skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I play games for fun and to relax.

Different people have different definition of fun. Some play Minecraft just to build CPUs out of redstone.

> On your website, it says that these will actually be real problems for real companies. I would think it's something I would see in production?

The key word isn't "production", it's "you". I, for example, don't really expect to ever use Go or Rust in professional setting. Nor do I expect to use Prolog. Then there are real production systems today that use PDP machines (nuclear reactors) or COBOL (banks). I don't expect to work on them either, but sure as hell would like to play with them at some point.

I get the feeling that Starfighter is about giving geeks some hard-core tech game with a side effect of helping them find a job that is not boring.
Hey, mine's a quad core 2.6GHz i7 with 16GB of RAM; it isn't a slouch and isn't anywhere near needing replacing - that's why the user-replacable battery means that this isn't a throwaway item after a few years. If I bought a car with a battery in it that I couldn't replace, it'd be stupid, but the same is being accepted on laptops.

Admittedly the disk is a major slowdown on this but I have a LOT of data to cart around (VMs, dev environments, and recorded audio and video).

I can take this thing all over the world and not worry about a bag of cables and adapters. It replaced my desktop machine and still fits that need, which is a good thing I think.

You're right about the screen though :-(
I probably just don't have enough experience. I like the idea that Grunt and Gulp are written in JS so using JS to build JS seems like a win.

But...., aren't build systems supposed to do dependency checking and just built the minimal amount of stuff? Maybe few JS projects are big enough for it to matter or maybe I missed where the dependencies are checked but AFAICT the default is to build everything always.
You can you just need externals which means an extra $50-150 depending on what you need, and it puts into perspective the notion of this MB being the most portable device in the Mac lineup.

I kind of see the MB as very solid upgrade to anyone using the 11 inch MBA for non-dev stuff (e.g. school) and is rich enough to be willing to pay 30-40% extra, despite it being hard to figure this type of user to really need 8gb of ram for example.

For anyone on the 13 inch lineup, it feels like a step back either in performance, battery, ports, price, screen size.

I mean, 13' MBA? Cheaper, bigger screen, better ports, better battery. Not many people will really care that the MB is a tiny bit lighter/compact to the extent they're willing to give up all these things, except if they cared so much to have gotten the 11', hence how I see the MB as being an upgrade to the 11' MBA.

Unless you really wanted a retina display and want to give up screen space, a few hours of battery, pay a premium and have to get a bunch of peripherals.
"Why was it audible? Why not, one could ask."

In my first year of university I used dial-up to connect from home. The university had a mixture of 14.4Kbps and 28.8Kbps modems all tied into the same phone number, so it was random which kind you got. Obviously, doubling your data rate in those days was easily worth hanging up and trying again as many times as it took! The handshaking sound of the two types of modems the university was using were audibly distinct, so you could hang up and try your luck again immediately if you heard a 14.4K modem handshake. Listening was much quicker than waiting for the handshake to finish and then testing the download rate.

So, why did a 14.4Kbps modem handshake sound different from a 28.8Kbps modem handshake? The scrambled data test phase seems to be a likely culprit, because modems with different capabilities should sound different in this phase. There are plenty of 14.4Kbps modem recordings on youtube, but I couldn't find a 28.8Kbps handshake recording to do a proper comparison! It might also be that different brands or models of modems could be distinguished from one another before they even got to the scrambled data test.
Which is why I was careful to prepend "generous" to every instance of "education" in my response. Starfighter isn't generosity of knowledge, it's barter of it.

Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their business is subservient to their idealistic educational aims.
Thanks for mentioning the preview; I am downloading it right now. I assume that it is all compatible with the Office 365 web services.
Cool, thanks! We get a thumbs down for mean frame time. It'd be great to know where we fit (%ile). Do you think it's because we use Bootstrap and SVGs?
Is it ok for a group of us who to complete the challenge as a team for fun? Or must we agree to only work individually?
It's a different target audience then. We can safely say my obscure needs are not their target :-)

Thanks for the info about the USB-C connector; I still find it odd that other similarly sized devices fit more ports on without the need for external adapters; it almost seems that they've put the port on just because they can.

Edit: having looked again at it, I was amazed by the tiny innards! The space metal grey looks good; perhaps I was too harsh.
Binder clips are useful for avoiding cable falls: http://www.efficientlifeskills.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
With 14.04 LTS? How good is your experience with the setup?
Perhaps it's to make you buy an AirPort and TimeCapsule instead?
Don't say forget CUPS
I do I started to get aching mouse hands after using the wireless touch mouse and I like not having the cursor zoom all over the place if i accidentally nudge the mouse
Fun is the point.

