skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do interviewers expect this much expertise or am I that bad a programmer?
Hi everyone,

So I recently had an interview at a unicorn startup for a software developer position (SDE3 as I recall). I have about 5 years of experience, mostly in php and rails.

It was a programming round. They gave me a problem to code in about an hour. This was the problem (Imgur link) :

http://imgur.com/gallery/osqJx

It was expected that there shouldn't be any data loss.

I have no professional experience in Java, and my CV was quite clear on it.

Do I have to prepare myself for this kind of stuff? I’m not in the valley but is this the general expected standard? I was quite stunned that I had to code this in an hour, really wasn’t expecting this.
Ontario property taxes == UK council taxes. I should have made that clearer.

Collecting from property owners is easier than collecting from tenants.
There's actually already a medium that can last hundreds, if not thousands of years which could contain the spec for this device. Let me see if I can drum up a link for it. Ah, here we go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
I am all for basic income, that being said...

Unemployment is bad overall. Too much free-time and not enough money (basic income won't cover "fun") will have consequences regarding crime.

Look at Sweden. Even with free healthcare, education and living costs covered the suburbs are filled with crime and radicalisation.
One thing I'll say is that on Tumblr, you don't give up ownership of the content, you just give them the right to reproduce it anywhere. So you don't lose ownership; you allow virality.

But that said, I agree that building your own way is the better route. It took me a while to get to that point, admittedly. But you have to remember as well that Tumblr offers something that's really hard to get in other places without a lot of work: A way to quickly build an audience.

Now I'm not saying that I was completely in this to get paid—I also wanted to have something I could point to in interviews and say, "hey, this is what I do with my free time." (That part of the equation worked, by the way.)

But the thing is, ShortFormBlog would've never survived without Tumblr. It dealt with short, blurby pieces of news—perfect in length for Tumblr, but not something with a long lifespan. So building SEO was a no-go, and it was hard to build an audience outside of Tumblr with a strategy like that.

My current website and newsletter where I build stuff is way more focused on evergreen stuff—and it offers a lot of the creativity that Tumblr did for me, but on a smaller scale. I'm happier with the result—I don't feel like I'm building stuff just to get a bajillion likes or reblogs anymore, but instead things that make sense as creative projects.
That's a very insightful comment. I 100% agree. And I'd add that I'm still completely baffled to see that some very obvious data support issues are still not resolved in the industrial world (e.g Java) :
* Computing with units (which is tough to put in a language, but so is compilation)
* Computing with dates in a sensible way

Of course one can make computation on those types, but it is so un-natural that it scares me :

* BigDecimal for currency, let me laugh
* Date/timestamp without proper casting rules
* Types towers with inheritance, generics, etc. Pfff...
* Still no fine library to represent an address
* Representing mutable ordered lists in SQL databases is still quite painful (possible, sure, but there's so boiler plate code to write)

So the data representation/manipulation problem, which goes with the data longevity you observe, that's something to learn about...

There's no reason to love current programming languages :-( (but I do love Python :-) 3 of course :-))
Yeah, they really didn't think though the transition when designing IPv4.
Open Connectivity Foundation IoT (Internet of Things) Standards Group Announced
It's any populace, not just American.
Interesting that you automatically equate "unemployment" with "doing nothing in your life." It is possible for people to find meaning outside of labor.
Also hearsay personal experience but a friend of a friend had his house raided by the FBI and all his computer equipment impounded. When he got it all back they told him his hard drives were empty or unformatted. He had them all formatted as ZFS...
Losing one function or even several doesn't automatically make something obsolete (outdated, outmoded and generally no longer used) if it's still functional for it's main purpose. Ball mice are obsolete mainly because no one is making mice that aren't optical/laser (AFAIK). A TV losing a smart function doesn't make that TV obsolete unless the person using the TV was relying heavily on the smart functions. And even then I wouldn't necessarily say that the TV was obsolete mainly because the smart functions on TV are used by a small percentage of consumers, typically less than 15%.
Membership of the EU requires you to sign up to the ECHR, but countries outside of the EU are also members of the ECHR. We can continue to be part of the ECHR without being inside the EU.

By leaving the EU, all our existing legislation that has been enacted will stay. It just means that our elected government will have the power to remove legislation without getting permission from unelected commissioners.

