skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
GitHub repo: https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen
"cultural fit" is a rather awful description of a hundred small factors, some legitimate and some not.

Sometimes it refers to statements like "commit early, commit often" or "move fast and break things"; that's fine. Sometimes it refers to office interaction, such as whether you tolerate interruptions and social interaction: an introvert in an office full of extroverts or an extrovert in an office full of introverts; that's fine too, though at some point you'll scale large enough that you can't necessarily keep being that selective.

On the other hand, sometimes it means "are you going to play foosball with us and drink with us", which is wrong. And sometimes it means "do you have exactly the same personality/likes/dislikes/ethnicity/gender/etc as us", which is wrong and illegal.

In general, "cultural fit" is a dangerously vague excuse without a concrete reason. Say what you really mean, and if you can't bring yourself to say it, perhaps you shouldn't be using it as a hiring criteria.
From my experience in the games industry, this technique is fairly common. Not so much in the sense of 'hiding' megs away from other programmers, but having team buffer space (by 'team' I mean engine-team, AI team,...).

For example as an engine programmer you'd want to pre-allocate space for various resources (models, textures, etc.); some stuff is dynamic, like the currently active game entities. So you'd have preallocated chunks of memory for N entities, where N is the maximum number of entities you could handle at that time (at every opportunity you'd want to avoid classic memory allocators because they're slow and a fragmented heap could kill your game on a limited memory device; so everything would be done with fixed block-size, fixed length, linked-lists). It was relatively easy to 'hide' buffer space for a rainy day because the list sizes would just be magic numbers that were decided as 'roughly what we'll need for later'.

They could be per level magic numbers, or system wide magic numbers. Nobody gives a shit about the magic numbers at the start of the project on development devices with more memory than the final device, and mostly nobody even knows what the game's going to be early on (this was something I saw a lot in the games industry: teams just feeling in the dark for what it is they're supposed to be doing for months on end).

Towards the end of a project when things are tight, and you have a better sense of how much of each type of thing you'll need, that's when you start giving up the buffer.

Reading TFA reminded me of how much I do not miss working in the games industry. It was fun while it lasted (I did it for 10 years, I left 10 years ago), but after a while this style of programming drags you down. It's too much stress, for mostly not enough reward.

The last game I worked on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9zMWu6PfSM
So, were you offered the job?

Which is why I try to avoid all types of personal questions as much as possible. I do not want to take if you like squash or knitting or beer into account when I evaluate you as a potential hire. So if i don't know, it can't subconsciously affect my opinion of you. I am interested in your job performance.
Missing from the list the Olivetti Programma 101 (1964) [1], of which the HP 9100 (mentioned in the post) was basically a ripoff. It was the first general-purpose programmable calculator designed to be operated by non-technical people, and it was even used in the Apollo 11 program.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101
What's done is done, but, some ideas may resurface later on (like closures did)
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
My guess is existing investors are going to try and peddle the product to less knowledgeable investors and cash out. Instead of risking existing investment on an entirely new product, cut your losses.
Software is a force multiplier.

If the initial force is headed towards uselessness software won't save it from it's fate, it will in fact just get it there faster.

By the same token if you manage to write some software that is magnifying a force of good the results can be staggering.

Software allows us to accomplish more net effect in our lifetimes than was ever possible before. However if we spend our time writing glorified forms over and over again we aren't going to live up to that.
The only ones over-promising and under-delivering are independent hardware reviewers who publish benchmark numbers Apple isn't guaranteeing.

Barring a recall, nobody cares which manufacturer their RAM comes from or the hard drive or optical drive or the battery cells or the WiFi chip (except for Linux users) or the LCD or even the NAND behind the SSD controller. The controller itself is the only component that Apple switches out with alternatives that aren't functionally indistinguishable, but I can't see any way to regulate that without also harfully restricting Apple's freedom to multi-source components in a ways that are strictly beneficial to consumers.
With modern hardware, I think it's not entirely obvious that specialized Lisp hardware would be a significant win. It's possible it would be, but not in the classic CISC-style approach of just baking important Lisp primitives into the instruction set. Without more, that would in practice just be implemented the way x86 is, translating the CISC-style instructions to RISC-style micro-ops, with no huge change to the basic CPU architecture. A more interesting question is whether significant architecture change would better suit some language paradigms.

There was an interesting series of posts on possibilities in that direction at Yosef K's blog:

http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html

http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html
Snooker balls are smaller than regular pool balls. There's also a difference between snooker equipment manufacturer in the U.S. and what's used in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. American snooker uses 2 1/8" balls on a 5' x 10' table. British snooker (also the standard for the rest of the world) uses 2 1/16" balls on a 6' x 12' table.