I don't know exactly what the "rules" are going to be, but what rules we have will have one purpose: not to screw the game up for anyone else.
Apparently still alive and well in some circles (agree with below that most uses are financial/credit/legacy apps). I worked at one of the largest developers of ISP modem infrastructure in the late 90's called Ascend. Company was purchased by Lucent. Just a few years ago I ran into a friend still with the company and mentioned that, globally, carriers were still installing new dial-up infrastructure to the tune of a few $100-million annually. Amazing.
With so little detail that you feel willing to share, how reliable can any answer that appears here be? Either trust your gut or shell out for a lawyer to educate you on it. Trying to validate your feelings here is going to be a fruitless endeavor.

I don't know about the non-circumvention clause; it sounds like a non-compete which is banned/unenforceable in some jurisdictions but it also sounds like you're in a potential supplier rather than employee relationship here, so labor law considerations don't apply. Geographic exclusivity doesn't sound odd to me at all, and if you don't get the concept then it may be worth your while to take a course in basic business law or buy a book on the subject to get a feel for why it matters and why it would make sense; a distributor who wants rights to particular territory is telling you that that's the scope within which they're able to carry on business effectively, and that they don't want to be liable for problems that might arise when dealing with customers from outside that territory.

In many cases you don't even know for certain where your users are, etc.

You will if you give one of them occasion to sue you and you find yourself summoned to go to their jurisdiction. If this concept is foreign to you, then you definitely need to learn more about it. Here's a book that would give you a cheap-but-decent introduction to business law: http://www.amazon.com/Business-Law-Barrons/dp/0764142402

You should definitely get legal advice; don't make the mistake of thinking that your common sense and skill at logic outweigh centuries of established inter-business legal practice, even though some of the conventions may be counter-intuitive or seem anachronistic.
Judging by the coffee shop I'm in at the moment where about 1/3 of people have their machines plugged in, I don't think plugs are dead yet (not to mention at home or in offices, of course). Part of the problem is that the battery life is not yet at the level of phones. My 11" 2015 Macbook Air advertises a battery life of "up to" 9 hours web-browsing or 10 watching videos, but in practice I've found it closer to 6-7 while working actively, if I've got several apps open, wifi on, and screen brightness up. Maybe switching from Firefox to Safari would help, dunno (but I'm pretty tied to Firefox at the moment). I can get 10+ hrs on planes, but there I have the screen brightness turned down, wifi off, and am mostly working in a terminal vim.
Mark Cuban: This tech bubble is ‘far worse’ than back in 2000
Exactly. Tesla Motors comes to mind as a company for which "electrification of the world transportation" is the goal, and "profitable business" is only means to an end.

I understand the fear though; most of the companies we interact with (and I'd wager, 90% of startups we see here) are what I call toilet-paper companies - they'd gladly switch from whatever it is they're doing to manufacturing toilet paper if that would render more profit or increase chances of getting acquihired; their top priority is business, not the goal. I hope that Starfighter isn't such toilet-paper endeavour.
If the scores/achievements can be public accessed then you can use it as part of your portfolio when bidding on contracts.
You must remember that:

a) Many people don't speak English natively.

b) Jurisdictions are different in every country, and sometimes in every state, the law of where you live takes precedence over what your LICENSE file says. Ex. jurisdictions where encryption is forbidden.

c) Some people just make projects "for fun". Reading and understanding different licenses until you find the one you agree the most with is definitely "not fun".

d) Nobody recommends a license without a disclaimer of "at your own risk" unless that person is a lawyer and it's getting paid to do that recommendation.
> EDIT2: Retirement age is 62, not 60. I plead youth, plus the fact that if I did keep a countdown it would be depressing to bump it every time they bump the official retirement age.

The Social Security early retirement age is 62, and it has never been bumped since being instituted in the 1930s.

the Social Security full retirement age is 67 -- it was originally 65 and in 1983 was bumped different amounts based on year of birth, so that it became 67 for everyone born 1960 and later, stayed 65 for everyone born 1937 and earlier, and was somewhere in between for everyone else.

No matter how old you are, you would never had to bump the countdown you were keeping if it was to the early retirement age, and if you can plead youth with any credibility, you would never have had to bump it if you were keeping a countdown to the full retirement age, either.
I bet that Thomas and Patrick could do something like have dynamically created tests, where there are multiple versions of an exploit, so that they test the same skill but in different ways. You might have a challenge that tests whether you can do SQL injection, but the tables may differ. Overrunning a buffer (as Patrick mentioned in his post about Microcorruption) could depend on different payloads.

