skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I have done interviews, I too was truly surprised by how many "programmers" could not program even simple things.

But I do think you should realize what type of programmer you are looking for. Most of their questions mentioned assume a knowledge of C. I have not used C since high school, even in college it was optional for CS majors, and a lot of programmers majored in things other than CS (I started in math, I know another truly good programmer that started in nuclear physics).

This is great if you are looking for C programmers, but I would not consider them basic things any developer should know.
How to Lead a Self-Managing Team
The idea of the phone as a dock for the tablet is an elegant design concept. Let's hope it supports SIP.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6789/ps...
Oh, thanks!

That's weird though. When I submitted it at first, it did show a submission to the same URL, but from ~160 days ago with only 2 upvotes (hence the ? at the end.)
I actually had a big bar across the top earlier saying "Student? Get in touch."
A Plain Text Personal Organizer
I've also noticed there's this phenomenon I'll call Reverse India Off-Shoring:

1. western companies hire Indian engineers off-shore because they're cheaper and yet equivalent, supposedly

2. online forums flooded with barely readable questions by folks with Indian names where the thing being asked about is so simple and basic that it basically amounts to "would someone please do my job for me? k thx." How do I print a string. How do I write data to disk. How do I install Apache. Etc. That level of question.

I've seen that 100's of times in the last few years. It's alternatingly both funny and infuriating.
I have said it before.

Seymour Papert's book "Mindstorms" is a must read if you are serious about changing education for the better.

http://www.papert.org/
It's fine as long as you keep consistent naming. Calling 3.7 version 4 is dumb, if you're going to call it 4 then bump up the version number, if you're not going to bump up the version number until later then stop calling it 4.
IPhone 4 Users Beware - Double check your plan
The chrome of Firefox is better now: the line between the bookmarks bar and the navigation bar is no longer here and the buttons are squared.
It really looks like Safari, wich is good for minimalism and Apple-compliance, but sad for diversity and innovation.

I really enjoy this update, BUT do not enable the "tab on top" feature. It's not fully implemented yet and it's really ugly.

(I have also the two icons issue.)
Too little, far too late.

I really don't know if the media companies know just how much they have already lost - at this point most of the under 30 crowd downloads without even the tiniest feeling that perhaps, just maybe, they shouldn't or the companies deserve payment for what they have created.

At this point their only hope is to make it more convenient than piracy, which is possible to do now but won't in a couple of years and then slowly ween people away from free content.
If someone doesn't know some definition, they can look it up in a book.

If someone isn't able to solve problems, that isn't something you can fix easily.

I'm tired of all these people who do poorly on tests turn around to blame the test. Everyone is nervous during tests and interviews. Those who succeed do so because they can solve those problems like the back of their hand.
Schools build their own software (and why that's wrong)
Not quite: If you have a retail brokerage account you could have put an order in to purchase TSLA anytime this morning when the price was between $18-$20.
Formal CS education has many merits, but listening to the interview made me realize that aptitude, motivation and a conducive training environment can go an incredibly long way in producing competent developers.
Countries like India have very large populations to draw on and the seed costs there for such an approach are very low.
I am not sure if the same method would work so well in 'developed' countries where there is such a strong 'you need a degree' mindset.
you make a valid point, and i completely agree. It's about more efficiently honing in on the best candidates. And the trick is to do that early in the process, especially when the hiring process is typically front-loaded with mostly crap candidates.

I've thought A LOT about this problem... so much so that my web-startup is attempting to solve one aspect of this problem (see my HN profile for the link).
I was hoping it would look like Dwarf Fortress. :(
Permutations are much harder than reversing a linked list. Actually I'm interested in what solution you had in mind. I can only think of these three:

1) Do it recursively like permutations(xs) = [[x] + p for p in permutations(xs - [x]) for x in xs].

2) Systematically generate all combinations of letters, only print the ones that are permutations of the original.

3) Systematically generate the permutations in lexicographical order.

All three would require pretty significant effort to get correct on a whiteboard in a language like C (without high level list comprehensions & operations).
Now all it needs is a text editor and it's done.
Actually, I think Conrad Hilton revolutionized the hotel industry - the creation of business hotels, providing a similar experience around the world, 99 year leases on property etc. His autobiography "Be My Guest" is actually quite good.
Yes, but I know (or at least believe) that I'm technically competent. Therefore, the more technical questions I'm asked, the better I'm likely to do on the interview and therefore more likely to get the job.

And also, if they don't ask technical questions, they don't have a bozo filter and I'd risk having to work with bozos.

It helps, I suppose, that I enjoy explaining things to people.
No, the post explicitly said that the app was priced at $4.99
I always just do it recursively and go "oh did you mean efficiently?"

