skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the work sample test. In similar threads, some found cheaters, but the followup interview exposed them because they can't speak about the process and solution cogently. I imagine that if you look at enough, just reading them will allow you to spot cheaters, and having so many applicants will provide a good selection ethical developers. And a short contract-to-hire or probation period should deal with any who get through.
Top 7 Social Media Sites for Website Traffic from January to May, 2015
That's the ticket! (sez the ol' biochemist) Just peruse some of these images and compare: https://goo.gl/TpzzxB

and consider the virtues of beamer over powerpoint.
It makes me sad to see people who donate or contribute to charity for popularity. The idea behind giving blood--or other community services--is to help society as a hole, not your ego. Charity should not be flashed like a status symbol.

If a charity is wasting time and money developing systems to stroke your ego, they should just skip the step and sell themselves to Fleshlight. Their time and money should be spent on improving the lives of those in need, not by stroking off some people.
That just seems to result in everyone getting underpaid. Keep paying musicians, let's just figure out how to pay teachers and bus drivers and everyone else more.

If we say that musicians should be paid less because our standard as society is that everyone else is underpaid and that's fine, that's really disrespectful to the productive workers for the world.
That assumes every Apple Music user is on their 3 month free trial at the same time. This 3 month trial won't even be a consideration in a year, as the majority of users will be past theirs. In reality, at any given moment a small percentage of users will be in the free trial period (excluding the first 3 months of the service being generally available).
> Factoring is not a huge burden compared to the earlier steps

I agree with this. My point is just that it's not required for the proof, and usually isn't included -- so the proof is not constructive. You can extend it to be constructive in a very straightforward manner, but you don't have to and you usually don't.

The reason I'm calling this a nonconstructive proof is by analogy to the following proof, often given as an example of a nonconstructive proof:

Theorem: it is possible for an irrational number raised to an irrational power to result in a rational number.

0. For typographic convenience, let r = sqrt(2). r is known to be irrational.

1. r^r might or might not be rational -- who knows?

2a. If r^r is rational, the theorem is proved.

2b. If r^r is not rational, then (r^r)^r is an irrational number raised to an irrational power, but (r^r)^r = r^(r⋅r) = r^2 = 2, which is rational.

3. Therefore, there exists some pair a,b for which the following is true: (I) a and b are both irrational; (II) a^b is rational.

I don't see any way to consider this proof nonconstructive while considering the proof of the inifinitude of the primes that I've described as constructive. Do you?
Typical system behavior. Tax offices are uber fast at cross relating shallow data to spot potential fraud, but coudln't help you fill some form to save their life.
"If you're a programmer..."

There are many different kinds of programmers. If you want to hack web or phone apps for a startup, a degree may not be necessary. But if you want to work on software that requires significant algorithmic or math knowledge (e.g., building something like Photoshop or Google search), the formal knowledge that you'd get from completing a CS degree would probably be helpful. (Remember that the guys who founded Google weren't college dropouts - they were PhD students at Stanford.)

The original poster may decide after a few years that they're tired of working for startups (or startup funding may dry up), and having a CS degree would give them many more options on what kind of jobs they could get. Big companies like Google or Facebook have a tendency to hire people with degrees. A degree from a well-known university serves as a signal (whether justified or not) for quickly sorting through the huge stacks of resumes that these companies receive.

So I'd agree with the advice that others have already offered: finish the degree to keep your options open; there will be other (perhaps better) startup opportunities in a couple of years.
Go Ahead, Ask Google 'What Happened to the Dinosaurs'
The basic linear scan algorithm generates poor code, so you almost always want to extend it with additional heuristics. If any of these heuristics involve reversing a tentative decision then you have to rewind the state of the entire register allocator, because the linear scan algorithm is designed to process the function in one direction. This coarse-grained backtracking is fairly expensive. If you use a better algorithm that lets you consider tentative decisions on a more individual basis, then you scale better than linear scan with these extensions.

