skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note that this does not necessarily imply these people are useless in real-life tasks. It just means they are bad at passing exams.

This is why I would never get through Google's interviewing process.

I understand that some people are bad at doing these types of tasks on the spot.

But what about training yourself to get better at working like this, by working through exercises, having friends help you out, etc?

Maybe it's unfair of me to comment because I'm not in the same boat, but surely there is a way for most people who are currently inherently bad at this class of problem to work on getting better at it, rather than just always assuming that a company like Google or Rethink would never hire them.
Okay, when I first saw that I thought it looked bad, like PHP or something. But then I realised strings are just [char], and that's not so bad. Compiling away the labels sounds like a good optimisation, especially given the wire format and evolvability. Three line terminators? Ugh, but no worse than "public static void".

If Erlang is suffering, why has no-one written a better front end compiler with saner syntax or a static type system?
Is Partisanship a Drug?
I used the linked-list question for years as well. I think our phone screen was harder -- it probably only filtered out about 60%-75% of our applicants rather than 95%.

It's a good one. I have an awesome follow-up to it that it sounds like your interviewees would never get to anyway :-)
The "until we all have retina displays and 4 megapixel digital cameras." from sesqu's summary is what makes it still relevant. Or newly relevant?
I admit this has been nagging me for a while (especially as it is with some regularity they find hosts whose sites have been widely hacked); I keep meaning to do some digging and find out one way or the other but never had the time.
I agree with you that it's not even wrong, but I disagree with your reasoning. I think (2) is the natural intended meaning of the question.

The problem I have is attempting to assign a probability to something that isn't reasonably known to be based on randomness. Did the questioner arrive at this statement by picking an arbitrary child and then declaring his gender and day of birth? Or did he pick his favorite child and declare his gender and day of birth? Would he have used this same question if they had both been born on Tuesday, or would have have picked a different distinguishing feature?
Pomodoro Cheat Sheet - for the busy but organized programmer
The point on the company's team is the most salient, I think. If this is your first startup, making sure you're a good fit for them and they're a good fit for you is really important. Consider a couple of the reasons people join startups:

1) To learn. If you join a company with bad founders, poor communication or inexperienced members you can still learn, but there are barriers to learning that are unnecessary.

2) To have a significant stake in something new. If your team does not value you, it's easy to get discouraged and stop caring about the product or to feel marginalized and worker-beeish: If you wanted to build something for someone else, why not just work for a more established company?

3) To build work experience. If you don't fit with the team or the team sucks, it's going to be really hard to put on your resume for your next venture/application.

In short, at an early stage startup, your place on the team can literally make or break the product. If you guys work well together, the product will fail or succeed on it's own merits; if you don't work well together it can doom the company.

Be smart.
daverecruit dot sc shift+2 gmail dot com = daverecruit.sc@gmail.com.

It's not rocket science, folks.
For some reason - given the DC context - I read your comment as the event occurring at The Front Page. :-)

I'll be doing what I can to attend this event - maybe there are more of us in DC than you (or I) thought?
Google Maps API Turns 5
Sencha Getting Sassy with CSS
Thanks for pointing that out - too bad I missed the last one!
What does this mean? The article also states they ask other questions in which the candidate can respond in any language of their choice.

The language isn't important here, it's knowing the algorithm and being able to put your ideas into code.

You could ask the same exact question in Java and you should be able to get the same answer from people.
I didn't know about condition variables either, but it seems like the questions are drawn from their own problem domain, concurrency (condition variables, multitasking modes, threads vs coroutines). It's fair enough to ask at an interview if that's what is used in your code, but I don't agree that 'what is a condition variable' is of the same level of 'fundamentalness' as 'reverse a linked list'. A graphics programmer will probably find people who don't know their transformation matrices by heart lacking in fundamental knowledge, too, but in the end it's just one concept that is taught once over a 4 year degree, and after that is only relevant for people in that specific subfield.

The article says 'Because they’re part of a core body of knowledge taught in any undergraduate curriculum worth its salt, and because in some form or another, they came up in our daily work' - I can agree with asking it because of the second part of that, but I don't agree that all the questions presented in the blog post are in the category of the first part.
What is there not to get? Running a business costs money for very obvious reasons: salaries, office space, computers, servers, marketing. Even for a very frugal early stage company that is usually hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Those costs tend to exist regardless of whether the idea is simple or not.
Chatroulette is fun. Chatroulette is silly.
Chatroulette as a cultural mainstay? Nah.

I hate to bring business into this, but Chatroulette never really scored that high on a net promoter score — even if people recommended that I play with Chatroulette, it was under the guise of something illicit and/or taboo. Most reports of Chatroulette were negative, and it was only taboo feeding the fire of people looking at it. Once. And then fading away.

