Hacker News Reader

8_hours_agoon The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

Yes, that's the one! (I just checked the back of my cocoa powder to make sure)

8_hours_agoon The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

My family’s “famous” chocolate cake recipe is from the side of the Hershey’s Cocoa container. It is way better than any other chocolate cake, even from baking cookbooks. I should write it down in case they ever change it...

8_hours_agoon A small town that kept Walmart out now faces Amazon

That's a benefit of shopping in a brick and mortar store! I used to always get annoyed and say "no thanks, I'm good" when the employee approached and asked that question, but then a friend told me that I should take their help. If you tell the employee what you are looking for, or that you don't know exactly what you are looking for, they will usually (about 75% in my experience) be very helpful. The employees tend to be very knowledgeable about what they are selling and have good advice about what to buy or what not to buy.

8_hours_agoon Ask HN: What are good writing tips for software developers?

8_hours_agoon Battleship Solitaire

This reminded me of Tents [0], which is one of the games in Simon's puzzle collection that I reach for while waiting for code to compile.

Someone should add this game! Simon has very good developer documentation [1], and the code is very cleanly written C. Seriously, every C developer should take a look at it, it is inspiring [2].

[0]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/tent...

[1]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/

[2]: https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git

8_hours_agoon Some Code I Deleted

I came here to post something similar to this. I have seen this happen many times on open source projects, and it is especially depressing for the person who volunteered to write the patch. Going back and forth many times over several months to make small adjustments to your code and never having it committed is very demoralizing.

I don't know what the solution is, and it is probably just an inherit flaw with volunteer-run open source projects. Without someone being paid to get the bug count down it's easy for bugs like this to get forgotten about.

8_hours_agoon Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years–and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix It All

How is this done? Does the Facebook mobile app record all location data? Or does it record all nearby bluetooth devices?

8_hours_agoon Do Not, I Repeat, Do Not Download Onavo, Facebook’s Vampiric VPN Service

I pay my ISP a lot of money each month. They don’t need my data to be profitable. Facebook, on the other hand, has a business model completely dependent on selling advertising based on my data to 3rd parties.

8_hours_agoon Center for Humane Technology

This reminds me of tobacco company funded anti-smoking campaigns. I'm sure they hope it doesn't work too well...

8_hours_agoon Solving Minesweeper and making it better (2015)

Simon's puzzles are all really well done, and run in the browser, OS X, Linux and Windows. The code base is very cleanly written C and he has extensive developer documentation: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/

He is also the person behind PuTTY.

8_hours_agoon Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

And they did study him!

Article about it in New Scientist: https://books.google.com/books?id=rYIJJP7audkC&lpg=PA26&dq=g...

Here's the study "Exceptional case of survival in cold water": http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/292/6514/171.2.full.pdf

They immersed him in 5.3C water for 83 minutes, and only stopped the experiment because of discomfort in his feet. His temperature only dropped by about 1C.

8_hours_agoon Jack White bans phones at gigs for “100% human experience”

I too enjoy crummy-quality bootlegs of bands occasionally, but there are already enough of those videos of Jack White. He’s at the point in his career where he can ban phones without noticeably affecting the amount of bootleg videos of his performances.

8_hours_agoon Mary Lee Berners-Lee has died

Off topic: I got confused by the phrase kindle fire, until I remembered that it can also mean start a fire. Now the name of the tablet seems less arbitrary...

8_hours_agoon Show HN: AirHelp flight scanner finds all past flights and checks for eligibility

It is linked from their homepage: https://www.airhelp.com/en/

The linked page (https://www.airhelp.com/en/ahlp/travels/) is a terrible landing page and doesn't have much information or a link to the homepage. The homepage is much more informative about what they offer, which is more than just a map of your past flights.

8_hours_agoon Show HN: AirHelp flight scanner finds all past flights and checks for eligibility

Their privacy policy is here: https://www.airhelp.com/en/privacy/

I don't see anything specifically about what information they collect from scanned emails.

8_hours_agoon Can (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) ever evaluate to true?

Questions like this don't tell much about a candidate's ability to design, write, and test maintainable code, however they do give information on a candidate's specific area of knowledge.

These questions are useful if you are looking for an experienced X programmer who can immediately start being productive in an X code base. While the original problem is definitely a trick question, I don't believe that any of the individual pieces of knowledge required are merely "bits of trivia" for an experienced Javascript developer.

