skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(I wrote the imgix post you linked to)

I think Steve has done a great job on his MacBook Pro rack design, but I do wonder about the advantage the MBP has over the Mac Pro for their workload.

It may be that the GPUs of the Mac Pro don't matter to them, which would reduce the value proposition of those systems by a fair amount. The MBP also has an advantage in that it was just updated, and the current Mac Pro is a bit older. That advantage is hopefully just temporary, but it is pretty likely that the MBP will continue to receive more frequent updates in the future.

You can definitely squeeze more systems into a rack with the MBP, but my preference would still be to go with the Mac Pro:

No batteries on your datacenter floor
No power bricks
Better airflow
No screen burning electricity (although this is minimal)

The batteries particularly worry me. They're a potential fire hazard, and over time you'll need to replace them (even though they don't matter) before they expand and deform the system chassis. They also make power outlet control over a system annoying, since you'll have to wait for hours after the outlet is cycled off and the battery has discharged to cycle the outlet back on.
Sounds good in theory. But if enough companies started doing this, I can guarantee you that Indian companies will spring that will offer to create an open source project for you for $100 to $1000 depending on complexity of project, and amount of activity the github profile would show.
I wish I was kidding.
> Face it, with any smart assistant that we want it's going to be the same, they're all cloud powered.

> It is a necessary evil to have a useful virtual assistant

Not necessarily. With things like the Jasper Project [0], you can run your own personal assistant that decodes voice on your machine and doesn't use the cloud. Granted, Jasper doesn't fit in your pocket (yet).

[0] http://jasperproject.github.io/
> Github isn't actually supposed to communicate anything at all on their site, good or bad. They're supposed to act as a platform and a common carrier for others.

"Supposed" by whom?

Arguably, they might be analogous to a common carrier with regard to their paid services. Their free services appear to be provided on the basis of mutual benefit -- the consumers of those free services get the services, Github gets the promotional benefit of hosting the services.

At least in the case of the latter, Github has a clear incentive to view the exchange differently when the content exposed by the repositories in question is, in Github's view, inconsistent with the image that Github wants to present, and seems to me to have a clear moral right to decide whether or not to make the exchange in consideration of that basis, among other factors.
Pastebin for binary files? By the look of things, clean and easy to use? Handy!

It's probably time to start thinking about ways to monetise this to pay for the hosting costs at least.

Also, have you talked to a lawyer yet? If this takes off and you keep it up long enough, inevitably you're going to get people using it for child porn, stolen credit card numbers, leaked classified documents, instructions on how to make home-made bombs etc and someday a relevant law enforcement agency is going to want to have a conversation about the content that Mr Smith sent to Mr Jones via your server. It's probably a good idea to get your legal position straight before that day rather than trying to do it after the fact. And yes, I do recommend talking to an actual lawyer. Internet commentary is not an adequate substitute for legal advice here.
Many other fields require competency tests. What other field requires you to do a potentially unbounded amount of free work in the open and give it away to everybody?

Not everybody has any major projects on Github. The lack thereof does not signal lack of programming aptitude. If somebody has done a lot of great work, but it was all for employers and clients, that doesn't mean they would do poor work for you if you were their employer or client. I find that suggestion much more distasteful than having relevant work-sample tests.
I don't think the users of spreadsheets are dumb. I think they don't have an appreciation for organization of data to allow for efficient machine-readability. Your use of a spreadsheet as a game editor shows that you're one of the exceptions that proves the rule.

The free-form nature of spreadsheets, in my experience, almost always makes for human readable repositories of data that are nearlyuseless from an automated processing perspective. I cringe when I'm asked to export data from a database into a spreadsheet for users to edit, because I know I'm going to get back an unparsable mess that I'm going to have to invest time in to make usable again.

The spreadsheet is, effectively, shifting the user's inability to understand why data needs to be organized well off to a programmer (or some other grunt) who ends up fixing all the data up. (Or, alternatively, nobody fixes it up and the business ends up making bad decisions based on garbage data that came from a spreadsheet that's a disorganized mess.)

Edit: Grammar.
The comments here make it clear that I am not alone in my skepticism regarding their conclusions.

But to be fair, at the bottom of the page, they say that they are not trying to claim any statistical significance... just trying to look at their own data to gain some insights. It doesn't sound like they expect any of this to be taken too seriously.
Excel is already programmable via everything from Powershell to VB to F# via its .NET bindings. The problem isn't that anything is missing from Excel, it's that it's used by so many people who are not 10x software engineers that no higher-level approach will ever work with 99,5% of the Excel out there.

The people who are organized enough and use Excel enough to find value in saving formulas in a library are already extreme edge cases...and then you are selling into that tiny market against the idea of using full blown tools like Visual Studio and C#.

