skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's one way of looking at it, sure. While tech workers might be entitled, we're also a hot commodity and work hard to be so. These slimy recruiters are like the family that pops up when you win the lottery. Opportunists who lie and manipulate to try and get their chunk of the tech money.

Not all recruiters are this way, but the good ones aren't the ones being made fun of. The ones who went straight from a used car lot to becoming a tech recruiter "because there's money there" are the ones being targeted here. Do you really expect hard working intelligent people to respect slimy smooth talkers?
I think the unfortunate logical outcome of your theory is "You have no right to criticize the practice's employed by recruiters but rather you should just be completely thankful you're wanted" Not what you're probably after but the natural outcome of trying to create only black and white vs a shade of grey on issues.
PM for GCE Autoscaling here. On protection from malicious traffic spikes - you can set a max-instances threshold to prevent over-spend which you can change at any time.

Ultimately though, from an instance's perspective, there's not a lot of difference between a malicious DDoS and a genuine traffic spike. You can mitigate this (a) by setting low max-instances thresholds when you aren't expecting high traffic, and (b) upstream filtering or QOS management to filter our DDoS traffic from legitimate traffic.
Hi folks,

I launched Payola[1] a few weeks ago and I thought you all would appreciate an update. Since launch Payola has gained a bunch of features, most importantly including subscriptions.

If you have any questions please ask away!

Thanks,
Pete

[1]: https://www.payola.io

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8482500
LAMP Certified?

http://www.strategic-options.com/insight/are-you-lamp-stack-...
Is it AI? They had to formalize a problem and define what a "trick" is. So the problem becomes a search for a solution in a space of possibilities. If the space is small then brute-force search will find all the solutions. I don't think this kind of approach has anything to do with AI. Of course if the space to search is large then genetic algorithms or other AI solutions can be used and we can say it's AI...

Looks like "AI" is a cool term nowadays and it's hijacking the more basic notion of formalizing a problem and using a computer.
Google are invested in Clang by virtue of employing guys like Chandler[0] to work on it. When you're scrubbing up monstrous codebases like Chrome, tooling matters. Clangs architecture, and things like all the sanitizers that are part of the broader project, presumably go a long way.

[0] https://twitter.com/chandlerc1024
These days most of them seem to know how to edit PDFs.

I kind of want to add a PGP signature to my resume, and add an opening line that warns the recipient not to trust the resume unless the signature matches up. Naturally, the recruiters would just nuke any mention of the signature and carry on.
Most of these demonstrate the outrageous lack of homework the recruiters do on the position, the person they're spamming, or the required skillset.
Can't say for sure but I imagine the ratio of candidates to jobs is better most places than in SV. Right now skilled SV engineers have so many options without even thinking about answering cold calls from recruiters that the situation just devolves... recruiters get desperate, "creative", start spamming, candidates ignore them, bills keep coming in, cycle escalates and repeats.
"Just had a recruiter call (yes, on a Sunday) and ask if I had “C hashtag” experience." from my Twitter:

https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/506185678175367168
Show HN: SetTimeout as a Service for simulating delays
I think you have a point about the entitlement that tech workers have. This is a problem that many would kill to have. We should keep that in mind.

As years pass, though, it is easy to get snarky about the nonsense that passes for recruiting. I'm always polite to anyone contacting me, even thanking them for reaching out, but I can't suppress shaking my head at some of the things I've seen.
A Few Thoughts About the Elusive Art of Creating a Truly Happy Workplace
Lots of overlapping skills there.
> Well, from experience in the music industry, it seems that the person doing the hard work (the artist) most often is on the bad end of the deal, while all the middle-men are laughing their way to the bank.

No, the person assuming the most risk, the label pushing large sums of money in promotion in a high risk investment, gets the most money.
I think 10 hours is a lot, but I would consider it if the position was really intriguing.

