skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true about the binary search. I didn't complete that one in time (although I did relay the algorithm structure). Although I think white boarding gets a lot of undeserved hate, one gripe I have is with its occasional focus on compilable code. Obviously you want to hire a developer that is actually capable of implementing solutions to problems, and one that can code in a timely manner.

However, it really stings to get the algorithm right and know what the implementation concerns (overflow/OBOB) are, but simply not have enough time to get them written in a correct/compilable manner. I've failed a few online interviews where I knew the solution to a problem but simply didn't have the time to write it. For example, I got a question that required building a heap, but at some points you needed to remove items from the middle of the heap. This would require being able to call sift-down/sift-up on the underlying data structure. I didn't know how/if I could call sift-down/sift-up on the priority queue implementation of the language they made me use. So I essentially ran out of time because I couldn't look up an algorithm I knew how/why to use.

I have to disagree about the palindrome question only because I got it in the last ~15 minutes of a 30 minute first round interview. With 10 minutes passed and 5 remaining, I still only had the naive solution on the board with less than five minutes to go. After a few more minutes of thinking I eventually realized that I had only been thinking of palindromes from outside-in. With about 1-2 minutes left I hurriedly explained to my interviewer that you should check each character and find the largest palindrome that character is the center (or half of a paired center) of, by expanding outwardly. He asked a few questions, then assured me that it was ok to not write it on the board and that he could tell I understood it. It really gave me a good impression of the company that their hiring practices were so rational, and I now work there.

I really think anybody would have figured out the problem if they looked at it long enough, it's just that sometimes things like this take 4 minutes and sometimes they take 4 hours. It depends on the person but not strictly an "intelligence" way, I just think there's a lot of variance in how long it takes people, even pretty smart people, to solve sufficiently hard problems.
It doesn't exactly apply here since the author doesn't seem to be allocating resources dynamically, but another thing that's "newer" and less widely used are the devm_ family of functions.

Nowadays, lots of code could be using devm_kmalloc, devm_ioremap, etc which will release the resources automatically when the driver detaches from the device.
Links between early life adversity and later pace of aging and risk of age-related disease may be mediated by cytomegalovirus exposure.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01263

"The paper here finds that persistent cytomegalovirus infection is likely the mediating mechanism linking early life stress and later increased risk of age-related disease, acting through accelerated immune system dysfunction. This implies that the early stress may or may not be all that important, as - for whatever reason - the groups selected as examples of stress in early life are also more likely to be infected. That might be the short-term detrimental effects of stress on immune function, or it could be a matter of being in close contact with more distinct groups of people during childhood, as is the case for the adopted individuals in the study here. Cytomegalovirus is a persistent herpesvirus that the immune system cannot effectively clear from the body. Near everyone becomes infected at some point in life, and extensive evidence links this infection with immune system dysfunction. Increasing numbers of immune cells become dedicated to uselessly fighting cytomegalovirus, and ever fewer are left for everything else the immune system must accomplish. Other than this long-term corrosion, cytomegalovirus doesn't cause obvious symptoms in the vast majority of people - few notice the initial infection."

This is also compatible as a mechanism to explain greater disease risk in descendants, since growing up in an infected household presumably raises the risk of early infection with cytomegalovirus.
With thinking like that you'll probably be wealthy some day.

Good analysis.
I'm a former physicist and I was expecting this article to make a different point (particularly because it's on HN). Physics education is heavily centered around--well... physics--but the majority of what most physicists do on a daily basis is really software engineering, and most physicists are woefully unprepared for that. The majority of them are talented enough to figure a lot of it out as they go, but best practices like testing and code reviews were basically unheard of when I was in the field. I wasn't in a small laboratory experiment either, I'm talking about a large-scale collaboration that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and involved thousands of people. A simple bug in someone's code could literally have a major impact on the field. Another comment asked whether universities are too focused on preparing people for academia rather than a job, but I honestly think that they're not even really focused properly on preparing them for academia.

Teaching physics is a hard problem because there's a long and rich history of building upon previous advancements. You can't teach somebody quantum chromodynamics without first teaching them quantum electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, and all of the mathematical methods that come along with these. It's hard to legitimately get anywhere close to the cutting edge in graduate school, let alone as an undergraduate. I hope that this has changed somewhat in the last decade, but most of the teaching methods in these subjects have historically been unchanged since the 70s. I strongly believe that it would be better preparation, for both academia and the real world, to integrate much more of an emphasis on simulation, visualization, and numerical methods into these requisite courses. These would be far more constructive for people developing skills that they simply can't get from doing problems on paper.
Does the 4k monitor have multiple inputs? If it does, then connect both laptops to different input channels and switch inputs on the monitor as needed. Then presumably all you would need is a USB switch for keyboard and mouse input.

