skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still my favourite interview process was a small coding assignment and presenting the resulting code in front of the devs, who got to ask questions about it and then vote in private on whether to hire.

Everybody got the same assignment, everybody solves it in a different way, and everybody makes mistakes[0], but how they handle that and explain it tells a lot about how they are as a programmer.

[0] Except for one who was insanely thorough and still apologized for really minor imperfections in his code. He got the most enthusiastic votes ever.
Thank you. This was a very informative read indeed. I'm currently in the process of rewriting a hobby compiler[1] that I hacked together over a year ago. This time I wanted to do it properly, and hence have been scouting on the web for a short, concise and to the point, tutorial that briefly explains most of the important concepts that I need to know be for I begin. This was exactly that tutorial.

[1]: https://github.com/runarberg/ascii2mathml
I wonder what they are all thinking over Apple HQ about this... I suspect it is some variant of "Ok, now how to make these phones even more secure?"
Their could be forms of life that we don't even have a clue about the biological nature of itz composition.
Croteam: Bugs in our code? No waaaay…
I've been having some trainings on agility and software development, at an european Big Corp™ (where I work).

Here at european Big Corp™, management is worried that our size is making us slow, and they also want to be cool like the start-up kids in the valley. As such, we've been using/trying to use Agile, but with very limited success. Big Corp™'s solution to this obviously low success is to buy thousands and thousands of Euros worth of training, with Agile and Scrum certified trainers and partners, which - every single time - repeat ad nauseam the same doctrine and dogmas, much like liturgy in a church. A few examples:

* "So your colleagues are over-estimating every single task - pardon me, user story! - to have time to browse reddit? Estimate with story points, they'll see that their velocity is slow.";

* "So your colleagues don't like resolving bugs? Put a bug chart in the office where everyone can see it, they'll feel guilty and solve them!";

* "So your colleagues don't like to create tests and write half-assed code, totally ignoring definitions of done and the like? Just wait until velocity drops because of technical debt, they'll understand and learn!".

Well, what's my point here? Agile may require "safety" and all the technical goodies described in this article, but - before that - it requires a team of committed people. This is the basis of Agile and Scrum. And that's where my company fails, and that's why Agile - or any other approach - won't work here until people are responsible and committed. The build is now broken, will a team of uncommitted people will care? They'll push around the responsibility until someone fixes it.

So, yeah, Agile requires safety; but, before that, it requires commitment. I feel it's an engineering-type trait, to try to solve human issues with tools (bug charts, code coverage, continuous integration/delivery), and many engineering-driven companies seem to play the game that way. But all these tools won't solve the real problems which explain why a team might be failing. And if a team is committed, they'll eventually succeed, even without the shiny tools and cool approaches.
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I think it's more about the senior management and people like marketing, who aren't technical. That could go well: "Yeah so we're ditching MS SQL Server Pro and instead will go with Cockroach from now on"
> I read that more as attempting to appease the CPSC and avoid an import ban and mandatory recall.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. They were careless with the packaging and didn't make clear the risks, until they were regulated, and they resisted the regulation until they were faced with a ban.

> It's abundantly clear that the CPSC has chosen to take actions that are substantially out of line with the actual level of hazard posed by such products.

I'm not sure it is abundantly clear.

Toys have very strict standards requirements. These items are sold as toys, alongside other toys, albeit (more recently) sold to adults not children.

But even though they're not sold to adults there were many children being injured by these magnets - more serious injuries than other toys. You can't (and shouldn't) eliminate all risk, but you should take some effort to reduce risk of death or surgery.
If you find this topic interesting to think about I strongly recommend the book Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

It was written in 1930's, but in some ways it's still incredibly refreshing and thought provoking.
Awesome project. Terra seems so powerful, it's great to see more applications for it.

Sidenote -- I hate to be the guy complaining about web design, but the Raleway font is very hard to read (Retina MacBook). Here's a screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/9DkVEaQ.png

The screenshot is at 2x resolution so the readability problem is not quite obvious, but look at the vertical lines on the "m" letters -- the line width is all over the place even within a single letter. Raleway's miserable kerning doesn't help things either.
Alibaba just dove headfirst into the world of eSports
The designed is compared against Spanner's several time in the interesting design doc: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/de...
How things grow: people use them. They don't stop using them. IPFS is growing.
I don't see it. Let's say I 'know' that for all sane input my function should return a value between -1000 and 1000. I write some tests for this and they all pass. So far so good.