Because of the poor output code quality of the linear scan allocator (even with all of the additional heuristics), there was a post-pass that performed local optimizations. Over time it accumulated a lot of special cases to target particular poor code patterns, and it became more expensive than just using a register allocator that produced better code in the first place.
In the Apple Music situation, there's likely very little opportunity cost unless we
believe that it's going to be so amazingly and instantly successful that it will
cannibalize all current revenue streams.

You or I may believe whatever we like, but I’ll bet big money that Apple believes that it will be amazingly and instantly successful and further that their entire business plan consists of cannibalizing all current revenue streams.

I don’t think they’d be in this business at all if they didn’t think they had a shot at rendering the competition irrelevant.
Agreed. What you linked to looks like an interesting way to generate simple animations, which indeed could be of wide interest. I haven't (yet) tried using it, but may...
A Provable Security Analysis of Intel's Secure Key RNG [pdf]
Aphyr.com Jepsen Series – Distribution Is Hard
This is a simple and cheap method to get more people to male the altruistic[1] step of donating blood.

It's not much fun; it's sort of awkward for some people; we could probably do woth more people donating blood.

The blood banks have a choice: spend money on tv ads, or spend money doing this. Why are ads okay and this terrible?

[1] I'm not interested in philosophy of altruism.
I may have missed the point of the article, but it seems like most consumer marketers have always been hyperfocused on (roughly) the 18-30 segment for various reasons. Some of those reasons would be flattering to people in that age range (more likely to be trendsetters, for example) and some would not be (more susceptible to marketing, or more likely to want to follow trends established by perceived trendsetters). But it seems like it's been this way my whole life.

Is the marketing focus on the Millenial Generation simply the fact that the age demographics that marketers have always been fixated on now roughly corresponds with the age range associated with Millenials? It seems that way to me, and if so the article may be conflating stereotypes about capital-G Generations with what consumer marketers have always done, which is to try to squeeze as much money as possible out of twentysomethings before they wise up to it.
If it's open source please submit it to F-Droid [1].

[1] https://f-droid.org/
I really don't have time for a complete point-by-point here, I really don't. The proof as you've stated it here is really, really close to being complete and correct. Mostly the problems are where you haven't said something that is, in fact, true, reasonable, and easy to add. The point being that you haven't actually said it.

Step 1 is the specific example. You say:

1. Assume there is no prime number larger than p_n.

But you haven't said that p_1 through p_n are all the primes up to and including p_n. A set that satisfies your step 1 is the set { 7 }. I can read your step 1 and say: OK, I'll assume that { 7 } is the set of all primes.

Then you say:

2. Compute the product of all the prime
numbers less than or equal to p_n,
plus one. Call this number c.

The natural reading of this is to think you're saying that p_1, p_2, p_3, ..., p_n are the primes up to p_n. If not, why have you called it p_n and not simply called it P. Doing so makes it clear that in step 2 you are taking all the primes up to some limit, rather than taking all the primes in a collection of size n, with p_n the maximum element.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the usual proof does start with a specific collection, which is at odds with what you seem to be saying.

You say:

> Since I don't know which numbers
> I multiplied together, I won't
> know the numeric value of the
> number produced in step 3, but
> I certainly do know that by
> construction, it is not divisible
> by any prime <= p_n.

Yes, but only if you use this unexpected interpretation that p_n is simply a limit, and not the largest/last element of an arbitrary set of primes.

So the proof you've given is not exactly the usual proof, it's subtly different. The notation you use brings to mind the usual proof, and creates a confusion about what you're actually saying. The objective of the proof I gave is to avoid those potential mis-interpretations.

