skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In which case there is no such thing as passing by reference. Ever. In C++ when you "pass by reference", what actually happens is that the address of the thing is taken, and a pointer is generated, and then that pointer is passed by value. Do you see? Any argument you put forth to the contrary will involve language specific features and conventions of C++. Your will have to claim that because the C++ compiler does this for you, that makes it special. In Java there are primitives and objects. Primitives are only passed by value. Objects are passed by reference. If you pass an object as a parameter, and then modify a property of the parameter, then it is the original object that is modified. This, in fact, is the same as when you pass an Object in C++ by reference. In contrast, in C++ you can also pass an object by value: the entire object is copied onto the stack.

class Foo; void modify( Foo& x) { x.setBar(1);} ; <- pass by reference in C++.

class Foo; void modify( Foo x) { x.setBar(1);} ; <- pass by reference in Java.

Java spares you the & because Java only passes by reference.

Again, to argue the contrary, simply because it passes an object pointer by value, automatically, is to argue that C++ never passes by reference because it too takes the address automatically.

The fact is that Java passes by reference exactly as C++ does. However, even if this were not the case, it would also be completely acceptable for Java to refer to what it does as pass by reference simply because it chooses too. These things are object references. If I pass a java object reference, is it acceptable to say I'm passing by reference? If Java people want to say it is, then it is. Will the world end, for example, because the word "heap" means two different things in computer science? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap OMG! Who is right?

My point is basically summed up here: http://xkcd.com/435/

You are where the physicist is standing. You insist that Java biologists are using your terms wrong while oblivious to the mathematician. You have your abstractions. Java has theirs.

Of course, maybe you're the chemist, and I'm the physicist (I still write assembly) and the hardware guys are the mathematicians. Whatever.

As for the insulting tone, yes its a character flaw. When someone makes a statement like "I'm really tired of hearing folks (incorrectly) state [whatever]", its insulting. Its especially insulting when its wrong. In an ideal world I'd be able to respond without resorting to responding in kind, but I'm flawed. Sorry. You're still wrong.
i have to second this...we learned so much more with just one sit-down with an "average" user than we could have sending them out to friends and asking for feedback.
Product first, rebrand later. A great name can only get you so far.

Though if you have cash to burn, his method doesn't seem so off. Then again "five to ten dimes" could also get you (a) another employee or two (b) decent marketing (c) cover your overhead costs (d) rent and living expenses for a while (e) some mix of (a)-(d).
Good insights. Thanks for sharing the latter part too, that gives me some perspective. Congrats on the new position. Feel free to drop me an email sometime if I can be of service in whatever, and thanks for sharing.
Well I know that I've solved a few problems in my time: like developing a multi-threaded distributed object-oriented control system, implementing a JPEG2000 encoder, a convolutional neural net, as well as solving a number of debugging problems that escaped my colleagues.

I also know I failed miserably at a trivial coding task in an interview.

So I don't know. If I'm the only one who has that kind of problem, maybe my brain works differently from other people's.
Am I the only one who gets intimidated by good UI design? I think I should just focus on back end stuff and completely outsource anything on the front end.
New co-founder, new features, and the chance to meet us over a drink...
Better Loud Music
Thank you, and good luck on your travels!
Sure, it's completely fair. We all reinvent the wheel sometimes.

That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal---and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.
Announcing The Winners Of The 2010 TechFellow Awards
The 55 year old still has 30 extra years of life. You can't dismiss all of that as useless to the job. That's 30 years of learning about communication, teamwork and productivity through just experiencing life.

I don't know how you make the argument that the candidates are otherwise equal unless one has a resume item reading:
1970-2000: Coma, Mayo Clinic
Any positive number has two square roots, but the (present-day) notational convention is always to take the positive square root.
Chrome Web Store could emerge soon
I'm too tired to properly respond to this. It's clear that you don't know what NOLOH is, or the advantages it provides. By it's nature, it's not equivalent to GWT, and provides significant advantages over doing web development in most other frameworks or languages. The fact that it abstracts away JavaScript is only one of it's features, and as mentioned previously you can still use JavaScript. Furthermore, if you read the "Lightweight, On-demand, and Beyond" article I linked you to you would've seen how it's not middleware in the traditional sense and actually produces lightweight and on-demand output for target devices that is significantly more optimized and targeted than one could ever hope to do manually. Either way it's irrelevant as this just sidetracks from the real topic of discussion in that it's not necessary to learn or use JavaScript and that in most development cases it's advantageous and faster not to.