I naiively believe that things could be varied enough that you would need to understand the concepts rather than paste answers, in which case "cheating" would mean "learning", and is basically something they say they want you to do. I'm not sure how hard it would be to get to that point rather than being vulnerable to Bob the Super Coder posting walkthrough screencasts, but I trust that the founders are already savvy enough to have been thinking about that.
Blister packs help, but they won't buzz on your wrist at the right time to take the meds (with a text reminder indicating what all of the buzzing is about).
This is not a real laptop, as they claim it is. 2 core 1.2Ghz no discrete video, it has only ONE extension port. Really, u cannot connect at the same time mouse, screen and external drive, WTF?
It is not suitable for most of professional tasks, it is like an iPad with keyboard and multitasking, thats all.
I think if it leads to higher quality job leads than that would be great for many people. I find personally with response rates to cold drops of a resume being around 75%. The amount of time shifting through positions I don't want >> than pursuing those that I do.

The great employers don't require to much chest thumping and I've had some down right fun interviews. I question the culture of a company that uses a CTF game as a metric to hire people. People who play and succeed at CTFs tend to be hyper-competitive and thats not always a wonderful characteristic in a team member or company.

Thats fair, after reading some of your comments above. I believe you don't intend this to be more work for people. And, I believe hiring on both sides of the equation is a non trivial problem.
What exactly are you referring to? log 100M is roughly 27. A call stack depth of 27 has not been an issue on any general purpose system for a very long time now. Granted, there are certainly some niches left where you'd want to avoid that, but those are clearly exceptions.
Retirement age is whenever you're able to. If you're 73, and your retirement can't give you an income you're willing to live on, you have to hustle in some way.
Getting on-site means you're at least better for the position that the ones who weren't invited on-site, so that's a start. And you definitely don't need a CE/EE Bachelor's to be a good programmer - especially since it sounds like you're not completely green (having at least done freelance development work and, more importantly, being paid for it!).

Do your best to present yourself as humbly confident in the interview. Good luck :)
Even if you are being generous with your time and effort, you can't carry out an effort with any kind of reach without some support model. Financing it through its own operations may not be the only choice, but its not a choice incompatible with generous motivation.
I would imagine a worst-case scenario would be something much worse than an earthquake and tsunami, which are, while not usual, certainly expected.

And while nobody died (yet), that's not the problem... the problem is that so many resources had to be invested just to ensure nobody was hurt that makes the prospect of building more nuclear reactors in similar positions scary.

IMHO nuclear reactors should be built to deal with problems of the magnitude of an earthquake or a tsunami as a base line. Fukushima was built with this in mind, I'm sure, but it's hardly a worst-case scenario.... Worst-case would be something like a direct hit from a comet when all the engineers who know how to run it are already dead.

EDIT: It's also that we should be designing these things to run in 100+ years when equipment is failing, the disasters could be an order of magnitude worse than expected, etc.
Thank you, I always thought that one needs special hardware.
Licensing their entire infrastructure would probably not impact their profit. There are already very capable competitors to Github, the also-proprietary Bitbucket, and the Free Gitlab most notably.

It's not so much their technology that keeps them the market leader, their tech isn't really anything special (not saying it's poor quality or trivial). It's their network momentum that makes them the perennial favorite.

If they released their entire source code under GPLv3 and started accepting pull requests, they would almost certainly be fine. Bitbucket couldn't make much use of their code unless Atlassian followed suit and released their source under the terms of GPLv3 as well.

They also of course sell a self-hosted version of github to enterprise customers, who now could give them the finger and just build the application from source, but if they wanted to do that, they would just use Gitlab. The enterprise customers are paying for the support package that comes with the software.

Free software isn't about not making money. It is about "giving away" the core of your business. Not because we want to run ourselves out of business, but because we have an ethical obligation to preserve our users' freedoms to run the software however they want, to study and modify its implementation, and to redistribute it regardless of whether it was modified. Or at least many of use believe we do.

Part of the reason the GPL exists is to help your users without endangering your business.
The 10 most useless graduate degrees: #9, Computer Science
I dual boot my old MacBook Air between OS X and Ubuntu - really nice because some software development tasks are just easier on Linux.

(Off topic, but a good tip: buy a 64gig memory card and always keep it in the memory slot with a file system friendly to both Linux and OS X - there are cards designed to fit in flush on MacBook Airs. This lets my old 128gig MBA comfortably support dual boot, and the shared file system on the card is handy.)
This seems to be true, but then I wonder who they expect to develop the software for their target audience?
This is purely an anecdotal evidence, but I like to walk in Pacifica, CA which is on the flight path from SFO runway 1R/19L. On the weekends, the number of private jets taking off is equal to the number of commercial jets.
chflags nohidden [path]
Original source is more interesting: http://content.knightfrank.com/research/83/documents/en/weal...
I wonder how easy it will be to bias the samples for profit. Make some bots to submit bogus data that shows that people that consume product XYZ are healthier. Or, just make the health apps bias the data. Like say company XYZ gives kickbacks to "RecordYourActivity" app in exchange for reporting something that suggests MySnakeOil is good for you.

