skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very well put, completely agree. A cursory interpretation could equate this to mere confidence, a trait that some people are able to exude more than others. But keep in mind that an interviewer interprets confidence on a scale as well, from 'lack there of' to 'hubris.' Acknowledging the importance of a successful hire from the interviewer's standpoint frames the dialogue on a more even playing field. I place a very strong importance on the two aspects nezumi mentions above, "Will this guy fit in my team? Is he going to stay interested in the job?" I want to make sure I do right by my current employees and hire an individual with an attitude/outlook that is complimentary; and I want to make sure I'm not wasting anyone's time by hiring below their payscale for a position they will abandon shortly thereafter. Empower yourself by thinking of the process primarily as a dialogue, one where you are also gaining perspective on the company. Nothing says 'pass' like a interviewee who has no questions of their own.

Note: I am not a hiring mngr on the programming side, I do work and hire for fairly technical marketing positions at large web company you know well.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Dr.+Drew
How to give your creaky old Windows computer an Ubuntu makeover
Most shopping carts are abandoned because the buyer just wanted to see how much a purchase actually costs. Factoring in shipping, taxes, and possibly shadily hidden fees.

"All set to go with your purchase Mr. Smith?"
"Nah, I was just testing ... =) [close tab]"
Stop Enforcing Noncompetes
Case Starter
Case Starter for Tractors, Combines, Excavators, and other Equipment for Agriculture, and Construction Machines.
Privacy Lawsuit Targets Net Giants Over ‘Zombie’ Cookies
Can you move, rename or replace an open file with current Windows? That's possibly one of the reasons why it's so hard to apply patches without rebooting a Windows box. And an endless annoyance when using a Windows desktop.
US target practice: the $57m Aussie fall guys
One reason why spam sites have high bounce rates is because they act as funnels to other websites.
I completely agree. Further, as he points out, code using events is fundamentally different than code that uses threads, in ways that aren't immediately clear to someone writing a "hello world" app. Complexities arise in ways that don't in threaded code. I think many of the more naive "event-driven" boosters haven't gotten far enough to see the real potential for pain.

That's not saying threaded code doesn't have its own set of issues; but having written a tool that saw very high traffic, was written an event-driven style, and suffered performance reliability issues, I can say that the event-driven approach is no panacea.

That said, for certain applications, one or the other approach is clearly appropriate. But to make that decision requires an understand of the strengths and drawbacks of each.
Or just put the toolbar at the bottom nearer where your hand and the input pops up anyway.
I got my hands on a copy of the Facebook movie script
Can Google Apps and Live@EDU win over Academia? (Survey of top 50 US schools)
The entire worshiping of Credit Scores is somewhat laughable to me. My Father was a mortgage broker and land developer, who developed properties and then funded the mortgages that people took out -with his own money-. That subtle difference, between selling mortgages with OPM (Other People's Money) and your own money makes for a certain "clarity of perspective."

He always used to recite the Five C's, Collateral (what percentage of the value of the property where you borrowing against), Capital (How much money do you have in the bank), Capacity (what is your income) Character (what type of person are you) and Credit (The infamous credit score).

When you are lending with your own money, only of those Five C's is worth a squat - and that's collateral. What percentage of the asset where you lending against. Anything north of 50% was considered risky.
(No, I’m not making the “callbacks turn into a pile of spaghetti code” argument, although I think you hear that time and again because it’s an actual developer pain point in async systems.)

Amen.

On my first try I was mostly underwhelmed with node precisely because of the callback hell you end up in. I've already had my share of that in twisted and despite the arguments various people make for it; thanks, but no thanks.

That's not to bash node as a whole, mind you. I'll most certainly revisit it when and if it grows a stable co-routine wrapper or similar spaghetti prevention facilities.
Adobe voiced their position on this back in Feb:

Adobe condemns cookie respawning in comments to FTC
http://www.research-live.com/news/analytics/adobe-condemns-c...
I would really emphasize "incomplete" here. Newton's laws fully accounted for the phenomena they sought to account for, and gravity really does work like Newton said it would work on the level that Newton was talking about it. The idea that there were things under the surface giving rise to this phenomenon probably would not even have surprised Newton.
IMHO you may be able to scale node 'in the big' if you plan to scale on a level above node (i.e. in node instances and inter-node communication) instead of changing the code running in node to scale big.
What Does The Future Hold For Micro-Blogging
http://vimeo.com/13682463
Exactly. I saw this back when it was relatively new, at EuroSys 09, and it seemed very smooth, very neat, and very much not what I'd want on anything mission-critical.

