skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My entirely useless and anecdotal meeting with Jewish people lead me to believe that this is really mostly a 'pick your parts'.. :)

Like, 'Seafood is really okay, I eat that. Pork? No way'. Or 'I don't care about Shabbat all that much, but try to avoid grain based stuff during Passover' etc. etc.

The situation is more complicated off course, because I still haven't figured out if I read 'Jewish' as a nation, religion, culture, mixture of two or three? Being raised in a somewhat Christian (sort of - my parents don't care about religion) environment I never felt confused about that one ("Religion", in my book) and I tend to lump everyone Muslim into that same category. Different religion, but .. religion. Jews? No Jew was able to explain to me how it all fits together.

So .. I'd bet that there are quite a number of people following (a hand-picked number of) Jewish traditions who wouldn't count as religious if you talk to them about God (or if one exists) and attending services or somesuch things.
How about peopleperhour.com? I've been using it and it's not bad.

There's a screening process to start selling on the site, and there are a more people from England rather than India.
That's largely because the experiences are ineffable and simply can't be accurately related. It would be like trying to describe the color "red" to a blind person. At best you can try to make an analogy to something with which they are familiar. But they will never be able to imagine it in the way that they would consciously see it.
gwern, Scott makes a specific point of not linking to his blog from his LJ in his penultimate LJ post - he might prefer that you didn’t make that link here?
This article and its footnotes constitute the best summary of an IBM mainframe computing environment I have ever encountered. Have occasionally tried to read the old reference materials but they were never remotely this cogent. He also makes good use of modern context, since we have now settled on fundamentals such as word length, binary encoding, and so on. A masterpiece in miniature.
You should spend time improving your live performance skills. It comes in handy for more than just job interviews.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing that is available separately, just that one isn't included.
Hornet archive still has them
https://hornet.org/
Show HN: Translate text through random languages, 35 times
Oh, I see. Doesn't a power brick come with the MacBook, too, though..?
> I'm convinced one huge reason all this happens is to discourage job-hopping, because in this market, liquidity would probably help salaries move up faster.

Walk yourself through that for a second. You're saying a company that's hiring would intentionally make the process difficult for applicants in order to help their competitors retain their employees? That doesn't make sense. Even if they conspired with said competitors for this purpose, they would simply be ceding the hiring advantage to anyone who wasn't conspiring with them.

Occam's razor suggests a simpler answer: it turns out that identifying good software workers is a hard problem.
Wow, this is my worst nightmare. I freeze anytime a co worker is near my desk because I worry they will judge how I type and get around the IDE. Of course that just makes the vicious cycle worse.
Yep that's exactly why we built it. To be honest it's not overly complex to build yourself, but taking the time to get it right, setting up the CDN, and maintaining background workers can be pretty expensive when you factor in developer hours.
I doubt that anyone who has actually tried ayahuasca (or a similarly potent hallucinogen) both with a shaman and without would agree with you. Do you have any citations to back up this opinion?

The danger of your opinion is that it precludes research into things like drumming and chanting. Humans have been using rhythm to build a sense of community for thousands of years. Could there be something here for science? Could we learn how to help therapists and patients bond much faster?

I don't know these answers. Do you?
What should have been.

https://www.google.com/search?q=boeing+joint+strike+fighter&...
> "I see that you've spent X years using Subversion for source control. What are your opinions on trunk-first development vs. branch-first development?"

Actually, this demonstrates a problem right here. It's not clear to me what you mean by these terms. A quick Google search ("trunk-first vs branch-first svn") suggests that you're not using common terminology.

After thinking about it for a minute or two, what I _think_ you're asking is "should all development happen on a common branch, or should developers create separate branches for individual features/fixes, merging back into the mainline when finished". And, indeed, I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about this.

But if it takes me a couple of minutes to figure this out while just sitting here at home, in the pressure of an interview, I'm probably going to fumble, or say "I don't understand what you mean", which will make me wonder if I've blown the entire interview. This despite the fact that I've been programming for 20 years and have used a number of version control systems (CVS, ClearCase, P4, Subversion, and most recently Git).
Here are mine:

How to Promote Your Business on the Internet
http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/website-promotion.htm...

White Hat Search Engine Optimization
http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/search-engine-optimiz...
One other difference on modern compilers relating specifically to character arrays:

This will work fine:

char arr[] = "stuff";

printf("arr:%s\n", arr);
arr[0] = 'b'; arr[1] = 'l';
printf("arr:%s\n", arr);

arr is allocated on the stack (not heap, sorry about the mistake) and is mutable.

