they believe it themselves?
Wikipedia [1] describes the cannibals and missionaries problem differently than you do. Particularly, there is no "you" who transports them, there are only 3 Cs and 3 Ms.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_and_cannibals_pro...
I share your perspective on this. I have also found that writing tests forces you to write testable code (goes without saying). Often times, if code is impossible to test and requires to you to mock and inject a bunch of different things just to write the test then you're design is probably no good. So, while this necessarily mean you have to do TDD, it's interesting to see that testable code and good design kind of line up.
Indeed, it would be interesting to add more features. However, for international games, I saw that it was quite hard to improve accuracy beyond what I already have. One other approach would be to create alternative ranking systems (modified Elo...) and use them as features.
Specifying invariants via tests before or during the writing of code is a great technique.

Making your whole development approach blindly revolve around one technique is self-evidently a poor idea.
In my job, I could successfully be an asshole. But my assholishness wouldn't be irrelevant. If it's a weakness, then I had other advantages to make up for it. If it's a strength, then I applied certain things to make it work.

It also depends on the culture. Some cultures make assholishness less viable. For instance, conferences with a decent code of conduct make physical harassment less viable.
places I've worked either do one off "bonuses" or trips or whatever.

Please don't give adults gold stars for effort.
"- Can I use #define? - No!"

I think teacher has some ideas here :) .
CF Summit Video: Diego Reimagines the Cloud Foundry Elastic Runtime
I dont agree on this point. Javascript has quite a many gotchas i agree, but once u get over them, javascript is a pretty beautiful language. I've been a pythonist before getting into js about 4 months ago, i still love python but the flexibility js provides is unmatchable. Even python cant beat it.
Cloned Blek Sets a new standard for shameless mobile game clones
So why is it inevitable that any civilization that can evolve to the point of space travel will necessarily have the desire and capability to continue to expand before extinction? We've only been around a relatively short time and there is no certainty that we will be around long enough to be able to spread across the galaxy. If someone had told me in 1969 that 45 years later we would have lost the capability (or desire) to colonize the moon, I would have thought it highly unlikely. But here we are.
Let me remind everyone that Karpeles is an established liar and a convicted computer fraudster, and will obviously say or do anything at this point to clear his own name.

http://newslines.org/mt-gox/joins-linux-cyberjoueurs/

http://newslines.org/mt-gox/convicted-of-computer-fraud/

Again, what ultimately convinced me of Karpeles' character is that he paid his IRC support staff to lie to users. The support staff didn't realize they were being paid to lie, but they were certainly lies. They were being paid to tell users, "Yes, all of your coins are safe and secure" while Karpeles was drafting his Mt. Gox crisis report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...

Once Mt. Gox was hacked in the aftermath, a log of their trading activity was leaked. In that log, there's evidence of an Mt. Gox trading bot that had been operating for a long time, buying up bitcoins in order to inflate the price.

http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7796748

At this point, I don't think Mt. Gox or Karpeles deserves any further attention, except as a warning that even the largest Bitcoin exchange can fail, which is why you must store your bitcoins in your own secure wallet, not any third party service.

EDIT: Also, Mt. Gox lost at most 386 bitcoins to malleability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482451
Solving the Mysteries of QM, Cosmology, and Black Holes in One Go
heroku strikes again
What was the puzzle?
Show HN: Grasswire – an Internet newsroom curated and fact-checked by everyone
I think it would be funnier to silently transcribe the code from the phone to the whiteboard, and then just sit back down and look at them while you wait for a response.
Said maintainer who hasn't merged this PR yet here. The reason I haven't is because I looked at this, went, uhhhhhh I'm not sure, and haven't had the time to figure out if it's a good change yet. I don't want to change signal handling and then break things for other people.
Seems likely, any references that support your theory? Many people on /r/bitcoin and such places seemed to think that he outright stole it, but could be pure speculation (I didn't follow the story, don't take my word for it).
Assuming the terms of your sentence aren't like Mitnick's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Arrest.2C_convict... (where he wasn't allowed to be near a computer for a period of time after he got out of prison)

"I live in Orlando, FL, and I never have the opportunity to speak with a company directly". I don't think you're trying hard enough. This kind of 'all or nothing' thinking doesn't help you.

Get involved with other developers in the community. Go to some toastmasters meetings to polish your face-to-face social skills. Don't mention your felony unless you're asked about it. Remove it from your resume if you've put it there. If and when you are asked about it, clearly explain that it was you trying to act in good faith to protect the interests of the Tampa Bay website.
He's not ignoring anything; he said non-distributed would handle 90% of use cases and that's probably somewhat true. Saying hey I'm one of those 10% isn't a rebuttal to what he said.
Agreed. As a few individuals have really make some big impacts I have been sure to thank them personally for working hard and helping us hit our date. I intend to thank the team publicly as well once we are live but I guess I was looking if there would be something in addition to verbal praising that would be meaningful.
Yep. HN wants to avoid eternal Septembers; occasional Septembers are fine though.
I think there's definitely some sort of reality distortion field in Mark's head - that or the interview's been heavily edited.