I have often wondered why no one offers wireless keyboard/mouse combos with multiple USB fobs and a switch on the keyboard to change which fob it talks to.
Works great so far. The iOS app was janky at first (it would forget about the hub it was connected to) but seems better now. I don't really use the app though - a recent update added Alexa support, and that works great. I've mounted the remote control on the wall and either use that or Alexa to turn the lights on and off.

I don't want purple or green lights in my living room, so the fact that IKEA bulbs are limited to warmth and brightness is fine for me (I like to just keep them on "warm").
The Lego Storage Guide
Nothing at all wrong with the IDF or Israel. I happily support my Jewish brothers and sisters buy buying Israeli-made goods.
The brain probably has a lot of hard wired networks to recognize faces and to not like being cold for example. I think even feral children have these capabilities.
Which in turn relies on older work.

I wonder if anyone has looked at what Mumford-Shaw implications would look like projected onto a CNN?
How would you implement types? receive / send make dealing with types incredibly difficult. Also, hot code reloading makes reasoning about types difficult as well.

There's been some proposals for Multi-party session types, but none that are practical by any means.
My understanding is that this kind of hiding evidence and tampering would not be punished in the current trial. Instead, if it was determined to be criminal behaviour, there would be another follow up criminal trial.
Fair enough, although that last is also a good point. Rust matches can last a while, but when you die you can just slot into a new match starting elsewhere, so you still don't have to wait. There's no direct equivalent in board games.
This actually looks pretty useful. I'm adjacent to you (DL on hadoop/spark competing more with the just launched amazon sagemaker among other things) and was curious about your go to market strategy.

Like us you're kind of strattling the line between the hadoop ecosystem and GPUs. Mesos does this as well.

It seems like most folks in the GPU space still don't get Hadoop or S3 as a data source yet though (despite it being the dominant source of data warehousing S3 or otherwise).

How are you guys coping with this? Have you found a different experience than me?

It seems like a lot of the big data companies are at least adding some sort of gpu management as a checkbox now so the spaces will likely converge with or without the MPI crowd.

The other trend I'm seeing is you have folks like MapD and Kinetica trying to run the whole stack themselves. I'm not sure how well that will go overall (especially given how you can't really have everything in 1 warehouse typically). Could you comment on this? Are you going to try this as well after integrating?

I hope to see more companies in this space actually exploring this intersection.

Many make the mistake of boiling the ocean and doing nothing well though. Due to that it ends up being consulting. How will you guys over come that? Reworded, what is the initial focus vs the long term strategy?
Creating is perhaps better states as “asserting”
Well, right, it's not even a unique document. Multiple, equally valid birth certificates can exist. As a form of ID, it's not great.

A passport or drivers license is much better because the issuer put a picture on it and already did the checking to make sure the birth certificate and social security card were valid.
People brag about their FICO scores. What do you think FICO scores are? Just glorified citizen score.
Initial Evaluation of the Windows Subsystem for Linux
If I’ve learned anything from being in this field it’s that:

1) many if not most implementations will support lots of algorithms by default, and
2) as a result, approximately zero users will lock it down
Remember fractal image compression ?

https://youtu.be/AjdogjBxfco?t=260
The guy wasn't so clever, because regularly missing location data fosters suspicion. About the reporter, I was also struck by the technical cluelessness. For example, there's no need to ground Faraday cages.
>The problem with that however is how we use tags today.

"Doctor, it hurts when I cargo-cult workflow from GitHub..."
Easily get started on your new SharePoint Hosted application
> but the majority of what most physicists due on a daily basis is really software engineering

Do you have a cite or explanation for this claim? Sure, particle physics is mostly software these days, but I don't think this is true for anywhere near a majority of physicists.
Some of this is on you. Relationships take time, work and effort from both parties. Meetup is just a platform for making RSVPs to events.
That's actually true. There might be some more initialization overhead if you exec a process (the libc stuff), but non-kernel (i.e. user space) code is not slower per se.
If you are trying a new coding or design question, have a few co-workers try it first to help flesh out the wording and get data points on how long it takes to solve.
Yeah. Managers.
Yes. This. :)
Yesterday this was in the front page, I have it on my "try out list": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15810268
I feel this is somewhat industry dependent, so take this with a grain of salt (finance answer).

They cultivate a friendly banter type atmosphere. As to the actual test part:

The ones that have asked questions that require a judgemental answer.

Bad interviewers try to ask difficult or complex questions. (Stupid monkey puzzles / google style "trick" questions")

The good ones assume you're technically competent and throw you questions where the question is crystal clear but the scenario is ambiguous & open to interpretation & vague. I don't need people that can do monkey puzzles I need people that can respond dynamically in the face of uncertainty.

e.g. How would you go about detecting fraud in a scenario like XYZ.

