skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would never take this option.

At my current workplace, I have the tools I need to work. Most of my softwares licences are under my employer's name. I have access to my snippets, my previous projects and many build processes (minifying my code, preprocessing my CSS, etc.). My workflow is great.

If you give me a project to do at home, I can't use any of that.

I would have to spent hours working either from my bed, my dining table or in a coffee, on a laptop. I would also be required to work on this project after the 40h/week that I already do.

I'll take the regular interview any time.

One of my worst interview process was one time when they required me to do a project of 20+h in a week. They knew I was employed elsewhere, so they let me give it Monday instead of Friday. This was ridiculous.

Otherwise, everything was doing very well. However, the experience really discouraged me from working there.

But I guess it's not all that bad, because I most likely dodged a bullet. If they can't even give correct deadlines to future employees, I can't imagine how they threat their own employees.
> 'retarded' in it's current usage is not offensive. It means "very foolish or stupid."

Maybe where you live. Where I'm from "retard" is about as bad as nigger. Feel free to say it. Just don't be surprised when people tell you how annoyed they are at you for using it.

EDIT: not quite as bad. Media will use "the n word", but would not say "the r word".
He makes some really good points about the way that the capital owning classes actually don't want greater democratic enfranchisement. He also makes some great points about how there doesn't seem to be as much inclination towards revolutionary art.

As people come to grips with the decline of American power and begin to realize that, in fact, we aren't free or special or really living up to any of the high ideals that are described in some of our founding documents and rhetoric you will see more arguments like these.

At the root of his critique is that he really does believe that we are special and this place can be magic. It isn't and it won't be.

EDIT: Libertarianism is a dying hooker licking 9V alkaline batteries for that metallic taste of excitement every time it gets to posit a counterfactual notion about some basic human tenant. It's a foolish sounding semi-sorta ideology when espoused by the middle class who are algorithmically incapable of seeing any benefit from it's implementation and a smug blanket of self-serving satisfaction for the wealthy who use it to make their social position intellectually palatable in a "dinner party" conversational sense.

While the wealthy capitalists in this article may really entertain ludicrous thoughts of building a treehouse-fort-island where they are the biggest bully, they don't do so in any way that might upset their own apple cart's on the way to markets created and policed by a political process that they go out of their way to openly despise but are intravenously connected to in ways that conjoined twins sharing a single heart would consider too close for comfort.

Libertarianism's philosopher's are the unpopular clowns at the children's birthday party of society hoping that bending their "business innovation's" into balloon animals will convince the starving attendees to actually enjoy watching them eat all of the cake. "Look it's a lion! Rawr!"

EDIT EDIT: COME ON. You know that's good. Come on!
GISgirls – where are the women? 4 thesis
Yahoo Livetext – A New Way to Connect
> update or render some game object that's died and been deleted

Woah, woah. No, object pooling is not for that case and definitely doesn't help with that. If you've re-used the object for something else and you've still got a reference to it - and you're updating it - you've got some seriously nasty bugs and randomly broken code.

Object pooling is not a 'must'. You need object pooling when you have a real time app and your total create/delete bandwidth exceeds the garbage collectors ability to process it in the 'early generation', forcing eventual 'stop the world' GC.
This. Happened with my most recent round of interviews. I took an initial stab at one assignment, moved onto other opportunities, and landed an offer before getting back to the project work.

At least the take-home work I did perform in my second-to-last job search provided good, compact example code for my last search.
The caption on panel #3 of the "DNA shot" graphic made me burst a blood vessel.

Here's how I extract DNA with fun kitchen science.

1. Freeze.
2. Add dish detergent and NaCl.
3. Puree in blender.
4. Thaw. Stir *very gently* from this point forward.
5. Add meat tenderizer and/or contact lens solution.
6. Filter the mess to get mostly clear fluid.
7. Layer rubbing alcohol over the solution.
(If you use ethanol, make sure it's high-proof.)
8. Draw DNA and RNA up from aqueous layer through alcohol layer with a kebab skewer.
Of interest:

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2013/09/05/remote-control-he...

"A 19-year-old model helicopter enthusiast was killed Thursday when a toy helicopter he was flying struck him in the head, a law-enforcement official said."
Wait - where does it say this is an option? It isn't as far as I can tell - it is how they do it. You either invest 3-9 hours on a "project" before the interview or you don't get the interview.

This isn't "an alternative testing process" as such.
Git is not equivalent to retard. Git is an everyday word. You can definitely get away with calling a pal a grumpy git. You're not going to get away with calling peoe retards unless you know them very well. And don't do so in public.

