skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what will happen now that several game engines are given out for "free". Will employees start to accidentally violate those license agreement, forgetting to send the 5% revenue which the license require, and a few years in the future we get a major lawsuit where unreal has to sue a future minecraft or candy crush?

In one way, this seem to be suggested. How can we expect employee of software development companies to understand software licensing, copyright, or that downloading stuff from the internet doesn't automatically make it free-for-fall. On the other hand, the software industry seems to be very aware of piracy, that downloading stuff from the pirate bay is copyright infringement, and that its not free just because its on the internet.

I am thus torn to the suggestion that this is a education problem.
I've ben axed twice.

Details aside, getting fired was best career move I ever made.
Controlled English query language
Harlan Mills has a much better metaphor that captures how different roles match with different personality types and doesn't insist that people be fired as if the company "out grows" certain engineers. (http://javatroopers.com/Mythical_Man_Month.html#Chapter_3)

If companies outgrow anyone it's executive leadership that for whatever reason can no longer motivate and inspire their workforce.
Did you get the job? I have the interview next week. :S
Had a great opportunity to use this in anger a few months ago. Working on a mapping application, where the map could only handle a few hundred items at a time, but the customer account had tens or hundreds of thousands. And the user could set a realtime filter which would select an unpredictable subset of the larger collection.

QA raised a ticket complaining the subset we were using (just taking the first n items from the collection that matched the filter, collection size was enough that we didn't want to double enumerate or store the whole thing in memory) was unbalanced, eg we were giving the impression that areas of the map that had plenty of items were actually empty.

Switched to reservoir sampling to make sure the subset was a fair representation of the collection, with only one pass and not blowing our memory budget. And everyone you explain it to gets to admire the algorithm.
yeah I never came across that website before (probably because I don't touch ruby) and I was pretty impressed. Thanks for sharing. :)
Most organizational "lay offs" start by identifying the most expendable, the least valuable, the people with the worst performance reviews, etc. This is especially true in the technology industry. I'm not saying this as an objective "it is thus justified", but rather a simple reality that the same criteria by which some shops might say "you're not working out, so I'm sorry I'm canning you" is the same criteria that companies like Microsoft use to chop the "bottom" 10% or so.

It's actually a little ironic that this conversation is happening because you're trying to load the term "fired". Fired never meant "because you stole" or "because you sabotaged the PCs". It just means you had your employment terminated, often if not usually for banal reasons of lack of fit or suitability. Life goes on.
Small nitpick: the Trappists are not the only Western order that practices the "vow" of silence. There are a couple of other orders which are smaller than the Trappists: the Carthusians, the Hieronymites, and the Monks of Bethelehem. (There might be more.)

The Carthusians, in particular, are quite rigorous and notoriously reclusive. Only family members are allowed to visit them, and even then, only once per year. There was a documentary made about them in 2005. The director asked the charterhouse if it would be possible for him to film them in 1984. The monks responded that they needed some time to think about it and replied sixteen years later that he could film them if he wanted. The Trappists, Carthusians, and the Catholic Church more generally, live on a very different timescale than we are accustomed to. Reading these interviews from them is wonderful.
>So you're saying that it's impossible to process information without experiencing it? That the act of processing and the act of experiencing are one and the same?

Yes, exactly.

>Do you think that computers are conscious? What about a single neuron that integrates and respond to neural signals?

This is a different question. No, computers aren't conscious. You need to have the 'right kind' of information processing for consciousness, and it's not clear what kind of processing that is.

This is essentially the Sorites Paradox: how many grains of sand are required for a collection to be called a heap? How much information has to be processed? How many neurons are needed? What are the essential features of information processing that must be present before you have consciousness?

These are the interesting questions. So far, we know that there must be continual self-feedback (self-awareness), enough abstract flexibility to recover from arbitrary information errors (identity persistence), a process of modeling counterfactuals and evaluating them (morality), a mechanism for adjusting to new information (learning), a mechanism for combining old information in new ways (creativity), and other kinds of heuristics like emotion, goal-creating, social awareness, and flexible models of communication.

You don't need all of this, of course. You can have it in part or in full, to varying levels of impact. "Consicousness" is not well-defined in this way; it is a spectrum of related information processing capabilities. So maybe you could consider computers to be conscious. They are "conscious in a very loose approximation."
speculation: the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.

You wrote:

For the first thing, I am noting the actual possibility. Whether he is, I don't know, but he in fact could be, and if he were, a lot of people wouldn't catch it unless it was pointed out.

You have a theory that he added a paragraph about embezzlement that might be a rhetorical defence, but you have no firm evidence. You're speculating.
What do you have against netbeans? That's why I put a question mark after my comment.