I mean reversing a link list is literally reverse the tail of the list recursively then append the head to the end. Base case is the empty list. Maybe 8 lines of C for reverse, a few more for appending to the end (easy) and the struct for a Node.
It's hard to find people that can answer programming questions while applying for programming jobs. People generally do OK on the "soft" questions appropriate for the phone. "Explain automatic testing." "What kind of editor / IDE do you use?" etc.

I have been surprised when doing interviews how many people fail the basic soft questions. I have had people saying they were senior programmers not know what automatic testing was and who did not understand what an IDE was at all. (I have also had people tell me they preferred simple text editors to full blown IDEs, but they always knew what they were doing.)

And I concur with your basic concept. Even granted the pressure of an interview, if they cannot do the really simple stuff like fizzBuzz on the board or at least get an answer that only has minor syntax issues than I would be very dubious of their ability to program seriously.
How does YouTube handle nudity? I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on there before. Is it automated or does it have an approval process? Or do they just rely on dmca-like takedown requests?
Mixergy Interview with Khan Academy's Salman Khan
Cisco ? They never got wireless working on the Flop Camera.
But you do not have to experience a feeling to fully enjoy its opposite.
Why do I feel that #2 is the most important thing on this list? I'd imagine that any VC firm would invest in a company that is "growing faster than Twitter did", no matter who the CEO was or what the specific market was.

From all of my experience with VCs, they are primarily driven by usage graphs that go up and to the right. Traction seems to cure all ills.
> Even with the "micro" package, we couldn't even be three students because only one collaborator was allowed.

Why did you use private repositories for school work?
That rainbow mode also looks useful.

http://julien.danjou.info/rainbow-mode.html
Google scrambles to save Internet license in China - Yahoo Finance
I say drive for an hour or two, find some place with streaming water and some trees or just a huge green field, and take a day there.
Changing the policy of a large corporation is like turning a tanker ship at sea. To avoid upsetting the balance, one has to go verrrry slowly.

This was a load and clear signal that Youtube knows full well that the time of HTML5 is coming soon.
Maybe HTML 5 isn't ready for YouTube or Hulu, but for people who just want to post a video of their cat on their blog, it is a lot simpler to use the video tag than a Flash solution.
They're both O(N). Pseudocode for the other way:

1. copy head of list consed with nil
2. copy next item consed with previous
3. goto 2 while next item is not nil

That's N*(cost of a copy and a cons). Granted, it's not as fast in absolute terms, but the slowdown is a constant factor. You're certainly not doing N operations on each item.
The pie chart is based on this paper: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/oltpperf-sigmod08.... The pie chart numbers have been updated to reflect the right charts in the paper, but the graphic hasn't. We'll try to get that fixed for future presentations.

The point is very real. Stavros, Dan, Sam and Mike took the Shore RDBMS and stuck it on top of memory. Then they removed parts of it and measured the performance difference. Logging, buffer management, and concurrency management make up about 93% of the instructions run and 88% of the cycles for TPC-C "new order". There was no single area that dominated this overhead, so removing one piece doesn't make enough of a difference. Results on Oracle, SQL Severer and DB2 might be different, but it's hard to imagine they'd be dramatically different.

Because VoltDB was built without these sources of overhead, it's usually quite a bit faster than systems that take legacy RDBMSs and back them with memory.

VoltDB has limitations (especially in 1.0), but if your workload fits, it will go as fast as you need it to.
I too had too look up wtf a condition variable is - but it was because everybody calls them "monitors" which I did have a couple of course that hit on.
The trick is to not fire up your text editor until the very last moment. Big design up front works for (difficult) algorithmic problems, and it's the only way that works.

I'm sure you could do it if you took a piece of paper and drew a linked list with boxes.
I don't want to be rude and I am making some assumptions here (also no knowledge or experience of running a company). But if you have 12 people dev, assuming they are being paid for their work and not working pro-bono. Assuming its a company. You are probably spending somewhere around 600k - 750k per year on these developers. Surely 100/month is not too much?

Like I said, I am making some assumptions. Maybe I am missing something.
Yes, the 3.7 release was renamed to 4.0. See http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/05/10/firefox-4-fast-powerful-a... for details. Not all of the new UI is in nightly builds yet (much of it is just finishing the design phase).
Haha great. I will start making a long list including everything down to the comic book I drew in crayon when I was in elementary school :)

and also a statement reserving your current and future rights

How do you think that should be worded? Maybe something like "I reserve the right of ownership to any future projects, inventions, writings, etc that I develop after beginning employment with Company X in such cases that the aforementioned projects do not use Company X resources, do not compete with Company X, do not negatively affect my performance on Company X projects, and are strictly and independently developed during my personal free time"?

