skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Neither of which can be solved by 'studying' for an interview. I'll argue that the required skills are on the interviewer, not the interviewee. As an interviewer I'm trying to assess a skillset, be it social, be it technical. All the points you listed (except #5) I deem to be a failure on the part of the interviewer:

1. You didn't make enough progress on the problem.

The interviewer didn't properly explain the scope of the problem.

2. You were too slow and didn't get through all of the problems.

Again, a scoping issue on the interviewer's part. When I interview, I have one _single_ problem that I pose. I interview largely for embedded security folks, so I write this on the board:

void func(char* arg) {
char buf[128];
strcpy(buf, arg);
}

And I will ask them to explain what's wrong with it. Most people can answer that question fairly easily. With this simple problem on the table I now have a base to start more questions from:

- How would you fix this problem?
- In a large codebase, how would you find this problem?
- What's really happening here on a machine level?
- What sort of system-level mitigations can I implement?

These are all branches I can take, and once I feel like the interviewee is out of his depth in any one of them I jump back up. I'm trying to assess the skill-level of the person, not whether they meet some minimum bar (though I can do this afterwards, of course).

3. Your solution is complicated.

There's a little bit of shared blame here. The playing-field isn't level in an interview as the interviewee is naturally going to be nervous. You as an interviewer can help level it a little by giving some broad strokes help. "That solution looks like it might end up a little complicated. Do you think there's a better one?". I have given no technical guidance, but have given the interviewee a chance to step back and think.

4. You didn't communicate well enough with the interviewer

Everyone works differently. When I'm solving a problem, I like being alone in my head to focus. Some people more naturally are drawn towards collaborative problem solving. An interviewer that doesn't recognize this is a poor interviewer.

You as the interviewer can solve the problem by occasionally asking "So, what direction are you thinking?" or "Can you write me out on the whiteboard where you're going?".

5. You ignored the interviewer's feedback

Yeah, ok, that one is on you.
The average person's life is many times better off
If you're assigning blame, don't forget Nokia's board of directors at that time, who elected Elop and started that whole mess.
I like a lot of things about the USA, but I'm not sure it's the best destination for a Turkish person.

The first reason is practicality. As Trump cracks down on H1B visas, immigrating will become even more difficult than it currently is.

The second reason is safety. Of course NYC/SF/LA are fine... But elsewhere in the country there is a rising tide of hate against Middle Easterns. In February, two Indian engineers working at Garmin were murdered in a Kansas bar [1] because a man mistook them for Iranians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Olathe,_Kansas_shooting
Please god no, too much already :)
To build the gang you must recruit where `new-recruit-power < total-gang-power`. Since to start you are the only gang member, you can only recruit one dude who is 0.75 your strength. Now the gang is 1.75 strength, so you can go after another dude who's really strong, say 1.25. Now your gang has a strength of 3. Eventually you will be able to swallow up whole other gangs.
>The fact that I can still reliably open my documents is huge, though

I've had multiple instances where a document that compiled with one LaTeX installation didn't compile with another. It was always possible to fix after a certain amount of head-scratching, but LaTeX is a twisted network of packages that interact with each other in unpredictable ways, and there's no real guarantee that your LaTeX will still compile in 10 years.
The NSA case however strengthens my argument:

Someone did come forward.
Because it's RISC under the hood
Out of curiosity, were your interviewers largely young? 20-28 years old?
Only few of my colleagues have active github or open source contributions. They code enough in work basically. Some of them a lot actually. Oddly and I think it is just random, those with active github are less productive/reliable at work.

Then again, I never bothered to have linked in account. Nobody I know is using it.
Which machine learning APIs do you use?
Amazon, Google, BigML, or Azure?
In addition, we seem to be going back to a more CISC like model. RISC was appealing when you could have simple instructions and take advantage of that to get high clock speeds. Now, that avenue is gone. Now, may CPU's are adding special instructions (for example AES or SHA acceleration instructions) or wide instructions (SSE, AVX, etc). We are likely to see more in the future, and may see specialized instructions to speed up neural nets.
Fair point. Although that also only would implicate that maybe, there were competent people, it's just that no one bothered to ask them.

I don't know if that's making the matter better or worse ;-)
There are lots of others - my personal favourite is Monoid. http://larsenwork.com/monoid/
The NY Times is read across the country, because it's one of the few high quality newspapers left.
We need more proper Linux in schools, not ChromeOS.
Nope. The water is largely coming through the same gross infrastructure. That map is not an accurate guide to regions of the state where arable water is directly available.

Water issues in the west are complicated.
And what license problem do you see with distributing it?
Blocking wikipedia was ridiculous and doesn't fix the problem of biased moderators doing propaganda on wikipedia articles. Many people believe russia and iran have teams for editing articles [1], so maybe it's better all governments do the same instead of blocking it. People should know that this is not Erdogan's decision, but a court's.