Calibrating tests like this is pretty difficult though, anecdotally. We give out a work sample test that we think should take 2-3 hours maximum and try to frame it that way in the problem description. Nonetheless, we have gotten a few in the past where it was clear that way more time was spent, and I feel bad when they don't make the cut.

Tip - if you are giving out tests like this, ask for feedback from hires on how long they spent and then adjust accordingly. Anything you give out is probably way easier for you than the candidate.
IMO, the bigger complaint about CoffeeScript is ambiguous syntax - the syntax tree is very sensitive to even the smallest whitespace changes.
I always assumed it had more to do with the recruiter trying to make sure you don't cut them out of the loop and negotiate directly with the company for a position.
Take a look at 'Double Your Freelancing Rate': http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/get-started/

TL;DR: don't focus on the technology you are using, focus on the business problem you are solving.
Another reason to prefer CoffeeScript is because of its low cost of both defining and calling functions. The combination makes functional programming, including working with callbacks and promises, much less of a headache.

Even if you don't know CS very well, I dare you to take a look at the JavaScript this compiles to and call it more readable:

(req, res)->
getUserIds(req.query)
.then (ids)->
Promise.all ids.map (id)->
getUser(id).then (user)-> user.friends.count
.then (response)-> res.send 200, response
.catch (error)-> res.send 500, error
"You'll love these guys. They've got Macs and french presses all over the place" - My recruiting agency's understanding of 'cool startup culture'
The Googlebot drives REST APIs just fine, and would be impossible to write using an RPC model.

I've yet to see or use an API that was easier to deal with because it was REST.

Of course not, because people actually want to use RPC, and so shoehorn REST into RPC-like models, which destroy its usefulness.

If you're sitting at your computer and deciding that you're now going to write a client against Service A's API, the point of REST was missed, and Service A might as well have used RPC.

The point of REST is to decouple the client from the specific service, using the Uniform Interface and standard formats to allow clients to interact with any service that "speaks" the same formats.

But nobody's is thinking on those terms. Everyone is still thinking that it's perfectly normal and OK to waste years of developer time rewriting the wheel, over and over again, for each new service that pops up. This is fueled by the services themselves, of course, whose companies want to use their API to lock you in.

So no, while this is the normal mentality, you won't see any major gains from REST.
Cyber Monday Is Mobile Monday
Developer here. Hoping to hear some feedback!
Gamifying Charity Impact
> If you have a competitive advantage why contribute back in any meaningful way?

Cost. If your advantage was perpetual and didn't increase your future support costs, then sure, you wouldn't contribute it back (ignoring belief / culture).

It isn't though. Someone will do something similar and even if they don't, each new version requires you to not upgrade or spend the time integrating your wonder code into the mainline again.

Long term cost of staying current is going to be an issue. Each change to your fork makes bringing in new features from the original harder.

Plus, in my mind, it is a nice self selected pre-screening filter for companies / individuals that would be good to work with.
The new reality of venture capital
That's an interesting perspective. Could be. The financial motive is certainly there. Hadn't considered it, but it makes sense.
Are you kidding? Do you love getting calls from telemarketers too?
#OpKKK: Anonymous hacks KKK websites, Twitter over Ferguson threats
Yes, I had that in mind. The phone poll will be changed regularly as a protective measure. I have PITA when I'm dealing with craiglist, it works for me right now but I want to share that service(pro version) with other people.
Hmm I've worked with about 6 different recruiters so far, and all of them have been really helpful. It seems that only the bad apples make it on HN's front page, and a lot of people ride the hate-train.

I really don't understand why the majority dislikes recruiters.
I've had the pleasure of working with a recruiter who spent the time to get to know me personally and to make sure I get exactly what I'm looking for. He back-channeled and worked as a mediator giving me details and information. It was actually a very pleasant experience.