Now it's a week later and all of a sudden my function is returning -10e8. Where does TDD help me with debugging?
Yeah. When you look at it everything is just a sphere rotating on something.
However, its flash is supposedly not inside the processor but in the form of an external flash chip, and it's not really possible for Apple to move the flash onto the main processor because the manufacturing processes they use don't support it. That's why everyone uses one-time programmable eFuses instead.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/06/18/a-child-bor...
It's an excellent name! It's telling a story, it's memorable, evocative. I think people complaining are all complaining on other people's behalf, i. e. they think others are going to be offended/put off/etc.

It's like that test where men were shown pictures of women and asked to (a) pick the one they thought was the most beautiful and (b) guess which one others would pick most often. Result: they pick the girl-next-door for (a) but think others will all go for the pornstar-look.
That brings back fond memories. Back in the day on BIX¹ (is anyone else here old enough to remember BIX?) we were talking about different languages and compilers, and the topic of C++ came up. I said, "C++? That's a preprocessor, isn't it?"

Much to my embarrassment, Bjarne Stroustrup was hanging out in the same BIX conference, and he chewed me out for this - but very politely. Bjarne explained that Cfront was definitely not a preprocessor (which would imply something like the C preprocesssor), but an actual honest-to-goodness compiler that just happened to have C as its compilation target.

Now if we could only get the younger generation to abandon that horrible "transpiler" word and call things by their right name: a compiler!

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange
>Freedom
People are not interested.
We are colonies of cells.
From what I've seen the Project Orion and later designs concluded that was the most efficient design. Imagine a parachute (hemisphere) with the place where the explosion happens in the center and the (heavily shielded) capsule behind it, so fully 50% of the explosion is providing forward thrust. You don't have a single tether passing through the heart of the exhaust, rather you've got several going around the outside (like the frame of a cone tent, with the capsule at the apex). This was apparently easier than designing a rigid "pusher plate" with the right shape to capture a lot of thrust.
It has ocasionaly in the UK on big rollovers for the UK and Euro Lotteries.
> That being said, I do think I would be a better developer if I had access to some formal education

That might be true, but there's a very limited number of courses on a typical computer science degree which actually do help. I think on mine it was mostly just data structures, theory of databases and concurrency. Possibly math.

Many others were interesting but I wouldn't say that I ever used them.
This is very good advice. The only problem with it is - he will be spending enormous amount of time practicing, preparing for interviews, and end up learning stuff that he might never use in real life. Unless he gets a dream job, I don't know if that is a great use of his time.

The other option is to look for companies that put emphasis on past projects, open source contributions, take home problems etc and apply to those positions. At least this way, he can spend time making things he is interested in.
Or why the error codes are kept secret from the user, resulting in only the dealership, not your local independent, being able to fix some things.

And also the requirement of specialist tools to do non-specialist jobs like set the engine timing, and then charging a lot for purchase of the tool. It will be interesting to see how serviceable electric cars become once they are old enough to start being parted out and the used market expands to those who 'just need something to go from A to B'.
But you are still making a profit on the ticket
7 Trending Colors and Designs of Scroll Cards for Royal Indian Wedding
New York Times Fooled People into Thinking Stanford Didn’t Accept Anyone
It was satire.
This idea is explored by Robert Charles Wilson in his Sci-Fi trilogy. He calls these being Hypotheticals and they operate over time frame and distances uncomprehensible to human mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(novel)
I read somewhere that there is a universe in each scale. For example, there is a whole world in the atomic scale. Similarly there are billions of bacteria in our mouth alone. They couldn't make sense of their host. Sometimes I think it is possible that the entire universe is some body part of a giant organism which we couldn't comprehend.
The issue is not that they're trying to unlock it, but that they're trying to force the manufacturer to unlock it for them.
Ok, but the source code was published, everybody could see it. Of course, according to the definition, you need to actually be able, legally, to modify the SW - and from what I gather from this discussion, TrueCrypt creators had copyright on the source code? (this I did not know)

How do you call SW with public source-code that maintains copyright? Apparently it isn't "open source", but what is it?
Planning Bus Trips with Python and Singapore's Smart Nation APIs
What does it take to make a productive machine learning guy?

OP seemed to hint at a master's degree or Phd, but then also mentioned doing one's "homework".
I'm watching this now and just wanted to say thanks for the great link!
Interviewing is a number game. Treat it as one and it will make your live easier.
All systems have flaws at some point, but not all systems equal in terms of exploitable value for the effort.
> if it survived a nuclear blast and had join[t]s

That would be Keith Richards and cockroaches (sorry had to). So two names are up for grabs for the competition.
Roborace's Crazy Self-Driving Cars Will Look Like This
Your landing page have ZERO information about the app. I don't count the "app store" buttons. And the diary tab just looked like clickbait articles - so I closed that instantly.

