skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true of trader and quant interviews, but not when people are being evaluated for "soft skills" departments like IBD and M&A.

A "tricky" brain teaser for IBD is: "What is the expected value of an 8-sided die?" or "If the Euro is worth $1.50 and a dollar is worth 100 yen, what is a Euro worth in yen?" Mathematically-illiterate but intelligent people (125 IQ; Ivy League non-quant major) will sometimes get these wrong on occasion, but they're not exactly hard questions by our standards.

DE Shaw quant interviews, on the other hand, are tough, but the average wannabe banker will never get anywhere near one of those.

This is what an IBD or M&A interview will be like for the average HN reader: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0yQunhOaU0#t=0m51s

As for intelligence in investment banking, it's an asset to be very smart (135+) if you're looking to be a quant or a quant trader (floor trading is dying) but it's generally to your detriment if you're looking for an analyst position, because the smart people tend to fail when it comes to the conformity aspect. If you tell a smart person that he needs to sacrifice his weekend in order to have X finished by Monday morning, he'll probably do it, but he'll ask (gasp!) why it was left on his desk on Friday afternoon instead of delivered to him earlier... and you just don't ask such questions if you want to make it in banking.

Analyst programs are designed to pick out people with an unconditional work ethic: people who believe "deadlines are deadlines" and will never question why the work needs to be delivered in the way specified at the time specified, people who will toil for 100 hours per week and not care if their results are ever used or even relevant. This process tends to select against intelligence. Don't get me wrong: investment banks would obviously love to have someone with a high IQ and that sort of obedient profile, but that's a very rare combination. Not only that, but people with that sort of obedient makeup, while sometimes smart, are never creative or passionate.
> Also you get a half a dozen or so programming languages out of the box, including free IDEs.

For now. I'm sure Jobs would love to make the Mac a locked-down platform.
If you don't have time, then why are you on HN?

Summary: Instead of doing normal work they let teams work on a new project that they wanted to work on.
Exactly. I have retired back to my home in deep Red State America (SW Missouri), and I interact with local liberals on blogs and the local paper.
Hey if the US and Austria (I believe I saw you comment somewhere else that it is where you live) then that's really what matters. Here employment taxes are taken out like in the US, you never see the money so it would be impossible to pay the US first and then the local tax authority. My company registration is Swedish and my only ties to the US are citizenship, a credit card and bank account.
But now I’m down to the lucky 35, I can speak more freely about my personal life. Details of my family, my travels and my thoughts that were too sensitive to broadcast to just anyone are now fair game.

Until Facebook decides at some point that those too should be public. I try my best not to post things on Facebook that I care about keeping at all private. At some point I don't think they will be anymore.

(related: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduce...)
Basically, everyone worked on either internal tools (better reporting for testers, etc.) or new initiatives ("SQL Pony" or some such). Plus they fooled around some and made a video.

So not really a "down tools" week as much as it is a "work on something tangentially related to work (with your tools) and have a little fun" week.
I'm amused that you think that it is a morally right choice to allow a full civil war to break out - would that not result in many more deaths on both sides?

Why is that the right choice to make?

How long before a UN peace keeping force is asked to intervene? (actually, that might be a good result... but lots of unnecessary death to get there).

The US shouldn't be there, really. They should leave. But I think it has to be done right.

It's easy to judge when sat miles away...
RHEL 6 Beta Now Available for Public Download
Because grading a work by student you like gives you positive utility :).
US needs better-trained math teachers
Can we just assume that developing the brain in way that makes it better for golf or basketball has any transferable value? Richard Feynman couldn't have been like Lebron James, and vice versa, but can you really argue that perhaps he would have been better off learning more sports rather than reading, thinking, and tinkering with electronics?
ISOs: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/6/

Docs: http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6-...
Strictly Democratic Tools Build Boredom and Disinterest
That's neat, I'll have to take a closer look.

Once I hear back from YC as to the status of my submission I'll share.
Someone needs to make an app for handicapped minorities that comes with an embedded interpreter so we can get properly outraged. I'm not sure you can top children, but then we could call Jobs a racist...
"Whatever the causes, the implications are grave. In the United States today, around one-third of adults are obese. At the same time, dementia is already one of the most costly and devastating health problems of old age. The possibility that obesity today will lead to higher rates of dementia in the future is, therefore, deeply alarming."
I need somewhere to run it from; I thought Google Code was just source code repositories?
I'd say JoliCloud is probably the nicest linux I've seen:

http://www.jolicloud.com/product/features
Who's making that argument?
http://wufoo.com/ is beautifully designed, really useful UI and great work with all the colors.
This explosion didn't produce time or space.
Tips For Making Ideas Happen
I've done this recently as well. That, or I've hidden status updates from various pseudo-friends. It's nice to reconnect with that person from high school... for a while, but then I really don't want to hear about their personal lives. Perhaps we need multi-level friendships in Facebook, as in, friends vs. acquaintances? Though I guess if someone friends you and you only "acquaintance" them, things could get ugly.
Restricting choices can be a good thing
"No alternative?" What about all the stuff that adults do with their lives? Doesn't that count?
To stay afloat, the occasional stunt is necessary.
Question: in hiring, what would you read for in a code sample?

