skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. The comment I replied to was asking for something less trivial, while this is probably all you have to do to identify the candidates who can't code.

The FizzBuzz problem is at least one order of magnitude easier than this, and still is able to rule out a great part of the candidates (by time limits, according to CodingHorror, not exactly by not being able to code it).
The good thing with this test is that you can actually get a glimpse of the ability of the candidate to come up with an efficient solution and identify its complexity.
You are correct in that I'm using the term loosely. Blackboard introduced a product which was marginally better (even that is arguable- I didn't use it and I was one of the first people they pitched, to my knowledge, as I was chairing a technology committee at a huge community college with a lot of tech funding just a few miles from their offices) than what we could do with excite/yahoo at the time.

They went public early and were quickly on the ropes trying to make their stuff work. They then turned to intimidation of their competitors by trying to (so I understand, but probably not in an unbiased way) stretch the coverage of their patents rather than giving the teachers the system that they need.

They were(are?) way overvalued and trying to defend their position, not by getting better but by stifling innovation. The one they couldn't intimidate they bought (webCT) to the detriment of us all.

IMHO, what is stupid about what they did was to not innovate once they had the financial advantage after going public. They were the only public player at that time, and raised quite a bit of capital as I recall.
According to the ancient, unspoken rules of the Silicon Valley elders, this means that Bill will have to pass the Sacred Dagger of Evil to Steve in a secret ceremony with the sacrifice of a virgin. Apple fans are already lining up by the hundreds, hoping to be the "chosen one". Said one "well, yeah, stabbed to death, but...hey, it's Apple! The iDagger is so cool!"
I disagree with you. It seems there are two simultaneous things happening, and you are unfairly dismissing both.

The attitude you're calling out is, as you rightly mention, harmful to a startup. Anybody who refers to themselves as the "CEO" in internal discussions early on has a problem. You're right -- everybody in a startup does as much of everything as they can.

However, as the commenter above pointed out, there is another important function being played while handing out titles early -- establishing a basic leadership structure -- and this is vital.

Being on top of the leadership structure doesn't mean you sit around and order people all day, or refuse to do work; both of those would be the hallmark of a horrible leader. The leader is someone who takes ultimate responsibility and who has the final call in all decisions (should it be necessary).

Early on, that might not really show up much. A good "leader" would be the person who makes sure the little things get done and on time, like prioritization meetings, or helping to hold people accountable if/when they are underperforming (both of which can be unpleasant). Early on, a good leader would recognize that it would be horrible to exercise any kind of overriding call as consensus is better in a very small group.

Over time, however, having a clearly defined leader from the beginning helps in the outwards presentation of the company (to investors or prospective employees) and, most importantly, prevents the company from failing to due a power struggle or a misunderstanding of the leadership chain when it comes time to formalize it. I've seen it happen to several companies -- it isn't pretty, and is entirely avoidable.
What gets scored, gets played.
Care to elaborate?

Even if a vendor uses custom skin, it does not mean that applications are inconsistent.

You have to actively work around to look and behave out of place.
The VAAPI for GPU accelered video decoding on Linux is really interesting. I don't know enough about video to understand how low-level it is from the MPEG2 exemple on their web site: does it have to be a codec already supported by your video card as I understand, or can you code new ones with existing building blocks?
>The German speaking part of the web to me seemed utterly boring,

I feel you, and also the German web ist full of grammar nazis, which is, admittetly, kinda funny. (Plus the mods in most forums seems to be on some sort of power trip)
He certainly didn't when we were pitching him...
In that case I completely agree that trivial problems would weed out the candidates that can't program, however who says you can't give something harder than FizzBuzz?

Also, FizzBuzz is now so common on the web that a simple search would produce numerous solutions for those that can't program, allowing them to get through to an interview. Assuming this is your yard-stick.
ASK HN: How to plan and manage a large web project?
Hello fellow HN readers. I wonder if I can spare 5 minutes of your time, if I may please.
I have a very large personal web project that I will be developing over the next 6 months. This project is much bigger then anything I've ever done before, and I am really struggling at the moment.
I want to plan and organise my project in a efficient and logical way so when I hire/fire coders others, and myself can understand everything that is to be done.
Usually I just jot things down in a notebook, or write a to-do list for the smaller projects.

I am thinking of using a brainstorming application to help me with this, have each feature of the site on its own branch and then branch off of that with its comments/solutions. Could you suggest any good applications for helping me with this? Or is there a better way to plan ideas/solutions?

I also need to start looking at svn/cvs repositories as I have never used one before to manage revision control of a project. What is the best way to start with this? I have done a little research into subversion and git, but really I am clueless as to which I should learn/use.

The last thing I need is bug tracking, I usually just write down bugs I find in my applications in my notebook and fix them as and when. But seeing how large this project is, and the use of multiple programmers. I want to keep everything in one place, so we have an up to date list of bugs and a history of old bugs, should they give us trouble at a later date. What can you suggest for me?