It's the interviewer's responsibility to know what areas of knowledge are required for a role, and how important it is that a candidate is familiar with them. Memorizing the intricacies of "==" vs "===" may not be important, but I'd expect an experienced Javascript developer to know something about it.

What about ability to test? Design? Function as a team member?

Those skills are much harder to test for so most companies ignore them during the interview process and instead focus on attributes which can be tested for, and accept that the process is not 100% reliable.

8_hours_agoon Can (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) ever evaluate to true?

This could be an acceptable interview question for Javascript developers, but from the SO question it looks like the interviewer screwed it up:

My answer was that it's impossible. They said nothing is impossible. It happened 2 weeks back, but I'm still trying to find the answer.

The interviewer should have gone into much more depth instead of (presumably) marking that question as failed and moving on. This was a perfect opportunity to find out more about the interviewee's knowledge of Javascript instead of whether they immediately knew the answer to a trick question.

The interviewer could have asked about the difference between "==" and "===" operators, which any experienced Javascript developer should know at least a little about.

Then they could have asked if the interviewee knows how "==" converts types before comparing them, and find out if they know that it uses .toString() and .valueOf().

Then the interviewer could have asked about if those functions can be overridden, and how that can be done.

At this point, the interviewee's eyes may have lit up and they may have been able to solve the original question.

This approach would have given the interviewer information about the interviewee's knowledge of: "==" vs "===" operators, .toString() and .valueOf() functions, function overriding, and object variables. Instead the only knowledge that the interviewer learned was whether the interviewee had seen a similar problem before or was able to immediately recognize the answer.

8_hours_agoon WhatsApp Encryption Security Flaws Could Allow Snoops to Slide into Group Chats

"server-client encryption" means that the data is only encrypted between the client and the server (i.e. the server can read all messages). "Secret Chats" are only between 2 clients and are end-to-end encrypted which means the data is encrypted the whole time between the clients, and the server can't read any of the data.

8_hours_agoon Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

FYI, Ubuntu released updates today for Meltdown:

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3522-1/

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3522-2/

Ubuntu 17.10: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3523-1/

8_hours_agoon Ubuntu Meltdown patches available

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3522-1/

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3522-2/

Ubuntu 17.10: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3523-1/

These are fixes for Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754). Spectre (CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753) will be addressed later. See more information here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAn...

8_hours_agoon The secret world below Chicago

A 7 hour work day was standard?

8_hours_agoon The secret world below Chicago

That map mentions:

Normal operating hours of the Pedway are 7am to 5pm, Monday - Friday, unless otherwise noted.

Does most of it follow that schedule? That seems like a very limited time. If you wanted to use it during your commute you'd be limited to work between 8am and 4pm.

8_hours_agoon Brilliant Jerks in Engineering

"We need you to set up recurring billing for our new feature X"

"Hmmm... that would be easier if we had a custom OS... I'm going to start on that first. Also, custom version control software would really boost our productivity..."

8_hours_agoon Cloudflare Wants to Buy Your Meetup Group Pizza

I really like the sentiment behind this... but you need to submit a W-9? That will dissuade people from taking advantage of this.

8_hours_agoon Skyrim rendered in text

...procedural content is not for "lazy developers". It’s not there to free you from creating content. It’s there to let content react to the player. You still need a lot of it.

This is a very good lesson for game developers. Too many games rely on procedurally generated content, which can be boring to a player if it seems random instead of being a result of some interaction (see No Man's Sky).

8_hours_agoon FaceID Security [pdf]

You can find your iPhone and remotely lock it from the web: https://www.icloud.com/#find

8_hours_agoon The new study suggesting sitting will kill you is kind of a raging dumpster fire

For those that are interested, the full original journal article is available here: http://sci-hub.io/10.7326/M17-0212

8_hours_agoon Apple Watch 3

Will the cellular piggyback on your existing service, or will it require a new line?

Here's the list of countries and carriers that it will work with: http://live.arstechnica.com/apples-september-2017-iphone-8-l...

8_hours_agoon Radar reveals two moons orbiting asteroid Florence

Peter Diamandis[0] has repeatedly predicted that the world's first trillionaire will be made by mining asteroids.

Planetary Resources[1] is at least one company that is attempting to do it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Diamandis

[1]: http://www.planetaryresources.com/asteroids/

8_hours_agoon My Failed Attempt at Engineering Love

This reminds me of a very humorous high frequency dating story https://web.archive.org/web/20170325010439/http://robrhineha...

(previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773841)