I have used sublime and textmate. They where fine but not my style. I don't work on MSFT code so I wouldn't use Visual Studio.

I don't understand why I would have to grow up?
Woah! Don't be afraid to plug your new firm in the blogpost :-) I doubt I'm the only one to mistakenly ascribe your new hiring policy to your old company.
It looks like the corresponding author of this article (Didier Raoult) is also the Editor-in-Chief of the the journal (Clinical Microbiology and Infection), so it seems entirely possible that he might have relicensed the article to Elsevier when the journal moved over there from Wiley. This would be permitted, since Creative Commons does allow for dual licensing.
Thanks, I didn't notice the issue. I'm guessing that the hn enhancement suite fixed it.
Similar story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760643
I was horrible at interviews. I was a sport interviewer. I had favorite tricky questions. "Design the fastest possible traceroute" was one for a long time. "Describe the most important feature of TCP NO WRONG, IT'S CONGESTION CONTROL NITWIT". I trust my own interviewing ability least of all, which is why I sink so much time into avoiding them.
Deploying Flask on Ubuntu with Gunicorn and Nginx
Then the document they sold should have had the relevant commercial license text included. If the document still contained the CC text then they can't really use that defense can they?
No, you're not mistaken! That's how Matasano has hired for something like 2.5 years. I left the company to do hiring-related things, after feeling like I'd more or less disposed of the challenge completely at Matasano/NCC.

There's a pretty big plug coming next week, though not from me. What we're doing meshes well with the worldview in my post, but it isn't a productization of it. This is just what I really think about hiring.
I use Google doc because I don't care if the syntax is perfect. Those IDEs do and when someone is nervous, they make simple mistakes and can't see them right away. It spirals from there.

I ask people to do the best they can to get the syntax right, and I will ask for corrections if it's way off.
Kind of like that report about how efficient the airport "backscatter" scanners were. All we know about the report is a congressman said that "if released we'd face public outrage". But hey, someone's making a ton of money out of it, so who cares...
Compare this earlier genealogy visualization: http://www.aviz.fr/geneaquilts/
Yeah, that's the only real problem with remote work sample tests.

Thankfully, with application security, you can mitigate most kinds of cheating by presenting a custom-written black box and require a candidate to attack it in some way. Unless previous candidates are leaking or sharing info, there's not that much you can do to cheat on that, especially if you have some reasonable time limit (< 5 hours).
Girl's Guide to a Toned Upper Body
Very good post. Thank you for sharing it. I've been interviewing applicants quite a bit lately, so have been thinking about these issues.

Two questions for you.

What is your experience hiring fresh college grads? Is the process different? Since one of goals of the process seems to not arbitrarily adjust it for every candidate, but rather stay consistent, do you think it makes sense to adjust it for someone who just graduated. They might have been learning computer science type stuff, data structures, did a few group projects and have certainly been practicing the typical interview puzzles, fizbuzz and O(n) times of the all data structures.

How do you account (or do you account at all) for culture fit. That is a fuzzy and slightly dangerous area. Is there a score in that regard? There are some people who are brilliant but they do not work well in a team, or rather would not well in one particular team. This is course full of danger as "culture" fit often becomes an opaque discriminator for racial, sexual and other stereotypes. "He's just not a good culture fit" is such an overload euphemisms that I feel kind of sleazy just saying.
Seems like the states/country should accept gold bars or bullion much more readily than bitcoin.

Of course, the ability to pay via credit card is only because tax processors add that ability, I see no reason why TurboTax couldn't partner with BitPay if they really wanted to.
I was a bit confused as to how an article published by Wiley could even be on an Elsevier site, but it seems that the journal is transferring from Wiley to Elsevier. Guess they messed up the licensing when transferring the articles.
That's not my implication, nor what I said! I said that this website should choose a link method which is unambiguiously not cloaking. Then there's no chance that you'll confuse search engine bots.

The duplicate content issue is not in play for my suggestion; as my edit above states, I'm only recommending changing links, not creating any new urls.
That is not a problem with MediaWiki, but that copyright on JavaScript has not been acknowledged or enforced since it was created. Site like archive.org, spiders, and scrapers are regularly copying JS, and most JS libraries I have seen lacks any copyright information whatsoever. Many media sites gives out JS snippets for users to include (for inline video, images and so on), but do not add a license permission to include (copy) the JS.
Royal Society celebrates 350 years of scientific publishing
I think Thomas is saying that, if the process is repeatable, then the person who possesses a black box which ingests smart person on the left end and outputs a programmer can rent that box to industry and charge, well, billions of dollars for its use. (Fermi estimate; cost of college education to credential the number of engineers AppAmaGooBookSoft will hire this year was on the order of 10^5 * 10^4 = a billion dollars.)
So, who feels like building a cloud based "work-sample tests" platform with me?
These seems pretty cool. My worry is that you lose intuitions of centrality with this, with the exception of degree centrality, since nodes with the highest degree are sorted from left to right. How can we capture other measures of centrality? What about weak ties?
This includes a lot of visualizations that I had never considered for interrelationships.
I believe in the 'learning style' myth, because it works. Some folks need text; others need pictures. Or they complain and don't learn. So what makes this a myth?
Ironic that the article is served with automatically-starting audio ads alongside.
That's probably best.
> How is that legal, are you invoking the Bush doctrine[0] of pre-emptive strikes, although to call that legal is a stretch.

