skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Early in my career I got asked a question about database reporting on sales items and totaling the number by a given date. This was one of the hardest questions I was ever given because I had to "write" the sql out over the phone and was not given a schema so I had to make one up as I went. I was then asked how I would go about writing one that included $0 sales days. At the time I didn't know the answer to this -- just that querying for something that doesn't exist is not straight forward in sql. I explained that I didn't work much with reporting so I had not encountered this solution before and gave a list of possible answers:

* Generate a complete list of dates in memory and see which do not exist.
* Create a temporary table to match it up that way.
* Do post-processing on the report.
* Research prior art.

I was not offered the job.

Years later I was given the task of creating a "data warehouse" to enable easy reporting by business analysts so they could stop bothering the engineering team. So, it being the first time I had done this, I read up on different techniques. I solved the problem the previous interviewer proposed by have a table of dates with attributes on them (is weekend, is national holiday, day of week, etc) and all dates foreign key to this table.

However, because I couldn't think of this solution within a few minutes -- despite it not being in my background -- I did not get the original job from years before.

In many ways, I'm thankful the original interviewer passed upon me. I was able to get a different job that valued being able to think of creative solutions AND being able to research prior art so we don't invent a badly designed wheel over and over again.

I suspect the author of this article will experience the same feeling with time and it is a real shame companies are valuing root memorization and keyword matching over real problem solving skills.
...and the goal is enriching her donors. As the other leaks show.
What i think he means is counting the amount of set(1) bits in the array,
Like the rational 'fact' that Trump is a Russian agent. Please.
Are you ruining on Lamda? I like serverless, but hate AWS bill sucking up my cash runway. Not economical in Production...maybe at lower scale. I would prefer to deploy LB on a private cloud serverless architecture. Tips ?
If you have a collection of data, and you want to know the number of 1 bits, and you want to do it with a minimum of resources... what is the process?

For example, standard bit-shifting and masking the lowest bit to set a counter is one way to do this. Possibly there are other, faster ways, such as using a lookup table (a byte or more can be "counted" at a time). Of course, because so many people were doing this, intel added a popcnt instruction which probably is more efficient (faster) than either of the above, at the expense of more CPU real estate, heat, etc.

Turns out counting 1 bits in a dataset is a super-important problem that shows up in a lot of situations.
"Most actual users"?

How about a citation?
Obama: We'll be debating unconditional free money over the next 10 or 20 years
Good to finally see some hexagons put to use in city planning. The more-area-per-perimeter effect is a great template for a future where automobiles are less common and there are more people. Plus they just look cool.
Hey, other cofounder here. We love the idea of having more public options like this and considered having a display mode to put on TVs around the office
The thing is that windows 8 (and 8.1) was perfect for a tablet or a tablet pc user. How ever, for a normal desktop user, would feel at least strange.
Thanks. I mention it because, as a tech enthusiast, I was once very much in the camp of "we should know everything our government does"

Now, I understand that "we can't know everything, because some other governments won't tell us their true feelings if we don't keep those conversations private."

Perhaps one day some Chinese or Russian hackers will level the playing field.

In the mean time, I wonder if more tech folks can understand that our government might actually want to prosecute Snowden, Assange etc. for legitimate threats to our national security.
Wow, I had almost the very same set of questions for a junior SRE role! The difference is: I graduated ~1 year ago and therefore have a lot less experience than this guy.

It was kinda funny, the recruiter called me to "go through some of the questions to see what I will encounter in the actual interview". I remember, when asked about what Unix function accepts connections on a socket I could just answer "dunno", because I never used or did that. Even more funny if you consider that they actually came across my profile and called me initially and there is just no place in my CV where I claim such "low-level" knowledge. I also remember that Inode question, "What is stored in an Inode?" - Again "idk" and the answer the recruiter gave was "metadata". Yes of course metadata, goddammit, what else? (Can an answer really be that simple???)

After the interview I felt quite devastated because I did not expect that I had to come up with a solution to process an array with the size of 10,000 in a call with the recruiter. I wasn't (and I'm still not) sure if this was only preparation or an actual interview. In the latter case, I was sure that I failed. Surprisingly however, I was invited to an actual engineering interview some time later.
Yep, you'll have to do more work than just breathing. :-P
There is wide-spread consensus that BBC, NPR and NYT are left leaning.

But this is not about right/left anymore - the scary fact (and becoming patently obvious to more and more people) is the fact that all "mainstream" media is pro-establishment (whether it is left or right is less important). That's why outlets like Breitbart, warts and all, have been gaining so much popularity.
Wait. You didn't know what position and location you were being interviewed for? That kind of arrogance from a company can only exist if the job seekers are desperate or perceive any job at Google as nirvana.
This strikes me as an entirely trivial point, the meaning of the question was pretty clear. It wasn't "what is the literal return value". Many APIs will return error codes, and people still talk about them as "returning" certain values colloquially. Of course, if the OP's answer would've been "it returns an error code :) but I assume you're talking about..." I would think that's fine.

