skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had routinely given Uber drivers ratings between 3-5 stars (good, better, best), because service was always good enough that I didn't feel a need to dip lower. Then a driver mentioned that if a passenger gave him less than 5 stars, he would have been better off not taking the fare at all. That was pretty eye opening: that a $30+ fare wasn't worth being rated a 4, because of the future lost business that results from having a 4.8 average instead of a 4.9.

This was a few years ago, before Uber X launched. So even then, Uber had limited their scale (which provides 50 ratings points) such that only the top 5 ratings were acceptable. I think it has only tightened since then, I rarely see a driver below 4.8 at all.

Now I always give drivers a 5 unless something truly unacceptable happens, in which case I file a complaint with Uber. The ratings feedback loop has been completely broken for me.

It's ridiculous, and I don't see how they get the results they want when people have no idea what each rating number is supposed to mean. Some people start at 5 and remove points for issues. Some people start at 3 and only go up if you've gone beyond the call of duty. The only thing that makes sense is an up / down vote, when the scale can't be agreed upon by all participants.

I suppose that the driver -> passenger ratings might actually work as intended, since the drivers are presumably well aware of the reality of the ratings scale.

I don't think this is unique to Uber or car services by any stretch either. I have noticed that any service with too many ratings choices seems to suffer from poor ratings quality. Yelp is my go to example here. There should be no shame in a restaurant rated 3 stars, but in actuality it's seen as the kiss of death to a lot of places. Here again, some people are rating as if 3 stars is the baseline, some people as if anything more than 1 is earned at great cost. When you're pulling your responses from everyone in the world, I don't think you can really get consensus on a scale that goes beyond up / down.
Say goodbye to educational loans, healthcare loans, car loans

You make a good point and I do not want to undermine it. However, it is worth pointing out that people don't have to take out educational and healthcare loans in most of the civilised world (Croatia included).
This is really interesting. That said, it looks pretty straightforward to build; looks like there are no novel materials or equipment needed to make this happen, from my reading of it. Given that, why don't we have a full-scale prototype of this, at the very least? Is it just the money, or is there something non-trivial about this? I feel like I'm missing some reason why this is non-viable in practice.
Though quite a lot of Romanians still have mortgages to pay. And to add to the injury, some are in Swiss francs.
The origin of the map is
http://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/2sm2vj/world_popula...
Taste is an incredibly difficult thing to measure and understand; my startup[1] builds machine learning based tools for flavor profiling and quality control in the craft beverage industry - I'm speaking from experience!

Before you can even approach understanding what a specific product tastes like, and what individuals and populations like or dislike about the product, you need to:

1. Develop a consistent system for collecting flavor profiles - while eliminating exogenous factors such as unattributed variables, halo and masking effect, environmental effects, and cognitive effects.

2. Collect thousands of reviews. Either from an IID sample of the population (sure...), or include the collection of demographic and personal identifiers within the data.

3. Understand the effects of age, race, sex, socio-economic status, and past tasting experiences.

4. Build basic flavor models, test that your system isn't leaving out important information that causes unseen variance within the product reviews, and continue collecting data.

After all of that, the real fun begins! At this point, we can determine most of the chemistry of a product, its risk of flaws taints and contaminations, its production process, and its optimal target demographic just from a few full-sensory reviews.

But we don't rely on standard sensory science to do it - that's stuck trying to figure out how Craft Foods can add less of a cheaper sugar substitute before people notice.

[1] www.gastrograph.com
Mixmax | Founding Engineer or intern | San Francisco | https://mixmax.com

We're a small team looking for a founding engineer.

At Mixmax, our mission is to do the impossible with email: to make it as rich, interactive, and developer-friendly as the web. We’re looking for a senior, full stack engineer to bring email into the future. See for http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/13/mixmax-takes-sending-e... for the first version of our product. See http://blog.modulus.io/mix-max for a company overview.

