skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EX1: You wrote code before asking for more details you fail.

EX2: Then again some people view asking questions as stalling.

This is interviewing, not a mathematics competition or a judicial proceeding. It's not a test, it's a first date.

If your interviewer applies either of these rules so strictly that you "fail", you probably don't want to work for them...

...unless you really are the type of person who wants a work environment where such rules apply strictly, and you happen to have the same ruleset as the person who is interviewing you. In which case the two of you may work together very well, and the interview will be a big success.

The first rule of interviewing is: Although one of you is leading, and one of you is following, you are interviewing each other. It's a conversation. If I start out answering your question on a track that you don't want to follow -- integers and not vectors, Lisp but not ASM -- you need to lead me in the right direction, just as you would do if we were discussing a real problem. Your ability to guide the conversation, and my ability to follow, and our resultant ability to establish a rapport and keep the conversation moving, is what is under test here. The problem itself is far less important.

P.S. I have seen that XOR trick before, once, but it still blows my mind. I can never understand it without spending half an hour in a corner muttering to myself. Is there a field where that trick is so idiomatic that it's a reasonable thing to expect a candidate to come up with it an interview?
thanks for taking the time to review these editors. I was using TeXnik center while in windows, I switched to TeXmaker and now I will be trying emacs
Android 2.2 is excellent. It easily competes with iOS on many metrics, beating it in some areas.

Phones like the Samsung Galaxy S (esp. the Pro), the Droid 2, the Droid X -- excellent devices that are hyper-competitive. Few with such a device would look jealously on an iPhone.

So no...on the phone front Android is top tier. Yeah, subjectively someone will say that the iPhone is all roses for them, but that's the value of a competitive market -- you pick the one that fits you best. On the tablet market it is future tense because, I suspect, Google really didn't want Android to be the tablet OS. They wanted ChromeOS to take that crown. I don't talk tablets when the conversation is about Android.
Technology and the Future of U.S. Competitiveness: Nightmares and Dreams
X% of programmers can program. But they do so in such a way that when they've added N thousands of lines of code, it starts to suck.

An easy metric for suck doesn't immediately pop into my head.
E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The Humble Programmer (EWD 340)
Electromagnetic fields cause fluorescent bulbs to glow
Well if you are a 'internet' start up aimed at the consumer market the correct answer would be "EVERYONE, is going to pay me on Friday"
Everyone's gotta start somewhere. My advice to you is to stop worrying about how long it's going to take you to do what you want. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and working towards that (those?) goal(s) and you'll be there before you know it. If you've worked with startups before, just not the technical side, talk with some of the programmers you know and ask them to give you a lesson or two or even just direct you towards some good resources and cheat-sheets (these are a lifesaver for me). Just stop worrying about the time; you'll drive yourself crazy and it will feel like going nowhere fast.
I wish there was an Omnisio version ;(
Even something as basic as on-screen typography is much worse under Android.
Can I ask what plugin is being used on the page? Every time I click it my Chrome tab crashes.
I guess the point is the reviews. Not great.

http://www.amazon.com/Archos-Home-Tablet-Android-Black/produ...

Roughly the same number of reviews for each star. 5 has the fewest. Reading the positive reviews is possibly more informative than the negative ones:

I'm now satisfied with my Archo's 7 Home tablet. After many hours reading helps and hints on the Archo's 7 Home Tablet Forum and installing some of the programs they advise downloading to beef up the weak and clumsy operating system, I got my android tablet just where I want it.. ..new firmare that makes the touch keypad a little easier to work with, but you still need a stylus to get best result..

Not sure what this means about the future and it's certainly not an apples to apples comparison, but it doesn't sound like a cheap android tablet exists that an average VC'c dad would be happy with.
What's old is new again. Some may recall the days of "bang addressing" to send email beyond a local site.
Revenge of the bind shell (over IPv6)
Dalton Caldwell did a good job of that during the talk with his startup Imeem and his experiences with the music industry.
Tom and Mark Zuckerberg's, both very insightful. The other talk by the guy from imeem was pretty interesting too. Overall it was a pretty good day. Oh, on my end the stream was flawless and I guess that helped.
Hmmm, waterproof "toe-socks with a thin-but-strong sole" and a flexible bit that goes halfway up your calves. Sounds like an idea.
I've seen Archos Android tablets in stores for longer than the iPad has been out, such as at Best Buy.

Besides that, there are plenty of Android tablets out there for various prices.. and build quality of course.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AkYukCg_h8T-cmRtOGMy...
As posted by a commenter on the original article, this website may help: http://www.AccessibleTwitter.com/
NASA 1981 Space for Women (Narrated by Ricardo Montalban)
Huh? What are these uses of JavaScript that are increasingly sophisticated and powerful?