Does that make it clear? Perhaps it's important to add that I'm not saying your proof is actually wrong, I'm just saying that if an undergrad produced it I'd be asking for clarification on a few points to see if they really understood it, or if they'd just memorised it and perhaps missed a point, or muddled two formulations.
`ccat`, the coloring `cat` demo
Real estate investment algorithm
Her whole statement just smelled funny. You typically don't get rich without being good at exploiting people.
That's a valid point and a good solution, you could easily replace the ECS with AWS Lambda for running your task without having idle machines, but the scheduler is still necessary. If you have more complex tasks or are using languages not supported by Lambda, ECS can still be a very cheap way around (you can use a t2.micro instance and share it across all of your jobs)
The difference between a profit center and a cost center, I guess. It costs money to secure a bunch of systems that process credit card data or other stuff; it profits to be able to take that 60% cut.
The FDA's ban on transfat is almost entirely after the fact. Transfats have been on the outs for a long time, and their use has declined in accordance.

The rise in the use of palm oil has more to do with people thinking that because it's natural, it's "healthy" for you (which is really only true if your baseline for comparison is eating tubs of margarine) thanks to folks like Dr. Oz.

So, since you can't see my eyeroll at the downvotes, here are citations:

NPR piece noting that transfat usage has dropped by 86% before the ban: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/16/414906829/fda...

And somewhat surprisingly the wikipedia article on the nutritional & health effects of palm oil is pretty well cited: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Palm_oil#Nutrition_and_healt...

tl:dr; Transfats are bad for you. That's why they don't sell them. Palm oil isn't vastly healthier than other oils. Eat less fat.
> […] in 1979 I became a reluctant entrepreneur. I formed a software company to market the Scribe document production system , which was developed by Brian Reid […]

I wonder what role he had in inserting one of the first (if not the first) forms of DRM in software: a time bomb which deactivated the commercialized version of the Scribe software after a period of time. At the time, this upset many, including Richard Stallman: https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/faif-2.0.pdf#101
> Allen says he's read about 25 percent of the books in his basement

Interesting. I don't own any books that I haven't read. My rule is that I can't buy another one before I've finished the previous one and I've only stopped reading a book once or twice and violated that self imposed rule.

He's probably still read more SF than anybody alive, impressive.
It's not a .com so it's as valuable as a .technology domain to most people who don't know how DNS works.
Enterprise Software Still Sucks
Does the TV have speakers? Most do. You can get audible frequencies leaking onto the audio line and emitting noise. My LCD monitor has built in speakers that I never use and have turned "off", but every once in a while I hear a hiss from them.
These people are almost as bad as the "Healthy at Any Size" folks who deny that Obesity leads to serious health problems. Sadly, "Fat Acceptance" is the only point of view that's allowed on reddit, and in Y Combinator News, despite the fact that it's just as unscientific as believing in EHS.
BabelJS support chat that used gitter moved to slack, Reactiflux a React community uses slack. If think there is a real opportunity for slack to do like reddit with their subs for opensource software, they could monetize it with jobs offers. But for now if slack is more slick and fast than gitter we loose google searching, history.
I would say it depends on even what your SaaS is. If you're doing CI, you can probably do an IO domain or whatever the hipsters use these days. If you're selling to healthcare providers or basically anything not inside the technosphere, it'll probably be less confusing for your customers to use a .com.
Don't do it. I left universitet for job and now I can't leave this f*ing country (Russia) because every country requires "degree" for visa, even for crappy positions.
Does Slack really use LAMP?
Parkinson's Law states that work is expanded to fill the available time. The law I refer to is that the time itself with work to be filled is expanded - for the purpose of requiring more human and non-human resources - which again requires expanding the hierarchy - which expands the power of those who cause this process (as the newly hired people will be added below those "managers").
Show HN: News CMS – News content manager for mobile
When are you giving this talk? I am very interested.
I only bought a DS when there was homebrew available - or at least the possibility of "Hello World". Is the Vita at that point now? Do I have to search eBay for an old Vita or will the newest ones work?
I was being a bit sarcastic, its just that sometimes I read these highly critical blog posts about "we made X decision with Y product and it sucks" where really the person who was responsible for the decision could have anticipated the consequences with five minutes of evaluation.
> suddenly

Ignoring the Gameboy, Gameboy Pocket, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advanced, Gameboy Advanced SP, Gameboy Micro, all the various combinations of those machines, and then the Nintendo DS and combinations.

