skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I "stole" this question from a friend, who may not have invented it either but cultural/language barriers aside [1] I'll often ask something like:

* Larry Wall wrote "We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." Pick one of these three "virtues" and tell me about a time you exhibited it.

[1] - Some less-than-perfectly-fluent English speakers are unfairly thrown by this question, it has a lot of relatively obscure vocabulary, and then layers irony on top. BTW, even among native English speakers the single most common response is "what is hubris"?

Also, a standard although not necessarily favorite general interview question I use (technical or not) is something like:

* Suppose we brought you on board at Firm X and found that you were doing an excellent job. What kinds of things could we do to reward you?

followed by:

* No job lasts forever. What sorts of things do you think would make you want to leave Firm X eventually?
Why is that so?

A landline phone is also trivial to tap into. Should you not expect some degree of privacy on the phone?
I meant to upvote you. Touchscreen syndrome. Somebody please upvote the parent and downvote me. Thanks.
Programming reference sheets in one page
How can I run more than 1 kernels on one GPU
This margin is too big to contain the answer.

But I'll try to sum up: PHP was designed as a minimalist, procedural language designed to help occasional programmers write interpreted scripts that run in brief, efficient bursts to generate responses to HTTP requests in a classic CRUD-app context. It's designed to be the perfect language for someone who wants to embed code in a set of HTML templates, upload them to the server, and test them by clicking around and making sure the pages look right.

These are PHP's great strengths, and the reason why it isn't going anywhere. But they are also its weaknesses. Attempts to drag PHP too far out of its sweet spot get gradually more painful until you start to cry and switch to something else.

Today PHP makes me cry because Ruby is so, so much easier to test. Tomorrow there will be a different reason to cry.
Have used Visio, Powerpoint, Axure - prefer Visio however.
My first pages were on my ISP which offered a subdomain! I paid £2 a month extra (on top of call charges) for the privelige. My friends thought I was crazy but I showed them when that very same subdomain impressed someone enough to give me a web dev job ("You have a subdomain? Impressive").

I also looked down on geocities/angelfire sites and I still think I got the better deal out of it - my first stuff was too embarrassing to live on for eternity in the depths of a torrent.
they don't work, the second you start getting any serious traffic you get a warning. I had a video(flash movie) that got popular, and they sent me a warning after only 2 gigs of bandwidth.

Granted those 2 gigs were used up in something like 5 minutes, but never the less..you'd think they'd give you a little more to play with.
Try Cain Able, its it probably the best ARP spoofing tool around for pc.
Does anyone smell SCO?
Here's the actual complaint: http://www.scribd.com/doc/39856344/oraclevsgoogle

I don't see too much about the copyright claims in here, though.
Apple removes mention of white iPhone altogether
Because when you specify a disk, you realise he's guiding you in the direction of a specific answer.

Use the filesystem. It's what it's there for, particularly if the data never changes. Nice big cache, xfs, nested hierarchical datastore using folders based on keynames, 20 lines of code, job done. 5000 lookups a second is trivial throughput for a decent disk with a decent readahead cache.
What is really cool about this story is knowing that PG keeps such close tabs on the HN community.
How about an HN Python Study Group? Join #HNpython on Freenode if you are interested.

Link: irc://irc.freenode.net:6667/HNpython
I only ask because watching the presentation that Ryan Dahl presented in 2009 ~ http://jsconf.eu/2009/video_nodejs_by_ryan_dahl.html mentions node.js isn't secure enough to use as a webserver for production use yet :)
For Lisa, the World Ended in 1995
Rare disorder which renders you insensitive to pain
You don't need to ARP spoof on an open wireless network.

But Cain is in my standard pentest toolset for various reasons, not just ARP spoofing.
I think stackoverflow.com pretty much solves all of these problems for you.
BTW, in the valley, or the rest of the US, you would say "moved" to the valley.
I ask myself whether you have actually lived here or base your assumptions on hearsay from friends.

I find it intolerable to strike comparisons between the Holocaust and modern-day Vienna.
If this fight goes in favor of oracle will it impact android developments ? I mean for developers how does it matters ?
Copyright applies to things that express creativity. But also it does not apply to things which are strictly dictated by technical/compatibility requirements, even if they originated as an expression of creativity. So editline, Wine, Linux, Dalvik, and dynamic linking should all be OK (unless there's internal copying beyond what's needed to externally conform to the ABI/API).
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We need some designs doing for a project that we're doing in November for the November Startup Sprint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773398

If anyone is interested, let me know. Also, we need some good progammers - both PHP and Python. My email address can be found in my profile :)
Invite them to an online poll inquiring about their hiring needs and frustrations. This will be a great way to validate that you're thinking right and to see how these quality leads themselves are describing the problems you are thinking about

If you really want to crush it, reach out and make friends with some of the people on your list. From the material you collected in the polls, you can get in touch with each of them and ask for specifics, tell them how you are adressing the problems they are describing and so on.

