skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting (to me) observation: I found I spent significantly more time on the scaffolding for this problem to prove my answer correct, than on the answer itself. (I'm one of those folks addicted to "FizzBuzz"-esque toy problems.)

I probably spent five minutes at most working out a reasonable way to do this in-place with a single pass, but spent 20-30 minutes reassuring myself that I had it right for all cases.

These kinds of problems are always interesting to me: they have simple and obvious (after some thinking) answers, but probably aren't something you've touched in a significant amount of time, because nobody reinvents the wheel like this day-to-day. They're very satisfying in a "back to basics" kind of way.
I've always wondered how one gets in on the ground floor of one of these IPOs. Is it just large institutional investors that got this stock at $18/share? Or could I have placed an order through my usual broker?

Also, if the stock is worth $24 after the first day, didn't Tesla just get screwed out of a whole bunch of capital? Seems like they could have sold the shares for more (although, I suppose they probably held on to some shares so they are making some money off of the rise in price, and I'm sure their employees with equity are happy about it too)
"As someone who's working in this space"

Do you mind saying where?
firefox-4.0b2pre.en-US: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates...
On the other hand, any half decent programmer should be able to reverse a linked list under nearly any circumstances.
The prospectus talks about floating 100 M$. It is also an interesting read, at least in parts. Especially the risks section.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/0001193125100...
Google Product Development Process [from 2003]
I'm away from my desktop for another week: my only question is if they've put any thought into speeding up startup times and/or improving the UX and design on Macs. Firefox used to be great, but it's really fallen behind in terms of speed and usability. I hope this changes that.

EDIT: Thanks for the replies! I'll be giving it a try again. It's good to have choices.
The joys of being white.
From a presentation given by a Google Product Manager named Marissa Mayer
Just read through this and look at the technical part. Why didn't they randomize their MAC addresses? Why the heck were they using standard protocols in the first place? Oh the glory days of spying when they had a transmitter in a shoe, a mike in the olive and the olive in the martini...

http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/062810complaint1.pdf
They have clear roadmaps for each major version number. I'm not so sure I'd consider it dumb.
Perhaps he is just trying to say something else? Albeit in a really bad way. In some ways the post is just too vague, but I see it this way; constantly remind that organization that you are of some value, which isn't such bad advice at the end of the day.

I recently read Dale Carengie's book. Although, I started reading it with a WTF-Is-This? point of view, but I've fallen in love with his idea. I think that he has an important point. People, like everyone else, that make up those companies are only interested in themselves, in order to make them follow your path you have to be interested in the. Instead of just kissing someone's ass this means actually making contribution to that person be it in their work, or personal lives.

Most of us would walk away from that article with an idea of counterfeit charisma, but the real deal is something quite different. Something that all of us sense, but cannot define. Take a look at this article he linked to (http://sivers.org/tom-williams), which simply made my night. That person had the drive and the talent to do something, but he short circuited a process that would take years upon years to achieve, and I think that there is a lesson in there for all of us to learn.
Would AI algorithms to detect and flag a penis in an image be any easier or less error-prone than other similar image recognition problems?
The Mac UI _looks_ better; for some reason, though, I'm getting two icons in my dock, occasionally.
Yeah, I'm familiar with that click to run Office 2010. I think that is the start of App-V becoming more prevalent by default in Microsoft's own applications.
It seems that large vendors miss out on bottom-up sales opportunities. Imagine if I as a developer could sign up for a free, three month test drive without asking permission from my boss or anybody else but Cisco. I'd bring the thing to work, show it off, build some little app that would display order shipment information from the ERP system, and then show it to the VP of Sales. A few months later, the Cisco sales rep would be having a high-level conversation where the value proposition was already made. Instead, Cisco will concentrate on convincing the VP of Sales and the VP of IT that a million dollar tablet purchase would be successful and that one could indeed connect the ERP system to it.