I ask this because, in my experience, the most destructive breed of lousy programmer is not the sort who can't program but the "rock star" who writes code fast that seems acceptable on the local scale, but has no modularity or organization at a more global level. This is the sort who can hammer out a 4000-line project over a weekend, but if you have him on something major, he won't even understand his own code if it's older than 2 months (and no one else will be able to understand it, either).

You can't really catch this kind of programmer in a code sample, unless you know what to look for (and I think I'm among the majority of people who don't).
It is starting to scare me that Adobe is acting more and more like Real every day.
These numbers are all lies, because they don't take financial aid into account. See, eg. Harvard's financial aid program here: http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&...
It seems completely understandable to me that Apple would not want kids using ipads as toys when they are trying to build a premium product.

They seem acutely aware that the software that most commonly run will define the purpose of the new device and will ultimately define the price. Cheap looking flash widgets and kids toys could damage the image.

I'm sure that there will be plenty of cheap tablets that kids can use, they just won't be using daddy's iPad.
Lehman's Failure: "A Story In Large Part Of Fraud"
Well, from someone who has to setup a lab of Macs running Adobe CS and put Adobe Reader on our XP boxes, they are really a pain. They make assumptions about permissions and have horrible installers / updaters. To make matters worse, Adobe Reader is something of a "security risk of the week" piece of software. I find myself turing off javascript just to save people trouble.
Hmmm ... while mainline Lisp has traditionally been multi-paradigm I don't think you can say that of Clojure, which I think is much closer to being purely functional than a lot of other "functional" languages (but I could well be wrong, I don't really know the others).

Clojure at least gives you some absolute guarantees about the immutability of its core data structures.

"Much simpler" could well be an exaggeration. I just multiplied my knowledge of Scala by N by looking at its Wikipedia entry and I didn't get that impression. To the extent you can avoid OO while writing idiomatic Scala there's no need for the latter to introduce a lot of accidental complexity.

(I've not explored Scala not because of anything having to do with it but because I'm very dedicated to Lisp.)
When was this golden age of phys ed? I'll admit that I don't have a ton of knowledge of the history of gym class, but if depictions of phys ed in movies or television are anything to go by, 'incompetent teacher with whistle' pretty much describes it in its entirety.
Google's updater should be manageable. It is a real pain when a whole lab of machines decides to update Google Earth at the same time. Not all of us have super high speed internet. I really wish Google would realize this.
And limited to Classics, Criminology, Islamic Studies, and Social Work.
I use the same tri-level distinction-
Facebook for people I know and talk to regularly.
Linked-In for People I know through Work.
Twitter for everyone.

I also use twitter as my base-level feed; It inserts into Linked In and Facebook, so people don't need to pay attention to all of them; The public things trickle up.

I believe that Facebook would prefer that we solve this problem by using friend-lists. With lists, you can say "Push this update only to members of my family", or "Only show this to my D&D Buddies"

While I've experimented with that a bit, too many things are too granular, where they are only showed to all-friends, or nothing.

For now, having the firewall of separate services serves me well.
Reading this reminded me of why the lucky stiff, who committed online suicide last year, at least as far as the Ruby community is concerned. It was fast an efficient: he was gone as well as all of his projects and websites. The Ruby community had to scramble to try to piece back together his missing work, like Try Ruby. http://www.rubyinside.com/why-the-lucky-stiff-is-missing-227...
Efficient Coding FTW: Akamai's 61,000 Servers Getting Greener
I'm sure this is true, but it doesn't justify the organizational arrogance that is often seen in the interview process. One all-day round of interviews is fine, but when people are pulled out of work for 3 or 4 days just to interview, and informally expected to interview at their own expense, that's ridiculous. Selecting good candidates is extremely difficult and most companies and people suck at it, but coming in to the process with a rotten attitude isn't going to make it any easier or better.

A large percentage of "programmers" shouldn't be. They don't like programming (enough to be good at it) and many just don't have the talent. This doesn't mean one should be a dick to them. Can you fault them for aiming comically high in the job search process? It's what everyone is told to do from the cradle in this country. And the "collateral" fall-out is that this attitude often alienates people who actually are talented and who quite possibly may be future customers, partners, et cetera.
Wide Awake Developers: The Future of Software Development
This idea always struck me as a little childish. Do developers who are creative enough to make useful tools need to be constrained to some one-week window in which it's allowed to do so?
This has always seemed a bit obvious to me: the problem you are trying to solve is to take something which weighs several hundred pounds (passengers) and put them on something which is traveling at 100mph and weighs several hundred tons (a train). From an energy efficiency perspective, stopping the train is just silly.

