skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If companies actually tracked the exact questions that are asked and how they are asked, then bias would be easy to spot. People they want to hire get softball binary tree or linked list questions. People they don't want to hire get disqualifier questions that are not in any textbook (and not in journals either) which definitely can't be white-boarded to their satisfaction in 40-45 minutes. I've gotten both. The latter I research afterwards to make sure that it's in none of the 30-40 textbooks I have or in any journals, ACM library, Dr Dobbs, etc.

The worst are interviewers who refuse to accept a correct answer. "Oops, I didn't expect the person to have the answer so I better make it more complicated." It's so ridiculous that it's hard to believe people would sink that low. Until you've experienced it though, you won't believe. I think it suffices to say anything that deals with distribution of money, which employment does, is going to have lots of bullshit.
Material design is about semantics; the documents make that clear [0]. When people "get it wrong," that's what they are usually missing.

Even deeper than the semantics of material, though, is the ontology of the space. If you think that most bad design decisions flow from an inadequate conceptual model of the domain, check out this 1998 MIT thesis from Mark Foltz, "Designing Navigable Information Spaces." It has changed my world.

[0] http://google.com/design

[1] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infoarch/publications/mfoltz-...

PDF version at

http://rationale.csail.mit.edu/publications/Foltz1998Designi...
See also Zooko's Triangle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle

There's a long tradition of using this kind of approach in capability systems. If you do it right, you can have globally unique identifiers that are not human readable (probably, some sort of public key which is also routable), and then let humans assign local "petnames" (labels) to them in a way that is actually pretty usable, if everyone is using software designed for it.

Problems come when, say, you want to put your web address on a billboard. In an ideal world the billboard would somehow transmit the advertiser's public key to the viewer's device so that the viewer could then look them up, but obviously we don't have any particular tech for doing that. So instead we create this whole complex system by which people can register human-readable identities, which in turn requires a centralized name service (yes, DNS is centralized), certificate authorities (ugh), etc.

Similarly, whenever you tell your friend about some third-party entity (another person, company, whatever), you should be giving them the public key of that entity. But that's not really practical. We need some sort of brain implant for this. :)
An urban legend for sure, this version also claimed the government was culpable:

(Towards bottom of page)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_saving_device
TEDx has completely destroyed everything I thought of TED. I used to think of TED as a place of science where things are well vetted but TEDx has thrown everything away that they have built up in credibility, in my opinion.
Bayesian Calculator
I can't say because I don't have any way to tell if an ALPR system has recorded my presence somewhere. I think that it is not rare, and that it becomes less rare every day.
There is a new - more MOP-py - branch I'm working on, which is yet to be finished (ping me if you'd like to see a preview).
Ask HN: Local politics and the speed of light – forwarding an innovative agenda?
Long-time reader, 1st-time poster

I am not a physicist - but I was watching a local news channel and heard a politician (Sen. Chuck Schumer) claim that green laser beams travel faster than [red] ones. All else being equal, the speed of light is the speed of light.

This was part of a segment outlining an initiative to reduce the number of incidents with lasers and aircraft. I understand that this is serious, and that there are more incidents involving green lasers than other colors - but what is the real problem, and how is vilifying green lasers an appropriate response to the underlying issue?

Links in comments.

I thought back to an adolescent me: exploring technology and gadgets - and how taking tools and toys out of young mind stifles thought and growth… At what point do we stop restricting products based upon their potential uses? Especially in a land where gun ownership is a God given right.

The thought transitioned to regulatory and political environments (specifically American - although not specifically an American problem) and how disconnected it is from technology and innovation - and in this case: basic scientific fact. It seems to me, if you are trying to keep powerful lasers out of the hands of pranksters, then regulate the power - not the color.

This disconnect extends in the arena of digital money (bitcoin), and host of digital services (Netflix, Airbnb, Uber etc). The Fed wants same day settlement and lower friction transactions - but we continue to both balk on a concise digital money strategy and disparage digital currency adoption . “The world of bit bumping up against the world of atoms” (T Kalanick) - the friction is caused by the agile and innovative digital world colliding with the real world and our laws and regulations.

Are incumbent enterprises and politicians disconnected to a point beyond hope?

How do we best forward an innovative agenda inside organizations and states on a political level?
I was able to read the gif as the information was displayed.
> Hey curious about downvote (honestly, want to know why). I didn't see anything saying that was a bad idea in the HN guidelines

I didn't downvote the typo comment but I find it odd you would read through the guidelines to see if commenting about typos is taboo but failed to notice it says Resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
That's pretty much the prime directive of semantic formatting systems -- LaTeX, HTML (as originally envisioned), Markdown, and the like.

