skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I usually see most jobs in software engineering divided in to two categories: One that needs people with lot of plumbing skills and other that needs people to come up with algorithms for hard problems. I do not mean disrespect for the first category - it's an important job. Somebody needs to wire up database to API layer to UX, be very good at optimizing productivity by writing quick scripts, find components and modify them to solve the problem. These are by no means trivial problems. Developers in this group, however, would rarely find themselves writing code for graph traversals or finding common ancestors in trees. Most likely some available library already fits their needs.

The developers in 2nd category are different breed. More often than not they need to figure out, for example, how to do breadth first search in distributed way or write code for median in O(n) or do edit distance search on millions of records. For people in this category, CS interview questions aren't merely a check if they were paying attention in their class. Without having demonstrated ability to work on those kind of problems, these candidates would most likely fail in their jobs regardless of their culture fit, passion for the company or wear-all-hats startup attitude.

Your interview questions needs to be fine tuned for which category of candidates you are looking for. My personal policy is to ask questions that I faced myself and needed to solve to get the job done. This eliminates several issues such as candidate prepping up from well known questions creating deceiving impression. It also eliminates questions that are not relevant to the job. If candidate floors you with better solution, at least you know you are talking to person smarter than you and would have likely done better job - which is exactly who you want to hire.
> Why are consumers okay with paying a metered fee for electricity, water, and gasoline?

They're not. But normally they don't have a choice.

However, some of the utilities in the Northeast have plans wherein your bill is mostly constant year round even in spite of the spikes at certain times of the year. Lots of people like them even though they almost always wind up paying more than they would otherwise.
foobarqux, actually he is planning on doing that. I met with him just the other week, so I know this for fact. It just takes time, maybe you could help contribute?
You need to look at it the other way - it's really a two-headed network effect: there are two classes of users, drivers and riders.

The more drivers they have the more useful it is to riders. There more riders they have the more useful it is to drivers.

Whether this is sufficiently far from the original meaning of "network effect" that we need another name for it, maybe. Given how obvious this effect is, is there an existing name already for it?

This isn't particularly new nor unique to technology. This is the entrenching effect you see in all exchanges - the stock exchange, eBay, etc... any clearing house for sellers and buyers to meet will benefit from this effect.

I don't think "mindshare" is the right word for this.
That's the amazing thing about Uber: it does increase demand. By making it easier and simpler to ask for a cab, and actually providing an enjoyable experience in a market where expectations are very low, they managed to attract people who didn't really "need a ride" before.
More realistically, they will make your life easier as many machines before them have.
As a person who is using react, this is a welcome change! I'm glad they're taking time to get rid of the kludgy code that wasn't quite consistent.
YouTube Ready to Eliminate Ads [video]
Where did you see the increased difficulty if you weren't using JSX?
Ever seen anyone drop tables from a MySQL master to have that statement replicated across the cluster? (I don't think this problem set is correlated with cache vs. primary store, but with the fact you have some kind of replication going on.)
Lava House
For starters:

1. You can reuse your existing API, or choose the stack you're comfortable with (I prefer Python to Javascript and Postgres to Mongo)

2. They are being used in production by high traffic websites (Guardian and Instagram respectively), so they're more battle tested

3. Their press releases aren't loaded with buzzwords and hyperbole
This is a completely fair question to ask, from either direction.
Right, this. There's still a lot of experimental features that are implemented differently or not at all in one or more of the big three. But I can't remember the last time that I've had different browsers produce fundamentally different DOM trees from the same document, even when I'm using invalid attributes or made-up tags (coughangularcough).
We Can Be Heroes (on GoPro and Surveillance)
Did/have you tried tokumx ?
To increase the pedantic-levels: these are not plotted by graphite-web. In this case graphite-web only spits out source data in csv or json, actual plotting is done by Grafana (see stereo typical Grafana legends on the screenshots).
Cooperation Is What Makes Us Human
There's an incredible amount of regulation with health data/records that force companies to anonymize them and not allow them to sell it.
You don't need to do a separate step to use JSX. JSX is a still a superset of JS and you can still opt to not use it with no additional steps.
I'm in agreement with you, but I think the dark satanic mills were a bit of a low point.
Why not? App development for phones and tablets offer beautiful and very usable platforms to make it easy and painless for developers to create apps.

Contrast that to the preferred emacs/vim + terminal tools of your average developer. No one is trying to make this easier for us, and those that are get ignored (like Adobe Muse, maybe?).
Will there be Mesos-specific pricing? The full benefit of Mesos abstraction would remove the concept of a physical machine, and allow DigitalOcean to compete with Heroku-like services even better!
Apple Pay: Why some retailers have ditched it after one week
Not to "do good", but to "do innovation" and thus build a legacy for themselves.
Facebook Warns of Increased Spending, Shares Fall
It sounds like the author simply doesn't like change and is looking for things to pick apart. Yosemite is faster on every machine I've installed it on and I think the new interface is a new, modern, fresh take on OS X. If it's slow or dropping frames, perhaps it would be best to investigate and diagnose if your machine is OK or not before complaining. Of course, interface preference is subjective but I suspect most people simply don't care that much.