Thankfully I never had any money in MtGox, but comments like "I learned a lot, but I lost a lot" and "I always worried about ‘What if all the bitcoins were gone?’" really make me think he never did and still doesn't understand that he was responsible for half a billion dollars of other people's money.

I just don't comprehend his attitude. He's posting pictures of kittens on twitter. It's just... odd.
Well, could anybody sum this up? Because I'm definitely not going to read Part 2 since it seems Fowler didn't even bother to produce correct sentences.
-- Make Stickers Regular --

Helmet type stickers would feel like a way to vey much marginalize any significant contribution. You might want to make stickers something regular, ie for any new feature. Sales guys often do stickers for each deal or every deal that they win against a competitor.

-- Do an extra celebration --

Grab $100 from the budget and d
o an extra team outing that they'll enjoy. Get a mini keg for the office, kick back and relax for the world cup one day.
You don't necessarily have to find companies that are openly hiring. You can look for interesting companies and contact them directly. The failure rate would be high, but it's a starting point.
You can't tease us with such a question and not tell us what it is! Or perhaps you're still using it and don't want to reveal it publicly? :(
Ah for Jesus sake. At least his font is kind of nice. Would bump that body copy up to font-weight:400 however.
Unit tests are only partly to prove your code works when you initially write it, though. They also have significant value in allowing others—or Future You—the confidence to touch nearby code without feeling scared of breaking things. This is very important in Java and similar languages; in Clojure I suspect¹ this is less important just because functional styles lend themselves better to obviously-correct code.

¹Disclaimer: I have no experience with Clojure, working primarily in Scala these days. I do aim for good unit test coverage in Scala just the same as I did when I worked in Java.
Costa Rica knocked out both England and Italy, and yet it places below USA? Nonetheless, it's an interesting approach.
> Google have taken the Open Source ideology and bastardized it to fit their commercial needs.

Ah you're one of the people that thinks open source also comes with a mandatory ideology. That it's not good enough if source is released for everyone unless there are also other strings attached. We can leave this in disagreement then.

> Feel free to explain this clause in Google's privacy policy.

You have to redefine a lot of words if "sharing aggregated non-personally identifiable information" (e.g. statistics of "how many people aged 18-25 are seeing my ad?") is to mean the same as "selling your data".

https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/

> We don’t sell users’ personal information.
Three areas which every start-up should focus their attention on
The Willy Report makes it seem like there was more at play than simply incompetence: http://willyreport.wordpress.com/
If you are carrying a Google phone and using the Google systems you are giving them access to where you are going, where you have been, who you have met, who you know.

All these can be intimate personal details at times. They may provide information about health, sexual partners and activity. They can also reveal journalistic sources and high level company meetings that might give rise to insider trading.

Is this all information that should in your view be completely transparent.
Timely yet on-topic ;) https://twitter.com/tom_forsyth/status/482337551718440962
A Novel Tech Incubator That Silicon Valley Wouldn’t Understand
I think somebody ever wrote about an interview experience for an IT position at MtGox on reddit - it was very close to what you imagined.
I did something like this recently. The question was more around increasing efficiency of an algorithm though, and on top of what you said, the other part of my answer was more like "I wouldn't waste my time as long as performance was acceptable until it became an actual problem at larger scale. I'd move on to shipping other features."

It felt that they were interviewing for a computer scientist despite advertising for a software engineer.

Needless to say, we were mutually not a good fit.
Tessera: Big Data in R for non – distributed computing experts
DConf 2014 Panel with Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu
Exactly! Well said, "any jackass can plop in a data table and move on." The problem with that approach is that it's very deceptively easy. The data table morphs into a screen, then into an app, and before long you've got a big fat steaming pile of JS that is a 5mb download.

And then you get some really weird bugs like "If these two components are layed out inside an hbox, every once in a while you get a "Layout Run Failed" exception". Not that that's happened to me or anything :)

I'm actually in the middle of an exploratory re-write to use straight Backbone. I'm hopping to wrap up widgets like DataTable, Select2 and such into Backbone views and use them.