Under the Lisbon treaty, we will continue to be members of the EU for two years following a vote to leave. I expect if we vote to leave, there will be another referendum in 2017 after the EU has had some serious introspection about the democratic deficit. I would expect them to try to keep the UK as a member.
Yes, /r/programming is much more ruthless and honest in my experience. Listen to their comments and give them a bit more weight than most other forums.
US would let Apple keep software to help FBI hack iPhone
I follow 100+ webcomics and a bunch of other news sites and blogs. Feedly is amazing, have been using it since long before google reader was shut down. Feedly, reddit and HN are my daily chores.
I would like to see this written up as an MMM case study. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/category/case-studies/
My definition is not about number of employees and is common usage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstate
Certainly an interesting time to be alive. A part of me thinks we (the rest of the U.K.) should just jettison England and be done with it. They're dragging the rest of us down.

[edit for clarity]
Virtual reality promises to transform film
To be fair, they might be on to something. I've programmed my whole life in OO and recently started looking into FP. I can see the veterans thinking that OO is a fad after seeing things like BeanFactoryFactoryFactory (I personally do not program in Java and have never encountered the use case for a "Factory", and as such do not know what the use case is). After that, what value do you get to adding the functions to structs? I personally see the value, but I also see the value in not doing that. I would recommend teaching them OO while yourself should study FP and criticisms of OO. After them, it may be easier to evaluate which is better for your use case. It sounds like the vets have already cornered you out of OO, but you also definitely don't want to force the wrong tool onto a project just because it's the tool you understand best.
> Maybe we will have to get visas to visit the EU.

That's really unlikely, though that would be a hilarious hit to the "power" of the UK passport (in terms of countries you can enter visa-free).
I can't believe I read this here. Hope you're joking. I don't wear rosy glasses, I won't say there's no trouble, but targeting some people the way you do... awful.
IMHO it doesn't matter. Judging Snowden by his computer skills is like judging Ghandi for his ability in court[1]. Snowden is a symbol for freedom of speech, privacy and democracy worldwide, the rest are small details.

Now, to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, his speeches and analysis on various topics is extremely sound. I am astonished by his composure, depth and well argued answers. He technical prowess shows-off IMNHO, I've never seen an answer that shows lack of technical ability or understanding.

Also as another commentator pointed out he is the only one we know who comes from the inside for sure: When he says that your 6-letter password is like having none when the NSA is after you, I take his word for it.

[1] Ghandi was a barrister-at-law.
If we asked before changing every url, we'd do nothing else all day.

I've put it back to the one you want, though I'm skeptical it's a better choice. It seems so to you because you know the project inside-out, but the audience here does not. The best story is the one that explains what it is, optionally with a comment in the thread pointing to updated information.
Reading the messages on this bug shows you how much of a hunt it was. It turned out to be undocumented messaging behavior in user32.
Well biologically the person has inherited some genes that function in such a way as to lead to their obsession with young people. At the end of the day this is very much a mental problem that can be remedied with bioengineering. Not much else you can do for these people.

To criminalize it in all of its forms, is the same thing as criminalizing any sexuality. Perhaps one day we'll create an algorithm that can generate these images without anyone being involved -- does that sound distasteful as well.

At this point even artful depictions of a sexual nature are illegal, criminal offense.
The British political and electoral systems are fundamentally broken, to be sure. That said, it's also worth noting that in this case by far the biggest loser at the last general election because of that broken system was UKIP, the "small anti-EU, right-wing party" you mentioned, which despite commanding 12.7% of the popular vote wound up with only 1 MP out of 650. Even the Lib Dems, who took probably the biggest political battering in a generation at that election, didn't lose out that badly.

Had we had anything resembling proportionate representation in the House of Commons after the election, it is not unlikely that UKIP would have held the balance of power in a hung parliament, and that as effectively a single-issue party they would then have demanded action on their main issue as the price of co-operation. Whether any of us would agree with them or not, the fact is that nearly 4 million people did vote for them, so it's hard to argue that the current situation is somehow unjustified.

My personal view is that one good way to bring more accountability into British politics would be to make more use of direct democracy on specific issues, moving away from the transparent fiction that whichever party wound up in power despite almost always receiving a minority of the popular vote somehow has a popular mandate to implement any policy that was in their manifesto on any issue. From that point of view I'm happy to see a referendum that splits party lines take place on such a controversial issue anyway, regardless of my personal preference for its outcome.
Washington Pauses for Justice Antonin Scalia’s Funeral
I'm one of those Commonwealth nationals resident in the UK with the right to vote in this referendum. I had thought the case for the UK staying in the EU was obvious until I started thinking about it and, in the process, stumbled upon a frustratingly alluring argument for me -- and other non-EU, British-resident Commonwealth nationals (that is, other Commonwealth nationals legally living in the UK who are not also nationals of an EU country) -- to vote for the UK to leave.

The argument runs like this.