Of course I guess that kind of thing happens already. Just wondering will this make it worse, better or about the same.
I feel like this is an implementation of my idea here: https://medium.com/@sargun/interviews-as-a-service-dfa6d4a03... -- Or at least a competing alternative to traditional interviews.
> How about showing the actual filesystem?

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles yes

I only realized recently after switching to a new Mac just how much the default Finder sucks. If you switch that option on, switch off almost everything in the left hand pane except common folders and ~ / then it becomes bearable.

Other options are here, I wish I remembered all those I had changed because I still haven't gotten by Finder back to how I had it:

http://secrets.blacktree.com/?showapp=com.apple.finder
As a former aircraft engineer, my take is the Fukushima design had too many single points of failure. It's like an airplane - despite flying being inherently dangerous, it is incredibly safe. The plant design could be made far safer with rather minor improvements.
Interestingly, all these things, screwed up credentials, weird refresh issues when editing network file names, hang-ups, all happen to me on Windows 7, too.

My biggest issue with my Mac was eventually working out that my Ethernet over Power bricks don't actually forward any mac networking info, so networking only works properly over wifi for me at home!
The x21 didn't have an optical drive either, nor the x31 before it.

Of course, one could argue they were specialist laptops which never had a large market. But maybe the same could be said of the MBA?
yeah, i know you can scale it. Will it look good though? In addition, it has a pretty weak processor, so we will have to see how the performance works out if you scale it. Especially if you drive a monitor.
- Do you think there will be some threshold where people get past a certain stage and then start getting offers, with nothing being offered below that? (my only experience is basic OverTheWire challenges, so not sure if this will have similar progression of 'levels')

- Is it going to hurt?
+1 for signing up without Linkedin, and adding geo support.
Ask HN: Why the HN Nginx error for articles below 9M?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999999 not working
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9000000 working

The pages I have tried above 9000000 works and below that number doesn't.

Frustrating when using Google to search for HN articles!
Literally the first objective I had when I took over recruiting was to reduce the time demands on Matasano's hiring process, and the work-sample process we came up with slashed time demands by more than half. Candidates we passed on wrote us to say how much more they liked how we hired than other companies. That's because:

* We demanded the same or slightly less time in total than other conventional-interviewing companies did.

* The scheduling of our demands was totally flexible, unlike interviews, which are rigidly scheduled. If you're a morning person, and you have next Tuesday free, that's when you threw the 2-odd hours you needed at the challenge.

* Obviously, it's easier and less stressful to put effort in from your couch than in an alien office environment with people staring at you waiting for you to answer properly.

* The challenges themselves were fun. They were real work: we didn't have people literally slaying dragons (they were breaking a web app and a client/server app), but they were the distilled enjoyable essence of that work with most of the BS removed. In fact, if you didn't find the challenges fun, that was a huge signal that we were the wrong job for you.

* If you did decide we were wrong for you, you could stop at any time --- randomly, on a Tuesday night, with a slice of pizza in your mouth --- and have none of the weird social pressures that would make you sit through a string of pointless interviews. Which is an experience I have had, more than once.

Regarding certification: pure, chill-filtered hatred of certifications is what got me into the part of software security I wound up in. There is zero chance that we are going to build something with the market dynamics of a certification.
Eh, well, the alternative is perhaps that you buy a "new" app, install it on your device, and find that it's never updated anymore. Their current workflow allows you to get the last available version of an app you already own, which is what you want. You don't probably want to newly buy an app to find that the last version released that actually works on your device is years old.
I use a little shell script saved as an app created with automator for toggling hidden files:

showfiles=`defaults read com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles`
if [ "$showfiles" = "TRUE" ]; then
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
else
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
fi

In combination with the spotlight search it's really fast ;)

Edit: Formatting isn't that nice in the comments, here's a little gist which is pretty much the same.
https://gist.github.com/rprieto/7349079
> How did I not know this?

Because it isn't obvious, or even really very easy to find.
I'm not an expert, but my views of faculty was that many spend much less than one would think on research. According to 1 study [0] "Research – 'and the external funding and recognition it brings' – makes up just 17 percent of the work week and 27 percent of weekend work,"

Based on personal experience, I gave up the idea of a Phd when I saw how much time the professors spent begging for grants. And I've learned the most within the first 6 months of a new position. (This is also why jobs that offer a lot of variety are nice)

[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-show...
Well, the process will still exit unconditionally immediately afterwards, attempting to signal an error via its return code. It's hard to do better than that in the context of a real operating system.
I'm with you. The ls(1) and find(1) utilities in the shell are my day-to-day file management tools. I almost never use the GUI Finder.