But the following will segfault:

char* ptr = "stuff";

printf("ptr:%s\n", ptr);
ptr[0] = 'b'; ptr[1] = '1';
printf("ptr:%s\n", ptr);

Strings are allocated in the read-only data segment. Technically you can only write const char* ptr = "stuff", but due to wanting to remain backward compatibile, gcc will let you write the above and not even warn you unless you use -Wall or similar.
Nearly everything you do with computer tech was seeded by government/large corps.

For a military contracting specific account: http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...
Arg! I'm on my phone and I meant to upvote! Apologies, this was a very insightful comment.

I had never thought of it this way before but this is an instance of Bayes's rule. If the false negative rate goes too high and the percentage of good programmers is small then yes, the process could actually increase the odds of a bad hire.
Full rules for protecting net neutrality released by FCC
Apple removes all antivirus apps from iOS App Store
I worked as a paid programmer on card systems in 1970. I'm not saying things were better then. Give me C++ and Python any day over Assembler.

However, there was something magical about being able to step through your program one instruction at a time using a switch on the control panel, or being able to display and modify the memory with lights & toggle switches. It was like you were reaching right into the soul of the machine, in a mysterious world.

Compilations were so expensive (40 min. for a 4,000-card program) that we would often patch the binary card decks to squeeze one more test.

We had to segment our programs into "overlays" that would load consecutively, and re-use the same limited memory locations. What a pain :o)

Having dealt with index registers in Assembler, C pointers were a cinch.
With respect, I think you might just be making (what we should now call) the "Fizzbuzz fallacy": "99% of applicants can't answer basic questions, therefore the talent pool is poor".

Really, it's more like "99% of the people still searching, who don't have a documented contribution history, and don't have a network that lets them find good jobs in a heartbeat, who must resort to this to find a job[1], can't answer basic questions."

Most of the talent pool is working and has to be pried away; they won't show up through HR channels.

[1] Not a diss, by the way; I count myself in that set, though am still not "on the market", and still don't fail at fizzbuzz style questions.
This also leads to incredibly interesting (or funny) situations. A coworker of mine uses a simple/trivial timer, plugs it in the power outlet and therefor predetermines some things that Should Happen on Shabbat.

Now, if there's a brown-out for say 3h and you're not allowed to interact with that thing until Shabbat is over, you .. get interesting side effects and have to reschedule the daily life.
Great :), first impressions:

I've seen a few of these before and the things I remember I liked about them was the ability to provide a default image incase you cannot load the image.

Major kudos if you could do a g_face so you could center / crop around faces!

You say you provide a CDN and yet the images are loading slow under HackerNews weight. I guess the type of people who are going to use these aren't super concerned about being hammered!

Lastly the Heroku add-on, does that mean I can run your code on my Heroku instance instead of rely on your site? That would be fantastic!
I've been having nightmares using oDesk as of late. Almost every job I post is 95% bots and when I try to bid on jobs it's difficult to cut through the noise when developers are working for $5-10/hr.

My biggest issue with oDesk though is the language barriers (on both client/freelancer sides). I really wish there would be more accountability for this...
uBeam: Wireless electricity
My thoughts exactly. I don't think anyone would like to sacrifice convenience for freedom the way Stallman does, but to me he is the maximum of the "How free can we be" scale. I believe he reminds everyone (especially open source developers) that there is always room for more freedom in the sofware we create and use, in the behaviors we engage in, and in the data we release. He remains in the software crowd's mentality reminding us that there is always room for more freedom for the user.

In short he's not the Leader we want to follow, he's the Explorer telling us of the harshful yet free landscapes he lives in. We may not want to go and live where he is, but there are things we can apply back in our world.
This is straight from Expert C Programming book, including the diagrams. It's dishonest to recycle and present it as if it's yours with a reference mention at the very bottom. This is not a reference, it's a copy.
Much of my initial confusion with C style pointers was using & to show pass-by-reference and to get the address of a variable. It still doesn't make sense, but at least I've got it deeply ingrained now :\
Fair enough, although the OP was a comment about the seemingly inevitability of CTE for this math-loving lineman, and my comment was nothing but a foil against that particular POV.
How’s the Weather There? Crowdsourcing App Promises Better Forecasts
For anyone interested in learning more, the book 'Boyd' provides a lot of useful background information on

- why the F-35 is a total disaster
- the Pentagon's intrinsic inability to make reasonable decisions

In a nutshell, this guy Boyd pioneered modern fighter jet design (and important general strategic theorems as well), but spent his career fighting crony-bureaucrats to get any of it adopted by the U.S. military

http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The-Fighter-Pilot-Changed/dp/0316...
Maybe I'd have sideprojects if I didn't use all of my spare times studying for interviews.
Why we chose Ember
It makes me think slapping a C-style skin on Ada (ala VB.Net <=> C#) would make for a killer language.
Yeah, 10mg is a crazy dose, even 5mg is far more than most people I know take. I would try out doses in the 100mcg-1mg range and see how they work.
Well there's no doubt on the side of the aerospace companies. Anyone can confidently offer to engineer you anything given sufficient time and resources, and a 'plane' that is actually a family of somewhat-related airframes in different configurations seems like a plausible way to be all things to all people given virtually unlimited budget. A certain amount of cynicism is required to bid in such circumstances, but money does tend to distort things.