Uh, any web app? Gmail? Google Maps? The one I'm working on? Surely we don't need to make a list.

If JavaScript continues to advance at the lightning pace it's been advancing these past ten years we'll be in exactly the same spot we are now!

That's incorrect. The language didn't need to change much. The two things that have changed are so major they couldn't be majorer: (1) it took people 10 years to actually figure out what they had in JS; (2) the implementations needed to catch up. While 1 may be more or less done, 2 is still in full swing. This will enable further innovation. It's not even clear we need major changes to the language itself. I'd be much more excited if the VMs were opened up to apps.
I loved the post, but would be interesting to see some actual data behind these observations.

Some of these seemingly contradict each other: one "rule" claims that ascending order of prices is better, another claims the opposite.
Getting To The Bottom Of The Crazy Yahoo-Groupon Rumors
It isn't worth calling it Android.. I think when people think Android they think of the default interface, the ability to install applications from the App Market, and so on. I have a nook and it's basically stripped down to just a few customized apps (besides the reader function a couple games, a basic media player, and a web browser).

However, I do think it's important in that it shows the versatility of Android as a platform..
Are there any screenreader software packages that can output a transcript of what they're reading aloud?

That'd make it infinitely easier for web developers to test pages...
Startup School: Reid Hoffman On The Burden Of Competition
That's unfortunate. It's using videojs, from http://videojs.com

Can I ask what OS you're working with?

The full video is at http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenrea... or http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenrea... if you want to watch it.
So many favorites today.... Brian, Ron, Andrew, Dalton and Tom were awesome. I can't decide which one was my favorite because they all were in different ways.
Nobody talks about shrink-wrap or enterprise software either, presumably because they're mature markets that very large companies dominate.
I worry that doing something like this entirely client-side may make it easily abused. =/
There's a Firefox extension called Fangs that I use, but it's not that great. I plan to have some posts soon that talk about tools.

JAWS for Windows gives you a 45 minute trial. All you need to do to restart the trial is to reboot your machine.

But like I said in the article - it's not gonna be a checklist that gets the job done, it's gonna be about testing it in real screenreaders. I haven't seen any emulators that behave like the real ones.
There are many discussions about game development here. Why don't we have more? Probably because not as many game developers come here to post as other types of developers and startups
Cool site once you actually find the tiny little input box in the bottom left corner.
It works great in Linux and OSX. I think windows probably hates the font.

The other sites you see trouble on were probably designed on Linux or OSX as well.
A very interesting look at the painting. I do wonder at times if art historians and other afacionados place too much importance on every minute detail as intentional rather than a mere artifact, even for painters known for perfectionism. Specifically, in this case, whether the technique used was intended to be a part of the "user experience", the work of art?
Is there a known problem with this font?
The point of the article was not to pick on Twitter. While using a tool like AccessibleTwitter is great for that particular example, it's not fixing the real problem - people will run into problems with modern websites, and simple things can make that experience better.

I hope I didn't make a mistake by pointing at Twitter.
It depends. What is the likelihood that that person will get hired if they go on the day-long excursion? Will this person be just one of many people you will take on these marathon interviews? Or will you be completely focused on this one person, and if they seem like a good fit they get hired immediately?

The point is, if you expect me to invest so much in an "interview" with you, you had better be laying some big chips on the table as well.
tl;dr (sorry, had to)
As a supporter of capitalism, I was taken in by the socialist propaganda.

My interpretation is rather different. I thought the corporations are creature of politics and political institutions, rather than a product of free markets. The state make a bunch of laws that influence the size and nature of corporations, determine what they cannot do and often what they can do, and so on. The state would then give favors and listen to what corporations wanted the law to be, and so on.

Politics is the partitioning of a cake without expanding the cake. Indeed, in some case, the cake probably become smaller. Interests are easily given into thinking short term, not the general long term prosperity. They rather not work so hard amongst their competitors to get what they want.

Ease of life with no competitors to contend with on the market lead to less innovation, laziness, and blindness.

We see that the record labels are lazy and blind, and less keen on innovations. This of course make them vulnerable to adversaries and emerging competitors.

No matter how intensive their lobbying is, they are targeting consumers, not competitors. Unless their behaviors change, it will only be a matter of time before they are out-competed.
I know the job market is sick these days and many people are jobless, but I do believe that someone with such skills is already involved in a startup, working at a company or have filled his life. If this person left a company or get fired, he'll immediately find job offers (8 year of experience, he should be popular in his field!).

That being said, none of those you are dreaming of will look at your job post. Take a look at: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view...

I like this job post. It mention requirements, role, responsibilities. Short and precise. I'm, however, more interested in the life at Google and the photos, which are covered in depth.
Yeah, the links in the wild are the problem. Users have a habit of copying URLs from the URL bar, unfortunately.