Everyone that hates on recruiters should be thankful that our industry is full of opportunities and embrace the fact that it's pretty damn nice to be able to have the jobs come to you. Who cares if you got a few emails or messages on LinkedIn. Change your LinkedIn privacy settings and email them explaining you're not interested instead of writing a shitty blog post trying to bash people. I bet if you were in a different industry, you'd be on HN bitching about how hard it is to find a job and how unfair employers were. So shut the fuck up and stop complaining. No one wants to hear your childish rants.
This option will be available in the pro version as well as buying international phone numbers.
> The spec for 403 states that "Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated" so I don't think that is appropriate either.

I think that in context "authorization" in 403 can only be understood to mean the same thing as is authorization is implied to mean by the use of "Unauthorized" with the specific definition in 401 -- that is, reauthentication via the HTTP authentication methods. Under that view, 403 (and, to avoid leaking information, 404) fits.

400 does not seem to fit: it is not a generic code that fits the whole class of things in the 4xx series. Its definition is specifically "The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications." But the problem that is being identified is not malformed syntax.
That's a good paper. The studies that involve someone writing a small program aren't too helpful, though. Typing is most useful when the type structure won't fit in the programmer's head all at once, or when there are multiple programmers and changes over time. Small scale experiments don't catch that, and are more sensitive to how well the compiler reports errors.

Looking at code on Github is promising. Several people have done that, trying to analyze changes. Of course, you only see the changes that get pushed to the server, so you're only seeing post-test results.

We seem to be converging on a consensus on typing. Within a module, automatic type inference makes life easier and programs less wordy. The newer hard-compiled languages, Go and Rust, have that. Even C++ has that now, with "auto". Program-wide type inference is hard and less helpful. Program-wide inference also means the caller's types drive the callee, which is a mismatch to the concept of libraries. So that hasn't caught on.

Expressing size remains an issue. Is size part of a type? C and C++ struggle with this and lose. Go and Rust make a distinction between arrays and slices, which seems to be working.

Type attributes are still up in the air. Read-only/immutable is common. By value or by ref is sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit. Whether something can be nil is not common, but has been tried. Rust has the "borrow" concept, which is promising but doesn't much mileage on it yet.

There's been real progress in recent years. Until recently, type systems in mainstream languages looked like either C or Pascal. Now they're getting better.
ES6 already has =>, I think that Spider should probably stay far away from trying to replicate existing language features with different syntax
Hire both. Assign the permanent employee to watch the temp contractor and learn how he or she does the work. Then assign the temp employee to watch the permanent employee to make sure he or she does the work correctly.

Of course, that only works if your permanent employee is not willing to jump ship to be the temp contractor with specialist skills and specific experience somewhere else.

There must be some valid reason why businesses would pay more for recruiting than for training and retention, but I am not familiar with it.
Plus 5 years of iOS development in Swift or an Android language.
How did you come to this conclusion? The images shown may just be a matter of perspective and the lander still could've had a vertical descent
Head hunters are the real estate agents of employment. If you think their motives have anything to do with altruism, you're definitely sucking what they're blowing.
tl;dr Because the author says so.
Exactly. Syntax style is usually a matter of personal opinion. "Alien syntax" wasn't very objective and I should probably remove it from the website.

However, ambiguous syntax is a huge problem of CoffeeScript. Read more here: http://ceronman.com/2012/09/17/coffeescript-less-typing-bad-...
How to be a badass web developer (free for hacker news expires Nov 30)
I will have a slightly different payment model. It will be refillable wallet that will cover the cost of your usage. ie: you put 10 dollars to you wallet and you will be able to buy: phone [international] number(s), make calls and send texts.
Exactly. The lack of Apple's release of its LLVM/clang code for its popular platform is a problem. And it might be a reasonable argument to make about copyleft in the abstract (c.f. Apple's very different behavior toward WebKit which was enforced by license).

But it's not an argument against clang, which remains a high quality free software compiler and one worth using. And citing the existence of said free software as evidence for the "end" of free compilers seems... weird.
It's relatively easy to build a compile-to-js language because of the pre-existing tooling.
Good idea. I've never done a chrome app before so I could learn things in the process.

