skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all about context.

If your software team works on code with lots of binary trees, interview questions about them makes a ton of sense.

If your software team is making a website that just displays stuff from databases and web services, interview questions about binary trees makes no sense at all.
i've read the report, and it's very very clear: osama bin laden and al qaeda were behind every facet of the attack.
Completely deliberate. As others pointed out, they've already been doing it, on less popular products that caused no backlash. It's there in the article up top, pre roll-back:

UPDATE: Amazon has provided VideoGamer.com with the following statement in response to this story:

"One of the many benefits of Amazon Prime is access to exclusive selection on a number of great products. Customers who are not Prime members can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, or they can purchase those items from a Marketplace seller."
Correction: That experiment was repealed, last year I believe. It was a failure on pretty much all counts, looking back. My guess is it will not be revived.
Great idea! :)
Have you ever stored a dictionary inside a dictionary? (e.g. something like the JSON:

{foo : {bar : "baz"}}

That's a tree.
You ruined this thread by tossing in an inflammatory "racist", thereby knocking it off-topic and making it a flamewar at the same time. Please don't do this on Hacker News.

Pretty much the worst thing a comment can do here is take a specific discussion about something factual and turn it into a generic one about something ideological. I'm sure you didn't mean to produce that undesired result, but because the mechanism is predictable, it can and should be scrupulously avoided.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548148 and marked it off-topic.
About 2 years ago we paid $2k to have a solar study done on our house. This is just one data point but the results of that study and Google Sunroof are an order of magnitude apart. And this was from a solar company trying to sell us solar panels.
Lots of comments in here about economic factors. It's important to recognize that depression can occur independent of one's situation. There's a stigma around depression which keeps many people quiet when they need help the most. I worry that our decreasing face-to-face interaction and emphasis on individual-success-at-all-costs is worsening this; it's so easy to socially isolate yourself these days.
You dodged a bullet there. Maybe you can use this as a canary to tell if a company is one you want to work for based on questions they ask.
Makes you wonder how much investor funding that would have otherwise gone to startups with an actual viable product was sucked up by Theranos.
Semi-random thought about the article on middle class people who can not afford a $400 emergency a few days ago[0], media creates remarkably unrealistic expectations. In that article someone estimated that one needs $100k - $150k for a middle class live. Or rather for the expectations of a middle class live.

An example is people tweeting food, if you follow thirteen people who post pictures of their lunch, then you will only have a comparatively good lunch once every two weeks. (And that is only if you don't follow people whose job is to post amazing food.) Similar, TV is full of people who complain about being poor sitting in an apartment with Hudson river view. ( It does not help, that the apartment looks like it was designed by an $5000/hr interior designer, because the director wanted it to look good and hired an $5000/hr interior designer.)

Basically this is a variant of Charlie Stross's idea, that news acts as a depressant, because that is the kind of news that sells. ( And is usually a lot easier to write.) Old-media is full of the kind of middle class existence that is at three times the median income, while social media means that the expectation is to keep up on average with the maximum of your peers (because only the best is posted).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11527523

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/psa-igno...
They actually do the same thing with other items as well. I was trying to buy a Dell monitor the other day, and it was reserved for Prime members only.
Case in point for the article title..
>Browse the web with friends

Why? Keep that garbage out of the browser. Everything is too "social" and integrated already.

Just give me a "dumb" viewer - nothing more, nothing less.
you presented no evidence. you presented quotes.
I'm turning into a single issue troll with this, but I think we can make a positive change at the state level by changing ballot access. Just stop allowing parties to nominate candidates.

The machines can still endorse a candidate, but we could gut the national election process one state at a time by requiring any individual that wants to be listed on a ballot to submit petitions for that ballot, rather than receiving the blessings of a privately run national organization.
Seeing as Yahoo! completely lost the race to hire the "best and brightest," and is now teetering on the brink of dissolution, I'd say that you:

a. dodged a bullet
b. should basically do the exact opposite of every part of their hiring practices
And if you worry about that you can always use 384. Plus a side benefit is that 384 is faster on a 64-bit processor.
> "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

The sizable problem with this statement is that it is using a solution to pigeonhole a person. It takes a bit of audacious hubris, something Torvalds (an extraordinary engineer no doubt) is known for, to paint an entire person and their capacity and skill into a singular and simple quote.