There was no reason for you to bundle NOLOH negatively in your response without actually taking a hard look at it. From your initial statements it's clear that you don't fully substantiate your arguments, but rather phrase things for most impact, which just makes it very difficult to have a meaningful conversation.

Frankly, I'm sick of having these type of discussions on Hacker News, I expect a higher class of individual here, but over the years I've clearly forgotten to lower my expectations. I feel like I'm on Fox news dealing with an aggressive host who isn't listening to what I'm saying and just lists false associations for psychological deception.

I'm very comfortable with my history and experience and can't be bullied into thinking otherwise. Your reasoning of the history behind why people wrote frameworks is flawed, but frankly, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what I say, or what I link to, or what arguments I present. You have your viewpoint, which is okay. It's clear from the personality type you expose in your response that any further response would fall on deaf ears.

An aside, NOLOH has been around in some form since 2005, pre-AJAX craze, so we can definitely appreciate the evolution of the web.
Mr. Adams analysis is most certainly correct.

In addition I offer the following word: Diebold
Exactly. He just showed that he has minimal foresight or too low a threshold for what he considers "must learn" languages.
I am not discouraging this kind of initiative, as it is the kind of thing that good managers are looking for. It has just been my experience that the majority of employers will not care, even if you have something to show.
#1 Sounds plausible, but I know nothing of it; 60% confidence seems a little high to me on conspiracy theory
# 2, at least with respect to the following leaked items, which are perhaps not especially surprising, but are a little more than "baaarely embarrassing":

1. US pressuring Germany not to pursue criminal investigation of US agents' kidnapping and torture of German national (who happened to be innocent, but that's not especially relevant)

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/11/hbc-90007831

2. US allegedly obstructing Spanish investigations of torture of Spanish subjects at Gitmo and use of Spanish facilities for extraordinary rendition program.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836

3. US diplomats spying on foreign diplomats, including the UN Sec. Gen., (although some do seem to think this is all de rigueur).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable...
It is the opposite.

Interviewers are coming to realize credentials, be they Microsoft certs or computer science degrees, are not great indicators of software engineering aptitude.

The more you believe in the accuracy of credentials, the less you would want to ask coding questions in an interview. Better to simply examine resumes for the appropriate certifications and then ask fit questions.

If on the other hand, you believe nothing but on the spot coding demonstrations can prove a candidates abilities, you would do exactly what these interviewers are doing. Perhaps these tests are not the optimal tests, but they sure beat credentialism.
I've interviewed a lot of programmers and I think there are many misconceptions about what an interviewer is looking for or expecting.

I don't expect you to be able to code quicksort from memory. I do expect you to be able to code quicksort given the spec for it.

Just because I point out an error doesn't mean I'm counting it against you. I'm pointing it out to see how you handle it.

I do expect you to ask questions. If you are unfamiliar with an algorithm or forget the details, ask. I may not give you the answer but I'll at least point you in the right direction.

I generally try to make this clear to candidates so that they don't get uncomfortable if I point out some problem, but a lot of interviewers don't, which can be hard on the interviewee. I doubt, however, that there are many who expect perfect code on a whiteboard.

It's as much about the process than the result.
J,

Hadn't really noticed that feeling of not-quite-there-yet, but you summed up my feelings about node.js frameworks pretty well. (This is where someone tells me to start developing it myself...)

I'll check into Express again and see if it's getting to the point where it's reasonable for a neophyte such as myself to invest in learning it and helping to develop it.
Nice, man. Cool name for it, too.
The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend.

Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am."

We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that."

I contributed that this is an issue in defining average wind directions, as well. The basic problem is that if you record times on a 0-24 hour scale, or wind directions on a 0-360 degree scale, and then naively average the numbers, you get meaningless results (for example, 180 degrees if the wind steadily rotates through every point of the compass).

