skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do remember disassembling it and looking at it from the other way! (I was curious.) Pre-emptive multi-tasking kernels at that level weren't things you saw frequently on consoles then. Many people just hung things off the vertical blank instead.

You can decode the audio bits - it's just Sony's special version of ADPCM - or use a cartridge (for those PlayStations old enough to have a cartridge port) and read out the SPU memory over X-Link. You didn't even need a debug model to do it (although you did need a handy parallel port and the ability to bit-bang, or run a DOS program).

The CODEC used CD-XA Mode 2 Form 2 (2532-byte sector, with less error-correction layers) ADPCM-compressed streaming audio, 1 of 8 channels, at a relatively low sample rate - which works fine for speech. Lots of PlayStation games used the same basic technique for music and voices (as well as FMVs, although the bulk of that data would have been MDEC-compressed video).
That's not a useful solution. Consider they are trying to get 3 candidates for 1 job promotion; having 6 doesn't help it just dilutes the ability to observe. On the other hand, you now have to manage/babysit double the number of over-qualified, highly ambitious people with too much time on their hands. Thats a recipe for trouble.

Its the same logic as why PhD programs don't simply double their size when there are plenty of people with enough credentials to pass entrace exams. Its a people-management issue, and maintaining the incentives of the rank-higherarchy. It has nothing to do with talent levels.

These positions are only loosely meritocratic. The higher-order filtering is almost always based on some form of social privledge. Its not dysfunctional, at least in a litereal sense. Privledge opens doors and changes the economics (ie, productivity) of the industry materially. That is why it is selected for very heavily.
I'm not gonna tell you not to go for it. However, the reason most of the other apps connect to bank accounts is because that way they can actually get the whole picture information that's needed to make them useful. How are you going to get the transactions without connecting to their bank account? Have them enter the transactions? I'm going to forget, and I might have far too many to do by hand. I'll enter 3, mistype one, and then give up.

Also, the easiest way to monetize is for it to be paid. You did hard work; why shouldn't you be paid for it?
Do insect societies share brain power?
59 Tips for Scaling Startup Sales
True. It might be because the research has not involved empirical tests of any such practical information, as far as I could tell from the article.

My vague takeaway is that burglars rely on patterns of typical household layouts and homeowner behaviors so that they can do their work, as it were, at a higher level of abstraction than an amateur can. Anything that you can do to frustrate their assumptions of typicality, then, might lower their efficiency or discourage them from attempting a burglary in the first place. Perhaps some clever applications of home automation tech could be employed. Or if you're fortunate enough to keep an inconsistent schedule, that too could help.
Neurons are also relatively simple, at least in comparison to the mind. I don't think the simplicity or complexity of the underlying model has much bearing on the higher-level properties of the network.

Now, this isn't to say that the kinds of neural networks we build today are conscious, but I don't think that's because they're based on a simple mathematical model; I think that's because they don't have the network-level properties that conscious humans do, for example, a self-representation.
New grads are different. For that you're usually hiring more for an entry level position with the expectation that there will be a lot of on the job learning.
Explanation for non-PhD's (my qualifications: I do some quantum research, and the other day I was at Aaron's talk he refers to, and briefly talked to him afterward).

The overarching problem is whether we can prove that quantum algorithms are exponentially faster than classical algorithms. We believe it's true for things like factoring or discrete log (maybe), but these are conjectural because proving lower bounds for general classical algorithms is really really hard.

One the other hand, there are other problem models in which we can prove quantum algorithms are much faster than classical algorithms. These generally take the form of a "black-box query" model. Here is one example: there is a hidden boolean function f(x), and you get the promise that it has one of two properties (which are mutually exclusive). You get to query inputs x and receive outputs f(x), and you want to determine which of the two properties it has. The simplest example of such a problem is determining whether a function is contstant or is 0 on exactly half of the inputs and 1 on the other half. Classically you have to query 2^(n-1) + 1 inputs in the worst case. If you're allowed to give queries which are quantum superpositions of some inputs, then you can actually do it with one query. [1]

The model studied by Aaronson and Ambainis et al. is a slightly different kind of black box model, but with a similar flavor. You know f and you get query access to the bits of an unknown input x. You want to compute f(x) with as few queries as possible. Clearly you can do it with N queries where x has N bits, but some quantum algorithms can do it in 1 query by making a quantum query. In that model the goal is still to show the biggest gap in the number of needed queries between quantum algorithms and classical algorithms (possibly with randomness). Also people are interested in the difference between classical algorithms with randomness and without randomness, and in addition to proving the biggest quantum/classical gap, Amabainis et al refute a major conjecture about the biggest possible randomized/determinstic classical gap.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch%E2%80%93Jozsa_algorith...
A couple of days ago, Stripe gave one of our clients 14 days to 'switch their website over to a new provider' accusing them of selling 'pseudo-pharmaceuticals' when I know for a fact they do no such thing. It seems to be 'shoot first, and don't bother asking any questions'.