The UK's current level of migration is seen as a problem by the current UK government, by a significant proportion of British citizens, and probably even by a good few in the left-leaning parties. While the UK's in the EU, there's almost nothing that can be done to curb skilled or unskilled migration from the EU. Any government of a UK in the EU that wants to curb migration has to do so by clamping down on non-EU migrants. There's already no legal unskilled migrant route to the UK, so that means cutting back on skilled migration.

That clamping down is for me a personal pain, so much of a pain that it feels like every time I see Theresa May in the news it's because she wants to make it harder for me and other non-EU nationals to work in the UK. (I try really, really hard not to hate her.) If the UK left the EU, that'd allow the British government to apply the same rules across the board (to EU citizens as well as non-EU citizens) which'd probably lead to any UK government (from migration-hating UKIP to migration-loving Greens) having a more sensible approach to skilled migration. And not only is that in my own interest as a non-EU Commonwealth national, it's also in the UK's interest as far as having a sensible skilled migration policy goes.

This argument is, of course, too narrow on something as broad as the UK's members in the EU to be enough: it doesn't deal with the host of other things around British EU membership (wealth, security, environment, international influence etc). But my working visa issues are so frustrating that I find it a very, very tempting argument.
Windows on the Will
> Membership of the EU requires you to sign up to the ECHR, but countries outside of the EU are also members of the ECHR. We can continue to be part of the ECHR without being inside the EU.

Oh I am well aware. I am referring to the Conservatives' manifesto promise to repeal the Human Rights Act, which so far has been kicked into the long grass due to opposition and infeasibility. But since the ECHR is a European thing, EU or no, I think it will inevitably be brought up again with the referendum.

(Side note: The EU is actually trying to join the ECHR as member in itself. Wondering when that process will be finished.)

> By leaving the EU, all our existing legislation that has been enacted will stay.

Sure, most of it, but what of it? We nonetheless lose participation in the Single Market etc.
In Spain in some villages they still make charcoal like in old times.https://youtu.be/n_k74Kohudk . You can even visit and watch them. There was a movie sometime ago that brought it to public again : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088230/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
But the parent said "that that's", which is a valid thing to say.
> When he got it all back they told him his hard drives were empty or unformatted.

Maybe that's what they wanted him to think. I refuse to believe the alternative...
Open Connectivity Foundation to establish specifications & protocols by which manufacturers & service providers can ensure interoperability. Members include Intel, Microsoft, Samsung, Cisco & others. https://twitter.com/openconnorg
The EU requires protection of it's external border by member states. The ROI would be required to protect it's border with the UK. If it failed to do so, the EU could withhold funding from it, in effect fining them.
Apex from @TJ is similar https://github.com/apex/apex
I expect if we vote to leave, there will be another referendum in 2017 after the EU has had some serious introspection about the democratic deficit. I would expect them to try to keep the UK as a member.

In the news yesterday, before the deal was announced, there was talk of incorporating a specific guarantee that any decision this time would be final, and the EU would not then come back to the UK offering an improved deal later, precisely because of the issue you raised there.

Any mention of that has been notably absent in every news report I've seen so far today. Does anyone know what happened there?
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>If it is incompetence then that bolsters the argument that any backdoor will lead to leaks and unauthorized access to the backdoor, causing more harm to everyone.

The backdoor the FBI wants to exploit cannot be leaked. They are specifically requesting it be limited to the specific phone.

If it were possible to take an apple update, edit it, and then apply to other phones, they wouldn't need Apple's help.
It might be more accurate to say "being required to be employed is bad" since 'unemployment' is a loaded word. But then again, that's OP's point.
Gove's statement today -- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-... -- sounds to me like he'd also like the UK to leave the ECHR.
The rest of the EU countries should also hold a referendum about granting the UK these special conditions. It is very likely that, event after getting these privileges, they will act as if they were making us a favor to stay. Just leave. Maybe a free Scotland joins back in a few years.
The implication was mafia or mossad -- or some other group above the law?
Ask HN: What music do you listen to while coding?
Last few years I've noticed most people listen to music while programming probably due to awful office environments. Any recommendations? I like Jean Michel Jarre, Mike Oldfield, Black Sabbath, Caravan. Prog or instrumental is often good, can really get you in the zone ;-)
Does SSH over a nonstandard port improve speed? If you don't have a host set up like that you can try it with GitHub: https://help.github.com/articles/using-ssh-over-the-https-po...
What to do with alcoholics and drug addicts that need jobs to avoid addictions? What to do with people that some sort of purpose in life? Wouldn't negative tax be better?
No. They emailed me 4 hours before I went there. If I went there based on the estimated time I would have been 4 days early.

