skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, US immigration law makes it very difficult to come here to "make money." Once you get a green card, you can do that, but then it would be difficult to convince smart young people to spend years as research assistants in PhD programs. So the US has created a system that makes it easier for a smart young person to come here as a sci/eng PhD student (but not so much as a law, mba, or medical student), and get hired provided they do sci/eng for a big corp or university for a while. Eventually, they'll be free, but usually at an age where they have spouses, children, and other things that keep them from doing what they would have done had they had this freedom a decade earlier.

Ok, that's a big of an exaggeration, but only a bit.
TheAwl has a solid little write-up about this: http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/another-journalism-changing-st...

"It is very difficult to get readers regularly returning to any site; it takes a blend of pumping out the content and getting linked by high-profile sites both in and out of its immediate topic — and a not-insignificant amount of luck — in order to do so. Internet behaviors can be very entrenched things!"
Nobody in America (meaning no programmers) has a reason not to know this stuff. You don't have to do it on daily basis to understand it. I have never in my life had to reverse a linked list, but I know how to do it. I don't see how these are unreasonable questions to ask, especially for a company that develops a database engine.
Better explanation would be great, still wondering what it does - What is the common use case ?
Direct link to Hulu's Blog Post: http://www.hulu.com/plus
> None had a media background.

With utter honesty; this was my biggest concern with the whole thing. I believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and they were "redirected" onto this idea.
They bootstrapped their business, but not the audience, i.e. they didn't magically start out with a built-in audience through a deal or prior celebrity, they had to build that up over time.
Doug Lea is my guess. We were writing algorithms, but they were machine learning algorithms so implementing our own concurrency abstractions wasn't a win.
Is this something that I should ask the firm to help me resolve/understand before I submit my paperwork?

Yes.

Most of the time these sorts of things are just boilerplate CYA garbage. I highly doubt they want your dining hall ratings website. I don't doubt however that they want to ensure that you are primarily committed to their business interests above your own.

If they stick on these terms, you'll probably also find that it's a shitty place to work and will be little fun, and offer little rewards as well.

You should bring this up with them, and likely spin it that this site is a low-effort sort of hobby of yours, and is a good platform to enable you to stay sharp on new technologies and put different things into play in a live environment. They should understand that in the long run it is to everyone's benefit that you have this little self-learning side project/hobby thing going on.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure their "Code of ethics" blurb is basically unenforceable and pointless.
It's hard to take people like Naggum very seriously when the languages they so self-righteously dismiss (C, C++, perl, Java) are used every day to build software at all scales of complexity and Lisp remains an essentially irrelevant niche.

He also completely misunderstands free software. It's not about giving things away for free. It's about sharing the grunt work so we can focus on doing new things.

Naggum is an extreme example of the somewhat common example of the grumpy old man that refuses to understand or accept change. You can find much better gurus if you want a guru.
I'll be applying for college this year. So, I am a would be undergrad and I think you are right in some ways but wrong in others.

You are right to say that;

>>>An undergraduate degree serves many purposes. For one, it indoctrinates you, which sounds evil, but is a necessary evil. Second, it allows you to find out what you like and what you don't. Third, by doing what you like and meeting like-minded people, you end up realizing who you are, not by introspection (fuck that new age BS), but through ?action. Fourth, it allows you to network with people from all walks of life and the most various fields. Fifth, it provides the skills necessary to accomplish something. You can stay 4 years at home studying by yourself, but you'll go crazy before you accomplish anything. Being in a structured environment for 4 years is a much gentler way of building a skill set that actually matters...<<<

Yet, in the longer run why are you doing that? It is corny to say that there is more to life than the pursuit of social prestige/money/luxury, but it's quite true.

I think of it this way; when I die I want to die knowing that I have lived life to its fullest potential, and for me that involves creating beautiful things. I might not be a special and unique snowflake, but my integrity is precious to me. If I rush down that path I have no doubt that I will lose myself, and what worth is a life like that?

For some people that path matches their core identity, but for me it simply doesn't. I don't know why, but I am just nuts about stuff like that.

You see, for me the beauty I see around me and the overwhelming beauty of the things I create is reality. It might starve me to death. Maybe not. I accept the risk as the price I shall pay for my freedom to create.

Oh and Sociology, Psychology, and women studies do matter, but the way they are currently taught is nothing but intellectual fraud.
You make good points. I can definitely see arguments for making it easier for bright, hard working, educated people to immigrate legitimately.