At least, this is the case for the UK.
Well the argument is pretty solid, however the last time I heard FLOSS Weekly, LibreOffice developers mentioned building document sharing over XMPP relay. That sounded amazing, and a pretty interesting modern analog.

https://docs.libreoffice.org/tubes.html

Still, siag is amazing in how far ahead it was/is. Gzip archives make it seem like development slowed to a standstill in 2010.
The trail lines and any distant landmarks would move differently
If I may make an even stronger statement, to hopefully spark an interesting conversation:

I have hope. Spontaneous cooperation between equal peers which unintentionally upsets the status quo and becomes the inflection point for political change for the good has been a longstanding tradition.

The requirements are:

1. Equal peers who abide basic human rights such that cooperation is possible.

2. Pent-up desire for political change for the good which needs a catalyst/release valve.

3. Critical mass of willing participants who, if they discover new status quo, can immediately grasp its significance. (a.k.a. The Innovator's Dilemma)

4. Method of communication which enables #3 to cause the political change.
Even if the cost of moving into the neighborhood went up, the white homeowners surely also benefited from higher home equity values which they can borrow against; realized gains from selling the homes -- for them and for their heirs; better public school systems; better public facilities.

So, no I don't think the subsidy argument falls apart.
"do well"?

How many times did you go buy a product advertized on TV?

If at all, they have a negative effect.
Only one person reported that to me. I didn't have the problem on my Firefox but, nevertheless, I changed it now. Just to be sure. Thanks for saying because otherwise I might have never noticed!
I gotta say, for all the talk I heard of the years about Scheme not realizing anything practical, this seems insane to me.

I am definitely checking the code out over the next few months during my down time.
At this stage, I think it may be easier to automate a drone than a car. Buildings and hills don't move around that much, and air traffic won't be as random as roadway hazards if implemented correctly.
Yes, but that switches the cost back onto the company instead of the employee.
Curiosity: We Have a Problem (with just days to spare)
Nicely said. I always take note when I see libertarians and left-liberals in agreement (e.g. on the war machine, or surveillance/privacy) and wonder if there might be some more substantial basis for a coalition there.
well, the trick was the same as usual - under the guise of protecting the "struggling artist/creator" the public was sold a law - DMCA (and supporting ideology&moral) - which main purpose and function is to protect the platforms who as the result of it got to exploit the "creators" instead of the Studios/labels who did it in the pre-Internet/pre-DMCA time.
I don't know about that. It's true that I can maintain relationships with people all across the world, in more or less real time, without months-long delays for letters to travel. But...

It used to be that I'd go into the bank and talk to a teller. Now I use an ATM. In the grocery store, I used to have a checker. Now it's mostly self-check-out. I used to go to the ballgame with thousands of other fans. Now I watch it on the internet.

Once upon a time, I would go to the theater, and watch live humans on the stage. Then I'd go to the theater/cinema, and watch a movie. Now I download it from Netflix.

In short, life has gotten a lot more impersonal in a lot of ways. It's more efficient, but less human.

The parts about addiction ring true to me, too. Paul Graham has talked about this with distraction. But I suspect that it would be valid for you to classify me in with the "artistic and spiritual" people.
There's a lot of negativity in this thread. I'm really excited about this.

Even on an aesthetic level, it will be amazing to look at the city sky and see hundreds of lights buzzing about, blade-runner style.
Democracy doesn't necessarily lead to freedom.

It's dependent on the voters making the correct decision on who to elect.

There's a reason why people hate our politicians.
It's ironic that a university administrator is studying Uber, considering that universities and colleges in the United States are busy replacing all of their professors with contractor 'adjunct faculty', who can be paid next to nothing. An adjunct position bears a similarity to being a driver for Uber, in terms of inadequate pay and security.
I worked at OneLogin and always lamented that we didn't care about managing engineering-level access at all, esp since that was actually my job at OneLogin. Definitely impressed with some of what I see.
But we do pass laws about wheels. You can't drive them too fast, you must have them inspected to see if they are safe. The engines that power them mustn't emit harmful emissions. You can only drive them in certain places, and following a certain pattern.

Why is the notion that you shouldn't be able to drive your computer to support radical terrorism, violate copyright, or purchase illegal materials any more strange than the rule that you can't drive your car over 70 miles per hour on the highway?
I logged into my TripleByte account and selected it as an option. The UI is still broken, but yes: it's an option. It's a separate track you can choose to be on.
I've done quite a few "at home" programming challenges [1][2][3] as well as hacking challenges and most of my experiences have been overwhelmingly negative. The challenge is that "programming" is about 20% writing code and 80% other stuff (requirements, design, testing, security, documentation, meetings, beer, etc...). It seems like the proposed solution is not addressing the problem: Explaining how to solve a programming challenges you may have never heard of on the spot.