I love TI's supposed entry into the hobby market with its $4.30 demo device. If nothing else, it's a cheap way to cement brand recognition with a bunch of techies. It's gravy if their $0.75 chips make into some consumer product because the demo board was the path of least resistance to building a prototype.
My own pre-launch startup.
This isn't about rejecting bad programmers — it's about rejecting good ones. If you can't afford a bad hire, that means you should spend more time and care trying to determine accurately whether somebody is good rather than relying on a rough heuristic with a strong negative bias — especially if you find that your heuristic is rejecting everybody.
Even the latest stable release (3.6.6) starts just as fast as Chrome for me (I use an ad blocker, bookmark sync and firebug in both browsers). Firefox has been painfully slow in the past, but it seems okay now, although its UI is still rather clunky.
Why hasn't anyone built a Chatroulette competitor yet? Every post about chatroulette on HN has at least a dozen plausible sounding suggestions for fixing chatroulette (and probably twice as many implausible ones). Why hasn't anyone implemented any of them?
Interesting topic-I love and have worked at startups for the past few years and my soon-to-be spouse has worked at a big corp. for an equal amount of time. We both work in tech,and he is sympathetic to my crazy hours and understands why I have to work on a Saturday, midnight, and "have to answer this email right now."I think as long as you unplug and have devoted time to your personal life, everything works out. In the past, I let work dominate my life which diminished my personal life. I think I am engaged today b/c I set time aside to grow in that way. It's all about boundaries and understanding, that's been my experience.
I still post questions on SO, but only because there simply isn't any other place to get answers to some questions I have. It wouldn't have annoyed me so much except there seemed to be so little complaint when this change was made.

Perhaps if there were a competitor that had as much interaction, I wouldn't post there.
Flagging also opens the door to 'pranksters' that will false-flag everybody just to clog the system.
Seems to me this could be mostly avoided by having the flagging mechanism repsond to some # > 1 of flags from unique users. Issues could still come up if there were > 1 people engaged in this practice simultaneously, though it doesn't seem like an activity holding much long term appeal. So, this solution seems while perhaps not optimal at least functional.

Please share some other hard type problems from such sites if you feel like it. Then we can talk through/theorize about what might work in practice.
They are great for quickly building walls.
Much discussion already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1471300
Interesting that when you launch the windows installer, it says nothing about firefox, it says Installing Minefield

Is this some quirky pun on the fact that it is pre-release software? Or is there a more general name change in the works?

[edit] Seems it is due to the testing process - http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/ WARNING: THIS IS NOT A FINAL VERSION OF FIREFOX and then goes on to say:

This program is provided without any guarantees of stability and you should back up your profile regularly as there may be bugs that corrupt your data. If that sounds scary, please use the latest version of Firefox.
$125k/year is what you would give to a decent coder with 3 years of experience.

You're living in a dream world.
"Minefield" is the name given to the Firefox nightly builds.
My only foray (to date) into shares was an IPO that didn't go up. My logic was much the same as your statement - don't these things always go up on the first day? I'll just get in early, get out on day one, make a profit.

(I was at university, so making a few hundred bucks and learning on the fly seemed like great returns!)

I purchased for 50c / share. Looked set to open at 55c, but a heap of stock got dumped right before it opened so it opened at 48c. I got out at 47c on day 2; the stock was at 5c twelve months later.

So I learnt a lot about research and business fundamentals from that. About six months later I tried again but missed out due to oversubscription - would have 4x my money on day one, more for those who bought and held on for a takeover 12 months later.
For the IPO process, at least in Canada, the 1st sale of stocks are already spoken for - basically, there wouldn't be an IPO unless a certain threshold of institutions wanting to purchase blocks of the stock has been secured.

What you see on the stock market is actually 2nd hand selling and buying. It is near impossible to secure a block of IPO stock unless you are an institution, or represent someone with enough assets to get the brokers' attention.
Seriously.

How often do you need to find mail that you have filed? Once a month or so?
How often do you need to file mail? Much more often.

Optimize for many writes and few reads. Just throw everything in a box in chronological order. Everything will be easy enough to find and VERY easy to file. The most you should do is have a couple of boxes for broad categories of stuff to file.
I bought some today and am up about 32%. I wonder what it will be next week.
They've always used Minefield for nightly and alpha builds.
This is not the actual beta. These are just nightlies tagged as the beta (the version string was updated to 'beta') for testing purposes. This same story showed up on Slashdot and Mozilla's Asa Dotzler commented on it: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702398&cid=327...

You can find the Firefox 4 Beta when it's actually released here: https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
They don't always go up. They try very hard to set the price a bit low to make sure it goes up.

I unfortunately bought (a few years ago) an IPO that went down the moment it traded. In hindsight the fact that I was invited to buy it should have warned me off.
California Labor Code... Does this affect me at all since I will be living in Baltimore, MD?

Probably not. You can look into seeing if there is something similar in MD.
I've seen a ton of them- one that comes to mind is Chatville (ChatVille.com, made by the Digsby team).

I think it's the same answer to the question, "Why hasn't anyone built a Craigslist competitor yet?" The answer is that they have. However, nobody cares.
Metered source code hosting, please ?
Remember the story about what you could have bought if you had invested such and such amount in apple stock in 2001?

