skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does "written by a computer" even mean?

I mean, computer-written can be anything from filling in some blanks to rendering a formula by reverse-parsing. And suppose that an apparently fancy formula actually results in blank-filling-in most of the time?

Lots of professional writers are described as following a formula. Lots of writers and non-writers construct text using word-processors and even an occasional search-and-replace.

-- Oh, and add to that "The Eliza Effect"[1], in which it's pretty easy for humans to ascribe greater meaning to some kinds of computer generated text than it really has.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
This Week in Science: 3D printing bones, regulating behaviour, and more
Privacy is long dead. I am sure some people will care, but not enough to matter.
Ask HN: What's next after websites and applications?
The website/application paradigm has been useful for a while, but it's now dated and out of touch with today's considerations. It is wasteful and unsustainable to expect every individual/business/product/service to create and maintain their own digital gateways. Why are we still doing this?

As a user, I don't care about software diversity. I don't want a restaurant or phone manufacturer to "differentiate themselves" by making horrible UI. Most businesses shouldn't even think about UI and presentation, they should delegate these concerns to third-party UI/UX platforms. They should focus on their products and services, nothing else.

It is clear that the website/application paradigm where a service is tightly coupled with its UI is not going to last. People don't want 100 websites bookmarked, and they don't want 100 apps on their smartphones. They just want to get things done. How? That's for you to answer.
No concerns about the privacy. The rewards outweigh the risks. Why be afraid, on the Internet everybody anyway knows you're a dog.
What I would do is search reddit for the article URL, if there have not been any submitted yet, then I would submit it to the appropriate subreddit and hope a discussion forms.

Unfortunately, with the way reddit works a lot of times this fails for larger subreddits, because your submission gets burried, but it works just fine with smaller subreddits.
It may be related to this issue: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=445075

Tentative fix: https://codereview.chromium.org/868393002

I did experienced this bug around January with Chromium on Arch Linux, but now (v40.0.2214.115) everything is ok.

Edit: I've replaced "Known" with "It may be related to this", as I'm not 100% it's the same issue.
Estonia itself tries to do that for anyone in the world: https://e-estonia.com/taavi-kotka-promises-10-million-e-esto...
Seekr[0] was posted to HN 2 months ago.
It is described as a Reverse Search Chrome Extension, and it supports Reddit / Hackernews / Twitter / Facebook / Google+ Discussions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8854712
They're really really not stupid requirements.

The poster you're replying to isn't narrowing to a niche, he/she is simply trying to catch a red flag. You're right to be concerned that there are many interviewers who will climb way down the ladder of abstraction to their own particular niche and then crucify a candidate. But this isn't one of them. The poster even explained that it was only really a negative if all were wrong. I use a similar process as a quick pre screen.

Sailing through all questions allows us to proceed at a relaxed pace. Having nothing to say for one or two questions tells me nothing (it could easily be a fault of my question rather than the candidate). But no coherent answer to any question? Red flag.
This also happens in places where people are hired 'in bulk', and where technical questions can be answered by rote. Even when your standards are higher, it's still easy to hire people that are just slightly more incompetent, just by not doing a coding assignment.

This is why, at least around here in the Midwest, it's easy to stereotype other programmers by just looking at the last few companies they worked for. Came from XYZ? I won't even suggest an interview, because their architects would barely be junior devs here. Came from ABC? You don't need a screening, because you'd not have lasted two years there if you aren't at least decent.

This is the real reason hiring through networking is so prevalent around here. If someone competent vouches for you enough to bring your resume forward, chances are they'll at least not embarrass themselves in a simple interview that asks for a little bit of coding.

The reluctance of accepting a mistake in hiring is also an issue too, but I see more of that when we add both time and changing standards. For instance, I know of a big company that started with a really low talent level. They somehow managed to hire better people than they had, as time went by, but promotions have a lot to do with seniority. So you have a team of 'architects', that are supposedly in charge of things, but that, really, are worse at their job than the people that they are currently hiring. So what happens there? They have this nice cycle of hiring developers, having the good ones see that they will have to spend their time there arguing with architects that were never that talented, and whose skills are now outdated. But the architects have been there so long, they are part of the scenery. They'll never quit, as they'd never pass another interview for their experience level somewhere else, but they'll never leave their spot open unless they are fired. And management will not fire them, because they are old buddies. That's how organizations decline.
Some people care. And anybody implementing something like the suggested idea here should enable both hosted "preferences" and the capability of just being a hub for these same "preferences" hosted in external sites.

Here's a solution that is like Gravatar, but for microformatted data in each people's own websites: http://webvatar.com/
Thanks.
Honestly, I'm starting to consider that possibility, that what I pursue is not what I like, but I don't know for now, I think that's the only thing that keeps me interested. I like to read about 3D rendering, I like to watch conferences VODs. But when it comes to sitting behind the keyboard and getting things done...

