skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We had a number of network outages at Apple due to squirrels inserting themselves in the NOC's power lines.

Note to self: Don't design any circuits that incorporate these animals. Squirrels make terrible fuses.
The linux kernal an GNU tools were built by emacs and vim users. That software is running the world from android phones to servers.

Python, Ruby, and Javascript were built by emacs users. All the modern goodies the new hip people rave about.

Web browsers were created by emacs users. The entire industry we make a living in came from the belly of emacs.

But 2 guys at some company refused to follow coding standards, so yeah...
Why wouldn't you just do it? I can understand if they're nit-picking syntax but I personally ask people to write out algorithms/code on the board all the time in interviews. I don't care about the code, I want to see them think through a problem. They can use any for syntax they want, even mix and match things like brackets and indentation or how control structures are defined (for i = 1 to 10 { .. } ), or use a function outside of the current abstraction level without writing it as long as they say what they're doing.

If you can't write out an algorithm or some classes that work together without a compiler/interpreter, then you're just guess and checking as you work and not thinking through what you do ahead of time. I can't program without google, but I can write out my implementation just fine -- that's what people are interested in.

I don't really get how I'm being an idiot wanting to explore how someone solves a problem in the medium they work (code) -- I'm not a human compiler so I obviously don't care if their program compiles or is even in a real language, as long as it gets across what they are trying to do and how they would do it.

Also -- you'll need to deal with stupid people forever, the way your comment is worded it sounds like you think you're smarter and better than everyone else and are "above this silliness". When interviewing I'm jaded about people who can't interact with people who they view as "below them" -- you'd hopefully not even make it in the door for an interview if you can't politely answer a question you think is dumb. Like 90% of interactions for software developers outside of their dept are answering dumb questions...

I may need to add dumb questions to my interviews to catch this...

Edit: Also -- can you explain the code you've written/your implementation? How do you include me in your problem solving? What type of questions do you or don't you ask while doing it? Where do you start/how do you start? If the HR person is there, can you explain what you're doing to them? How do you take suggestions? How do you break down your objects (this gives soooo much information about background, I can tell a lot about a developer based on how they name their classes, like people who have worked with only activerecord style classes). I can follow up with a refactoring change (substitute this for that in this situation, decide based on a configuration file - does this require a significant redesign?)

I mean come on... it gives so much information about how someone works, I think its dumber not to ask some type of question with writing "code" - it just gives so much information about a candidate that would be hard to get one question at a time. This one question can infinitely expand and lets them interact about something they know/are comfortable with (the solution to their problem).

Don't be silly.
Yeah, and his life was his property, but he risked it for one of the greatest missions of mankind on behalf of NASA.

So that kind of makes it even.

Or let's put it this way: this man did more for mankind than the collective sum of those who would accuse him as a thief over that that it makes them as insignificant as fruit flies in comparison (and I'm not even American).
That's because of flawed design usually. Architects cook up these lovely stylish renderings that the school boards find inspiring (particularly since it isn't their cash), which often involve flat or complex roofs.

Fast forward to the post-construction era, and that inspiring building now has 10 inches of water or ice on the roof. Water being water, it eventually gets in, usually around flashing.
You're not alone - I did the same, and can completely relate to the strange feeling of insecurity from "not getting" a book touted as the best-ever by Gates and Buffett.
In a society with ridiculous and increasing inequality, you make a fortune by investing in what the ultra-rich and the very poor will buy.
Do you REALLY care if someone knows how to make the PHP interpreter segfault? How to create garbage collection cycles in the JS interpretter? etc.

What does knowing a language inside and out really gain? "Oh yeah, Java totally does covariance in generics by default, but not contravariance" Is this really useful knowledge?
President John Adams -Congress Extends Reauthorization Adams Memorial Foundation
Crowdfunded military intelligence in near future? People interested in what's happening on some specific place putting their money to pool and purchasing live video feed from the region?
I don't agree with that. If you understand the mathematics and computational foundations, then you already have the depth of programming languages in an abstract form. You might choose to pick up new languages because you want to learn how others elegantly can solve the same problem on a different level of the machine.

Then you can apply similar techniques in whatever language paradigm you have to work in, while also understanding the pros and cons of such a thing (are you just mimicking the paradigm or on what gradient is the implementation correct? What can you assume now from tweaking the language?)

A programming language is not really a separate thing from the machine. It's useful to think about them in this way because it makes the knowledge simple and easier to make fast assumptions given some 'correct usage' of the language with regard to the specification and design of it.

It's just different stuff that each programmer has to pick up as they go. Everyone who is building anything has to do some thinking while they are building and do some remembering while they are building.

