skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
fwiw, I think there are reasonable ways to approach these kinds of issues that will work with any interviewer you'd actually want to work with:

> For example, how many variables can someone use?

I've never heard of an interviewer explicitly limiting this, but if you have enough variables that you're asking, it might be a sign you've missed a more elegant solution to the problem...

> How optimized should the code be, regarding memory and speed?

Don't spend a lot of time on something before you know if it's what they want. You shouldn't go all the way through debugging the naive solution before you know if they're looking for something optimal; you shouldn't look for a very complex but theoretically optimal solution if they looking for fizz/buzz level of complexity.

To make it more concrete, many of my candidates just say something like "I could put everything into an array, sort it, and print it", maybe even adding "in O(n) memory and O(n log n) time". When that happens, I write down "quickly got naive solution", ask "what if we don't have O(n) memory?", and wait for them to (or help them) come up with something else. That's great from my perspective, as is asking me explicitly how much RAM is available / how large the input may be / if I want an optimal solution or an easy-to-understand one.

> Are you looking at the code to be understandable? Should I use comments?

In general, they're probably looking for it to be understandable, but they should know if you're coding under time constraints on a whiteboard that it's hard to revise quickly, that you can't fit a lot of stuff there, and that it's a lot faster to say aloud what you might otherwise put in a comment. If they don't make allowances for that, you'd probably hate working with them anyway...

Consequently, understandability might be more be about picking a meaningful variable name or thinking for a moment if you actually need to special-case some path before adding that extra if statement. Maybe drawing a quick diagram of your data structure.

And if you have extra time (a judgement call: maybe if you have a working solution, they aren't trying to move you on to another problem, you have don't have anything more to ask them), you could refine a bit.

> Should I use for or while?

They should know you haven't had the chance to read their internal style guide. They shouldn't care about this.

I also think they should give you significant leeway for minor syntax errors (saying, missing a ";"). There's a line somewhere between that kind of nitpicking and needing to see that you actually understand the language's syntax. It differs a little by interviewer. If you're anywhere close to the line, they should point out what's bothering them (perhaps saying "the compiler says ...") and give you an opportunity to correct it. If they don't, again they're probably kind of a jerk.
My question with regards to (3), is that wouldn't re-enacting maintenance laws effectively destroy the operation of groups like the EFF and ACLU? Groups like these work though funding small cases, usually hoping to set precedent to make future cases much easier to bear. I think it's the kind of thing where there's definitely positive and negative uses of the same mechanism. As the saying goes: Guns don't shoot people, people shoot people with guns.
It sounds like Riot handled this very well: rather than just fire people based on their analysis, they sat down with the employees to discuss the matter.

So, yes, making an irrevocable decision based on one ambiguous data point is a bad idea, but using it as an indicator that a conversation should take place strikes me as wise.
Well - I'd probably write my own database from scratch. If the list was short enough and time tight enough, I might just let it be an array stored in memory, but I guess that would cause performance problems after more than a couple hundred lines.
She wouldn't have to 'protect her privacy' if she followed procedure in the first place. The workplace communications of public officials are considered public records, she knew this, she was informed of this, if you wish to mingle personal communications with those do so at your own peril. She is 100% wrong on this.
Andreessen Horowitz officially closes its newest fund with $1.5B
After the first Billion, the same multiplier becomes more difficult.
Sure... but this was in Alaska. Pre-Columbus oceanic contact across the Atlantic is not surprising (vikings et al). Across the Pacific is a bit more impressive.

What was your point?
I guess I was thinking of Common Carrier status [0]:

The FCC classified Internet Service Providers as common carriers, effective June 12, 2015, for the purpose of enforcing net neutrality. Before that time, the Good Samaritan provision of the Communications Decency Act established immunity from liability for third party content on grounds of libel or slander, and the DMCA established that ISPs that comply with the DMCA would not be liable for the copyright violations of third parties on their network.

My understanding (which may be flawed) is that "ISP" covers things like discussion forums, public chatrooms, and private(ish) chat like Skype and Facebook Messenger, and that the liability immunity goes beyond libel and slander. But, ISPs that filter third-party content are not protected because they're exerting control over the content, and implicitly approve of anything that is not filtered.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...
If you care about free speech as it relates to porn, then this is nothing compared to some of the other limits put on free speech. Consider the Australian guy who was convicted for having sexualized drawings of the Simpsons.