And that's actually a great quote.
http://howtospendit.ft.com/technology/77791-the-man-behind-t...

Before I leave, Ive holds up the watch’s white outer box. Almost imperceptibly, the bottom begins to move, obeying the law of gravity that pulls it away from its other half. It is graceful, calming… and far from accidental. “We work out what we feel is the optimum time for it to drop and then we back off that and work on the tolerances, and even work on the friction of the materials we use. I mean, that’s fanaticism,”
I agree with you, but I also have many friends who are on a neverending quest to make their wallet smaller and slimmer. I think a part of it might be society figuring out just how much someone really needs to carry in the digital age.
> we cannot afford to waste any of the limited attention on non-critical problems like landfills.

As an environmental, this type of attitude is one of the things that concerns me most about the alarmist attitude on climate change.

Climate change is an important problem we need to solve. It is not, however, the only problem.
Graduate students who work for university as teachers are unionized at many schools. Research assistants might not be, on the theory that their research work is supervised education, not net value creation.
This is also the same problem with the entire H1B situation and why Google, Apple et al. have made some pretty poor justifications of the price-fixing collusion: because they've avoided investing in on-going education to such an an extent that the only thing they've been able to imagine for getting talent is poaching it from other companies (leading to the on-going upwards price war).

They could easily solve their problems if they actually wanted to train people, and promoted those who would/could mentor more aggressively.
Can anybody figure out the year on this one? Internet Archive says 2011 but it seems it might be earlier.
The idea here is, these are apps that will have a watch app on day one. I expect Apple is going to drop iOS 8.2 next week, so these apps will already be on your phone, with the watch binary, waiting for the day the watch jumps on your wrist.

I have a few duplicates just for filler. If you have any suggestions, feel free to submit them or let me know here.
Is there any chance the bad programmer was new to whatever language you were working with? Stuff like this:

"The fooBar subroutine was one statement long."

reminds me of when I first started to learn Clojure. I was so used to "=" or ":" for assignment that I had a difficult time seeing where the assignment was happening. Especially the rules about destructuring, which took me at least 6 months before I was comfortable with them. Also, the recursive rebinding in a Clojure "loop".

I don't mean to defend the bad programmer that you are talking about, but I can imagine an experienced programmer having trouble recognizing assignment if they were new to the language and the language had some unusual system of assignment.
General Relativity turns 100
Flappy Bird Is Dead but MLG Flappy Bird 420 Lives (Short Video)
> you need the rest of the assets anyway

Like I said, I expect some things not to work. But the page should not be completely blank.

The plain text on the home page does not need javascript for anything.
First cards were issued in December. The first e-residents were Edward Lucas from The Economist and Steve Jürvetson and Tim Draper from DFJ http://news.err.ee/v/politics/874266b1-53ce-49ad-b1da-6ff9e9...
Idea Sunday is awesome.
Please don't tell me Geocities was our Renaissance.
So Western centric. Now imagine you're a brilliant 2x year old guy in Ukraine, Belarus or Vietnam. That $30/hour would put you in the upper 1% of income in your country.
Gender-neutral communication: how to do it
A Firefox (or Chrome) plugin to collapse comments on HN.
There are a series of licensing exams for the (non-software) engineering fields: one typically takes the Engineer-In-Training exam at the end of undergrad, then can take the Professional Engineer exam after a few years of working under a licensed PE (exact regulations vary from state to state).

These exams are more common for civil than electrical engineers; if I remember correctly, there are regulations that require a Professional Engineer to sign off on blueprints.
It's from "Sohrap Sepehri" [1] an Iranian poet and painter. and I think the replies to your comments answer you question.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sohrab_Sepehri
Yik Yak has been racking up some controversial media coverage for quite some time now, and before it came along, some of its predecessors were doing the same. I doubt this is the result of some intentional strategy on a competitor's part. And if it were, it's a short-sighted strategy. All that this bad press is accomplishing is getting Yik Yak more and more coverage, and thus, more and more public exposure. It might also have a "forbidden fruit" effect: making non-users more and more curious about using it.

I'm sure you've heard the old expression, "No publicity is bad publicity." There's some truth to that, especially when your business or brand kinda-sorta benefits from being seen as edgy or controversial.
It's probably a systematic issue with how programming work is paid for. There are lots of 'software companies', but there are orders of magnitude more contracting and consulting and IT companies - companies that charge work based on what some sales guy can get through the front door. After that point, it's about filling in seats with whomever can charge the most.