They've never been friendly to homebrew, but after DS flash cards it's not surprising they tightened things up.
Developers have figured out the secret sauce for gentrifying neighborhoods
There is overhead. WPA2 Enterprise does not have a signup mechanism; you'd neee to run that on a separate SSID. Now you have to get people to join the appropriate SSID for what they want. Also unless you have a corporate managed device with the company CA installed, you have to click through scary certificate warnings.
GroupLens: applying collaborative filtering to Usenet news (1997) [pdf]
"Common sense" derives from Aristotle's use of "sensus communis"

He noted that animals and humans share the same 5 perceptual senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. And animals are also able to make distinctions combining one or more of these senses just as humans do.. (e.g., white and sweet = yum, compared to white and salty = yuck).

Animal rationality has no place in Aristotelian philosophy so the common sense was posited as that facility that both humans and animals share that unite multiple perceptual sensations into self-evident truths that are not just simple facts but also not requiring logic or rational consideration / synthesis.
You can definitely fault him for not researching pricing. Even if there were no limit to teams the pricing alone does not work for his organization. Why would you switch everyone over?
His point may be a good one but he does it a disservice by framing Swift's letter as a rant, which it very certainly was not.
Compilers have been steadily advancing for 40 years now. Doing a lot of things previously deemed too hard or almost impossible. I'm pretty sure there will be further breakthroughs compiling more dynamic cases into some high performance form.

> Then there is the issue of heap allocation of most if not all variables since their life times are hard if not impossible to determine.

It's actually other way around. In most JITted "scripting languages", by far most variables have lifetimes that can be determined and stack allocated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_analysis
> The Lib Dems (who I stood for in the election) have actually tried to do the probably-impossible here and build a platform on evidence-based policy. Much good it did us in the poll, of course.

Interesting you mention that. The Lib Dems didn't do the common sense thing: ditch their leader. Even after a bloodbath in the European elections, even after opinion poll after opinion poll showed considerable negativity towards him.

They had an abundance of data, but a total lack of common sense.
How do you verify that your mock behaves exactly as the real database? The type system certainly helps with function signatures, but what about behavior?
> A career in tech has a crazy pile of expenses associated (Stanford isn't giving away comp sci degrees

I would contend that for somebody who's already going to Be Good At This, that would be a crazy expense from a bad decision. The best three engineers I know have degrees from UMass-Lowell, UMaine, and the University of Delaware. (I'm not #2, but I went to UMaine and graduated with $20K in loans. Paid off in four years, and I slacked.)

As far as lower career ceilings--each of those people (and I) are at lead/staff-level positions in the Boston area and have not wanted for challenging or well-paying work, while having expenses less than half of your average San Francisco tech nerd. The specter of the Bay Area looms large, but I think it's silly in how all-consuming it's considered.
They do mention in the write-up that, "We also held our breaths as we waited for Slacks' teased support for large open source communities like ours." and show the FAQ addressing their use case - https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8...
In Germany there is connection between electrosmog advocates and the tobacco industry in the person of Franz Adlkofer, Mersch-Sundermann and others. Here is a german-language text that deals with that connection: https://www.psiram.com/ge/index.php/Elektrosmog
This might help explain where flux is useful http://briandipalma.github.io/flux-for-components/
The Lawn Mower – asciinema
Every chat system since IRC has been worse than IRC. Without fail. Just use IRC, people, stop chasing shiny things.
Snowden was someone with access who acted on what he thought was in the best interest of Americans. Whether it was or wasn't is debatable. But to assume foreign spies exist in the NSA, and would risk treason for foreign interest because NSA screening missed Snowden, is a big leap in logic.