Here's a novel idea: sometimes a person is a good programmer and sometimes they're a bad programmer. There's definitely a skill level that people fall into, but these aren't neat lines delineated with tired generalisms about "worrying about code" versus worrying about "data structures". Put your question into an interview and get different people to ask it and sure pick the people who were able to get a better solution. Hopefully you're asking more than one question. That's totally OK, but please don't attribute someone's performance at one question or assume that you've mastered everything it takes to know to paint someone as a "bad programmer" from one interview loop[0] or performance with their performance for that one question.

Sometimes it's obvious someone has no idea what they're doing and you can tell that from a question, but even in that case they could become better. There might be a weakness in a fundamental area they need to learn and sure you don't want to hire them until they do, but that doesn't make them a "bad programmer". All it is is a specific problem that the candidate should recognize and improve on to up their skill. They shouldn't walk away from your massive ego rethinking their career as you puff your chess out and write a haughty blog post about what you think about people and their skills.

[0] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-intervie...
"To use a library effectively, you have to be able to write it."

That's a blanket statement. If we find one exception to this rule, then we can say that it's 100% false (since its truthfulness is binary -- it's either true or false).

To find one exception, we only need to find a single "good" piece of software whose author can't write 100% of the dependencies, including: (probably) C/C++ compilers, FS drivers, low-level network libraries, and the widely-used monster that is SSH.
By coincidence, I just posted some notes on what I've learned over the last 15 years of hiring software engineers. I prefer giving people real-world, fairly large, programming tasks to do, and then having them talk through the code they write, rather than posing puzzle-style questions.

https://medium.com/@kwindla/hiring-software-engineers-98498c...

(This is also on HN/new right now.)
Especially since some of those accidents are going to be death by suicide that went undetected.

The US uses this definition for suicide. http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/suicide/definitions.ht...

> Suicide

> Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intent to die as a result of the behavior.

That "intent to die" part makes it hard to decide whether something was suicide or accidental death, and we know it causes some incorrect classification.
It's not a "brain teaser" or a "trick question". It's an ordinary software engineering problem.
It was? I guess I haven't been shopping inside the city limits enough.
Paying for shill comments would probably be cheaper: https://xkcd.com/1019/
my thoughts exactly, never had to do that once.
Intercom is getting cost prohibitive for us, so this could be a good alternative.
Do you listen to EconTalk? Michael Munger (famous econ prof) has what he calls the "Munger test", which is, does this proposal/statement about business/government/academia/etc. presuppose ideal human beings to carry it out, or the venal, petty, real people we know?
You can frequently buy a performance increase by representing nested calculation logic in hashmaps via memoization.
Cool, where can I download swift.py?
> fuckwad

This isn't allowed in HN comments, so please don't do it, regardless of how wrong someone is.
The idea that research involving bacteria could go dreadfully wrong.

Imagine if she had somehow fostered a deadly pathogen on her toothbrush and through a mistake outside of her level of expertise managed to contaminate something/herself.

The mentorship of a professional was probably for safety reasons. Safely handling bacteria, avoiding contamination, etc. Which is partially why a risk assessment had to be filed (what are the chances of a deadly pathogen being raised in the samples?). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I understood the situation.

I don't believe safety regulations should be waived for minors because "reasons" or "fostering an interest in science". Even if that makes life unfair.
I think it's to blame more on her privileged, connected background than her gender. Her gender was just something to focus on due to her lack of any other accomplishments; there's no shortage of golden white boys being elevated in the tech/mainstream media on a cloud of nothing.
fingerprints are UUIDs, not either usernames or password.
I know. That's Amazon, though, not Steam.
Only the most vulnerable. The 1989 epicenter was around Santa Cruz. Something similar to the 1906 earthquake would be probably be very bad.
What differentiates you from Reddit or any other community-sourced link sites?
The Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers
Quora: Starting an ads beta
>filled with a total dread of death

I'm not sure I've successfully communicated my feeling about this. It's less like a total dread of death and more like a total dread of losing life, if that makes any sense.

Do you have any close loved ones---a younger brother, a daughter, a close friend? Anyone for whom you might consider sacrificing yourself; anyone who you believe to be a shining light unto the world. Say that person is eaten by cancer. Once they are dead, they feel no pain; this is clear to me, and is not central in my judgement.