The most valuable thing I took out of it was that it is a good lesson in marketing a product. I mean, the tech itself obviously took a lot of work, but it doesn't really attack what people doing dynamic upgrade consider hard problems -- in particular, it doesn't do changes to data very well.

However, look at the way it was presented. Firstly we get good stats to the effect that the vast majority of kernel updates are things that can be done without solving difficult data update problems. This was a particularly important point to make at a research-related conference.

But the marketing doesn't stop there -- they also run a service which you can use to generate updates for you, so you can track from kernel to kernel automatically.

So, the end result is a strong argument for something which a) works most of the time; b) will work for you without much effort on your part; and (most importantly) c) is fantastic bragging rights: "My OS doesn't ever need rebooting!"

In the wrong hands, this would have been a mediocre research project. "Sure we can upgrade the kernel, but we have to interpose functions, create shadow data structures, the result isn't anything like what a "real" kernel would look like after reboot so you have no guarantee of anything, and sometimes it doesn't work". Instead we get something that everybody is talking about and is rapidly emerging as a strong selling point for Linux. My respect to the KSplice team for doing three jobs well: research, implementation, and marketing.
As someone with anxiety disorder, I can say agreed and I suspect this to be the case. This is also my problem, but medicating before an interview doesn't help a whole lot more either.
I hope this works for other countries as putting my code out there didn't help me, in Turkey, for over 10 companies I have applied but I should note that this is the reason why I have a job now.

If you are interviewing with the start-up founders, the #1 reason you are not hired is the salary you request. If you are interviewing with the lead developers, #1 reason you are not hired is that they felt you are better than themselves and you could replace them so don't make them feel that any way.

Do not put hope in any of the interviews. If you are told that they will get back to you, expect nothing and if you are told that they will get back to you, for say, in 2 weeks, either negative or positive, again, expect nothing. Just apply as many jobs you can and go to interviews if you are called and then wait. Eventually, if you are a good developer, you will get a job.

Another thing is experience. If you don't have any working experience, be patient for a little while and work less than a salary you'd request normally and after a long time such as a year passes, start looking for a new job when you are still working. Then you'll get a better job.
What's in it for the company other than a potential lawsuit if they say something inappropriate?

Isn’t having a reputation of providing good feedback useful? I interviewed for Intel’s rotation program and got rejected. When I asked why, they told me that my circuit knowledge was weak. This was back before logical effort was standard material in VLSI classes; I hadn’t seen it before, and ended up deriving an overly complicated and slightly wrong version to solve the question I got asked in the interview. After getting the feedback, I opened up the VLSI text the interviewer suggested and worked through the problems. From that point on, I aced all my circuit design interviews and even got circuit design job offers, even though my specialization was in a different area. Had I not gotten that feedback, I would have had no idea that the reason I was failing my VLSI interviews was because my course didn’t cover logical effort, and I wouldn’t have been able to find out by asking my classmates, because they were all in the same boat as I was.

Why was that useful for Intel? I told my friends about it; some of them, who were on the fence about interviewing at Intel, took an interview they might have otherwise turned down because they knew that, if nothing else, they would get useful feedback from the interview.
Keep in mind when reading this article that Alex recently left a little company called Twitter. It's safe to say that relatively few companies will ever have to scale the way that Twitter has.

You mean the failwhale way? ;-)

Not meaning to discredit al3x but I really don't consider twitter a success story in terms of scaling. I don't know if it's incompetence or just some truly bad early decisions that they're still suffering from.

But one thing is for sure; other sites of much higher complexity have scaled much more smoothly to similar sizes (facebook, flickr, just two from the top of my head).
I have seen TV shows that were quite consistent. That doesn't make them fact rather than fiction.
Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005)
When it comes to the Go language, bare-metal performance certainly seemed to be something Pike was giving a shit about when he spoke last week at OSCON and the Emerging Languages Camp I organized. Go in its current fairly young stage has performance that's not too terrible; they've mostly optimized for raw complication speed so far, which is interesting, and uniquely suited to Google's development problems. Pike has said that he wants Go to be a replacement for other systems languages. That's going to mean competing with those languages, performance-wise.

I think Clojure's concurrency model ends up more concisely and correctly expressing the "parallelism of the real world" when you consider the dimension of time. Rich Hickey has done some really important thinking there.

Finally, I think you'll find that anyone with a fixed budget for servers isn't going to think that making the most of "local physical concurrency" on every machine in their cluster is a "fool's errand". Hardware is cheaper than it used to be, but it isn't free, and deploying and maintaining it is costly and time consuming. If you can make the most of your hardware and operations investements with a little more thought-work, why not do so?
Webinar Recap - MapReduce Querying in Riak
Stepping back onto the square where it started could have been added by whoever modified the game, and fits with the message I'm getting from it, even if it would be hard for the player to realize that they needed to do so. Playing through many times makes sense, with the goal of finding other easter eggs which might have been included in the game, and experimenting with various potential outcomes.