Edit: grrrrr autocorrect
Can you give specific examples of this alleged lack of stability?
Honestly that's the part of this story that stands out to me. Clearly Gawker was in the wrong for posting the sex tape, but the size of the punishment seems massively disproportionate.
While Apple Pay might not be as convenient and simple as a world that only swipes credit cards, the spread of chip readers makes Apple Pay look comparatively convenient. First you do the dance of trying to figure out if the chip reader is actually enabled. Then for a lot of readers you have to wait a really long time with your card in the reader. And it's easy to mess up and pull out the card too early. With Apple Pay you just feel a little silly smacking your phone or watch up against a wireless reader.
That's a really good reason for not making decisions outright based on the information. You'd want to use the results of these models as a means to direct attention to where it is most likely to be needed. It sounds like this is exactly what they did.

Of course, the other side is that the chat data might create biases. The worry here would be that reading the chat logs might create a unfavorable opinion which then leads to unfair interpretations of workplace behaviors. If I was implementing such an action, I would make sure that the people checking in on those flagged by the system don't actually have access to the chatlogs, except in egregious situations.
Well, if you think that Elon's companies are a scam, that's that then, I doubt I'll be able to change your mind. This project is difficult and risky, especially for the first colonists, yes. But it's not a scam.

Your questions will mostly be answered slowly over the next few years as SpaceX, NASA, and others collaborate and build the infrastructure for a Mars colony.
While I do appreciate Gawker telling me about PT's sexual orientation and showing me the hulksters junk, I will reserve journalistic martyrdom status for Assange and Snowden. That's the ethical, necessary,pick your battles part of my previous post.
There's a pretty big chasm between "only 2x as slow as C" and "not needing optimal performance". That's even assuming it is generally true and a constant 2x factor.

How many skilled assembly programmers you know that are able to write better code than the collective intelligence embedded in current compilers? Even if you have a few of them handy, then aren't their resources better spent in hand-optimizing the compiler output for critical sections only?
The difference is, traditional media normally holds itself to a higher standard and is tasked with filtering out or at the least refining the typical "some guy's blog" content. But "some guy's blog" will always be just that.
Don't have enough good things to say about Surge. Wonderful service, damn easy to work with, great number of features (even in the free plan).
Why aren’t big companies implementing best practices to protect user’s data?
Why aren’t the big companies hosting millions of users using the best practices and tools available to protect user’s data like passwords, emails, etc?

It seems that modern hashing techniques like bcrypt and salting are not being implemented.

Is it because of the cost or hassle? Is it laziness, ill advice, lack of care for customers safety or poor management decisions? Or is it something else?
Yes, into a field. From the air. It literally flew through the air and crashed down onto the ground. Doesn't matter that it was a field, the ground is still the ground, and if there was an engine in the car the passengers probably would have been killed. But you make it sounds like it merely drove off the road and into a field.
I thought the writing style was pretty clear at conveying the disturbing, unsettling nature of an experience like this. I don't think it was miscommunication though: it was an exercise of the arbitrary power held by bureaucrats. Every day it is exercised, sometimes in a reasonable way, sometimes not. We usually only hear about it when it's one of "us" getting shafted.

If it's Group 4 Security strangling a black man on a deportation flight, you might get to hear about it... and then forget a couple of years later.

I thought the article was good at asking us all to think about how much power we want to invest in a bureaucracy. They always want more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_3dDNPwJTU
> They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means

This seems to be a very confused application of evidentiary requirements. Before we talk above motive, opportunity, and means, we talk about the act itself. Every time a person bumps me on the subway when I have a pocket knife, I have motive, means, and opportunity to murder them, but unless I commit the act, that is not even the least bit interesting in terms of whether I am a murderer.
This difference on this test is caused by Rust not having stabilized SIMD support. Also Rust support hand rolled assembly (on nightly) that C has.

On non-SIMD tasks Rust/C are neck and neck https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/rust.html

You're just cherry picking benchmarks. In the cases you care about raw number crunching power you'll likely be using a GPU not SIMD instructions as CPU's are roughly 3-4 orders of magnitude slower then GPU's at pure number crunching tasks.

Not that SIMD isn't important as it's instructions also cover things like AES, SHA1/2, Random numbers, Cache pre-loading/evacuation, memory fences, and fast loading paths. But so few programmers worry about these things you are really hitting a niche market.
http://gawker.com/5741535/police-find-photographs-of-berlusc...

(An irony that the first site that came up was Gawker)
I would not download and run this software.
Most of the slower benchmarks were fixed and just need to be merged iirc.

I don't have much faith in microbenchmarks. Usually all they measure is how much effort the author put into overoptimizing code.
Alaska is only 55 miles from Asia at it's closest point or less if you consider the islands between them. Several people have even swam from one to the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait
My first instinct is that this is creepy overreach, and that I'm glad I don't work for Riot. On the other hand, they have the right to big brother their staff - and said staff should probably know better. It's definitely one of the costs of turning a hobby into a job.

