skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a pity that there is so much background noise on the audio, it really makes this hard to watch, especially on headphones.

Vivid is an interface SuperCollider, apparently built with livecoding in mind. The talk itself is mostly examples and provides little detail on how the system works behind the scenes.
I asked someone with a PhD in statistics to, "Explain regression to me like I know some math but have never used statistics." For those of you who don't know, regression can be taught to people either with a single course in calculus or people with a single course in linear algebra. It is also a, maybe the, fundamental statistical tool. I'm generally satisfied with people drawing some points on a 2-variable graph, explaining we're trying to calculate the least error fit, then telling me what that the error specifically is squared error. If the candidate can discuss penalties and outliers and glms and exponential family distributions and IRLS and sampling distributions and gauss-markov then great, but I'm satisfied with a really basic understanding. This guy couldn't get any of it. I simply don't understand how you can have a phd in statistics and not be able to explain in 60 seconds roughly what regression is, how one interprets the betas, and at least one basic inference method.
coin pouches ruin the leather of wallet and make them really bulge out. Just store coins directly in your pocket.
What data are you basing this assessment on?
My take: Anything that tries to hide the underlying asynchronous nature of modern computing is going to get you into a heap of trouble when the abstraction breaks (and it will).

RPC is magical thinking (and it was always a bad idea), synchronous messaging will make you loved by hardware vendors as you come back to buy faster and beefier machines, and if you're doing distributed shared memory, well, good luck with that.

I have little to say about microkernels (and yeah, I've worked on them) other than the good systems seem to start out micro-kernelish and then mutate into something useable, while the good monolithic systems start start looking more like microkernels over time, so the truth is probably in the middle.

That caching on file servers and file replication were ever controversial seems quaint. :-)
One-stop-shop for Azure news
I am currently working with Google. We had people who couldn't code on our team. I don't know if they were officially contractors like me or Google proper.
I have one of these knives. It's handy since it's always on me and it fits in my wallet. That said it would be easier to kill a man with a calligraphy pen than this knife. I need to remember to take it out of my wallet before my next flight though, I completely forgot it would raise an issue.
I've been using a Bellroy Slim Sleeve for the last few years and couldn't happier: http://bellroy.com/wallets/slim-sleeve-wallet (no association with them beyond just being a satisfied customer)
Potentially also that if every butterfly that ever existed were still alive, we wouldn't be very fond of them.
>Compiling main() with an assignment and a print is technically programming, but has extremely little to do with what is actually being developed in real products. You aren't going to give anyone a job if this is all they can do.

I do not think that is even necessary to being a programmer. It is possible that someone has always worked on projects with an already existing build system, and only knew to run "make" (or equivalent) to compile. These people could be competent at actually programming, but not know how to compile something outside of an existing build system.
If you were to put the event bindings in the markup instead, some of the examples would look very similar to Riot 2.0 [1] tag definitions, although it uses a more Glimmer-like approach which only looks at the bits which can change based on the template, instead of a Virtual DOM.

[1] https://muut.com/riotjs/
Bootstrapping New Product Development Part 1
I have a credit card made from some sort of metal. I've little doubt that that will start getting flagged now, too.

As much flak as we give the TSA, I'm glad we have someone with a mission to secure airliners. I just wish they had a better user experience...
> Universities seem to have no incentive to fail people out, and every incentive to continue grade inflation.

Ostensibly, the idea is that if you don't weed out the idiots, you are going to end up with people with degrees from your university who are garbage, and this hurts your brand. You see this happening with for-profit colleges, where grade inflation is particularly egregious. "Well, we've given a bunch of DeVry grads a chance, and they've all done terribly. We're not going to be considering DeVry grads anymore unless they can really, really prove that they're any good."

This should, in turn, get back to prospective students, who won't go to a college if it can't get them a job.

Unfortunately, you're now at three steps that are pretty opaque and difficult to measure, and the rewards for lowering standards are immediate and vast.
I'm with you. I have written a mountain of Bash scripts to solve various one-off problems, and I'm fucked if I can ever remember the nuances from one time to the next -- when to use [], when [[]], when () or (()), when the dollar sign precedes (), etc. Every single time I have to do anything in Bash I have to re-learn Bash. I suppose I keep using it because, even with having to re-learn every single element of Bash coding every time, it's still faster for doing a bunch of filesystem stuff for me. But god, I hate it. I can't think of a computer technology I hate more. I hate it more than R, and I really hate R too, for some of the same reasons.