Snooker is a major sport in the United Kingdom where players earn millions in prize money and endoresements. Pool pros in the U.S. earn less than most of the people here on Hacker News. And, yes, hardly anybody cares to watch pool on TV.
That's a "Ted and Bill's excellent adventure" reference right?
It is known for quite some time that while there are diseases caused by transcription errors, the only reason the occurence of those diseases increases with age is that the immune system becomes worse over time.

There are strong indications that aging, and dying, is an entirely programmed-in part of our genetic structure. We age and die, not because of DNA copy errors, but because DNA sabotages itself and the cell it's in over time. There are, of course, ageless cells. The most obvious example being procreation-related cells, but there's many different kinds (for instance, muscle cells have very different aging clocks).

Multiple "death clocks" have been identified, telomeres being the most famous, that measure number of cell divisions, others measure the amount of energy expended by the cell, genetic quality, and presumably a few other things. Exceed the limits on any one of them, and the cell commits suicide. But if you're close to the limit, the cells will "senescence", which means they'll be less active and less worried about making mistakes. But this is an active, controlled process, not an accidental result of gene degradation. All of your cells contain logic somewhat like this :

do_something() {
if (rand() > age/150) {
don't do it
}
if (rand() > age/300) {
kill the cell off
}
actually do it
}

The huge question now is : why is that logic there ? Presumably, there's a good reason (there always is for things in DNA). What, exactly, goes wrong when cells (and therefore people) are allowed to age without consequences ? Likely, we'll find the answer when we learn how to reset the clocks on a large scale in someone's body.

Also there are plenty of animals and plants, smaller ones, that don't age. Which has the surprising consequences that death (caused by old age at least) has an origin. There must be a point in history where evolution decided we'd grow old and die.

There's a very interesting book about this subject :

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Origins-Death-William-Clark/dp/019...
The idea is really good. They add additional services that can be really valuable in order to make you lighter during the product's take off.

If still doesn't fit what you are looking for, StartupHub has a similar concept without taking revenue or acting as a middleman. Just focusing on the crowdsourcing and collab side (like the iWeekends).

http://www.startuphub.io

It should be up and running soon
Do you think your opinion on the question as being "aggressive" or
"adversarial" is a matter of personal experience?

I see the question as both direct and deep. It's a good way to pry open
the problem/market space, think about what has been done or is being
done by competitors, and consider/query the "new" approach to the "old"
problem. If you know your market, it's an easy question to answer. In
fact, it's a fun question to answer -- it's not every day that you the
luxury of a smart and trained person assisting you with the endless task
of prying open and evaluating your problem/market space.

If you consider the question to be aggressive, adversarial, and intended
to be harmful, then answering it becomes more difficult, particularly if
you're unprepared. On the other hand, if you consider the question to be
simply direct, deep, and intended to be helpful, then answering it is
much easier.
Only familiar with one of them, but "teachers are taught science as a religion" seems spot-on.
How about a first hand example from the secretary at the last university where I worked? The university used to give travelling professors and students a per-diem for food. I think it was around $50 US per day, so pretty reasonable. You had to justify if you spent more than that.

However, while I was there the administration decided that they wanted to cut down on some imagined "abuse" that people were not spending the $50 on food, but maybe kept some of it, or used it to buy a beer heaven forbid. So they required receipts for everything, no more per-diem. Even better, they decided that they know how and when you should eat and set limits on breakfast lunch and dinner individually.

This created so much paperwork that they had to hire more full time staff to go through all the receipts. Clearly this cost the university way way more than it potentially saved and also created huge problems for people with special dietary requirements.

All of this was exclusively caused by the administrative staff, not tenured professors who universally hated it. The older secretaries who were around when things were better also hated it and thought it stupid.
The loser's max liability will be what he paid his own lawyers, not what the other party paid theirs. Thus, you cannot spend your opponent into oblivion.

A better formula for what loser pays would be:

min(what you paid your lawyers, what the other side paid their lawyers)
Hah! Now there's a blast from the past. A friend of mine from school got one as a gift and we spent the better part of one summer messing around with it (while listening to Kraftwerks 'Computer World').
The comparison of the sailship, submarine and the airplane doesn't really hold, though.

A sailship travels for weeks or months, has not a single piece of automation and has to be maintained during the journey.

Similarily the submarine is meant to travel for long periods of time during which it has to be operated and maintained.

Both of those are designed to be self-sufficient, so they have to provide facilities for the crew, and the crew grows due to maintenance required, medical and battle stations.

