skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm giving paper coding tests that make sense to me, and I'm generally very happy with my recruiting. [...] I've passed people who completely screwed the test. I've failed people who nailed it in 5 minutes.

When I read someone saying "I've taken countless interviews, and I don't get a job", I'm thinking: well, either he's been very unlucky (which happens), or there is something wrong with the guy's attitude.

Yeah, must be their attitude. Not the arbitrary and biased test given by an interviewer who doesn't even realize it's arbitrary or biased or that they're selecting for qualities they personally think are important rather than whether the candidate can actually do the work.
Just because the punishment is legal doesn't mean it isn't excessively harsh. Would you have the same reply for someone who was caught with a bag of weed in Singapore and was facing caning and a long prison sentence?
"Justifiable from their perspective" is trivial. Given the wealth of examples, which GGP can be assumed to know about, that's not what they were talking about.
Technically, the writer did use the term "majority". That's not really the point though.

There's this obnoxious US attitude that is really wide spread in the population that the US is the best, and that Americans are noble, even though they mess up occasionally.

It's to the point where even when criticizing their own country, Americans will write that the criticism is in the spirit of improving the greatest nation on Earth, etc.

It's just a really noticeable and obnoxious pattern, even among allies. It seems to be very, very deeply ingrained.

I don't perceive people of other advanced Western countries being so jingoistic. Canadians don't crow about how Canada is the best. We might have unrealistic views that we are e.g. more tolerant, or accepting than we really are, but the US attitude is really jarring, even among friends.
The IDE would make huge difference for me and this question. It would allow me to instantly know string api which I normally don't need. Also, it would add confidence that what I am doing is actually java.

I don't mind whiteboard in general, however expecting me to solve language specific question like this is weird - especially in language like java that is never written without IDE.
As someone who only recently went through about 25 interviews this article gave me a bittersweet laugh. I wish more people understood how awful the torture chamber interview process is for everyone involved. Maybe the industry will catch up one day.
I can't comment for VB or the error you're getting, but System.ValueTuple is a nu-get package that facilitates the new tuples in C#; so maybe try including that in your project?
It's the only situation where a build up of arms before war is understandable. Massing arms out of defense is basically indistinguishable from preparing an attack.
Hmmm ... so you can afford the car, the gas and the insurance -- but you can't afford to pay for the road? Perhaps you should share a car.
My experience with initial stage of recruitment to Amazon, Google, and other "we can afford false negatives" jokers.

Write O(n) algorithm for bus ticket allocation. Use yellow unbalanced binary tree, you have 40 minutes. Then we will run it against exhaustive tests our engineers have been working on for the last couple of weeks. Uhhhh... what's that?... your algorithm melted down... We wish you good luck in your job search, thanks bye!

Luckily I approached these tests while still being employed, otherwise it would be quite soul-sucking experience. Now I just don't take them seriously anymore and feel an urge to troll them somehow.
> "I see your background is in artificial intelligence, you've written your own compiler, and you maintain an open source project - how nice. Now implement radix sort using only red-black trees."

Sadly this quite could almost be pulled right out of a real tech interview we've all had.
No one is asking for a 50GB ISO. ISO is another way of saying "a single file". If you could provide a single ZIP file with SHA or MD5 hash we are happy too. Look at Xcode - the main bundle is around 3GB and all the SDKs, simulators, and documents are available as in-app downloads. Or you can look at Android Studio, or Eclipse. The base software package is relative small and there are options to download plugins/components.
How often do you take the Big Blue Bus? People really do drive so they do not have to deal with the bums. Those guys can be really violent and smelly some days.
Is someone downvoting a comment on reddit so hard to believe?
I was unable to view a few slides in the presentation. I imagine its probably because they are flash videos and Firefox on Linux has been a pain about it so far. Anyone else experiencing this or knows how to fix it?
Ask HN: Cap table privacy?
Are cap tables typically private?

That is to say, can new investors see the entire cap table?
> Why reward such selfishness?

It may be because of reasons other than selfishness, outside of one's control.
Don't assume somebody is as insensitive jackass as you with such statements.
Note that for comparable performance, you probably need not only the network topology but also the training data...
I've opened an issue for tracking this here: https://github.com/scrimba/community/issues/9
> And, don't get me started on: if <Constant> = <Variable>...

