skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for your detailed answer. You make a lot of good point, but I'm still not entirely convinced:

> Assume the server operators are 1) competent and 2) trustworthy. Then let them use the standard, time-tested technology of SSL to send data in the clear, and trust them to encrypt it on their end.

What if the developers are entirely trustworthy and almost competent? And, what if there'd surface a JS crypto library that's also pretty time-tested and be considered equally secure as, say, OpenSSL?

The almost competent developers could be relying on entirely standard OSS browser-side encryption library. If they then make a minor fuckup on the backend (say, forget to update OpenSSL in heartbleed-times, or look past that newest Rails vuln Egor Homakov found, or look over an intern-created SQL injection in a code review, etc), then the harm is smaller because there's simply no plaintext ever in memory on the server.

Like the GP said, by doing client-side security, you really do add another layer, right? This of course assumes that the client-side JS is decent, but there's no need for the coders of the app to homebrew that just like they don't tend to homebrew their HTTP server or their SSL layer.

Sure, some of the above-mentioned vulnerabilities could enable a hacker to also inject false encryption JS code but that's still way more complex than just injecting some server-side code that dumps plaintext to pastebin.

I'm interested because I consider myself to be such an "almost competent" developer, at least when it comes to security. If I can add another layer of security by using decent OSS and not becoming a crypto expert then I'm very interested.
Why do node people feel like they have to re-invent everything UNIX?
One Plus Two Coming Soon, Likely with the Oxygen OS
We've done this.

Back in the Day, it was BSD Unix, which used tcsh as the interactive shell and Bourne shell as the scripting shell, as tcsh had tab completion but has a scripting syntax which is harmful to sysadmins and other living things, and Bourne shell had a sane scripting language but no interactive functionality beyond cooked mode.

We developed Korn shell, Bourne-Again shell (bash), and, eventually, zsh to move beyond that idiotic experience. These days, our non-interactive scripting languages are Python, Perl, Ruby, and Ruby with a different mix of libraries, all of which have better FFI other support libraries than any shell does.

My point is, unless bish has Python-class libraries, I don't see the point of taking on the annoyance of having a scripting shell different from my interactive shell.
> doctors are asked trivial questions just a handful of times in their careers during their bar examinations and boards.

This is incredibly inaccurate. Physicians have to take a series of comprehensive, extremely difficult licensing exams just to graduate medical school and get a residency. Then, to be board certified, you have to take and pass comprehensive and expensive board exams in your specialty every couple of years, depending upon the specialty. Furthermore, they keep increasing the frequency of the required examinations. Doctors take tests to prove their knowledge their entire careers.
Could you expand a bit on the intangible benefits of a cs PhD? I have recently been offered admission to a top 10 program and am struggling to decided between it and staying in industry.
I don't disable javascript, only some externally loaded scripts. Anything loaded from the same host is allowed.

I expect some sites not to work fully, but completely blank is unexpected.
https://weworkremotely.com is a good start to find remote jobs. http://careers.stackoverflow.com as well.

I worked in London for one year and I prefer working there. Waaaay more stuff to do in London, and you have a lot of great developers over there.
See my reply elsewhere: sell a lab-kit, customers send them in, anonymously if they want, get results by writing the code from the kit into a website.

This is kind-of-anonymous (won't help if the feds are after you)
This reminds me of a scene from Continuum, where the protagonist, who was a time traveller from the future, had to buy a Bluetooth headset and she expressed her bewilderment on how much material we waste on packaging something small.
If they weren't making backups before, and you instituted them, they should have been super happy with you.
I'd like to think your points are unnecessarily and viciously cynical.

I'd like to think that, but actually I suspect you are dead right.
The examples include threats of rape against his underage daughter. How on earth do people here find that acceptable? Would it be acceptable if she was 16, 15, 12..?