I keep intending to learn Perl really well, which I think could absorb much of Bash, and also Awk and Sed, and then there would be only one thing I needed to know for this kind of work, and I might use it enough to remember the various weird syntactic bits from one month to the next. But I never quite get over the hump.
I think technical interviews will be obsolete in the future, your technical competence will be evaluated with GitHub or other public projects. So the interviews will be only about culture fit. I don't know if I will ever be in a position to hire anyone or even if I'll ever work as a programmer, but this is how I would interview. Send me a link to your GitHub, if I like what I see, I want to know if we would get along well, if we do your hired.
What you're missing is that he had to tackle a large number of disciplines and execute them at least halfway competently. Lots of people can do antenna work. Lots of people can do RF design. Lots of people can do DSP. Lots of people can do HDL. Lots of people can do C. And there are a fair number of people who could do all of the above... but 99% of them are too chicken to try. That's what earns my respect, more than anything else.
Follow Solar Impulse 2 live
I've never worked with anyone who flat out couldn't code. I've worked with some who needed more help than others, but I'm fine with that since I've been that person myself with some things. But never with someone who just couldn't do it at all.

On the other hand, I've certainly had interviews with people who are just awful at it. So much so that I think the interview process is by far the greater obstacle to finding competent people than some huge mass of incompetent people out there.

Think about it this way- Almost no one has ever had explicit training in interviewing. Everyone learns by trial and error and rumor and superstition. It's one of the most cargo cult aspects of any given business.
Does not crash for me: Chrome 41 on Windows 8.1
It crashes for me. Chrome 41 on Yosemite.
I can set up my own git repositories so I have no need for github.
Sadly doesnt support the PUT or DELETE http verbs so I'll have to setup my own proxy :/
I had one job that, days before the interview, sent me the spec for an archival format they used, and asked me to implement an extremely basic archive generator and email them my code. At the interview, they asked me to explain what my code did. I went into detail about specific implementation decisions, things that worked for this restricted domain but would not work for a more general version, and ideas for future development.

Best job I ever had.

I think the answer to your question is that it's impossible to determine whether someone is an STE with 15 minutes in front of a whiteboard, because nobody codes like that. You will get false positives from people who can slap together a simple algorithm but don't understand why slapdash hacks aren't good enough for production, and false negatives from people who are brilliant coders but need a little while to get into the headspace, or have their flow disrupted by having to use a damn marker instead of a keyboard and their favorite text editor. You cannot identify an STE in a one-hour interview. If you want to see if someone can code, have them actually code.

Oh, here's another big problem I don't think anyone has mentioned yet: people who think that the stuff they, personally, have memorized represents the core knowledge of computer science that everyone should know, and everything else isn't really important. This is the guy who is unimpressed by absolute mastery of regular expressions, but sneers in disgust when you don't know all the arguments for pushd off the top of your head.
No true Scotsman would question my definition of a "real programmer."
A cool source for searching and sharing Local Events in 2 clicks or less
Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower
I think the author is saying we should do interviews like nearly every other industry.

Look at past experience, and ask the candidate to talk about that experience to verify that they aren't lying.

If someone has 5 years experience working at Google, and they can talk coherently about technical aspects of the projects they worked on, there is no reason to ask them to code on a whiteboard.

The way it currently works is this: I see you have a CS, degree and 10 years experience at a well known company.
Excellent. Now you have 2 eggs and a 100 story skyscraper. Tell me the minimum number of egg drops you'll have to perform to discover the minimum height that will break the egg.

Every engineer no matter how experienced has to answer questions like they just left school yesterday, no other industry does this.

>Personally, I know that to be false. I have worked with incompetent engineers, who literally couldn't code FizzBuzz.

99 times out of 100 you could catch that engineer by talking to him about technical aspects of past projects he worked on.
New version of sidewaffle released
> Grad students are compensated in other ways: training, prestige, independence, etc.

A grad assistant is usually not perceived as an employer by most universities, US and abroad. As such, from the university's perspective (which you took in your comment), one cannot say that they are being compensated, at all.

Assuming that you do understand that a graduate assistant (in this case, e.g. a research assistant who is also a student) is actually an employee of the university,

- The training they receive (courses et al) is what we call unpaid training. They do not receive salary for the hours they spend receiving training, which is a requirement for them to do their job (research assistant) efficiently and successfully.

- Would you accept payment in prestige if you were in, say, Google or Apple? A graduate school has much less prestige (hence the need for "internships").

- Independence does not exist for a grad assistant, whose not only livelihood but also school registration depends on her/his relationship with her/his "mentor" (i.e. boss / advisor to boss) and other department members. Not only job security but also school security depends on maintaining "good relationships" with these people. (As a student, on the other hand, s/he is expected to produce and engage in independent thought.) Additionally, this particular kind of employee cannot switch jobs easily since most jobs will not provide benefits for external education.