Once you're there, Alexey's Law kicks in: your probability of seeing a penis is almost 100% after three or so "Next"s.

As much as I loved the concept, Chatroulette was ruined by the typical scourge of the Internet: male sexual frustration.
What I have found in terms of co-founders is that people will join when you have traction.

At least in my circle, people aren't risk takers and wouldn't stop their own personal project to work on someone else project.

With so many people having problems finding co-founders, I would suggest they implement something and get some traction. After, find a co-founder who now you can offer less equity since they weren't there to share the initial risk then approach investors.
A box. A big box.
I can only use myself as a point of reference-- I'm in the early stages of setting up some referral programs for my business (and am interested in zferral), and where the idea of having people refer business to my site for an affiliate fee sounds fine, the idea of those same people trying to round up other affiliates for me, well, skeeves me out.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to keep the incentives clear and close. But maybe that's just me.
There was a time when computer programmers were often also very good musicians. People liked to suggest this was so because of a mystical math/music connection, but I always thought it was because musicians were used to practicing to improve their skills.
It seems they're all some type of "monitor".
For me, it's one guy 'liking' YouTube videos.
Well, maybe you are right about the fact that I don't use github for the good reasons. Mainly, I don't blog, host website and I don't comments on my own line of code. I mean, I'm a bit weird to use github to host my git repository. Now that I think of it, I might try to email posterious my git repository and blog on github.

I've used github before for school and yes, I was paid 0$/hour to work on those projects. Even with the "micro" package, we couldn't even be three students because only one collaborator was allowed. It's relative.. but 7$/month (~30$ for the semestry) for ~15 meg seems over priced for me.

All I'm saying is that the micro package isn't "that" micro and that you should pay for what you use. And thinking I'm not their "target" is wrong because there is more chance for me to use github later for real projects if I have used it during my university time.

But maybe you are right and I should switch to cheaper substitutes. I know lot of my colleague are doing it and more and more people on internet blog about them switching from github to other "cheaper" alternatives. In my opinion, it's way better for github to reduce their prices then to see users leave for alternatives.
I understand these use cases, but I'm not sure the attachments related to these things are already in my email frequently enough for this to be useful.

My voicemail is on my cellphone or in Google voice (where it already has a humorous machine translation that might be good enough.) If I want to take a picture of a product, the closest camera is in my phone and there's already an Amazon app for that.

Perhaps you could de-emphasize the "attachment" part, which makes me think of files and serious emailing, and emphasize "send a picture" which I can do quickly from my phone. I know it's the same thing, but the different wordings send my brain in different directions.
A history of the telescope
A nice big filing cabinet that's sorted alphabetically. It's been great. I put things in manila folders that are labeled with a label maker. Straight out of GTD. It's helped me a lot.
hmm here is my solution for solving the reverse the list problem

Reverse(pStart)
{
pOld = null
pCursor =pStart
while (pCursor !=null)
Change(pCursor,pOld) // Passed by reference
}

void Change(pCursor, pOld)
{
temp = pCursor.next
pCursor.next = pOld
pOld = pCursor
pCursor = temp
}
not syntactically correct of course, took me 5 minutes
We have been testing this feature for a few months now at Shopify and it seriously takes GitHub to the next level. Really amazing and kudos to the team.
How would you reverse a singly linked list without traversing it? (and without knowing implementation details too I guess - doing pointer arithmetic and storing the size somewhere else doesn't count).
Unless I'm missing something (likely given the author's reputation), he goes off the rails on the very first page when he defines a pixel's coverage as [0,1] and not [0,1). Fill-convention discipline is at least as important as sampling considerations.
I think it's better to start high and appear generous and in touch with your customers when you release at a new-lowest-price based on a careful gauge of customer reaction.

In other words: yeah, definitely, but I think we should stay tuned.
IPhone, Facebook, oAuth 2.0 and the Graph API. A Tutorial, Part 2.
When you ask someone to reverse a linked list, do you mean 'in place'?
Of course, the path to buying ONE of these things is a long, twisting road through sales reps and the like. Why can't I just buy one online at a reasonable price?
I like the visual representation of what the service does, but the images are small. The result images are essentially your product, but they're cropped too much.
This is the sort of thing someone might write if their entire exposure to Erik Naggum's writing was that single blog post.

Your summary is inaccurate.
Yes, and still mostly down an hour later (SF).
When are you going to release the results? I'd really like to understand different local startup scenes around Europe better and your survive could shed some light to that aspect.
Don't get me wrong, I think people will continue to buy "desktop" class computers for a long time to come, and in great numbers, so I believe Windows on the desktop has a long and prosperous future ahead of it. But so far as where the growth is these days, it's all in mobile.
I'll believe it when I see it. Just a few bits quickly found in Google News archive search:

November 2008: http://www.macworld.com/article/150187/2010/03/att_verizon_i...

