skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly if a native Android or iOS app can be several Gb in size then a webapp can be a few Mb. That said there are lots of optimizations that we're missing out on. I hope http2 and other advances in server side render + tree shaking help reduce the size of payloads further.
> This is actually apples and oranges.

You are making a distinction without a difference here. The ss7 network has been known to be broken forever, and all the carriers sell their customer's historical data - so the Italians could have applied the same technique anywhere in the world.

> ...automated co-traveler inference...

That is exactly what they did, only instead of protecting in real time they ran models after the fact. Real time would actual be easier, because instead of dealing with the carrier - you just poll the ss7 network. There is nothing novel about the tracking methods, the inference, or the combination of the two.
I assume there are several examples of this where there will be a better client for database X than to use this. I rarely use my swiss army knife - if I want to do something serious I use a real saw, screwdriver etc, because while the Swiss army knife may have a lot of features is pretty bad at all of them. I often see examples of Swiss Army Knifes software which integrates poorly with several different systems and good with none.
That's an impressive pace. I wonder if they're going to use their competitive advantage to reshape how HTTPS works at some point...

Edit: the 1M news was 45 days ago - details in the first comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11244040
front page because the 'reversing binary trees considered harmful' article got a lot of attention last year
This is genuinely not obvious to me. What convinced you of this? Or, what do you think the world would look like if there were people who actually had a strong, reasonable, non-insane suspicion that they could do the things that cryonics people claim to be able to? To me, it looks like we are living in that world. Have you e.g. looked through the information, studies, and arguments on the Alcor website?
Ha, I was just

# TODO: Finish this comment
>You have to create the algorithm to reverse an arbitrary AES-256 key, which is considered to be impossible, so that doesn't really make a difference.

What? Why is brute force impossible to code? I don't understand what you're claiming.

I agree that adding in Moore's law doesn't change the numbers by much. Moore's law plus weakening of cryptographic assumptions might do it, though. Plenty of previously-believed-to-be-strong crypto algorithms have been cracked, it's reasonable to think that we just don't have the tools to create unbreakable codes yet. (E.g. RSA is known to be breakable with quantum computers with Shor's algorithm.)
What is the best approach on Parse migration?
I don't know if its better to use a Parse hosting service or to do a self hosted instance. I mean what is the risk to happen the same that Parse...?
This is not vulnerable to brute-force nor rainbow tables.
I can relate to this and have each reaction at different times.
Relative to the 2^80 (1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176) possible onion addresses, whatever they generated would be miniscule.
What exactly constitutes a Republican campaign for coroner? I didn't know that was a partisan office.
Exactly, I would take this interview question to mean that this place is so cheap that they won't even invest in a proper database engine for the product to run on. You have to implement the database engine yourself. And that you probably won't get paid commensurately for it.
In case one instance of humanity isn't sufficient to brighten your Friday, the next story (linked at the bottom of the article) is cheering, too: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/relying_on_executive_... . (Given yesterday's story about a measured response to drone fears—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11544082 —I wonder what will become of my cynicism.)
> "prince.org crashed.... The site is a remnant of an earlier Internet, with an ancient design not built for the speed and density of the modern online world."

The author is unaware these "ancient designs" are lightweight and actually better suited to speed and traffic. The site crashing has nothing to do with an outdated design and everything to do with the hosting plan the site is on.

The big story (IMHO) not mentioned here, is all the unheard and unreleased songs and videos he locked away in his vault. In a fascinating and hilarious story told by Kevin Smith, he describes how he briefly worked with Prince on a documentary. Smith met a Producer for Prince who told him she'd produced more than 50 Prince music videos of songs nobody has heard and videos nobody has seen. All locked away in the vault. I really like how crazy this is, and hope they are released.

The story told by Smith is about 30 min long, but worth it if you're curious about how odd Prince was, and up for a laugh: https://youtu.be/8LhcParuzpc

If you just want to see a really good example of Prince doing what he does best, with awesome female drummer and rockin band, turn this up loud: https://youtu.be/nyyS0FSztKc
Learning R in Seven Simple Steps
> "Just about everything you do in your programming career will be related to trees."

I've never knowingly used a tree structure since college, everything is abstracted away from me. Now whether this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, but it has not been a problem yet.
Mbps Experimental Acoustic Through-Tissue Communications: MEAT-COMMS
All the major browsers ship with JavaScript.

If JS, absolutely needed JQuery in order to, say, select an element the way C needs a library to output to the console, then sure, you may have an argument here.

But, no.
Many working programmers will disagree with this article. That's a good start, but we should also work toward ending this practice:

1. If your company does it, you should try to end it. Research alternatives and propose them. Take-home problems that mimic real problems at your company might be an option, as would hiring someone for a few contracting hours to do solve real problems before hiring them full-time.