That said, still glad I don't work there. To my mind, this sort of company behavior sets an unpleasant precedent, and I kind of like knowing I have the freedom to play a game without worrying about being fired for "snarky passive aggression" or something similar. Maybe I'd feel differently if gaming wasn't just something I did in my spare time.
A more productive line of questioning, rather than prodding them to convert their probably-quite-substantial codebase into a language that, with all due respect to the Rust team, is probably still a wee bit cutting edge to be putting in self-driving cars, is to ask them what static analysis tools they've been using and why their static-analysis tool missed this one.

If the answer is "no static analysis tool", there's your problem.

But as my first paragraph implied, they can't catch everything, so "we installed many layers of protection and it still got through even so" is definitely a possibility. Rust may have a different set of such issues but they will of course always exist.
Hear, hear. Coincidentally, and on the same topic, I posted this question on superuser.com. Was surprised that there were not more responses [1]:

http://superuser.com/questions/1085654/how-to-minimize-unwan...

[1] The NetBalancer software seems to be helping with the issue.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of these ISP issues of excessive bandwidth usage are intentional.

Where in the world did you have the issues you describe, if not private?
From your link:

There are regional nuances, but toxic behaviors include homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of hate speech.

This would indicate that there are regions in which such speech wouldn't be considered "toxic". I wonder if they've made a map of this?
Plus, you know, actually getting paid very well while working on the patents.
You just inspired me to see everything in its simplest yet powerful form. Hell with intent!
Failure of a hedge fund during the worldwide financial crash, out of which he started two new investment entities (Thiel Capital and Mithril) which are alive and well.

I can't understand why people are so upset about a third party paying legal expenses... what do you think the ACLU, EFF, and tons of other organizations and private citizens (either in individual or collective form) do? A jury (impartial to Thiel and unaware of his involvement) found Gawker and Nick Denton personally guilty. Denton himself is worth over $100 million (Gawker itself was valued according to reports to the court at $80 million, so he has plenty of assets outside Gawker), so this isn't a story of a big financier ganging up on a "little guy" that people are trying to make it out to be.
Well he developed launchd for OSX, that was a partial inspiration for Poettering to develop the init part of systemd. Note the launchd stops well short of the scope creep that systemd has engaged in.

That said i think Hubbard has given up on getting one of the existing BSDs to adopt launchd. Instead he has forked Freebsd into Nextbsd and added launchd there.

Note the difference between that and how systemd is crawling its way into every big distro out there by absorbing (udev) or replacing (consolekit) existing, loosely coupled, projects.
Not just that, none of the current web economy exists without linux and gnu and other free/libre software.
Oh my! How can you work in firmware and not know the basics of C pointers? Firmware is mostly C!
I just use an excel sheet. Have their name, number, business, size of business, business description, notes on contact, location, did I contact them already, did they answer, when we last spoke, is a follow up needed, topic of follow up, have I done work for them in the past, potential future work to contact them about, etc

Probably more than most would record, but I like the option to circle back to past people I've done work for and past cold contacts that turned me down. Plus I have a poor memory and do this on and off in my spare time.
Very nice service and interface. Only issue I've had was when my site went down a couple of times due to issues at DigitalOcean.
For 10,000 can you imagine someone building Instagram as it was available on the day it was released? How about 2 months after it was released. 2 years?

Sure, there's a point where the scale of Instagram tipped over and they had to hire more than 2 engineers, but that point was 30 million people a day, and even then it was still recognizable as "Instagram" the service and the app.

They don't have to set out to duplicate the billion dollar company from day one in order to achieve their goals. Simply being a knockoff from the early days would be good enough.
The thing I have trouble reconciling is that the merits of the case were judged in a court of law and found in favor for Hogan and against Gawker. AFAICT, the fact that Thiel was funding Hogan's case only became widely known after the judgment. Honest question - would there have been the same judgment against Gawker if Thiel didn't fund the case?

I also have trouble understanding how what Gawker did as ethical journalism, relativistically speaking or otherwise. It's hard to compare a sex tape of a former wrestler to uncovering scandals in a major institution, like the Washington Post did for Watergate, the NY Times did with the Pentagon Papers, the Boston Globe with the sexual predation in the Catholic church, or even what every major media outlet published with the Monica Lewinsky affair. Publishing this sex tape was for clickbait, which is purely about metrics and much less about holding our institutions and public figures accountable for unethical or illegal activity.
Well he might have been using the Slack iOS or Android app so I think it's a bit premature to assume that he wasn't using a phone at the time.
Yes, Rust is younger. There is less code out there running to root out undefined behavior.

Except Rust allows for less undefined behavior. I wouldn't be surprised if it improved at a faster rate then C. Or C++ ()

() Please don't say C/C++. They are different beasts.
The adjusted price of a share of MSFT on 6/25/87 was $0.37. Had they received $14m in Microsoft stock, almost 38 million shares would be worth about $2B today.
No, because the liabilities are getting discharged with the results of the sale. Essentially, Gawker isn't selling itself. Gawker is essentially exchanging itself for the liabilities to their creditors, and the creditors are then selling it in lieu of Gawker paying their debts.