The app itself, and the content in the app store (text+screenshots), actually looks kinda neat. Just use that.

I guess it just looked like "tinder for thoughts" now when I look back at it, is it?

And seriously, 18 pages of "X ways to do Y" and "Why X is blah (and how to X it!)". It really feels like spam.
We have a Cordova app that begins on a local web page then immediately redirects to a remote page, and we have recently had a bunch of users on iOS 9.3 complain that they are just stuck on the first screen.

So it looks like it probably does affect Cordova apps.
Agile enthusiasts really enjoy applying agile methodologies to functional requirements such as user stories.

But non-functional requirements are rarely explicit: security, reliability, redundancy, durability, concurrency, performance, scalability, configuration, deployment, documentation, logging, monitoring, supervision, maintainability, construction for verification...

You don't get a user story saying: "as a user i would like my information to be private" or "as a user i would not like to experience a concurrency bug".

To neglect those non-functional requirements in favor of perceived progress is not in the company's best interest. A solution that doesn't comply with those requirements also has a name: a functional prototype. There's a difference between developing production software and developing prototypes, even if you consider yourself agile.

Now, as a software engineer, you should be able to identify these requirements and include them in estimations. You can also ignore them, and project an image of a highly productive engineer, but some day your code will crash and you won't have 10 days to fix it. That day you will be miserably fired to the sound of a trumpet.
> Whether or not EEE was specifically invoked is sort of irrelevant...

By responding to a point that hasn't even been raised, you add noise to the conversation. It would have been substantially more useful (and injected signal into the discussion) to address the points that either jblow or ausjke raised.
IP Blacklists Analysed – let's see what they do, how they compare
I wrote Vanilla Cookie Manager years ago to clear cookies. I've always wanted to clear local storage as well but they have left me hanging since 2011:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78093
Can we have s/Higher/8 and 24/ in the title? As written it suggests that sphere packing had been solved in all higher dimensions, which would be far more dramatic.
Air gaps between layers are useful in a safty context, but don't reduce the total thickness required.
Human society is certainly a distributed intelligence.

That doesn't mean we should think of society as a singular "living creature".
Could we trust Big Data to predict people's death?
What are the current performance characteristics in terms of number of select and insert per second per node ? Does anyone have synthetic benchmarks published ?
"if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions."

That's not true unless you work with very narrow technology or single framework. For example, good luck trying to remember all these POSIX API functions. I don't even try to remember mundane things by heart, because it takes a precious and very limited resource (brain memory) for a very small gain (few seconds saved that would cost to look it up).
It is possible this is the beginning of the end for Window and Linux too. Basically the strategy would be to get all the user to switch to a priority (aka propriety) version of Linux, much like Google has done with Android.
(Wrong button, intended to up vote you, my apologies.)

Maybe DNA from blood is a different matter, but when it comes to hair samples I don't think we can trust the FBI.

"The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000."[1]

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...
Yes partycoder, it sure would be interesting to hear what "neckbeard" RMS has to say about this move by Microsoft today, would it not?
Cultural fit over skill fit. Always
Show HN: AYLIEN News API Launch
My little contribution to the InfoSec community!

This site analyses, documents and compares IP Lists, with a focus on attacks, malware, abuse.
I imagine dropping a powered board into salt water has very different results to running an unpowered one through de-ionized water so water damage probably varies wildly depending on the circumstances.
Phalcon – PHP framework delivered as a C extension
> have you ever been rejected from not having a degree?

No, never. Not even for jobs that listed a degree as a requirement.
Isn't that what a degree is? Granted, an expensive, intensive course in the US.
You're undervaluing Steve Kerr. Under Kerr with essentially the same roster as the season before the Warriors jumped from being an above average offense to an elite offense. The popular narrative is that David Lee was injured and Draymond Green took on Lee's role but Green was already a key player and 6th on the Warriors in minutes the year before the championship.