2. If you apply to a company that uses these questions, politely excuse yourself from the process (assuming you are at the point in your life where you can refuse offers). That company probably doesn't really have the employee-focused culture you'd want to be a part of. If enough candidates refuse to do these tests, we might see them decline in prevalence.

3. If your company used interview methods like this and then stopped, try to create a case study. What did your company switch to? Do you have data to back up the perceived benefits of the switch?
Terrible way to hire in my opinion.

Personally, I'd rather hire employees who are resourceful, can admit when they don't know something, can follow up with others and conduct proper research to tackle cases where they don't know the solution to a problem, and most of all, are a pleasure to work with and bring good and diligent attitudes about work into the office.

Hiring based on questions like this will get you someone ahead of the curve who perhaps you can trust to execute well immediately but will probably turn out to be a massive pain in the rear in the long run.

I'd rather hire people with good attitudes and willingness to learn and spend the extra time training them and helping them out rather than hire someone because they happened to get in enough rote technical exercises before coming into the interview.
I think some folks get hung up on the idea that the answer to one question can be used as a go/no-go for a hire decision.

Its never that simple, there's a lot more to consider, and the vast majority of candidates will bomb a technical question or two eventually.

For those of you that are job hunting right now... don't get bent out of shape, there are plenty of employers that won't hinge their acceptance on one technical brain-teaser.
In all fairness he does work for a DB company.
Pretty sure there still is.
How We Use Asana to Build Products at Flatbook
Ranking My Favorite Cellphones I've Ever Owned
In the case where you're using a fingerprint unlock for your own phone, you are both Henchman #752 and the boss.
There are different sorts of 'need' - we have finite resources, and feeding 16lbs / 7kg of grain to a cow to produce a 1lb / .5kg of meat doesn't scale to feeding 7 x 10^9 humans.
> knowing how to devise algorithms to accomplish a given task is a necessary competency

Agreed. Why not use a realistic problem and setting?
Or worse, people would use the buggy, out of date default.
> "My point is that with some larger solution space, the question doesn't matter anymore."

The question still matters ethically. If they're not aware, should we put their rights over the rights of humans? Probably not, no.

E.g., If AI is seemingly intelligent, but without consciousness, we wouldn't want to give them a right to self defense.
One of the reasons I appreciate how Arizona's statute revision system works... as new laws come in they effectively replace a given section of the statutes to reflect the new version of the statute... this doesn't help much when a local ordinance conflicts with a broader one, but is a nicety all the same.

At least it makes the law as it stands now, easier to reason with.
Really. This would also solve one of the biggest problems of battery-based grid scale storage. Li-ion batteries are one of the best solutions to storing renewable energy for use in off-peak periods in almost all metrics except longevity. The cost/benefit for grid-scale storage is over a time period of decades and hundreds of thousands of cycles, usually far longer than li-ion is expected to perform.
I wish that the immediate reaction by most people to such a thing wasn't something preposterous like "let's cure death before we all die." Death has already arrived, exists for all natural beings on our planet, and has existed for millions of years. We don't need to wait for it to show up with rubber mallets.
When I was there I called it "The Expensive one", "The One No one Goes to", and "The cheaper one"
Wait. This is the same guy that uses the MEAN stack and likes to think he can distinguish good software from bad. Obvious troll.
Who’s the Michael Jordan of computer science?
They're not contradictory; they simply can't find a "ready-made" version of counter-top that satisfies both requirements at the same time.
Ask HN: Anyone worked on Darpa software projects?
Hi,

In the wake of the Snowden revelations we all learned the state of eavesdropping software in government.

So I'm wondering what else there might be that's over-the-top type of unbelievable software the government might have.

While speculation along these lines might be entertaining, I'm more interested in hearing from those who've been a part of such things, so if you can legally talk about it, please let us all know if you've been part of that sort of stuff.
I bought this book the other day, haven't had a chance to start reading it yet: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520266568

I did get a chance to read one excerpt which proposed that Prop 13, by shifting power from local to state government, reduced participation in local government, making it more beholden to special interests and less goal oriented when it comes to exercising the power it still has.
> If you hire using know it or not questions about binary trees

The article author doesn't think of his question as a "know it or not" question, but a "you should be able to figure this out" question:

> Here's the first reason why this question is so good: a skilled programmer can map their intuition to code. You can tell at a glance whether a binary tree is symmetric, but beginners will often struggle with a question like this because they approach this problem from a visual/intuitive angle rather than the logical angle.