Software companies need people who can code, as well as do other things. Other types of companies that do 'IT' need people who can look good in a seat. This causes lots of incompetent people to get jobs for many years.
Ask HN: Do password reset policies really prevent security issues?
Per the title, I'm curious if the security-minded folks amongst us feel that forced password resets (particularly on Windows hosts) make a real difference. I understand it's not a philosophy that will change, as it's the stuff of baseline security, but am curious as to whether or not its value is perceived as high.
As a father of an premature born child I find this topic very interresting. Do you have an idea where to look for more info on cognitive deficits of prematurely born children?
I knew a guy who could go to the board and draw a FSM, construct a context-free grammar, or construct a proof for anything the professor asked for.

And in Algorithms, he could go to the board and walk through any algorithm we happened to be talking about.

In essence he was perfectly suited to white board interviews.

But when I worked with him in Software Engineering his code was unmaintainable, poorly commented, and he was very abrasive and unpleasant to work with.
You're the one who doesn't understand the free market.

Grad students tend to be intelligent capable people (from privileged backgrounds too!). Therefore we don't expect grad students to be desparate, because we infer that they ahve a lot of other options.

The only sense in which grad students are desperate, is that they really want the other advantages that being a grad student confers, most of all the education and experience, and the degree they get at the end. And this was precisely the point of the post you replied to: graduate students are getting non-monetary compensation.

If you disagree, I challenge you to find one testimonial from a grad student whose story is that they were so desperate for money, that they had no choice but to enroll in grad school to make ends meet.
Got it, thanks for explaining. Here's my two cents and I'm sorry if it's not what you want to hear:

The foundation of recruiting is sales - you are competing again internal, external recruiters and many other avenues pursued by an employer to hire THE best candidate for a given role. They don't care about anything but you delivering the best in the most efficient way possible.

I regular give advice to people testing new tech recruiting approaches - because the system is broken in many ways. The worst attempts at fixing are generally made by engineers with limited understanding of what it takes to actually be.a.recruiter. They assume that their technical proficiency will give them the edge - wrong. This is the mistake made by most technical people who believe they'll also succeed in sales - it ends up being a handicap. For the most part, actuaries make terrible insurances salespeople, mechanics fail in car sales, and so on. Human first, salesperson second, technician a distant third.

At this point, all you have is a visually appealing tool that may add a tiny fraction to the employer's hiring productivity. But that means nothing unless you have the best candidates for them, yesterday. If you are starting from scratch, you'll either need to partner with a recruiter with a huge rolodex or spend about years building up your own. You cannot just enter this game without a huge database ready for your hiring campaign. It's a numbers game, it takes massive outreach before you can even offer a simple tool like this to differentiate yourself. Until then, an employer could care less unless you've proven you can deliver the best candidate, now.

Hope this helps!
Two fraternity guys make an app for anonymous posts. Genius! Never in a million years would I think this was something worthwhile to make or that it would contribute in any meaningful way to any community. The bit about empowering individuals in a community to level the playing field is especially hilarious.

The problem is that 20-somethings don't have the required gray matter to foresee the consequences of their actions and by many definitions they're not even fully realized humans yet. I attribute this trend of throwing money at such individuals to the geniuses in SV like PG, a16z, etc. It turns out you don't need fully realized humans to do a random walk among shitty ideas to see if one of them sticks. Evolutionary tactics will do it for you.
I'm a little skeptical about whether poetry science/technology will take, largely because the literature community is going to be suspicious of the last half of your terms, and the tech/science communities will be suspicious of the first. :)

That said, it's nascent, and it may be a while before terms, norms and practices settle. I completed my MFA in 2012 with a thesis I'd call computational poetry or computational literature. Goldsmith as you mention is trying to float uncreative writing--which I think is a decent-enough broad term that covers a lot of territory, but I suspect it, too, won't find much purchase outside of literary circles.

I'm happy to get this chance to discover a number of your projects, particularly the PoetryDB. You may already know this, but I also wanted to point out that the field of computational literary criticism and analysis are also building steam, and you may want to think of your DB/API in terms of both a creative service for computational poets, and a service to computational literary critics.

You may want to see work by Franco Moretti for a starting point here if you aren't familiar (particularly "Graphs Maps Trees", and "Distant Reading"). There's a nice review for starters in Wired from a few years ago. Moretti himself laments the lack of shared tools and resources (well--let's be honest, everyone doing this is lamenting it) when it comes to machine-readable texts and analysis.

Thanks for posting.
This sentence was written by an algorithm that humans did not deliberately implement, and do not fully understand.
Perhaps we should be investing more effort in predicting and preventing premature births. When it already happened it doesn't look readily fixable.
At least it works. Since you're able to give that in not even a minute, the interviewer has plenty of time to go further:

- Do you see any problem with your method ?

- If yes (you should say yes), how can you improve it ?