- No or lower-end benefits etc.

You can very easily hire a grad student on a "free market"[1] for even $15k/yr if they are [made to be] desperate enough. Most already are.

[1] Please read Adam Smith to understand how a "free market" actually operates. It's not what you think it is.
That's actually not a bad idea for hot button threads like the firefox CEO one a year ago, it would've forced ppl to think a lot more before replying and kept the discourse at a higher level (bec most ppl would've either waited or not replied at all and those who would pay wouldn't waste their $5 to call someone they never met a bigot or whatever).

Though for where the donation goes it'd probably be best to keep it rotating between non-political causes like Red Cross, AA, etc.
I think this is fixed in upcoming releases.

It DOES NOT crash for me on Chrome Canary (43), on OS X 10.10.

It DOES crash for me on Chrome 41, same OS.
I got 6/8, but I had already heard of robots writing box-scores (more than one of the questions).

I was duped by the old english poetry, and also the novel which was dictating a human experience. I imagined it too difficult to write that for any current type of writing programs.

They need to get this technology into spam bots, pronto!
http://xkcd.com/810/
This seems like a great idea.
I currently have Google News Alerts to get information about Microsoft Azure.
I have always wondered if there is a site where I can get all the information on Azure I need..
I will browse through this in detail..
It's definitely cheaper.
If I said that lots of people commit murder, is that an endorsement of murder?
htaccess would have been your friend.
How did you prevent any visitor from deleting the site?
I worked with a guy who, after having been at the company for 6 months, called me over to his desk to help with a "problem." He wondered why he was getting a syntax error. Okay, fair enough. I looked at his screen, and he was putting the arguments to the function OUTSIDE the parentheses. The guy had clearly just been copying and pasting code until "it worked" the entire time he had been there. I almost palmed my face right off of my head.
How is it determined who needs to pay child support then?
As an interviewer, I would have hoped for this:

int sum = blah.OrderByDescending(x => x).Take(2).Sum();
Name a more free and open platform than the web. You can choose from any point in history.
Then he can wait for the RNG to produce this same random data. Eventually it will produce a file which matches. A dynamic solution of sorts, because he would have to be quick to diff, before the file starts changing again.

I feel that the compressor for a true random stream is a true random generator. If I quickly show you a screen of black-and-white unpredictable noise, and ask you what it was, you'd compress/understand/recall that as "generate_noise()". I do not feel that this is lossy compression, for what did you lose? The ordering of a random file? Random files have no order to lose.
I am not sure if your comment is supposed to reply to mine.

I do think there are incompetent engineers, and I have interviewed about a dozen of them. It is very easy to filter them out.

The challenging part is to evaluate how good the candidates are, and if they would be good for the team and for the applied positions.

In start-ups with <20 engineers, you would like to have the candidates to be able to wear many hats. In a big engineering team, the requirements could be different. For example, besides challenging and creative work, there could be some tedious, even boring, work. The latter is also important, both for the whole system running smoothly and for the long term health of the system. So if the candidate is sufficiently competent, very detail-oriented, disciplined, team-oriented, she/he would be an excellent fit for the job, even if she/he is not technically very strong and couldn't figure out challenging technical issues. An excellent engineer, on the other hand, might get bore, grumpy, and leave in 6 months. It is expensive to restart the hiring process.
Accessibility. Screen readers allegedly support JS - I don't use one - but I think we can agree it's a harder problem to solve than HMTL.

Not to get too much on my high horse, since you're clearly in an area where there's no way you could ever support vision impairment, the problem with ignoring vanishingly small portions of an audience is that the same people tend to be in that portion all the time and never get anything. For apps that aren't expecting interactions more than every ten seconds, it's so easy to just give them flat HTML.
The marginal benefit of grad school is obviously a very personal thing. It depends on a) how excited you are about your current position/opportunities in industry, and b) how excited you are about the independent research you'd pursue in a PhD program. The latter will of course depend on what program(s) you're considering, who your likely advisors might be, and if there's a research topic you're passionate about investigating that you wouldn't otherwise be able to pursue in industry.

In my case, I was interested in machine learning, and after doing some internships as an undergrad concluded that there was no easy path to work on interesting ML problems in industry with only a bachelor's degree (both because the positions weren't available, and because I didn't know enough to do the work). So for me the first-order benefit is that I get to spend my time learning about and working on stuff that I'm interested in, and developing a skill set and a credential that should let me keep working on interesting things for the foreseeable future. It's different for other people, of course: some want to become professors, some want knowledge for knowledge's sake, some could pursue their chosen area equally well in industry but have a specific crazy idea they want the freedom to explore (I think this is more common in systems research), some want the lifestyle flexibility to go skiing in the middle of the week and make up by cramming work on weekends, etc. For most people it's really a mix of these factors and others.