It's early days on it, but am hopeful that I'll arrive at something useful.
I write tests not to convince myself my code is correct (it often is, and repl and ad-hoc testing are more than enough to make sure it does the right thing now) but to prevent myself & future others from breaking it as they maintain it in the future.
Program bots in Scala to play against other player bots in an RTS game
Scalatron is a free, open-source programming game in which bots, written in Scala, compete in a virtual arena for energy and survival. You can play by yourself against the computer or organize a tournament with friends. Scalatron may be the quickest and most entertaining way to become productive in Scala. - For updates, follow @scalatron on Twitter.
Every one that I have seen has a follow up: If yes, please explain. But maybe that is more to do with location. As noted by another HNer, we're not as concerned about that in the SF Bay Area.
Patent trolls (and patents in general) are ruining innovation in this country.
There's not much to learn from Calacanis' story, unfortunately.

Scott Arciszewski's story is very sympathetic. He crossed an invisible (and very poorly understood) line in poking at websites for security flaws. He made a mistake that's very easy to understand, and, while I don't share his politics, it's straightforward to see how someone could get caught up in the moment --- in this case the original Assange drama --- and find themselves in a perfect storm of legal drama. Scott barely "pushed the envelope" at all, and appears to have just been very unlucky.

Calacanis' employee is much less sympathetic. He was convicted of running a botnet and, IIRC, using it to steal money from victims. That employee was put into a role where he was given access to the authentication information of thousands of users. Calacanis' employee didn't "push the envelope". He tore it open, took the money from inside it, and passed some of it out to his friends.

Be careful about false equivalences. The comparison you're making here is very unfair to Arciszewski.
One paragraph stands out for me:

”In his article Dobzhanksy turned Sagan’s argument on its head. Dobzhansky cited the fact that of the more than two million species living on Earth only one had evolved language, extragenetically transmitted culture, and awareness of self and death, as proof that it is “fatuous” to hold “the opinion that if life exists anywhere else it must eventually give rise to rational beings.”“

I find this interesting because some scientists are open to the fact that dolphins[1] and elephants[2] may be significantly more intelligent than we previously supposed, and possibly as intelligent as humans. The difficulty lies in defining exactly what intelligence is - and how we measure it in other animals.

That in turn leads to more questions. Suppose that there is, in fact, at least 3 human-level sentient species on our own planet. Observe: only one of them have developed tools to the extent that space travel is a problem that we're trying to solve. Perhaps the reality is that there are as many intelligent species as astronomers posit - maybe multiple species per planet! - but almost all of them have no interest in exploring and settling on other planets.

[1]http://www.dolphins-world.com/dolphin-intelligence/
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition
The only companies that have ever cared about running background checks in this industry in my personal experience have been the likes of Microsoft and Genentech--giant corporations (on contract--not sure about their 'full-time' hiring policies). Everywhere else I've worked, both contract and full-time (quite a few places) have not cared. Perhaps you can target small to medium companies. Especially startups (if that's your thing) don't care too much about such frivolities. This comes form working mainly in the Bay Area, however.

Speaking of which, if a recruiter is unwilling to work with you, stop talking to them. Recruiters are dime a dozen. When one drops out, ten pop up. There is no need to deal with the bad ones (almost all of them). I've noticed this in the Bay Area, Austin, Portland, and Seattle. I'm sure it's no different in Orlando. Basically, don't tell them about your past. They don't need to know anyway. Just ask about the hiring process and decline if it includes a background check. There's no need to be honest with recruiters. Seriously, if I had to guess, I'd say there are at least ten recruiters for every engineer, designer, etc.

Now, if you need help getting in touch with more recruiters that's very simple. Use dice, linkedin, stackoverflow careers, or whatever. Just post your resume up and make sure your availability date is in the near future. You may want to use a separate email (and maybe even phone number) just for this as it's guaranteed to get recruiter's attention and offers (oftentimes referred to as recruiter spam).
In summary: The universe is very young and we might be one of the first type >= 0 civilizations.
Do you have a link to that? It sounds like an interesting read!
As to code quality, the closest I can come to agreeing with you is that I think some people do unit tests ritualistically, not thoughtfully, and those suites can be relatively low in value. That brittleness you describe is often a sign of that. I rarely see that from people doing actual TDD, though.

Where I part ways, though is the notion that an hour of activity X substitutes for an hour of activity Y. For any given fear you have about your code failing, you should pick the testing approach that yields the most risk reduction per unit of effort. I don't think we can externally judge the right choice for a given team and code base. As long as it's reasonably easy for people to write tests at a variety of levels (unit, integration, functional, end-to-end), and as long as they're committed to continuous improvement, I'm inclined to trust that they'll figure out the right mix for their project.
I tend to agree with you, these factors would not improve the already good accuracy, however due to KO phase the games are all-or-nothing ( unlike other types of international games ), so some little factor ( extreme heat or a missing player ) could incline to a victory or not.

Anyway, good work!
Almost always, the next question is "If you checked yes to the previous question, please explain"
That's probably fine if you're going for a junior position where your job is to bang out code for designs that others have come up with.