Personally, I think it might be wise for the US to consider providing a very fast and easy path to citizenship for people who earn PHDs here. In my current graduate studies I know many very bright students that could contribute tremendously to society in the US if they were actively encouraged to stay here after finishing their PHDs, and most of them would want that opportunity if they had it.
They aren't unreasonable demands, I'm just suggesting it's going to be easier to find people outside of the USA.
If Google manages to acquire ITA Software, ITA will bring Common Lisp with it to Google. That might be an interesting situation...
I upvoted you and I agree people should not make comments with just half of the story. But come on this is the internet. It's near real time now, and people will not wait for someone to tell their side before they can come to a conclusion. You guys should have taken a day to handle the outcome before sending the email. That being said, I think you guys had something going. Good luck on your next projects.
Here's the thing: you're not being asked to reverse a linked list because they expect you to implement one. 99% of the time, you'll just use a library (the other 1%, you're writing the library). You're being asked to reverse a linked list because it's bloody easy if you understand the fundamentals (what a linked-list is, how a loop works).
I think this is right; in the early stages (post YC funding) when they were doing a QA mailing list wwith some journalists they were just building the product.

(in fairness it appeared very fast and iterated really well from what I saw/heard)
I really really like it, but I can see this getting very expensive, very fast.
I'm currently using MongoDB for my application

You might want to make sure you're not losing data. http://www.blue74.com/?p=25
Yes, I wonder if it would be received with arms wide open.
http://ileriseviye.org/blog/?p=1221
It seems like the guys had the product prior to joining YC. it could more than a year in the making.
Games of code golf, "what's your favorite programming comic strip" threads, and "What language should I start learning now" threads made it way too easy to attain points without actually demonstrating real knowledge or expertise.

Actually, such threads are marked as 'community wiki' and there the reputation points aren't counted. The rest of the article is true, I also got tired of SO and mostly only google it.
My guess is it's massively taboo, so people want to try it. The total anonymity cancels out the taboo, so people feel they are free to do so.

Some of them just wanna gross you out- see goatse, 2 girls 1 cup

There's probably also some Freudian stuff going on.
It looks like a variant of a basic floorplan, the sort you would use when designing the layout of your office. I've never seen it used with respect to algorithms.
Common use cases:

transcribing voicemails from emails.

finding products for shopping without having to do the search yourself.
Yes, he is changing the numbering from pi to tau.
More fallout from the early to middle of the last decade bad electrolytic capacitor problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague).

But I'm not so sure "being too cheap" (not in the original headline) is a fair characterization of what happened.

Dell failed in this situation because A) They had insufficient surge capacity to deal with a widespread common mode failure (which may have been as much a problem with their volume as their minimal inventory system) and B) Decided to lie about the situation.

Amusing note: the law firm suing them was screwed by them.
I realize that but wishing that people applying for jobs actually knew what they are doing unfortunately is not going to help much. You can make a whole career without understanding linked lists. If you need people to work on database internals you either have to hire from the areas I mentioned or figure out how to poach people already doing this kind of work. The pool of applicants who just send in their resume generally does not contain the programmers you actually want to hire.
Sure, or at least chat on IRC some evening.
"Is it impossible to boostrap an audience on the web?".

It is nearly impossible unless you spam.
Most people's questions about programming problems are going to be somewhere in the middle of the distribution. As time goes on and all the most common questions have been asked, the site is going become increasingly long tail - the dominion of obscurists - and any social/reputational component which it may have once had is going to be reduced.
I know two separate groups of people who are both already working on such a project.
I think getting to be profitable is more important than finding a co-founder. It does indeed sound like neither really believed in the idea passionately.
How Google Can Bust Facebook Network Effects
Which leads to the question - should one strive to join a startup as an early employee or should one strive to be a cofounder?
Download Hulu Plus Now And Watch Free Videos: No Beta Code Required
Cisco Cius: Cisco Unveils Android-Based, Business-Focus Tablet Computer
yes, but only if you pay enough...
This makes my heart flutter with anxious optimism.
I am a consumer and I will be replacing cable with Hulu. Just saying.
"I still struggle to read most Haskell, and I certainly can’t use it to build anything"....but it's great; and, if you don't know all this cool esoteric stuff, you're ignorant.

Have heard/read similar posts from fans of other fringe languages: Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, ... There are grand claims of superiority, but with little practical evidence to bear out the claims.

I agree with other comments here -- the art of software design and programming is _generally_ independent of language. Languages, bad ones, inhibit good software engineering, and good ones enable if not encourage them (which is why good ones are typically minimal).
If you have to traverse a linked list at any time to reverse it, you're doing it wrong.
One thing to consider is that there are many people (myself included) who are really bad at solving problems under stress, especially next to a whiteboard.