I think Google could have done this better; they could have made it so all ajax URLs are crawlable (standard robots rules apply) as long as your site opts in, then you'd only have to support pretty URLs, something you probably have to do anyway.

For example, now twitter needs to support twitter.com/#!/ev and twitter.com/ev and twitter.com/?_escaped_fragment_=ev
In this case respecting HTTP's Expires: or Cache-Control: max-age= headers seems like the thing to do.
The real problem would be the cold, I'd think. I'm not sure how easy it would be to insulate them sufficiently to let you walk in the snow, while keeping the form-fitting flexibility that's their appeal.
i've been a runner for about 10 years.
i bought vibram five fingers 6 months ago.

i used to run for mental stability, but it was a painful exercise that only paid off in well... mental stability.

vff's may not be fully barefoot (but i live in a country where i wouldn't dare run fully barefoot), but i've never enjoyed running so much in my life.

when i switched it took a good 2 months to adjust, but now i run 7 miles on average per time as opposed to 4 before.... i just cant help myself.... its SO much fun to run. who knew?

edit: p.s. everything they say about it is true. there is a very noticeable difference in the amount of wear on my body after a long run in shoes and VFFs. my calves and feet take the brunt of the impact, not my hips/knees/back.

This is the biggest change to my physical life in the last 5 years.
Sorry, where did they do this? Some of the examples they gave, certainly, didn't conform to all of their tips - only the one that they were demonstrating at the time, but I didn't see any contradiction in the text?
You could target bloggers with audiences that might want to use the app. For instance, if the app was to help people take the SAT, find bloggers that write about SAT test taking skills and ask them to feature it.
I just get a grey X pane in my WebM-enabled Firefox4 build.
Date Hater: OKCupid: Please improve your customer service
Zuckerberg: Facebook doesn’t make real profits, and that’s okay
Great question.

One thing to keep in mind regarding Facebook/Twitter integration is you must keep it optional. A lot of users hate giving away that info and will instantly 1 star/delete your app if you force them to login. I've seen this over and over again (most recently with the Gourmet Live iPad app).
I'll take rick.ww.com -> richardminerich.com
There is also the Austin Javascript meetup that @getify puts together. Anybody else planning on going?
Something that has thrown me off here: The position very clearly reads as a senior System Administrator / Engineer, with some project management and lead experience. But the title is Director of Infrastructure. Speaking from my experience, a director is a manager of managers.

Is this req really a director role? If so, where are the criteria for the leadership and managerial components? The listing goes into quite a lot of detail about the technical side on things that would end up being optional when deep-diving with the right candidate.

If not, and it's actually a "director of the machines that compose the infrastructure", IMO the education bar is too high: I've never worked at Google, but I don't know anyone with a masters degree that gets Nagios alerts.

Lastly, as an outsider, I see "Customer up-time and data integrity is the most important thing in our company and we need someone who has the experience, depth and skills to lead this area of our company.", but the listing does not speak to the candidate's responsibilities with regard to the development / architecture of the software itself. A senior technical contributor or a manager with this charter will spend no small part of their time in design and code reviews. Frankly, in a lot of shops this position has to argue with Dev to keep them from doing things that seem clever but can't be operationalized, whether due to an unforseen technical restriction, or because the new idea will have a lot of corner / edge cases that will make administration of the application very error-prone.

Had I not moved across the country in the last year, I'd definitely consider throwing my hat in the ring... UT is on the short list of places I'd move next round, too. Good luck and please post a follow-up!
I'm experiencing the same issue with Chrome 7.0.517.41 beta on Ubuntu.
But if you choose middle class today you can't expect to sleep with them all.
Dear Sir,

I just purchased this app. It's awesome. I mean, it's like someone actually dealt with recipe sites, and wanted to use their iPad for getting those recipes and planning meals and shopping lists. I know you built this app because YOU wanted to use it. And I know you use it. And that's why it's pure awesome. In the first 2 minutes of using it, I'd saved several recipes from sites and it worked. Easily.

Congratulations, this is an awesome app, worth every penny.
If you're talking pseudo-code, I'd agree. And I think all these various sketches you're talking about are comparable to psuedo-code. Those sketches aren't going to tell you exactly what PSI some escape valve needs to blow at, or what temperature a reaction is going to run at, etc.

If you're expecting me to write out code that can be ocr'ed and compiled, which is basically what most whiteboard tests expect, I'd disagree.

I failed one whiteboard test (C#) because:

(a) I didn't know the formatting for Console.WriteLine off the top of my head, because who the hell uses that when writing an app anyway?

(b) Because I didn't check the List<int> parameter too see if it was null, even though I did handle an empty list correctly.