It obviously didn't "get placed in a particular spot at customer service order pick-ups." It was in the normal stockroom treated like normal stock - which means people don't pay attention to quick and easy access and stuff gets piled on top. They have shelves in the site to store area behind the desk. Said shelves are completely empty. It does make sense that they don't want people taking stuff off the site to store shelves so they keep them in the back. Even though the shelves are behind the desk the desk is unattended except whe someone presses the button.

My experience is not unusual at all for Walmart site to store, if you look online you'll see plenty of similar stories.
The author of the talk cites this study in support of his method of defocusing or 'print pushing' : http://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2126435
Small sample (N=28), but highly significant (p<0.0001) change in optical axial length.

It also seems he is not selling anything to cure myopia (books, glasses, courses..). The technique is just 'read from a position in which the letters are a bit blurry'.

Though, his site does look alternativish.
Google is only a proxy to The Internet, nothing more. There's a bucketload of untapped traffic coming from sources Google could only dream of. I found this out by mistake when I had AWStats running for way longer than it should have, and it hoovered up globs of what we would call 'big data' today.

Some of the referal links are still alive today and funneling terrabytes of metadata through their servers; a practice I thought was more or less frowned upon, but still serving SEOs today. Still so much to tap into, still like 2012 too!
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11138086
From http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-...

>You will require Canonical’s permission to use: (i) any mark ending with the letters UBUNTU or BUNTU which is sufficiently similar to the Trademarks or any other confusingly similar mark, and (ii) any Trademark in a domain name or URL or for merchandising purposes

That sounds like it covers *buntu too, unfortunately
In addition to your misreading of Homage to Catalonia, you also misattributed -- the author you're looking for is Thomas Friedman.
ditto. I would love an easy answer to the question: what CPU has the best performance as a compile-server. That answer has to be somewhere inside openbenchmarking.org, but I'll be darned if I can get it to tell me.
>We've got to enable some kind of meaningful labor (market-compensated or not) that people still can engage in after the basic income is implemented.

Are there no charities, no community organizations, no sports teams? Why trade the forced labor of market compensation for forced labor of government compensation?

Meaningful labor already exists outside of market compensation. Anything the government would implement would just be beaurocracy soaking up funds that should be going towards the basic income.
Has it been proven that Pedophilia is genetic, tho?
If nobody visited the hidden service, the operator would have no reason to keep it running. Watching child porn fuels its demand, and therefore encourages its distribution.
Didn't Sun use lawyers to design the CDDL to precisely prevent this situation?
Has homosexuality? In general in many of these cases they is definitely some element of OCD involved, as in hoarding millions of images, and the criminal offenses are set up in a way to penalize for each image using the same sort of logic as above. But then that's common for other people with what are considered normal sexual orientations, having a huge porn collection.

I mean the deviant element of this is that it's all so taboo, I mean after all "think of the children" (tm). We should treat it as any other crime and try to do harm reduction.
Yes. The analytical chemist's credo: never test an irreplaceable sample using an untested procedure. Or as Norm Abrams from This Old House put it, "Measure twice, cut once." Spares one that embarrassing moment when you say, "I cut it off twice and its still too short." :)
... and without mentioning that it was, apparently, successful.

Let's not let the details get in the way.
Police often supplement their income with odd jobs. I once worked with a police detective who also worked as a sysadmin.
Joan80bites.com
Agreed. I would love to be consulted on this deal. Because I don't think the UK should get (any more) special rights. Stay as it is or leave, but why the special treatment ?
Letter to a young Haskell enthusiast (2014)
If the EU make significant changes in the next year, I think another referendum would be a healthy thing. Especially if this one is close. This is a very significant decision and whilst I'm for leaving; I'd rather be a member of a pared down EU that concentrated on free trade and less on bureaucracy and the creation of legislation.
It would also be possible for the County to reset it if they were using any of the myriad "MDM" applications.
There was a project in Elektor a few years ago to program some cheap 8-bit microcontroller to emulate a 555. https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazine/elektor-201511/2819...

They also did a kit to build your own 555 from discrete transistors. https://www.elektor.com/the-three-fives-555-discrete-timer-k...
As long as you are honest about it I wouldn't even demand an extra IRC client.

I have my doubts about whether this will make you rich but as long as you are being honest and honor the GPL etc I see no legal or moral problems.

BTW: I know that I personally was not scammed and I would guess nobody else who paid for it felt scammed either.

I think many like me are happy to chip in with a little money as I don't have capacity to contribute code or support.