skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What I have to do get a job? Tech Recruiters?
Just had this correspondence from a recruiter/client. Do people actually accept this as reasonable?

Recruiter:
Hi Chad,
Hope your day is starting off well. We got some positive feedback form the folks at ---- and ----- and they are interested in having you take their PHP challenge. To quote their Director of Development:
“I know this isn't an easy challenge, but senior-level work is a lofty claim. Nailing this challenge is a pretty quick ticket to landing this job.”
I have attached the Code Challenge and they would like you to complete it as soon as possible.
Thanks, Recruiter

Chad:
Hi Recruiter,

I will admit the the Director was smart not just to issue the challenge, but he put a small psychological challenge to taunt the ego with the term "lofty claim". Unfortunately, three variables that where left out of the equation: Risk, Time and Economy. Risk: preforming this task is no guarantee of job, so the time spent on this project has the complete potential of being unhedged, i.e. unpaid. Time: The opportunity cost of preforming this task, as I can be developing existing clients (profitable), job opportunities (variable profitability), spending time with my new born, or playing basketball (the last two are not profitable, but enjoyable) instead of working on this unpaid project. Economics: Based on the current demand for programmers and senior programmers this particular project seems a little egregious, it might have been acceptable in 2008-2009, today not so much.

In Nov., I was paid to work on a side-projects for a company that was interested in hiring me. I did a side project for them that benefited both parties. In the end I wasn't interested in the position, I got paid and they got the side project done.
Thanks,Chad

Recruiter:
Thanks Chad I’ll let him know.

Challenge can be found here: http://pastebin.com/jLMeGBW6
Magic: The Story of an Accidentally Founded, Wildly Viral Startup
I used to be like the person you're describing.
I had such a hard time with actual software development, until a few years in, when all the theoretical knowledge "clicked".
Then I was able to always make consistent gains in dev skills from the os level to higher level software architecture.
I think it was because I could understand the core abstractions from the higher level ones. Though I also might be an outlier, because even out of school I study a few hours a night.
With great power comes great responsibility. mmap is one of those tools.

Keep in mind that your whole linux system essentially mmaps your binaries / shared libraries when you run an application. And with caveats our world still keeps going around.

Error handling with mmap is a PITA but there's a few ways you can work around the general cases:

Use used mapped region for reading data and then use write() for writing it. That's what LMDB does. That's an assumption that's betting errors occurring in the write path.

If you're doing IO in a tight loop you can catch the SIGBUS sent to your thread (SIGBUS/SIGSEGV are always deliver to the thread that caused it). You can deal with the fault via sigsetjmp/siglongjmp. This has all sorts of fun draw backs (like if you're using C++ RAI after sigsetjmp).
Exactly! It seems anything that can fly is a drone nowadays, from a remote controlled quad copter to a Predator.
Its broken? I dont see anything on the page
The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

Also, you don't need to meet Western development to be a success. China has incredibly high growth rates and Deng Xiaoping's "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" (i.e. the mixed economy) basically saved China.
I'm not sure this addresses the problem vs. just moving it to another agency.

Would it be better for the FBI to be doing these things than the NSA? Or should we be instead fighting that they're done at all?
This is my method, too. The only problem I have is that it seems about half the companies who cold call sales leads use some software that spoofs a local exchange, and I do generally answer the phone -- even when it's not one of my known contacts -- when it originates from my home area code. Not doing so risks missing calls from contractors, schools, kids' friends, my friends, etc.
I use the word "proctor."
Second, all surveillance of Americans should be moved to the FBI.

The FBI is charged with counterterrorism in the United States, and it needs to play that role. Any operations focused against U.S. citizens need to be subject to U.S. law, and the FBI is the best place to apply that law.

No no no a thousand times no.

One of the only saving graces about the massive surveillance from the NSA is that, I'm willing to wager, very little of it at all has made it over to where it could be used to oppress the citizens directly.

Bruce's claim that "FBI is charged with counterterrorism" means that they are also charged (along with DEA, ATFE, etc.) with the application of undue force on citizens--something we've been only somewhat spared from because of the difficulty they have in collecting information.

Turning over to them that capability--or even the just the current stockpile and archives of information!--would be a gigantic blow against freedom.
So we need an API to search all the languages and countries, pay in the appropriate currency, abstract this "feature" away along with the language barrier, and give me the lowest price. I hope Google will do that. :)
How we got our first 10 paying SaaS Customers
It is so exciting that people have started to couple the creation of offices with the creation of housing!
Have you ever raised a support case with MS properly I.e. Not via feedback/connect?

Your can speak to someone who knows their shit pretty sharpish and get a fix to you. Most of the time this is same day stuff.

As for Chrome, the open web is much better now we have NaCl, sign in nagging and dubious privacy and no support even if you're a paying customer (google apps I'm looking at you).
This is very insightful.