With the whole interview thing going on, I didn't even argue point (b), there was too much going on. On the way home I was thinking about it, and as a design decision I actually would've just let the function throw a NullPointerException. No specification was provided to the contrary. Should I have wrapped it in a FooAppException, java-style? Or just silently done nothing even though the inputs were invalid?
Android can also run just fine on MIPS processors, and there are MIPS options available which are competitive with the offerings from ARM. And of course it has been ported to Intel's Atom processor.

Windows only really runs on x86 these days, but the Linux-based Android OS is not so encumbered.
I remain skeptical of anyone trying to tell me that I'm suffering from a horrendous disease for which there are no symptoms. The whole thing smacks of pseudoscience.

Back problems are very common. Digestive problems are very common. Foot problems? Not so much. Most old people have feet which are still perfectly functional and comfortable, and the shoes they wore most of their lives are less comfortable than shoes are now. Even women who have spent most of their lives in high heels do not, for the most part, seem to suffer from serious foot problems.

So where's the horrendous downside, that I seem to be missing, of shoes?
I saw an Android tablet in Macy's today for $169 (might have been $179.) It was an off-brand Chinese model and the display had a dead battery and wasn't plugged in, but the fact that it was there at all, next to the shoe department struck me as notable.
Check this site
http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
http://personalmba.com/2010-reading-list-update/
Is there a video of this talk?
An interesting thing that comes out in a lot of these topics is how people are historical determinists when it come to tech platforms.

"The way OS wars work is..."

To me it seems like so much is different that I'd be very hesitant to have such a strong opinion. The players are established companies, it's phones and tablets (cheaper devices with shorter lives), the web is the killer app, software development is easier (in many ways), it's twenty years later....
No. The .NET you have to "learn" is just a set of class libraries and interfaces, the gist of which you will get in a weekend hacking together your first C# project.

Unix is the platform to teach in CS , if you should even teach towards a platform at all. Not only because *nix common in industry, but its set of small and reusable tools is well suited to the software engineering philosophy.

My CS department had a course in .NET. It also had a course in XML. Why anyone would take those is baffling.

Also, if all you're extracting from your CS classes are new languages to pad your resume with, then you are missing the forest for the trees.
Glass and stones, thorns, various disgusting substances, surfaces that are too hot, surfaces that are too cold, and my personal favourite, bees.

Too much time spent walking outside barefoot as a kid led me to step on a lot of bees. Get stung by enough bees and eventually you'll probably develop a bee sting allergy, like I have. Now, the next bee I step on could kill me.

Anyway, there's a lot of things on the ground which suck in one way or another. Our ancestors invented shoes for a reason, and it wasn't because Nike marketing told them to.
Replaced with video from Vimeo. Hope that helps everyone.
And yet Apple have been making the same mistakes they made during the original PC wars.
never posted tl;dr or knew what it stood for. If its posted though, it may not add to discussion but should educate the OP to post shorter, why you shouldn't downvote it.
The Killing Buddhas[1] rule has lead me to dig up information.

Initial investigation:

Bolivia seem to be a country that got into a lot of debt. Following the advice of the World Banks, they privatized everything in rapid order.

Wikipedia article on the privatization of Bolvia states that the public utility is having water shortage, high tariff, accounting errors, and such. The citation was from a Spanish source, but the link was expired. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization_in_Bolivia#...

I have to say that the Water War is a lot more complicated than it look. First, there is the issue of privatization and how it is conducted. Second, we need to know the economic consequences of privatization. The possible bias of the World Banks that argued for privatization of water will have to be investigated, and so on.

Note this is only a cursory look into the issue of water privatization. It is also unlikely that I will go much into the issue as water use is not that interesting to me.

----

1. Killing Buddhas is taken from the Zen maxim If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. ESR generalize it as a rationalist maxim that said that our strongest belief should not be immune to and should be subjected to attempted refutation. This help avoided fixed beliefs that are totally wrong and help make sure that we do not mistake beliefs for reality.
There's quite a few startups in the game industry, but they aren't really startups in the scale-fund-and-exit sense that the web ones are, with the exception of a few mostly web- and mobile-focused ones like Zynga and ngmoco.

A lot of the small studios' commercial ambitions are more along the lines of "profitable small business that makes us a living while maintaining our artistic independence" rather than "looking for an IPO" or (god forbid) "sell to EA".
Interestingly enough, this is actually gone in browsers that implement the HTML5 History API: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=438532093919

For instance, use Chrome and browse around the site. You'll notice there are no hashed URLs.

The same thing is done on Flickr. Look at this page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timdorr/3707685058/in/set-72157... Now click on the sections under "This photo belongs to". As you expand them out, you'll notice that the URL in your address bar changes. This is particularly useful in Flickr because you can use the arrow keys to navigate through photos. And when you link to a page, your personal state might have been browsing through a set instead of a full photostream. This keeps the state intact when sending links to other people. It's a great usability feature.