That seems to be quite the pet peeve with many and I quite like the style in certain scenarios: namely the common one where the constant is a simple literal and the variable portion is a longer (no, not excessively long, just.. longer ;) chain of things, a call within a call or some operator etc. It's as if to signal "there is some crunching/intricacy here but look, it's just to check against this simple value here right at the start". Kinda reassuring. Likewise find it quite readable for checking for magic strings / code-monikers (of course to be avoided but sometimes not when dealing with certain input formats etc) and especially when a couple of such in a row are tested..
But other parts of the world are overcrowded..if we could redistribute population, won't we relieve hyper dense hubs and manage resources more effectively.
Only if the other floors in your building aren't doing the same thing. Which is exactly why this approach is no longer viable with 2.4GHz. ;)
Man this is good. Any plans to extend it to other languages?
You can learn a lot about a company by the state of their bathrooms, and not just the ones out front for customers and visitors!
If you're working with a recruiter, those pre-interview references are also business leads for that recruiter.

Source: I'm a former recruiter
It definitely feels like getting developer tools bootstrapped/funded is harder than other things sometimes, so congrats.

Mostly just wanted to say Scrimba looks pretty cool way to teach/learn coding - nice work!
That land values don't increase as much near impermanent infrastructure isn't surprising; this still doesn't explain why people would use it less while it's there. And in any case, this data doesn't distinguish between your theory and the theory that buses are less desirable for other reasons.
> You can publish only true facts

Can we go back to just calling them "facts"? A statement can be true or false, but a fact is true.

You're playing into the idea that there are "false facts" or "alternative facts." There aren't. Those are lies or errors.
> Functional programming and ownership are concepts that just don't mix well.

Of course they do, ownership is part of substructural type systems, more precisely affine types.
"The componentization work we've done means that the smallest install is one-tenth the size of Visual Studio 2015, making it far more likely to succeed" - Is VS going to be a UWP in the future? An installer is so 1999
If you think that money from tolls is actually going to go to buses and improved public transit and not just into some Bel-Air businessman's brother's pocket, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
This may not be quite the direct answer you expect, but yes there are multiple ways to create cross-platform UIs with F#:

1. Xamarin[0]. It supports F# for everything aside from UWP targets.

2. WinForms on Mono[1].

3. FABLE[2] to compile your F# into JavaScript. It's a very good tool and it produces really nice JavaScript as well. From there, you can run the code on the web, Electron, or React Native[3].

[0]: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/fsharp/f...

[1]: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/

[2]: http://fable.io/

[3]: https://github.com/fable-compiler/fable-react
Then it is the problem with the society that such people are allowed to ride on a bus and disturb other people.
As I understand it, the idea is that if you're already collecting sales and gasoline taxes to pay for roads, collecting the same amount of money through tolls instead isn't any more regressive (it replaces one regressive tax with another), plus it cuts down on traffic.

On the other hand, replacing income tax with tolls really would be regressive.

(But I don't know enough about taxes to say if that's really true.)
exactly my point... it has been said for years, decades, centuries...

NO - not hard to believe... but interesting the unveiling we are seeing now...

forgive all typos as my fingers are experiencing the chilling effect ( my hands are cold... makes it hard to type)
I think its because they use github for storage/forking things, but they could certainly extend it to work without it later.
Introduction to CSS Variables- Like SASS, but No Compilation Needed
> Because of this the "evangelize to the world" feelings of the Cold War have given way to "protect us from the world - we need to get OURS."

But looking from the outside -- when has the US ever done anything but put America first?

They have killed hundreds of thousands, to over a million people over the last 30 years by putting their interests first, by default.
> I think a lot of people in the US associate mass transit with sociallism and associate soccialism with "everyone should live like the dirt poor live".

No, it's because busses in the US are actually full of dirt poor people. I know it sounds cruel, but given the choice, most Americans would rather drive than sit next to dirty, smelly homeless people and also have to listen to shouting matches, sit in close proximity to fist fights, etc. Oh, and did I mention that they're rarely on time? Busses in the US are legitimately not a pleasant experience, it's really that simple.
When dreaming up new ways to tax cars, please bear in mind that wear on roadways from vehicles is proportional to miles driven times per-axle weight to the fourth power.

A gas tax is already proportional to miles driven times vehicle weight times a fuel efficiency factor.

Congestion, on the other hand, is a more difficult thing. Vehicle length certainly plays a factor, as well as width, acceleration, and braking distance. Number of passengers is an obvious factor. Trip routing efficiency has a role. I really don't expect local legislators to understand the mathematics of traffic. If they don't commission a study by traffic experts, and do exactly what those experts recommend, they might just end up making things worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox#Traffic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
Yes of course. Sometimes people ask for data because they would generally like to learn, not as a tactic to win an argument.
It's plainly satire. It's in the style of a The Onion piece but with more depth, and probably personal experience.
What would be the point of the CIA sponsoring jailbreak teams? The exploits they find are generally burned very quickly.
These take home projects are a bit inconsiderate to a candidates time. I've done a few and if you don't watch your time. You could be spending 5-6 hours just trying to please people
Vancouver, BC a "North" American city has had the same traffic volumes entering/exiting its downtown core since the 1960s even though the amount of jobs and people living in the area has massively increased during that time.