Similarly, when you drive from A to B, most of the energy expended is used on the side-effect of moving their car, not on moving them.
This is exciting because people are beginning to build cool libraries around HTML5, not because of the details of the games themselves.
The main thing that attracts me to Clojure is the abundance of java libraries and standard APIs and corresponding documentation available.

To do anything useful with common lisp I had to spend a lot of time researching which CL supported which APIs, and stuff like GUIs and SQL weren't standardised (or maybe they were, but finding implementations of the standards was difficult).

Contrast this to my experience with Clojure, where I had a REPL running in a text widget within an hour of starting to play. Sure, most of the code isn't very Lisp-y ATM but then it's mostly direct library calls. As I learn more I expect I will start using macros for things like GUI building (or perhaps someone has already created a more natural clojure library for GUIs and I will use that)

Being able to get started and productive immediately is a big win for Clojure (and other JVM based languages). Even if you don't know much Java, there are abundant tutorials and examples on pretty much any API that are relatively simple to translate from Java to Clojure.
I thought I was a nerd, but I must not be, because that was one of the least interesting stories that I've ever read. I want my 3 minutes back.
Doesn't the article state that it was "removed" from the App Store meaning that it had made it through one of the earlier development agreements, but has since been removed?
You are probably also more inclined to believe excuses from people you like, which also plays a fairly sized role in the article.
It seems too early to me. I know that Google is the leader in several spaces, but I can think of alternatives. If I don't like Gmail, there are other email providers. If I don't like Google search, there's DuckDuckGo! ;) I always thought problems began when a company became a monopoly and there was no real choice (kind of like Windows some years back). Am I wrong?
Yes; generally, quality of work and how much a professor likes a student are positively correlated. So, if a professor likes grading good papers, ey will accept papers from late students ey likes.
BitsyBox Hosted CMS w/API
http://www.bitsybox.com
I've been a big fan so far of Cashboard. http://www.cashboardapp.com
Everybody has the same amount of time. It's about priority. Not many want to watch a 10 min video.
So they really didn't stop working for the week. They just re-focused on some of the things they should have been doing all along in order to make development easier. Everyone seems to forget that tools and infrastructure should come first.
Narcissistic CEO bully threatens lawsuit
> "1. I think Clojure is much simpler"

Scala is now 170,000+ lines of code. Clojure on the other hand is about ~30,000 lines of Java and 4,000 lines of Clojure.

Scala brings a very sophisticated and robust type system. This has it's benefits but it also seems to inject a considerable amount of of complexity. I haven't experienced Scala's type system so I won't venture further than that. If somebody asked me where the complexity was in Clojure I would answer thus:

1. Understanding the roles of the various concurrency primitives

2. Making idiomatic Clojure fast w/o resorting to mutable Java

3. Macros (if you haven't written them before)

Besides these three areas, Clojure is mind-blowingly and beautifully simple. I've found it to be as "conceptually" small as C or JavaScript while adding an incredible amount of expressive power.

EDIT: I have no actual opinion about Scala. It looks like great technology.
Nearer Wikipedia's turf, surely, than Google's.

The three entries I looked at, "Herodotus", "Homer" and "Early Christianity" seemed unobjectionable but also not particularly informative. What audience do they have in mind for this? I couldn't off the top of my head have told you the organization of Herodotus's histories; but if I hadn't read ever read them, I don't think the summary would tell me why I'd care to.
And now Facebook puts TOS and privacy policy changes on a Page (Facebook Site Governance) that you have to be a fan of/follow/like in order to be aware of anything.
"Alternatively, you could try writing awful science fiction novels and hiring a ton of lawyers. I hear that also works these days."

Off-topic but I disagree : Battlefield Earth was a good book.
And terrible movie.
Ubuntu’s Indicator Menus – Ayatana bearing fruit
You forgot the laminated lesson plans. Perfect for when you spill your coffee during class. Wipe them off and you're good to go.
An interactive cheat sheet. Awesome. I hope this starts a new genre of cheat sheets. :)
The Global Climate Change Consensus: Peter Norvig's Experiment
Old versions of Foxit were ad-free. Only the newer versions have turned into some kind of crapware mess. The same thing happened to BSPlayer (VLC-like media player). None of these programs force updates, so someone who hasn't updated their program for years will blindly reconmend them to friends, only to get laughed at for proposing such crapware.
Ok, but I'm referring to the general home user (that uses iTunes), not a carefully configured corporate environment. If all these moms and pops out there switched to Safari and cut IE6 usage in half, I really would not mind. Yes, I know it's evil, but so is supporting IE6; this is my disgruntled self speaking.
costs are too high currently for escorting anything but very high value targets. that will change over time though.
Gary Reback has recently been involved in the Open Book Alliance, I wonder whether this is part of a larger negotiation that is going on over book rights.
Good uses of goto
That particular project (simulation) required a lot of bit twiddling and working with data of various sizes 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit. So having the specific types nailed at compile time helped. Lack of unsigned data on the JVM was a pain though.