At this scale, don't think only of automatic emails. You are probably very eager to get to the stage when your email list is so huge that automated emails is the only way to go. But at this point, it isn't. Use that to your advantage.
Implement a bubble sort, then a binary tree.

Ask how they'd approach the travelling salesman problem.

Given an SQL query, a request, a set of objects and required output, ask them to optimise the whole process from start to finish. The smarter ones will ask about caching, look at optimising the query, look at the way the output is generated etc. The not so good ones will focus on the .NET/PHP/<language>
B&N Release a Colour Nook
I wonder what counts as an "emergency" and "cyber attack" and what is the extent of a "portion"?

These terms seem too vague for me, take this example:
Someone tweets that Obama has killed a baby kitten, Obama could shut down Twitter because it's an emergency, he was falsely accused. He could shut down Facebook too, and all services that could be connected to Twitter to stop this cyber attack from spreading.

No disrespect, but I seriously doubt that the majority of the people(not just Americans) actually know how the Internet works, it's like asking a first graders to solve a differential equations.

The Internet just works fine by itself it does not need supervision from the US government, in fact it is one of the reasons it works so well.
sydney here
Yeah, like I said, I ultimately don't think it's a good idea: it would add too much friction for the benefits.
Thank you jamesbritt for finding this link. This has to be one of the greatest things I have ever seen on the internet. Seriously. The sheer amount of information I can gleen from these interviews is worth so much more than almost anything I can think of.
I'm busily copying many interviews and pasting them in plain-text format in order to read something when I have no internet or for when the end of the world arrives, whichever comes first. I'm resisting reading them online, though I have succumbed a few times. Congratulations to the Paris Review for making these available and again to jamesbritt for thinking of posting this link on Hacker News.
hi,
thought i'd ask in a comment rather than emailing, others might be interested to.

What sort of settings are "best" for flash videos? eg bit rate/resolution?

Every time i go to encode in flv i tend to use default settings, never really knowing if its a good idea to increase (/decrease) the bit rate etc? I have some sites where i know most people view the videos in full screen, so want high quality, but at the risk of it running slow (both because of internet speeds + flash videos are choppy on slow computers)
Seeing as you worked at Ning and likely participated in these types of interviews it's not surprising you don't get it. Surely Ning was a great place to work and I'm sure you found really top-notch employees through your well known tough hiring process, but I'd be willing to wager they all look very much the same when you blur your eyes a little bit.

My diatribe, as you so eloquently put it, is based on the article. The list of things that the author expects to see in the answer. The way the question is presented. The lead off with "interrogation". The "gotcha" follow-up regarding how things might fail. These questions are great at finding a very specific type of candidate, but the entire point of my comment is that this one candidate type is typically not indicative of the best engineer. Of course you'll disagree, I'm sure, seeing as you were part of this process.
As long as I've an apartment in Vienna & my girlfriend doesn't mind having guests: So yeah, August next year should work!

For the festival: I believe you mean the Sziget Festival: http://www.sziget.hu/festival_english
Open the task manager, go to the processes tab and order processes by CPU usage. Is there a process called 'monitor' consuming around 50% of your CPU? If so, kill it.

The process has something to do with the Acer restore partition, and if you remove the restore partition, it freaks out. I find this causes it to consume an entire core, ie: 50% of total processing power, as I have a dual core. So if your machine is a single core, I'm guessing it could use up to 100%.

Hope that helps

Edit: thought I should add that so far I haven't found a fix for this (although I haven't really tried), I've just gotten into the habit of killing the process when I first boot up.
An index of all Apache projects
Pretty rad. Here are the specs:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nookcolor/features/techspecs/i...

The IPS display looks to be similar to the iPad's and is a full touch screen. I doubt it is multi-touch, though. Odds are the glare will be worse than the Kindle's now, but it looks like they did just about everything right. Kindle 3 buyer's remorse setting in...
Facebook - Can it defeat The Google?
Success & Motivation - Mark Cuban
The background on that site makes it nearly unreadable for me.
As the co-founder of a conference related startup ( http://lanyrd.com/ ) I'm very obviously biased here, but I've found conferences incredibly valuable in my career to date. What you get out of them depends very much on how you approach them.

Unless you live in the bay area, conferences are going to be the highest concentration of smart, informed peers you'll be exposed to for the whole year. Talk to people! Don't think of it as "networking" - think of it as an opportunity to learn from others (and to share your own knowledge). At most conferences, the hallway track is by far the most valuable.