This was accomplished by:
1. Never building a freeway and never expanding any road capacity at all. (This is a strong disincentive to drive to downtown)
2. Building rapid transit.
3. Building residential housing in and adjacent to downtown so that people can just walk to work.
Are there any behavioral economists on here?

Isn't there a well-proven positive (meaning unstable) feedback loop between the increased supply of roads and the demand for them? Is there any way to introduce an effective negative (stabilizing) feedback loop into the system? Congestion pricing is an attempt to do that.

How about introducing some kind of net metering into the system? Not only could people who use the road at peak times be charged a toll, but people who travel off-peak could get a credit. It should be possible for somebody who has an off-peak commute to actually earn a bit of money.

Yes, I'm proposing the transponder-age version of the toll-booth person handing money to the driver.

With respect to Mr. Musk, his tunnelling proposal is nuts: on many things he's good, not this. We did some tunnels in Boston in the 1990s and early 2000s. Caissons! Flooding! Cooling systems to freeze the mud so the buildings near the project don't fall down! Ventilation systems! Rats flushed out by the tunneling projects! Buried utility lines! In LA, several layers of underground storm drains! Cost overruns!
At the bank I used to work at, traders had a habit of wandering over and asking questions about the differences between the prices of securities over time (as arbitrageurs, it's all they thought about).

I got so sick of writing one-off SQL queries that I wrote a very small (not much bigger than a calculator) language to express their questions. They liked it, but it had no potential for use outside of our trading desk (which was disbanded a few years later).
London hasn't adequately priced the externalities of traffic congestion. Air quality is still rather poor by European standards! The more recent changes are well overdue, but still don't go far enough.
Thanks for the link. So then is the assertion that the relevant hacks are all for older versions of Android? How does that comport with the current batch of hacks?
This whole narrative of Wikileaks not being neutral is a very weird story, because they've never published anything that wasn't verified to be true.

What does the one thing have to do with the other? Just because you're truthful doesn't mean you're neutral, and nobody is seriously denying the authenticity of these files.

What, exactly, have we learned here other than a spy agency knows interesting methods of spying? I mean, of course it's interesting to see they use this or that vector, but that this technology exists isn't surprising in itself.

I see two possibilities: either this has caught the CIA on the hop, in which case everyone else will harden their security and the CIA will be less effective at gathering intelligence for a while, or the CIA has already moved onto better tools and is dumping details of its older ones to see who reacts and raise the technological stakes. There's no sure way for me to know if it's compromised or not, and the only predictable outcome is another leap in the diversity and capability of malware and another round of the cybersecurity arms race.
This is one of the reasons I don't run in the cloud.
And for North Africa, the Amazigh (called "Berbers"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers
Yes. This will definitely happen (more than it already is), because developed countries aren't producing enough children to take care of their aging local population.
According to seriouseats, the only thing a slow cooker is best at is keeping food warm, carmelized onions and bread pudding. http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/10/why-pressure-cookers-are-...

I certainly getter results doing pot roast & pulled pork in a pressure cooker than a slow cooker.
> Someone is seeking to control the narrative.

China and Russia immediately come to my mind. China has been influencing american public opinion in more than subtle ways. Hollywood movies are forced or incentivises to show china is positive light. Any material manufactured in China is forced to adopt Chinese world view for example China secretly forces printers to make changes to how Taiwan or Tibet is mention in the books. NN Taleb's recent book face the same issue.

The problem with CIA or US Government in general has been they have long stopped using american ideas of freedom, transparency to their own advantage while being transparent and accountable to public. Constant lies, optimising for dubiously useful goals, financial mismanagement etc. has made them less credible and very correctly so.

I bet the next thing CIA would try to get Assange killed and facts suppressed only making themselves less and less credible and reducing freedom in the country.

When John Kennedy appeared on television during Cuba missile crisis the American public to a large extent believed their president. After what Bush did in Iraq I think American public will not trust another President like that even in the face of a real crisis.

I think that is how nations probably fail.
Iterators of this form are not functional construct, they are a pattern from
object-oriented programming.
I wouldn't say it's crazy to question it, but neither of the potential motivations you cite for faking the leak really holds up to me. The NSA didn't need to leak on itself just to flex its muscles, people are plenty scared of it as is. Not to mention many of the capabilities confirmed by Snowed were already widely speculated to exist - Wired wrote an article shortly before Snowden that touched on them[0]. Nor can I imagine they would try to claim capabilities they don't have: what would be the point? Seems pretty expensive for a psy-op without a discernible target.

Also Snowden ending up in Russia has never seemed suspicious to me - where else could he go that would protect him from both legal and clandestine extradition?