And it seems to me that really sound previously snakebit engineers aren't going to go around changing working software that isn't backed up by a suite of regression tests. The problem isn't Excel, it's bad code. The cause of the bad code is bad programming practice, and the reason for that is that the people programming are not programmers and even if they were they're under just give me a kludge time pressure.

Spreadsheets are successful because they're really easy to use. Excel dominates because making one that's userful for important work is really really hard.

Good luck.
Displays HackerNews titles in Atom's background
I've had a similar experience. A company I was trying to intern at asked me to write a rails app for them before they would think about giving me an interview. I wrote the app (which all-in took maybe 10 hours) and sent the recruiter a link to the heroku instance the app was running on and the repo on github.

I never got a response. I think three months later I might have gotten a one-liner saying they had gone in "a different direction" or some bullshit like that.

It's insulting and ludicrous for companies to treat prospective employees so disrespectfully.
The ONLY Metric That Matters in Content Marketing
I've done this, and liked the process.

Interview with 2 people for an hour or so. Then you get a Rails project, fix 3 bugs, choose and implement 2 features from a list, then 2 features they choose. Come back in a few days and discuss why/how you did what you did.
I've heard of crops where a machine shakes the tree, and the crop falls to the ground (maybe some kind of nut?). Then another machine vacuums them up and separates them from other debris.
You can snap a picture of a filled board with your cell phone.
I have been programming fulltime for 30 years which is 3/4th of my life and I still find it magic. Although I now do a lot more management tasks, program standing, go on long walks or to the gym while crunching harder problems or when in need of creativity, I never stop feeling great when something I made works. It's why I recommend everyone to at least do some coding; it's often a great creative outlet.

When I am coding I forget everything and often I make too long hours. Not because I have to but because there is so much more to code; work coding, side project coding, hobby coding... I cannot see how I would ever start to dislike it.

By the way; if there is a shortage of coders (as the article says), how come the demand is not a bit more flexible as in allowing people to work from different locations? I know for instance there is a large demand in Silicon Valley while here (in Europe) many of friends, who would work quite a bit cheaper than the prices I see flying around there, sit idle. They just cannot or don't want to move.
Actually, it looks like this one only serves Boston...
This only applies if the take-home interview is obligatory.

I agree that obligatory take-home interviews are unfair (I feel the same about trial periods). They work (they're probably more accurate than a standard interview), but they take too much time from the applicant (and will thus scare away many of the best people).

As an option, however, I totally disagree. There's a significant percentage of good programmers who are ill served by standard interviews. Those people want this.
Not OP, but as someone who took a 6 hour test at full concentration, with no feedback other then a polite 'no', there are a few reasons I don't out them.

1) I didn't score well on the test. It's within reason they read this post and release my scores with a 'it was because he scored low'. Future employers then come across my scores and deny me.

2) Don't bite the hand that's like the hand that MIGHT feed you. You don't yell and storm out of investor meetings. Because then they tell other investors. Similar logic here.

3) This place is very optimistic. Pessimistic people aren't particularly desirable. Whistle blowers are included in the latter group especially by corporate entities. Who knows what it could cause.

It really boils down to the fact that it's not a safe environment to do so. Or at least it doesn't feel so.
Is "pattern matching != intelligence" what occurred when the Google image recognition stuff in the news recently was shown to recognize the pattern of a "dumbbell" as always having a large muscular arm attached to it?

Seemed like a great way to highlight the limitations of patterns.
>Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being.

Problem with that is it's hard to find one. It's gotta be someone with pretty good coding skills. This person would then have to share their time between either coding head-down or managing coders, either of which are time-consuming and intolerant of disruption.

One idea I had was you could have mutual feedback. A bunch of people would after a while have anonymous input on each other, giving you say 10 coder's impressions of a fellow coder. This wouldn't have to be quizzes, half hour coffees could do.
They don't have to crash; some 777s have been retired already (Google it). Debris could end up in the sea.
Debian project cuts support for Sun Sparc
> Would expect it to take maybe 5 hours to code.

So, if you are interviewing at 20 companies, you need to expend 100+ hours or almost 3 full work weeks?

It should take 1 hour or less. Period. Probably less that 1/2 hour. I doubt I get much more information asking you for a 5 hour assignment than a 1/2 hour assignment.

If I'm really that interested in your programming on the fly, I should do it at the interview where I'm paying for your lodging, food, etc. I should tell you what you are going to be doing, and to bring your laptop set up to do that.
Humans have evolved to be good at identifying and handling ripe fruit. I think a machine could be better, but it'd take a ton of R&D.