It's not the type of thing that is easy to measure outside of looking at team wide efficiency statistics (and thus viewing the result, not the strategy) but it seems as though Steve Kerr did an amazing coaching job. And I say this as someone who thought highly of Marc Jackson's results (it seemed like he was doing a great job coaching defense because a team that looked offensively stacked had one of the best defensive efficiency totals in the NBA). It's not a great analytics/HN narrative but what I've heard in interviews with Kerr is he made the team scale back in the complexity of their practices and work on fundamentals and avoiding turnovers.
As a non-religious athiest hindu this is the first time I am hearing this, could you give some pointers. I would have expected it to go the other way (if at all), that is, only a small minority of hindu's do not cremate their dead.
This reminds me of Look to Windward, a Culture novel which features behemotaurs, creatures much larger than whales which are near immortal and have a very very slow metabolism.
I sometimes comment code like this, including the odd "increment". Because omitting it would disrupt the flow of the code+comments.
Canonical has been trying that for a long time, what with Ubuntu having a huge semi-proprietary code base not shared with any other distribution (Mir, Unity, own font rendering, Launpad/bzr for development, …).
Could not upvote this enough !
Ask HN: Advice on selecting programming languages for a new web product?
One of my friends, who has experience in algorithms (from programming competitions) and enterprise programming (ABAP, some Java), wanted to know what language he should use for his new web-based startup product. He said it needs to handle very high volume of small requests (like a like a event tracker), and then analyse on background.

I suggested NodeJS backend with Coffeescript for both ui and backend. When I really think about it I suggested it because I use it, which might not be the best option for him.

What programming languages (for backend & frontend) do you think will work best for him? And what are the important factors to consider when picking the best programming language for a project?
Everything is awesome about this even the logo.

Somebody knew what they were doing when they geared this towards the kind of people that inhabit sites like HN.

Good job. :)
Mattermark is hiring a Front end Engineer
> The firm is obscure, so the name doesn't belong in the headline.

I don't see how that works. If the name is obscure, and we should know about it, put it in the headline.

That kind of headlines definitely turn me away. "Here's why we should care" is typically preceding a text which says nothing useful about why we should care. I just won't read articles headlined like this, because they feel like an insult.
That argument also assumes that such an intelligence must evolve. If you were to build it out of individual cells, that seems reasonable. But such an intelligence could also be an emergent property of civilizations of intelligent beings, for example. We know too little of what sentience involves to be able to rule out such hive minds.
Making a neural net to play Tic Tac Toe
> I'm not sure what you're saying here. They were careless with the packaging...

I expect that some manufacturers were. Until we see the packaging we can't determine if Zen Magnets was being careless.

The responsible distributors that I've seen all have the same story: "No amount of packaging changes have satisfied the CPSC. They won't be satisfied until noone is permitted to manufacture within or import SREM magnet sets into the US.".

I've looked at the rejected packaging from responsible distributors. The packaging makes it abundantly clear that those are not children's toys. I've read the documentation shipped inside Buckyballs magnet sets. It makes the dangers of ingestion of the magnets in the sets very clear.

Because what I can see with my eyes differs so wildly from what the CPSC is asserting about manufacturer's packaging, and because (as the ALJ found) what the CPSC is asserting about injury rates and the like isn't actually credible, I take what the CPSC has to say about the topic with a very large grain of salt.

It's one thing to prohibit the sale of inadequately or improperly marked SREM magnet sets. It's another thing entirely to ban the production and/or importation of all SREM magnet sets, regardless of how well marked they are.

You dig?
If something compiles down to C, does that mean there has to be another compiler to compile the C after that?
Like you, I’m constantly zooming in or out because there is so much variation in font sizes and layouts. I wonder if Safari could be programmed to automatically adjust the zoom level of every web page, based on my preferred viewing style. Safari would need to take into account things such as preferred font size, current window size, etc.
Can you just call it something else internally? It's not like any of those people know what databases do and do not exist. Maybe CR, CRDB or like someone here suggested, RoachDB.
One small suggestion to make it more friendly for the casual reader. Include input and output for every step.

I want to see what the final output is...
You can solve it for any specific instance of this structure. To solve the general case, you would need to teach an AI of the physical properties of and relationships between every word in the chosen language. That's much more than just language and grammar.

Wikipedia has another example (the original Winograd Schema) that doesn't allow you to "solve" the problem by asking Google:

The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence.
The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence.
To what does "they" refer in each sentence?
Yes, and? Should we believe him? He's the director of the FBI, he's almost certainly lying. It will come out in some leak or declassified document, or someones memoirs, or some such, in 30 years that the guy was lying through he teeth.

We can't seriously be expected to believe that over the next six decades it will come out that all these politicians and law enforcement folk were just, upright, moral citizens, acting in everyones best interests.