[0]https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
Easy answer. They may not have to send the audio. They could transcribe it locally at the client, encrypt, and send text to store on the server. Consider that almost a decade ago, programs like dragon naturally speaking could be run on a relatively inexpensive laptop. It's entirely possible that a dedicated device like the echo could do this today.
EDIT: Original reply sounded too definitive
That is an interesting point of view.

I want to play along.

So..what about imperfect offsprings of those who play the procreation game? What do we do with them?
Hello! Have you seen the CIA's leaks? It does not matter, because you should already be aware of all the vulnerabilities in IOS.
> Not if the "well regarded source" has a clear motive to lie.

Then it is not a well regarded source any more.
I've heard it said that the creator of Elm regularly pairs with newbies and adjusts the language based on what they find difficult, but I don't have a citation.
Really cool tool. Congratulations and great job! Look forward to seeing where this goes.

Feedback: the rerun project button is hard to locate and not prominent. I wanted to rerun the project after making some changes. I felt encouraged to save (fork) or resume playback, overwriting my edits. Make it more intuitive to rerun after making an edit.
You need tolls but with public transit upgrades
I've done a lot of interviewing and do hit a lot of these but it's kind of the unfortunate 'state of the art' for figuring out whether to hire someone. For example, phone screens are often less than a hour (because most applying to us are likely already working somewhere else) but we need as much data as possible. They're done from a script because we want a consistent metric to iterate on and it's really important we get a good read because on-site interviews are incredibly expensive, especially for a smaller company. It'd be great to just call up and chat about personal projects or whatever but it's just too inconsistent and subjective.
Exactly. So many of the proponents of the whiteboard algorithm question industry are thoroughly convinced that they are eliminating people who will fail on the job. Of course it's impossible to verify this. The only thing you can verify is the performance of candidates that do pass your test and you subsequently hire. I'm sure there are a lot of bad hires even at the companies where they use these interview techniques. The believers are clouded by survivorship bias and confirmation bias. They get no information from those that they reject and they refuse to acknowledge the bad people that they accept.

Didn't the guy who started WhatsApp fail his facebook interview? :-)

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-rejected-whatsapp-co...

Here is some debunking of other commonly held misconceptions about this interview strategy:

1) The questions are not tricks -- actually every coding algorithm question that has a "naive" solution and an optimized solution requires a trick. That's why you can study for these interviews. The studying involves memorizing the catalog of tricks and identifying which one to apply based on the question. Even the simplest and most commonly used tricks (using a hash table, multiple pointers into the same array / multiple accumulators, bit shifting) are still tricks.

2) The interviewers have a large catalog of these questions so you're not going to pass by memorizing stuff. As I mentioned in #1 above, this is false. The list of tricks that need to be employed to solve these puzzles is finite and definitely less than 100. Most common interviews will probably be solved by one of the top 10 tricks.

This page has 80 solutions: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/top-10-algorithms-in-interview-...

3) This method may have too many false negatives (when they reject a candidate who would have been a good member of the team) but it eliminates false positives (when they hire a candidate who cannot code). With enough dedication and time, anybody can train to pass these. It's not really a skill that is super useful for getting things done in a programming job.

Some people are very good at riddles but have no common sense. They do not make good members of a software development team but they are very good at these interviews.
NYC supposedly fixed some of their problems in the 50s if you believe Jane Jacobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

She teaches that the key to getting rid of traffic is getting rid of roads. Not everyone buys this theory, but in LA's case, why not try dynamiting the freeways and let's just see if things get better? It's not like they can get any worse.
The express toll ("Texpress") lanes on I-635 in Dallas do something similar:

http://www.lbjtexpress.com/pricing/how-pricing-is-determined
Ask HN: What's your dev environment setup look like?
I know this has been discussed a lot, but things change rapidly.
I currently use a combination of Vagrant + local services, that I manually run when required. Some other people in the team use Docker, that I personally haven't touched for quite a while. I'm looking to standardize the dev setup in our organization and curious what are the best practices in 2017. There are a few goals I pursue:

- an easy way to spin up the entire infrastructure locally (say for new hires);

- an easy way to share new services with the team;

- the environment should mimic staging/production as much as possible.

I'm leaning towards a Vagrant VM + Docker containers inside of it. In this case we can share a single Vagrantfile across the team, which to me solves the first two goals. Running multiple containers in the VM solves the third goal.

I sometimes hear that Vagrant is a useless layer in this setup. But I'm not sure.

Are there some best practices today? What's your setup looks like?

P.S. We use Chef to manage non-local environments. Could be nice to have a single tool for all environments (local, staging, prod, etc.), but I'm not a dev-ops, not sure if that's a handy practice.
Interesting coincidence that Wikileaks chose to help Trump during the election as well.