Btw, that is the only thing I really disagreed with OP on, the rest seemed just ridiculous.
Thanks, the question makes more sense now :)
The labels that distribute his works control that.
Helping unfortunates is a great thing indeed. But the original idea was different: it was about "giving back". Can you spot the difference?
Thanks for the feedback. We agree the homepage was a bit mysterious and have updated it with some text about our feature set.

PS - We also fixed the hover :)
What are the components that make up a color?

"Well, it depends what color model you are using, which differentiates between additive and subtractive color mixing, the medium used (print, screen, etc.)...

No. It's Red, Green, and Blue.
That's okay, I wouldn't be heard by them anyway :-)
Is this a lambda play?
Pentagon Video Warns: “Unavoidable” Dystopian Future for World’s Biggest Cities
> This gulf in skill and experience meant that the two couldn’t play together in a meaningful way; if they tried, Gage would get crushed, and the match wouldn’t be much fun. So he decided to fix the problem.

This problem has already been solved for hundreds of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_handicap
It's likely that they're all public positions--finance industry professionals are a 'public' like any other.
Ask Jeeves? Being able to find it in a book might be useful, but when Google is down I bet they would like to get things up and running as soon as possible.
Why the hell is a non-technical recruiter giving these tests? Google engineers or managers should be administering it, not the high school dropouts who make up the recruiting industry. There's so much wiggle room here that have a rote-memorization style test for engineering is completely crazy. I've never had a technical test given to me by a recruiting firm. Its always a call with someone from the company, if not the hiring manager.

Perhaps this is what they give to 'second string' applications to make HR happy while the guys who actually get the jobs are friends of the hiring manager or team leads. Or its a H1B ploy to say, "See Obama, we need tech talent. Look how terrible our domestic talent is. They score 40% on our tests!" Meanwhile Bombay Upstairs University has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge deal with Google hiring managers who accidentally leak the test on a 'forgotten' ftp site.

Everything about this is fishy. I think there's fraud here, not just incompetence. I've been the hiring stooge for shops who have already made their decisions before and its always terrible and, frankly, hurtful. These are the signs of a non-serious 'stooge' interview.
To be entirely objective, I have run into recruiters of that variety in my career. However I've also had plenty of recruiters that were able to pick up on one's deeper knowledge of a given concept and accept that as correct, even if it wasn't the "textbook answer" they were looking for.
Why would I buy invisible, non-smelling food?
If I'm not mistaken, with Matrix you do not have to run a front-end per se. I believe you can simply setup a matrix home server, and then interact via an open source mobile/desktop/web application. This is not unlike old school email, where you can host your own email server, but manage email via any mobile/web/desktop email clients (of which you don't need to host the client side) .

For example, I'm running a private (matrix) synapse home server for ONLY my family; as a test. I only interact via the mobile (open source) riot application (formerly named vector.im), though they do also offer a web application at https://riot.im . I simply point the client to my server's (appropriate matrix) url, and am off to the races - again internally for my family and I only at this point.

My plan eventually is to keep running my own matrix home server, and open it up so that my family and I keep using any old client (like https://riot.im or whatever) BUT begin to interact with other users using matrix clients/servers, etc.

My understanding is that what you wish to do ("...I'm the only user, but I want to integrate into the network") is actually quite common for folks beginning to use matrix. Give this a look-see: http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

Alternatively - less ideal of course but - you can always lurk around on certain matrix-related rooms on the first/original matrix.org home server, and ask questions (on how you can set up your own server, etc.). Because I'm still in my own test phase, that's what I'm doing. Here are a few channels (via riot.im):
* https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org
* https://riot.im/app/#/room/#riot:matrix.org
* https://riot.im/app/#/room/#homeowners:matrix.org

Good luck!
I lost it at this one. As if there is some single point of failure that's going to bring all of Google down, and some intrepid director of engineering has to inspect some TCP packets by hand to fix it.
Soylent and coffee is not a good start to a day. Neither provide morning hydration. Sacrificing your health because it's fast and easy is something my younger version used to believe too. And yes I have consumed Soylent in the past up to 3 times a day for months on end.
I don't see the need to bristle when the rest of that paragraph dispells any notion of an "impoverished poet": "Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry."
The difference to me is that under iOS, you can go without these things (third party libs, Cocoapods/Carthage) and still be OK — you'll be at a relatively minor inconvenience, not ripping your hair out. Particularly with your example of Alamofire/AFNetworking, there's not a ton of functionality you're missing out on if you instead use NSURLSession, since they're both just light wrappers around it. This wasn't always true, but Apple recognized the gap in functionality and fixed it.