A quick glance at our doctor friend showed she had checked out of the conversation entirely. Possibly she just felt slighted that we were not bowing down in awe at the terrible hours she keeps. But my main impression was that she lives in a world where one receives a piece of information, notes it, and stores it away. And when repeating that received information, one's listeners duly note and store it away.

Chasing down the source of the information, calling it into question, relating it to other things in the world-- these just weren't things she seemed to find pleasurable.
Because someone else is paying the client's power bill?
Along with the funding, prior to the 30's/40's guys like Norbert Weiner were excluded from places like Harvard due to their race, and ended up turning MIT into a powerhouse (on top of the federal funding).
Geometry is only harder to you because we teach more Algebra than Geometry in schools. They really are elementary.
Haskell is the academics coming out of the ivory tower to discover if their theories work in the real world, being joined by some more academically-inclined programmers trying to help them.

It's been a learning experience all around. Interesting things have happened and are happening. Not quite ready to call it "practical" but it sure is interesting.

IMHO, the most interesting confluence to date is a relatively practical Software Transactional Memory. There's a lot of good Haskell concurrency but it says something that for STM to really, really work, you pretty much seem to need Haskell. (It is a characteristic of STM that once you allow even a relatively small escape hatch, the guarantees it provides go flying out the window and it explodes in complexity beyond usefulness.) I'm still not sure exactly what this says, but I'm having fun learning. And note I'm not saying I even necessarily use STM all the time; I specifically find interesting the idea that it doesn't seem to work anywhere else because the temptation to impurity is too strong and it's the impurity that causes the complexity detonation; it's a good exemplar of the sort of interesting things going on, not the only such thing.

It may be the most genuinely innovative area of programming research going on right now. Most other communities seem to just be shuffling the same ideas around over and over again. (Or are so straight-up academic as to be impractically useless with no real chance of escaping that designation.) That does mean it is still full of rather sharp pointy bits, whereas even a brand new Algol-derived language now has so many decades of experience behind it that even its warts can start out well-polished. If Haskell does intrigue you, you should probably be aware that even though there are ten calendar years of Haskell history it still feels rather like a promising three-year-old language, with things like large library gaps, distressing amounts of "best practices" living in oral history and obscure mailing list posts, and some questions about "how I do this" not really having good answers. But it's improving.
But if your competitors have the same amount of experience but have picked up and used the 'latest and greatest' tools in real production environment, guess which one will get the job?

Do keep in mind that if you're 40 years old, it's less likely you'll get a job by picking up the 'latest and greatest' tools. Cause most companies that use these tools often employ workers a wee bit half over your age.
I was unemployed for about six weeks last fall, and in that time I sent out (on average) about 5 resumes per day, every day. I got three phone interviews out of it - one turned into part-time contract work, and one became a full-time job.

There's definitely a relationship between the amount of work you put into a job search and the results, but it's dependent on so many factors (age, location, industry, experience, etc). I'm not sure how long I could have kept up that pace before I transitioned from motivated panic to resigned despair.
Ok, just doing my job:

"Kidding aside, I've been self employed most of my life and I've never written a resume up, so I don't know."
________________

"Was the recruiter good, or your friend a strong vouch?"
___________________________
"Would be curious to hear more about your experience"
____________________________________-

"credentials in 400 applications"
_________________________

"Well, I believe in the power of warm introductions."
____________________________________

"Would be curious to hear more."
_______________________

Man, you're all dead inside, aren't you?
I worry a lot about this. I don't think it's distrust so much as thoughtlessness.

From what I can tell, Google (and other companies) started using these kinds of questions as a way to cheaply filter sudden floods of applicants, not because this is the way to find the greatest geniuses of our time. Policies implemented under the gun have two unfortunate properties: they are wasteful and hard to change after the fact.

As the tactics of successful companies percolate through the rest of the industry, they take on a third unfortunate property: cargo-cult foolishness. Google asks binary search questions and they have great engineers. I want only the best engineers, therefore I will ask binary search questions. I don't know what else to do so I shall grade strictly on style points, because points are scientific, right?