I don't know if I have asked the right kind of questions here but I have a million things running through my head at the moment that I just want to manage and develop this project in a correct and professional way.
If you have any suggestions on the planning, and management of a large web project could you please share them with me?

Thank you very much for your time and I hope you have a wonderful day!
Ok, mail in your inbox, do I get my cookie now ?
Facebook | Οι Φωτογραφίες Μου - mmm oti nane... :/
I moved to Canada when I was 23 and left when I was 25. After those two years, native English speakers frequently wouldn't believe that I was from Germany and that I didn't grow up speaking English.

My take on becoming good at speaking a foreign language: You must make an effort, it will not come to you passively. You must be willing to "forget" what you already know. Listen to yourself. Ask other people to help and/or correct you. Try to learn like a child. Play with the language. Be curious.

(On another note, I also realized that not having an accent got me into fewer conversations since people would not bother asking me where I was from.)
Nahh, only because it's counting on google hits, it doesn't mean it's worthless

If that were true then you would see quite different results!

Look at sourceforge.net and compare perl and pythons numbers (2700 vs 4200)

Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap) shows Perl & Python with 8905 and 12,149 respectively. Certainly interesting to see that C# has even more opensource projects on there than both Perl & Python with 12,192 :)

Still no good looking at one repo site without comparing with some of the others for a fuller picture. Here are some other figures I just browsed for:

Freshmeat:

* Perl 3898 - http://freshmeat.net/tags/perl
* Python 3526 - http://freshmeat.net/tags/python

Github: (http://github.com/languages)

* Perl 13%
* Python 9%

When it comes to site statistics, always take them with a pinch of salt when you try to imply meaning outside of their context!
We should stop talking about religion and faith in terms of good or evil. Religion is merely institutionalized ignorance, completely understandable. Outside of overwhelming evidence, believing what everyone else believes is completely logical. Nobody ever got fired for using choosing Microsoft right?

All of us atheists that pride ourselves on our rational thought, probably 99% of us would have been just as religious or superstitious if we were alive 500, 1000 ago.

On the other hand religion's claims on morality are just ridiculous, can't believe anyone gives it credence.
You can get shoes that are better for you. Maybe seek advice of a physio and they will suggest correcting shoes based on how you stand (I for example stand too much on the outside of the foot). Check your every day shoes, you will see you tend to use them more on one side than the other, that's your defomration. According to your post, it seems to be the heels. So you could look at getting shoes that correct that.
HTH
Lessons learned from 13 failed software products
And it does not cause an error, despite being written back when bytes mattered. Hats off, anonymous Nintendo programmer, you are the modern equivalent of medieval artists who painted parts in cathedrals which would be occluded by planned construction "because God would see if they were unpainted."
Which also means our Handbrake 64bit encodes will finally work...
One thing I had to do years ago as part of an interview was to write a C function to find the first bit set in a block of memory, flip it and return the location of the bit. Doing that at a whiteboard while explaining to the bearded chap interviewing me what I was doing.

From what I recall, I actually sort of enjoyed solving it as my C was bit rusty as I'd mostly been programming in Lisp.
Can we have some explanation for why it's 1.4.3 only, as in, what's new in it that the plugin requires?

Thanks.
What are Secrets of thesis writing essay
Students who are nearing the completion of a particular degree will be assigned the task of thesis writing essay. There are many elements which need consideration when writing the thesis essay. If the process of writing is adhered, you will be able to submit a well written thesis essay.
Why would you spoil the answer in the title?
The Digital Talking Pad
Indoctrination must start early. See also: "Happy meals" ;)
People on the periphery will always be confused about the specifics of a technology. If it's your client, you can softly correct them, if it's anyone else, well does it really matter. Don't see what the hubbub is about.
You need a leader for one thing only at this stage, which is to break deadlocks, but it usually better in such situations to find outside counsel. I usually have someone on board specifically as a tie-breaker in the case of deadlock. In one of the companies I'm involved in the shares situation is exactly balanced so when we're deadlocked we ask the bookkeeper. Everybody gets to state their case, he casts his vote, we move on.

Having a 'clearly defined leader' is as good as having a single founder and a bunch of employees, you will never get the kind of teamwork and commitment from your co-founders if one of you starts to behave like 'the boss' until it is absolutely necessary.

The places where you see power struggles are those places where decisions are not made on their merits. Attempts to force such decisions usually backfired, and as you say, it isn't pretty.

Once you start taking on employees, or investors that ask for a clear corporate structure, you're probably at the right time to start to solidify those roles, so we agree there.