The airplane travels for 16 hours tops and is supported by a sizable crew of engineers, ground control, and for passenger planes, cooks and cleaning personell, on the ground.
The key to successfully introducing insects into the western diet is processing. Processing to remove the chitin exoskeleton (which can be saved and used for making non-edible objects), and processing to remove the product from the direct image of an insect. If you scatter some fried cockroaches over a salad you'll get a some brave souls who will say "eh, crunchy, but not bad"; if you process cockroaches to a 'meat patty' or sausage or 'protein bar' then the large majority would give it an honest try enough to become regular customers.
Not to mention "completely harmful".
I think that the question that this article is trying to answer is not whether it is ethical to produce foie gras, but whether it is less ethical than producing other farm animals. Only the 4th point you made is specific to the production of foie gras, and I believe that the article argued fairly well that force feeding is not painful for the ducks.

Whether eating farm-raised meat is ethical or not is another topic all together, which this article doesn't touch on.
> FROM The Baffler No. 5 1993

http://qz.com/202194/steve-albini-the-problem-with-music-has...

> ‘The Problem With Music’ has been solved by the internet (2014)
Mary Meeker's Internet Trends (2001)
Blocking DNSCrypt entirely and forcing a fallback to the approved (censored) DNS servers is still not any harder to accomplish than censoring unencrypted DNS with or without DNSSEC. DNSCrypt as it currently exists is not any more censorship-resistant except where it is completely unknown to the censoring party. The only real security (against censorship) that it offers is security through obscurity, so saying that DNSSEC's problem is a lack of encryption is complete bullshit.
Project Estimation Techniques During Initiation Phase
Is there a way to filter by language?
I, seriously, don't understand how this works, unless your candidates appearance and accent are your main tools for judging a candidate. I would prefer to think that's not the case. If you were teaching a new member of the team to make such a decision, what would you point to?

What's more important, is I don't understand how anyone could possibly improve their 30 second impression.

I guess it could be that you believe this to be the case, and are remembering wrong. Why don't you note this down after 30 seconds, and then check it only after you make a decision to see if you were correct?
(Nearly) full text of what Steve said here:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...
that is coming. We're releasing version 2 of the platform shortly
This probably depends more on experience, and which OS/platform you're using; although I don't do it a lot, I've configured Apache servers several dozen times, whereas I've only done nginx a couple of times, so it is 'easier' for me.

Also, on ubuntu (and centos, but haven't used it in a while), it is something like 'apt-get install apache-mod-php' and everything is there :)
Consumers can decide (with non-vendor advice) what's beneficial for their goals (which are unknown to the vendor), but only if there is transparency on the ingredients inside the device. Vendors can change components as much as they want, as long as they disclose the components.
Perhaps I wasn't clear... or responded to the wrong post.

I agree, signing a document is really stupid and unnecessary.

What I mean, if you give someone a reason, it can lead to it looking bad on paper. Unintentionally. If you don't give them a reason, you protect yourself.
I'm presuming you are talking about Google? Why can't they then just hire in their offshore offices then?
Yup. I've been running nginx + php-fpm for pretty much as long as it's been possible, and it's pretty great with far less hassle than most other configs.
Blocking receptor in brain’s immune cells counters Alzheimer’s in mice
This Norwegian Prime Minister dude doesn't know what he's talking about. That was a mass murder incident, not terrorism. White people can't be terrorists.
Limit Hold Em pales in comparison to No Limit at every cardroom I've been in the past 10 years. Yes, limit still gets spread, but the limit choices are very poor in most casinos.
Satellite, 4G and microwave connections are poor substitutes for a wired connection. The sheer amount of latency and packet loss makes them not even an option for my connection. I would hardly call them competitive. For a wired connection, I have precisely one option: Comcast.

Even if latency and packet loss weren't an issue for my use, there are additional restrictions that come in to play. For instance, my HOA doesn't allow any satellite dishes or microwave antennae to be mounted in the neighborhood. While petitioning my HOA for change would be much easier than trying to petition for national legislation, why should those companies be allowed to divvy service areas like gangs agreeing to stay out of each others' "turf"?

A duopoly is no better than a monopoly for all intents and purposes. It creates the illusion of choice. ISP A sucks at this, this and this, whereas ISP B sucks at that, that and that. There's a voting analogy to be made there, but let's try to stick to the topic at hand....
> I still find it crazy that the world went from gmail/googlemaps to appstores. It's beyond me why most apps arent anything more than cached javascript and uitoolkits.

* because javascript is still not as efficient as native code

* because code efficiency translates directly into battery life

* because downloading code costs bandwidth and battery life

* because html rendering engines were too slow and kludgy at the time

* because people and/or device vendors value a common look and feel on their system

* because not everyone wants to use google services/services on US soil
The Weaknesses of Smalltalk Are the Strengths of Erlang (2011)
This is why a general assessment should be separate from hiring.
I'm not sure why I was downvoted into oblivion; but that's actually great news.