What is central is the lost blossoming of a mind. A rich internal experience, a reflective world with joy, dreams, and curiosity, is not a thing that should be destroyed. A mind that wishes to continue seeing the world and its people, and other minds wishing that mind to continue shining its light, annihilated---don't look away from the pain! If you look away from the pain, you lose your already slim opportunity to fight back.
Yet somehow despite wrangling with it for hundreds of years, they manage to do a worse job than most entry-level programmers.
You seem very unhappy at the idea of market failure.
You don't reverse a binary tree, you iterate in the opposite direction (right-to-left). Reversing is generally a pointless operation, and which would be much more efficient if not done at all.
May be unable to achieve self-actualization in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
I dunno. Cook recently said in an interview their manufacturing is in China not due to cost but because the supply chain is simply stronger there, and they can do things there that they can't elsewhere. Of course they could make a bold move like make a big outlay to get their supply chain operating in another country/region, that strikes me as something they could do. But it would be a really big deal.
Yeah, I doubt Amazon is cutting any corners. /s
Lumen – A semi-modular analog-style video synth for Mac
A cocktail for putting dents in the universe
The vast majority of compiler runtime libraries have explicit exceptions to licenses to avoid this, to avoid creating copyright infringers out of everyone.
It _is_ possible to adapt Jackson (with minimal effort) to use Ion, since it's very similar to Jackson's native JSON format.
They also teach things like this in boot camps now. The graduates are trained to game these tests because placement rates are so important to boot camps.

Assuming someone is a good programmer because of trivial examples like reversing a binary tree or, worse, writing a bubble sort is like asking someone you to use a wrench to prove that you're an architect.
I love solar powered hot dog cookers!
Seems simple to police : have an account that has a "registration" number. You get some basic training and access to a FAQ generator and can post "on message" replies - all above board as you need it.
> It's almost as if the "city council" or "government" is an entity composed of multiple people who are human.

Not just human, humans from California.

Just saying.
IIRC it was not easily disabled when it was first introduced, the control was added after community reaction. However, I just included as another example. Further, I don't know the situation now, but IIRC you can't remove (i.e. delete the code, not disable) zeitgeist and online searches, keeping Unity, those are hard dependencies, even though non-essential.
And yet that study is across 40 countries. It would have been nice if before putting that forth as evidence to the contrary, you'd read the second sentence of the abstract upon which you'd have found it's not relevant (at least, it's not relevant in the way that you cherry picked that quote).

Having said that, your first paragraph is spot on.
Imagine how long electric cars would last if the only part you really need to replace is the battery. Not to mention, you have a chance to decouple the parts that don't have or need a technical revolution ( the motors ) from the parts that do ( the battery ).
There are several advantages of Facebook over Tor. One of them is that your ISP is unable to see who what site you are talking to, and that Facebook is unable to see your source IP address.
Rosea (http://chiselapp.com/user/mangoa01/repository/mrtools/wiki?n...) is a tcl-based tool designed specifically for embedded medical applications where provable quality is critical. I think it deserves more attention.
We're pretty consistently seeing Edge use fewer resources than Chrome, though there might be measurement challenges. Here's one recent benchmark: http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/
So this article leads off with @mxcl's tweet about google not offering him a job because he wasn't able to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard.

I don't think that being able to describe an algorithm you haven't had to implement in more than decade (at least, that would be the case for me, college is starting to be a long time ago for me).

Honestly right now, without looking up the answer, I probably can't reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard. I could, however, do it by test driving a solution with a real computer (I haven't flexed those muscles in a long time, but test driving would help me dig into the recesses of my brain).

Which skill set is more useful for production quality software? I can say for sure that it's not white boarding.
Enable Ghostery and load cnn.com and you will see why the web pages are so heavy these days.
When I was at Shutterstock I got a resume that followed everything to a T, including a lovely code sample. A bit of googling revealed that it had been copied line-for-line from an IBM blog. That one went down in the books :-)

During the in-person interviews, I like to focus on getting folks talking about something they are excited about. It can be hard to get comfortable in an interview for some folks, and it's paid off a good handful of times for me to make significant effort getting there. Especially with candidates who downplay their own experiences, who can easily be overlooked.
I think most people here miss the point, thinking that they need to know about symmetric binary trees in order to be able to answer such questions.

These kind of tests are aiming to find developers who can think out of the box and start solving problems they haven't heard of before. This is quite a simple problem to solve if you start thinking about it. If you get stuck because of the binary tree and because you've never done that before, then I believe you would be a mediocre dev (which is not a problem in many companies).
Human-rights icon Maher Arar is back to doing what he loves
This incorrect.
While Gecko is not in its entirety going away, components of Gecko will be replaced with Servo's code.

