skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I seem to suck at interviews. I don't want to. Please advise.
Dear HN,

I have convinced myself I'm terrible at interviews to the point that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy now. In spite of being a good developer (never had any problems at work and have launched two side projects into the wild), I seem to always perform less-than-stellar in interviews. Something happens before and during an interview and I am unable to impress easily.

I have a Masters degree in CS from a good school. I code in C extensively and do a lot of RoR work on the side. I wouldn't say I'm at the top end of programmers by any measure but I'm good. I can get things done, intelligently and efficiently. Years ago, I didn't make it through a pretty major exam (one of the toughest entrance exams in the world - the Indian IIT JEE) and I suppose somewhere in my mind, a fear has been lodged. I am still trying to regain that lost confidence.

I get an uneasy feeling in my stomach before one, I never feel that I'm prepared and in fact, out of my fear I don't even attempt to prepare much. I just tend to wing it which makes it worse. I know I would have done well at most of the jobs where I didn't get through the interviews (google included). I hate the fact that someone gets to judge me sitting across the table. I just want to tell them, give me the damn job and I'll prove to you that I can do it.

I wish most coding interviews were of the kind where you went off to do a project and came back a day or two later with your code. Unfortunately, most still require you to think on the spot.

How do you deal with interview anxiety? I have one on-site this Friday and I really, really want this job.
They're also different. I flew from Perth to basically Washington DC about a month ago, including a 13ish hour flight from Sydney to LA, in economy, and I can tell you it's absolutely horrendous. Maybe it's just me but it was entirely unbearable, aside from boredom and not having enough leg room. The economy plus or whatever is seeming like a necessity almost, especially when you include a 13hr flight with another 5 hours either side.

That said, it did get me interested in a trans-Pacific airline, flying solely between Sydney-Melbourne-Auckland to LAX-SFO-whatever. Seems like it could be done much better for us who can't afford better tickets.
The use of the credit score as an indicator of character is also frustrating for those of us that don't borrow money. Even if you don't borrow money you run into resistance trying to get insurance, etc.
I came up with what was essentially Jaiku a number of years before it launched (which is funny cos Jyri is a friend now).

I built specs and wireframes and was beginning to plan out the backend but then lost interest after a number of investor-friends couldn't see the market for it.

To be honest, I'm not sure there is a market for it but that also proves that startups don't always need a market on their own to be successful and exit.
Which would still be more useful than classical music, if your objective is to tell the user that something is wrong.
I came home to my crashed PC one day and it was very quietly playing a sound over and over. I turned the volume way up and it was saying something like "The CPU has failed!" over and over. It was more freaky than awesome.
In the end, you're most likely going to get rejected for a bunch of common reasons:

1 - Someone else appeared to be clearly better than you (see 2,3,4,5)

2 - You didn't have good enough communications skills

3 - You didn't have enough 'perceived experience' or the right set of skills

4 - You don't appear to be a good fit, personality-wise

5 - You priced yourself over what they thought you were worth

#2 and #3 are what most candidates need to work on. Communicating that whatever skills they have are more than satisfactory, preventing #1. On the other hand, if your personality rubs the interviewer the wrong way (#4), there's usually possibility to recover.

In the end, most people don't need explicit feedback. They just need to pay attention to the verbal and non-verbal cues given off by the interviewer. Unless the interviewer is negotiating compensation, there's usually no need for him/her to have a poker face. 9 times out of 10, you'll get clues as to what the interviewer isn't liking about you.
in 1998, at age 18, I made my high school's yearbook on CD (with Macromedia Director), along with two friends. I told them the format seemed stale, and that the future of yearbooks was on the internet, where you could keep in touch with your classmates and upload photos of your current life.

Even though we were computer geeks we had almost zero execution capabilities at the time, so I'm not kicking myself on the head.
Rebooting is for Windows
If you haven't seen it, you'd probably enjoy the documentary Art & Copy (http://www.artandcopyfilm.com).

W+K are featured prominently, as are most of the other stalwarts of the marketing industry.
That's where I failed... why on earth didn't I buy a second? Oh yes, the price. Which is also why I don't pick up one off of eBay, they're incredible nowadays with some going for an easy £600 or more. For that price I'd rather buy a great monitor.
I got errors when I had spaces in my credit card number. Removing the spaces let me purchase. (true story.)
I always wondered about that, but I think that part of the problem with XScale is that it ended up being so far behind. When Intel acquired XScale from DEC, they really only got the IP, not the people... so they had to waste a lot of time assembling teams and re-building expertise, by which time the rest of the industry had left them in the dust.

Atom is a decent first step toward that niche, but I'm still not convinced about the value of x86 in mobile computing either.
Oh, I thought it was because HN had become ... a little limp over the last year.
Various Apple ][ emulators do a fine job of playing this game if you are so inclined for a stroll down memory lane.
Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte dedicated an episode of Security Now to Vitamin D, which I found very informative...