But if you go up a few steps then suddenly the problems might not be that clearly defined and the set of possible solutions can be huge. A person who is constantly relying on Google to come up with solutions is probably not going to be that useful in design discussions.

I'm not defending the particular question, but on-your-feet problem solving is a real and valuable skill.
It is a shitty generalization slandering all articles which (possibly poorly) chose a question as headline.

This is obviously an "article" where the author was legitimately interested in answering the question in the title. This is one of the cases where Betteridge's law does not apply.

Betteridge's law may be useful to remind people to watch out for poor journalism and fact checking. In that case, I propose that all articles shall henceforth use questions as titles because people should do that anyway.
When approaching the Fermi paradox astrobiologists usually use the principle of convergent evolution [1], where multiple types of life will evolve similar features because of similar environmental pressures. (the application is the development of intelligence.) I'm a big fan of this, because it affirms my hope that life exists elsewhere. But unfortunately we don't really know what "life" and "intelligence" is -- an intelligent dolphin might never think or desire to leave the ocean, and an intelligent four-legged creature might never think to look up at the sky and wonder, the way that humans have always done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
I have said 72 assuming constant speed and equidistant spacing of the chairs- though as that seems to easy
Internet, Why So Blue?
JOIN the Listening Club
Disables zoom (iOS, Chrome).

Why do people do this? They are, even if they don't realize it, yelling "FUCK YOU" to people like me.
Encircle Partners With e-djuster To Redefine Claims Flow Process
Oh I agree. That's exactly the stuff I keep in my brain instead of linked list algorithms, which have a mathematically proven optimal solution. Remembering them when I don't use them regularly would be a waste of brainpower which could be better used for solutions to business/UX/architecture problems, which one cannot solve with pure logic.
Fact checking is what makes this different
Disagree that this problem never arises if you're not implementing a linked list data structure.

Here's a file a customer sent you that describes their organizational hierarchy:

ID Name Manager
1 Alice 4
2 Bob 1
3 Charlie 8
4 Dave -
5 Elise 3
6 Fred 2
7 Gemma 1
8 Henry 5

Is this a valid hierarchical tree? Okay, it's not exactly the same problem, but it's certainly similar...
A REPL does a good job of proving your code works as intended now. If you save that code in a file and run it regularly (which is a fine way to start making a test suite), then you can prove your code still works later.

That's especially important when multiple people work on a project: you have some chance of remembering what important REPL incantations prove a system works. They won't. If you haven't put your REPL magic in a test suite, then they're going to break your stuff.
When Torvalds hurls invective at some idea and at anyone who would support it, it's clear that he read it, understands it, and is speaking directly to it. Drepper would just swear at people and call them stupid.

The way to figure out the difference between the two is to strip out the choice of language and focus on the content of their responses. Drepper, if you strip out the invective, rarely has any content at all. Torvalds' sweary hateposts are often some of his most profound, detailed, and quotable.
It's easier to find other people who know git that who know mercurial.
Ugh. Pull requests again? OK, look, unless your team is so large that you can't effectively communicate otherwise, pull requests are just friction. Use feature branches, then merge them when they are ready. Trying to pretend like your two person team is a huge open source project with many distributed part-time and full-time developers is cargo cult at its worst.
I would be surprised how many people don't use a butter knife ;-) But I agree - way to abstract.
The problem with that style of testing at the repl is it proves your code worked for those tests at that time, but unless you turn that into test cases that will keep on being run then there's a good chance that you'll forget one of those test cases in the future.

Trust me, a large, old, code base like that is terrifying to work with.

Don't obsess over code coverage though, concentrate on areas of risk and scenarios, I've written code with 100% coverage that still had an exciting range of bugs, and I've seen extremely robust code that had relatively low coverage overall but had tests focusing on the really tricky areas.
Hmm, that's a good point that I hadn't considered. Thanks :D
Aw man... Where can I get this now that the campaign has ended?
The figure was outdated. It has been fixed now.
Here's a mention of it: http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1yuvj4/coinb...

Another mention: http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1xeg9b/mtgox...

Getting closer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7196109

Here we go: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x9gue/my_protest_a...

Here's a different interview experience too: http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1zg66x/lets_play_spot_t...
Something like happened to me once, someone asked me a riddle (it was: "you have a polynom of coefficients that are positive integers. I can give you the values of this polynom at integer points of your choice. Can you get all the coefficients by asking only two values?"). Somehow I got it very quickly, and was thinking in my head "oh man I didn't know I was that clever", but the guy thought I already knew the answer.
Here you go: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x9gue/my_protest_a...

Editing code in production on a financial services platform? Wow.

Note that his/her interviewer actually shows up in the thread a bit farther down to confirm the story.