November 2009: http://www.crn.com/mobile/221600785;jsessionid=WQM2VISJVVS4B...
The best way to look at it is instead of scheduling your work and fitting in relaxing/hobbies on the side, pick a few high-happiness activities and make /them/ your schedule. E.g., I will play soccer every Tuesday evening. Commit yourself to always doing them and try to not feel tempted to skip, or feel guilty for doing them.

This will significantly increase your ability to feel motivated working at other times (not just increased productivity, but ability to work longer hours other days)
why wouldn't you scan your tax returns?
A degree is simply a certificate of minimal competency. There's other ways to demonstrate competency than spending $100k on a degree.

I'm speaking from experience. I quit college during my sophomore year, got multiple job offers, and took a high-paying job writing compilers. How'd I do it? Entirely because I had a portfolio of substantial projects under my belt.
Street-Legal Tron Lightcycles Are Up For Auction
"Some of them just wanna gross you out- see goatse, 2 girls 1 cup"

No, don't. Please, just don't. Let them die a quiet, unremarked death.
Good old Tim Minchin (That quote is from Storm, if you don't remember.)
I've been doing the startup thing for almost 3 years now, and I will absolutely and unequivocally say that not only can you afford to spend time on a hobby, you must if you want to avoid bottom-of-the-barrel burnout. I love what I do, but if I didn't have other things to do, I would have burnt out about two and a half years ago. Having distractions allows me to recharge and refocus.

I'm a father and a husband. I play the bass guitar, I mod games. I work on small exploratory projects. I hack on Android development. All of these things are important parts of my life - they anchor and stabilize me, and enable me to work for obscene amounts of time at a stretch. I will burn hard, doing 16 hour days for two weeks straight, in order to hit deadline X, but being able to switch directions allows me to escape burnout and continually enjoy what I do.

An important part of being a founder is knowing when to stop working and do something else. You're good to nobody if you're so mentally blasted that you can't function. It seems somewhat contradictory, but my productivity shot through the roof when I learned to pay attention to my body and my mind, to know when they were good to work and when I needed to stop and do something else for a little while.

Don't give up the piano. Not only can you afford to keep it, I don't think you can afford to lose it.
I'm just amazed you're a scanner, but you keep paper manuals.

Don't worry, I understand it sounds peculiar.

One reason I keep manuals is for when I re-sell the product later, like you said. I also freecycle a lot of stuff, I feel it's nice to give people the manual. Also they are not zero-effort to scan - some of them are larger than letter size, you have to take the staples out if you have a feeder-scanner and so on. Given I can fit them all in one filing drawer, it doesn't seem to be worth the hassle. And if that is all you are filing, it is actually faster to pull the manual out of the drawer than it is to look for it on a computer, print out the page with the diagram you want, and so on.

If it helps, I generally throw out boxes. I used to keep them for resale but it got out of control, so the only boxes I keep now is for stuff where the box comes with special packing inserts that I would need if I had to move - that means computer cases and monitors basically.
Kitchen Towels are not the most exciting of demo images :)
If universities only sold knowledge, public libraries would be out of business. Ideally, a diploma would be a rough estimate of one's knowledge. Theoretically, a 4.0 student knows more than a 3.0 student... theoretically! Most people do not care about knowledge, they care about a piece of paper that allows them to work, make money, support their families, and finance their vices.

Many of my former EE classmates ended up going into business, consulting, banking... and I am sure it wasn't their expertise on analog VLSI or DSP that landed them the positions, it was a piece of paper with a lot of good grades that, essentially, said: "I can be an obedient worker, I will put in the long hours without questioning the status quo, and I react to carrots & sticks".

If you actually care about knowledge, you can learn a tremendous lot in 4 years, but don't assume that most people are like you, because they aren't. Except if you go to Caltech or MIT, of course, but the girls are ugly and the parties suck at such schools...
Very much so! It would also stop people from emailing something then assuming it's broken when they don't get a reply a few seconds later.
from my CS class last sem I clearly remeber this one: Semaphores and Monitors are different.
Monitors are implemented by compiler to make sure that thread dont mess up with the memmory.However Semaphores are implemented by the porgrammers.
A semaphore contains a value on which either up or down can be called to indicate its status also it has a queue which contains process which are sleeping and are waiting for the up on the semaphore to be called.
Actually, doesn't that prove that having a co-founder is as important as pg argues? You need co-founders for moral support as much as anything. Having your co-founder leave puts you in a bleak situation; it kills morale. Not to mention there were probably external factors about their business and market that lead them to believe more and more that they picked the wrong idea or executed "poorly".

