skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I could agree more with more upvotes. One of the most important factors IMHO when hiring people is their personality and ability to work with the team. A battery of quiz, psych and trivia questions does little to reveal anything related to that other than what a person's stress tolerances are.

I usually just interview as a conversation. Likely I'm going to have to be able to talk to this person regularly anyways. Once that happens, they relax and I've found that their background claims tend to be far more realistic, more willing to point out their faults, and yet still have plenty of ability to discuss deep technical questions as well. But now it's not 20 questions it's "can you whiteboard the architecture of that project your were mentioning a few minutes ago?" And then use that as a point of discussion, e.g. "well why did you do it this way vs. this way?" They should be able to provide a reasonable answer.

Really what most employers want is somebody who's able to think deeply, justify their own thought process, demonstrate the ability to research and general technical acumen. Most likely their technical history won't be a 1:1 match for what your company does anyway, so they'll simply have to learn a number of new languages or development metaphors, use cases, architectures etc.
Poll: 32 or 64 ? (or other ?)
I'm wondering how widespread 64 bit computing has become since it was introduced into the mainstream in '92. I see a lot of 32 bit systems still.

What 'size' operating system do you use on your dekstop or server computers ?

If you use 'lower' or 'higher' I'm be very curious about the details of your platform.
desktop lower
desktop 32 bits
desktop 64 bits
desktop higher
server lower
server 32 bits
server 64 bits
server higher
You mean that ssh fingerprints are out of the encrypted data packets, aren't they?

Honest to say, I could not afford another premium VPN service.
You do figure out the point.
Wasn't dropbox.com run by a Canadian University or a Canadian student? I seem to recall searching for dropbox and ended up at the non 'get' one and it was a website of something different.
That's literally the billion dollar question. Even the simplest functional 'seed AI' would be a major technological shock.

There are lots of people betting vast sums of money on the answer being 'yes'.

Maybe the question is not so much if it is possible but if it is possible with current technology and if not in what century we'll be technologically advanced enough to really make this work.

It would certainly take some of the fun out of programming, programming would become teaching.
I've never met the guy and I don't like him.
Get an account. They're free.
That goes triple for switching between the keyboard and mouse, unless you have a specific workflow that involves the mouse and the keyboard at the same time (as is common with Photoshop, Autocad, etc.).
Designing Effective Warnings
$150k Settlement for Amazon's Deletion of Orwell Books from Kindle
I'm going through that process now. It really is a culture difference when you've been using Windows, or other GUI apps in linux, for a long time. The links in the original link did help. This http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html is useful for me at the moment.
I think this is a growing trend in the world. Politicians has learned about the "tubes" and trying to control it. of course every children must be protected from the dangers of devil's tool Internet.

In Turkey there is law numbered 5651 giving TIB to control Internet access. They have the uncontrolled power of "deciding" wheter any content is outlaw or not. And ordering ISP's to block access. I think they even "self decide" to block sites where court orders are required. Our trust ISP TTNet obeys any order from TIB. And the funny thing is they do block whole domains. Not content. If a subdomain.example.com is decided to be outlaw then access to example.com is blocked. Funnier thing is they do this by hijacking domains at the service provider level. And the funniest thing is our Prime Minister once answered a question about Youtube's access restriction with "I can access Youtube, so you can".
Driven to distraction
On Being Narrow
Right, voting up articles because you like them means that the front page will tend to get clogged with "woo $thing, vote this up if you like $thing too" type articles, which are almost always very shallow AND encourage other such banality.

There are still interesting discussions to be had about multiple-decade-old text editors, but this is not one of them.
dropbox != getdropbox.com

FWIW.
Could you flesh that out a little?
They are using godaddy nameservers so something must be off there.
IRC was actually (almost) mainstream in Portugal as a way of meeting/hooking up with people online before MSN and Facebook took over the "meat market".
But of course, the hosts of these malicious sites and the source of the spam links to them are compromised Windows machines.
The Title
The line weight on "M" stays consistent in Helvetica, but it shits the bed in Arial, getting way thicker at the "V" junction.
32 bits is easier on memory, and if you have less than 4 gigs of memory, probably makes sense.
A stiff canned question deserves a stiff canned response.
Google Removes Pirate Bay Frontpage From Search Results
A small nit: proposed UWB (ultra wide band) schemes at 5GHz and 60GHz are considered EHF (extremely high frequency) or millimeter-wave; IR is generally considered to start at at least 300GHz.

There isn't a heck of a lot of interference per se at 60GHz, but it is very hard to design a transmitter that is not highly directional and line-of-sight sensitive. My feeling is that the low range and line of sight requirements mostly limit current incarnations of this technology to situations that are already amenable to HDMI cables.