Change is hard, but if you go into it with this attitude you won't ever want to upgrade or try anything new.
Burning Man as a Commons
What rate of progress? Academia is glacial.
"X is NP-Complete" is a different statement than "X is proved to be NP-Complete". I said "I believe" the former. Bitcoin mining is clearly in NP - you can check blocks in polynomial time. The only real question is whether it is also NP-Hard. Contrary to your implication, there is nothing about the shape of the problem that implies other NP problems couldn't be reduced to it - indeed, we can express any NP problem as a pile of bits that, fed to an appropriate algorithm, generates a single 1 bit; that is the nature of a decision problem.

I fully recognize that the NP-Hard-ness of SHA256 is speculative, and I run a not-insignificant risk of being wrong. The strongest case for my correctness, so far, is that no one has found a polynomial attack against any of the SHA functions - this is far from conclusive, of course.
Surveillance Law
My friend made an app that measures how much money you earn a day with pooping
Same here, I was so hopeful.
I don't think the standard Linux kernel supports user-space OOM handling. That's a patch set that Google has been pushing for a few years, but that hasn't been accepted yet (as far as I know). So I'm guessing she's talking about Google's server infrastructure.
Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps
Getting Started in the IETF
He meant for example what data points would the phone use to know you're working out your triceps?
Are you just bragging or do you have a point?
I absolutely love Meteor. I've been evangelizing it a lot this year. I wish someone at Meteor would reply to my emails. wink ;) me@danielfischer.com
Thinking about the entropic explanation of the arrow of time in conjunction with the anthropic principle led me to this fantastic FAQ: http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/faq.html and the idea of Boltzmann Brains: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/01/...
Spread is like python's *args.

Instead of this:

var mapArgs = function() {
var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 0, arguments.length - 1);
var mapper = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, arguments.length - 1);
return args.map(mapper);
};

You can do this:

var mapArgs = function(...args, mapper) {
return args.map(mapper);
};

And you can also use it to apply. Instead of:

var max = Math.max.apply(null, [1, 2, 3, 4]);

You can do:

var max = Math.max(...[1, 2, 3, 4]);
My opinion on what is linkbait or misleading is often not the same as yours. But that's fine, that's why you're the mods.

My titles have been changed so many times (in both directions), that I just decided to always use the original title, and let you do your mod job and change it according to your judgement.

Do the HN guidelines also say to always use the original title unless it's misleading or linkbait too? I hadn't actually been aware of that -- where do I find these guidelines? I'm not actually sure. If I had known that, it would have spared my energy in coming with titles I thought were more informative only to have them, as a rule, changed back.

Thanks for your work!

I just found the Hacker News Guidelines you mention by googling -- previously I hadn't been aware they even existed, so didn't know to look for them. I see they do say to ordinarily prefer the original title. I am not sure how people find out about these guidelines, are they linked to from somewhere on HN that I'm missing? It might make a lot of sense to include a link to them on the 'submit' form.
A while back on HN, there was an article about private mail filtering services. You would have your ground mail sent to them, they would get rid of the junk mail and send you only the "good stuff" that you specified.

(Anecdotal) Well, these guys had a meeting with Postal Inspector who didn't think much of what they were doing. When informed that it was a voluntary service, he pretty bluntly informed them that it would upset the 400 or so of his (the Postal Inspector's) largest customers.

Upshot, the Postal Service has a vested interested in you receiving junk mail because they are paid to deliver it, and woe betide anyone who interrupts that.
This is a weird article, because you're talking about the importance of negative feedback to improve your personality, but then you just brush off the negative feedback you got:

> The feedback from the Bold Italic article is NOT helpful…those guys are just a bunch of jerks.

Did you, in fact, stop to consider why you come off like a d-bag in that article? Or how being less of a d-bag (or at least disguising it better?) might improve your personality?

I'm trying not to be an asshole here, but how about some self-reflection?
Ask HN: You forget everything about programming. What do you do?
If you had to start over in your field, how would you relearn everything? Or would you choose a new field?
I would guess that more people probably visited tacobell.com today than on any other day in its history... and all that traffic is funneled to install Taco Bell's Android or iOS app. Seems to me like a very clever and successful campaign to boost app awareness and installs. As a temporary campaign it's totally brilliant; but the message "#onlyintheapp" is pretty risky as a lot of people might not "get it" and negatively associate Taco Bell with technological regression. It's ironic and a little post-modern that the site hosts a message about it's own non-existence and by doing so becomes the primary source of downloads for the app.
> Thanks for the link. A lot depends on where a flat price ends up of course. There's benefit to predictability but not if I pay 2x what I would under a usage-based scheme.