It wouldn't be acceptable if she was 30 or 90.
I've been going through a 10€ wallet every 2 years but then I walked into a leather shop, asked a quality one that would last longer. It was 20€ and it still looks about the same as when I got it 5 years ago. It's the same one the German who commented before has. Also here in NL everybody has those.
> Yet another testimonial that something is wrong with Git UX :)

I'm not going to debate whether git's UX is good or bad, but I don't feel like this is much of a testimonial to that. Bearing in mind that git and bash's aliasing capabilities implement the short-aliasing side of this project, (as just about every other comment in this post mentions), such that "git" can be aliased to "g" and "status" to "s", most of his examples seem to either output needless output ("Fetched!"), or output less than the original command (gg status), or are otherwise quite similar. An alias for clone seems like an odd example — the original command is 4 keystrokes longer; what's gg add here?

It might be good to show in the README how each example is materially better than git's default output, because I'm just not seeing it.
Can someone please comment on the significance of this for the physics layman.
Except if you're somewhere where it does matter. Take Canada for instance, you cannot call yourself an engineer without being a licensed Professional Engineer.
I've never heard of Royalty Cards before — that's interesting. What country is this?
Stop blaming the Euro… It was not its fault. We are just awful at managing money we lack a strong moral sense. Simple as that.
It's funny because I'm pretty sure this is exactly the kind of thing projectileboy was talking about.
Lol check this fish kissing a baby and baby enjoys the kiss
> I can't tell a "stakeholder" who did real engineering work apart from a "stakeholder" who got their name attached to the patent for political reasons.

Neither can most interviewers.
Wide Eye Creative is hiring a Senior Web Developer (Washington DC Preferred)
Yours is essentially a variation of the correct horse battery stable/diceware method. It is quite secure way to generate/encode passwords, but I'd recommend using more words, at least three but preferably four. The punctuation, numbers and capitalization might help to get through some onerous password requirements of some sites, but they do not contribute as much as the words to the security of the password.

edit: Just a reminder: check your randomness source for security!
Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543
I strongly disagree; it seems rather perverse to label many developers and programmers as engineers, because most of what occurs in development and programming, especially because of the lack of rigor involved, could scarcely be passed off under the heading of traditional engineering, and should not be confused as such.
And?

It is a webapp, those require javascript. The fact that you do not like it is not really relevant.

Ludits cannot be allowed to stop progress.
Wow most programmers aren't allowed to have any sort of hobby involving programming without risking a lawsuit from their employer? That seems pretty crazy, I'm surprised places like California permit that.

Any ideas what companies tend to have such onerous conditions in their employment contracts? I've never seen something similar but I've only ever worked for smaller (less than 500 people) companies.
Signs that you're a bad programmer (2012)
NO!

Now you start reading before making assumptions!

SERIOUSLY: The reddit link is about KiA being subreddit-of-the-day.

The other link is about the Swot[sic] team, and it is NOT on reddit.

Now you wait until you are sober and/or ready to read before you comment : )
I have trouble understanding people that are not happy in London. Maybe it’s just my spirit city or something.
Stoicism and coding go together
Those Amazonian women are sending me this book as we speak...
It could easily be done in a shell script with a bit of effort, which would remove the dependency on node.
Interesting point. Though universities allow F students in through loopholes. Fail HS, go to community college where the tests are open book, then transfer to a University which by law must accept them.
My money's on Unicode.
Hosting external javascript allows sites to load faster and it is easier for the developers so that strategy isn't going to last much longer.
Or your analysis is wrong and he didn't need to know a single keyword in C to be fantastic at his job. i.e. if this is the truth then if we re-run history but you spontaneously accept an excuse and let him skip your technical interview, you might have been extremely satisfied with his work and input with you over the next 9 months.

We have a couple of things to analyze here: 1) could this have happened? 2) in this case would your satisfaction be false, i.e. he wouldn't have been doing good work for you over the next few months?

