skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As my colleague Ethan Zuckerman said, “It’s obvious now what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.”

Can we find role models who were successful at achieving their "brave and noble" social goals? We can draw upon centuries of negotiation between labor and rent seekers.

> Your generation does not need to surrender to some sort of techno-determinist future. Let’s try and “rewire” (Ethan’s term) the Internet.

The article mentions SOPA but not TPP/TTIP/TISA/RECP which will "rewire" the Internet, computing infrastructure and more. Caution is warranted when listening to rewirers bearing gifts.
It keeps up in some cases, as some dialog options are only available for one platform and ignored in the rest.

But it is updated slowly, i.e. the platform has a new widget and the corresponding wxWidgets update happens several months later.

You can check for example Audacity in your platform and evaluate if it feels native enough.
Will give that a try. Thanks! :)
A point well made. This article has all the hallmarks of a person who understands that wheels are powerful and that the people who design and engineer wheels are clever. Yet, this person also fails to understand that wheels have limits. Only that clever people can do impressive things, therefore they should obviously be capable of doing a particular clever thing.

The more I read, the more I approach the conclusion that the author should change his name to Rip van Winkle.
Interview with Audrey Lim, the lawyer-turned-programmer who learned Go in a year
> Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.

Wait, wouldn't it be the other way around? Inflating property values would increase tax revenue. Even if they were subsidizing white home ownership they may have come out ahead.

It's one of the driving forces of gentrification: if investing X gets the city X + Y in tax revenues then it's an economically sound decision.
I don't think 65-75 years old qualifies as "the prime of life"
I would assume it's Disney's position that copyright terms should be indefinite. Such a policy allows them to indefinitely extract rents from the "assets" of "intellectual property" that their earlier works represent.

I don't agree with the position, morally, but from a purely practical perspective it makes sense that they'd want to maintain the value of these assets ad infinitum.
"Does anyone in their right mind honestly think that in less than 150 years there will still be a single human-controlled vehicle (plane or automobile)?"

You do realize that we don't even have clean water on a global scale?
Even old busted partial tech is better than a black LCD or even with bad reception, since you don't even know when you'll have bits of data. I'm starting to think that our 'old' world is actually a massively distributed, redundant, fault tolerant information system, just not an electronic one.
I tried doing that with a tumblr blog I have and it didn't work out. It's faster and easier to write by keyboard. Seriously, I can't see how anyone talks to a phone while trying to get their thoughts out. Correcting a sentence or copying/pasting a series of sentences is much easier with a mouse/keyboard combo than a touchscreen/voice combo.
Very sad. May they rest in peace.
Dude, you don't really make much sense with all that reductionist gobbledygook. You're quite hung up on the concept of "information arbitrage" in your numerous replies on this thread. You almost come off as a troll but I can see you're serious.

There is more to life than "information arbitrage". You cannot reduce people and society to transactions. Get out of your green-ivory tower. Arbitrage the asymmetry between your theories and reality by living a little. Maybe get laid. But if you reduce that too to some sort of arbitrage, you probably won't, unless you're paying for it, which only reinforces your world view.

> I find comments like this to be sorta akin to putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "lalalalala I can't hear you!".

Ironic.
I guess I disagree with the idea that patents are inherently bad. Like hammers they can be used to build or to destroy.
"I don't believe in a proof done by a computer, says Pierre Deligne of the Institute for Advanced Study, an algebraic geometer and 1978 Fields Medalist. “In a way, I am very egocentric. I believe in a proof if I understand it, if it’s clear.” While recognizing that humans can make mistakes, he adds: “A computer will also make mistakes, but they are much more diffcult to find."

THE DEATH OF PROOF by John Horgan
http://www.math.uh.edu/~tomforde/Articles/DeathOfProof.pdf
The Media Center addition was given to early adopters of Windows 8 for free.
I don't own a gun, but I have had fantasies about doing exactly the same thing. Vigilante justice is an American tradition. A better course of action probably would have been to photograph the drone and report the incident to law enforcement.
RubySpec is Reborn
Ironically, the author seems like he is the Rip Van Winkle here...
Not necessarily, they are quite different forms of communication.

Coming up with something that works, versus explaining why it works or why you did it that way after the fact.

I think it's the "thinking out loud" part before you have a solution, that can fluster a lot of introverts.
Hey there, I’m a programer at Wealthsimple. We're currently looking for web, iOS, and Android devs, as well as engineers with expertise in financial backoffice, financial modeling, and analytics.