However, I'm leaning towards it being fictional, mostly because it feels similar to other creepypasta I've read (some of them are quite good, and highly recommended if you're looking for something unsettling). Of course, that idea could be implanted by the suggestion of it originating from 4chan, but there are some other things which make me lean towards that, especially the bit about misplacing/losing the game several years previously.
You know, I'm impressed with Firefox pushing the envelope inside the browser window, but their chrome is still terrible: the tabs on top take up many more pixels than Chrome's do; closing tabs in rapid succession doesn't mimic Chrome's resizing; you still can't have favicons in the bookmarks bar without using Stylish or something similar; the bookmarks bar and the Bookmarks folder aren't one and the same; and so on. (EDIT: Mac; I think some of these are better on the Windows side, particularly favicons in the bookmarks bar)

The only reason I ever used Firefox any more was to use the Mozbar, and that's not an issue any more. I really would love it if the Mozilla Foundation stopped focusing on rendering and focus on experience. Normals go to the same seven (or nine) sites. Make using the browser to visit and interact those seven/nine sites as good as possible first.
Thanks for doing this, it really helps!
For what it's worth, I don't think Twitter currently counts as a scaling success story either. Hence this in my post:

"Twitter is still fighting an uphill battle to scale in the large, because doing so is about much, much more than which technology you choose."

That's part of my point.
Oh, right. (Forgot that my `gcc` is a shell script that adds a bunch of `-W` options.) You can ask for it with -Wpointer-arith.
Successful Conversations Involve Mind Melds, Study Reveals
Exchange; that is quite a huge one for businesses where I am. Many people are just so used to outlook for email that when it comes for them to put in some kind of email management architecture they will always go exchange.
Can you remove a logfile on linux/unix while something is using it? Of course you can but the open file will stay around in limbo. It wont free up space, the program that holds it open will write to the deleted file, etc. Most linux programs will let you send it a nohup and it will close and reopen the logfile, that's something I haven't a clue about on windows.

I still pipe logs to a separate process that checks if the logfile is deleted and reopens/creates the logfile, its just easier.
One of the traditional threads-don't-scale arguments, which led to the early-2000s wave of evented competitors to Apache (lighthttpd, nginx), was that threads have per-thread call-stack overhead that's hard to minimize without either OS support for dynamically sized call stacks, or choosing really small static stack sizes that make writing code that doesn't stack-overflow tricky.

A different issue was that OSs used to be very bad at scheduling large numbers of threads--- if you spawned 10,000 threads, the system scheduler blew up. I believe that's mostly much improved these days.

Most of the threads-don't-scale arguments also assume OS threads; user-level threads are another story.
Speaking as someone who always "got" math, the understanding really needs to come from you. You can't expect to get it from a book or from the teacher. I had two tricks that has served me well: always ask yourself "why" until you reach that critical "a-ha" point, and secondly, visualize visualize visualize.

What I always did for new concepts was to ask myself "why". And I'd just think about it and visualize it until a reasonable explanation came to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be completely "right", but it just needs to make sense to you.

As an example from high school, everyone seemed to struggle learning basic algebra. The basic idea to learn from algebra is that you can do the same thing to both sides of an equation and the "truth" of it remains in-tact. This fact covers about 90% of everything you'll learn in Algebra I and II. The rest is basically just learning tricks for different situations.

The problem is you can't really be made to "get" this critical idea, the understanding has to come from you. The takeaway from all this is to focus on finding that a-ha moment for every new concept you learn.

As far as proofs go, again you can't be taught to do them well. You have to find your way on your own. The first step is to just convince yourself what you're trying to prove is true. Either by working out many different special cases and finding some pattern, or by visualizing whatever process you're trying to prove. Then you "formalize" your intuitive understanding by writing a proof. Convincing yourself that something is true is the crucial part.
There was and are a couple of dead Pokemon Chaos Black torrents out there. Something at least similar to this existed as a ROM but I doubt it was ever ported to a playable cartridge.
For a junior position, I think one of the best ways to show what you can do is to have a side project you've worked on. At that level we normally don't care about your leadership ability, skill at designing scalable architectures or knowledge of the domain, etc. We really want to know if you can take a design and produce good code from it and if we would like working with you. The former can be very difficult to ascertain in an interview for a number of reasons.

If you have a project that you can point to, particularly if you have a URL on your resume, or some other way the technical interviewer(s) can see it before the interview, you're well ahead of everyone else.
Here's a nice book about, among other things, a similar country: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Smugness doesn't constitute an argument. For any statement you make, I can respond "Ha, I knew you'd say that, how naive and predictable!" I can also add "I perfectly understand your position" despite giving no one any reason to believe this is true.