There's a good writeup from earlier this year on Ars Technica ( http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/02/cutting-the-cord... ) that goes through some of the commercial offerings around that time. No idea if any of them are still around, or in what form.
> I bet most hackers have made their editing decisions long ago and are content with their choices.

I think you're completely ignoring the next generation of hackers, which is unfortunate. I've been working on getting past vim's learning curve for over a year, on and off. True, this submission sucks, but it lead me to find this: http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html, which is pretty informative for a beginner.
i must admit, if i owned the dropbox.com domain and wasn't doing anything with it, i would have either sold it to the dropbox team, or used it as a front for the dropbox affiliate program.
The power of the command line and editors like vim and Emacs is only apparent after spending a lot of time with them. It also requires a methodical use of documentation.

C programming in vim might seem masochistic compared to Visual Studio. I'd suggest that Emacs offers a richer set of features when building software in C, complete with autocompletion, SCM integration, and build commands.

You can also use Emacs (or just GNU Screen) to have split views of source code and program output and the debugger (gdb) in one window. The real advantage of the command line environment is the ability to create new tools. When you're in Visual Studio or Eclipse it's a much more formal and involved process to create a custom command or automate something and integrate it with your workflow. With the CLI you can just throw together the tool you have in mind in whatever language is most suitable, and integration is not an issue because the shell (hosted in Emacs or not) is an integral part of your "IDE" at this point.

Compared to tools like Visual Studio and Eclipse, the trek is longer but the peak is higher with Emacs and the CLI.
Some Books
wow I had no idea. How do I get to dropbox? I almost signed up for getdropbox.com a few days ago.
Yeah, and I think it's a shame because, while getdropbox.com works great as a marketing site, getdropbox.com/home doesn't feel right for their Web interface.
If you're in to old sf try to find 'The Space Merchants' by Pohl and Kornbluth.
Well, it works exactly like mathematics. You start with a small kernel that seems likely to be true, then you build on top of that with transforms likely to be true, and at the end you end up with a proof statement that is fairly likely to be true.

Then you sit and pound on the core axioms and transformations to make sure they are correct. This is impossible, in the strictest sense, but it is often practical.

All programs are mathematical proofs of one sort or another, so in the end, it's the same problem that every programmer faces: How do I know this program isn't buggy? Well, you don't, and yet, here we are, with broadly functioning programs of great complexity. Ultimately, going through a rigidly mechanical proof is a quantitative change, in that it takes your confidence in the lack of bugs from less than 100% to another value much closer to 100% but still lesser, but as I like to say, a large enough quantitative change is a qualitative change. So while it is true that the proof may not be 100%, that doesn't mean it would be useless.

Also, it should be pointed out that in the real world there is a real error rate that real CPUs have; a percentage of computations will go wrong. Pushing your confidence of your algorithms below that point is largely useless. In the real world, the difference between 10 or 15 9s and actual, factual 100% isn't actually relevant, so the fact that the proofs can't get to 100% is a much lesser concern than you might think. It would only matter if we had 100% reliable computers in every other way. I think I can safely say that the dominant problem in computing today is not unreliable hardware, though, it's bugs in our algorithms, so this is the right approach. (Note I said dominant; massive server farms have to worry about unreliable hardware, but even then, you'll be handling that with algorithms and code and your dominant problems on that front will be bugs in the code.)
Not only that, but it's a federated protocol (like email), so your company can set up its own Wave server, and you can communicate through it with users on any server.
Wow. A123 went through 11 rounds of financing. After getting used to seeing web/IT companies raising 3 to 4 rounds, it's easy to forget there are other industries out there that are much more capital-intensive.
Bootstrapping. You build the proof inside an automated theorem prover that's already been verified. In fact, one might have bootstrapped that from a simpler tool that's already been verified.
Does this mean that Google might buy Dropbox that is at getdropbox.com now?
This is like the adult version of everything the culture tells you where you're a kid: "you're special! you're a unique snowflake! you can do anything, if you just believe in it! follow your dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeams!" The adult version is more succinct, ever so slightly more specific, and doesn't have all the pretty pictures, but it's the same thing.

Well, I grew up in the culture too, and I guess I drank the Kook-Aid. If it strikes any chord in you at all, you should probably go for it. If you want my advice, don't do what everyone else is doing. Not everything has to be a social networking webapp. Get off the net and read a book once in a while. Be in a hurry, but be smart and thoughtful about it too. Always Be Creating, but make it something you'll learn a lot from, even if it fails.

But why care about my advice? There are so many other people who will tell you what to do.
The problem is definitely there, but, after using wave for a couple of months now, I don't think it's the right solution.

I would echo a lot of other reviews: it's too complex and ambitious. This applies to the protocol/platform as well as their initial client. There's just so much going on and it's trying to do so much at once that it's very unwieldy.