Thing is, as a developer I spent a year trying to convince them to switch from their current payment gateway to Stripe. This particular client has been in business for a long time, and does $300K+ per month in sales. They have over 25,000 satisfied customers and zero BBB or other complaints.

Needless to say, Stripe has given our company a black eye.
Downgrade+iOS+9+-+iOS+9+jailbreak
> Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who it decides to make friends with.

They are user friendly they just represent the usages of the type of user using them.

This is something I see said a lot, constraining an interface to your average completely new user who knows nothing makes it very difficult to have that interface adequately serve people with more experience, you load up the benefit on the front side and trash the backside in response - that said some powerful interfaces are just objectively bad but the tools utility overrides that.
The enthusiasm is fine -- I just wish it were couched in the understanding of the limitations of the technique. I also think it's naive to say that Go's design solves "many [production] problems" -- memory-safe languages solve one set of problems, but often introduce or exacerbate another. (The most obvious example being memory exhaustion: postmortem heap analysis is often much easier on a C-based system than in memory-safe languages.[1][2]) More generally, do not fall into the trap of correctness from smugness: nasty production bugs can exist in any language, and time is much better spent on the production tooling to debug such problems rather than simply asserting that such bugs are tautologically impossible.

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2004/07/13/number-11-of-20-libum...

[2] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2039361

Edit: added a much better reference.
I live in flyover country, and rented single family homes here with no problem until we finally bought a year ago. It's true that there's a smaller stock of rentals, but there are more than your example suggests. I'd bet that there are lots of rentals in Westerville, OH that aren't coming up in your search, because they are rented through other mechanisms (anything from Craigslist to a sign in front of the house to locally-specific websites). It's true that fewer people are looking to rent, because buying is more accessible to the median family here than on the coasts, but renting is absolutely a thing that people do.

Also, mortgage is REALLY not the only cost of home ownership. I own a house worth about $200,000. My mortgage payment is about 850/month, my taxes are about 550/month, insurance is 60, and I budget 300/month for maintenance. It would cost me 1600 to rent an equivalent house, so I'm paying more on a monthly basis to own than I would to rent. Some of that is equity, true, which is why we bought. On the other hand, when/if we sell, we'll be paying a realtor $12,000 for the privilege, so we'll have to live here awhile before the equity gains outweigh the transaction costs.
16 Things You Should Consider Before Going Freelance
Smoking would be bad because the fire would be amongst the tanks, but you'd have to open it almost on top of the motor to cause a fire that way, because the fire in contained, and the hot part (the exhaust) is under water. Plus the motor is not located where the people/supplies are.

So simply don't carry the tank over to the motor and open it there, and don't smoke. Even the most basic of safety practice would make this not a problem.

Do you not carry any fuel onboard? Hydrogen is safer than gasoline, yet people carry it without a second thought.
Maybe you should build it. YC RFS Maybe? https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
Outsourcing to some remote part of some other country, and outsourcing to some remote part of the country you live in, aren't much different.

Many large companies are able to maintain a large number of server operators and perform essential functions without needing one person to do everything. With sufficient communication you can avoid the "too many cooks" problem. I've personally lead highly-communicating teams which avoid this problem. In short what you do is put one of the 3 in charge of different work as it comes up, load balance and collaborate.

But maybe it's cheaper and easier to pay one person a huge amount of money, and beat them up, than to create a highly-communicating organization of people (including email, IM, ticket system, face-to-face time, regular meetings, bridge calls, etc). It certainly looks simpler.
The bulk of WebKit is under a liberal license, similar to what they'll likely use for Swift. Google could do exactly the same with Swift if it felt like this (though in practice forking language compilers/runtimes rarely makes that much sense).
Well I guess the Go community is a little bit too passionate about any update regarding Go, even if the introduced new thing is subpar compare to other languages, like this one in the post.
Step one could be to define an open data format for personal budget data, like todo.txt for finances :)

Then you can simply submit PR's to current system open finance tracking apps, and you can sync state between with dropbox or syncthing or seafile or whatever
Anti-Feminist Frequency pamphlets appear on poles around E3 convention
As a Level 15 message board arch-nerd, I love that word, because it's a sort of two-fer: it suggests "noisy", which is really what I'm getting at, but actually means "annoying" --- "noise" and "annoying" having apparently different roots.