If a machine picks fruit 2x faster (which is unlikely, check out a YouTube video of people picking), then you still only need 2 people to beat it in efficiency.
The POM implies for Clouseau is built on Lucene 4.6.1 and compiled for Java 1.6 and Scala 2.9.1. Also the artifacts don't seem to be in Maven Central.
And you put the picture in version control?
It's the pizza delivery business model refresh from the 80's. This time it's catering, a much better likelihood of success than a food truck.
So I used this site to check my server and then used the Mozilla SSL config generator. This fixed my site and got me to an "A" rating.

So at this point the biggest thing I'm looking at is the "Chain issues" line that reads "Contains anchor". Assuming this has something to do with the bundle file I created?
(author here)
We cross-tabbed system age vs perception of amount of TD. There was a moderate association between older systems (> 6 yrs) and more perceived debt.

I did not explicitly look at size as this was not one of the original research questions, but a good point. I suspect older systems will tend to be larger (in the domains we studied, anyway). And your point about arch choices being great "early on" can, I think, be captured in the "system age" variable. I guess I'm trying to think of a system that might be young and yet quite large in LOC.. would be an interesting outlier to look at.
Streama
The most detailed and up-to-date resource on the link between ABC conjecture and Mochizuki's inter-universal Teichmuller theory, IMHO, is http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=ABC_conj... .

It lists a survey article on IUT Theory by Ivan Fesenko entitled "ARITHMETIC DEFORMATION THEORY VIA ARITHMETIC FUNDAMENTAL GROUPS AND NONARCHIMEDEAN THETA-FUNCTIONS, NOTES ON THE WORK OF SHINICHI MOCHIZUKI" [preprint February 2015] ( https://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/personal/ibf/notesoniut.p... ).
Tesla Experiments with Giving Out Free Cars, Exclusive Models for Referrals
I graduated 2 years ago from University of Memphis, and I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time they were offering free master's programs in bioinformatics for CS graduates.
It hardly matters now. The details of these cases and the private lives of the people involved are really none of our business, and scrutinizing them will not fix anything for anybody. Let us please mourn the loss of a person beloved by many.
For anyone who wanted to read the slides without the animations, here's the slide deck's source: https://github.com/mikrofusion/react-flux-reflux/blob/master...
The refurbished machines are a decent deal and I haven't had any problems buying them for personal or business use in the past, but the big limitation is on supply at any given time and the configs offered. Refurbs are largely stock configs and you can usually only buy 5-10 at a time. There are big benefits to config uniformity and bulk purchases, so refurbs can be tough in that respect.

Also, no one buying in this quantity should be paying list price to Apple, which cuts into the refurb discount considerably (if not outright eliminating it).
I've always found the "don't waste vertical space" rule to be particularly important when I'm reading code.

I've also always hated frames in IDEs.

I think I used too many small monitors...
The link should be automatically copied to the clipboard upon creation IMO.
Succeeding Through Laziness and Open Source
Windows 10 Solitaire requires a subscription to remove ads
More to the point, I wonder about the long term viability of some of these services. If the economy hits a snag, or food prices or gas prices soar, they don't have a whole lot of margin to work with and would likely face a very bleak situation.
It was requested on Facebook that in lieu of flowers, people consider donating to one of the following organizations in Nóirín's name:

Rape Abuse Incest National Network:
https://donate.rainn.org/

Center of Excellence for Transgender Health:
http://transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=ab-donate (please follow the additional instructions underneath the “Donate” button)

Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
http://anitaborg.org/donate/
>If a rogue drone with mounted guns starts shooting up a public square, we won't know who launched it unless the manufacturer played by the rules.

a bomb hidden in a thrash bin or a stolen car parked on the public square. A bullet from sniper rifle from a mile away. No drones necessary. And just imagine what kind of, including chemical or nuclear, havoc can any engineer wreck with tech available today.

>Terrorism has always been a problem of technology.

centuries ago Church tried to outlaw crossbows:

http://militaryhistorynow.com/2012/05/23/the-crossbow-a-medi...

Safety through obscurity works only for very cutting edge technologies and only for the very short time.
The problem with random or unaligned assignments is you end up with a randomly skilled programmer. Often not bad, but not on point.

The problem with Rosalind or Project Euler assignments is you end up with an excellent theoretical math or bioinformatics programmer. Often not bad, but not on point.

Fundamentally anyone with a degree or experience or a non-trivial github can write code, but you want to test their judgement, their thought process, their comprehension, their style, their knowledge about your business domain. Other than total open field blank slate projects (very little of my time over the last 35 yrs has been spent in that mode) you usually have existing systems and code. So give them a "special" sample of your own code. Shouldn't be too hard to find unless you're literally hiring the first technical employee. Then give it to them a couple days before an interview and inform then you're gonna review that code together, they'll present you with a rewritten, redesigned version, and then review the rewrite together.