The offer is good, I just bought a car so now I have loans, and I am starting in two weeks so it would be foolish to bail. I realize they have to do this and I have no problem cooperating, but I just want to make sure I am covered all the way to the kitchen sink :). Not working on some side projects for a year or two would be extremely difficult for me. Hopefully, it is just a formality and I can get it worked out. I sent emails to my team lead, the HR department, and their help desk for new hires. Hopefully, I will get some informative emails tomorrow morning.
I think it's more about steganography than about poetry.

The presence of mathematical patterns is very plausible, and their Puthagorean origin is probable (the musical scale he allegedly used is of Pythagorean origin, and he has been hanging out with some of them.

Puthagoreans were to my knowledge the first initiatic society in occident. They were very secretive and relied on oral transmission for most of their teachings. Rational numbers and the law of harmony had a metaphysical/mystic meaning to them. IIRC, the poor dude who first proved that sqrt(2) is irrational was thrown at sea with a boulder tied to its ankles.

Regarding the presence of the "mean" word at ~61.8% of multiple texts, if the same word is used at that very spot and only there in several texts it has probably been placed there intentionaly, possibly to tie its meaning to Pythagorean symbolism/mysticism.

He might also have been enjoying the activity of concealing math references for its own sake. Being highly intellectual, he might actually have been of the geeky type :-). Since the Greeks didn't have any jargon for discussing about math, they just overloaded other common words to communicate mathematical ideas; it would be Quite amusing to discover that he sprikled its work with math puns :-).

This is of course highly speculative, but it's so fun to play this kind of detective games.
There's probably a big market in the US for efficiently retraining college graduates who got the wrong degree (as long as they can swallow their pride).
Hi,

Is it possible to publish the algorithms and technique you are using to prevent spoofing.
It would really be a big help to us as well as every body else.

Thanks,

Al
So what do I do if I want to write a function that takes another function as a parameter, and some of the possible functions use Maybe and some use Either? What would this code look like?
The next version was originally going to be called 3.7, but it was later renamed to Firefox 4.

Starting with beta 1, there will be no more references to Firefox 3.7. As we speak, all version strings are being updated to refer to 4.0 instead.
I don't understand the title. Why is this a killer feature for Java Developers? The Django admin is the killer feature for most anyone.

For example, even if you are coming from Rails, the Django Admin is a more refined interface than basic Rails scaffolding, and most any "perfectionist with deadlines" can appreciate that.
"the art of sketching half-baked solutions out loud while waving one's hands"

You mean, teaching?
Each time I see a post about Emacs, I get jealous because I prefer Vi's text editing.

If only there existed a good modal editor with a good scripting language behind it...

I keep hoping that Yi (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi) goes somewhere, but it doesn't seem too active.
IPhone 4
I tend to replay events from earlier in the day or the day before in my head, and sometimes I find myself responding or criticizing my actions verbally. It's usually while traveling to and from work, but it's mildly embarrassing when I've arrived at my destination and mumble something.
I don't really see much point in writing open source software - either I keep it to myself (isn't really good enough to release, or only designed to solve my problem) or I spend my time doing contract work.

In addition I find git to be fostering bad habbits (no default push of private branches), and github to be an abomination (stuff that relates to my code and source control should not be accessed in a 3th party website, but in the tool itself).
What AI algorithms vs what image recognition algorithms?
Here are the design mockups for how Firefox 4 should eventually look by default on Mac OS X: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Mac_Theme_Mockups

These designs are not fully implemented in current nightly builds, and are subject to change. Also, here are the Windows and Linux mockups:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Linux_Theme_Mockups

There are quite a few performance improvements going into Firefox 4, with a strong focus on startup time. See http://autonome.wordpress.com/tag/startup/ for detailed tracking of Firefox startup improvements.
Ask HN: How can I track my videos?
Is there any tool like clicky for videos? I could really use one now.
Seems to be working very well: http://cl.ly/1W6b
Heatmaps, iRules Style: Part 1
People pay for cable not so they can watch specific shows, but because they have adapted to always have the TV on no matter what. People use TV as their ambiance—an empty room with the TV blaring is considered "silent." Perhaps Hulu has a random play function, but I think people who pay for cable do so because it's a very important and indispensable part of their lives. If you've ever told anyone that you don't pay for or watch broadcast television at all, you've probably seen their surprise or disbelief.
It's a question of opportunity cost. Are the new features worth $100/month as opposed to the old way of paying $10-20/month?

Some people will say yes. Some people will say no.

It's a little silly to say "Well, you're spending 600k-750k a year, you can afford it." They can also afford a bouncy castle.