I felt like my response was dispositive. I'm telling you straightforwardly that's not what he meant, and I have good reason to believe I'm right. Your rebuttal actually ignored the substance of my comment and instead launched into a tedious semantic tea-leaf-reading exercise.

"Noisome" seems like the right word. :)
Let's talk about BRAIN FREEZE. And I mean the total, complete, 300-baud mush when some question --for whatever reason-- kills your ability to think.

I've had it happen twice, and man it ain't fun. The second was like an out-of-body experience. I forgot the question, I forgot my train of thought, I knew I wasn't responding, I knew that I knew that the interview knew that I was just sitting there, saying "ummmmmmmmmm" for about 147 seconds now. Yikes! Yet in day to day, these would have been easy questions. And TBH I didn't even want to job at that point.

It's critical that you as an interviewee learn to monitor and CONTROL your physiological response to stress. And I've learned that as an interviewer, I try to pay close attention to physical stress responses from the candidate -- flushed cheeks, signs of sweat, sudden lock-up -- when I see these signs, I back off and let them come back to normal first.
And admittedly, that's true. I suppose I shouldn't have let that come off as a purist "only ask this" situation. You need some technical problem that they can solve based on the skills you need and the skills you can judge. For those types of problems, I tend to focus on watching HOW they get to a solution and why rather than pure syntax.

I shouldn't have represented my original comment as the only thing necessary. Getting a mainframe guy to geek out on me for an Android position is probably not going to be all that beneficial.
I see your point now. I respectfully suggest that the valuation of a company is intended to represent the discounted summation of future cashflow, and in a highly competitive marketplace that valuation is intended to reach the summation of those market place participants who estimate the cash flows to be the highest (without presumably deliberately intending a loss to themselves)

I cannot see any other way to price it (well lots of ways to estimate future cashflow and even define cashflow) but there is not some agreed amount of discount for risk out there. Yes people will always want such a discount, and can walk away. But the discount does not start with a figure and work downwards. It's only a discount in hindsight as it were.

Imagine if you will a hotel in NY that has one room, 100 USD per night and is going to be knocked down in 100 days time. I would only expect to pay a maximum of 10000 USD to buy the hotel. Any more would be obviously foolish. Present value plays some part but mostly estimated occupancy drives the expected cashflow.

But also if I demanded a discount for the risk that the hotel might not pay back my investment, there is likely to be some other investor who has a different view on the Hotel scene in NY. Especially for the "ultimate in boutique experiences". No one will pay more than 10,000 but how close we come is (should be?) determined entirely by investors estimates.

I do not think that the main driver of valuation is that between VCs and the founders. That is admin work. The driver of the price paid by a VC is how much other VCs are willing to pay instead.

That seems a good thing to me.

Thank you for the comments - good to think these through.
Comparing our attitude to tech companies with religion
Actually, effective and reliable communication is the number one thing most all companies are looking for in engineers. No one wants a developer that is resistant to daily peer cooperation. A developer that can't clearly explain their decisions to their stakeholders is just about useless. A line item about communication is almost always present on a dev job listing's requirements, much more common than any stack/language flavor of the month.

Code is easy, being able to communicate is not. We engineers love to loathe non-tech people who talk too much while producing nothing tangible. Even more though, effective engineers loathe their peers that don't talk enough.
In Unity's tests, they were able to reduce the code size of their WebGL demo from 19.0 MB of asm.js to 6.3 MB of WebAssembly code (uncompressed).

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/06/18/webgl-webassembly-and-fe...
Thats excellent, thanks :).
My first language was some awful proprietary BASIC dialect. It hasn't harmed me any, so far as I can tell. Learning one language, proprietary or not, gets you about 99% of the way to learning a second (potentially more open) language. And in any case, isn't the language due to be open-sourced pretty soon?
Yes, you can start with the 2013 review of the "Project Oberon" book, that Niklaus Wirth made by Oberon's anniversary.

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/

It includes the source code.

The original edition and many other books are available from his site at the university.

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/

Some screenshots and information from the old days:

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/native/WebScreen.html

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/native/

Oberon was followed by Oberon-2, which you can find here:

http://www.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Papers/Oberon2.pdf

http://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/Oberon2.pdf

Which then gave birth to Active Oberon:

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front

There was also the EthOS as Oberon evolution.

http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/view/eth:38713

The Oberon operating system was fully implemented in Oberon, with some assembly for the kernel module and boot loader. In the later versions, the SYSTEM package gained all required intrisics to do everything in pure Oberon.

It is a bit confusing to speak about OS and language, because like Java, the same name is used for both.

Eventually they moved on to other stuff.

There was an Oberon evolution for .NET called Zonnon, but it is hardly known.

One of the guys working on Oberon as a student was Robert Griesemer, a Go designer. Hanspeter Mössenböck from Oberon-2 is one of the researchers working on Graal.