If you'll feel bad about making them do "real" work, the best code to send out is some that has been heavily customized to only work some of the time, not properly error check, and intentionally somewhat obfuscated, so I sincerely hope that code thats screwed up to that level has to be intentionally manually generated for the interview. So strip out most of the failure/error detection code, screw up some of the code, maybe intentionally cut and paste an almost identical function in place to see if they clean that up. Some folks like intentional outright errors, like typos, is this the kind of programmer who can't write English? Also wipe most of the comments, put some intentional logic errors in the comments. This can be fun...

If you're looking for non-intro level programmers "everyone knows everyone" and my latest job we didn't talk programming because I was vouched for as knowing what I'm doing from years of coworker experience at a past employer. I'd be moderately offended if someone I worked with for five years asked me to fizzbuzz, either in person or as a take home test.
A test is only as good as the engineer who glance's at it with the fate of the candidate in his/her hands.

In my experience 90% tests get 10% of the attention of other assessments.
You don't have to agree with a criteria to be able to apply it objectively; it just has to be something that can be evaluated by anyone to come up with the same answer. You can't objectively evaluate whether art looks good; you can only get subjective answers and attempt to find consensus. You can objectively determine if a word is a noun, verb, adjective, etc (given context, as some words can fall in several categories). And given context, you can objectively determine if a word is a slur. (Personally, I avoid both slurs and insults, but github only bans the former, not the latter, and that seems like a reasonable position to take.)

So, to be clear: there's an objective criteria for "what is a slur"; there's no objective criteria for "what is acceptable" or "what is offensive". But in any case, a hosting company is hardly required to provide an objective criteria for what they accept; it's nice if the rules they supply can be objectively evaluated, but that doesn't mean their choice of which rules to apply needs to be objective.

In any case, I have no further interest in arguing with you; I doubt you're going to stop being outraged that someone won't give you a free platform for hatefulness.
Malaysia Flight 370: This is still our best theory for what happened
I did one of these when I applied at my most recent position. It took most of the weekend and actually it was a lot of fun. But I doubt I'd do it again if it required more than a few hours of my time. Any test that time consuming is arguably biased against those with families.

Some advice to those doing take home tests: write (good) comments and include tests.
These images were posted in the above thread purportedly from 777 maintenance manuals. The diagrams bear a very good resemblance to the photos thus far:

http://i.imgur.com/OAw6AOc.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Ti09xEh.jpg
Workout+Music+-+My+Top+10+Favorite+World+Cup+EDM+Songs
It is a complete no-no, even if your DC doesn't say anything to you about it.

Just think of the potential loss of equipment if the sprinklers were to activate in a datacenter suite -- and if the flammable material is located in your cage, it's going to be you or your insurance covering that.
"The second the light says go, I am GOING" I call BS on this story. Cyclists don't stop for a red light. That's why I hate them so much. They somehow manage to believe that they can be on the road, that cars have to share the road with them, but the rules of the road don't apply to them.
I like the idea of getting paid $500 or even $1k for a take home test. It's frankly a simple matter of respect. For employers, they're just asking you to do one task, but for employees, talking to 4-6 companies in an interview cycle can easily be 40 hours of interviewing and another 40 hours of work on top of that.

I'm at a point in my career where I mostly refuse take home tests because I'm busy and I value my free time. Getting paid would make me much more willing to jump through hoops. Particularly when that day of vacation cost me $350 after taxes, so it's not like I don't have skin in the game already.
Basic Income Is Happening: The Growing Support and Early Experiments
I like the tool. As for the extensions, I would suggest that in my experience SonarQube has the same ability for extension, and does most of its work in the open. So it might be worth considering turning your project into a plugin (or plugins) for SonarQube?
> must occur for one computer generation to usurp another. It must become self-hosting

This is for completely superseding the previous generation. When the level of functionality of the new platform surpasses the needs of a all pure consumers, a general purpose computer will become a niche item, much like a Sony or Nintendo development system.
This sounds great! I am looking for some initial users that can give some critical feedback as well. I will get in touch with you soon. Thanks!
In 15 years as a software engineer at companies large and small, I have never seen anyone code on a whiteboard (outside of interviews, anyway), nor have I.
Seeking a diagnosis on the Internet: survey results
Make a new account and Glassdoor them.
On how Jet.com chose F#
Everyone wants everything to be free

Market dynamics are complex and the wants of the uncoordinated many are usually override by the wants of the coordinated few. For instance, Microsoft wanted core competencies of the competition to be free. So it developed Internet Explorer and bundled with every Windows system. The wants of the people weren't relevant.

You get what you pay for, therefore it is shit.

This implies a correlation between money and quality, which not always holds.

Some things are free and aren't shit. For example: Linux

Some things are made shit when they aren't free. For example: many scientific papers .

Things that require effort usually require an incentive. Money, specially paying for use, isn't the silver bullet of incentives.