The ironic truth is that "responsive" design is a horribly late-to-the-party awareness of this, and often accomplished by tremendously convoluted design -- adding more complexity to systems in which less is preferred.

But yes, it's quite an epiphany when you finally get it.
Now if only it told what or how to enhance it :)
Be a Problem Solver
I've personally been interested in implementing something similar on top of BLAS / LAPACK in Scheme (either CHICKEN or Guile). Any tips from the authors? Any tips at all? My main questions concern how you decided on an API, or how you decided to construct primitives (matrices, ndarrays) within the library itself?

Basically, I'm just not sure where to start with such a large project. Currently I'm just trying to learn the language and ecosystem (how the FFI works, etc.) to the point where something like this may be feasible. I want to switch over to using scheme as my de-facto language, and this would be the number 1 library that would make it possible; Unfortunately, the lack of resources on the web for learning how to make good lisp-like APIs is lacking, and I really need some help figuring out how to do it. Unlike Python, we don't have PEP 8, and I think the difficulty in constructing a domain specific language for numerics is under-appreciated.

Thoughts? Tips? It seems MatLisp has been around for some time (2000, I guess?), so there's got to be someone with considerable experience here, right?
Video Clip of news report (sorry for the quality):
http://youtu.be/MAwzFvdbFcU

Full story from NY1:
http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2015/03/15/schumer-...
The web of today is based completely on "this named thing references this other named thing". When we create links to other content we are most definitely doing so in the context of the content as it is at the time of linking, not some future state. What happens if that data is waaay different or missing? Dead links we call them.

It terms of commerce this is somewhat analogous to bait-and-switch.

In this thread I'm mainly referring digital content as an end-to-itself, not of digital content as a reference to physical products.

As for referencing physical products, be they automobiles or paintings, deriving a direct cryptographic hash isn't possible, but GUIDs are. Cars already have serial numbers. Paintings have signed certificates from experts.

If I'm on a website buying a used car I definitely want the price list to be linking to the GUID, that is, to a reference of the object itself.
>a wide variety of nutters and pseudoscientists that have wrecked their brand

For those who aren't aware of this plague of bad quality TEDx talks, Sam Hyde's "2070 Paradigm Shift"[0] is a very entertaining, self-conscious deconstruction of such poor TEDx talks.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yFhR1fKWG0
When I was in highschool we had the those Novell systems, including its own email client. All students and faculty had an email address. Whilst trying to be clever, I discovered that Novell will happily forward an email to everyone, including all mailing-lists, if you enter an asterisk in the "To" field. Novell happily kept the asterisk in the field when replying, so every reply was also sent to everyone. Students naturally got inquisitive and emailed back, trying to unsubscribe, asking what was going on or even trying to sell an old PlayStation.

The load apparently crashed the email server. All I got was a detention — kept back half an hour after school. And had to apologise to the network admin. That to me was a suitable reaction to a kid doing something stupid.
>it has to do what needs to be done to fulfil its promises.

No. Scrum is explicitly open to renegotiation. This is where burn-down charts come in to play. This is where having the product-owner be part of the team comes into play. If a feature is costing a lot more hours than anticipated due to unforeseen problems, it is expected that the team gets the product owner involved early so that a decision can be made: do we drop other work to deliver this feature, or do we drop other features to deliver this?

The core premise of scrum and other agile methodologies is that given the uncertainties inherent in software development, it is impossible to fix both the featureset and the schedule. Scrum fixes the schedule and explicitly allows for flexibility in the featureset. Other methodologies (like spiral, for example) fix the featureset and allow for flexibility in the schedule. Waterfall attempts to fix both, and fails as a methodology.
> Keep your pranks on the right side of legal, or get burned. Understand the CFAA and when you are in violation. It's as simple as that.

If it's so simple then why do you have a conviction? To me, your comment reads like "I didn't get fair treatment so neither should he!"

That's not how we move forward.
Running BitcoinCore 0.10 on a Raspberry Pi 2
Swift started private development in July 2010.[1] So not quite five years, but pretty close.

1: http://nondot.org/sabre/
IMO, you're missing the point. Is this laden with hyperbole? Perhaps.

But 'how bad life REALLY is as a felon' is not so much the issue at hand, as it is the absurdity of pressing felony charges for what is, apparently, effectively, just a silly computer prank.
One of the big differences between Oculus and Valve's philosophies is that the latter believes that there must be a 1:1 correspondence between motion in the virtual world and the real one. No doing so kills presence and causes the nausea that people talk about. Having spent a fair bit of time in an Oculus DK2 I couldn't agree more.