I find when you reduce all technology to this level, it becomes very hard to determine what proficiency is. Every bit of knowledge and piece of experience is potentially valuable at the same level.
Horus, 16yo WebRTCfest Challenge Winner
What's the default implementation of GetHash() in c#?

I actually like this question (not that I've ever asked it before), because it teases out how well someone knows .net and C#.

The specific implementation of GetHashCode isn't what's interesting. It's whether you know that .net implements reference vs value equality by default, whether you know you really do need to override GetHashCode if you override Equals, testing if you know the fundamental requirements for objects you might use as keys in a Dictionary.

The specific number returned and its relationship with the identity of the object - that's not important, and is truly not something you could be expected to know. But you're ability to think things through, and know the environment - yes.
Anyone who provides a reference on a web page to another web page without making it a clickable link is doing the internet wrong.
In my experience, although not very large, people who only know one language do so because they stick to things in their comfort level. they are also disadvantaged in environments where projects vary quite a deal. certain environments have different communities supporting them, making them better for certain tasks.

an example, a ASP/ASP.NET developer (only thing) of 10+ years couldn't do something over 6 months that I did in a week. That something involved web pages, polling data through a restful interface, projecting coordinates, tweeting, and a few other moving parts.
This is why I moved to Thailand to Bootstrap my Startup
The point of whiteboarding isn't to "build" correct/functional code - it's to get an idea of your thought process and how you go about solving a problem.

It's not perfect (and there are both advantages and disadvantages to using a computer instead of a whiteboard) but when done correctly it gives a lot more useful insight than sitting there asking questions about their past the whole time.
You might want to play with React and it's ilk. It's basically a framework for only the view, and it's pretty easy to reason about once you wrap your head around it. You're just asking for calculated fields on change events right?

jQuery is fine for this too, but can become painful to use and organize once you have a lot of DOM manipulations.

React only starts to get complicated once you dive into the Routing + Data Fetching + Flux stuff IMO. React on it's own if you don't need any of that is pretty simple.
That's how I find myself conducting my own personal development. The deeper I dive into Ruby, the more I find myself able to hold my own in conversation with my friend the graybeard C++ guy whose been doing it longer than I've been alive. He'll describe something he's trying to do and I'll be able to immediately find an analogue in Ruby. I'll get a sense for how Ruby exists in the general evolution of programming languages and what it tries to solve. The experience makes me more aware of the problems that Ruby tries to solve so that I can use it better.

I see a lot of people who know three or four languages, but don't understand any of them really well or the underlying concepts. Or they'll focus over-heavily on the algorithmic side of the craft and neglect maintainability and readability. I see a lot of Ruby that looks like C.

When I finally do start branching out and learning new languages, it will be on a totally different level. I'll be diving into the entire ecosystem of the language and not just struggling at the surface.

But before that, I want to learn how Rails really works. I think I understand the difference between a library and an application, now I want to understand what a framework is and how one is built and maintained.
Handy tip! Which - just tested - seems to work for me, at least with a couple of coats of black nail polish, and double-checked with a high-end Canon flash and a random green laser pointer. (Of course your mileage, and nail polish, may vary.)

I should change the hostname to nemi. ;)

There's another 'shiny' chip on the board too, next to the HDMI port, U8 I think, but it doesn't seem to give a damn what you do to that.

Compared to having to resolder all the Ethernet ports by hand, or USB power issues, this is a pretty minor errata! I presume the factory will pop a blob of epoxy on it for future runs, if they can't get this chip with a package on it.
It doesn't mean that the cables or other equipment differences, can change the 'beats per minute' of a music track.

If the bass is reproduced poorly and sounds 'woolly' it will subjectively mess up the timing of the bass playing with respect to the rest of the music, as though the bass player is less skilful. Whereas listening to the same track with equipment that has tight, clear and dynamic bass can make the music sound more lively and subjectively 'faster', and it is more likely to make your foot tap.
>The standard riposte to arguments like the one in the article is "well, then someone would pay their workers better and make more money, and those firms would come to dominate."

This assumes that workers, firms, and managers are all economically rational agents. Doing so not only overlooks all the findings of behavioral economics and social psychology, but also ignores the major role of ideology in shaping the modern workplace. People mistreat workers because they take their thinking on labor relations from an ideologically-tinted worldview in which you have to mistreat workers to make the economy go -- whether it's conforming to the archetypes has nothing to do with whether it's economically rational.
OpenPandora seems great!

It's a bit confusing. At least, the DragonBox shop (In Germany, but official supplier for the UK) is pretty confusing, especially on mobile.