Two other reasons I picked scala for that particular project was OO support and mutability. The problem fit OO better and performance was very important (I was anyway taking a bit of a hit choosing JVM over C), so with scala I had the option of for e.g. setting up a C like while loop with a counter rather than mapping a function.

This was maybe 6-8 months back. Since then clojure has added neat concepts like transients[1] which allowing mutability in a controlled manner within a function. So thats worth a look. I just preferred to go for a multi-paradigm language rather than a semi-pure functional language as I wasn't sure how the project needs would evolve.

What I would have really liked to do was use Python. I actually created an early prototype but the performance didn't meet the needs. I look forward to unladen-swallow :)
Python did have some neat libs like struct[2] that would have worked.

IMO the choice of static or dynamic should be decided by the problem at hand. I feel dynamic tends to work for majority of projects so thats what I usually prefer but sometimes static works best.

[1] http://clojure.org/transients

[2] http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/struct.html#module-struc...
The math by the commentator sucks, but this goal is still a masterpiece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXA0PoEE6Y
I've been thinking maybe it should be due to its control of advertising, but like the first post its too soon right now. Lets see how the next "boom" cycle in advertising plays out. That being said, I feel if any company should be broken up into baby G's right now it would be Goldman Sachs. I think that would be a great message to the rest of the financial industry.
The hiring process in America is broken.

Although far away from relevant machinery, social class stratification is the root problem. Very few people have substantial money or power. Since the middle and lower classes have more people, and talent seems to be fairly evenly distributed among social and ethnic groups, most of the talent is in these relatively powerless classes-- separated from the means to get anything done.

Back doors (social connections, informal gatherings, elite colleges) are always going to be more effective for hiring and job-seeking than front doors (HR). I think it's doomed to be that way. Back doors are in a miserable state now because of the social entrenchment, gated communities, invitation-only events, that reinforce the power of the hereditary aristocracy and marginalize 99+% of the talented (the young and poor++).

++ Here I define "poor" as anyone who would face financial ruin in event of long-standing (several years, plus a need to go back to school) unemployment or an unfortunate event (e.g. uncovered medical expenses). So the vast majority of people, even those we'd consider "middle class", qualify as poor by this definition.

With social gaps widening and "back doors" in a state of general failure, it follows naturally (in my estimation, although I admit I've made no case for it here) that front doors are going to fall into an even sorrier state.
Maybe it was like the golden age of New Math: theoretically supposed to happen, but never really did.
I certainly hope it's not surprising to anyone that a company following half a million people isn't paying close attention to all of them.

There's little technical reason for The Onion to follow back its followers. Yes, Onion employees could read a random sample of their followers' tweets, or use filtering software that selects useful-looking tweets for human attention. But they can simply use their followers' RSS feeds for that; they don't need to formally follow them back. The only advantage I can think of is that Twitter automatically bundles your followees' RSS feeds together into a single feed. (But I'm curious how Twitter delivers an RSS feed that aggregates half a million talkative users -- does it still work at that volume?)

Naturally, follow-backs are merely symbolic at that scale, so mass unfollowing doesn't strike me as news. It was a little interesting to see the how many immediate unfollows The Onion's move triggered, though.
Very enjoyable podcast indeed!!!
A similar idea may be used by http://www.unimodal.net/ — a cross between a train and a car. The individual cars don't stop until they need to: http://a6.unimodal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task... (sorry for the hideous URL).
No matter how close your FB friends I suggest not posting anything you wouldn't say in a public forum. Electronic communications can come back to bite you, friends can share your posts and FB saves literally everything. Note, this advice isn't limited to FB. It applies to email as well.
Because they shouldn't - at least not in the early stages.

Once you know what you're making, shipping product comes first through about fiftieth. If tools get you on the shortest path to shipping product then do that, but ship.

It's Jobs' biggest contribution to theory. Real artists ship.

If you don't know what you're making, or should make next - which is a real challenge for big companies - then what RedGate do (and they're an awesome company) makes a lot of sense.
Plus optional semicolons to put some on the same line as in Python.
Good start. Keep them coming.
Sounds just like the Death Star
Internet Explorer 5.5? That was unexpected! :)

Documentation about drop shadows in IE 5.5: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms532985(VS.85).aspx
mootools made javascript a better language? Javascript is a wonderful language regardless of the availability of good tools and libraries.
Here is the post from three days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274655