And if you really want to get the most out of conferences, speak at them. Preparing a talk forces you to learn a great deal more about your subject, and presenting guarantees you some excellent conversations afterwards.
The recruitment consultant will only get about 20% of that figure, with 80% going to cover the agency costs. The average IT recruiter in the UK makes about 40k GBP/year (about 25k base, and 15k commission).
Google *Is* 'Closed', Just Like Apple
> divide by 1.0 (GB)

I wish that was the case.
I personally think it's rather irritiating that you go off on such weird reasoning when somebody offers you a place to stay. The difficulties with that line of reasoning become obvious if you start thinking about whether Turkey or Marroc have been free of guilt during the past 100 years. (Although that would be weird reasoning in itself.)

Anyway, if you had ever been to Vienna you would know that the people there aren't oblivious to the events of WWII. And greeting somebody with Yes/Ja isn't all too unusual in Vienna. I also wouldn't assume a girl selling bread in a Viennoise bakery is necessarily Austrian who speaks fluently German. The simple assumption that she had to be Austrian demonstrates a certain nationalist/racist bias on your part.
Did you read the rest of the article anyway? The "interrogate" wording may present a bad first impression but the remainder of the article is pretty reasonable.
NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Power World's Fastest Supercomputer, Tianhe-1A
Well, I know what language I won't be using for future projects...

The creation of this sort of legal uncertainty around a project that was open-source in name if not always in spirit is a concern though.
For the hubris definition, here http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hubris :)

Very interesting questions the last two, I am wondering what are the answers that you get and how do you evaluate them.
35. Don’t drink on airplanes unless you are on a flight of longer than 8 hours. It ruins you and wastes your time.

huh? it seems out of place in comparison to the rest of the list. Did I misunderstand what he meant?
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/dw3sh/will_you_moro...
This really is wonderful kick-starter material. Thank you. Just seeing some of the terminology you use and how you break down the topic/domain is instructive.
Moved to BackboneJS and JQuery Templates
There's a guy on the Lua mailing list who has mentioned (e.g. http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-09/msg00513.html) that he appreciates how its relatively small and keyword based syntax (http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8), makes it easy to program in with a screen reader.

There's also Emacspeak (http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/). I haven't used it, but there's a chapter about it in _Beautiful Code_.
I just met the dumbest salesperson ever
Auto Transport Quincy, Shipanycar
I truly apologize in advance - this is not meant to be flame bait or anything of that nature - but it bothers me when someone states they "won" a position. The interview process should be used to find a good match, both for the company as well as the candidate. When I am interviewed I am evaluating the company as well and will have no reservations turning them down if I feel I wouldn't be a good fit. If I have to win to get in to the company, then that alone would make me back off and possibly lose interest in the company.
Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) takes care of that.

So does Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/).
Top 10: Tech Cities
Seems cool and useful. I'm using, thanks! ;-)
How Meg Whitman Failed Her Way to the Top at eBay
Ben Rockwood on Time Management Tips from Randy Pausch
I'd heard of readability but never used it. Wow what a difference that makes. Thanks!
Always wrong is doing it right
with so much crappy apps out there I figured blind people where already programing. :)
Movies does not reflect how the movie-makers understand the world.

When movies show computers searching for fingerprints by displaying a series of fingerprints in rapid succession on-screen, it is not because the movie-makers actually thinks that databases works like that. It is because it is an effective way of telling that piece of story.

Movies reflect how the movie-makers believe that a story can be told most effectively. And they have quite a lot of experience in this field.

Dramatic storytelling requires that the protagonist has a motivation to reach a goal. "For the fun of it" is not a dramatically effective motivation, since it does not drive the story towards a climax where the goal is reached - or lost forever.
On a related subject. I accidentally mis-configured remote desktop on Ubuntu, I selected the 'configure network to automatically accept connections' which uses uPnP to open a port on your router (poorly named I think).

Someone ran a port scan on my IP and noticed port 5900 was open and decided to connect to it, I had my computer configured to automatically accept connections (because I use the iPhone VNC client as a remote control), I was quite glad I was using my computer at the time and noticed them connecting!

My first reaction was to run NMAP against there IP, I guess thats probably a bad move!
Ask HN: Outsourcing credit card data storage?
I'm currently developing a complex recurring payment system. Our payment gateway does not offer a "secure vault" service, and we will need to charge customers a variable amount each month. Therefore we will need to store customers' credit card details.

However, ideally I would like to avoid having to be compliant with PCI level D, so I'd like to find a company which:

* Will allow us to securely store customers' credit card details on their PCI-compliant servers.

* Allow us to retrieve one or all of the stored card details via their API at any time, so we can submit new payments using them.

I'm pretty new in the world of payment processing. Is there a company offering this kind of service?

(NB: I'm not looking for a full billing service like Spreedly or Chargify. I just want secure storage for credit card details, nothing more.)
That's the waiting time for an unlocked phone though. You can't order subsidized phones direct from Apple in Canada. You have to visit an Apple Retail Store or a store that carries phones from your carrier of choice.