Such is detailed at Servo's roadmap.
https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap

Specficially:

>> Internally committed 2016 goals

>> Ship one Rust component in Firefox Nightly, riding the trains

>> Experiment with the uplift of a major piece of Servo into Gecko
Hey, yes, sorry, I had misunderstood the Facebook Messenger bot review process. Thought that it was enough to publish the Facebook page in order to be able to receive and send messages to external people. Now the page can receive messages but those messages never make it to the server where the bot is located, and hence no response ever makes it back to you.. :(

Good news is that if you follow Facebook's guide to create a Messenger bot you can easily deploy this code and play around with it yourself. It works great to receive and send messages but only for the owner of the page/bot :)

I'll update you if I get the required permission from Facebook and the bot becomes publicly accessible.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11547298 and marked it off-topic.
I've had problems with Intercom's price, maybe we'll try this - it looks good!
Standard cya http://ktla.com/2016/04/05/explosion-that-killed-teen-injure...
Safety regs aren't written for the expected case, they're written for the worst reasonable case. I can easily see how an experiment that involves bacteria cultures could cause problems. What if his daughter's immune system was fighting off strep throat at the time the samples were taken? How can we be sure that her samples don't present a threat to the judges and other people around her experiment? And that's just an example of a merely annoying infectious agent. She could easily have been carrying small quantities of something much more dangerous - a danger that is clearly amplified by growing them in a culture.

There are industry-standard protocols for performing this kind of work, and the school has a clear responsibility to ensure they are followed.
Doesn't Segment.io address such issues?
IIRC homebrew doesn’t handle inter-package dependencies very well - it’s no apt - but apart from that it seems to mostly work OK.
Braverman's test [pdf]
Yesterday I discovered that Twitter's HTTP headers alone are ~3500 bytes long (25 tweets!) with several long cookies, custom headers and the Content Security Policy[1] containing ~90 records. Is this considered normal nowadays?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy
Researchers have found a ‘striking’ new side effect from eating fast food
That's rather garbled by transmission. For the original, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11433139 . (-:
You know, I used to be a hardcore libertarian, but I've reconsidered a bit.

The density of cities like Manhattan/SF mean you have to have some level of regulation above and beyond what makes sense when everyone has an acre of his own land, to do with what we chooses. Whether it's noise, pollution, traffic safety, fire codes, etc., I think giving up a little bit more freedom than you would living on, say, a farm, is the price of living in a place with so much jammed in to so little space.

Maybe something to think about, if you take umbrage with people "imposing their whimsies" (I'm not being sarcastic, I really think about this a lot). Austin is nice, but it's a car-city. Show me one walkable city without the petty tyranny of city government and I'd move there pretty quickly.
>I think it's very simplistic to say income is the driving force in these numbers.

For some groups of people (farmers, vets, construction workers) the correlations between the economy and suicide is very clear. There's pretty good correlation between economic downturn and increased rate of death by suicide.

It is simplistic to just say "it's the economy", but the economy is pretty clearly one important factor.
> So if we pass enough rules the will of the voters should eventually take precedence?

Its a bit more about removing some of the incentives for "bad" behavior. These two are the most problematic to being fair and honest in government.
I found it amusing, deplorable and brilliant when I found out how SLC handles a lot of their homeless problem... given the homeless bus tickets to AZ, NV, NM, etc... effectively making it someone else's problem.

At the city level, it's hard to strike a balance, because if you do too good, then other cities will make their homeless your problem. In the end, I wish that more were done all around, I don't know what the answer is.

I'm not sure how solar panels will decrease emissions in SF, or how much carbon emitting fuel is used for SF electricity. I understand that it leaves more for others that would use carbon fuels, coal, etc. Just the same, I think there are more impactful measures that could be taken... requiring EV charging posts be placed for 50% of the parking spaces in addition to solar requirements. Requiring placement of commercial grocery location (even bodega, convenience stores) within walking distance (under 1.5 miles), etc. The latter would probably do more than current public parks requirements.
> Amazon.de doesn't usually help. Besides, I can't read German.

The German Amazon site is available in English too. http://www.amazon.de/gp/switch-language/homepage.html/ref=cs...
something you have, something you know, something about you. Nothing has changed in 40 years. The key is making them reputabiable. It's hard to get new fingers.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11549820 and marked it off-topic.
He named the argument for free market capitalism vs. socialism after himself? Wow.
Science MacResearch O'Gravitas, Fourteenth Earl of Bergcleave, breaker of the ices, measurer of time and tides, and bearer of the kegerator