Feel free to reach out to me at peter@wealthsimple.com - happy to chat more about the technical problems we’re solving
Shariff: Social share without compromising privacy
The Same Number of Americans Live in the Red Region as in the Orange Region
Also consider railroad tracks, at least normally you'd only have one property owner making claims (the railroad), and the local residents are already used to 9000 HP worth of coal train rumbling thru at 3am so a tiny little quiet drone is no real issue. Also in an accident, I think its pretty obvious who "wins" when a ten million pound train hits a ten pound drone, so other than glass and paint claims I think you're pretty safe. I don't envision a drone ever causing a coal train to derail, LOL.
Buying Bitcoins in the UK – if you're under 18
Also, it seems that energy consumption per pound delivered must be much higher for flying than for rolling over paved roads.
I think it still matters, sadly. The whole sordid affair has taken from a language community a developer who did much good, and who is as of yet unable to return because the question of his guilt, if any, is unresolved. The end of this case, if it ever has one, might possibly see her claims validated, or it might possibly enable the return of a valued talent.

I do not assume to know which it might be, but the chance that it might be the latter makes me think that the question still matters, since as of yet, that developer is still assumed guilty without there ever having been a trial.

This does not mean that i do not have nothing but the utmost sympathy for all those hurt by her passing. I merely think it does not merit ignoring the possibly undeserved pain of another.
Use these 8 steps to write product reviews for 10x conversion
JFK, 1962: We're going to go to the moon.

You: You do realize that we don't even have clean water on a global scale?
A fun and easy way to take your first dip into Blue Ocean Strategy
Or just encrypt your files.
Interesting angle on female founders. My initial thought was "I wonder if they're a much smaller % of the overall pool and so vulnerable to the 'Uber' effect of one or two big exits dragging all the women up" But yours is a great point too. They face more obstacles and so it's a higher calibre out of the gate getting funded.
I'm sure your existing homeowner's insurance policy will cover that. I'm certain of it. It may add an extra $0.50 a year to your premium, because the odds are so small that:

(a) Your house will get hit by a drone
(b) The collision will cause damage to the building
(c) The drone will have no ownership identifiers on it.
(Hint: Not Amazon, which is what we're discussing here)

You don't currently purchase "uninsured baseball thrower" insurance, do you? Those things cost tens of millions of dollars of damage in broken windows every year, but we've figured it out.
Wow, that's pretty awful. I might posit some rules for good take-home tests:

1. A very loose time limit. Maybe, as a rule of thumb, at least 10x the time you expect the challenge to take (so, a 1-hour challenge is given a 10-hour limit to turn it in, and a 5-hour challenge is given two days). If you expect it to be done in real time, why they heck don't you just bring the candidate in for a normal interview?

2. If the challenge is expected to take more than, say, 5 hours, the candidate should be paid for their time. Long challenges are going to disincentive candidates with lots of good alternatives to your company, so compensating them as in your own interest if you want good engineers to make it through your process. Plus, it's a strong signal that you value their time.

3. The challenge should be as close as possible to the sort of thing you do day-to-day. This should be obvious, but don't ask math questions or graph traversal questions unless this sort of thing comes up regularly in the job you're hiring for.

4. The candidate should be given an opportunity to discuss their solution. In real-life code, a seemingly stupid decision is may well be totally justifiable, but not obviously so from the code itself.

5. The candidate always gets an explanation of why they were rejected. At one company I worked at, I was in the position of reviewing takehome tests (which were one component of a longer process which involved some on-site coding). I had to write those explanations, and I know it's hard. It's easy to say "your skills are not a good fit at this time", but it's hard to tell someone you don't know what's wrong with something they put a lot of work into. It's still worth doing.
I'm not sure where to differentiate between the rebel filmmaker and the rebel software application developer - at least not in his analogy.

The rebel artist is there to disrupt social norms through a particular medium. In his time, anti-Vietnam messages were a big one.

Now apps like Uber aim to disrupt social norms through the software medium. (I will argue all day that software is art, BTW.) Just because the author doesn't recognize the movement personally doesn't mean it has really changed all that much.

(P.S. All of author's heroes listed are rich. I fully believe both art and riches can be pursued at the same time, but being paid well for doing what you love is the same as it's always been.)
I see this as businesses pushing off even more of their part of the early employment process.

We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with ever increasing minimums.

This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a good fit.

Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive environment?
Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees when they can demand only employees with very specific experience.

With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix.