Maybe one day I can buy one of these with the measly investment I made today. Or maybe my grandchildren.
Intrigued by the Air Martial part.

I'm not at all surprised. I (unintentionally) carried a 3" knife on the last four US domestic flights I've been on. They even called me out for the 1" of water left at the bottom of my thermos in the same bag. I had to go back, empty that into a trash can and RE-RUN my bag through the x-ray machine...
Don't you have to actually click the bookmarklet for these to work? That sounds like an annoyance to do on every page view for each site you go to.
What extra code? I've got a struct definition, a print_list function, cons, and a really dumb testing driver that builds the list [1 2 3], reversing and printing it a few times throughout its construction. The line count of all that [EDIT: I meant "everything except the testing driver"] is about equal to the line count of my reverse.
Well, Elon no longer has a cashflow problem. :)
Does this affect me at all since I will be living in Baltimore, MD?

Likely the company has HQ or major operations in California. Maryland's laws on this may be different; but in a dispute with any firm you generally have the choice of suing them where they are incorporated, where their corporate HQ is, or wherever they have major operations.

As for the list, I'd throw on everything you can think of, including the kitchen sink. All your software projects, your blog, stuff in your college newspaper, your poetry notebook, whatever. You don't have to say what everything is, just reasonably describe it, like 'various personal works of prose and poetry written between 2005-2010', and also a statement reserving your current and future rights. Not to be an ass about it, just to demonstrate that you have a clear understanding of what belongs to you.

Remember the company isn't out to screw you, they're just protecting their own interests and naturally they would prefer you to cooperate. If their offer is good you should consider it and maybe just put your ideas on ice for a year or two while you make some $ and get experience.

But again, consult an attorney - I can explain what stuff means in literal terms, but not what course of action you should take or what other factors might apply.
Electric Fish
Nature is a tough place to grow up in. Let's look some of these terrifying beasts.
Also, is someone keeps flagging people, then there flags don't count. This has been solved before.

However, someone who uses chatroulette may have good reasons to flag every person they see as a pervert.
I disagree with you and agree with the author. :)

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.

People generally don't do well on simple whiteboard questions, and try to BS their way through. Our questions are very simply, along the lines of: in your favorite language, write a function to: "calculate the nth Fibonacci number" (we explain the sequence if you've forgotten), "capitalize the first character of a string", "reverse a linked list in place", and so on. The people that have been good fits for our team answered these questions without trouble.

The people that hemmed and hawed and didn't get a working answer (or claimed that their favorite language already had built-in functions for each of the problems) simply didn't get hired. If people don't do well on one question, we ask more; trying to find one they can do. They usually can't do any of them.

They couldn't show any ability to program, so we don't hire them to program. It's a large percentage that doesn't show any ability, but the people that do pass the interview are good to work with. I don't think it's unfair to expect people to produce code during an interview for a job where they will be producing code. Even if you're nervous, you should be able to do a little bit of your life's work, if only out of habit. You do this every day, after all!

(Another thing I like to ask: after describing your grandiose project from your last job, tell us what you actually did. Oh, you wrote the build scripts, not the custom hardware for parsing FIX messages? That's fine, but why'd you tell us that the design was "ours" for the last 20 minutes? Did you think we wouldn't ask what you did? We're hiring you, not your entire team.)

So anyway I think we've confirmed the OP's results. It's hard to find programmers.
didn't Tesla just get screwed out of a whole bunch of capital?

I wonder about this as well. Perhaps one of the metrics companies should use when evaluating investment banks is how accurately they price IPOs.

There may be some other intangible value to having the stock jump on the first day. If so, that value had better be larger than <IPO amount> * <% increase> .
And of course the flip side of that point is a lot of people's questions ARE already answered somewhere, often in books, if somebody just cared to get off their a-- and go look for it, spend time reading and investing in their own education. I've seen thousands of questions asked on the Internet where the asker could have answered it themselves by putting in a little more common sense effort, upfront.

The RTFM phenomenon.
>>>At some places but not in general. If you had started reading when you were two you wouldn't be able to categorically make this statement. Chill out on proclamations about things that you couldn't possibly know.<<<

I am sorry if it came out as if I was making a categorical statement. It is quite true that I might not have read up on those subjects as much as you have, from an academic point of view anyway.

What I was trying to imply was that even though earlier a few years ago I used to snort at such things, but now I have some rather unique life experience that has changed my view point. I've come to realize that people aren't really rational beings at the end and it is quite important to study what composes their identity in order to make sure that you don't burn up bridges.