I think simplicity is an important feature if you want new software to gain traction, and especially if you want new protocols to be adopted. I think simpler tools like http://shoptalkapp.com (disclosure: co-founder) do a better job of solving the problem you describe. And the tools we use to build it, which are gradually being open sourced at http://dieselweb.org, make real-time web apps pretty accessible to developers.

Having used the wave client and read about the protocol, I just think both are too complex to really gain traction. All the bugs in Gooogle's own wave client are evidence that it's not an easy platform to write apps on, at least at this point. I'm sure they'll continue to pour tons of resources into it, and maybe they'll turn it around. Time will tell.
Clojure's data structures handle this by sharing state across different copies of the structure. So say I have a hashmap with 15 k/v pairs in it, then I change one of the values in an existing key. Only the path to and that k/v pair are changed, the rest are just pointers to the same items that were already existing, minimizing the cost of "changing" it and allowing concurrency to still work without contention issues.
GP is not talking about UWB but about IR:

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS117678+16-Ap...
Your automated theorem prover contains bugs, too.
I don't know the costs because I'm not a publisher but.. I think my book has an RRP of $40. Most places sell it for less than that. Amazon, for example, sell it for $26.

According to my royalty documents, my publisher gets about $18 per copy and I get between 10% and 20% of that depending on how many copies I sell. The 20% rate only kicks in after about 25,000 copies or so and few programming books do that well (my first edition sold just under 10,000), so effectively I get around $1.80-$2.50 a copy.
it's about a number of safety properties always holding as long as the assumptions are true

And no project is ever without such assumptions. You can't have abstractions without them.
Read the link.

If you understand a little bit about how something like Isabelle is constructed, only a small number of axioms are "hand coded", and then the rest is built from those. You can always build an external proof checking tool that checks that the proof you've constructed is correct. And if you're not confident in that, you can build another one.
WTF no,

Registrant:
Giri Nirkondar
1929 Clover Ct
Pleasanton, California 94588
United States

Someone just pointed the domain at GOOGLE APP ENGINE. It's been like that quite a while now.

So WHY THE HELL did you all upvote this to NUMBER ONE??? Jesus Christ I swear it's like a gossip magazine here some days.

<storms off in a puff of smoke>
iMacs use laptop ram. Getting 8GB DDR3 ram for laptops is expensive, even from newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE.... $900 from Apple isn't nearly as bad of a markup as you might imagine.

side note: I wouldn't buy the G.SKILL ram. Anecdote, but I've had bad experiences with it. Plus, ~half the cost of the closest item makes me suspicious of its quality.
Venture Exits Might Be Down, But Total M&A Activity Is Definitely Picking Up
I've noticed quite a bit of introductory level Python stuff showing up on HN lately, and while there's nothing wrong with that (and I appreciated the link to the Decorator PEP because I'd forgotten about the decorator generator 3rd party module), I wonder what's driving it.
I'm gonna say no...unless Google has started using GoDaddy to register their domains and uses nsXX.domaincontrol.com instead of nsX.google.com for their name servers.
>Everything you outline except taxes fits into that framework.

You have missed my point, which is that governments do indeed have the power to both increase and decrease your happiness. Your contention appears to be that they do not have the power to increase happiness but only to decrease it (or perhaps, at best, fail to decrease it). This contention is what I'm arguing against. I am not arguing against the libertarian conception of a perfect minimal government (not because I agree with it but because this is a separate issue from the one you've raised).

>You speak as if the government by default owns all my money, and I should be happy about what I am graciously permitted to keep.

Actually, I didn't speak like that at all; you may be confusing me with a statist caricature. Which part of what I wrote are you referring to here?

>Failing to make me less unhappy is perhaps in some sense increasing my happiness,

So the legal system merely "fails to make you less [sic] unhappy"? I'm pretty sure it makes you happier in the ordinary sense of the phrase. I could choose many other examples, but I suspect that you are ideologically incapable of admitting that any government programs outside the bare libertarian minimum have made you any happier (whether or not this is in fact the case).

I realize, having been on the internets for more that five minutes, that most libertarians are in favor of the government maintaining a legal system. Some of them are even willing to admit that they are happier as a result of its doing so. But this just goes to show that government-run things are not inherently bad and misery-causing, which is my point.
It's an open secret in IT industry. And I think the policy will not help, but intensify the discontent under the ground, and it will harm the society in the long run. But given the flaws of the institution, I don't think it will change in the near future.
Agile Evangelism Can Be Dangerous: Focus on Your Needs
If I don't want to wait I use jabber. If I DO want to wait I use e-mail.
Looking for a cross plaform web based torrent client? Check out Tonido Torrent
I was using 'assumption' in the strict mathematical-logic sense. These assumptions are stated and it is trivial to check that the proof is not true if the assumptions aren't true.
This isn't intended to be scapegoating the situation but it's really up to our client how they decide to communicate with their followers. Depends on if they want to track metrics per follower.
> all the comforts that something like Visual Studio gives

What are these, anyhow? Whenever I've used Visual Studio or Eclipse it's felt like a burden.
Ah reminds me of when I used to get to play around with B.
That makes more sense. In fact, it sounds like automated testing, only at a higher level of abstraction (proving general invariants rather than concrete examples).
If you are trying to suggest where I can get a product I want, then I want to see it. If you are trying to infect me with mind-viruses or slap my face with offensive content or waste my time, then I'll block you. If I can't tell when I'll get the good or the bad, I'll block you.