I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me
Don't worry. Amazon will deliver water filters via drones. Clean water for everyone!
Also its more than a little disingenuous on the part of the company. It communicates "my time is more valuable than yours . Go do this thing async so if you don't work out I don't have to waste resources on you." It also drives a perverse incentive on the part of the interviewing organization. The only resources you've spent is the time to send them the test if you are unmotivated or are having second thoughts you don't even have to look at the candidates work. But the candidate might spend hours on this thing.

I prefer an interview system where the company and the candidate both care. Commitment is a requirement for everyone.
I've found a few problems with celery myself. It has an absolutely amazing feature set and seems like a clever and very clean abstraction.

However, when it starts hiding exceptions within your tasks if you use JSON for messages or if you are having problems with it doing things you were not expecting... Like randomly not passing information between dependant tasks... Gevent and celery I have found don't play well together even if you disable Gevent for the worker.

Maybe you eventually realise that writing your own task for rabbitmq and your own workers is simpler than relying on someone elses complex code.

Celery will 100% do what you want but it's definitely been a steeper learning curve than it should be and has lots of gotchas and many hours of hunting around to deal with obscure issues.

I do wonder if there is a reasonable heuristic, apart from experience, to learn when a piece of software may be too complex for at least me to use well.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you've never been to a 3rd world country for an extended period of time. If I'm wrong I'd like to apologize for making this assumption to make the rest of my point, because you can easily step on the way back machine by moving someplace where only a few people have computers.

During my time in Bolivia and Haiti I experience massive culture shock at the way people interact with their community. At night you can walk around the central plaza in the Okinawa Numero Uno (mind you this is a TINY town) and someone will find you to chat with you. In bigger towns (in Bolivia) people are friendly, because they have to interact to get directions, ask for a good place to eat, or just chat. There are community events ALL the time.

Was it a golden age? No, I don't think so, but it was a time and culture where people KNEW their neighbors because if you want to stave off boredom you have to hang out with them to laugh, eat, drink, etc. I don't think technology has changed this per se, but instead that TV and the culture of entertainment that we have has changed this.

I know that comparing the USA 30-50 years ago and Bolivia is an oversimplification, but there definitely was a culture difference before everyone had a cellphone in their pocket. It may not have been a golden age, but for some people it was a period where the risks were easier to understand.

That said, I also think people were still able to find isolation who wanted it, the main difference is people who were seeking a way to fight boredom had much fewer ways to do that in their house by themselves 50 years ago.
>This is supposed to be a community of "Hackers" making cool stuff

or may be a community of voyeurs who like to watch the Hackers making cool stuff?
These are not normal parameters, they are "Secrets", a special kind of parameters that are saved internally in Blockspring and automatically applied to functions that use them, after the account owner has set them.
The death of Cecil the lion and the big business of big game trophy hunting
Hackers combine coded photos and Twitter to hit targets
Licensing should be up to the candidate, and it could be commercially licensed and not available to everybody.

You shouldn't have to write a OS Kernel or a modern browser in your spare time either. I'd say it would be about 4-8 hours work that shows off your skills.

But if you prefer to spend that same time on some inane made-up problem for one employer and code something that you will wont enjoy writing and never use again, then as I said in another reply that there should be the option for that too.

> Many other fields require competency tests

Is there a field that requires 4-8hr competency tests where each test is wildly different from the previous, with completely opaque criteria. At least with the provide your own project idea, if the employer has fucked up criteria the candidate has only wasted a few seconds of their time in sending the zip file.

Kind of analogous to 'show me your portfolio' for a photographer. The portfolio should be enough. Unfortunately this is not possible as a developer as the source from your previous jobs is likely to be closed, hence the need for a personal project.
We don't draw the a line. Freedom of speech.

All I'm trying to promote is understanding among people from both sides.
I think that's a risk if there were only 3 or 4 big conclusions but with 10 I think nearly everyone gets to stay "Well we hit 4 out of 10 and missed 3 out of 10 with a few in between"
While true, the combination of the Thiel's beliefs ends up feeling a little bit "For me, but not for thee". Relying on the free hand of the market to take care of things depends on there being a market, but any given company is massively incentivized to distort the market as far as humanly possible.
Interesting.
Nokia was way behind in a market it used to lead. Shaving off the burden of past success thanks to the Microsoft acquisition was the only way for the company to freely pivot into an innovation company again.
Let's see if they'll keep up with the expectations.
I wonder when old fashioned ideas will become more main stream again. When I look at Farm Feedry it screams franchise opportunity. Why try to scale this out yourself, if you can come up with a working model and equation for how to source local farm fresh ingredients, a database of reasonable recipes for a set of ingredients, and the logistics for delivery? It would seem like an amazing business opportunity.