I think it's done on purpose on the news but purging 4000 officials is not related to any dictatorship power of Erdogan. Those officials came to those positions by just being a member of an islamic organisation and by preventing competent people taking the job. What is happening in Turkey is, we see Karma is working.

[1][in Turkish] https://eksisozluk.com/wikipediadaki-fars-sovenizmini-engell...
There are dumber things to dedicate your life to.
> It doesn't make sense to have a touch screen on a Macbook because the form factor is totally different from tablets.

I suspect this is like the iPhone screen size issue. Apple had some very good reasons for keeping the screen size small, but ultimately consumers found large phones to be more valuable, and in the end, Apple's commitment to small screen size held them back. You listed a bunch of really good arguments against touch screen laptops—and I agree with them—but tons of people who use touch screen laptops nevertheless find the value in it outweighs those negatives. Eventually, Apple will have to concede to the marketplace's wishes.
On the other hand, someone willing to 'work' unpaid overtime and jump through unreasonable hoops to just get a job is more likely to continue doing the same once they get the job.
> Why are x86/64 processors used for most high performance applications then?

Because (1) you can overcome those issues by throwing enormous manpower at them; (2) the business success of Windows, coupled with Intel's patent portfolio to keep out competitors, historically generated enough revenue to fund that manpower.

(There are signs that this may not sustain itself forever, with Intel's failure in mobile and the performance disappointment of Kaby Lake, but regardless of how well the strategy will continue to perform in the future, it worked for decades.)
This is not a useful metric, surely? As you say most of the die is cache.

What an instruction costs depends mostly on what you want to do, and how many bits wide it is. Multipliers are expensive. Then there's considerations of pipeline depth and branch prediction.
The vast majority of instructions are microcoded, so it's unlikely to be much at all, instead you're killing the poor decoder :P

In any case, the primary energy and die space hogs are the OoO circuitry and the caches.
Ask HN: Is my addiction to porting Unix onto the web psychologically damaging?
I've got a web site I've been working on for going on 5 years now. The project is called "Linux on the Web".

See it here: https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/

The concept of a "web based operating system" is certainly not new. Most of the links returned by that search term are barely from this decade. The only project that seems to be active is called OS.js, and it is honestly a joke compared to mine.

For instance: it doesn't even have a command line interface.

I can't even begin to count how many thousands of man-hours I've spent on two Javascript modules called shell.js (the backend interpreter) and Terminal.js (the actual application).

My idea about this whole concept is very philosophical... a true web based OS would perfectly encompass all of the deep, technical aspects of general computation as well as the infinite potential of having immediate access to the world's own information retrieval network.

This idea seems to be a no-brainer as far as being the kind of thing that smart, decent people should devote a non-trivial amount of their time working on.

And yet I can't get the first human being to spend the least amount of time sitting down with me to browse the source code.

All I want to be able to do with my life is make connections with living human beings. I'm in my early 40's now, so I remember a time before all of this stupid "watch me as I stare at a stupid little rectangle filled with pixels" kind of behavior that most people seem to be exhibiting.
I think the potential for this app was very high, but their awful, downright stupid product decisions played a large hand in their downfall (or at least expedited it) - removing anonymity (the main selling point of the app), constantly fucking around with "The Herd" feature, the list goes on.

I remember seeing these things roll out and being so frustrated at whoever thought they were a good idea and the downfall of a solid app / community in the process.
Adding a buy it now price costs 50p upfront, whether it gets used or not, and the buy it now option disappears as soon as any bid is placed.

What you describe might work if I removed the auction component entirely.

Also note that the closest thing to a "scam" that I was subjected to was the on-platform non-paying bidder. The off-platform experience was just 2 honest individuals conducting a transaction without trying to cheat each other.
This puzzle based interviewing system is a complete mess. How did it get to this?
Heh.

There is no true CISC anymore, everything is RISC under the hood with a CISC to RISC conversion layer.
I really appreciate your efforts. One of the most frustrating things to encounter as a student doing research is a pay-wall.

Regardless if such kind of search was available before or not, many people, like the author of the linked article, will encounter this pay-wall during their research.
I think you could benefit, and especially grow, a lot if academia.edu becomes a place where students actually start their research instead of landing there through an external search engine.

In 2017 fulltext search should be considered a basic feature, which according to your business model should be free. Even the online library of my university offers it, even though on a much smaller data set.

If it is true that other premium features are more heavily used than "advanced" search, then you still have enough reasons to legitimate your premium accounts without it.