Nevertheless you can clone the repo and open the HTML files in your browser. It's only static html and javascript.

Thanks!
It is a django based app.
The big one is the recent add of the 'invokedynamic' instruction, which has dramatically improved the performance of dynamically typed languages.[0] Mostly, though, it's just externalities from the slowly-and-steadily-improving Java language; for example, the improved support for anonymous functions in Java 8 also promises to make Scala faster.

[0]: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/vm/mu...
I mean, shouldn't your CV come off of the LaTeX presses in .pdf format anyway?

Though continuing your line of reasoning, you could output it as .dvi or something more exotic, such that the hiring manager will have no trouble running through his command line to look at, but non-technical peoples' attempts to view/modify it will be wholly stymied.
I'm sorry but the syntax is absolutely gash! This is like a horrible lovechild between Python and Coffeescript gone terribly terribly wrong. If that was the selling point then its a no go from me. I know this sounds harsh but I actually thought that this was a language to create web crawlers.

func TimeMachine(pilot) {
this.pilot = pilot;

this.go = func (noise) {
::console.log(noise);
};
}

func Tardis()
extends TimeMachine("The Doctor") {

this.go = () ->
super.go("vorp vorp");
}
When would this be useful? Really curious, thanks!
Please create a PyPy team on Gratipay.
The reason why recruiters don't want to share the company name is because they are afraid you will circumvent them, apply directly to the company and they won't get their commission.

It's a pretty unfounded fear IMO and they would be better off just sharing the company name. I have friends who are recruiters who get a much higher response rate when they share more details about the job. Hopefully it becomes the new norm.

Shameless plug: I'm building a job search tool for developers that screens out jobs from 3rd party recruiters and staffing agencies: http://www.codejobs.io/
I'm also starting to believe that the devils is very much in the details.

Personal testimonials:

Objective-C is an uncouth mishmash of strong, weak, dynamic, static, and duck typing, with different rules applying to different corners of the language. In theory this should be a train wreck. In practice I found it to be one of the most productive languages I've ever worked on - provided I was very principled in how I built my code. Whenever I let myself slip into hack mode, the result was indeed a train wreck.

F# has a mostly-fantastic type system that still manages to fall apart in a couple of key areas: First, its type inference mechanism doesn't have any clue what to do with calls to non-curried ("C#-style") methods, so any code that interacts with the .NET API ends up littered with type annotations or convenience functions whose only purpose is to wrap a .NET API call up in a curried function that the type inferencer can understand. Second, no type classes. This is particularly painful because .NET's original designers didn't have the foresight to create a base abstraction that numeric types can conform to.
It's simple , use shitty Javascript.
Some weeks I write negative lines of code. Those are good weeks.
Maybe just include the checksum of the .pdf, without loudly mentioning what it is? The right people will know what to do with that, and the wrong ones won't.
To extend your statements:

* breaking 1024-bit RSA is believed to be well within the resources of the NSA given public research/attacks.[0]

* MD5 is already completely broken in the public research and the NSA has used MD5 collisions in malware attacks that are independent of public methods[1].

* RC4 has been attacked for a number of years, and someone who has seen unreleased Snowden documents claimed that the NSA has the ability to break RC4 in realtime[2]. Plenty of HTTPS traffic is protected by RC4.

[0]:"One estimate is made by Shamir & Tromer (2003) in their hypothetical TWIRL device. They suggested that for "a few dozen million US dollars", a hardware device could be built to break a 1024-bit RSA key within around a year. Franke et al (2005) similarly estimate a cost of 200 million dollars2 for a machine to factorise a 1024-bit number in one year. If these cost estimates are accurate, it's safe to assume that the NSA has built such a machine (unless they have another way of breaking RSA more efficiently). And by Moore's Law alone, we'd assume that their machine takes considerably less than a year." http://www.javamex.com/tutorials/cryptography/rsa_key_length...