Not necessarily. The combination of the value of the services you decided to forgo to not rack up metering charges and the mental cost of doing those calculations can be arbitrarily large, because the mental cost is a sunk cost[1] by the time you know whether paying for the additional metered bandwidth is worth it. You could theoretically spend all day worrying about using too much bandwidth without ultimately deciding to use any at all, so your bill would be much lower but at the cost of spending all day worrying about it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs

There are also knock-on effects of not having unmetered service. It causes people to use less bandwidth (obviously) but that means they're deriving less value from the network, which means they're not willing to pay as much for service, which means slower upgrades, which means potentially higher customer costs in the long term as the price per GB stays higher longer.

> That flat price is going to depend on things like marginal costs, to what degree flat pricing drives up average costs, and how much the heavy users drive up costs for others. As the link suggests, flat pricing seems to work pretty well for broadband but it's unclear how practical it is (today) for wireless.

The strange thing about wireless is that it seems likely to eat itself. Spectrum is scarce and towers are expensive, but charging a high monthly fee for unlimited usage or a high metered rate is likely to drive customers to use WiFi rather than cellular whenever possible, which reduces demand for cellular and pushes the prices back down.

I suspect the equilibrium is going to be "unlimited" wireless service where only the first X amount of MB per month is "fast" and then the service works but is throttled. The result then is that everybody uses WiFi whenever they can to preserve their "fast" cellular bandwidth (or because they've already used it and then WiFi is much faster) but nobody actually has to worry about using too much because there is never any bill for the overage. And then you start demanding that WiFi access points be installed at whatever locations you were in where you used all your cellular bandwidth.
What a great article. To think this guy had no idea for months he was talking to one of the biggest whistleblowers of our generation. Reading this makes me wonder if there's room for a yellow pages style public key directory for journalists. That would of saved a lot of time and hassle.
https://gist.github.com/sebmarkbage/07bbe37bc42b6d4aef81
It's the same 80/20 split as usual. If your fare is $11 including a $1 "safety fee," then drivers see $8. If you're in x2.0 surge and so your fare is $21, drivers see $16. For UberX.
Poor college kid turned self-taught meteor.js developer
my extra strength placebos are doing there job, don't Jones my fix.
Win-win all around
Meteor does make things easier, by making things simpler.

It is much simpler dealing with Meteor's API's then working with documentation from 3 or 4 different frameworks that you need to accomplish the same kind of stuff Meteor does.

Meteor gives you a set of clean coherent APIS to work with to get stuff done.
I enjoy Asimov's tongue-in-cheek version:

> Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Manuel Noriega case against Call of Duty is dismissed
The Minecraft soundtrack was composed by Daniel Rosenfeld[1]

1: http://minecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Daniel_Rosenfeld
1) Probably not but it is much more one sided with media streaming. This is why I said that ISPs should be forced to peer for free at the local loop level. But outside of that, they are acting as a transit network.

2) Small ISPs buy transit if they need it. Comcast and Verizon don't because their larger networks acts as a transit for them.

3) Yes they are taking advantage of their size, but they are performing the same service as a transit provider. If Verizon spun off their local ISP network, Cogent would have to pay VerizonT1 to transit to the local ISP.

Why does Verizon owning the transit and local somehow make it unreasonable to ask for payment?

Verizon and Comcast aren't asking for money to accept data, they are asking for money to transit the data for Cogent and L3.
"It seems like you could game the system by simply only driving during surge pricing."

The more drivers stay at home, the more there is surge pricing. The more drivers drive, the less there is surge pricing. Such is the game of equilibrium :)
Great idea, but seems like there's a bug on your demo page - if I click "Add Extras" before selecting a plan, I can't go back to "Select Your Plan" (clicking it doesn't work)
Agreed, hence my comments about it requiring expensive litigation.
Show HN: RTron, My Take on Tron
It's basically something like Java Server Face in javascript,which can be a good and a bad idea...
Driverless cars is exactly the play. Once driverless cars arrive, their margins will jump from 20% to something like 50-80% overnight.
This is a change for the far worse, someone branch this please and maintain a backward compatible branch with the same syntax.
How bad is the California drought?
The subtlety of modern CPUs, or the search for the phantom bug
Caption competition: CERN seeks help with photo archive
MBTA Green Line Data Visualization (Boston)
> Given how obvious this effect is, is there an existing name already for it?

It's a marketplace.