I think it's a fair criticism to say that, at this point, "reverse a binary tree" is something a lot of applicants will have simply memorized rather than figuring out on the fly. But (to play Devil's Advocate) isn't the goal of the question - to test a candidate's ability to think logically and problem-solve on the fly - a reasonable one?

It seems to me the real problems with whiteboard-coding interviews aren't that what they're trying to test - problem-solving on the fly - isn't useful or valuable, but that whiteboard coding is confounded by so many irrelevant variables: ability to think under pressure, ability to code "in your head" (without an editor, IDE or REPL), memorizing solutions, and so forth.
Is it really that hard to download an ISO and mount it and do a quick 5 minute install and immediately make a clone of it? Then you always have a handy fresh installation. It would literally take a few minutes longer than using this untrusted website and the result would be exactly the same.
> Trees are the single most important data structure in computer science.

And yet I've never professionally had to reverse one or know if they are symmetrical.
Presumably those 3 letter agencies also have the technology to generate RSA keys.
He doesn't explain. Just a link to video that says exact same thing as the essay.
In some ways, though, he was apparently a master of not distributing music.

I heard a story today on my local NPR station where they interviewed the maker of the documentary "Hunting for Prince's Vault". Many years ago once of Prince's engineers set up a vault to keep all of Prince's unreleased material. (And they made it a literal vault...complete with the kind of door you find in banks).

It was interesting. Prince was apparently pretty much always writing new songs, and making studio recordings of them, and promo videos for them...but then not releasing them. People would find him in the studio recording on holidays and ask why he was working on a holiday, and he'd tell them he wasn't working.

From what it sounds like, he wrote and recorded music the way Isaac Asimov wrote. It was what made him happy and what he wanted to be doing all the time.

As far as the documentary maker was able to figure out from talking to Prince's engineers and collaborators and such, the vault contains enough finished and recorded songs for over 100 albums, plus a couple full length movies, music videos, promo video, concert footage.
In a Crap Market, Don’t Abandon Your Developer Community
Just enforcing the laws currently on the books would be a good start.

“The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim... People think the FEC is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional."

- Ann Ravel, FEC Chairwoman

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/us/politics/fec-cant-curb-...

The FEC has referred __eight___ campaign finance enforcement cases to the DOJ since __1978__.

http://www.bna.com/fec-rarely-votes-n17179934048/
At the very least, it means they studied up on the tricks. That's good for something.
I think you've got it backwards, it's Apple that needs China's market and China basicallly has them over a barrel on these secondary products.

What China has to be careful of is eventually the US/EU decide to get tough on Chinese protectionism and impose significant barriers to goods manufactured in China. And that would also be bad for Apple again since they make their stuff in China.
Got it. Thank you!!
While Servo will not replace Gecko wholesale, the two absolutely will share code before the end of the year.

Bugs to watch:

- https://bugzil.la/1135640 - (oxidation) Add rust compiler support

- https://bugzil.la/1243581 - (stylo) implement support for Servo's style system in Gecko

- https://bugzil.la/1151899 - Integrate the rust-url parser into necko
Why this instead of clojures "transit"?
Well, to pick on Valeri, this is simply wrong

Trees are the single most important data structure in computer science. Just
about everything you do in your programming career will be related to trees.

Trees are a horrid data structure for any modern processor. Pointer chasing thrashes caches. The actual most important data structure is a hashmap. The same speed in theory, much faster in practice.
The author even addresses the fact that they didn't set the background on the site.

"I would've even made this site's background a nice #EEEEEE if I wasn't so focused on keeping declarations to a lean 7 fucking lines."

Also the whole site is satire which you seemed to have missed
Unique Selling Proposition for Bandwidth Brokers
How is that a "trick" question? I never been asked that in an interview question and had the correct solution in my head in just a few seconds for the very reason he gives -- experienced programmers can map their intuition to code. This is certainly a skill that takes time to develop, and if you're concerned with hiring the best, don't you think this is a decent heuristic to throw in with a bunch of others?

Programmers are so sensitive, and honestly all your "sighing" is obnoxious. You don't have it all figured out.
Malaria is not a sentient organism that feels cornered and will lash out because of that. The chance that it will mutate to an other infection mechanism is directly related with the number of specimens in circulation. Killing off it's carrier will reduce it.
That's okay; I definitely don't want to work for you either.
Build a standalone executable from a Lua script
I found the spirit of article a bit narrow-minded for all the reasons mentioned here already.

It did however make me think of an almost opposite activity for the next time I interview someone:

Pick a difficult trick question (like Binary Tree reversal but harder/arcane) that neither of us can solve, and spend some time working on the problem together with the candidate.

After all, solving problems together (directly, or indirectly) is what we'll be doing day to day.