You’ll be working closely with our expert team to build Mixmax, from its core infrastructure to its custom front end. This includes architecting systems to integrate with external services, building a full-featured web editor, and choreographing email systems and protocols. We’ll leave it largely up to you to evolve the stack as you see fit. We eagerly participate in open source development and will encourage you to do the same.

Current tech stack: Node.js, Meteor, Redis, Express, Mongo, Kue, Handlebars

Email: hello@mixmax.com and let’s grab coffee!
Boston, MA - Xamarin - Full time onsite

Founded in May 2011, Xamarin is a fast-growing mobile startup with offices in San Francisco, Boston, London, Århus and Buenos Aires. We have almost 1 million developers and over 14,000 customers using Xamarin because we provide the best platform to create and test fully native mobile apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows.

Miguel and his talented engineering team in Boston are looking for:
Xamarin Studio Lead Software QA Engineer
http://xamarin.com/jobs/oddnZfww

Complete list of all Xamarin Opportunities (multiple locations):
http://xamarin.com/jobs

Interested to learn more, chat about what it's like to work at Xamarin? Email me: paula@xamarin.com
What you mean is it's not solved from your perspective of the word solved. Again, that's the central point, that theoretical research is asking different questions (and answering them).
Squeak is not representative of the original Smalltalk.
GitHub rankings and its impact on the local free software development community
Thanks for raising that. I've clarified in the post:

There are marketplaces to buy and sell consumer data orginally started around credit agencies and direct mail companies, then growing with the browser toolbar industry when Internet Explorer was big - now they're filled with more information than ever before.

http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-w...

When I worked for a direct marketing arm of the agenccy JWT, we had a bunch of "list augementation" services for our clients' customer lists. Back then, they were used to derive and clean contact information, and glean insights into people's psychology via course methods like correlations to their postal code. (This was surprisingly accurate in Canada, but didn't work as well with US ZIP codes.)

That said, I'd love to hear from a modern insider too. I've just extrapolated.
Geesh. I'm no Greek and not fond of Syriza, but god damn, the brainwashing is strong here.

a) fraud the state's accountings: True, but the difference was minimal (2.7% or so to 3.07%, and by fraud you mean they accounted for the expenses on arrival and not when ordering, not cook your books). Also, this was well known by all the other countries and none of them made a peep at the time

b) get as many as you can before the crisis from banks that (correctly) assumed they would get their money anyway.

c) get as much as you can from european countries after the crisis to pay the mostly German and French banks what they have loaned before, moving private debt to the hand of the tax payer (of the 250b, only about 27 billion were for greek gov. usage and all the rest was for debt payment/interest/etc [1])

d) they never said they won't pay, they just want to change terms and not just keep getting more and more indebted to foreign institutions that through their mandate are actually 'ruling' the countries.

Again, no fan of Syriza, but enough is enough. Folks in Greece (and Portugal and Spain) are in a very bad shape, poverty is up and the only thing the troika cares is about the deficit reduction and nothing else.
Box - San Francisco and Palo Alto, CA - Full time - Frontend & full stack engineers

Crocodoc (YC W10) founder here. When our company was acquired by Box in 2013, we launched a new set of developer APIs on the Box platform for anyone (even those who don't use Box itself) to use for converting documents to HTML. We're now powering apps from LinkedIn to CoTap to the newest version of WebEx.

We've also open-sourced one of our biggest projects (https://github.com/box/viewer.js) and are expanding into developer experience as well.

We're looking for frontend and full stack engineers to join our close-knit team and help us push the limit of what browsers and mobile devices can do. (Fast, pixel-perfect rendering of documents using just HTML, SVG, and CSS turns out to be really hard!)

We're also building out a developer experience team and are looking for someone who is passionate about UX, APIs, and making developer tools easy and fun to use.

Drop me a note if you're interested at damico@box.com or ryan@crocodoc.com
Wow, pre-congratulations! Let's hope this inspires some renewal in the Perl community.