Think about it this way. We live in an interconnected world where our ideas are not judged my majority of the population on the basis of pure intellectual merit. The idea that all human beings are born equal is met with acclaim around the world as long as it supports people's bottom lines. The very next second they tear it apart and turn into oppressors. Thomas Jefferson put it quite beautifully;

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

I have experienced that first hand in my life, and now I understand the value of understanding how people behave and why they behave the way they do so. The entire way that field now works in some places is quite like intellectual fraud. I know this through a few interesting experiences with a few psychologists.

So sorry about that.

edit: Those experiences were supplemented by stuff I downloaded from iTunes U.
especially as there is NO warning during the conversion process that the price will rise so dramatically. This really sucks. I just planned to upgrade to a small or medium plan but now I dont think I will, I'll probably just keep using our private gitosys setup for private repos and github for just open source. 100$/month is a LOT for just repo hosting, I can have a dedicated server with backups for that much.
The rule is: if you can buy it, then you don't want to.

The only time they will sell in small quantities is if they can't sell it anywhere else. And if they can't sell it, then you don't want it.

The only realistic way to get in on them is a mutual fund that specializes in them. Or have a lot of money.

This is bringing back a lot of memories of 2001 when this kind of stuff was very very hot. I wonder if that IPO mutual fund still exists.

Also google witcapital - they would buy IPOs then sell them to individuals. As I recall they had a very hard time finding shares. It reached the point that social pressure would force companies to sell at least some to witcapital if they wanted their users to like them.
Out of interest, can anyone remember what the prices were for the Large, Mega and Giga plans ?

I can think of a situation where a small start-up is on Medium, and switching up to the next level at $100 per month is looking quite dear. Would be good to have a comparison with the old prices.

Edit: Found it via Google Cache:

Large
$50/mo Large
50 Private Repositories
25 Private Collaborators
Unlimited public repositories
Unlimited public collaborators

Mega
$100/mo
125 Private Repositories
60 Private Collaborators
Unlimited public repositories
Unlimited public collaborators

Giga
$200/mo
300 Private Repositories
100 Private Collaborators
Unlimited public repositories
Unlimited public collaborators
Counter with: what other people are you hirering?
You've probably also been asked to do it at some point during your formal CS education, if you had one. Grading this problem on the final for the introductory CS course was a load of fun, let me tell you... (and yet, I had to do the exercise myself just now, because I haven't touched that stuff in a couple years and I was worried I'd forgotten!)
An American liberal arts education is about way more than acquiring particular technical skills; it's about learning how to analyze a space of competing claims and discovering novel ways of combining them to produce insight. In English courses we would sit around and discuss the various ethnic and historical factors that led to particular narratives. We wouldn't just derive mathematical functions in college, we would derive ideas themselves, and then analyze how we came to derive those. I guarantee that these are the same kinds of conversations that lead to truly revolutionary technological ideas and spawn countless brilliant business decisions.

Sure, one can learn how to solve various technical problems on ones own, but where will one get the skills to actually define problems in the first place? (hint: you can't get it by watching lecture videos, not totally)
An IPO that doesn't go up is considered a failure. So yes, it's basically required to jump at least that much on the first day.

That's why the company only sells a small amount of their shares at the IPO. The rest are sold slowly over time at more accurate price levels.
Some things are more important than money, companies, startups etc.

Don't be so quick to pass judgement if you don't know the full story.
When I interview programmers I start off with this question:

Write a function in C (on the whiteboard) that takes an array of integers and returns its sum.

I explicitly explain to candidates that this is a warm-up question to start the interview, and that I'm looking for the textbook solution, no tricks.

The advantages are:
1. It takes a reasonable candidate 3 minutes to write down the answer.
2. Answering a question correctly gives them confidence, always important in an interview.
3. It provides a good basis for a little advanced discussion (overflow, speed, error handling, supporting infinitely large numbers, etc).

Amazingly enough, some candidates have actually failed this...
Heh well that's true. My father was an one such developer before he came here. The only problem is that if you outsource like that you might or might not get quite what you want. You either have really smart folks working for you or you are dealing with a scam and don't know it. Lots of success and horror stories on this front. For me face to face time is very important so I would look elsewhere first but you may be right.
Interesting that the people whose business model actually rely on video distribution (Hulu, YouTube) have opinions that are the opposite of the common user consensus in Redddit or Hacker News ("Flash is dying", "HTML5 is ready", etc).
Just copy the addresses of each node in the list to an array. Then you can make copies of each node and reverse the copy in O(n) -- if you want to do it in O(n) out-of-place.
Drop me an e-mail when you launch and good luck!