I wonder however if his partitioning of the economy into "labor" and "capital" isn't a bit too black and white, though.

In particular, it leaves out knowledge workers who are capable of implementing automation, inventing new products, performing new research. These activities can be fueled by capital but they are gated by a not-entirely-fungible resource; namely, skilled individuals, that I'm not sure it makes sense just to classify as "labor". Such individuals could wield considerable influence, aside from capital.

I can't help but wonder what kind of an effect (if any) this observation has on his analysis.
Asian tree rings explain historical plague outbreaks in Europe
Still would like to see your source for the "50k active user base" claim.
Not all supernovae have a GRB and not all GRBs have a supernova, but most long burst GRBs are thought to be from a supernova, no? I've been out of supernova research for a few years now, but that's what I recall.
When they can experience happiness and suffering, that's when we should care. Animals apply, robots don't.

Yet.
I am unimpressed. Offering the customer options is NOT a bad idea. Many customers know what they want and expect the barber to execute on that. Other customers can't quite express what they want but if you ask them leading question, like "Would you like it shorter over on the side here?" then they can communicate their desires. Apparently THIS customer had no idea what he wanted and expected the barber to deliver a cut he liked without asking him any questions about his hair or his preferences. He doesn't even mention telling his barber "Hey, I don't really know what I want, just give me a good, standard cut without asking any questions."

Frankly, I think the barber was doing a good job and got stiffed on his tip.

All analogies to software development are intentional. I've had great customers and I've had tricky customers, but I've had a few customers who refused to meet with me to discuss requirements and they were the worst kind of all.
Just wait until the DeepMind section of Google starts to watch the Boston Dynamics videos. What will happen when Google's AI knows that Google employees kick and smack other Google robots around?

Sure, it's a silly example right now in 2015, but just wait until 2020 when the examples won't be silly at all. This is a real fear - I think it's almost a certainty that there will be hundreds of videos showing violence against robots posted online. And this could very well be the reason that the robots decide to rise up against us.

Sure, not the 2015 "Spot". But just wait.
Do you know about `git add -p`? That allows you to stage hunks or lines interactively in the terminal. Press `s` to split a hunk, `y`/`n` to stage or not stage.
Ahhh, that would change the situation dramatically. I'm used to dealing with property value assessments occurring every 5 or so years.
Using ECMAScript 6 with Rails 4.2 Projects
Hmmm. A lot of late stage stuff is being done by sophisticated investors, but ones who are sophisticated about other asset classes. Very often large public equity investors are lining up at the pre ipo round thinking they can get some alpha. Think names you associate with mutual funds and retirement accounts.

The other ill matched category that is getting a lot of exposure at these rounds is the private wealth groups of large ibanks. They get an allocation in the pre ipo round and farm it out to private wealth clients, because 1. PWM clients are all accredited investors so they can do it as a reg D exemption, and 2. The PWM clients feel special and like they are getting insider access from their PWM. I'm not super clear on why the companies take the PWM money, although I suspect that in fact it is a shrewd form of pre-marketing the IPO by getting private wealth clients to go bragging to their friends about the hot pre ipo deal so the friends want to buy it when it goes out.

Even private equity firms who would seem well matched to the size and structure of deal, often IMO come with mismatched expectations. The PE guys love complicated terms, dividends, fees, promotes, and all manner of East Coast legal wrangling which is often quite out of place in a relatively "clean" West Coast tech deal.

Disclaimer: am a West Coast tech venture investor
One of the other results I've seen posted on SSC (will try to find the link later) is that sensitivity training, at least as it's been actually implemented in the real world, makes people more discriminatory, not less.
You've Never Seen the Star Spangled Banner Performed Like This
Keybase lets you do some key stuff, but the bigger feature is that it provides a bunch of ways to authenticate the source of a key above and beyond the WoT and getting into the strong set. Authentication is an inherently hard problem. With keybase you can, for example, see that the key that you want to use to send an encrypted email to x@example.com's website is owned by someone who also controls x@example.com's twitter, reddit, github accounts, web-site, etc, making it less likely that there's a MiTM going on.
Also, the long term cash outlay for a drug that might have side effects discovered long after the patents run out. It is a very chancy business with a lot of failures per success. There are much better things to investment in.
Can we just flip their budget over to making sure US companies are secure?
There is an interesting south park episode about this.
It ended up with police drones brutally destroying civilian drones. I think it was parody of violence occurring during protests.
However it still made me wonder, whether drones will become avatars for people who don't want to leave home, and how much history simply repeats.
I think the question you want to ask is, would you pay to contact people via email?