I was under the impression from reading the boostrap document that this meant I would have to port 1.4 and 1.5. I think I completely misunderstood the new ports section as to how it related to the plan overall.

If I can get away with only porting a newer version, that's considerably easier.

Thanks for assuaging my fears.
Show HN: Meshbox, router firmware for zero-conf, encrypted mesh networking
Kalt – Non Contact Thermometer for Mobile Devices
At the time, I felt that a bear hug was the best way to avoid an actual fight, and it worked. If you want to co-write a post on de-escalation techniques, I'd genuinely love to! What would you have done in that situation to defuse it?
TempleOS: The Grand Vision
You can do the rewrite with a single nginx command:

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
The easy solution for that is a stipend and receipts when you go over the cost for a few defined scenarios (for example, $60 to get to the airport, $20 a meal). If you are a cheap bastard, you make a few bucks. If it took three train trips and a taxi to get to the airport, keep the receipts.
California poker isn't typical of most other regional casinos. Look at the Bravo poker app and browse through what games are spread across the country. I have fond memories of limit poker thanks to the old 6max games online, but limit just isn't remotely popular anymore.
the questions you asked or the way you asked them were answered in a way that made it appear to you that that person couldn't program. not saying that was the case, but just want to add that line of thinking too.
I can hear the result of this, but it's barely audible, and only near the top of the range, at bar widths thinner than the OP.

I'll have to find some other monitors to test this on. It would be awesome if there were some commplace model that's relatively loud for a wide pitch range. Said model might then be useful for musical hacks in the same vein as driving the stepper motors in old floppy drives.
Point being: It's not going to be constructive. Telling someone who thinks they know how to program they can't isn't going to help them and will only seem mean. Because those types can't see they have no idea what they are doing.
While linked lists are fundamental, depending on the language(s) people have used and how people were taught they may actually not be something people have used. Anyone using mostly high-level interpreted languages (e.g. Python) or something like PHP may not have ever used them, and if they're somewhat self-taught then they may not have encountered them in their reading.

Hash tables might be a better filter, because IMHO you're a lot more likely to find those in real use these days than linked lists.
What? Both his attacks are recognized as terrorist attacks in Norway.
Maybe I'm just dumb but it's not at all obvious which company you're talking about
I know Jared very well and my personal opinion is that this is really off the mark. I think he is keenly interested in how people are communicating in problem areas and particularly in how to combat violent extremism.
This is very awesome
Pinpoint: open-source APM for JVM
Disagree with that change, also the change from "world's largest dialogue" to "a dialogue" (though it looks like that bit of editorialization came from the original submitter).

IMO the original title of the article is the most accurate and is not linkbait. There absolutely is something about Reddit that has sparked an unprecedented direct line between "notable people" (for lack of a better term, but it applies to more than scientists) and the wider audience of their work, and that's what the article is about.

The current title is neutered to uselessness - how did Reddit "host a dialogue?" Well, simply by existing as a public web forum. And apparently to some that's all it is, no different from any other, but that pretty obtusely misses the cultural phenomenon that is undoubtedly happening there. It's been a few years since I visited Reddit regularly, so I'm not a fanboy, but I can still recognize that, whether intentionally or inadvertently, their platform has enabled something that didn't quite exist before (in a sociological sense, if not a technical one).
It seems like straight pool provided a more accurate means of distinguishing skill levels between players. Dallas West (straight pool pro from 70's) once said that he knew he had arrived as a pro when, as a teenager, he finally ran 100-balls in a row. He then said that he had made a 100-ball run every day of his life since then. There's a similar jump in standing at 50-balls. A complete beginner might have to practice hard for a year to clear a single rack.

9-ball players like to boast about their long runs, too, but there's an element of luck (the break shot) that throws a kink into direct comparisons between players' high runs. Earl Strickland once ran 11-racks in a row to win a $1 million prize, but a player with a "six-pack" (6-racks in a row) isn't necessarily half as skilled.
Bexfield’s insurance company, Presbyterian Health Plan, declined to cover the hefty cost of $198,000 for the stem cell transplant. He was forced to cash in his savings and turn to family in order to help pay for the treatment.

Only months after his denial, Presbyterian added coverage for stem cell transplants to their plans. Bexfield thought that meant his procedure would be paid for after all. But there was a hitch. Bexfield was told the insurance company would only cover stem cell transplants from donors — a much riskier procedure — not those done using the patient’s own cells.

Bexfield waged an epic battle against the insurance company that lasted several years and consisted of countless emails, YouTube videos, and even help from David Segal, aka “The Haggler” from the New York Times. In the end, Presbyterian reimbursed his $198,000 original payment for the procedure and paid $204,000 in interest.

Wow, the good guy wins. Was not expecting that ending!
Do you have any documentation?
January 0