I do agree that interviews add a level of pressure, but what you're trying to gauge thought process. How does the candidate think about solving the problem; Can they iterate; Can we lower the space and/or time complexity; Can this be solved recursively, Are they receptive to input? A take home assignment does't help you figure any of that out. Usually, the team who is interviewing already knows the answer to the specific problem and all of the intricacies (based on having to solve it on an internal project or just because it's a question they've asked before), but the goal is to see someone thinking in real-time.

In my career, I've never had a time where I go off on my own, work on something and come back to the team with a solution. Even when I was writing TI-83 programs in High School to solve all of my science homework and finish 50 minute tests in 10 minutes; I still had classmates asking me about what I was doing along the way. There is always discussion and I feel like by sending me off on my own, all of that goes out of the window. You can't verify if I copied the code from anywhere else, you don't know if I had my buddy who is an engineer at another company break down the answer for me to spit it back to you, and you don't know if I paired with someone else to get the assignment complete. I'm obviously biased based on my experiences doing over 40 interviews in Silicon Valley/SF. My goal for this type of interview question would be to understand how the candidate thinks; I don't care if you write your answer in Brainfk[4].

[1] - https://github.com/joeblau/sample-elevator-control-system

[2] - https://github.com/joeblau/sample-top-ten-tweets

[3] - https://github.com/joeblau/sample-url-shortner

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
Update on standardizing shadow DOM and custom elements
Absolutely. This is a bit like a university professor feeling "richer for the experience" of "working in fast food" after deciding it'll be an interesting sociological experiment to volunteer at a soup kitchen. Interesting to try, perhaps, but a very different experience from the people actually dependent on similar service jobs for a living. I suspect he'd have learned more about the "sharing economy" by asking to people actually driving for a living about how they decide between surge pricing fares and desperate need to sleep, but at least it's moved him to share his hard-earned insight that life can be difficult for people in America that don't drive...

I'm more intrigued by what (if anything) happens to the Uber drivers that venture to pick up rides where apparently taxis dare not.
>Why can I not middle-click task-bar items to close the app yet? This seems like an obvious feature since that's how you close tabs on a tabbed window.

Because middle-click on taskbar button opens new window/instance of application.
Wow, must have been awesome.

Found this cool timeline of programming languages: http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.h...
For all the negativity in this thread, you've pointed out (in my opinion) the one actual problem with this. It's going to be like living next to a highway in any urban area. Not any noisier than an apartment in new york, I suppose, but disruptive to quieter cities.
GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
Or try it yourself...

http://adrift.org.au
>The key concept is that people who have better reasons for evading the laws of nation-states--typically prison or execution--are already out there. Furthermore, you can't positively identify them or their motives, nor can you avoid dealing with them in the long run. And if you establish a system that deals with them (and naturally, the traditional seasteader's bogeyman of a state-owned navy vessel) acceptably, how do you prevent that from turning into a government?

Why not let it turn into a government? I'm not a libertarian, but I don't think libertarians are quite anarchists.

With regards to security, that just doesn't seem too hard of a problem, at least against non-state actors. Hopefully the place should easily throw off enough surplus to afford a security force that could take on pirates.

Now, I may be describing a more centralized authoritarian setup than a libertarian might be comfortable with. But Dubai and Singapore are real places not under threat by pirates, while I can't think of a libertarian society that actually exists anywhere.
> In a language with loops, however, TCO is not essential since you can always just use a loop.

That's not correct. Loops are just one kind (the simplest) of iteration. In a language with TCO, you can also implement state machines with function calls, or do continuation passing style (pass one or multiple functions to a function to be called with a result when done). There's a reason Guy Steele called the function the ultimate goto (assuming TCO): you can then build all control structures with them.

Missing TCO, you need to fall back on handling state yourself (like you can still implement recursive algorithms in a language that doesn't offer recursion, like old Basics or whatever, you just need to build your own stack).
> Any time you have two people interacting in any way, you have a culture dominated by a constant masquerade.

Often, but not always. And maybe that's another way to look at this. People are longing for authenticity, both in themselves and their interactions, and all they're getting are Facebook posts. In the non-tech society, you got phoniness, certainly, but you probably got more genuine interactions than you do now.
I hope I am not being rude, but could someone compare Cloud9 with nitrous.io? I am a light user of pro nitrous.io (a few hours per week) and like always having Haskell, Clojure, my most recent project repos cloned, etc.

Is it worth checking out Cloud9? Perhaps not a fair question, but I am interested in hearing from people who have used both. I enjoyed Google's internal browser based IDE Cider, and think that web based development has a strong future.
> 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.

Well, this is a different suggestion. Now we're only talking about a few hours of work rather than a pet project. I don't think the licensing makes much of a difference since I probably couldn't monetize four hours of randomly dorking around. I'm still not a huge fan of the idea, though, because it sounds hard to me to show off (adequately) skills I've spent decades acquiring with less than a day's worth of aimless work. I don't feel like it would be very impressive.