As a seller, and a buyer, you generally benefit from going to a larger marketplace. But that analogy breaks down for ride-sharing because there's nothing preventing drivers from being simultaneously available on multiple ridesharing services, and it's trivially easy to switch between them. So there isn't any true isolation between different services, and it makes more sense to think of them as part of a single, larger ride-sharing marketplace.
Check out http://hood.ie/ its CouchDB based and has some similar concepts to Meteor
Haftbefehl – Russisch Roulette – Babo Edt
> offering a Groupon deal was an easy way to attract new long-term customers en masse

What does that even mean, at scale? If it is a money printing press for everyone involved, you have to postulate either that the entire market grows rapidly (for "local businesses", no matter what they do, in this case) or you've (at best!) created a middleman to tax all transactions in the system.
I'm quite impressed by this. I can easily imagine some pretty sophisticated productions with such a small amount of code. For instance, your Better Looping example is basically a step sequencer.
Show HN: Blazing Fast JSON Validator
Which is really the way it should work. Let AT&T have all the crappy customer-hostile policies they want as long as they fully disclose it in a sufficient manner to their customers.

Then, their customers can vote with their money and go to a competitor that offers more for their money. That's the way it SHOULD work, but probably won't :(
I haven't used React, but maybe he's referring to this:
"Composite Component functions can no longer be called directly - they must be wrapped with React.createFactory first. This is handled for you when using JSX."
Interesting to hear your opinions about Yosemite.
Yesterday I had a conversation with an apple employee and he also confirmed that they are aware of the UI performance problems. I expect apple to fix this soon.
Teaching students to break into websites
Essentially every Android phone or tablet permits side-loading of apps, and installing third-party app directories ("stores"). People may not use such very much, but the freedom is still there.
The original project is hosted here:

https://github.com/playlyfe/themis
"...but I'm not liking how I have to do an extra step if I don't use jsx."

http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2014/10/14/introducing-...
Recording iPhone phone calls
He's referring to the createFactory stuff. The new JSX transformer automatically generates that boilerplate for you, but if you don't use JSX you'll need to add it everywhere yourself before you upgrade.
Never used Chrome for regular browsing really. Firefox was kind of behind in the 3.x days but not to the point of switching for me, especially since I value Mozilla's goals.
Wow! Your app looks impressive.. I think your team stands a good chance of being invited for an interview. How long have you been hacking on it?
Amazon's Fire Dwindles
Mostly what @BinaryBullet said. fb.me is a urlshortener and then it hits real CDNed files. I (as maintainer of React) suggest not actually using fb.me urls in production. Use cdnjs or jsdelivr. Or host it yourself. We've been meaning to put together a proper CDN hosting setup for JS libraries but just haven't gotten around to it.
I found "...was dropping bits (slivers of binary information)" hilarious. Would there be anybody reading this article who doesn't know what a bit is? Especially since a couple of sentences later they use "timestamp" without any exposition on what that means.
Unfortunately, the problems he reduces from are not so hard in practice. Knapsack has what's called an FPTAS, which means you can get as good an approximation as you want, and the runtime only scales polynomially with your desired accuracy. And independent set has nice approximation algorithms for bounded degree graphs and other restricted graph classes (though there is no general constant-factor approximation unless P = NP).

So it's funny that the author quotes knapsack as the possible true difficulty...
"Composite Component functions can no longer be called directly - they must be wrapped with React.createFactory first. This is handled for you when using JSX."
This article highlights for me how much the world could change if the overall knowledge level about PK crypto was raised -- if it became as intuitive for the non-technical user as, say, protecting physical keys.
On that note, we cry out in rage when a for-profit does some money-grabbing evil, but we also get our feathers all ruffled when a company for social good wants to be for-profit.

If we don't want corporations to make money by being evil, shouldn't we want them to make money by being good?
As the others have stated, react requires me to add this line: var MyComponent = React.createFactory(require('MyComponent'));

It's not a huge deal, but I keep getting this sense that jsx is strongly tied to react and this reaffirms that they are going to keep it that way. I do trust the react team still, but it makes me weary of future releases.
Basically, the question is this: is it possible to develop a process manager that would do the job of oomkiller that has as high code quality as the Linux kernel. I am guessing the answer is yes

I'm not trying to put the kernel devs on a pedestal or anything, but how can you compare a tool that's been tested in a myriad of use cases in literally everything from microcontrollers to clusters and big iron to something that's much less mature and probably won't see a tenth of the use cases? My bet is that you'll see more and more problems as people try to reinvent the wheel with their own "not-oom-killers", and blame it on the Linux kernel (ie, 99% of problems will be case 4, not nearly the same frequency). In that respect this article is incredibly informative as it will hopefully point people to check out their own code first. And the beauty is, if they do come up with a better oom-killer, they can always contribute a patch to the kernel.
VirtKick - a simple, open source cloud panel: https://www.virtkick.io/

Virtual machines and Docker containers made easy. 1-click install on a desktop or server, auto-configure hypervisors, super-usable interface. This week we're releasing a standalone alpha (almost one-click). https://github.com/virtkick/virtkick-starter

tl;dr DigitalOcean for open source.