The PandoraGHz with screen seems to be out of stock, while the screen-less Pandoras and the less powerful Pandora Classic and PandoraRebirth are still available. They seem a bit expensive, but maybe that's just me.

(Pandora Rebirth is €370!)
If your debugger is built with the compromised toolchain, it can theoretically lie about anything, including that.

Though yes, to accomplish this the original infection would have to basically #include a godlike AI that would be able to intelligently infect all future debugging tools.
>Tell that to gay people in the US.

Not taxes.

>CPS

Not taxes.

>documents

You have to tell them what your name is. This is not the same as them telling you what your name is.

>education

Taxes pay for that but it's optional.

>Renunciation of U.S. citizenship

If you're poor then you pretty much don't pay taxes anyway.

>Tell that to the Palestinians.

Sorry, let me clear my throat. TAXes, not TANks.

>Tell that to the Greeks

This is a complicated situation, but it's mostly repercussions of government spending without enough taxes to back it up. If anything it shows a way to screw up not taxing.

>Try again.

Yeah, you too. After you look up what taxes are.
It's a contrived situation that involves significantly more nerves than any real life situation will. I've known more than a few programmers that were perfectly capable of doing their work, but struggled through interviews because they got nervous during the coding phase.

The reality of the situation is that contrived problems in stressful situations are going to result in a lot of false negatives. That may be fine for you since you may be avoiding some false positives, but that doesn't mean your particular method is "the only way."
فيلم هز وسط البلد
It used to be the case that a service would politely ask you whether or not they could collect data about you, and would provide the same service in both cases.

This option (to minimise data collection/retention) ought to be enshrined in law.

If you pay (or not) for a service, you should be able to get the service without the expectation of your personal and private data being harvested.
Bull. It teases out if someone happens to know the GetHash() implementation in C#. Their knowledge of .NET and C# can, in no way, be determined by one stupid question about the implementation of a specific function in C#. Evidence of that fact is in your actual response: I could now answer that question, having never used .NET or C#.
> One of the arguments against raising the minimum wage is that it incentivizes automation and robot labor to replace it.

I really have to ask at what point people started thinking that reducing total productivity in order to increase the supply of menial toil is a good idea.
The B doesn't (at least according to the lovingly-hand-resoldered, first batch board I've got handy).

Don't have a B+ to hand, sorry. It might?
now I want to understand what a framework is

I'll short-circuit that one for you right now: you call a library, a framework calls you - it figures out how by some combination of convention and configuration. Libraries put you in control, frameworks make you cede control. You can usually mix and match libraries, whereas you can only use one framework at a time comfortably.
Not only anticipate, but also guard against. For example, someone asked about a debugger. A specific debugger is simple: patch the debugger's source at compile time to hide the presence of the malware. Of course, that means you have to handle the case where the debugger is used to debug itself, too. That may pose a challenge, but given the existence of quines, I think it is possible. Doing that not for just _a_ debugger but every debugger in the world is left as an exercise.

Next, someone will look at timing and notice something strange. So, add stuff that tweaks the real-time clock to correct for this when your binary runs, when the OS gets built with your compiler. That way, running 'time' on your binary will not show anything suspicious.

Next, someone may notice a discrepancy between real-time clocks and their OS. Solution? Make sure analog clocks aren't that precise, hook all digital clocks up to a time signal, and tweak that signal if you hit slower code paths that the user shouldn't see. Also, make sure that all other computers in the world slow down whenever one of them hits one of these paths.

Next, someone will notice a discrepancy between clock time and solar time.

For that, the NSA made up the leap second.
Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,
but he got the test backwards,
and, when the sense switch was turned on,
the program would cheat, winning every time.
Mel was delighted with this,
claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,
and adamantly refused to fix it.

I can't decide if its better if he intentionally did this, or it actually was an accident, but this was my favorite part by far.
This applies to a lot of jobs. Lawyers at certain firms are expected to wear expensive clothes and drive nice cars; the guy who drives a Geo Metro to work and wears a "meh" suit is frowned at. Even more ridiculous is the fact that like the drug dealers, the fashion is driven by the richest people, and the less secure and wealthy folks follow.

There's a great book called The Millionaire Next Door, where they look at the spending habits of millionaires. One of the things that stuck out was the fact that a lot of these people have "boring" jobs that don't have "face" to keep. No one really cares about what the owner of a janitorial company or a welding supplier looks like, so there's no pressure for him or her to have the Right House or the Right Car or the Right country club memberships. In contrast, the book notes a couple of doctors and lawyers who are really active in their professions' social scenes and are living paycheck-to-paycheck despite earning far more.