Really simplified example: suppose you're 12, you own a lemonade stand, and you owe your dad $200 (secured against the lemonade stand). It's not going well, so you go through bankruptcy - dad now owns the lemonade stand, you no longer owe dad any money, and he goes and sells it for whatever he can get (say, $100). $100 is a sensible bid for the stand because the debt to the kid's dad has already been discharged.
IMHO MVP means a product that users can use, but not full-blown scalable platform. [2]
"... a quarter of all fired employees had been unpleasant players. Toxic players tended to be toxic employees, even if the reverse wasn't always true."

Isn't this saying the opposite?
The bumper cases weren't given away because Apple did something wrong, they were given away to try and counter the bad PR that other companies were drumming up. The antenna "issue" that the iPhone 4 had was also an "issue" for every other smartphone.
Actually the judge wouldn't let Gawker present evidence from the FBI that both Hogan and the woman knew they were being taped. This means that not only is it possible that they lied on the stand, but with the huge amount required to appeal ($50 million), it's possible that they may get away with perjury.
I think WeChat has this right with scanning a QR code to pay. I like the idea of NFC payments, but like you said… it tends to take a while of fumbling around to actually get it to work.
I've heard the story of an American going through the reciprocal process in Brazil -- getting finger printed, interviewed, all sorts of documents generated -- and then having the interviewer confess that they were just going to throw it all away because they didn't actually have anything to do with the reciprocally generated data...
> Also its a good lesson to other sites to police content to ensure no one says anything bad about billionaires.

There's a brave new world of pro-billionaires media awaiting us. Just compare this lavish Vanity Fair piece (http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/photos-sean-parker-we...) on Sean Parker's wedding to the ugly reality behind it all, as published by Gawker: http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-full-damage-of-facebook-bill...
Surely, managements accounts where checked too?
I care about UX but I care about my desired UX. I'm not a slack user but assuming it were to be offered to me I'd want a command-line client. If it didn't have that capability I'd pass.
Don't leave us hanging... what was the stupid, stupid reason?
"nice distro you have there, shame if something was to happen to it..."
"hogan is a very public figure"

So it's OK as long as they cross the "very" threshhold?
If Web APIs are so simple why do we need SDKs?
You could always run Fedora Cloud: https://getfedora.org/en/cloud/

But you're back in the world of not having all those certifications which enterprise customers may want. On the other hand it shares common package infrastructure with RHEL so that's a bonus.

We used Fedora Cloud for a bit and I liked it. Be prepared for cutting-edge though, for example, journalctld rather than syslog.

We switch to Ubuntu for reasons not related to Fedora in particular but just ease of running an Apt repository on S3 vs Yum/Dnf.
I don't think so. A = fired employees. B = unpleasant players. B is contained within A, so B implies A ("Toxic players tended to be toxic employees") but not the reverse.
League of Legends is a 5v5 team game, not a private 1v1 affair. Anything said in in a LoL game is as sufficiently public as a Twitter account.
5 Travel Destinations Bound to Please Family Members of All Ages
I wonder how much of that was Walmart driving it. It'd be a pretty easy ask given that most of these companies have a hatred for the 2-3% credit card fees they give up.
How was power abused? It sounds like she broke the rules, even if the rules were poorly explained in the first place.
I took it to mean that sexism and racism are more common in different places.
> if the find your name via Google on the speaker list.

They'd first need me to give them a reason to Google my name.

If you're nondescript, then you don't arouse this kind of suspicion in the first place.
Facebook's DarkForest Go AI Now on GitHub
>What if the sex is illegal (see: Eliot Spitzer)?

There is another type of illegal sex, the kind involving minors. And I don't care how news worthy anyone would deem it to be, even the most hardcore Free Speech absolutist usually goes quite confronted with that conundrum. The public's interest doesn't create protected speech.
Absent an instruction to specifically "do not use a database", I feel like even 10K rows suggests the use a database as the data structure and then the DB query interfaces as the interface.

I don't see why you wouldn't use a database for a problem that it's particularly good at addressing.
FYI, I accidentally downvoted this. Sorry.
If you get hired for many companies, they'll do a background check. Would you consider that overreach? And how is this any different?

From my perspective, they're hiring someone to have access to their codebase; release their code to millions of users; and spend most of the day next to other people. Hiring is already a blunt tool for finding out if someone can do the work, much less interact well with others. As long as the information isn't completely unrelated to their job function, and it's not discriminatory, it seems reasonable to use all the information at your disposal to reduce that risk.
Yep, that's probably the only option, huh.