I think you could find other ways to generate income and become sustainable. For academia.edu it might be premium accounts offering additional services and maybe sponsored content like placed search results, job offers etc. Use the information you generate (but please don't just sell it to a 3rd party).
Most of my interviewers were between 20-30s, but I've also interviewed with people old enough to be my parents.
Recommend any of the north-western/central europe countries instead. Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, heck even Finland. Any of them is a better place to live in than the USA on almost every given axis of measure, and many of them already have plenty turks there providing help and support with integration.
* I am not aware of any attacks against legacy hardware except for VENOM. Intel's QEMU-lite patches are disabling these devices for speed rather than security reasons. In any case, no external patches are needed right now to disable most legacy devices: QEMU's Q35 machine type doesn't have a default floppy controller and you can already remove the HPET, PIT, SATA controller and SMBIOS controller. What is left is used, albeit sometimes rarely, by the firmware or the OS (e.g. IOAPIC, RTC, PCI host bridge or ACPI); any replacement would be more likely to have holes than the current well-tested code.

* Rowhammer detection is interesting, but not really related to virtualization. Thanks to KVM's design any such monitoring solution would apply equally to Linux containers. This is not the case for Xen, for example.

* Besides Rowhammer, memory dedup is highly subject to side channel attacks. I think this is a much more important issue, and it already pretty much forces you to disable KSM in multi-tenant applications.
Maybe the point of an interview is to find out how good you are at becoming good at something other than your core skill.

Adaptability / self-teachability / willingness to jump through hoops
There are JSON and JSONB types that can store JSON, in one can make tables that are simply a PK and a JSON column. There are function/option wrappers around this type to in place update a JSON field. Syntax is well different than Mongo. Can get a relational-JSON store which Mongo don't really have.

I used to use Mongo along side the PG for the JSON store but now am back all on PG with this JSONB type.
The Darkness Side and Long Honeymoons of Token Sales (Part I)
There are better things for a Stanford grad to do. If this is all they want, they'd rather join a bootcamp!
How are you even supposed to pronounce "libre"? :D

I think the "big companies who don't care about it" thing is exaggerated. Who cares about what terms they use?
Duration of Viking II transmission of images
The knee-jerk answer upon seeing the title was: "Too many".

So many of these instructions I never see anyone use, ever.

No doubt there are some folks using them, but as mere mortals, do the rest of us really need all these features to control our small amount of commodity hardware? As a user, I have modest goals. Is it not true that Torvalds wrote his kernel with a similarly modest goal in mind: control over his own commodity computer?

The situation resembles that of an overcomplex software program where a majority of the features are unused by an even larger majority of its users. In other words the depth of features benefit only the very few people who use them.

Given the choice between several alternatives with differing levels of features I tend to opt for software that is less featureful and hence more simple. Call me simple-minded if you wish. The same goes for processors, although when it comes to hardware how much choice to we really have as end users? (Hobbyist boards excluded.)

For a taste of some non-x86 assmbler, I enjoyed experimenting with a MIPS simulator still found at spimsimulator.sourceforge.net. I can report that the non-GUI portion at least still compiles relatively cleanly on BSD. This simulator has been mentioned on HN several times.

I have a no problem with using a processor with fewer instructions even if I have to sacrafice something by making that choice -- I leave it to the experts to detail those sacrafices and why I would be a fool to make them. NB: I am already a fool so it may not be worth the effort.

How many HN readers have tried RISC-V? A poll for those who have not: will RISC-V inspire you to purchase a new computer?
Hikikomori is not only a Japanese phenomenon. I was Hikiki for a year after dropping out of college.

I lived with my parents playing WoW all night and sleeping all day. I had very few social interactions.

What dragged me into that lifestyle was the complete destruction of my ego. I was simply unprepared to live as an adult. It's not much of a surprise I couldn't cope. In high-school I was coddled for being smart and never developed a work ethic. College hit me like a sack of bricks.

I'm sure there are myriad reasons why people choose to withdraw from society; my case is merely a personal anecdote. Nonetheless I think my case is not a rare exception.

Ultimately what pulled me out of that malaise was successful employment in a software company. It was only after I recovered a sense of self worth that I could finally step out of my cave.
Slimux- Vim plugin to send code from editor pane to interpreter pane in tmux
I agree, I had a windows phone and I actually liked the UI, simple clean, the 5 things I used the most often in nice big blocks, easy for me to find quickly. Too bad, I just feel like the whole phone scene has fallen into a duopoly, Apple iPhone and Samsung Android. I liked the idea of having a strong #3. Maybe it is my soft spot for the underdog, but I miss having a richer phone space. I know, I know, this is HN so someone will bring up some obscure thing I am supposed to know about like an Ubuntu phone or something, but let's keep it real guys, there are 2, keepin' it 100, K?
> it is high for 30 clocks and low for 31 locks before oscillating.

That's bad if you want white noise, but maybe the transients were put there intentionally? They could have a musical purpose.

EDIT: This is assuming the white noise generator resets for every sound. Is that the case?
The siren song of homogeneity
Neural nets are honestly best suited to a ZISC type architecture... In any case, specialized deep learning chips should be on their way.