Personally, I like my Shittic (beat-up Civic that is missing half the paint). Every month that it keeps running is another month that I don't have to make a car payment. My girlfriend winces every time she sees it, though...
Photo sharing is awesome and all, but what about photo organization and backup? I'd like a service/program that takes my "gold" copy of my photos with metadata off my external drive and keeps my albums on Picasa/+ and Flickr in sync.

Is there such a service/program that does this?
This inspires a major plot element in Ramez Naam's Nexus, a near future transhuman sci fi thriller. It's risky to run other people's code on your brain.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13642710-nexus
Get a better processor then. MIDs will fight for you, because of the intermediary fees.
It's interesting to compare the waist tether (http://www.collectspace.com/images/news-020615h-lg.jpg) from this article with locking carabiners used by rock climbers (http://www.rei.com/product/722360/black-diamond-rocklock-twi..., http://www.rei.com/product/722353/black-diamond-rocklock-scr...). I wonder what the design requirements were -- it seems surprising to me that the only locking part of the waist tether is a button. It seems like that button could get accidentally hit, causing the tether to unlock and become unsafe; that is, unless the button has a spring forcing it to the "lock" position.

Interestingly, there is a new carabiner on the market whose locking mechanism is more like a button (http://www.rei.com/product/840193/black-diamond-magnetron-ro...): the difference being that the mechanism must be activated from both sides (via pinching the purple parts in the image), and has magnets forcing the carabiner into the "locked" state when not being held unlocked.

Also interesting is that the waist tether is adjustable. That could be a point of failure -- imagine floating off the end of your tether. Although I can't tell whether the waist tether is designed to attach astronauts to the spaceship, or just tools to astronauts. Howstuffworks.com implies it attaches astronauts to the spaceship (http://science.howstuffworks.com/spacewalk4.htm), but brighthub.com implies it's for tools (http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/126178.aspx).
Binary Machine
In this case the issue is that it is not possible for them to provide the service without potentially collecting private data:

The voice recognition is done on remote servers, and they have no means of preventing you from saying something private when it is recording.
> If the bass is reproduced poorly ...

Yeah, sure. But most of these comments are about cables carrying digital signals, a class of devices which only have two real operating modes: "working perfectly" and "catastrophic failure". Instead of respecting the principles of the physics and information encoding associated with this layout, though, we see outlandish claims of frequencies traveling at different speeds and damaging your multi-octave audio.
Streaming is making Grammy hits and crippling artists
Right now it isn't so useful, but once stuff like "put on that Wes Andersen movie where they ride on a train all the time" becomes useful, I see why voice might be preferred over a button, especially in China, where voice search already has a big share of all search.

But I agree. I'd much rather have a dumb tv and upgrade my attached boxes.
I just checked, and that one seems to be banned.

Though in general, I would say Reddit does benefit from allowing lousy subreddits. Not because those subreddits are good things. But the policy of allowing easy creation of subreddits is also what's made Reddit good. There are plenty of great niche subreddits.

Once you get into quality control, it's going to reduce the potential for the creation of good communities too. You also need a lot more admins.
The responsivity of silicon (and other semiconductors) by wavelength is pretty well characterized[1]. Any data sheet for a silicon photodiode will include a similar plot, and as photodiodes are just diodes (granted, operated in reverse bias), regular diodes will have a similar response if light can get past the part package. Photodiode junction doping and geometry are optimized to make them useful as optical devices, but they're still VERY close to regular silicon diodes.

This property of diodes can be used in a fun way: LEDs emit light, but they can also be used as photodiodes[2]. It's easy with a microcontroller pin that can act as both a digital output and analog input. LEDs are of course not optimized for this use (small sensor area, the package may absorb useful light particularly in the UV, phosphor if present may get in the way), but they can be used as photodetectors. There's even an Arduino sketch[3].

1. http://image.slidesharecdn.com/lect12-photodiodedetectors-13...

2. http://www.merl.com/publications/docs/TR2003-35.pdf

3. http://playground.arduino.cc/Learning/LEDSensor
I'm thinking it's quite handy for a quadriplegics, those with learning disabilities, children, elderly, arthritis sufferers, parkinson's sufferers, thalidomide sufferers, disable in general, etc... Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean that it's not the number one feature in someone else's life.
IMHO, it probably mostly coincides with the immense capital glut that has pushed rates of return on speculative financial investments to almost nothing, forcing investors back to making their money off actual industry, at the same time that globalization is forcing up wages even in the Third World. Industry requires either cheap labor to exploit or skilled labor to use to raise its rate of profit... and that means that slowly, the tide is turning towards actually building stuff and selling it to people, which requires that the workers who do the job be able to think for five minutes at a time rather than just nail Thing A to Thing B.