But that initial phase can last for a long time, and naming your 'CEO' too early can cause real problems.
Aspect 0.90 - Aspect-Oriented Programming for Perl, rebooted
My point is simply that inline caching doesn't have an extra jump. It's called inline cache because the caching is writen in place (inline) making calling a method the same as calling a function. The generated function just has a type check at the top to jump back to normal method call scemantics in the case of a miss.
> "The Islamic Golden Age has contributed an invaluable amount to almost every aspect of our existence today" <- That is exactly correct. And during the Islamic Golden Age, muslims where not as fanatical as they are nowadays. On the contrary, on that age, christians were as fanaticals as muslims ara nowadays.

I understand your point, but I seriously doubt this is correct. This sort of argument is not likely to impress anyone, least of all a religionists.
"God is the only objective force in the universe" <- yet its mere existence still has to be proven

Open your eyes.
I can't believe it's still news to anyone that Apple grossly overcharges for ridiculous margins. :)
The fact that this is still sometimes the most practical solution is amazing to me. I was trying to get an IRC client for my Droid so I could talk to my friends during a road trip I was on, but the connectivity was poor enough that any local client would leave gaps in the channel logs whenever I was out of service. After searching a bit for something that would hold my message buffer server-side, I ended up just SSHing into my VPS and running irssi through screen.
Yeah, I tried it too. If you don't find any egregious bugs, I hereby claim it really is trivial.

EDIT: although the point is to weed out the idiots, not to provide a challenge.
Toshihiko Nakago, Kazuaki Morita and Yasunari Nishida were the main programmers according to <http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/525243-super-mario-bros>.
Healthy Benefit of a Good Night Sleep | Hi Health and Fitness
I always thought that you should use different words to prevent easy googling? The test remains the same, but with, say, BaaLamb or CowTip.
True but the only part they are actually subject to "the forces of a free market" is advertising, where they exhibit monopolistic behaviors (e.g. phone browsers being locked into google search). Every where else can be a "loss leader" for them which is extremely dangerous.
To be honest, I didn't believe in the FizzBuzz situation when I read it. I didn't believe that it was possible to exist such a group of programmers who couldn't do a simple code like that.

Assuming such a group doesn't exist, I'm all for harder problems, harder than the one presented.

But assuming the group exists, and assuming, as I did, that the problem presented tries to weed out its members, I just though something that "hard" wasn't needed.

But of course, the point of an interview is to identify the good, not the bad, so harder problems would do just fine as well in ruling out the bad.

But the whole point of the article was a user's doubt in being able to pass a FizzBuzz kind of problem. For that, something harder than the problem presented may probably not be embarrassing at all to fail at.
Thanks, appreciate the redirect to reframe as a question.

This is the type of question many developers should periodocially ask themselves, "what do I want in a language?" Our tools deeply affect how we think through a problem.
Who gets to decide which kinds of businesses are allowed to make money and which must be free?
How many of the things you mentioned are free themselves or also bankrolled by ads? Meaningless comparison as far as I can tell.
Or don't leave it there if you have a front seat passenger.

The primary use case appears to be something fun for the front seat passenger to play with. Oops.
You have a scale misunderstanding .... when V8 will be able to run as efficiently as the JVM is or have as many capabilities (e.g. V8 doesn't do multi-threading, which to do properly touches every aspect of a platform), then you might have a point.
GNU screen, the most convenient approach to persistent, "distributed" personal computing :-)
It seems very trivial :/

I don't really do much C, but here's x86:

// esi -> asciiz string
// cl = character to remove
// NB cl=0 won't work well ;)

mov edi, esi
cld
loop1:
lodsb // Load the byte from [esi] into al
cmp al, cl
je loop1 // Skip this byte
stosb
or al, al
jnz loop1

Did I miss the "gotcha"s?

edit: condensed code a bit
Isn't the existence of Buddhism enough to trivially confirm the thesis statement?
Guilty as charged. Much of my blog is mental fiddling ;)
I had never before yesterday thought about program language design from a top level, how do I want it to look/feel in the application?

Maybe it is just a flavor or Ruby, but there are some language level features Ruby is missing: implicit loops, smarter interface pattern fitting,smart multidimensional set handling, optimal numeric processing.

Some of my work demands fast turn arounds to think through and iterate on the data processing & algorithms
processing
or they could just test it this way.

http://www.iphonedownloadblog.com/2010/05/07/android-running...
>I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low

It is today. And it was with MS back in, what, the 80's? How easy is it to switch a big business off of them now?

The point here is that competition is important, and when one party is using an extremely profitable and largely unassailable part of their business to ensure they don't have to compete in others they choose participate in that is dangerous for legitament competition.
These are not mere formalities. Accidentally fail to comply with some bureaucratic governmental regulation? Run up a fine your company can't pay? It's the officers of the company who're going to be found personally liable.
No experience, no knowledge. Sounds like a perfect plan.

Clearly it will cost more than the retail price. One would think at least x10. So therefore $3M
"At some point, we'll have to do with /less/."