Not to toot my own horn here, but we're one of the hopeful deep learning chip startups, I'd be happy to answer any more questions or perhaps elaborate on why I think ZISC is better for neural nets.
I have a naive understanding, but the compilers had to do a lot more work with the RISC systems. Also, is anything really your classic RISC any longer? Lots of new instructions and instructions that take a lot longer than 1 cycle are there. Anecdotally when looking at the assembly for Intel or Arm, they are often very close.
Probably zero. The decoder isn't instruction specific, it's just something that translates the incoming ops into micro-ops internally. Even then it's pretty abstract. Is an adder circuit specific to an add operation? It's probably used for a lot of things.
I don't study for interviews any more. I figure as I continuously improve my Computer Science and Mathematics fundamentals it will just happen naturally. So yeah I've been to final at Google, Amazon, and now Facebook, but I probably won't get a job offer for another year or so. Their loss though :)
See: RISC-V not having a negate instruction, because it's encoded as SUB 0, $X. Similarly no bitwise-not because XOR -1, $X
Yep. Put an unique index on the collection too.
I'm pretty interested in this, but wasn't able to find it online. Was it released publicly?
As somebody spending a large amount of my time working on postgres, and obviously being convinced PG is good: Of course people sometimes choose oracle on technical merits (I've not worked with modern sybase versions much, so I can't judge, although some sybase IQ numbers look interesting).

Golden Gate, RAC, Management Tools, stable plans, decent parallelism, decent partitioning, some columnar stuff - that's not just marketing fluff.

Oracle's politics / sales tactics, and cost are one large argument against, being able to influence feature development / add features yourself another, against Oracle, that I've seen driving companies - including big financial ones - away from oracle over time. Often that's not starting with the business critical stuff, but with some smaller project, and then grows over time.
Is there a new way around the requirement to rebuild your entire replication topology after upgrading versions? (say 9.4 to 9.5) You get a new master ID when running the initdb step, and doing this throws everything else in the topology off. TIA
I believe the longest valid instruction is 17 bytes, but it's been years since I knew how to construct it.
Extracting building height using OpenStreetMap and open LiDAR data (2014)
Versioning is where the Microsoft world, and probably all graphical word processors suck big-time.

The world of pain I go through when I have to collaborate with partners in government or defence, sending back and forth word files from various word versions and tracking comments and changes leaves me losing the will to live.

Oh if we would only have the GitHub GUI for Office files!
You can do things like this in Postgres as well - my point was that the database are designed to solve distributed systems problems, so your database of choice is a good place to solve those problems.

I couldn't make a universal statement about where the constraints you're talking about should go without knowing the business rules for the application.
On HN last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895134
I wouldn't consider heterogeneous computing and vector instructions "going back to a CISC-like model". RISC is actually continuing a slow but steady march forward, with the simplicity of AArch64 being a notable step along the way.

I tend to think of "CISC" as complex instruction encodings, smaller register files, complex sets of addressing modes, lack of orthogonality in instructions, etc. None of these aspects are gaining in popularity for new designs. The only one I can think of that gained any popularity is Thumb-like compressed instruction sets, which aren't so much "CISC" as "don't spend opcode space for no reason".
KDB+ is not 20kLoC of dense C++.
I guess I already covered that in the culture of desiring parties to choke. Whether it's a vendor or your own employees, leaders that rule by fear like to find scapegoats to shift blame away from themselves and take credit for others' efforts. The people that know better are effectively kept away from any form of power or under-resourced, so they'll always be too small to succeed.

I'm familiar with a number of very large deals done basically between C-level to C-level where the scope of IT projects has nothing to do with technologies but entire about cost savings - literally "I will save you $n MM / yr in opex so you can get your bonuses" and other vendors get shut out. Sometimes these deals work out, other times they don't and the executive is basically ousted. Companies with bad politics and enormous cronyism may have worked fine for decades, but they just may not be doing as well anymore unless you're on Wall Street and you make so much money it doesn't matter how it's done.
Thanks, didn't know that! Nice.
post hoc, ergo propter hoc :)
Is this meant as a joke? It's just a description of the page behind the misleading link.
I'd like to know LaTeX.
And of course played with it a few times.

The issue is, I write something that requires a document editor like once month (if) and it's usually a minimal number of pages. I do it so infrequently it's always a huge pain even using Libre Office. And every time I think "it really ought to be possible to do this with Vim" (which I suppose LaTex would solve, and that's a big plus). It's just the learning curve/benefit ratio isn't there yet.
The issue is that there were Floyd and Hendrix then, but not now. So the survivorship bias is not applicable in this case as nobody said there wasn't junk then.

(And actually what the parent talks about goes beyond Floyd and Hendrix, which are not counter-culturish or high culture themselves anyway(.