I have multiple personal Obj-C/Swift projects on iOS and macOS that don't use any kind of dependency management and use very few third party libraries and working on them has never been an issue or source of pain.
How were the answers stated to the recruiter being a dick? There was no room to a be a dick given the recruiter was looking for verbatim scripted answers.
We need to teach 10M Canadians to code or we’ll get left behind
FIFA 17 Mobile Soccer Hack Tool (Android/iOS)
Lattice Performance Reviews
When did HN become /r/worldnews ?

> Dirt poor countries with a quarter the resources are beating them badly, Korea, Malaysia, Chile.

> where the Mexican side provides cheap day labor and a "safer" platform for criminal activity due to the financial disparity.

> Mexico now effectively a narco state ruled by the cartels

> The solution we've pursued thus far does indeed make Mexico richer, but it also makes parts of the US poorer.

> Well, as we can see from southern Tucson, that city has become progressively worse as more non citizens have taken it over.
I more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.
I've had similar phone screens previously both at Google and Facebook. The depth/specifics of some of the questions seems maybe a little deeper but it's not too far off what I remember from my screens to be honest.
I just see a couple of samples there. I'd like to know if the images collected by the telescope are publicly available in the original format.
> I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is?

Not surprised by the questions. Most are [somewhat] common and not particular challenging.

I am surprised by the stupid counter-answers from the recruiter thought. This guy should not be giving phone interview.
It was downvoted.
So I'm already a huge fan of Taplytics, but this is the first time I've heard of the Github Student Developer Pack (https://education.github.com/pack), which looks like an amazing idea. Kudos to all the companies participating.
The yogurt I eat has... yogurt in it. No added sugar, no added anything. Yogurt is also really easy to make yourself.
Then you do what people did before Google when they didn't know some trivia: Use a book.
If they are trying to hire for a position that will somehow be on the line for what happens when all of Google is down, I for real hope that they get some higher-power questions into that interview.

But, obvs, the answer is that you Bing it.
In the primary and secondary education markets in the US, most for-profits are fully or partially funded by the local government as replacements for government-owned schools.

Often this is done with some flavor of a voucher system, where students within the school district can attend any school in the district (public or private). In other cases, the district will hire a for-profit school to run a magnet school. The whole system is often corrupt, with the for-profit school being audited by a company that shares common investors.
Logerr – Make JavaScript errors readable, and log them remotely
It's totally dependent on the type of person being interviewed. There is a difference between "knowing how to work in a team" "knowing when to be civil, when to push, when to go to battle", and wanting to parrot answers in order to just get to the next step.

If it were me, I'd try to engage with the recruiter and make them go completely off book. I'd ask them about their career, and try to find a different job for them (instead of reading stuff off a sheet of paper), or if that's what they are content to do, try to escalate and get them to reveal their "client" or "person they report to" (which in recuiting is a no-no) - I think I have the confidence and social skills to try to do that (I've talked past border officials, and various recruiters, and having been in a tele-job where I had to follow a script, I know exactly where a script reader is most likely to go off book if I ask something at exactly the right time). I am in no way qualified for a director of engineering position, but I can very easily get past this telephone screening, because precisely I've been the person asking this kind of question and using this kind of script. If I got past this screening, I'd be wasting the time of the person next in line for the interview.

Of course, it is a valid strategy to get an interviewee to follow along, but it's misguided - using the entirely wrong tool (scripted questions/answers) for doing the job (finding someone with managerial and people talent).
I'm just reaching here, but is there a chance at all that the test wasn't really about whether or not he knew the correct answers but more that he knew the correct answers and was able to simplify them to the extent that a non-technical user could understand and compare them? I have a feeling that Google is far more interested in someone being able to get their point across than someone that just wants to sit there and argue about whether or not an answer is right. Just based on reading his responses, I got a condescending vibe and a vibe that this guy always has to be right and would work terribly with people of different levels of skills. At a Director-level position, that kind of skill is the most basic skill you need to have.
Common! Stop these old black legend about KDE being heavy weight! I saw it running soft and fast even without 2d/3d acceleration!
He's confused an inode (file object) with an inode number (the index). But who cares? This is not a useful interview question.

His confusion carries over to the stat question, because he's still thinking an inode is just an index. That said, I wouldn't describe stat() as returning an inode, either... it fills a stat struct. That's all. Inodes can have more or less information than is present in the standard stat structure.