The nuclear bombing of Japan was not a pre-emptive strike. Pearl Harbor was a thing.

> Are you suggesting that during a declaration of war it becomes legal?

While there are some prohibitions in treaties in force or what is accepted as customary international law on conduct during War (though fewer at the time of the atomic bombing than now!), yes, the consequence of a legal state of war -- whether initiated by declaration or an external attack -- generally is that fighting war by any but such prohibited means is legal. Those making the case that particular conduct is not legal would need to identify the source of the prohibition.

> Currently under international law that would not be legal unless agreed upon by the security council.

Well, the UN Charter postdates the atomic bombing, but even if it didn't it does not prevent the use of force against an aggressor once war has started (though someone had to violate the charter to start the war.) See, particularly, Article 51 of the Charter.
That's a problem with people, not with the LGPL. Would you sign a contract without reading it through? The same goes for software licenses. Suggesting an alternative license doesn't absolve people of the responsibility of reading the suggested text in the first place.

The language of most of common software licenses is straightforward; blindly using any license without being aware with their implications, especially in a commercial capacity, is... stupid.

Beyond that, we'll have to agree to disagree. If you're familiar with the four freedoms of the GNU free software definition [1], then licenses that are nonfree and non-copyleft do not ensure the four freedoms for users of the software. The (L)GPL has been carefully crafted to ensure those those freedoms. Although that might not matter to you personally, preserving those freedoms is important for many people.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I lot of these editors are jaded because they spend so much time dealing with "hilarious bro prannks." I don't envy them.
Still it proves that Opera 15 could have been done differently while still remaining Chromium-based.
"No, they're not. In the Western world, this is mostly an American thing. In most Western countries, there's a major responsibility for the employer to prove there is no other way before getting permission to fire someone."

It's basically a court case to fire someone, which makes it very easy for employees that should be fired to keep their jobs.

"The cop-out of "this isn't working out, you're fired" borders on infantile behavior on the level of "I don't wanna play with you anymore". Firing people can have a devastating impact on the lives of the people it happens to."

Sometimes it isn't working out and that person needs to be let go.

"Firing people should not be that easy, and in most civilized countries it isn't."

There is a reason why the US has the most innovation as well as the best place to start a new company and one of the reasons is because it doesn't require a court case to let someone (that isn't working out) go.

These kind of regulations prevent smaller companies from even starting and will create an environment with mostly large companies. It will eventually kill the startup scene that HN loves so much.
Show HN: Simple calculator, try urlcalc.com/1+2
Even on your own land, if you go too far your city's code inspectors might get involved.

http://www.kvue.com/story/news/local/2014/05/25/2435656/
That's sort of a problem. Also, look at these pages:

http://www.autoaccessoriesgarage.com/Seat-Covers/_Nissan-Alt...
http://www.autoaccessoriesgarage.com/Seat-Covers/_Hyundai-So...

The page looks identical, and if you think you're fooling Google into thinking these pages are very different with a couple keyword-stuffed paragraphs of text, think again. Now open both in separate windows and click a product. The product page itself doesn't change except for the vehicle name inserted with a cookie. This looks like you're just mass-generating category and product pages dynamically, which is probably what you're doing.

Don't get me wrong, I feel your pain, and funny enough I've solved this EXACT SAME problem on a similar car accessory site. Maybe I can offer some advice.

Your main Panda problem is that you have a page for every type of product for every make and model. That's a LOT of nearly-identical pages. You need to consolidate them somehow. Easier said than done, right? You don't sell all products for all vehicles, and you want users to have an organic landing page when they search for something like "[make] [model] [accessory].

Instead of generating these landing pages and making up text, I'd use a filter on your car covers page that sticks the user with a URL variable that stays with them until they change their make/model. This also frees you of the need to make up pointless mass-generated paragraphs.