The answer is most likely no.
It's ishan2(at)gmail(dot)com. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Secret Wars – Three stories about the things we can’t say
Homelike – Http://www.thehomelike.com – Cologne(Germany) – Full Time, Local
Fullstack Node.js (Meteor) Engineer

Thehomelike.com is a real marketplace for renting furnished temporary business apartments for mid- or long-term purposes. We help business travellers and expats to find ’a home away from home’ while relocating to another city or for longer business trips with an entire online renting process.

At Homelike we are using Meteor (web framework), NodeJs, REST, JSON and Mongo DB and we're looking for more development talent to grow and improve the platform. Experience in building applications using Meteor is not mandatory but you should be an expert in JavaScript development.

We're seeing continuous growth with currently more than 1500 apartments listed already in 6 cities – Germany only for now but with more cities/countries coming soon.

Speaking German is not required! Please only apply if you are a EU citizen since we can not support any visa issues.

You will find the job description here:
https://angel.co/homelike/jobs/50262-fullstack-node-js-meteor-engineer-m-w

You can also apply directly at jobs@homelike.cc
JetLeak Vulnerability: Remote Leakage of Shared Buffers in Jetty Web Server
It depends in part on what you mean by "witness" a supernova. We discover supernovae all the time (hundreds a year), but pretty much all of those are too faint to be seen with the naked eye. There's a decent chance of seeing a supernova visible with the naked eye in your lifetime, but a pretty small chance of one as bright as betelgeuse.
I've always thought the same as well. I sure wish my parents had experienced the woe of having their home value go up 5x over my childhood, but alas it merely maintained its value for the most part (we grew up far from any major cities).

It's the life-long renters who will be mainly impacted by this negatively. I do have sympathy for them. Many of them rented not because they were opposed to buying, but because they couldn't afford to buy even in the 80s. Granted, you might argue that if you can't buy a home then that's a sign you shouldn't stay in the area long-term, precisely because of this risk. But try telling that to all the new college graduates rushing off to Silicon Valley with incomes that are less than a 10th of home values around them. They'll possibly be subject to the same fate.
It's worth nothing that there is a large fraudulent market for marriages in the US, precisely for this reason.
As one of the idiots who responded with a property tax argument, I did not. Then again, I don't live in California, so I'll just eat the downvotes as the cost of a lesson learned.

Don't ask questions that other people know the answer to.
Just for reference, that situation doesn't apply to California because of [Prop. 13](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%2819...). It restricts the annual increases of property taxes to an inflation factor, not to exceed 2% per year.
From the first link:

Very briefly, pointer events has 3 main drawbacks relative to the alternative:

1) Mobile-first web:
Pointer events would likely never supplant touch events on the web (especially without support from Safari). Since touch events are here to stay, supporting another largely redundant input model has a high long-term complexity cost on the web platform.

2) Performance:
The hit testing model required by pointer events imposes a non-trivial performance penalty (hit test on every movement event) that neither Android, iOS or touch events has. We're not willing to add any feature that increases the web's performance disadvantage relative to native mobile platforms.

3) Richness:
Pointer events requires that scrolling and event handling are mutually exclusive. This precludes some UI effects which are common on on mobile platforms (eg. pull to refresh). Recently strong developer feedback has lead us to change Chrome in the opposite direction here - enabling event handling while scrolling (see issue 293467 ).
keybase proves who you are.. if you trust keybase
Anything to do with higher-order functions, least of all

compose :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> c

?
Git Tower is by far the best GUI I've used for git. It's not cheap ($59), but absolutely worth it, IMO.

It's fast, it's regularly updated and supported, and it's powerful enough to do complex stuff (rebases, merges, cherry-picks, etc).

http://www.git-tower.com/
Think of a study that needs 3 lab test per day for each of the participants. These tests aren't cheap and a multi-year study with a couple of hundred participants with shipping costs (overnight) for the samples. It does ring up quite a bill.
Oii Instant Messenger
That robot would make a good pro footballer.
Not sure if you're serious or not, but the domain is owned by Jelmer Tiete, who doesn't appear to have any affiliation with Boston Dynamics. He works at beyond.io, which on their homepage says they "make things that make you smile". I think he did just that.
Valve's VR Plans Could Prove Good News for Developers
Just a quick look over the code of the Django and Flask benchmarks reveals, that they are both run in debug mode introducing significant overhead.

In addition that that database access isn't performed asynchronously, which leaves the question about what is actually supposed to happen asynchronously.
As usual, the people who abide by the rules get screwed, while those who break them, not only thrive, but get written about as some kind of heroes.

Did she steal, defraud, or harm anyone?

If she contributed something of economic value, why are you so against her staying?

Maybe you should blame the immigration process instead.
try recording embarrassing messages so there shouted from your friends phones
There are situations under which your previous status is not an issue for getting a green card; i think being a victim of human crime and marriage are two such situations.
Based on the policies of the two universities at which I've taught, it seems like there's no possible benefit to admitting guilt.