TWiT link: http://www.twit.tv/sn209

Transcript: http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-209.htm

Steve Gibson's dedicated Vitamin D page: http://www.grc.com/health/vitamin-d.htm
This talks about numbers of threads being as high as 1000.

My job involves writing servers that can scale to at least 20,000 concurrent connections (I use Twisted for that, but I'm still interested to see what's happening in JavaLand).

I was disappointed the article didn't look at things at that kind of scale - it would be a much more impressive result if threaded/blocking io was still best at that level.
I think it's very dangerous to define and describe WikiLeaks as 'a news organization'.

News organizations curate and editorialize content - I hope that WikiLeaks doesn't editorialize their content (I know Julian Assange has talked about 'getting PR for leakers' as a motive, which is concerning).

We're still working out what WikiLeaks is as their model is basically something new for the mainstream world that they have not seen before.
Key to reboot the internet?
Google Web spam - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog
I guess I'm not surprised. My reason for using NIO in the past has been because I've had systems that supported many long-running, mostly idle open sockets. Seems logical that there would be a tradeoff to abstracting threads & state from connections.
Apple Responds to iPhone Jailbreaking Decision
The data from the story saying their sales were down was for the 52 weeks ending in April or May.

And even those numbers were suspect, as there was another retail data source that said the opposite -- that sales were slightly up..

I never believed for a second that the latest campaign ended up as a LOSS.
I am still an active user on reddit. Active in commenting, really. I don't post articles so much. I got tired of the slipping quality of posts and comments on reddit. I wouldn't have I've "migrated" here, but I just come here to indulge in posting of higher quality, in addition to some specific subreddits.
>The slums act like incubators

Yeah. Sure. Keep telling yourself that. 1 in 3 people in Rio live in those slums. Even Rio's socialists want god "to step in and clean up this mess", because they view the slum inhabitants as less than human and deserving of their fate. The poverty there is so bad people break into houses of vacationing families and steal everything: copper pipe, kitchen sink, floorboard -- the freaking floorboards -- because they're useful in improving life in the slums.

My friend spent 4 months there, and had to travel through the slums almost daily. He's concluded that poverty -- real poverty like what he's witnessed with his own eyes -- doesn't exist in the U.S.

Here's a tip: Brazil's economy is doing well because it is not oil-dependent, it exports oil, it has no social safety net, and its doing whatever it can to attract foreign investment. The slums have nothing to do with, except as a refuge for those who are left behind by the economy.
If you guys can give a general advice to start for a fresh bachelor graduate who doesn't have enough experiences but really want to join a startup in as an entry-level position or as an intern, what would it be?

I need to get a job in a period at most two months :(.
This might actually be useful for a PC project I'm working on. I looked into touch-screen monitors but they are way too expensive. A $100 wireless trackpad might even be more useful since it could operated at a distance from the monitor.

It'll run in Windows on a Mac with an update http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1068 but I wonder if it will work on a PC with an arbitrary bluetooth adapter.
Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
thanks for your input. I am sure that 1999 is inspired by your site.

Also, there are no "payouts" when setting up a referral program (non-monetary rewards), hence the monthly structure.
It sounds whimsical but the headline of this article helped me gain a new perspective on Wikileaks. I probably shouldn’t see them as this supposed holier than thou and perfect organization which fails miserably at being just that (especially in the wake of the Collateral Murder video).

They are just something like a news organization, with their own biases, their own screw ups (which should be criticized), but they still provide a valuable service to society. The headline helped me come to terms with my ultimately unrealistic expectations of Wikileaks.
Right. So why's that not happening right now?

Let me guess. Too much "big government"? We just need to cut taxes on rich people a little more and we'll be in capitalist utopia?
If you use enough cologne that you actually care how much it costs, you're using too much cologne, and I can probably smell you from here. A decent bottle might cost you sixty bucks, but it'll last years. Pennies per use.
The biggest is probably an eBay for services and rentals. Basically non-goods.

This includes renting your neighbours lawnmower or drill, through to renting a holiday apartment, or a floor for a night and was envisioned to be heavily integrated into a calendaring and scheduling solution.

I pretty much went into detail of scenarios like the floor space swapping (AirBNB now is very close to what I had described), went into detail on renting apartments around events (think along the line of apartments in London during the Olympics). I also researched and thought about how this same system could be used by small businesses, for example how you could bid for a slot with a famous hairdresser and the auction market would set the rate... so a skilled person in great demand would earn more than normal rates.
Who is your designer? I would certainly like to hire them for some work.
One thing that I have been itching for is an RSS feed of the top articles. Maybe there's already some way to get that which I haven't found?
The value of credit scores to banks / CC companies is the ability to sell that debt to a third party.
Thanks, they are great things I might need to work on.
I would also like to add that my co-founder is a core team member at piwik.org so he knows a bit about tracking and analytics...