Unfortunately, this kiboshes treadmills and things like the Virtuix Omni. At least until we manage to fool the vestibular system as well as we can the eyes.
A textbook case of 2 people who take themselves way too seriously... and it all escalated over a email address! The level of maturity of both sides is mind numbing and the whole case makes Hack Dojo (which is an amazing place) look like an immature little boys club.
Hi java-man,

I'm Max Bernstein, a student at Tufts University. I am starting a GNU/Linux User Group, the first of its kind at my school. We're currently looking for hardware because we want to offer web and general server space to our members.

We could definitely use these servers. If you're open to it, I would appreciate the donation!

EDIT: Incidentally, I am in California for the next week on Spring Break if that makes pick-up easier!

Best,
Max
I guess there's no point in trying to continue the discussion, since I'm "normalizing state violence" somehow, and I guess that makes me evil, for considering the facts.
I use DDG by default on all of my devices and the main reason is because DDG makes it easy to switch to any search engine I need.

So, if I can't find anything in DDG (usually very specific), I'll just type !g at the end, and it'll take me to Google's search engine (encrypted version).

If I want images, I use !bi or !gi.

The bang ! is pretty much the most powerful feature that DDG has.
I'm really surprised nobody has just built this trimmed-down design and called it a "distributed object storage mesh network" or somesuch.

You mean something like this?

http://ipfs.io/
> Keep your pranks on the right side of legal, or get burned. Understand the CFAA and when you are in violation.

Because the problem is clearly the "evil hacker jason" and not the ridiculousness of the laws in which severity of punishment is entirely inconsistent with any tangible damages?

I think people forget that it's their tax-payer money being used to ruin's someone else's life.
The New Yorker fiction podcast is quite good
Instead of a new tool, most people just need a new system. GTD is not anymore in fashion but it is the most efficient system I ever used. If you ever decide to try GTD have a look on this ultra simple implementation:

https://github.com/we-build-dreams/hamster-gtd
I thought about this too. As a math graduate student, I've helped in programs aimed at helping gifted local high schoolers. It's not just me - several math graduate students and professors contribute.

I view this as an excellent opportunity to diffuse a better and deeper understanding, even enjoyment, of mathematics into the community. But I think the author of this article would view this as contributing to systemic unfairness and leading to an uneven playing field.
In a way, you are right. However, they (Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan) are common names for those who have studied philosophy of sciences.
I also follow this rule or I try and state things as if they are my opinion. So instead of:-

> This method should not be static.

I would say

> I think this method should not be static.

I will also follow up with a reason. For example:-

* I think this method should be static as this class is instatiable.

Whether I give a reason or not depends on the experience of the person whose work I am reviewing.
Programming is great. It helped me streamline my thinking so to speak.

Once your passion becomes your job it becomes tainted though.
It is worth noting that the Yahoo! devs do not promise OpenPGP (RFC 4880) compatibility in the future.
Protesters stage anti-robot rally at SXSW
Digerati, heal thyself: Blaming our shortcomings on our devices
HackBoxes – Broadcast your next codding session
I have no idea how to get that extension or how to install it.

Is there some simple guide?

edit: all I see here

https://github.com/google/end-to-end

is

We’re releasing this code to enable community review; it is not yet ready for general use
Bad things happen when idiots collide. I signed it though, because even a fool doesn't deserve to be punished so severely.
The GP's point was that the origins of single-dash single-character flags is the original Unix, not Plan 9 as the GGP had claimed.
There's a similar situation on the border between Egypt and Sudan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil
I like what you are onto here. Algorithm questions get universally panned or praised quite often, but there is a good deal of nuance in fact. Some are much, much better than others. Some are pure trivia.
I don't think most of us would bat an eyelash at the idea that most engineers need to know that a hash table is a O(c) look up, but it is an algorithm question that I've seen people fail. Conversely, your examples of what is a poor question are probably accurate in most domains.
>he's coding 10x faster

Faster had nothing to do with it. If anything these guys code slower. 1 line of brilliant code will always beat 10 lines of mediocre code typed very fast though
> The assumption of size was "large-scale", which in this day and age usually means massively distributed. A B-tree is not a solution to that problem domain.

Another thought on this one: Space-filling curves decomposes the problem nicely: Scale out your favorite, ordered key/value stored, and then layer spatial indexing on top. No need to develop a new data structure that both scales out and handles spatial data.
Do you live in Utopia? How do you get around in your environment?

Scrum is not a solution that you buy off the shelf and just run in your company. It is a framework to manage work and scope in a team. And it acknowledges that we are individuals who have to interact with each other in order to achieve success. Both aspects are equally important and have to be addressed. Scrum will not make problems disappear. But it helps you to manage them in a transparent and controlled fashion.