This might not be a good idea, but I'll definitely try it out once and find out.
Flatbook CTO here. This has been a great approach for us. We've iterated a lot to get to the processes discussed in the article. We continue to improve and evolve it as we learn more about how Asana works for engineering + product.
I agree with you that capitalism alone doesn't increase suicide, but needing to sell all of your time/energy to keep a roof over your head and food in your mouth and still being told you're not good enough is depressing as all hell.

We severely undervalue social value for material value, and we're suffering horribly for it.
I'd say it works quite well. That looks perfect.
Can't be done like that. You can't imagine the regulatory nightmares that would be involved.
But surely an example question with only 2 right answers doesn't give you a good cross-section of the person's understanding. What if they understand the reverse relationship but choose the more concise option for many other reasons. The desire to understand a developer's thinking is good. This question does not well accomplish that goal.
Hacker-scripts
You mean it does for you. I have no idea what works for other people. I like Shaw's dictum "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." and "A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth"

Capitalism is merely a description of people's desire to trade goods and services with each other with as much freedom as is compatible with civil society. It didn't need to be invented; it was a natural occurrence. I do understand that some people would like to prevent that from happening.
Well, yeah, but you have now just made the counter unusably thin.
I wish he'd give some points as to why Homebrew is an awful piece of software. To date, I've had 0 issues...
when i interviewed at yahoo as a full stack web developer, i was dismissed after getting the a single tree related question wrong. was a trivial 'trick' question about balancing certain types of trees, similar to this article. having been through that, i wouldn't have wanted to work there based on that being the bar of entry.
I think their shipping windows are often just messed up. I've had the opposite situation too, where it says that an item must be ordered within the next 2 hours and then when I get to checkout the window is already passed for the day.

I'm wondering whether the ship timer on the item page isn't quite accurate, and the one on the checkout goes through and does a warehouse-by-warehouse check to see where the nearest warehouse that has stock and also isn't closed is. As east-coast warehouses close you might get additional availability windows from west-coast warehouses, and their algorithm might not be doing an exhaustive search of when the last possible warehouse that has stock will close.

I'm not saying that it isn't a dark pattern, but there are still some "incompetence" explanations before we need to jump to "malice".
..and this is the country that Zuckerberg idolizes.
Reversing a binary search tree is a binary (pun intended) answer: you either know how to do it because you learned it in college/read Cracking the Coding Interview, or you don't.
Very good point. If you write C++, std::set and std::map use trees. And most people who use them don't know that and 99% of the time, that's OK.
Fabs ? last i heard the Chinese are struggling to build even 28nm fabs.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11549269 and marked it off-topic.
How do you represent hierarchical data in a single hashmap?
I'm uncertain how much solar panels will reduce emissions anyway... I mean it could encourage the use of more electric cars. However, how much of SF's electricity is generated from fossil fuels? Beyond this, how much fossil fuel is expending bringing up the materials used in composition of the solar panels, not to mention shipping them to SF.

I would think that expanding BART, and/or requiring impact fees on new construction to expand public transit, and/or have walking distance access to grocery shopping would be a far greater impact.
Amen. You know how often I have to write a Fibonacci function for real? Let alone care about its elegance...
I do the same with keepass. I think it's the best we can do now.
Maybe not Steam or games, but Amazon has remotely pulled back digital books they sold to their customers (with refund though): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
I hope it was. But if it and the other services Orange found are just random internet-facing appliances, it's unlikely they would configure a CDN to get access, because CDNs are for public traffic typically. Nobody uses a CDN to open their outlook web mail to the Internet, for example. But they might have had a regular SSL proxy in front.... maybe.
>Your source is for full-time employment.

Number of people employed part-time, not by choice...falling:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS12032196

U6 Unemployment rate...falling:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/U6RATE
and (him) as a javascript developer, isn't npm in a similar place?
Invert. Invert a binary tree. Max never gave any details on what that meant exactly, but the question is not necessarily the same as reversing a tree.

Also, way to back up your claim that Homebrew is bad software by pointing to another guy not explaining anything about Homebrew but just dogpiling on Howell again.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/386/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160422155210/https://www.nasa....
I don't know JavaScript (maybe it somehow handles this automagically) but isn't his reverse function missing the base case of a NULL tree?

function reverse(t) {
var tmp = t.left;
t.left = reverse(t.right);
t.right = reverse(tmp);
return t;
}
Yeah, it's a constant fight to keep things that way.

For teams that need to be more reactive/responsive to constant change (like my own), scrumban has actually been a pretty good fit. We're a small 3 person team who is expected to turn high priority items around quickly, while also running longer term projects at the same time. Scrumban let's us track both needs pretty well, and we even pull tickets from other team's boards that we get matrixed into, onto our own internal board. Highly recommend trying it if you're in a similar position.