Or is there a chance that he had some skills that didn't require knowing any coding, while being able to contribute valuably to you...
This sentence was not written by an algorithm
I am pleased to see an increasing uptake in mass higher education, except like the OP I think we have confused liberal education with job training. But it would be unwise to ignore the history of distance learning, which started with correspondence colleges in the 1800s. Certainly anything which was done by post can be done now by computer, so I have no doubt that MOOCs can work. The question is how judge if they are "radically superior".

California used to have (1). The GI bill also meant (1) for many veterans. Germany, Sweden, and some other countries still have (1). Which makes it easy to judge if current US universities are radically inferior to tuition-free universities. The Open University in the UK is a decades old example of (2) and (3), though not (1).

It's therefore hard for me to accept that MOOCs are significantly more radical and superior than existing systems which already incorporate most of the points that are supposed to make it radical and superior.

And, (4) Seriously? What, some employer is going to come and insist seeing my individual assignments for partial differential equations before hiring me? And read through my essays for sociology class? And my term papers for introductory philosophy? Embrace the Panopticon!

For that matter, my wife's college (she takes online courses) is focused on team projects, so most of her assignments are done with 2-3 other people. How is the outside world supposed to figure out which part is hers? How much time are they willing to spend to disentangle this?

And finally, if this were useful then a pen-and-paper correspondence college could add a small surcharge per course to hire someone to scan incoming mail and put it in a file for future reference. That that hasn't happened, nor that there's been a call for it, suggests that it isn't so useful.
A Quick Note on Getting Better at Difficult Things
I'm glad these make your life easier, but I'm not sure why anyone else who already knows how to use git and can make their own aliases would bother learning yours.
Startups specify what tech companies the candidates have worked. This narrows the pool of candidates to ones already vetted by these companies.

For example, if a startup chooses Google and Facebook, they will only receive developers who have worked at Google or Facebook and who are looking to be hired by a startup.
I don't have any maternal instincts (by definition) but can assure you that loving a child is actually pretty easy (and natural). My adopted daughter is our fourth child and I've got the same attachment to her that I have to the three I sired.
It's all about continuous development and not how old an engine is. Unreal 4 is great in 2015, id Tech 3 with little development since 1999 feels like yesterday.

Unreal, ID Tech, CryEngine, etc. most modern game engines date back to the mid to late nineties. But where as e.g. the Unreal 4 engine has been in continuous development since 1995 and came originally with an editor coded in Visual Basic, one cannot compare the limited Unreal 1 of 1998 with Unreal 4 as of today. Sure many code lines are still unchanged and in Unreal 4 but especially the graphics and editor have changed a lot.

A modern Call of Duty (e.g. Ghosts) still use a heavily modified Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.² engine (Ritual's ÜberTools) which itself was a heavily modified id Tech 3 engine with the GtkRadiant editor. Infinity Ward added texture and map streaming in Modern Warfare 2. The id Tech 3 engine is now open source, but there is a big difference in the capabilities of what you can do with Infinity Ward Call of Duty engine and what you can do with id Tech 3 that has seen little development since then - also in the tool section.

GoldSource/Source/Source2(?) is one of the oldest engine still used in AAA games, based on Quake and Quake World. The Worldcraft/Hammer editor is dated in comparison to UnrealEd. Hammer editor for Source 2 engine seems to catch up.
He likely meant loyalty cards
If your technically astute hire spent too much time on HN or Reddit, it sounds to me like you failed to engage her with interesting work.
Ah, sorry about that. I agree there should at least be an error message.

We originally built this as a page on openlistings.co (/fixers), but then found this awesome domain. The assets are all the same from openlistings.co, we're just checking the current domain in our Backbone.js router. Kind of hacky, but it was the quickest way to get it up! Also, if you click any of the detail pages you need the rest of the assets anyway because it takes you back to openlistings.co. Long story short, it's pulling in assets and doing API calls to openlistings.co.
Not that it invalidates your larger point, but I feel I should point out that I invented FizzBuzz while primarily interviewing European candidates in London :)
It used to be that "doesn't work with javascript" also implied "breaks the back button, sucks for SEO, isn't accessible and I can't email urls to people"

It was a convenient short-hand for many things but it's not very reliable in that regard any more.