We will make this more evident on the website soon.
Most that engineering money is someone else's. Apple hasn't been designing its own machines since the x86 switch, really; they contracted their laptop manufacturing to the Big 3 (4?) laptop makes like everyone else. I remember the announcement when Asustek won the contract for one of the laptop lines (I think it was the MacBook) back when Apple launched its first generation x86 laptops.

Odds are, they're headed in either the same direction with their PC line, or they're finally going to give it up altogether and start finding partners to OEM the OS. They'd have a HUGE leg up at getting into datacenters that way -- contracting companies like RackSaver, Boxx, and other similar vendors (which does, in spite of recent news, still include Dell) would help enormously with that. It's already at a point where other than the pretty case and the OS, the mac is just another PC, and I would argue that the part that matters for the non-mobile PC's isn't the hardware or the pretty case.
Firefox 4 Beta 2 is here – Welcome CSS3 transitions
I would note that the NPR interview referenced and linked within this article is very interesting and informative; I recommend giving it a listen.
Except that this article is about pollution, not CO2.

And if you are talking about CO2 there are better ways.
If I reject someone who has made the interview stage, I always make sure to contact those candidates by phone/mail (for people who made it to the in-person interview) and e-mail (for those who made it to a phone interview).

For simple applicants, however, I always make sure the ad says 'only those qualified for interviews will be contacted'. Applicants should know from that sentence that "no news is bad news", shouldn't they?

When you're hiring these days, you get a gigantic stack of resumes for each posting. The bigger the pile, the more arbitrary the reason a resume or application is trashed.

Not to sound cold, but people who are hiring try to spend the most time on finding and interviewing the best candidates instead of appeasing the ones that didn't meet their requirements.
This was posted a few days ago, that probably does what you're looking for:

A cure for Hacker News overload
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547998
Just a list of all the things I can think of the at will trigger that alarm.

Google analytics,
Embedded Youtube videos,
Adsense,
Any of Google's websites,
Typing in the search box.

The chrome extension is even funnier. That would probably never be silent.

EDIT: Turns out typing in the search box doesn't set it off
Wow, as soon as I heard that sound I was reminded of sitting in front of my old Macintosh LC II system. Maybe I had set it up to use the klaxon for the beep sound. It's strange the way sounds can bring back memories like that!
Recruiting tip: don't hire someone who is able to answer this way to someone, no matter how skilled.
often the simplest things in machine learning/data mining work best---so maybe come up with a very simple way of achieving what you want, try it out. work out what's not so good, and improve. repeat.

an important thing is to work out what maths you can just rationalise and ignore the details of, and what maths you need to know in detail.
for example, you probably at this stage don't need to know how to prove the central limit theorem, but it might help you to know the intuition.
it might be a good idea to know, in detail, where linear regression comes from though.

warning: in my experience, data mining books tend to provide poor explanations of the mathematical justifications of what's going on. if you can, get to a library and get some more theoretical books on machine learning or statistics.
in stats, larry wasserman's all of statistics is great, in machine learning, hastie et al's the elements of statistical learning, mackay's information theory book, bishop's machine learning book, etc, etc...

with any text book, don't read them cover to cover. just get what you need and move on. if it's not obvious what you need from the book, try another one and go back. books can be expensive, but time is more precious. it's more important to do math than read math.
You get good at interviews the same way you get good at coding... do it a lot.

Start applying to lots of companies, especially companies where you do not or are not sure you want the job. Go with the goal of getting practice interviewing instead of getting the job. Not caring if you get the job will take the pressure off of the interview.

When you do not get the job, ask for feedback as to why. Ask questions about the feedback, drill in. If it is a recruiter giving you the news, ask them if you can speak with the hiring manager or if she can request more feedback from the hiring manager, or since you got the managers contact information in the interview, email them and tell them you are trying to get better at interviewing and ask them for some feedback and advice.

Then one day, you will start getting job offers. As for this Friday, while you cannot stop wanting it, look at it this way: It is either going to be good practice, or you will get the job. Either way win-win.
The Multiuser Sketchpad - Social Doodling in the Browser
All of the math is just wacky in the post though - he's comparing peak pageviews/sec/server to Facebook's pageviews/sec/server for a month. Reddit's pageviews/sec/server is 2 using 163 pageviews/sec and 80 servers.

Facebook also doesn't count all webserver HITS as pageviews, whereas most of Reddit's do count.

Beyond that, pageviews for Facebook may eat more resources (CPU/RAM) than Reddit on average due to photo uploading and other misc. things on Facebook. This means a server is working harder at 2pageviews/sec/server for Facebook.
Get to know Ksplice: kernel patching was never this easy.
I agree; every PC trackpad (even standalone, expensive ones) were, at best, tolerable. Once there are some display models out in the wild, I'll have to check it out.