That has a million possible answers...but depending on which route you chose it'll become painfully obvious to the interviewer whether you know what you're talking about. It doesn't even have to be the right one...the language and logic alone will betray you if you don't know what you're talking about.
I work from home. I bought it for myself because I like having the extra real estate. Best purchase I have made in a long time.

Also, I couldn't imagine two of these next to each other, 34" is very large!
Hm. But will I still be able to open them from the developer console...?
Haha you worked with Buzz! Your work's great but MAN those guys were really... something, huh?
I can't share everything here, but basics are this. Three tables: accounts, transactions, entries. Entries have amount, unit, notes. Accounts have name, parent_account. Transactions have subject, notes, date. That's the data. Then I have a view that flattens accounts tree, so that each has name and fullname. Name being Fun, fullname a full path to that account, eg. Expenses:Fun.

With that base structure, you can start answering any questions by just summing entries groupped by accounts filtered by a regexp on fullname and fitler on date. What is my cashflow for any time period, what is my equity, what is my balance sheet, what I actually have, what changed recently, how any of this develops over time...
Just contrasting this to death sentence

> estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely at least 4.1% would be exonerated. [1]

@_@

1. http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230.abstract
Thanks. Good luck and keep up the good fight.
Oh wow, even if you right-click "View Image" the script gets run.
Amazon Neptune isn't that great - discussions regarding vertical scaling
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth but this has to have something to do with Intel trying to stay relevant in the age of GPU computing. Yes? No?
Us programmers also think about things like failure scenarios and disaster recovery. It may be trendy to criticize us for overcomplicating designs--and many do--but non-tech people using Excel are often doing more than just getting the job done...they're creating a disaster waiting to happen.
Why do they need their own server? What's wrong with Dropbox, Google Drive, et al? Or, what's wrong with the network drives from Seagate and WD that will let you access those files remotely (aside from the fact that they do cost money)?
Hmm, I feel like I'm burning out right now - both very exhausted and very bored - work feels tedious. I never linked these too things together. Thank you
> For instance, in CoderPad, there are a few ways to abuse our quota system to get more than you paid for. Clamping down on this would require making the product more annoying just to penalize bad customers. Every time someone tells me I should be more strict about this, I ask, "How much effort should we spend trying to extract value from people who clearly don't want to give it to us? Shouldn't we just try to attract better customers?"

This is actually pretty sneaky. It takes a long time for the corporate gears to grind and get a contract signed. Meanwhile the engineers are finding the product more and more indispensable because the product is fantastic and there's not anything really stopping them from going over the limit. Eventually a signature is inevitable, even at the (to me) eye-popping price point because everyone in the org loves it.
Friden EC-132 Calculator [video]
It's certainly also true for astronomy, quantum gravity, and most of the condensed matter physicists that I know. Which subfields don't involve at least Monte Carlo simulations or writing code to analyze data and/or control experimental apparatus?
I used to have a KVM to switch between my many boxes with many OSes. Now with virtualization, I have box with a few virtual machines. Now if I want to use windows, debian and freebsd, I don't have to switch between 3 physical boxes, I just have to switch virtual machine windows on one box.
Successfully. They're still operating in London.
Most Mentioned Books on Reddit
Excel should have a built-in, top-notch SQL editor/IDE. Existing SQL IDEs return resultsets in a grid, thus, Excel is a natural fit. Excel would allow developers to go beyond a SQL IDE by subjecting the results to the rest of the spreadsheet's functionality. Would work great for exploratory analysis or for production reporting.

Currently, running SQL and returning the results to a sheet is possible, but very cumbersome now: either .ODC files, VBA, or PowerPivot, none of which are flexible or developer-friendly.
Manish gives a fairly interesting run down on vertical scaling on Amazon Neptune. I'd like to hear some thoughts
It's an op-ed piece by a highly biased individual in washingtonpost. It's meant to push a particular position, not to espouse truths or facts.
There's some pretty fundamental reasons that ocaml does not support open classes/modular implicits in that fashion.

Essentially you want Haskell's numeric tower, and while it's pretty amazing it's worth noting that it requires a lot of machinery with big implications.
Can you elaborate? I feel like depending on who you asked, that could be a point for or a point against.
This depends on the country.
Optical physicist here. I spend >80% of my time writing software and agree that I was woefully unprepared for this by my education. When I was a student the prevailing attitude that skills like programming were "trivial" and that formalized programming/computer science classes were unnecessary because it could be easily learned.
Mine too! Small world haha.
Huh. This seems to boil down to 'noise is higher information entropy than realistic content; partial learning will learn realistic content before learning noise' or something like that.
CoderPad is really, really good. I've interviewed using a bunch of alternatives, and CoderPad is far and away the only one that works reliably all the time. It always cheers me up when a company tells me they're using it, because I know it won't lag, the vi keybindings will work, the built-in terminal will work, there won't be weird interface glitches, every language I need will be there, etc.