This truly is frustrating, because the site is actually functioning in a way that makes sense for the user, and Google is penalizing them for it.
Why not link to the newspaper article, rather than the summary?

http://www.torontosun.com/2015/03/05/i-built-the-mystery-tun...
Are they really written out of history? Rob Kalin shows up as the first Google result for [etsy founder], is listed on the knowledge panel for [etsy], is the first name mentioned on the Wikipedia article for Etsy, and is mentioned several times there. Eduardo Saverin had a whole movie made about him, and Ron Wayne features prominently in Steve Wozniak's autobiography.
A hiring bonus would be a better impedance match - both sides are taking a significant risk. A candidate quitting a job is a significant, generally irreversible, risky step, while handing a new hire a 5 figure sum on day one is similar.
I see the TP debate as an example of a more general phenomena where people consider themselves to be an expert on any subject they have even a single direct experience with. ('Expert' is probably too harsh though; it's more like "I want to share my knowledge, even if it's not actually useful.")

Edit: It may even be a biological instinct.

PS: This comment is probably a perfect example, now that I think of it.
Thomas,

Great article. The prelude to the interview with books given to candidates is especially interesting. I'd love to see that reading list, and would further like to suggest posting it on your careers page. I would imagine that anyone who goes to the trouble of working through your suggested materials would be providing a very strong signal of quality and investment.
It seems like whenever someone brings this up, they have an untone of sexism within their point. Like "See! Women are fine, let's ignore pay imbalance, the lack of female CEOs, lack of woman in tech', and every other problem."

Facts cannot be sexist. However I cannot help that feel like this one gets bounced around because people have some type of agenda. This just further goes to prove how powerful of a force patriarchy is. Woman do better in academia but get lower paying jobs and promoted at a lower rate.
Io.js 1.5 released – with Buffer#indexOf and various enhancements
It's perfectly reasonable to expect extra data to be collected when using prerelease versions of software. Complaining about it now is premature.
Backend Developer @ ShareProgress http://shareprogress.org

At ShareProgress, our mission is to help progressive organizations achieve success through the use of data and technology. Innovations in these fields have made it possible to organize and campaign more effectively than ever before, but most groups don't have the knowledge or ability to take advantage of these advances. We help organizations like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, CREDO, Compassion & Choices, AFL harness these innovations for their work.

For us, progressive means more than just the political left. It describes any organization working to help and protect the less fortunate amongst us or to make life better for the population at large: improving our cities, protecting our environment, encouraging civic engagement, fighting for economic justice, and providing training and opportunities for those who haven't traditionally had access to them. Our primary focus is on nonprofit organizations, but we consider any company with an inherent social good mission to be progressive as well.

This role is full-time. Preference for the position will be given to candidates in San Francisco, but REMOTE work (including from outside the US) is a possibility.

Your Job:

- Scoping out, developing, and validating new features for the ShareProgress web tools

- Researching and making recommendations on third-party tech services to use with the platform, when appropriate

- Keeping an eye on scalability for all new development with the ShareProgress codebase

- Coordinating with the larger ShareProgress team on projects related to platform development

Experience with:
- Ruby on Rails

- Test-Driven Development using RSpec

- Developing scalable web applications (to handle hundreds of millions of records)

- PostgreSQL and Heroku

Benefits:
- Health/dental/vision insurance

- Stock options

- Team outings around SF

To apply or learn more, send your résumé to jobs@shareprogress.org.
According to Zach, Github doesn't have managers. So if there are no managers, then who fired him? Or can anyone just fire anyone else? Maybe Zach could just hire himself back.
Sure, my only point is it's not universal nor free (so many pundits in the US seem to think it is). Family of 2-4 is 104/month in BC.

Note, this does not include anything beyond medical, ie not ambulances, not vision, no private rooms, no dental, no physio and not prescriptions and in BC does NOT cover things like IVF (Ontario does cover up to 3 attempts).

Those are all extra (to the tune of 200-300/month for a family - usually paid by your employer - there are plans for solo/self employed http://www.coverme.com/ for instance).
ChipWhispererLite: Open-source toolchain for embedded hardware security research
Not at all. You get fired when you do something wrong. You get laid off when management does something wrong.
> One of the reasons you usually don't hear about why people get fired is the employee is offered a severance package in exchange for signing a non-disparagement agreement.

Obligatory: I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Just FYI, nondisparagement agreements have fallen out of favor in recent years, as they're interpreted very narrowly by courts[0]. Even if your company presents you with one (which they may not), you can usually negotiate it out pretty easily.

Especially in industries or jobs in which reputation and "social capital" are highly valued, companies are tending to leave these out, because they're actually massive liabilities for both parties, and there are already enough restrictions around defamation, sharing of confidential information, etc., that it's usually not worth the risk.

I have no idea what happened in this case, but it's worth mentioning since you bring this up.

[0] As in, this blog post would almost certainly violate a standard nondisparagement agreement, even though it's relatively innocuous at first glance!