skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recognized your confusion because not so long ago, I also had it. I started hearing about reputable security conferences having "CTF tournaments" and was all like "oh cool, they're playing shooters for prizes, go geeks!" and then was disappointed when I discovered that someone just stole the term CTF to call pentesting contest with it (it takes a lot of imagination to say that a file is "a flag"...). Not to say those games aren't fun - and I am very excited about Starfighter - it's just I don't like stealing names with well-established meanings and using them to something completely unrelated and not really fitting.
I wouldn't worry too much. The incentives align.

Starfighter doesn't make any money unless they actually place someone. Their pitch selects for people that aren't doing well in the traditional hiring process. So if a company tries to use its ordinary process, just putting the candidates in at the front, we can expect they won't do especially well. If a few candidates get sent out to an interview, have a miserable time, and don't get the job, I'd bet Starfighter will fire the client. Even when you are just selling to clients, you need to occasionally fire a toxic one. In a two sided marketplace it is absolutely crucial. The screened, high quality, applicants looking for a new job (or at least willing to consider one) are too valuable a resource to waste on companies that aren't serious.
Sure, that is what I use. Great package. But I can't tell readers what to use.

I spent a bit of time supporting a reader. It is easy enough for me to get the versions, but the typical reader may not be au courant on the latest libraries in Python. For example, we have Python 3.4, and IPython 2.4. IPython 2.4 runs Python 3.4. That's confusing until you realize that the IPython version has nothing to do with the Python version.

I mean, none of this is unsurmountable, but it feels quite wrong to have to provide tech support to somebody that just wants to read a book.
Based on my experience with the crypto challenges and Microcorruption: there will be a lot of players, and most of them will just be there to twiddle the knobs and see how things work.

There will be a subset of participants for whom it's worth their time and ours to have a conversation. Our job will be to identify that subset and start that conversation.
Dropcam customers cannot access accounts without Nest
How about a game to discover and formally describe new problems? The ability to find new problems is just as important if not more important than the ability to solve already known problems (especially those that have been solved by others) Obviously, the ability to do both (find new problems and solve them) is the most important of all. Focusing on solving known problems is NOT that interesting... Can you imagine building an environment that allows programmers to discover and formally describe absolutely novel problems in computer science? Just curious.
What kind of pleb prefers Finder over bash?
Awesome service. Had fun playing with this.
Total accident. Is it not clear to some that these are error bars?
I will probably go that route if we ever rebuild those tools.
This is really cool! It's a nice explanation of the topic (including some very effective diagrams), and the resulting visualizations are great.

[Side note: In discussing the distortion of the event horizon, the author says "I suspect the punctured sphere → disk map is conformal/biholomorphic". There is a conformal map between the punctured sphere and the plane[0], but there is no conformal bijective map between the open unit disk and the full plane.[1] Thus, the punctured sphere and the unit disk cannot be conformally equivalent.]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereographic_projection
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_disk#The_open_unit_disk.2C...
I have been using Ubuntu 14.04 since it came out. Anyone who calls Yosemite buggy should try running Ubuntu as their primary system and see what buggy really looks like. YMMV, of course.
I think you have an interesting concern. I don't worry that this will become an "extra certification", though.

I imagine that one might still get called for a 3 day interview, but I suspect that people using a work-test like Starfighter before asking for that will already have a MUCH better idea about your capabilities than they would have without it. Interviews then seem like they become more about assessing your fit with the company, and less about trying to weed out incompetence -- because they wouldn't invite you for an interview unless you'd already demonstrated your competence in this way.

That sounds a bit bad, if it were for only one company, but what excites me about Starfighter is that it sounds like something I'd want to do for fun __anyway__, and its signals about my competence (I hope! ;)) could then be given to multiple companies -- including ones I might never have thought to apply to.

I'd much rather hear, "Greetings Starfighter, .... we want to hire you to do more like that" than get spammed by random recruiters because my LinkedIn profile happens to have Python or Java on it.

At this point, my biggest fear is that I might not have the technical chops to complete the challenges.
I only know the term as applied in the Defcon sense (which goes back to the late 1990s).
I always thought its kind of funny that everyone believed this to be true when in reality you could just deactivate the sound in the driver settings. Which I did pretty much immediately, but nobody I knew ever even thought of.

Its a perfect example for the fact that most people will never ever change the default settings.
Sorry no, it's an easy clicky pointy path to hell when you discover one month later no-one understood what the file path options meant (and there can be many when installing Standard+) and then the system volume ran out of space.

Or what accounts to run SQL's various services under and wonder why stuff doesn't work or their SQL box gets hijacked ("oh I'll just run this under the SYSTEM account").