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. Some companies (like Google) just accept the fact they will throw away some possibly good candidates because of the nature of the selection process — and that's fine, as long as you realize that.

Note that I'm talking about solving problems involving abstract thinking next to a whiteboard here. The part about people not knowing the difference between cooperative and preemptive multitasking is something I fully agree with — people who do not know that should not seek a job at a company that deals with anything low-level.
If mturk is the back end, you need to tell users that a human will listen to their voicemail and look at their stuff. I assumed you had voice recognition software and clever image stuff, not random humans. The privacy issues of this are horrid; at least make it obvious what will happen.
Black Swans have jumped the shark.
It's definitely a gamble. Especially since they only have 1.25m capital. I say only because we can glean a lot from the published salary structure. Throw a senior, 2 juniors, an intern, CEO, CTO and some admin people and you probably don't make it to 2 years.
And what percentage of the company does your job come with?
Lawsuit Brewing Over iPhone 4 Antenna Issues?
To someone who does know about this stuff, though, it seems completely fundamental. It's a total mystery (to me at least) how a half-decent programmer could avoid getting curious enough to figure out what a linked list is.

There's at least one other place you can get competent people who know about the fundamentals: academia. This is why Google tries so hard to lure people from academia.
This is why I'm glad I was a mathematics major :)
We fully recognize that we have a high false negative rate. We work every day to get it lower, but unfortunately there is only so much we can do without compromising the integrity of the process.
Actually this case isn't a counterexample. Paul wasn't someone Nathan recruited; more the opposite.
Making the candidates reverse a linked list over the phone? Either the job market is worse than I thought or somebody is power-tripping something awful.
Yeah, it was mostly the first few grafs that came across as excessively googley-eyed. I guess some people would see that as grabbing the reader.
This was already on here a couple of weeks ago when I published it, actually
How would a online merchant get PIN debit rates? I mean this in a very practical manner: I have never seen a merchant with any way to use a card as Debit - only as a credit card.
Guy finds knife in airline seat-back pocket; orders the vegetarian meal
Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things.

My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations:

I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I can solve with google (yes, that was arrogant, I am aware of this.). After I have posted such a question, I usually get like 3-4 1 line answers and then the question goes dead, because apparently, the answer to such a question is more complicated.

On the other hand, if I answer a question, I usually look and poke around a bit in order to provide a good, complete answer to an interesting question. Once I have posted such a question after like 10 minutes, there are like 3-4 one-line-answers posted already, upvoted already and my answer (which usually is more accurate and all) is just ignored and stays somewhere in the middle.

Joining these two experiences together, I have moved on to use groups and certain IRC-channels, as these are more helpful for nontrivial questions.
I can reverse a linked list, but here's what happened on reading this article.

After seeing the problem, I fired up textmate and started writing C pseudo-code to do it. I started off with

first_item = l.first();
next_item = first_item.next();

Then I started writing the loop, and somewhere in there, I got confused. And then a wave of panic came over me - shit, maybe you can't do this. I shook off the thought, deleted my code, and restarted. At some point, I realised that I was always pointing at the first element. My stomach sank and I had this dreadful feeling - okay, you kind of suck as a programmer. Then my mind went blank, and I wanted to switch over and see if the answer was there.

And that's with NO PRESSURE AT ALL. With someone watching me, I'd probably not even have been able to get the loop right.

I have never written such a loop, but it's basic stuff, I can do this anytime. But just a little bit of pressure made me royally fuck up.

Programming is thinking - you need to juggle shit in your head - if at the same time you are paying attention to what a HIRER is doing or saying, it will totally smash this ability to do shit in your head.

Your programming exercise probably selects for calm people, not for good programmers.
The most important parts of this article, IMHO:

The bit that stirs me up is that this “stuff” isn’t, repeat is not, Haskell-specific. Its rooted in the fabric of our reality, in our mathematics and our problem domains, and bits poke up like the tips of icebergs into mainstream OO languages, their true structure part-revealed. But rarely in the OO-world have I found such carefully abstracted and subtle techniques of programming in daily use.

Ideas from Haskell & Functional Programming will continue to flow into the mainstream over the next couple of decades.

This is why it's important to read about things like immutable data structures and higher-kinded polymorphism, even if your problem domain (or personal / corporate style) is utterly unsuited to existing functional programming languages. This stuff isn't just obscure tricks for maths nerds to obsess over, it's fundamental to how programming works.