This sounds hyperbolic, but I've never wanted a feature during an interview and found CoderPad to lack it.
109 Microwave Towers Bring the Internet to Remote Alaska Villages
This is perhaps the highest praise from a candidate we have ever received. Thank you, that means a lot to us.
2GB with $15/GB overage fee.
It isn't. Stop insisting on that.

If you wish to talk about the 100% estate tax I'm willing to talk about it tho. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPdjuPPtnWA
What a hack (the reporter) Social Security and Medicare are over 50% of the federal budget and only going to grow. It would seem prudent to look at structural changes there when discussing federal debt and deficits into the future.
Yeah, if it was open source you know the first commit would remove the check for AMD hardware that removes optimisation.
They actually don't have an aerospace program. You're right about their mining engineering program. CS has been getting better over the last several years. It's definitely grown. I do agree it leaves something to be desired, but to be fair, plenty of graduates go on to work jobs at prestigious employers because they went for it on their own and picked up a lot along the way. They didn't just learn what was taught in school.

Source: I went there and https://inside.mines.edu/Degrees-Offered
Hardest for me was giving myself “permission” to recover. What I mean is that like a NBA star who is in the game but exhausted gets pissed when the coach pulls him out of the game for a breather (even if he desperately needs one) because well he’s the “the man” and you don’t put the man on the bench. I was exhausted, depressed, and anti-social outside work. But I did not want to stop because work was also my identity where I was “the man”. I forced myself (eventually) to take a time out but it has been very difficult being idle and I find myself struggling for something that is interesting and makes me happy to do. I can’t just sit on the bench. I find “doing nothing” basically impossible.
It seems like I've heard that every year for the last 10 years, at least... Who wants to take excel away from them? the same ones that like to change programming language every year?
The Information, who was behind the Andy Rubin story, today came out with this (non-paywalled site on the matter): https://9to5google.com/2017/11/30/google-leadership-miscondu...
Handcrafted, but auto optimizing is a hot research topic right now with DeepMind et al. Needs to be evolved at deeper level than what they’re doing now so architecture is discovered, not just optimized.
If you are interested in replicating this or extensions of this work, get in touch! You can reach via the email in the profile, here, or http://twitter.com/metaviv.
“that sounds like a homework question!!!”

I wish I was doing homework instead of struggling with an arcane production issue!
Sounds exactly like regular espionage to me. Hiring employees from competitors with "5 years experience in this exact line of work" really is espionage on a small scale.

They will use their knowledge of what doesn't work, and how not to approach problems gleaned from their previous employer to solve your problems much quicker.

Previous employers cost to develop a space laser: 5 years.

Time to re-invent space laser when you already know how to do it: 6 months.
The elimination in CS is in the region of 2-3 minutes, whereas in any board game I’ve played, it’s been 30+
How are you being a devil's advocate? As far as I can tell, your viewpoint is completely described in the conclusion, quoted here:

"In conclusion, the heart of our findings is that single-blind reviewers make use of information about authors and institutions. Specifically, single-blind reviewers are more likely to bid on papers from top institutions and more likely to recommend for acceptance papers from famous authors or top institutions, compared with their double-blind counterparts."

"The primary ethical question is whether this behavior is acceptable. In one interpretation, single-blind reviewers make use of prior information that may allow them to make better overall judgments. As a consequence, however, it may be that other work is disadvantaged, in the sense that two contributions of roughly equal merit might be scored differently by single-blind reviewers, in favor of the one from a top school, while double-blind reviewers may not show this bias as strongly."

Or are you arguing that there is no ethical concern at all? The introduction seems to cover the main pro and con arguments, as part of the justification for the need for experimental evidence.
> Argentina has the highest salaries in many other jobs too.

I get the point. Pilots however, are super interchangeable, like software engineers. There's no reason peruvian, brasilian, paraguayan , brazilian and chilean pilots wouldnt move to argentina to work and depress wages. Except the biggest payer and employer of pilots in argentina is the State. And it doesnt hire that many foreigners, for some reason...

> Also, that piece of propaganda conveniently forgets that Avianca just suffered the longest ever strike in Colombia, not really the most worker or union friendly place.

I dont know what colombia has to do with argentinian pilots.
I don't dabble with video games very much because I find it to be mostly a solitary experience and they tend to have addictive game mechanics.

Board games on the other hand force you to become social and is often times responsible for bringing your groups of friends together more frequently as well as being a toehold into new social circles.