If this is how Google interviews director candidates, they've really gone downhill since I last tried to interview there in 2011 or so.
But hang on, the primary colours are red, yellow and blue! I know, they told me so in primary school.
assuming you're not a joking, it's probably because of the sex position.
Node.js 6.8.0 Released
Apocalypse now: Telegram service is down
I was with you until the end. Instead of cultural fit, I would call it "a stupid way to hire".
Best of luck to Google, more like it.
Windows 8 was a separate UI for desktop and tablet. Windows 10, for comparison, more closely combines the tablet and desktop modes. Windows 8 was a disaster and Windows 10, at least for desktop/tablets, is more of a success.

I think the problem with completely different UX experiences is exactly that. People want a similar experience with the same software. Microsoft assumed with Windows 8 that the tablet interface would work on the desktop but people don't want that watered down of an experience. Windows 10 at least lets you use tablet-designed applications on the desktop in a more integrated way.
I never really "got" Bob Dylan.

https://lee-phillips.org/dylanreally/
A puddle of crowbar is still going to be forensically valuable, and a lot easier to find than for example, bomb fragments.
Also, yarn is finally available in Homebrew:

brew install yarn

Enjoy!
To be fair, I work as a sysadmin / helpdesk monkey / sometimes-developer at a Windows shop, and the amount of complaints about Windows 8 was a lot lower than I had expected. A couple of users did ask me, however, to install ClassicShell on their machines.
(Windows 8 has given me more trouble sysadmin-wise than its predecessors, but most of that was due to third-party software. Especially, Windows 8 will regularly hang on startup say "Please wait...", at least on some machines - but that has nothing to do with the GUI.)

Personally, I still think the lack of a start menu is very disruptive - and since Microsoft re-introduced it in Windows 10 makes me think I was not alone in thinking so.
Great points -- and its definitely possible we pigeonholed the product.

Here are some of our competitive advantages that we're trying to get across (we just updated the homepage cards in an attempt to convey some of this):

- Notifications

- Organization by team and / or project

- Search

- Kudos

- Persist the data, can view the past

- Can mark aims as an accomplishment and build a timeline of your career viewable by you, your colleagues, and managers
Where could you do it that wouldn't take it badly?
I think the point of the article is summed up in one of the last paragraphs,

"If time travel is possible, he submitted, then time itself is impossible. A past that can be revisited has not really passed. And the fact that the actual universe is expanding, rather than rotating, is irrelevant. Time, like God, is either necessary or nothing; if it disappears in one possible universe, it is undermined in every possible universe, including our own."
> No, we don't. Communities have bonds. Seeing facebook spam is not the same as talking to a person, and joining a group of people who post likeminded facebook spam is not a community. It just scratches the same instinctual itch as a community.

You and I may be using Facebook differently. I'm not thinking about random Facebook groups and news feeds of people you don't even remember. But e.g. for me, there are people with whom, due to temporal and geographical constraints, Facebook (both site and Messenger) is the primary means of communication, and said communication is frequent and often deep. It's just another tool, not unlike the phone or telegram or paper mail.

> Understanding how and why people control information to manipulate the public and undermine democracy is important.

How: with free speech.

Why: because they have goals they want to achieve.

This actually is democracy working as designed - people being free to bullshit one another. The hope might have been that bullshitting from different actors will cancel out, but that doesn't generally work due to, among other things, simple randomness.
"Dumb recruiter"? What?

Nobody's calling the recruiter dumb. Everybody is calling the process dumb. A process that puts somebody that cannot answer these questions, in charge of asking them and evaluating the answers.

Having the candidate evaluate the competence of their recruiter is not part of the interview process. What the hell.
Will be interesting to see if OEMs will adopt floating mode for tablets and such with Android 7.
Around here we just call that Cinnabon.
How mathematics can fight the abuse of big data algorithms
> Globalization is a threat to everybody as it increases instability across the board except for the very wealthy.

Tell that to, oh, every ex-peasant Chinese urban worker ever. The problem with globalization right now is that workers in rich countries don't own shares in companies doing the outsourcing. Maybe that's what populists should focus on instead of preventing globalisation altogether.
So SV tech billionaires are not just eccentric libertarian weirdos who believe free wifi and internet connected toasters can save the world and cure everything that needs curing (and a few things that don't). They are also, apparently, batshit insane eschatologists.

A few months ago that might have surprised me, now it's just another tidbit to add to the fast growing Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction file.
Never forget a thing [Android]
I realize they have enough applicants not to care, but constantly reading this kind of thing about Google makes me never want to apply to work there.

It sounds like they took the worst parts of a startup, graduate research lab, corporation and bank and put them all together, but they have enough advertising $ that it doesn't really matter.