The other main bit of grad school advice I have is that your relationship with your advisor is extremely important. The chance to be mentored one-on-one for six years by an extremely bright person you click with, share interests with, and who wants you to succeed is incredibly valuable. On the flip side, the possibility of being stuck for six years under a boss who doesn't care about you or know how to motivate you and develop your skills can be a massive liability (and one that's harder to escape than the equivalent situation in industry, since a lot of people internalize the value structure of academia and think of quitting a PhD as a failure on the part of the student rather than the advisor). So whatever you can find out about your likely advisors -- both by talking directly to them when you visit (are they looking for new students? do they seem enthusiastic about you specifically? how do they help their students find research topics? what is their philosophy of how to develop a student's skills as an independent researcher?), and by talking to their students: take them out to coffee and ask pointed questions like "is X a good advisor?", "what do you like/dislike about working with X?", "what sort of person is best suited to working with X?", "would you make the same choice again?" -- should have a huge bearing on your decision whether to attend, even if your program doesn't actually make you choose an advisor initially.
I'm building up the database of candidates at the same time as the database of startups. There are two sign up paths on the form, "Get Hired" and "Hire".

The benefit to the startup is convenience. Startups get a regular e-mail with engineers including their contact information. No app or service to log in to. They also don't need to deal with anonymous introductions to candidates who aren't seriously looking.

Requiring startups to specify which companies to hire from may be limiting or like you said not productive. If I see many startups selecting many or all companies I will simply make it a requirement that candidates have worked at a top tech company and not specific ones.
Doesn't crash for me; Chrome 41 on Linux Mint 17.
this article's description of intense wallet dissatisfaction feels like it comes from a different universe. I'm completely happy with my leather bifold wallet, and I'm not the type to shy away from complaining about consumer goods.
Ask HN: Is anyone building a decentralized resilient messaging app?
git add -A && git commit -m "message" is equivalent to git commit -a -m "message"
Am I the only one getting 403s on arxiv for the past week?
Probably because the embassies are not yet equipped to issue them yet.

Here's how you apply: https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/apply-2/
New App Enables Time Travel
> htaccess would have been your friend

htaccess didn't exist in 1996.

This site ran on IIS 1.0 on Windows NT 3.51. For scripting we used a prerelease Coldfusion version. (i.e. the version before 1.0, which was released as we were developing the site, partially based on feedback we provided as we tested it.)

> How did you prevent any visitor from deleting the site?

A security token in the url which was secret. The worry was that some admin would try to submit the site to altavista for indexing without removing the token from the url first.
He asked some pretty straightforward questions, like what the poster's concrete contributions to the project were.
Whether or not an argument is popular or not[1] has no bearing on whether it is correct or well-informed. But it's cool of you to dismiss my arguments by implying that I would be a social pariah.

[1] I'm guessing you are implying that my opinion would be unpopular among women.
I was once asked "Can you do a quick fizzbuzz implementation on the white board for me" by an interviewer. I stood up, looked at the whiteboard and said "So it's, what.. multiples of three are fizz, five are buzz and both are fizzbuzz right?" and he said "Yep, nevermind, let's move on."

There was a lot more technical, and a lot more practical stuff to that interview as well, but as someone with both dev and dev management positions on their resume, I appreciated that the interviewer just wanted to know if I'd prepared or at least been paying attention for the last few years with the easy opener. Would you even consider someone in this career field who didn't know what fizzbuzz was?
You are too polite. Where I come from, we call this "a pile of horse shit."
This is why I like to give laptops to engineers and ask to make something simple, that might require logic, but doesn't require any sort of specialized knowledge. They can even look up documentation.

Like make a table view that has word counts for a string. Or make this simple puzzle game. Or make a simple address book app.
Probably not. This happens more than you might think. I got called in to consult on a project where something similar was happening. Client would add products to their web store and the next day the products were missing.

Unsecured access and 'GET' based deletes were everywhere.
I've been happy with MightyWallet [0], but I don't need to put tons of stuff there, just a couple of cards and some cash. It's very thin and that's what I like about it, almost unnoticeable in the jeans pocket.

[0]https://www.dynomighty.com/mighty-wallet/
People are too lazy to use ID cards for something like commenting. More importantly though, most Estonian comments are anonymous with people attacking each other or politicians or whoever they like. Nobody wants to comment using their real identity.