If you want to understand LINQ, you need to understand higher-kinded polymorphism and monads. If you're writing a series of chained callbacks in Javascript and feel like there's some repetition you'd like to extract but can't quite put your finger on, you need to understand the continuation monad (I'm only about halfway there...) If you want to reason sensibly about concurrent updates to complex data structures, it helps a lot to know about immutable structure-sharing data structures.
You're not hurting with that salary and look to the right... 2% of a company for a hacker at the seed stage is amazing.
Yes, please go into an example or two.
Hasn't this been a continuous rumor for almost 3 yrs now?
It's not about the language, it's about how you approach the problem. Maybe their rationale is that using C discourages the use of built-in constructs or libs that circumvent doing the real work.

For this type of problem, it also hints at your understanding of indirection and pointers as opposed to stack allocated values, etc. Pretty much a pre-requisite if you're doing anything remotely performance-critical, like rethinkdb is. When you're dealing with a higher level language, that's all abstracted away by references.
Well, now I know my original post wasn't misplaced! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1471654

Prior to reading some of the comments from NYC residents, I was vehemently opposed to this kind of government interference, but now I'm not so sure. It would suck to live next to some of these people.

I wonder if entire building communities could vote on whether to allow this individually so either everyone agrees or disagrees and then has to live with it.
Or it selects for people who do this kind of thing every day.
This is a question is sort of a chicken/egg problem. By the time you're ready to be a co-founder you usually are one or have been one before.

It's like being a parent, really: Reading every parenting book on the planet, getting a degree in Child Development and attending lamaze classes won't make you a good parent. Being a good parent will make you a good parent.

By all means strive; but by the time you're ready you'll probably find months or years of being a cofounder behind you.
Dan Meyer: Math Class Needs A Makeover
At a glance: This sounds like kbd+ (http://kx.com/Products/kdb+.php), but open source, and with Java as a query language instead of K/Q.

Edit: Thanks for the clarification.
In other news: The US taxation formula is not tax = income×K

Scoot over to slide 5 before you shed a tear for the top quintile. Go top quintile!
I find it's the only sure way to talk to someone as intelligent as I am.
IEBlog: Measuring Web Page Performance
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To my mind, bootstrapping just means making something from nothing, which is exactly what they did with their audience.
Yes, you are right. How about a strap line across the bottom:

"Powered by Mechanical Turk: humans write these answers"
Can you give me an example of when it would ever be appropriate to turn something like that on?
The Current State of Advertising on The Internet
I wouldn't bet on that. It really depends on what they are doing in academia. You can get through some programs without doing much programming at all. They even mention in the post that a PhD failed the phone screen.
Precisely. Retreats (or equivalent period of intense focus) can help you get started or help you break through a plateau, but they mean little without sustained practice.

Of course, if you hit a plateau in that sustained practice or have a hard time getting started, a dedicated retreat may be just what you need.
Breitbart Offers a Bounty for Journolist Archives
Only two? I can only imagine that there must literally be at least 100 of these in development, and it will likely meet the same outcome as CR.
I know you know this, but I just wanted to clarify that international PhDs are not leaving because of a lack of encouragement, but that their F1 visas (which I also hold) stipulate that they must prove they have every intention of returning back to the home country.

Obviously, the F1 forces students to leave once they graduate.

The system is set up to actively discourage students to stay. I don't know which organization came up with the idea of using public money (because most will be funded this way) to educate people and then make them leave. It's somewhat bizarre, and doesn't seem to benefit the US at all.
I'd put it at the top:

Email an attachment to
go@mail2brain.com
and a human will turn it into something useful:

Frame it as a feature :)
People who live in the real world understand that universities sell credentials, not knowledge.

A good number of universities (especially if you study math, science, or engineering) sell much more than credentials. They sell you a lot of knowledge. I don't understand how you can seriously make that statement. I learned an unbelievable amount of stuff in my four years in college, and I'm sure many other studious students did also.
True, but such disciplines also have much less traditional content to learn. Much of what they need is on the internet, and once they get to a certain base level they get feedback from performer loops.

The "real musicians" have a longer history, and thus there is more to learn, which is why school is more necessary to be qualified.

I.e. the best violinists come out of conservatories, whereas the best d.j.s can easily be self taught.
I personally don't have any. Imo, the article doesn't add very much to anything and its title is misleading. If I would suggest a change it would be not submitting in the first place. This is hardly an article that I would flag though.
good point on the site allowing me to stay sharp on new technologies. The site was/is used to teach myself Ruby on Rails, which they were pleased that I already knew. I will definitely point out the benefit when I talk to them about it.
http://typewith.me/
People who run this sort of question usually allow for a bit of partial credit. It's not pass/fail. If you write something that's wrong, but you can at least point out why it's wrong, then that's not a good answer, but it's not always an immediate disqualification.