The install wizard for SQL Server 2008R2 Standard Edition has around 20 pages (counting tabs on a page) of user selectable options and settings. You certainly do need to know what you're doing and understand the implications of each every one of those settings.

Sure if you're just doing a quicky install of the Dev Edition on your workstation you can afford to be a bit lax and click on through, but on a mission critical production box you need to RTFM or let a SQL admin who knows what they're doing perform the install.

I've been called in too many times to unf*ck a SQL server because a customer has declined one hour of installation support because their devs thought they knew better.... "oh yeah it's just clicky pointy install, why do I need help with that". Trust me GUI installers do not equate to "easy install" if you have no clue what the installer is asking you.

I'm a SQL (MS and MySQL) admin, amongst many other roles, for a webhoster with 19 years MS SQL Server experience (started on SQL 6.5 in '97), been there seen it all.
We want G-rated curiosity. We want the benefits of creativity and invention, but without the naughty bits.

Newton practiced alchemy, occultism, and religious heresy. Thomas Edison researched the use of electromagnetic fields to communicate with the dead. Francis Crick claims that LSD played a role in the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. Jack Parsons, an early pioneer in solid rocketry and co-founder of NASA's JPL, was a practicing occultist and student of Alister Crowley. Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, has bankrolled investigations into the paranormal (Google 'NIDS') and claims that a UFO sighting inspired him to found an aerospace company. Burning Man is practically a Silicon Valley networking event.

Is some of that stuff silly? Sure. But invention is a product of feral minds. If a truly questing mind wants to go there, it's gonna go there and your religious or skeptical-scientific reservations are not going to dissuade it.

I suspect there are many more heretics we don't know about, especially among the non-tenured or not-yet-tenured in academia. Even with tenure, espousing really wild beliefs or asking really out there questions can get you hoisted up on a rail. In the private sector there's a bit of a bias too-- I'm sure many executives or entrepreneurs might feel wary of espousing out-there or unconventional beliefs for fear it might impact their ability to win customers or raise capital.
I actually liked the style. For me it read as amazing, totally cool and definitely-want-to-participate-in thing - but that might be mostly because I know who patio11 and tptacek are and don't apply the typical --bullshit-filter=strong flag I do when reading other announcements.
Do you have a wishlist of all the problem domains you'd like to tackle? (I'm thinking web, mobile, and desktop applications above the system level when I ask this, but any other areas are wonderful. Databases. etc.)
We used it at Matasano and had a diverse culture of people --- many with families --- with a variety of different personalities and personal styles. Beware of attribution error.

The underlying idea here isn't speculative. We used it at Matasano, and it was extraordinarily effective.
Yup. The iconic lack of care on software side can be seen since forever when ejecting an usb. What used to become an eject icon with an eject label it's an eject icon with a trash label

That is just the smallest of thing, but is so easy to spot and fix and really his square against the level of detail the hardware side gets.
Developing Watch Apps for Apple Watch
> However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job.

That's a nice thought, though it rather presumes that the playing field is level outside of the immediate neighborhood surrounding the hiring process.

I think that neighborhood, though, is probably, while not without gender/race/etc. bias, overrated in terms of the proportion of that bias on the course between birth and getting a software job that it is perceived to contribute.
Clear and beautiful (i.e. elegant).
I think I deleted the line from the draft that actually got published, but an earlier draft said:

Companies will process Starfighter candidates expeditiously and with dignity. Why? Because we're the work-sample company, and each candidate's experience is a work-sample of your hiring process. I see no need to introduce the best engineers in the world to anyone but the companies that most have their act together.

(Plus, yeah, obvious confluence of interests there regarding incentive compatibility.)
What Your Favorite Apps Look Like on Apple Watch
Facebook goes on 'ambitious' 1,200-person hiring spree to launch VR products
I'm curious which tasks you find easier? I was a hardcode Linux user before I got Mac, so I had to try it. Four months later, and I never boot into Ubuntu anymore because everything works equal or better on OSX.

Am I missing something?
I remember seeing people complaining that their accounts on google play got banned due to security issues with AppLovin SDK.
Example: http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/advertising-network...

Any comment on that?
I actually hope this happens, and that there's a community of code sharing that forms around it.
I am also a lover of shitpliances. A long-time shitphone user (before Android shitphones it was years-old Sony Ericssons and Nokias), I also buy shitty used laptops, tablets, TVs, sound bars, and... that's it actually, I don't own any other technology. But I always buy the lowest possible priced hardware that will do something I want. I like to think that i'm cheating an industry founded on selling the hapless techno-dweeb on electronic appliances that will lose 80% of their value in two years.