The right question is--does this provide enough value to justify the cost? For the parent, no, it doesn't.
And I would imagine they can charge advertisers premium prices for ads shown to paid subscribers as opposed to free viewers.
Our small and medium plans are unchanged, the only price increase was for organization plans. Existing business plan customers have also been grandfathered in, they don't have to upgrade if they don't want to.
I guess if you really want Java developers to look seriously at Django then I think Jython would be the way to go. JRuby has had a massive push lately with Sun's JRuby team jumping over to Engine Yard (http://www.pcworld.com/article/169145/suns_jruby_team_jumps_...) and gained incredible achievements with running Rails on the JVM. As I understand, Ruby is slowly becoming the #1 language choice for Java shops to work with next to the Java language. I assume the quality of JRuby has to do with this. I guess a similar thing has to happen for Jython if Python/Django want to attract Java developers in a similar way.
Duty & Failure
Hulu Launchs "Hulu Plus" Premium Service
That extra code :-) First I wrote everything to manipulate a linked list and test it and then I wrote the reverse function. Since I wrote a insert at front function, the reverse function is small. I must add that I am not a fast typer.
I'll gladly pay $9.99 a month to have the privilege and honor of still having to sit through their ads.
for people who just want to post a video of their cat on their blog

The simplest way is via a YouTube embed. So if it isn't ready for YouTube, it isn't ready for the web.
They're calling it 4. This isn't the official beta. The 3.7 are just old executables lingering in the FTP folder.
PrimeSense, the company behind Microsoft's XBox 3D sensoring technology
Scientists discover how the brain encodes memories at a cellular level
One of the main points of linked lists is that you can manipulate the structure (sort, reverse, etc.) without copying the payloads.

So in C, always in place unless explicitly specified otherwise.
StarCraft II region lock angers Australian gamers
I'm just working for a company trying to hire. Competent people are hard to find (as rethinkdb noted, 95% of applicants == fail), and when you find them, you pay for them. They are worth it.
Student-Run VC Funds: Education First, Returns Second
Foursquare is one of the few startups that I actively dislike (because they are responsible for much more noise than signal). At least in my mind, their brand represents some of the worst "Web 2.0"-era narcissism.

Their growth is certainly impressive, but I really wonder how useful Foursquare will be, outside tech enthusiasts living in big cities.
Curious that he thought ordering the vegetarian meal would make him seem less like a stereotypical terrorist. The standard, non-Halal meal would actually do a better job of establishing his non-Muslim bona fides.
void reverse_list(head) {
struct node* current = head;
struct node* last = NULL;
struct node* next;

while(current != NULL) {
next = current->next;
current->next = last;
last = current;
current = next;
}
}
How Researchers Realized Research 2000's Daily Kos Data Looked Faked
I don't follow the logic here or the bouncy castle analogy. A private repo adds more direct value to a company that has 12 devs than a bouncy castle (ok maybe indirectly it might make them happy and more productive, but its stretching a bit).

I understand the question of whether it provides value, and it would be sufficient argument if you are company with lets say ~50k/yr on expenses. But when you are spending (assumptions of course) 600k-750k JUST employing your dev team, I just don't see how this $1100/year is too much; esp when the cost is associated with a core aspect of your business.

We are not talking about renting a water cooler here.
hahah..nice one
I think choosing the meal full of pork would have been better than choosing the vegetarian meal, but I guess he had that partly covered by ordering wine.
Airbnb didn't invent vacation rentals or sublets. VRBO/Homeaway and Craigslist, the dominant players in the space, have been doing this for years. You bring up good bullet points but if they were real issues, Homeaway probably wouldn't be the $1B company it is today. This is nothing more than hotel lobby groups pushing a bill through their pockets. Occupancy rates are recovering from an all time low (as in lowest in 40 years) and they see cutting off vacation rentals as a strategy for improvement. Mayor Bloomberg even thanks the Hotel lobby groups in his press release http://bit.ly/9iNt3Q. Separately, there seems to be a misconception that Airbnb is hands off with taxes, when in fact hosts who meet the appropriate income standards are issued a 1099 form.

Over time, a city like NY will most likely see a drop in tourism if (a) if the vacation rental industry is removed from the playing field, and (b) hotel prices stay the same (or go back up to 2007 standards). There is a large class of travelers who cannot afford NYC on $300/night rates, and will likely still travel, but choose to spend their money elsewhere.
Regardless, who goes on a month-long honeymoon at all? Let alone being at a startup. No matter who you are, I'd say max is two weeks.

-----------
Edited my 'Irregardless' to 'Regardless'
I Got 99 Problems, but Developing Ain't One
It's irrelevant until you start applying rasterops to those pixels and areas.
Ask HN: How do well funded startups fail?
Any examples of startups that raised hundreds of millions of dollars but folded eventually?
Not to be a hater or be a potential-Twitter-doubter, and my thoughts about the product aside, what do these guys need $20 million for? The only exit for a company like FourSquare is a buyout, and is someone really going to pay $30m or $40m for FourSquare?
"Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this." Indeed... http://i.imgur.com/NWJut.png

Also, is it so difficult to not use PR-speak in a blog?