The commissioning side is much less clear. Who on earth would think one size fits all is the best approach? One possible guess is that it's an attempt to CONTROL complexity and cost, compared to having a succession of over-budget programmes and small orders for aircraft that cost fortunes to develop. A big bet on technology sharing, and an acknowledgment that the development of each new line of military aircraft has already become staggeringly expensive.
The air force as a whole is a large scam committed on the taxpayer. What an irrelevant organization for the 21st century. Misappropriations like this are responsible for increased casualties in current military engagements.
The Air Force.

The biggest limitations aren't practical, they're political.
As far as I can tell from this list[1], five A-10s have ever been shot down, while destroying at least 1500 battle tanks and AFVs[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_combat_losses_of_United...
[2] http://www.2951clss-gulfwar.com/statistics.htm
USA Over 5,000 Ph.D. graduates work as janitors
The bulk of the requirements for the F-35 are perfectly reasonable; a stealthier replacement for the F-16 and F/A-18, which essentially perform the same role but the Air Force chose one and the Navy chose the other. If you could get a next generation light fighter-bomber to replace both, and make it stealthy enough to replace the F-117 at the same time, that would be the perfectly reasonable aircraft. As it stands, the Navy already hedged their bets with the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which has been a complete success.

The only thing that did in the Joint Strike Fighter was the requirement to develop a STOVL close-air-support platform for the Marine Corps, to replace the Harrier. That should have been a separate project. STOVL and conventional aircraft have entirely different aerodynamic requirements, and there's no real requirement for a stealth close-air-support platform because it's not like the enemy isn't going to notice the slowly hovering jet plane that's strafing them and shooting missiles at them. But it's so hard to get Congress to fund any replacement aircraft at all that everyone decided to go ahead and put all their hopes and dreams and lobbying efforts behind a single plane.
There are also factors where the baby is unable to develop proper latching and sucking technique. My daughter had a tongue-tie, which, while corrected on her second day out, left her with the wrong muscle impulses for nursing.

We had to bottle feed her, and eventually the pumping wasn't enough to continue the supply, or allow the supply to fully "come in".
Had a big argument with a coworker about that this week, actually. What's usually brought up is that having a human being physically in the battle space affords you situational awareness and experience that just can't be replicated, as of yet, with a Drone. What happens if the enemy somehow cuts off the link between Drone and control? You can set the null to fly it back to home or wherever if that happens, but, generally, a human pilot can do a lot more than that - right now. I don't disagree that on a technical level Drones would be able to, eventually, out do a pilot in theory. They aren't limited by having to keep a human alive or conscious in-flight. But there are some pretty scary moral implications if we start affording more and more autonomy to Drones in warfare.

The question shouldn't be an "all drones" vs "all pilots" argument. It should probably be more of a "how do we intelligently and operationally integrate the capabilities of Drones into our strategic goals" conversation. That just doesn't seem to be happening with the F35.
I get to interview candidate team members for the malware research team I'm on. We write a lot of code, but we're not really software engineers. Accordingly, I only ask people very basic things in an interview to see if they can use the tools they list on their resume. Often times it's something that can be handled with a single list comprehension (though no one every does that). It is astounding how few people can do what their resumes say.

I'm sure it's stressful if you don't know what you say you do. Then again, if you list 6 programming languages on your resume and can't xor decode a string in the one I let you choose from that list, you deserve to sweat a little.
Browser to browser with JavaScript
This is absolutely correct. People who hate JS can't properly code JS. It's a fluid language that can be done in several ways and unless someone understands it fluently they will merely think it's "not a real" language.
Do you realize that there was a class-action lawsuit where the "competitors" Google, Apple, Adobe etc were working together to not poach each other's employees? You're acting like I'm a conspiracy nutjob when there were emails from Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs where they admitted they were illegally colluding.

Do you realize that many "competing" startups have the same VC firms investing in them who don't want bidding wars between their engineers?

They want new talent but they don't want their current talent bouncing around for more money.
"I don't see why mothballing the A10 is a poor decision"

Because we do not have any aircraft that can stay on station above our troops stuck out in the middle of nowhere and keep them safe by shooting for multiple hours. Every other aircraft (drone include) is a drop-a-few-and-leave. That is not good enough.

Where have we faced modern main-battle tanks?