This part of the long business cycle always produces a lot of arguments for austerity. So far they have always turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

"Nuclear fission is currently on decline."

Nuclear power, both fission and fusion, is currently in a renaissance and we appear to be laying the groundwork for the next stage of advances: gas- and metal-cooled reactors, superconductors, mechanical compression systems, reliable mode-locked lasers, dielectric wall and wake field particle accelerators, electronics that can do real-time gigahertz feedback, etc.

When the next long expansion gets into full swing, I predict that the nuclear logjam will break loose.

"There aren't any better energy source than oil available now, or in the foreseeable future."

There's a lot of solar power in space. A lot. And literal mountains of metal, richer than the best terrestrial ores and pre-smelted too. At some point technology will tip the profit margin positive on exploiting it.
I had the very same experience, down to the commas.
I have seen this comment come up a few times, and it seemed convincing -- you would think that a specific "menu" button and a specific "back" button would mean that Android apps would at least be consistent in these two areas.

But it doesn't seem to be the case. Some apps have half their settings in a "main menu" which is activated by touch and hang the rest of the "menu" button. Some apps put everything in "menu". Others have multiple "menu"s depending on where you are -- K-9 mail is a good example of this, where "menu" is context-sensitive, and preferences (for example) are distributed across three different displays. This is only intuitive once you grok the app layout. Others do horrible things such as putting menu items labelled "more" in their menus.

With the "back" button, there is no guarantee that pressing "back" will take you back. Sometimes it takes you to what you were previous doing, browser-style. Sometimes it takes you to an application's main screen. Sometimes it takes you to the home screen. It depends (I guess) on how the app author has organised the Activities in her app.

Really, the only consistent button on Android phones is the iPhone-like "Home" button.
The Long Tail – 60 Chinese Cities with a Population of Over 1 Million
Most of the productive stuff we do with computers is still all about text. Our computers are replacing our TVs though.
HTML5 doesnt work on the iPad - at least not as its intended to be used: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4
A neat trick for clearing the lowest bit is subtracting one and and'ing that with the original:

x_cleared = x & (x - 1);

You can get the lowest bit from the difference.
How To Install VMware Server 1.0.x On A Kubuntu 10.04 Desktop
LG GW910 Mode | LG GW910 Mode Cell Phone Review
Please don't post the solution, people would like to think for themselves.
I recommend:

1. using branches as short-term scratch spaces for new features. Branches should not be long-lived and if they are they should be regularly merged, unless you are deliberated separating them for some reason (eg 1.x-stable, 2.x-stable etc)

2. You owe it to yourself to get familiar with a SCM ASAP. I use and recommend git. I also use and strongly recommend a paid account at github. Yes, paid! Then give your programmers access and watch it all come together there.

3. I use and recommend lighthouse. I used to dislike it but it's just so frictionless and easy to use that I can't think of anything else I'd recommend.
Thanks again. Apologies if my terseness meant a loss in clarity. I thought the JVM was implicit in the thread and that you were listing languages with the JVM as targets (also my mistake as I see that you were not exclusively listing those, guess I should refrain from posting till I've had more sleep).
OK - I've had a flood of emails trying the challenge, so I'm going to delay the next post about this to let more people have a go. It's not automated so I'm dealing with it by hand, but feel free to have a go. I'll do the next posting when I've received no submissions for 48 hours.

And when I get time.
Check out http://www.helpspot.com/ and http://www.knowledgems.com/
Great post, Jacques.

I prefer "Lord Master of all I Survey" It leaves the immediate impression that if you're looking for titles, we can give you one. I understand that this gives the impression that I don't take the duties of the job seriously, but in fact what it's saying is that I don't take the competence of the questioner seriously.

Yes, investors want a CEO. We can't just have chaos, barbarians at the gate, or nobody to put in a suit. But to your point, if there are 2-4 of you in a team trying to find a market, you shouldn't be spending a millisecond worrying about who has which title. This is the organizational equivalent of premature optimization.

Or look at it this way -- before profit, before sales, before working product, how do any of you have any idea who might be better at doing what?

You don't know. Just be honest about it.
I think it's trickier than FizzBuzz, but not by a whole lot.
> in modern wars is it is always for economic reasons.

Even if that were the case - and I don't believe that it is for a second - what about indirect causes? What about gaining enough power to wage war by simply pandering to theists and labelling the wars as God's work? I can think of at least one example you may have heard of, but Mr Godwin wouldn't like me mentioning it.
Usability Fails: Introduction
Sounds like going with an Assembla.com account might be perfect for you. I'm in no way affiliated with the company, but most of the issues covered can be handled using their tools.

I have one git repo with all of my code. Have milestones and tickets related to specific code points. Not to mention that their Scrum/Messages tools are great.
Python Google Chart