It never made any sense to me that some people would rather see Perl stagnate and die and complain from the peanut gallery than they would help it move forward.
Closing the Math Gap for Boys
Ugh, I hoped we had all moved past perl.
Yo everyone listen up!

I found Grovo through Hacker News and I couldn't be happier. It's the hands-down best place I've ever worked and I highly encourage everyone to take a look.

Coming from Wikimedia, I had a really high bar for quality and Grovo vaulted over it. :-)
I see, well as a test you could download the Ubuntu fonts and switch to them for comparison.

PS I agree too, they look better in Chrome, don't know why.
Uh, that applied to Snowden as well.
Sorry - I just picked a theme and never thought to browser check. Weirdly, I run FF on Linux and it looks okay. Anyway, I'll try to tweak the font. Thanks for pointing it out.
Sr. Network Engineer - Mobile Gaming - San Francisco - FULL-TIME, H1B welcome

http://www.munkyfun.com/job-opening/

Senior Server Engineer

A Sr. Server Engineer will develop server systems to facilitate client engineers and live ops.

Job Description:

- Work with client engineers and product managers to define server features

- Implement server systems such as Accounts, Leaderboards, Content Delivery and Chat

- Reliably create good quality, performance-minded code

- Maintain a professional attitude and strive to maximize team and departmental performance

Requirements:

- 5+ years relevant experience in the creation and delivery of state-of-the-art, performance-minded server systems for mobile or web games

- At least one shipped game as a server engineer

- Fluent in at least one scripting language: PHP, Python, Ruby, etc

- Experience with database design and SQL programming, profiling and optimization

- Passion for creating games

- Proficiency in Linux administration and Bash scripting

- Ability to work independently and to be self-directing

- Excellent teamwork and communication skills
(Disclaimer: I am a Fluentd maintainer)

Here are some comparisons out in the wild (Note: neither of them is a Logstash or Fluentd maintainer afaik)

- http://jasonwilder.com/blog/2013/11/19/fluentd-vs-logstash/

- https://blog.deimos.fr/2014/05/13/logstash-vs-fluentd/

Also, if you have any question or doubt about Fluentd, please feel free to email me at kiyoto@treasure-data.com
How do poor people in Europe get cars? Or are you saying they don't need them?
Makes me wonder about which great fruit or vegetables I've missed out on my whole life simply because they were unknown and badly marketed.

A recent one would maybe be Kale, which has become dramatically popular in the last 10 years.
Most of this is fairly incorrect. The risks involved lending money to poor people are largely unchanged by this and the bottom lines of all of the businesses involved are essentially unchanged. All of these outstanding amounts are delinquent as the people being relieved of these debts have to have been in financial trouble for at least 12 months by the conditions set out in the program.

This means that all of these debts were long-since written off, the risks of these losses already worked into the lending rates and credit qualification cutoffs. It is actually, by most accounting standards, kinda "free".
If it just causes banks to not extend consumer debt to poor people then at the risk of sounding like Daddy Knows Best it might not be such a bad thing. Keep in mind these are small debts. Not like a home loan (ignoring the edge case of the person who paid off 95% of their home loan but can't pay off the last couple of thousand dollars). If it's just credit card debt left over from a plasma TV purchase then once-bitten-twice-shy banks not extending these kind of loans to the poor any more could force the poor to save money required before making a purchase in future.

Having said that, I'm thinking out loud here and not convinced of it myself. Mainly because whenever the government steps in like this it means that someone somewhere is getting screwed.

Agree that the free (black) market will move to fill the gap.
> This USB key RNG also demonstrates what I feel should be considered best-practices for TRNGs. It is low cost, reasonably fast, and has no firmware that can be used to PWN your computer. The USB key can easily be taken apart (with care!) using a toothless dinner knife, so the board can be compared to those on the github site.