I can remember exactly the moment I realized the ridiculousness of the overvalued tech gadget. Finally armed with enough money to buy my own computer, I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ Pentium Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never value a tech gadget that highly, and would only pay the bare-bones price. (That idea is probably why there literally became a market called the "barebones PC", computers with random commodity parts pieced together by the purchaser, like a made-to-order self-assembled Model T Ford).

My current shitphone is a $75 AT&T Go-phone with 1GB RAM and a dual-core 1.4ghz processor. I refuse to update any apps for fear they might use more RAM or CPU for some improved feature and make the apps less stable than they already are. I enjoy dropping it onto concrete in front of people and watching their gasps and cringes, only to show them how the seemingly plastic screen remains unblemished. I might be a shitphone sadist.
jrochkind1 correctly pointed out that divorce doesn't involve sexual coercion, which seems a good reason not to regard it as an instance of rape.
WhatsApp Voice Calling Invitation Text Spreads Malware on Smartphone
Minecraft people Mojang sneakily add 'standalone' Java just for gamers
I don't think Home is in the favorites pane anymore as of Yosemite (just created a new user to test ... it's not).

What's worse is that choosing something known to be under the home, like Desktop or Documents, yields a bare window with no way of seeing what's above it, in any of the view modes.

Eventually users will discover "Go" menu (yeah I guess Home is someplace I might want to "Go" - but I assumed that's where I already am and that it was just a view issue). Go menu seemss a pretty odd place to stash such an important location.

Not going to bite on the subject of requiring a three-finger solute just to go home ...
Project Ara is a cool idea, but I don't know if it's really practical for a device that needs to compete on size. A single motherboard with chips soldered to it will always be thinner than multiple modules which each require their own case and interconnects between them.

And sure, you might be able to upgrade individual modules, but even the interconnect will become outdated after a few years.

I'd love to be proven wrong though, it's a cool concept.
"More powerful" is a little hard to isolate as tightly as you are doing here. The 1.1GHz model will burst a single thread at 2.9GHz.

I'm disappointed there's no 16GB RAM model, and that'll keep me from buying it, but CPU perf is not on the list of my worries.
I find the cFE , http://sourceforge.net/projects/coreflightexec/files/cFE-6.4... pretty interesting - used as a base for actual spacecraft software, such as the LRO, LADEE, ATLAS and many others.
How did you manage before magsafe?
> The same way you do it with math problems. Mastery of the subject material is the easiest cheat code.

This, at best, sidesteps the question. If a solution is a string of characters, that string of characters will end up on the Internet.

If a solution is a series of tasks---try this string of characters, observe what happens, then try this other string of characters---people will still share the strings and instructions on the Internet. All this still holds if the strings are personalized in some way; then the general patterns will be shared.

I spent a few years at university as a teaching assistant for a programming course using an interactive IDE where this kind of thing was required: Run the provided unit tests, ONLY THEN write some code, ONLY THEN run these other tests, ONLY THEN make the appropriate modifications etc. The idea was to make cheating more expensive than actually thinking about the issues, and to some extent this succeeded in the narrow sense that cheating WAS more expensive, but it did not succeed in the more general sense: people STILL cheated because they really didn't want to think things through.

The higher the stakes are, the more not-so-great people will be attracted to the system and will chug through based on someone else's solutions. This will be a fun game for those who see it as a game, but I don't see how the using-this-for-recruiting part will not implode almost instantly.

Finally, the whole thing about keeping even the general subject areas a secret is a bit silly. The work the best tech companies in the world need ranges from medical visualization to databases to systems programming to pentesting (one of you wrote this will not be a pentest game!) to static analysis and verification to distributed systems to scientific computing to drawing pretty pictures in web browsers to... You will only cover small sliver of this. Everybody knows this, why be an ass about it?
I think so, but I don't use the web services so I can't vouch for them.
Seems odd that the actual cost of tuition is not stated anywhere on the site and discussion on it is vague; all that's stated is that you pay it with your internship earnings + 25% of your salary for 2 years post-graduation. Seems ridiculously steep[1] and unscrupulously variable[2].

[1] With some companies paying interns to $10k+ monthly, a student could pay out around up to 60k earned (a 6 month internship period is referenced on the site), then get a $120 job afterwards and have to pay another 60k over two years, totaling 120k.

[2] Meanwhile, a student who gets a 30k internship + 100k job only pays back 80k for attending the same school.
It's because the last few versions of OS X and Apple's applications have seen bigger changes than previous versions. And a lot of the more hardcore Apple fans tend to dislike change. A lot of Apple's more long-term fans hated OS X when it first came out, too.