This site seems fairly solid at first glance so personally speaking I'm not the slightest bit bothered that it doesn't work with javascript disabled.
Oh yes, my mistake, they're immutable. I was thinking of []byte.
I'm definitely familiar with foldit. I TA'd a class where we have extra credit to students for playing around with it. It's very cool! Thanks for your work.
Cowboy coders don't like to see the holes in their development process.
I would be interested in similar experiments but with a couple of minor variations to see the effects of each:

1. Sending the NOINDEX meta tag

2. Combining meta tags

3. Monitoring for a referrer URL that matches a Google search page to catch the 1st non-sneaky user coming from the index.

4. Monitoring other search engines and their behaviors.
50 Online Data Courses
No, I mean it literally, as in can't do do a loop/if/assignment level operation. ("Write a function that returns the sum of the two largest numbers in an array" is the literal question I would ask that the majority of candidates -- all with years of experience doing software dev -- were unable to answer.)

They simply flat-out could not program. Full stop.
Ask HN: How to overcome mental weakness?
Hi HN!

I turn to you in order to see if this community has actually answers to my problem. Shorter: I feel mentally weak, and moreover, even after reading advices about what it means and how to overcome it, I still fail at changing that.

About me: I'm a junior developer in a small start-up that does augmented reality, developing their mobile apps. I'd like to end up doing 3D real time rendering one day, and am quite into C++ as well.

So, how do you truly overcome mental weakness, that is:
- "Not showing up": there's this quote that "80% of success is showing up". Yet I still can't find the... energy? determination? in me to do “show up” to achieve what I want (e.g. recently I've been trying to develop my own 3D renderer).

- Giving up too easily: I think that's also one of my main issues, when I sometimes (miraculously) find that energy to do things, I won't stuck with it very long if difficulties show up.

- Emotional breakdowns: I've found that recently I'm a bit too inclined to, when facing difficulties, have kind of breakdowns, where I'll just stop and sigh, feeling quite depressed that I don't "achieve" what I'd want to.

- Whining: That's something I feel I do way too much, when I stop and just whine about how I won't make it and how I can't do things anyway.

I feel I've done the first part: identifying what's wrong. But I’m clueless as to what to do now. I feel like a fatalist "Anyway, that's cyclic. Not being able to make efforts won't help me to get out of this mental state". I've read articles that give advices like "Set up short goals", "Plan ahead", etc. But I find myself just unable to "show up" and apply these advices. I always end up just lazing instead. I feel trapped in a vicious circle where my lack of mental strength prevents me from reaching a state of mental strength where I could achieve things.

Have you found yourself in such a state and how did you overcome it?

Many thanks if you've read this far.
If you have coding experience it should be very easy. Most charts will simply need data in JSON format passed to them. Personally I use Keen.io for storing and querying analytics data. You can get a live URL of an query that can be directly connected to your code. They also have a dashboard template to get you started.

https://keen.io/docs/data-visualization/
Much like tattoos.
> In all my years immersed in the tech industry, I have never once heard a firm talk about the idiots lurking in their own offices. They always seem to be elsewhere. For everyone.

It certainly sounds like the author doesn't think there are any actual incompetent engineers out there.

Personally, I know that to be false. I have worked with incompetent engineers, who literally couldn't code FizzBuzz.
Please. The service is controversial to begin with and they seemed to have shady practices in trimming out posts mentioning competitors. This imagined anti-competitive thing is just fear mongering. A quick search here shows less than a handful of posts that might be considered negative.
This looks pretty but what's in it for me? The service is proprietary - it's a data silo with some very restrictive T&C's.