It's interesting to compare to another well known USB RNG, the Simtec's Entropy Key[1], which apparently is no longer available. The Entropy Key takes the opposite approach both on firmware and on easy of taking it apart.

Here's an overview of how Entropy Key worked (more detail on the "technical" tab on their site). They have two separate reverse biased PN junctions generating random streams. These streams are each tested using Maurer's universal statistical test for random bit generators, and their entropy is conservatively estimated. If the test fails or the entropy is too low, it is a fatal error and the device stops sending random data to the host, and reports an error.

The two streams are also xor'ed together, and that combined stream is tested with Maurer's test and its entropy is estimated. If this fails, it is fatal. (Combining the streams this way detects if the two generators have become correlated).

The two streams go through von Neumann debiasing, and are tested again with Maurer's test, and the entropy is estimated. If the test fails, or the entropy is varying too widely, fatal error.

The streams then go into a 256-bit cryptographic hash. When enough bits have gone in so that the input entropy is at least 150% of the number of output bits of the hash, the output is taken.

The hash output is mixed into a bit pool. When the pool has taken in at least 50% more entropy than it could possibly hold, a new pool is started. Enough pools are maintained to have 20000 bits of total pool data. The pool blocks are then tested following FIPS 140-2. The 20000 bits are then available for delivery to the host.

The protocol for host communication encrypts the data blocks that contain the random bits, using a session key based on a shared secret between the device and the host.

The device is filled with epoxy, and opening the case should destroy it.

So, are they any security experts who can comment on which is closer to best practice? A minimal device that just delivers fairly raw bits, with all the statistical testing and other processing necessary for good random numbers up to the host, and with no protection against hardware tampering (other than hoping that tampering would mess up the stream in a way the host will notice)? Or a device that does the testing and processing, and delivers ready to use random bits to the host, and that tries to prevent tampering?

I would think that even with the simple approach, you should put two theoretically identical generators on the device. That way, if someone does try to influence the device by external means, you have a better chance of detecting it because if it influences both devices the same way you'll get correlations.

[1] http://www.entropykey.co.uk
KickBack Rewards Systems, Twin Falls, Idaho or Remote

KickBack Rewards Systems
http://www.kickbacksystems.com
http://careers.kickbacksystems.com

KickBack Rewards Systems is a privately held company founded in 1999 that specializes in customer specific marketing and payments for over 1000 US clients. Our clients include a half-dozen Fortune 50 companies, one of them is an anchor partner in our national coalition loyalty program. As the CTO and Director of Software Development I need some help! You will be joining a medium sized team of 13 developers who all commit to their projects as a labor of love and their lives work. If you are interested in any of these positions my contact information is located under my profile.

-

Front-end Developer

I am looking for an expert in AngularJS whom can pair with my incredible world-class back-end development team. Heck, if you aren't an angular pro, anyone with amazing front-end skills will do, you can pick-up our framework or suggest a better one as you work in to the role. UX skills a plus. Like any start-up, we're big on usability.

-

Agile Project Manager

I need a strong PM/Business Analyst to assist us in managing all of this. We're a loose agile shop and have a few projects kicking off that I need you to scope out. You'll be a jack of all trades, product manger, scrummaster, project manager, etc.

-

To apply: Email me, my contact information is located under my profile, or, visit http://careers.kickbacksystems.com
Why do you have to fake it?q
This isn't a case of a memory management issue. It's a case of someone using an O(n) algorithm instead of O(1). There's not a memory layout that would change this. Even if you used an array, if you iterated over it, it'd still be rather expensive.

This is also what abstractions are for. Instead of killing your perf by using an unsuitable data structure, implement the same interface, but with a fast implementation. Using linked list for this scenario seems suboptimal.
First, while I generally advocate for bug bounty programs, don't be fooled by the apparent cost.