The only foolproof way to "convict" someone of cheating is to have (several) people witness/record the incident. If a student accused of cheating categorically denies everything, they're usually in the clear (although faculty will say nasty things in private).
Right, that is a definite feature of some fares. They allow a free stopover at their hub if you want. Given that, almost all fares allow a 23 hour connection without it having to be programmed into the fare.

And I didn't mean it was a scam, more like a cool hack.
Interview tips for Ubuntu developers
That's my intention. The first step is always to ensure that you're actually dealing with bugs though, it may just be something I'm not used to.
Yea, I swore an oath never to be a Deutsch Telekom/T-Mobile customer ever again after experiencing their customer service first hand while I was stationed in Germany 10 years ago. They make Comcast look good.

I don't even acknowledge the existence of T-Mobile in the US.
I was really excited when the very first iPhone launched because that one was essentially unsubsidized (or as close as us in the US had ever seen). Unfortunately, the mass consumers showed they wanted subsidized so the next generation of iPhone saw the plan cost go up and the upfront cost go down. Everybody I complained to thought I was crazy about the cost going up because all they looked at was the initial cost of the phone going down and failed to do the math at how much the increased plan cost would cost them over 2 years.
If you own your own limited company and received income via dividends, it's not subject to NI.
Easy to use, in-browser PGP encryption
I hate the phrase 'undocumented immigrant.' It's not like she had some documents and—whoops!—lost them. She had documents from Mexico (presumably); she had expired documents from the United States. She was an alien whose residence in the United States was illegal; the phrase 'illegal alien' is completely accurate. The phrase 'illegal immigrant' is also accurate in her case, since she intended to stay here for good.

> “There is still the stigma that what we did is shameful,” she says. “I’m tired of being ashamed for pursuing my dream, for climbing up the ladder, and for having success.”

She should be ashamed: she appears to have violated immigration, pension and tax laws. 'I'm pursuing my dreams and being successful' is not a valid counter-argument to 'you're breaking the law.' She's a criminal; she's literally a shameless criminal.
Keep in mind, she was also brought over as a child, without any input of her own.

The authorities have often given leniency in these cases as well.
It is actually the opposite. I want to know why people don’t feel comfortable charging to contact them via email.
She came over when she was 14. The whole problem is that there is no process for her.
There are sites dedicated to scouring and curating the best deals found using the ITA Software Matrix. http://Theflightdeal.com is the best that comes to mind. http://PointsBuzz.com also aggregates the various different sites focused on flight deals and maximizing frequent flyer points for the most worthwhile trips.
Could you explain why? What is wrong with that?
How to get the most out of Given-When-Then
Is it possible to hold the position that the NSA should be conducting signals intelligence, data collection, and code-breaking (and yes, email snooping) -- yet at the same time hold the position that the blatantly malicious activities: 0day exploits, software and hardware backdooring, etc should not be allowed?

Why commit ourselves to a massive overhaul of the entire NSA when we can address the actual problem here with some granularity and minimal cost yielding an impact almost all of us would enjoy?
Is it weird that I kept expecting the robots to turn around and destroy?

Too much Doctor Who for me.
I have known enough software development professionals to believe that we will never be a credible threat to any local government anywhere, right up until the point where 90% of local government jobs are obsoleted by computer automation, at which time it will be far too late to do anything about it.

Right now, I can't be arsed to even read the minutes from the meetings of my city council. I would much rather spend that time keeping my technical skills current. Mountain View politics will, like most local governments, still largely be controlled by smallpond-bigfish, loud activists, and retirees, unless it becomes a noticeable problem that requires fixing.

The one thing you do not want to do in a community of technically-minded people is to be categorized as a problem.

Denying building permits for the 5000+ units of housing that will be required--that's a problem. Not building schools, crime and fire protection, utility corridors, and roads to service that housing--that's a problem. Not building commuter infrastructure for the employees who can't live in town because you won't let them--that's a problem.

There are plenty of communities outside of the silicon valley area who would kill--literally commit multiple murders--to get Google to relocate headquarters there, while also offering zero local taxes on the business for a decade or more. Those communities would also complain loudly about all the young people coming in with no investment or engagement with the existing residents. But then they would float some bonds, up the mill rate, build like crazy, and immediately start pitching to other technology-intensive businesses. Money may not solve all the problems, but it is one heck of an analgesic for the ones that it can't solve.

Just cash the check, Mountain View. Cash the check and get to work.
Dropbox with EncFS for Privacy
You don't need an app. Just add a contact called "SPAM", and set it to go straight to voicemail. Then any spam numbers who call you, just add their number to your SPAM contact.
I've used Google Flights before, but I almost always end up flying Southwest, which doesn't disclose their prices to aggregators. Does anyone know if Google has tried to strike a deal with them? If anyone could, I imagine it would be Google.