If you're in a contract with a carrier, I'd suggest phoning them up and asking to speak with their retentions department. Talk to them about how you're thinking about leaving if you can't get an iPhone 4 soon. Most of the big carriers -- Rogers, Telus, Bell, and even Fido -- have taken orders through their retentions department. It really seems to depend on the day though, whether or not they can sell any. But it's worth a shot!
2c - Please Bear with me, I am not the best at conveying ideas.

The Offer HN trend is of great value, its inspiring, collaborative, and genuine. I think it deserves to be encouraged because, well... its more like the world I think most of us would want to live in.

I was thinking about how this trend would play out though, and being a cynic, I am certain that at some point this will be abused.
All systems can be bent, broken, or subverted and for a human system like the HN community, the inevitable abuse will damage the trust being built up on the site.
I hate to be negative, but I have to point out that there are people who do NOT subscribe to the DNA of HN and assume that some other human beings are just marks. Offer HN is an ideal target for such individuals.

At the same time, for a successful community, Good faith needs to be assumed. The alternative is, well, suspicion of most offers, which I think would be corrosive to HN.

From here, it suggests to me that a separate system to ensure transparency and good faith would be required to support Offer HN requests. A simple way to identify affiliations, skill level and so on would perhaps be useful, and would also help address any further concerns that people may have.
At the same time it could take away from the spontaneous nature of the help which would be a shame.

- Ok, complex rambling thoughts over! Hopefully someone finds something in this useful, it would be a shame to see Offer HN dissipate.
-2c.
Underscores vs hyphens (programming nomenclature)
Phone up Fido and speak talk about cancelling so you get transferred to their retentions department. Rogers and Fido have been known to sell iPhone 4s through that department to customers that threaten to leave.
How do you evaluate problem solving skills of candidates during interviews?
I recently signed up for eharmony. I was under the impression my 'message' to someone was an invite for them to talk back without paying.

That actually makes me feel slightly better. I have much, much higher success rates (and a much lower sample size) of approaching women 'IRL' as opposed to even getting a reply to a message on a dating site.
Buffett has stated : "I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million"
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/june1999/sw90625...

For him, its really a matter of how much money he has to put to work. This is probably in part why Burry can make the returns that he does, he doesn't have a $200B anchor around his neck.

For an inexperienced individual to make those returns (10%/mo) would likely be more risk taking than alpha generation. It's hard to describe exactly what would be involved in getting to the stage where you could do this reliably (alpha generation) because there are different routes to get there (fundamental, quant, high frequency), but it would likely involve quitting your day job and also likely involve getting a day job that involves asset management. And not the hot-air sales kind like Wealth Management/Private Banking, more like the hedge fund/portfolio manager kind.
I've had similar experiences - worth adding is that eclipse is a no-go - not worth trying at all. I have done c# development while having SQL Server running though, so it's not all that bad. Screen resolution is the biggest issue for anything other than eclipse.
Hyphens in function names are great too

Totally agree and there are good reasons why they are useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842575

BTW, While perl6 added hyphen usage to variable names :) unfortunately I don't think it added question mark :(
Test driven development at Transloadit
Really, Who will defeat The Google? Facebook?

Cuil thought about doing that, but got cuilled (read killed) themselves a while ago, apparently not the Google killer we were hoping for..
http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2010/09/20/death-o...

MS Bing is not really up to the task either..
2011 is going to add 2 big players to the market:
Ipad search and Facebook search..

Ipad could really become a Google killer, even the guys in Mountain View could see that coming.. Thats why they named their device Ipad-killer..
http://www.helium.com/items/1730715-google-ipad

Facebook had their $33 billion valuation by Google last month, but is bound to grow into even more intensive figures
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/08/20/the-case-for-a-50-bil...

Facebook will have to catch up fast with their cash and innovate even faster. Maybe even buy more engineers from Google Plex..
I thought they were, so now there's a process called plugin-container.exe, I'm guessing one for each different type of plugin, and if that crashes or stalls, FF still goes down (or stalls).
Their old names were great.

Word, Office, Windows, Outlook - all great names.
Amazing. It's really hard to imagine programming blind and jumping between methods/files/debuggers/browsers effectively, but it seems some people do pull it off.

I was struggling with tendonitis in my right arm a year back and had to do all my coding left-handed, and that made me feel crippled and annoyingly slow. It's really impressive what people can overcome.
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> Since the requests aren't randomly distributed

Does this follow when the original article says:

"The keys are not distributed evenly within the keyspace."

and:

"Requests are distributed evenly (and randomly) across the keys"
Asus WX-DL Is a Round Mouse That Likes To Be Touched
It would be hard to convince me to shell out $80 for Asus's WX-DL wireless touch mouse before actually holding one