Well known companies (especially those that pay out a bounty) typically receive tens of thousands of formal security reports a year, all from people hoping for a bounty and a place on the "Hall of Fame" list. It's very lucrative and competitive for aspiring security researchers in developing countries to learn information security this way.

Unfortunately, the most well known companies also average between 5% and 10% report validity (at the highest), which means that they sink hundreds of engineering hours into investigating spurious reports. In fact, there are security engineers at Yahoo, Google and Facebook who, despite it not being the entirety of their job description, almost exclusively fill their time by investigating reports.

To quantify this, if you estimate that about 200 engineering hours are spent on investigating reports each month by the security team (very conservative estimate), about 7% of reports are valid, and the cost of a security engineer's time is about $100,000, you quickly see that a bug bounty for the largest companies burns through millions of dollars a year more than the actual bounties paid out. These numbers might actually increase if you take into account the fully loaded cost of each security engineer, or their average salaries are higher.

I think it would be great if more companies embraced bug bounties, but to be very honest, the state of most programs' fiscal management is frankly a mess right now.

Second, consider that Apple does have a responsible disclosure program (complete with "Hall of Fame" honorable mention), and that many other "major" tech companies have excellent security without paying out bounties for responsible disclosure. Microsoft had a responsible disclosure program for a long time, and only recently introduced bounties (and the bounties are still for a very limited scope compared to the size of Microsoft's properties). Amazon also doesn't pay out bounties for responsible disclosure.

There is really no reason to not have a responsible disclosure program, but there are coherent arguments against having a bug bounty program.
Ecobnb - REMOTE - Trento, Italy - Frontend Engineer

We’re a small growing 5-persons startup based in Trento, Northern-Italy. Our online travel agency’s specialized in offering a selection of eco-hotels all around Italy and is currently expanding to Europe. Ecobnb makes it easy for responsible traveller to search for a place to stay for a short or long period, vacation or work and for eco-accommodation business owners to market themselves in the growing green sector.

Coming up on our roadmap is a big refresh of the current UI. When we say you’ll have significant impact on the product right off the bat, we mean it.

On the front-end we are using bootstrap, less and jquery. On the back-end we have a monolithic symfony application moving toward service-oriented, with the web UI more and more talking directly with APIs we are open to new tech and libs on the front-end.

Our current engineering team is composed by two full-stack-but-mostly-back-end devs, you’ll be an integral part of the team to strengthen the front-end side and complete the skillset.

We are a remote friendly team, using the best collaboration tools and communicating asynchronously with occasional video calls.

more info / contact: http://blog.italygreentravel.com/jobs/
Gametime - SF - Full time - Mobile / Backend Engineers

iOS Engineer + Others https://jobs.lever.co/gametime

Gametime makes getting into the game as amazing as being there. The app transforms your phone into your ticket to the best games. Since we are team ­focused, we examine thousands of potential tickets on your behalf and then present you with only the best values ­ not an impossibly long list of options. We present each option with an epic panorama view from your seat so you can select the right perspective

Check out what people are saying about Gametime!
http://www.businessinsider.com/7-new-startups-san-francisco-...
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/09/gametime/
http://www.today.com/video/today/55837468#55837468
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/gametime-sports-app-tickets/
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/23/gametime-4m-accel/

Gametime is looking for a senior engineer to help lead the development of our iOS app. As a senior engineer you'll be responsible for the maintenance and development of our fantastic iOS app: gametime.co/app (redirects if you're on iOS).

We don't write typical iOS code. The core of Gametime iOS relies on ReactiveCocoa and functional programming paradigms. We'll be switching to Swift as soon as it hits 1.0. We ship a build every Wednesday and move FAST. We peer review everything we write, and hold each other to impeccable standards without letting ourselves get bogged down in perfectionism. At Gametime you'll write great code, ship a beautiful product, and play a leading role at one of the fastest growing start ups in the Bay Area.

https://jobs.lever.co/gametime
brad (at) gametime.co