> Is there a field that requires 4-8hr competency tests where each test is wildly different from the previous, with completely opaque criteria.

Nobody is advocating for eight-hour tests. The OP said they expected their test to take less than half that. And most fields that require competency tests (e.g. cooking, acting, music) will expect you to do it live, on the spot. Take-home tests are being suggested in the case of programming specifically because programmers hate being expected to perform on the spot.

> 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.

Not all criteria that someone might test for are "fucked up." If I'm looking for, say, somebody to do a math-heavy machine learning job, and your pet open-source project is a jQuery plugin that makes web page backgrounds sparkly, the mismatch between those two is not the fault of my criteria.
Can you explain the tech behind this? How do you go about building an excel and google docs plug-in with custom formulas?
I understand what you're saying and I agree with it, but it hurts to see Ayn Rand mentioned along with actual philosophers and economists (even Marx, who's largely out of favor in the political and academic realms these days).

There's this sense of necessary equality of the ends of a spectrum (sort of like the two-sides-to-every-story fallacy), and Rand gets to sit on one end of that spectrum as its de facto representative, garnering some kind of scholarly-econo-philosophical legitimacy in the process. It rankles.
Ask HN: Is UC Berkeley Worth the OOS Price-Tag?
I am a high school senior who is getting ready to apply for college and am planning to major in CS (Minor in Math/Stat)

My biggest concern is whether or not it is worth it to pay the large OOS tuition coming from Florida to go to UC Berkeley. I rather not go to UF, I really don't think its community/geography/reputation/etc. is for me, but if necessary I will endure.

I believe I would b better off going to say Stanford where there is a superior community, professors, environment, etc... Stanford would also give me financial aid from what I have read, so I would actually be able to afford it! The only issue is I doubt I will get in (I will still try!) - I feel that getting into Berkeley is a much more probable and realistic goal, though as far as I am aware I would receive no aid considering that Berkeley is a public school from a different state. This begs the question.

Is going to UC Berkeley (or even Georgia Tech, though Berkeley is preferable!) worth the $150k+ debt versus going to UF and leaving debt-free?
> productive

This is where things usually fall over.
Neither did some of the local law enforcement:

"The 43-year-old man claimed that law enforcement officials,
including the county jailer, told him privately that they
agreed with his actions."
What's happened is that a lot of things that used to require human interaction are now human-interaction-optional. We have choices that didn't before. Many people seem hellbent on not considering the possibility that these mandatory interactions were not desirable for many people.

I don't want a conversation with the bank teller. I just want my cash so I can go do something that I actually do want to do. Maybe I want to be entertained and get sloppy drunk in my PJs instead of going to the theater. It turns out I'm not even slightly alone. A lot of us seem to prefer our "less human" lives.

Perhaps we find them more humane.
No free web in Russia
> Propranolol is used by musicians, actors, and public speakers for its ability to treat anxiety symptoms activated by the sympathetic nervous system.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol#Society_and_cultur...

Can ask your doctor about this
It really doesn't matter if they believe it. It will be convincing enough that the rest of the world no longer needs to pay them any heed.
To play the devils advocate: Bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles. Therefore we need a law that all wheeled vehicles have a government backdoor that broadcasts the location of the car and allows remote control.
Duoludo – a tool for achieving high-coverage testing of games
Unfortunately, often the answers you get when you ask in an interview bear very little relation to the reality you find when you start a job.
Sorry to hear that. Do you remember what question or problem they asked you?
Because violating copyright is not the same as stealing (at all), or stealing a car (which the copyright industry loves to say it is), or detonating explosives in a mosque (which this article conflates it with).

Radical terrorism is an enormous red herring simply because only a very small percentage of the total population will engage in it, they are easy to identify (Israel has been doing it successfully for years), and regulating their _computer_ use will not make or break their aims.

Therefore, we must logically conclude that the article is really about copyright, and not terrorism.
My house has already been hit by a drone, albeit a small $500 drone, though there was no damage. And the owner asked if he could retrieve it so I lent him my ladder.

But as drones become more ubiquitous and the big ones become cheaper and more useful, then the chance of damage increases.

Amazon isn't just talking about legitimizing their drones, but legitimizing drones in general with an "anything goes" airspace below 200 ft.

I wouldn't make a homeowners insurance claim for a baseball through the window since claims mean higher rates and multiple claims can lead to blacklisting among multiple companies. But a 20 or 30 lb drone dropping 500 ft to my roof may cause thousands of dollars of damage, and unless I can identify the drone's owner (or even if I do and he has no money), then either I or my insurance company is on the hook for repairs.
I mean overall, not just me. Obviously I won't be buying most things targeted at women (as I'm a man)