By the way, the food looks amazing! I wish I was in the area to buy it.
> Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes.

This is an efficient way to hire a team of good bullshitters. I've interviewed people who did extremely well when we were "talking like professionals" but were unable to do even very simple coding problems.

My bar for coding is really not that high. I don't expect perfect syntax. I don't pick the language. I don't expect "the one answer". I expect people to write code that could work after syntax and small bugs are fixed, and most critically, I expect people to be able to discuss their code meaningfully.

Unfortunately, "ability to write basic code" and "ability to talk like professionals" are not tightly correlated. And I expect both of these things from dev candidates.
1) Check their haplogroup. See what part of the world they came from. Put it on 23andme so people can see if they are related.

2) Test to see if they are his mother's bones.
Currently we're using JumpCloud, prior to that we used OneLogin before they had a ton of outages.

Would love to switch to you guys, since integrating with Google Apps as an LDAP/RADIUS server is our one-and-only use case.

Question: Do you guys guarantee encryption-at-rest for key storage? What about 3rd party master encryption keys?
Is that with Celery or are you using your own queue management?
Is there data on the efficacy of non traditional coding interviews vs traditional ones?

I'm all for improving the process, but as someone who at times has struggled on a coding interview, I believe that the onus to improve should be on me the candidate.
I hate take-home interviews and rarely finish them. Especially when a candidate has many options or places a high value on actually getting to meet possible future team members (as I do), a two or three-hour assignment take-home assignment is a lot to ask. I would rather get to show previous projects and explain context and what I might do differently now.
From the employees' perspective:

Take home tests are the worst. Company says take home test will take 3 hours to complete. They never do. Schedule 2x or 3x the estimate. Especially if you want to impress the reviewer.

You send it over, then the company says no or yes, only to move to new stage.

In the worst case you ruined your weekend and received a no. But the company just took 10 minutes to arbitrarily reject your application.

From the company's perspective:

I've seen applicants receive friends'/roommates'/spouse's help on take home tests. Not a good indicator at all even with a glowing submission.
Have you tried http://www.pizzatext.net?
Wouldn't they all look the same from the arrow's frame of reference? They're all locally flat.

I guess the lines of curvature in e.g. the cylindrical geometry would look different.
You don't need PowerQuery when you can have full SQL inside Excel, and in a very elegant way: http://thingiequery.com/
I can't help feel that people are being rather hypocritical in their outrage to this.
I would say that Excel is more a writing environment rather than a reading environment, the problem is not with Excel itself, it's just there is always a lack of validation, consistency and proper backups / history with Excel. So people just jump on it because it's simple to use and just make sense but the problem is that they don't see the broader picture and how the things they are actually creating are going to be used in the future (and if they can).
$300 per day sounds like a lot of money until you factor insurance costs, taxes, vehicle care, and so on. I'd be willing to bet (at least here in Atlanta) that the average full time Uber/Lyft driver brings home around $25-30k/year after taxes and expenses. Not too shabby for driving around all day, but it's definitely not for everyone.

Even so, I've thought about driving for Lyft in my off hours; my insurance company is rideshare-friendly and I could probably pull in a few hundred dollars every month in "fun money" and have fun doing it. Then again, I'm not willing to give up spending that time on personal pursuits and valuable family time.
> So I want to explore the idea that the last 20 years of technological progress — the digital revolution — have devalued the role of the creative artist in our society

I disagree. Technological progress has just mostly devalued the old institutions of middle men and gate keepers. Now anyone with a digital video camera, mic, and computer can become a star. They no longer need hollywood's or the record labels' permission
I think this is just BS rationalizing by talking heads because evil suicide muslim pilot makes for good tv ratings.

The path the plane took is known because of tracking systems it was supposedly avoiding.

It flew right over one of the largest/busiest airports in Malaysia. If you were trying to avoid radar would you have done that?

Would you have flown into Indonesian airspace or gone farther out before turning south?

If you wanted to crash the airplane wouldn't you just crash the airplane?

The entire suicide pilot theory [1] has unfortunately jumped the rails and become largely unfalsifiable and indistinguishable from CT, whatever the plane is observed to do is instantly ascribed to the suicide pilots master plan which there is zero real evidence for. Can't find the plane? All part of his master plan.

[1] which is a perfectly good theory and one of the two most likely scenarios.
My guess was to make a Top 10 investment you had to probably be in business 5 - 10 years thus invest at 25 and by 32 they have a very successful startup/exit
Thank you for letting me know, and I'll use their preferred pronoun in the future.