Of course no one can say foreign spies inside the NSA or access to their top secret files is impossible, I'm simply suggesting it's safer to assume this is not likely, and comparing the NSA to civilian corporations in this regard is unreasonable.
The Problem with Averaging Star Ratings
Has the pursuit of strong AI been a waste of time?
Something still needs to trigger your Lambda function. AWS really lacks a cron-as-a-service.
I'm not sure I follow this.. The photographer's getting paid up front, right?
Ok, that's quite a bit of news. Thanks for clarifying, shines a new light on things.
Two things.

1. The decision making process here was unsound. You need to follow the one, some, all approach of rolling out changes. Jumping in on multiple thousands of users was irresponsible.

2. Slack should provide some guidance earlier in the process about user limits. They are known for their friendly UI/UX. An email to the admin saying: "Hey, we've noticed you reached 50% of our maximum users for your instance, are you sure you are on the right path?" would have gone a long way.
Why are you surprised? LAMP stack, only at this scale is not a bottleneck. Who knows, maybe they are not even using HHVM, yet. I would be blaming actual code, not the stack for the current trouble.

P.S. LAMP != shitty developers automatically
Sorry, can you explain why? If the checksum is provided (as part of the sh snippet) by the website with the SSL certificate, isn't that enough reassurance?
Ah, I remember one documentary/subject in the news on the TV and technicians came to measure things then they found out the cell tower was not connected yet. Not connected as in not even powered on and no electricity running through its systems.

Of course it's just one data point and it doesn't prove people aren't suffering.
How Microserfdom Ate the World
I'd suggest that most of the people that want to pay to stream music through their iPhones already use Spotify - the rest use YouTube and pay nothing.

Apple pushing the labels to nix Spotify's freemium tier was no accident. Mediocre service + paid + Apple brand = no longer good enough.
I love script[1,2] for this sort of thing. Why wait for a video to play? Or host it on a third-party site? Having the entire session visible on a single, static page is less frustrating in most circumstances I encounter.

Having said that, Asciinema certainly looks like fun.

[1] http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?script
[2] Sample session: https://tinyapps.org/blog/nix/201107170745_copy_terminal_tex...
This is pretty cool. Maybe can be useful as a safe alternative to eval()?
OK sure, I get that Slack wants to make money and doesn't want too many 'free' users. The restrictions themselves are acceptable to me.

However, their platform seems super brittle and janky if it can't handle the users in the first place. Seriously? 5000 users, 10,000 messages is a "Use Case" now? Sending out emails without fucking up needs "engineering"? Um. OK. Personally, I would be embarrassed if I put my name on a product that couldn't handle such an extremely light load for a platform that basically transmits text.
I do not see .co as strong as .com - that is why I went for the .com domain I wrote about below - even though I did buy some other domains as .io and .net before the deal was finalized.

There is something about a .com that signals age and trust more than any other domains, I invariably think that it must be a new business or not as trustworthy when they don't own the .com (especially if the .com is for sale)
OK, sure, but in the absence of affirmative action, are black high schoolers going into science and engineering programs at rates commensurate with their aptitude and interest compared with non-black high schoolers?

Obviously we're a bit off-topic from codes of conduct at the moment. But the specific claim I was responding to was that minorities and disadvantaged groups are not being excluded from CS today in the same way as they have been marginalized from society for millennia. You can draw a fairly straightforward line of causality from imperialism and slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow to, e.g., why fewer black kids in elementary school learned programming in the '90s via their parents' UNIX account from the local university and reading their parents' textbooks (which is how I originally got into CS as a child, and I've heard similar stories from several of my peers).
Could be :) If you accept that it's slower. Benchmarks would show the difference.
Spotify has a freemium tier that converts extraordinarily well.
What did you expect? You can't expect to hit such a ridiculously large number and not pay anything.
How Copenhagen Became a Cycling Paradise by Considering the Full Cost of Cars