I'm not trying to bash Apple fans when I say this - I'm an OS X user too, and admittedly I only finally moved on from Snow Leopard last year (I actually like a lot of the changes, and most of the ones I don't like are ones that are easy to ignore). This phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to Apple fans either - just look at how many people still refuse to upgrade to Windows 8.
Well yes. She is. By a substantial margin. It's incredible really, and I mean that in the strict sense of the word. in-credible.
Standard, boring light water reactor with unusually good passive cooling. The exciting part is the modular, assembly-line nature of how it's produced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power
https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-ctf-history.html

Wow, I didn't realize that, thanks!

I retract my point about "stealing names". I guess that this application of term CTF just wasn't known widely outside INFOSEC field and that's why a lot of programmers (like me) get confused, as security conferences become more recognizable in the mainstream.
> Honeybees and wild bees alike are mysteriously dying off all over the world. And scientists have long struggled to pinpoint why, exactly, that is.

I really don't understand why there's debate over the notion that insecticide use is killing insects. This is incredibly obvious. Bees are dependent on flowering plants, which we have recently begun spraying with poison to prevent them being eaten by insects. Bees are also insects.
SaaS Sales Agreement:  license??
There's been much debate among lawyers about whether or not a SaaS agreement is a license or not and most California lawyers (at least those in the debate) have reached the conclusion that it is NOT a license but a right of access to the software. That's because there isn't any copy of the software being provided. I know, complicated, but think about it.
> Another language worth mentioning is Bliss

I work with a former member of the DEC compiler team who brings up BLISS from time to time. One feature he liked was the control over register assignment, making it easy to keep frequently used variables in registers across function calls.

I'd be curious to know whether BLISS lives on at VMS Software, Inc. as they port to AMD64.
We prefer to keep things a pleasant surprise, but we'll be emailing anyone who signs up with a suggested reading list if they want to start brushing up on old skills or acquiring new ones to get ready for launch day. The reading list will give a good deal of direction.
Whoah. You misread and we miswrote. We are not taking our clients problems and reframing them as games. How boring would that be?

Read "real" here in the sense of "plausible".

Sorry about that.
I would be surprised if it's mobile communication towers is what's killing them...
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Remote: yes
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: Python, Django, Javascript, Angular.js, Backbone.js, AWS, Frontend, Backend, Mobile (iOS, basic level), REST, MongoDB, Redis.
Résumé/CV: https://angel.co/lardissone
Email: lardissone@gmail.com

I'm a software developer from Argentina who worked remotely for companies in the US and several other countries for more than 12 years. I'm looking to help you make your project the next big thing!
The thing is, making money off providing a useful service that benefits society as a whole isn't immoral, so I don't see why it's that big of a deal. Nobody is forcing anyone to participate.

EDIT: In fact, socially rewarding companies that do good things incentivizes others to adopt ethical strategies and might do more good than a vow-of-poverty educational service provider.
Neat idea, I hate having to go looking for new music. My current solution is listening to the recent uploads of a few music curators on YouTube that I like.

You should definitely give more information on your website and provide examples of past songs you've sent. The whole "minimal to the point of no information" trend is bullshit. I signed up with fake info and it just said "great". I would not join this service as is. This post also likely violates the Show HN rules[0].

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with.

> For example, blog posts, email signups, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they don't count as Show HNs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
EDIT: Ill need to lookup other CTFs like this... as clearly I am not familiar with how they work.
The Surface Pro's come with only one USB port on the device, they make it up for it with having one on the power brick which I think is an awesome idea.
I thought the way it usually works is that the leader of the group gets hired as CTO somewhere, and then brings the rest of the team with him as subordinates?
It would be helpful to know exactly what's killing them instead of just assuming the reason is obvious.

Especially if we plan to reduce the damage to their ecosystem.
A thousand times this. I loved the "spatial Finder" of System 7. It was such a 1:1 mapping onto the filesystem that even my DOS-using friends realised that this wasn't a GUI abstraction over something cruder, this was the Mac and this was how it worked.

23 years later and I still can't consistently switch off "browser view" in the OS X Finder. Cmd-option-T works for windows on my local disks, but then I'll insert a USB stick or similar, and they appear as standard in browser view. Ah well.
I use this feature a lot..

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services > Enable New Terminal at Folder [0]

Not sure if this works in Yosemite.. 10.8.5 works fine for me currently, so not risked / bothered upgrading.

0: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/420456/open-terminal-here...
Right now I'm wondering, "Does this have any overlap with tptacek's Amazon reading list?" but I suppose I'll find out with the email arrives.

Thanks :)