[1]: "He discovered that for this spy malware an as yet unknown cryptographic attack variant of his own MD5 attack is used." http://www.cwi.nl/news/2012/cwi-cryptanalist-discovers-new-c...

[2]: "RC4 is broken in real time by the #NSA - stop using it." https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/398059565947699200
> There's some side effects of the custom as well.

Is this truly a side effect of the idea itself, or is this peculiar to Asian culture?

I'm a man, but if we had to care for my in-laws, I wouldn't consider this a burden. If anything, the opposite is quite true... my in-laws have always helped my wife and I through rough spots when they could.

We could adopt the custom without all of the baggage you describe, if we were so inclined.
HTML5's “Dirty Little Secret”: It's Already Everywhere, Even in Mobile
This is a really great idea and series. Looking forward to more.
Is there something like this for MYSQL? pg-versus-my.com?
I get to screen the projects, and if it doesn't look like something I can do I don't have to take it. I know what you mean about bad customers and unrealistic expectations, I've been pretty good (or lucky) so far figuring that out before committing to projects. I only work hourly and 10X structures the contract and payment so I'm protected.
MIT: "heres <product>, do whatever you want with it"

GPL: "heres <product>, do whatever you want with it as long as you make all your changes public, oh and theres a ton of rules you need to conform to if you want to distribute <product> with <other_product>"

I don't see how a license with MORE restrictions can be seen as free-er.
So, what qualifies as an athlete?
Google lowers prices of Cloud Platform again
As the core of any cloud workload, compute should be affordable, fast and scalable. That's why in October, we lowered the price of Compute Engine by 10% for all instance types in every region. On November 4th at Google Cloud Platform Live, we announced additional price reductions for networking and storage products.

Networking

As more of our customers manage traffic to and from instances and the Internet, we've lowered egress prices as much as 47% across Asia-Pacific to match prices in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Due to their particular costs, egress to China and Australia will be priced separately from the rest of Asia-Pacific, with China rates increasing March 1st, 2015. Developers can lower egress costs further by peering with Google via Google Cloud Interconnect at preferential rates.

Persistent Disk

The price for SSD Persistent Disk has dropped by 48% to $0.17 per GB/Month, still with no separate fee for I/O operations. Storage for Persistent Disk snapshots is now the same price as standard Google Cloud Storage: $0.026 per GB/Month, a 79% reduction. Beginning March 1st, 2015, restores of Persistent Disk snapshots will be subject to the same egress fees as other Compute Engine network traffic.

Cloud SQL

We've dropped the price of our biggest Cloud SQL instances - D4, D8, D16, and D32 - by 25%. This applies to both Packaged and Per-Use billing plans.

BigQuery

The price of BigQuery storage has dropped by 23% to $0.02 per GB/Month, the same price as Google Cloud Storage's popular Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage class.

With some of the lowest prices in the industry, Compute Engine helps developers gain the performance and consistency of Google's worldwide network. Now it's more affordable than ever to deploy large clusters, handle giant data sets and work more efficiently in the cloud.
At the moment, I can't find anything they've added to a known card trick. Let alone how it was AI.
If you can work on a green-field project, you'll get a LOT more experience implementing new things that exercise your architect muscles, and you'll be around architects that you can ask why they are making decisions they are. Versus working on an existing project, where you tend to just fix bugs or figure out how to hack in a new feature without breaking what's there. (I don't know which of these camps you're already in, but in general I think it makes a big difference.) (Disclaimer: I am a jr dev, but see a world of difference between what I get to learn and others at my level because of my project.)
Setup really is just javascript on the page but I do have a gem to aid in getting configured.

http://github.com/mattpolito/komments_gem
I can understand that. For me this is just what I already assumed them to be doing and find it all rather unsurprising. I would rather have your mindset, I think.
How almonds are sucking California dry
... and that is the kind of shit that leads to the "negative selection" that Altman spoke about.

Asking for a 15% draw against all income is ridiculous.