Consider it a Darwinian selection pressure.
If the correctness of a program requires the ability to terminate, how do these proofs get around the Halting Problem?
"...promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night's sleep follows."

These are mutually exclusive, at least from my experience.
I thought we already had stuff we could snort to improve our memory, some of it even legal!

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...
But you didn't answer my point: mathematical errors that escape the original prover are caught by inspection by other mathematicians, and one thing we already know about the software business is that inspection is an extremely scarce resource relative to the amount of code produced.
Two free help desk software tools
If I could afford any premium vpn, it would be a great choice. Thanks any way.
We do provide a unique shortened url per tweet/dm. For the public timeline it's more difficult to track the "referal".

We have thought about putting in a beacon of some sort. An issue with that is that a beacon (like #zs8) is one of the first things to be removed from a RT if it's not a valid hashtag. A url, however, is rarely removed from a RT since it's pertinent to the message.

We're still thinking about how to track RTs from the timeline. The new retweet API will most likely help and make timeline campaigns more valuable.

An "opt out" page on our site is a good idea. One issue is we don't do an interstitial on which to display that link. Have to figure out a good way to make that visible. Thanks.
Check the details of this reported result against these criteria for scientific studies:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
> Developers are usually smarter than to use a browser with appalling performance and a plethora of bugs (that never get fixed) when much better choices are just a few clicks away.

So the problem is that I'm "not smart" (enough). Okay - so I'll ask a dumb question. Are those the only relevant criteria for choosing a browser? Or, are they merely always dominant?

> This is probably a troll, but i'm hitting reply anyway...

Not at all. I'm open to self-improvement.
In retrospect, I feel bad submitting this. It was my first submission in the two years or so I've been here (~1 with an account), which makes it worse.

In my defense, I had no idea it would be upvoted so highly.
The post and all the comments are from accounts that were just created. Someone is trying to vote themselves onto the front page. Flagged.
Ah well, here's an opportunity for someone to develop a solution that will combine both the memory spray and a time-delayed sleeping medication!
I see Daniel's point. He's right. There are people who don't like you for bizarre reasons, for the same reason there are plain crazy folks out there you can never hope to understand. Like one of his commenters, though, I think these people are worth forgetting about rather than analyzing. Some people you'll just never get - and life's too short.

I tend to avoid confrontation and haven't had many incidents like Daniel's (this is a big part of why I work solo) but even I've hit into it. I positively reviewed a book on Amazon yet some third party guy I've never heard of (and unrelated to the book) went crazy in the comments how he didn't like me. Like.. WTF? So, yeah, let's write these people off to just being the crazy side of life we'll never understand - life's kinda fun like that :)
Ask HN: alternative to slicehost/linode? (need FreeBSD)
I need a FreeBSD VPS, can anyone recommend a reliable hosting company with prices (and virtualized hardware) similar to slicehost/linode? I found rootbsd.net but don't know anyone who can relate on them.
Feel free to skip this completely content free article.

Sometimes a 'bury' option would be handy, now it's flag or let it sit.

A short summary would be 'DNS hacks and XSS are OS agnostic'.
I was using 'assumption' to talk about the faith that abstractions and their (sometimes mathematical) assumptions can be successfully applied to solve real-world problems.

Some may argue that there's no guarantee that such proofs apply to real world systems. But really, there's no guarantee that any abstract model does. We humans have to get paid for something.
I think CampFire solves most of these problems much more elegantly.
Valid points. One of our main goals is to curb spam usage. Just to let you know some of the ways we plan on doing that.

1) We'll be introducing a pay model which should weed out the majority of spammers (CTR won't be high enough).

2) A free version will be limiting enough that it won't be worthwhile for spammers.

3) We have an artificial limit placed on "groups" so you can only DM N (500 atm) followers at a time.

If you have other ideas we'd love to hear them. We wouldn't post a site intended for spam on HN :).

In addition to that, I think Twitter should employ more robust emails (or just buy out Topify) that let's you easily block or unfollow users directly from the DM email.

Thanks for clarifying your original post.
Admissions choosing who is the best writer and meritocracy, don't go hand in hand.

The MIT student bloggers do a great job. I think the selection process is working just fine, and this degree of openness is a big attraction to MIT.