Having more "passion" as a single founder doesn't really make you better off or more likely to succeed. IMO, its a buzzword, because everyone wants to be successful and will claim they have dieing "passion", but at the end of the day all that matters is results.

What I think happened here: They picked the wrong market/idea or executed poorly. They weren't seeing results they wanted; they lost morale. Eventually one of them figured out it wasn't going to work out, didn't believe or have the patience to iterate their idea and decided to leave. The startup was finished. This is probably what happens to 99% of failed startups.
"This hacker culture of thinking everything can be solved with guru developer skills needs to stop."

Why? I don't see a downside to self-assuredness, even downright arrogance, when it comes to tackling problems. Sure, maybe every problem can't be solved by every person who tries, but why should you or anyone else care if they are willing to give it a shot?
> the interview process is something we won’t compromise on.

Sounds like you're caught up in a big circlejerk, to be honest. Your interview process is terrible and that's why you aren't finding any employees. You won't compromise on your process? What? You should be less worried about your process and more worried about finding quality employees (hint: your process isn't working).

Asking people to write a program over the phone isn't going to work. Have you ever written a program while on the phone? I haven't and I'm not going to. It's so far out of my comfort level that I'd probably end up looking like a moron.

Your test sounds like it's too much about what a person knows and not enough about how a person performs. You'd be much better off looking at a persons resume and, if you're satisfied with that, just talking to the person instead of worrying about whether or not they can reverse a linked list in C off the top of their head. If you want them to write you some sample code, let them do it at their leisure instead of with you breathing down their neck over the phone.

Frankly, reading about your interview approach just kind of pisses me off. What's more likely: all the candidates suck or your interview process sucks?
If you are doing any kind of image processing, yes. It will be relevant forever.
Clojure development with IntelliJ's La Clojure Plugin
Solving this problem (permutations) in Haskell helped me understand the list monad, which in turn helped me think about nested-loop algorithms in general and how they should be structured in code. So thanks. It was a fun exercise and I learned something.

I am pretty sure I nailed it. But I have been asked questions like this at interviews and screwed them up (e.g., at Facebook, which asked me something very similar and I failed to get it right). The notable thing was that at home, sitting at my desk, I wasn't afraid of sitting silently and figuring it out. It took me about 3 minutes of silence for my brain to organize itself enough to solve the problem. I'm not willing to spend 3 minutes in silence at an interview, and yet if I just jumped in I would go down a lot of wrong alleys, become confused, and screw it up.

Is there room at an interview for someone to silently figure something out, without someone waiting on you, asking to "show me your thought process"?
Relevant

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/chatroulette-enlists-shawn-...
Any media site still reporting or echoing unsubstantiated "Verizon iPhone" rumors should be embarrassed by now.
although I think the reason why it was so convoluted was because he didn't want to just write his email on a public forum for fear of spam </hint>
It's not just math class. It's every class.

I've felt for some time that the incentives we're given in school are incorrectly formulated: performance on massive standardised tests gear your brain toward an ability for short-term rote memorisation.

How many classes did you take in high school or college and pass with flying colours, but if you had to recall anything but the name of a core concept you would fail? At Michigan we called it "academic bulimia" — binge on textbooks the night of the exam for the class, purge it all over the paper, take your grade and repeat whilst you spent the rest of your time doing something you felt was more important.
Account need some kind of username. So why not make the username the email address, which does double duty for retrieving lost passwords, which is stated
Ask HN: Are advertising agencies broken? 
I've been learning a lot about this space lately and figure that some people here may have worked in it. Is what I'm seeing correct?

I think the traditional advertising holding companies are structurally broken. Particularly those that have been unable to make acquisitions of digital agencies. Ad companies have been turned on their head - they were put together in order to provide economies of scale on purchasing for media that gave scale (e.g., TV). Digital is the exact opposite - it is fragmented and targeted. It doesn't lend itself to the way holding companies are set up.

Technological expertise combined with global delivery and creative talent is what matters - not fiefdoms of agencies whose big pitch is creative with the benefit of purchasing at scale. Moreover, digital removes a great deal of inefficiency from the marketplace so the overall ad pie is shrinking.
You should definitely get this stuff sorted out before you sign anything.

As one other commenter pointed out, much of this is CYA garbage to ensure that you aren't using company resources to support your own extracurricular activities.

As long as your company time is spent in accordance with the company's wishes, I don't think they're going to take issue with you.

By the way, is this at-will employment or contracted employment?
In the OP's defense, this is how Google interviews, and they've done ok.
FYI, WoW has a grand total of around 30 engineers working on the game doing development. The majority of headcount is support and ops (~4000).
They're saying that they use http://typewith.me

And honestly those questions that they ask candidates seem reasonable for the type of work they're doing.