Oberon is related to Mesa/Cedar, not Lisp Machines. Basically something like a .NET/Java OS in the late 70's providing the same expressiveness of the Lisp and Smalltalk environments but in a strong typed language, capable of systems programming.

Although they followed the same principle as Lisp machines. On the papers they refer to Assembly as bytecode, because the CPUs were CISC with microcode for execution.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteCedarProgra...

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteriencesCrea...

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparctddingGarbage...

So while AT&T was making UNIX, Xerox PARC had Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar.
What I've noticed with different specialized lines of fruit is that early-on, varieties tend to show up in small niches where they succeed because they taste great. As their popularity increases, more growers and larger buyers start to become involved at which point the exceptional taste of the fruit variety often gets diluted. I'm sure this is partially because of the harvesting process for larger tonnage buy volumes. But, I'm also guessing that 'tweaks' to that fruit also start getting applied for yield/producability etc. In my area, Red Delicious was mostly a bad mealy/bland texture, Fuji's started out great but are now are sometimes good/bad.

It will be interesting to see if a controlling interest in the 'brand name' of a fruit variety ends up managing the quality of a fruit.
That's actually a surprisingly nice gesture.

I have a feeling that PayPal may be able to rebuild the trust it lost in hacker minds.
>My daughter at least appears weaker (I think she's hiding her skills

Note here (from a girl) remembering my childhood and maths: my interest in all things technical came to life when my father (figure) showed an interest in playing chess with me, and in building things like aerodynamically-interesting paper/card planes, rocket launchers and kites.
GS interns get paid loads
This is a very wrong way of reasoning about probability. The chance that a coin will at some point land on heads does not decrease with the number of flips.
Intel Edison with Golang
Burglars who have been caught...
I'm not trying to be negative, but the stripe channel is very active. Why aren't you assigning someone to give 100% attention to this concentrated collection of YOUR users?
When languages are consistent, they are much easier to learn. Spanish is fabulously regular, which helps many people learn it.

When a second language is similar to your native tongue, it is much easier. Swedish speakers have very little trouble learning Danish, but Turkish is a bunch harder, and Korean is _very_ tough.

My point here is that your example is difficult because it lacks any larger context. If you want your API to be easy to learn for Lispers, then s-expressions are going to be better. If the rest of your API uses verbs like "make-a-box" and "paint-the-background", then "make-a-line" is probably the right fit.

Design always works this way: it is defined by its users and its context. When you hit trouble like this, step back.
So this is a form of "labor-theater" that signifies a job that shouldn't exist? It's just a show, a play put on, to legitimize the transfer of wealth between the privileged? You make it sound like a false-problem, a social invention where any effort to resolve it is just wasted.
I find these whiteboard problems a breath of fresh air. Coming from an academic background, I've seen the downsides with the alternatives.

* Talking about something you've done? You're selecting for marketing, not programming.

* Letters of recommendation? You're selecting for ability to network, not programming.

* Academic qualifications? You're selecting for persistence, not programming.

* Offline tests? OK right now because they're a minority, but I guarantee if they became the standard, you'd get an astounding amount of cheating.

I'm not a marketer and I really resent how in academia to have any chance you have to "sell sell sell". I appreciate anyone who gives me a chance to just objectively demonstrate my abilities, whether I do well or whether I do poorly.
Especially if you're forwarding from your company domain to a gmail, some will be stuck in the company domain email and not get forwarded (has happened to me many times).
Good writeup, but I can't help but laugh a bit at the outcome pivot:

"We decided to build a solution to this problem — FundaMine, a community to help professionals interact with others in their profession."

Literally the "well, we don't know how to make what people want, so let's address what we as startup people want" outcome. Literally.
I love shit like this. Thanks for the link.
Old fart here. My favorite interview question is this:

Tell me about a project, any project large or small, that was 100% you. You thought of it, you coded it, you wrote the tests, you documented it. The only other requirement is that the project has to have at least 10 users who installed, used, and continue to use the project without any help from you.

Lots of people don't have an answer. Some you need to coax a little, because a small project is fine. For example one that I did close to 30 years ago was move/copy utilities that used regexp. You could do

move =.fortran =.f

and it did what you wanted (first = is .* and second is $1 and they could repeat).

Anyone with basic C skills could have done this (or perl, I think someone else did a perl version and that won). So people would think a project like that doesn't count, but it does. Small is fine, you just had to do the whole thing and people needed to be able to use it without asking for help.

This covers a lot of ground and my experience is if you get lucky enough to find someone who has done projects like this, and there is at least some overlap with what we are doing, yeah, we got lucky.
The Bitcoin Big Bang