We should remove close air support from the Air Force's mission and give it back to the Army.
And then they learned from that lesson and today they operate the F/A-18, which, if you count all of its variants, is one of the most successful naval aircraft of all time despite having a very ambitious multi-role mission.
> Did you weight in this - the bad developers are most likely to interview many times..

Which implies, almost by definition, that they will become much better at the process over time and eventually become very good at gaming it, therefore making it even less reliable.
This can be resolved very easily with inspectors or writing educated console logs.
Neither honestly. All of these sites are a race to the bottom from what I have seen.

There have been a lot of questions like this on HN, a semi-recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9030790

There was good advice given in that thread as to the ways to get work without using these sites too.
Actually, it happens as long as your "stricter hiring practices" increase your false negative percentage by a lot more than they decrease your false positive percentage.

Try it out with some numbers.

10100 candidates, 100 are "good".

Suppose you have 2% false positives and 1% false negatives.

You hire 99 good candidates and 200 bad candidates.

Suppose now you have 0.5% false positives and 90% false negatives. (You decreased your false positive rate by 4x but increased your false negative rate by 90x. This is typical for employers who look for every little excuse to reject someone.)

You hire 10 good candidates and 50 bad candidates. Your "good hire" percentage went down, and you're churning through a lot more candidates to meet your hiring quota!

So, "it is better to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad candidate" is FALSE if you wind up being too picky on passing on good candidates.

Assuming you can identify losers and fire them after a year or two (with decent severance to be fair), you're actually better off hiring more leniently.

It's also even worse when you realize that the candidate pool is more like:

10200 candidates, 100 are "good", 100 are "toxic", and the toxic people excel at pretending to be "good".

Also, the rules for hiring are different for a famous employer and a no-name employer. Google and Facebook are going to have everyone competent applying. If you're a no-name startup, you'll be lucky to have 1 or 2 highly skilled candidates in your hiring pool.
C doesn't have pass by reference.
Oh interesting, I hadn't thought of this from a therapy point of view. Any time you mix spirituality and treatment my mind goes immediately to scam, which is what I assumed this was.
> IMHO you havent seen https://extensions.gnome.org/.

Of course I've seen https://extensions.gnome.org/ , Gnome is almost unusable without it. But Gnome extensions aren't supported by the core development team. They can (and do!) break from one release to another.

The barrier for "customizing things" is pretty high, too. E.g. if I want to change my window decorations in KDE, I download a new set of decorations and change it. If I want to change my window decorations in Gnome, I have to install gnome-tweak-tool and that-program-that-removes-the-bloody-client-decorations-crap and now most (but not) all of my apps are going to use the decorations I want. With some glitches. That's not ok.

> If you really want to see where Gnome is going, please do check out Fedora 22. That really is the showcase for cutting edge Gnome (unfortunately, its not Ubuntu/Debian)

I don't need to check out Fedora 22, I can already compile Gnome from their public repos. The showcase for cutting edge Gnome isn't too impressive; it can be boiled down to "we really like tablets and you're going to like them too because two releases from now all our applications are going to look like they're running on a tablet."
Sort of, Syncthing it's pretty nice.
Am... I missing a color picker there?
It's my understanding that Google's self-driving car technology as shown to the public, cannott currently handle a crew repairing potholes without advance notice, or drive to an arbitrary location using a route that hasn't been pre-run to record navigational waypoints.

In other words, the disclosed technologies can drive in areas for which extremely large amounts of data have been collected and only so long as conditions have not changed. If a new traffic light or stop sign is installed, the self-driving car is likely to miss it.

There may be secret sauce in the lab, of course.
I like finding out things like this about people. Very talented athletes who are also very smart are not as rare as people would think. (Anecdote warning) Many of the most talented athletes I know are very intelligent people. Here are some more examples of athletes:

http://www.sportingnews.com/mlb/feed/2010-09/smart-athletes/...

If you think an engineering degree is tough, try doing one while also training 30+ hours/week. ;)

The list of multi-talented musicians and actors is also fun to read about.
Greg Graffin, the lead singer of Bad Religion, has a PhD in Zoology from Cornell. Here are some more: http://entertainment.time.com/2012/09/07/school-of-rock-10-s...
yes that is one. I remember accessing txt files via gopher on university systems back in the 90's. It was similar to browsing an FTP directory via a web browser, with a few more features.
I agree that technical interviews are broken, but not in the way that the author describes. I think the interviews should retain the algorithmic questions, but do away with language gotchas and design patterns etc. More emphasis should be added on the following topics: distributed systems issues, traits of modern hardware (cache efficiency, concurrency issues). There needs to be a part about mathematical competency introduced as well. Knowledge of basic probability, statistics and linear algebra should become part and parcel of the engineering interview process.