Don't you live in an environment with rules (law) and frameworks (social culture)? Is that environment perfect? I guess not. That's why we deal with imperfections on a daily basis. Like we have to do when living Scrum.
I swear "arrogant" is the catch-all term to use to describe smart people you don't like. It's lost all meaning and so I find it hard to take any critique seriously where arrogance is central to its thesis.
If your application is written in a language that could be used as a configuration language, then this is quite simple. I've come across it in Ruby and Python - for example, Ruby's rackup config file is Ruby code:

https://github.com/rack/rack/wiki/%28tutorial%29-rackup-howt...

However, if your application's language is not suitable for use as a config language, then this becomes significantly more painful. You have to link in an interpreter for the configuration language, and then expose your application's internals to the interpreter. The easiest this could be is probably using JavaScript as a configuration language in Java, because the Java runtime already includes a JavaScript interpreter which can reach into the Java object model. The hardest it could be is using pretty much anything with C, where you'd have to add a separate interpreter, and then expose all the relevant internals by hand.
8 Tips to Solve Linux and Unix Systems Hard Disk Problem
related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9208624

I was going to put it all in one comment, but I wasn't sure what the HN character limit was.
INSANE Toilet Paper PRANK
Changing the Future of Higher Education
I can not understand or empathize with the intent of 'promising enlightenment'.

Do you think that if 'a given organization' figures out a way to actually offer enlightenment, or the illusion of, and people pay for this, that it is guaranteed successful?

I guess I see social organizations as 'structures that produce things because they are the things that are the easiest or most likely to structure/build'. I do not see this as any different than what the rest of humanity does. It's just a being in that place at that time and doing what humans naturally seem to do to survive, sort of thing.

There's a lot of emotions and hype that conflate the actual mechanics of social production. But most of those labels are ephemeral, some get discarded and others remain. That's just life in general though, I suppose.

I suppose the question I would ask is "why has humanity in general created and supported such cultural machines that prosper from the continual promise of enlightenment?"
What I want to know is why the FBI even cared in the slightest that Jason broke Brian's wifi for an hour. I feel like there must be something missing to this story to explain that.
Is LinkedIn Getting Rid of Scala?
Hey, sorry, I just saw your request. There's another OwnCloud discussion here on this page (just search). But we had our problem over the span of about seven months and not at all when updating. We had everything from entire directories go missing, down to individual single-page documents. It took us a couple of months to figure out what was going on, and the tension in our office was extraordinarily high as you can imagine (people becoming paranoid about the true story of what happened to their documents). Finally when we discovered that OwnCloud does this, the only solution offered was to back up the files with another application (so why even use OwnCloud in the first place??).
The basis of this link is the 2008 New England Journal of Medicine article by Kirsch at http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa065779 .

Quoting from a more recent (2014) scientific article on the issue, "Are antidepressants clinically useful? Conclusion of a decade of debate" at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4102296/ (the key paragraph is at the end, but I provide the first few paragraphs for context):

> During the last decade, a number of meta-analyses have questioned the clinical usefulness of antidepressants, and exposed a significant publication bias and low effect size in comparison to placebo 1–9. The most important implication has been that antidepressants might not have any effect at all in mildly depressed patients 1,4,5. Several authors and agencies, such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), have suggested the utilization of “alternative” treatment options (e.g., exercise and psychotherapy) in mildly depressed patients, and pharmacotherapy only for the most severe cases. An immediate consequence of this is that patients suffering from mild depression may be deprived from receiving antidepressants.

> The Kirsch hypothesis concerning depression 10,11 is that there is a response which lies on a continuum from no intervention at all (e.g., waiting lists) to neutral placebo, then to active and augmented placebo including psychotherapy, and finally to antidepressants, which exert a slightly higher efficacy probably because blinding is imperfect due to side effects (enhanced placebo). This hypothesis has triggered much interest from the mass media and from intellects outside the mental health area, often with a biased and ideologically loaded approach 12.

> Two early efforts to re-analyze the Kirsch data set using different methodological approaches 15,16 independently reported results quite similar between them but different from those published by Kirsch. A recent multi-meta-analysis 17 utilized the Kirsch et al dataset and concluded that the most probable effect size of antidepressants relative to placebo is 0.34 (0.27-0.42) and that there is no significant effect of the initial severity of depression.

...

> The series of meta-analyses performed during the last decade made antidepressants perhaps the best meta-analytically studied class of drugs in the whole of medicine. The results of the recent multi-meta-analysis is likely to close the debate, suggesting that antidepressants are clearly superior to placebo and that their efficacy is unrelated to the initial severity of depression. Thus, there seems to be no scientific ground not to use antidepressants in mildly depressed patients.

(Emphasis mine.)
>TED presentations showcase individuals who think highly of themselves explaining in digestible soundbites how they're going to make the world a better place

You haven't articulated how any of this is bad. Somehow "arrogance" is all that needs to be said against someone to be considered a substantive critique.