In other words: the real point of asking technical questions is not can you code but much more can you engineer a solution to a problem.
Yup. The difference between a computer scientist and a software engineer.

It's a sad state of affairs that our industry is currently conflating the two. Or maybe the industry has only now reached a stage where the two need to become separate?

I mean, you wouldn't expect a theoretical physicist to design an experiment or, worse, a bridge.
Only if the entire mass is 18k gold. Not if the entire mass is 18k gold plus other Try your approach on two cases: 0% gold, with 100% unknown alloy, and 100% watch components.

Like how foods made with "100% fruit" still have other ingredients.
They have a section of links at the bottom; you can also try contacting the author.
I think there could be a service like this, but that relied on the already standardized types of data and categories such as schema.org.

The service could work like a hub, parsing private addresses people where indie-people would host their own preferences (for example, their own websites) and giving this data to external services; and, for common people, the website would host the data for them, also in a microformatted way (so other hubs and parsers could grab data from it).
Please, don't tell my boss about this.
Thanks for sharing this, I found this useful.
That may have been the case for 2006 Google, not 2015 Google; there's ~18000 engineers now.

I helped a classmate who didn't understand basic programming concepts batting 1/20 in full time interviews before getting and accepting a Google offer.

That was when I realized how far Google's hiring standards have fallen.
This is really disturbing and i think its the tipping point on anonymity. I don't know about you but i'm ready to give up my freedoms for the sake of some people not being offended. Shutting down yikyak or suing them to death would be a good start.
I missed 3. Some of these are getting pretty good but they probably chose the best examples. I'm guessing with a bit more context it would have been much easier to disambiguate.
Clearly your Reverse() is unnecessary and inefficient when you can just do

return blah[blah.size()-1] + blah[blah.size()-2];

I totally would not hire you. :P
Mexico mummies: Climbers find eerie head in snow, dig to find mummies embracing
in France, when the judge is a professional (by opposition to a jury), you can use whatever arguments you want in court. But outrageous arguments are extremely risky, the lawyer might have been in a desperate position to use that.
which reduces to `git commit -am "message"`

with alias, i have `gc -am "message"`
I heard this many times, and yet I've never encountered them in my career. I was even interviewing for a while and none of the candidates were as bad as people say.

Some wrote C or pseudocode on Java interview but pseudocode made sense and they could explain it.

I wonder if people with such experiences interview candidates without degree in CS (it's free where I live so it acts as a good filter). Basicaly unless you are on 3rd-5th year of CS degree or graduated, or worked as a programmer - you will have problems with getting to interview.
The HTTP headers can put an upper bound on the date:

Last-Modified: Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:59:15 GMT

And the changelog for CIL suggests that it may be significantly older:

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~necula/cil/changes.html
The Stanford Prison Experiment was debunked long ago. It's mostly taught today as a cautionary tale of how not to do psychological research, and as a case study in research ethics demonstrating why we have IBR's.
now you can search and open already saved bookmarks :) hope you like it
acquiring a new phone number is much higher cost than creating a new online account

Not really. Apps like Burner let you get a temporary phone number for $3-4 (well, that is still a higher cost, but makes switching around more or less trivial)
THE SUICIDE EXPERIMENT
The real question is why wasn't this coworker fired on the spot.

Also, how many years of experience with Java he has on his CV...
I've replaced my wallet with one of these:

http://www.allreli.com/product/allreli-google-lg-nexus-5-fli...

It has space for two cards and 3-4 paper notes.

I have two sets of keys; one with my car keys, the other with bicycle keys + work badge.
Genuinely curious about this - why do developers who are from those country not charge more?

Why is their work deemed $30/hr where as a Western counterpart could get away with charging $90? Same goes for people in India as well - if they are genuinely good at what they do why do they not charge a higher rate?
As someone who's in their late 30s and has accomplished a lot, I can agree with the experienced dev above's attitude. But also having interviewed a lot of candidates at scale much of these tests are just filtering tests to reduce the amount of interviews team members must do. We always have the majority of our team members interview candidates so that everyone has buy in, but if everyone had to interview every single resume that looked good on paper (I'm assuming we all at least agree on filtering out bad resumes) this would get cumbersome.

It is frustrating as you get older to deal with the fear of ageism, I haven't experienced it yet, but I'm starting to expect it's arrival.

I actually think the testing you on problem solving is the right way, not necessarily knowing the Big O notation, but at least being able to attempt an answer to difficult questions and explaining your thought process is very telling to intelligence and ability. Definitely there is much cargo cult behavior going on at companies.
Angular.ts.js.at.dart.wtf - http://work.j832.com/2015/03/angulartsjsatdartwtf.html . Also see the comment from Brad Green - https://plus.google.com/+KasperLund/posts/JtWmoEs5EjC
social bond