They are using Open Street Map for some of it and I'm already a happy contributor to that open platform. Maybe I missed it in the press release reprinted by petapixel.com but I don't see what financial incentive contributors have. Maybe I'm out of touch but saying I'm 'empowered' and that this is 'crowdsourced' isn't that interesting.
Have you ever tried researching the factual rational counter-arguments to that idea?

I think you owe yourself that, because repeating what you hear on the news is not going to make you a better [+edit] informed [/edit] citizen any time soon.

You can start here for example:
http://esquerdaalternativa.bloco.org/documentos/18-a-chantag...
Just check out any of the MIDI music forums for some sweet digital baroque art.
The US FDA frowns heavily on home diagnostic devices when it comes to detecting disease. It's not the technology that is the obstacle.
I've been in the industry for about 8 years now, and not having a degree hasn't made any measurable difference to my career prospects (in the long run).

Actually, it's pretty routine for a boss or coworker to ask me a year or two into a new job "hey, what university did you say you went to?"

My response: I didn't go to school.

Starting out though, it was a little tricky: I was making $27,000 as the sole developer at little photo-lab in downtown Dallas, TX. However, once you get a year or two of experience down on paper, and assuming you kicked ass those first years, not having a college education isn't a problem.
I got 7/10, but I think I would do better on prose with 3-4 sentences rather than a single one. Poetry is probably a bit tougher though.

I don't find computer-generated snippets that impressive--I mean, a lot of it is just pumping out variations or markov-generated mix-and-matches of things humans wrote in the first place. More impressive would be passing the Turing Test :D
“After four days, how can you not recognize your baby?” Sophie Chas, the lawyer for the clinic, told the newspaper Le Figaro. “We can believe in it when it’s a second, a day, two days. But 10 years? The mothers may have been involved in creating the damage.”

How sad that the lawyer chose to argue that "the mothers may have been involved in creating the damage"... because they trusted the doctors? ...because they didn't possess some "maternal instinct" to recognize a baby they had spent almost no time with? Even after say 2 years or 10 years it's your fault because you didn't call the police to report that your child's skin tone doesn't match your own? How is it even acceptable to make this argument in a court?
Is there a numerical analysis or just looking at the listing agent description? What I look for as a real estate investor is price disparity: a house with a much lower price than others around it. They say you make money when you buy a house, so buying a low-priced house and bringing up to the standards of the neighborhood has been my formula.
Well, good luck explaining your perspective to women, I guess.
fish does make scripting so much saner.
- $array just does the right thing, which bash can only approximate as "${array[@]}". This alone is worth everything.
- (command) splits the output on newlines.
- Block syntax is simpler, with exception of boolean composite conditions that need awkward begin ..; end wrapping
- "everything is a command" syntax makes writing sometimes more verbose but reading easier.
- prototyping at the command line then turning into a script is easier thanks to multi-line editing with indentation and syntax highlight.

There is however the portability factor. I've used fish as my only interactive shell for at least 5 years yet I rarely write a script complex enough to justify requiring users to have fish installed. Even when I write only for myself this sits at the back of my head and biases me to #!/bin/bash...
From this perspective, "bish compiles to bash" made me immediately take note as a wise move.
Federal benefits (esp. healthcare) are also quite nice.
1 Trick to Better Yourself and Business
OK, but how are you finding/convincing these prospective candidates to talk to these companies?

What value are you providing these companies here? The fact that you're already requiring the employer to TELL you which companies to target puts you far behind an average recruiter just in terms of hassle & productivity.
In 4.7.2 is max. 100mi² = 259.00km²
Say what you want about Google (it seems to be common here), but you will never work with anybody like that at Google. Really never ever.

You will work with managers, PMs, and lawyers who have much more coding skill than that.

Not to say there isn't bad code. Actually the problem at Google is people write too much code... But there is a base level of competence you can expect.