If our physicist friend didn't provide "backup" for his points, it's probably because he's just trying to set you on the right track. You can't reasonably expect someone to lay out the experimental results of every test we've ever run that has led us to assert TBB. And if you're going to persist in claiming that you understand the theory anyway despite all evidence to the contrary, I really doubt it would make any difference.

I am curious how you became so very confident that you are an enlightened genius and all physicists are naive and irrational fools. Especially since physics arrives at it's theories by empirical evidence whereas you seem to arrive at yours by proclaiming inapplicable truisms.
Total noob here - going to try to locate you in the Brower Center.
> The following functions are available to web content
This is Tracy (@limedaring), if there are any questions, can also let me know on here. If you're interested, I'm in the Bay Area and will travel to meet people over coffee/lunch!
Can most men bench press their own weight?
what advantages does MSFT have as a server OS?

I would say support for enterprise apps. A lot of enterprise software vendors still target their development for Windows, and don't support Linux well or fail to test with Linux.
Actually I was thinking more in terms of web-server or any application server that is not tied to the OS. I am guessing you can't host Exchange server on Linux even if you wanted to. So that advantage would't really be an advantage. Its more like you don't have any option but to use Windows server.
Threaded does not imply one thread per connection. As an example, Java Servlet 3.0 allows a request handler to suspend and resume execution of a request handler on a thread. This feature allows the application to relinquish the thread for the occasional long operation and use blocking threaded code for most other code. Threaded applications written in this style can support a large number of concurrent connections with modest resource use and no callback spaghetti.

Models like Java Servlet 3.0 allow threaded servers to handle a large number of concurrent connections. Are there other reasons why threaded servlets are slow or not scalable?

Most web applications don't have a large number of concurrent connections because they application request handlers do not block for a long time. The resource use for thread stacks is very modest for these applications even without a suspend & resume feature.
There are some non-Windows Exchange alternatives that would be transparent to Outlook users, but it's probably an uphill battle selling them to management.
Well, as you've been outed as being involved with twitter first-hand, can you shed some light on the problems they are having? Or is that internal stuff, not to be talked about?

I'm curious because I've worked with various messaging systems myself. And albeit never having pushed them to near twitter-scale, the principles of scaling those horizontally seem quite straightforward to me, unless complex routing comes into play. But I don't see complex routing at twitter.

To be more precise: For all I know twitter could (should?) probably just append those tweets to one file per user and would scale beautifully from there. Auxiliary services like search are a different story, of course, but those don't need to trigger failwhales when they break...

What wall do they keep hitting?
Ask HN: What to do about "grand ideas" in fields you have no expertise in?
Assume you have a great idea in a field you have no expertise in.

Of course, almost all people who are in this situation really don't have a great idea, but for the sake of this thread, let's assume that the idea is indeed great.

That is, great in the sense that if people with expertise and a proven track record in the field, and with connections in the industry, and with a lot of hard work, etc, could turn into something valuable.

e.g. a dentist having the idea for Tivo years before Tivo was out, or a computer programmer coming up with a design for a better propeller for oil tankers.

It seems to me that there is almost nothing you can do in this situation. Breaking into the TV/entertainment business, or the oil tanker business, or similar large industries is close to impossible for outsiders with no expertise in the field.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'm always fascinated by how easy it is for people within a field to test even half-baked ideas. A simple example is on the show Survivor, when the host once said that his niece had an idea for a challenge for the players, and the Survivor crew put it together and it was on the next episode. An outsider to the show and/or the industry would likely have to have a huge compelling case and do a lot of hard work before they even listen to his idea for the show.

This imbalance (for insiders and outsiders) is large and could be leading us to miss out on some great stuff in various fields.

Some questions for you guys:

1) Is it as impossible to do anything about ideas in fields you have no expertise in as I think it is?

2) Are we as a society losing out on some great or at least useful innovations because as society is currently set up, it doesn't facilitate cross-discipline (outsider) idea dissemination?

3) If the answers to the above are 'yes', is there anything that can be done to change this?

4) Is my premise wrong? Am I missing something?

(I should note that I can see that most ideas coming from people outside a particular field are useless, have been done before, are impractical, etc, but I think there may be a tiny minority that could prove useful in the right hands)
Social Problems in Computer Science
Again, no t=0. It never was "infinitely" dense, it just approaches this limit.
The golf(ish) answer is by JadeNB. My original code is exactly the same as yours =)

But more importantly, I have not seen anyone post equivalent Python or Ruby code.