Thank you for the informative reply.
A couple things spring to mind:

* Acknowledge your fear/unease up front, hopefully with a little bit of humor. "I get a bit nervous during interviews" and the accompanying "don't worry - relax, can I get you a drink?" sort of banter may help take the edge off. You've explained that you're a bit uncomfortable, but ideally they'll see you working through that.

* Bring code samples. You may be more at ease discussing something that's physically in front of both of you.

* References - it might help to bring some written references with you. Depending on how the interview is going, you may be able to point out something in writing that pertains to what you're discussing (previous projects, etc). "Sometimes I forget some of these things and need to have my notes with me" or some rationalization like that, done smoothly, won't seem out of place at all. Some may see it as the sign of someone who's sharp and on the ball, able to go beyond 'winging it' and prepare with extra material even when it's something which is difficult to do.

There's no universal way to deal with it - everyone's reasons are different. That said, make an effort to prepare even if you're not at ease with it.
The Android version is also open source :)

http://code.google.com/p/dopewars-android/
I remember running a small Windows app that would sit in the background and pipe sound of various frequencies through your speakers depending on system state. I think I had mine set up to rumble at 30 or 40Hz at 50% CPU and slowly increase the volume as it got past that point.

One night after I turned the volume up for a particularly quiet movie I fell asleep and let folding@home go. I woke up a couple minutes later with my subwoofer rattling the entire room and my roommates knocking on my door to make sure the place wasn't falling apart.
I was wondering if you can go into the specifics of what changes you made and how it made you discover who you wanted to become?
just to be clear, you make 3 x 60,000/year working at a start up?
There is a great opportunity here, if you have unlimited funds and can hold your own loans. The problem is that nobody with the money wants to take this risk on themselves, so they need to securitize these debts. Securitization requires categorizing different loans into risk pools or tranches, which are only categorized by FICO score.

In other words, sure, if you've got $billions lying around and are willing to hold 30 year loans for their full term, feel free to start a business doing this. If you're like any other bank and you want to off-load it to Fannie/Freddy immediately or securitize them and sell them to hedge funds, you need to put a FICO score on every loan and that is the only thing anyone cares about.

It's obvious this is why our financial system is so screwed up. There are people with 800 credit scores that are upside down by hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet they can still get as much revolving credit as they want because of their credit scores. Then, there are people like me who have actual cash reserves in the tens of thousands and 0 debt, and refuse to hold revolving credit, who have sub-700 because we don't buy into the whole debt ponzi scheme. The system is broken and it will take a lot more than a new business model to fix it. It will literally take several acts of congress.
Kabul War Diary as a Replicating CouchApp
Ah, but you're assuming that the only purpose of the credit score is to accurately determine risk. The other purpose, from the point of view of the lenders who support the credit score system, is to encourage people to borrow money, since the only way you can build up a high credit score is to keep borrowing money and paying it back.
Deciding everything in advance like that (e.g. banning cash, which could turn out to break everything) is actually the big co way of doing things, not the startup way.

A real startup country would start out with few rules and a bunch of early adopter inhabitants, and they'd figure out what they should do incrementally in response to the inhabitants' needs. A lot like the early US in other words.
I'd need to go back and grok the epic pile of shoddy journalism that this event created. Somewhere, I thought I read that people were trying to hire Ms. Sage's persona.

Also, this really isn't much different than what Shawn Moyer and Nathan Hamiel did ahead of DefCon 16 and Black Hat Las Vegas 2008. They set up a twitter and facebook account in the name and visage of someone who is a REALLY big name in information security (who happened to have not yet gotten on board with social networks) and just started going at it. They amassed a bunch of followers and "friends" on a few different networks. They generally tried to say the kinds of things this person would say in real life. They linked the account to that person's real web presence, etc.

You really wouldn't know it was an impostor at first glance.
There's nothing wrong with returning void. There is something wrong with casting void.

First, as someone else already pointed out, it can lead to an LP64 bug if you miss the declaration for malloc(), since int and caddr_t are not necessarily the same thing.

But the bigger problem is that casting to void* basically tells the compiler "stop all further type checking". That's not a big deal if the token "malloc" on that line never changes, but, in real codebases, allocators get changed all the time. If you change from foo_alloc() to bar_alloc(), the compiler will rightly freak out when you try to assign a foo* to a bar. But that (void) construction explicitly prevents that check from occurring, thus turning what should be a compile-time error into a runtime error.
Why roles in Perl are awesome
Tenure in a Nutshell
Fact: Most People Have Never Heard of Location-Based Apps
Re: third bullet point, it is definitely a big city thing. I haven't seen Vancouver suburbs, but those of Toronto are not substantially different from you would see in rest of North America, though perhaps not as bad as the worst examples.

Hope you enjoy Vancouver!