Bleh. Put it another way: if there are a large number of productive creative people shut out by a culture of thoughtless interview checklisting, that's an opportunity for some smarter company to snap them up. Such a company would by necessity have an outlaw air about them. Who else would hire misfits? But gangs of talented misfits can be a powerful force.
This sounds like risk aversion to me. People place twice as much emphasis on avoiding loss than they place on gaining something equivalent (even though the end result is the same). If you look at it in this light, then of course the good ones weren't as good as the bad ones were bad. The end result is that you end up with employees who definitely don't suck, but aren't really great either because you spent all of your time avoiding bad programmers and not enough finding good ones.
What makes you think it was held against you? Most programmers can be kind of OCD about code and would want to point out that kind of error, whether they thought it was relevant to your abilities or not.
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I mental block sometimes on UI design. OK, got a great idea, I can see how to implement the code, but the UI...
Sometimes square root is assumed to refer to the positive one. I assume that was the case here.
D,

Definitely had seen that, but, as with all things server-side-javascript, I'd been a bit confused both by the number of choices and by the number of defunct-ish projects. I'll dig into it again. Definitely is seeming as though I oughta look at node.js again...
Remember Good Times With our Cartoon Fabrics
So if Amazon had hosted the NYT during the Pentagon Papers releases, they would have pulled them under that TOS? Not likely; it hasn't been legally established that Wikileaks doesn't have the right to post what they are posting, and in fact the NYT is posting some of the same stuff this time around.
I feel bad for this lady, but there's a flaw in this logic (and with the logic of many commenters here).

Everyone assumes that the battle is between...

Person 1:
-Great resume
-Relevant work history
-Strong sense of corporate citizenship
-Can't code on white board

and Person 2:
-Can code on whiteboard
-Smokes crack in the bathroom

But the reality is, you're all interviewing for the same job! You're not getting the job, not because you can't whiteboard code, but because someone else has the same qualifications AND CAN whiteboard code.

Which would you choose?
Sup NIH, how you doin'?
Kindlebility: Sending articles to your Kindle, one click at a time
Plus, the younger employee will probably be cheaper to insure, and may not have kids (although at 55 someone may not either, and if so would be less likely to gain them). All of which is highly illegal and lame, but may be a factor at some jobs.
As a mathematician, I see this as a sign that my field needs an evangelist.
(Can't reply to the other subthread, it's apparently tripped HN's "this is too heated" trigger, so I'll explain here.)

It's easiest to illustrate this with code:

public class ValueHolder {
public ValueHolder(int value) { this.value = value; }
public int value;
public static ValueHolder THREE = new ValueHolder(3);
}

public class DoSomething extends TestCase {
public void passByValue(byvalue ValueHolder value) {
value.value = 1;
value = new ValueHolder(2);
}

public void testPassByValue() {
ValueHolder myValue = ValueHolder.THREE;

passByValue(myValue);
assertEquals(ValueHolder.THREE, myValue);
assertEquals(3, myValue.value);
}

public void passByReference(byref ValueHolder value) {
value.value = 1;
value = new ValueHolder(2);
}

public void testPassByReference() {
ValueHolder myValue = ValueHolder.THREE;

passByReference(myValue);
assertNotEquals(ValueHolder.THREE, myValue);
assertEquals(2, myValue.value);
}

public void passReferenceByValue(ValueHolder value) {
value.value = 1;
value = new ValueHolder(2);
}

public void testPassByValue() {
ValueHolder myValue = ValueHolder.THREE;

passByValue(myValue);
assertEquals(ValueHolder.THREE, myValue);
assertEquals(1, myValue.value);
}
}

Syntax is slightly made-up because Java doesn't have true pass-by-value or pass-by-reference for object, only pass-reference-by-value. But the test cases illustrate the expected semantics for each parameter passing mode.

In each case, you're passing a mutable object containing a value to the function. In pass-by-value, you pass a completely new copy of the object in, so the mutation doesn't affect the original object at all, and then the reassignment obviously doesn't propagate back to the caller. In pass-by-reference, you pass in a reference, so the mutation changes the object in the caller's scope, and then the assignment reassigns the variable in the caller's scope to the new ValueHolder. It's this last part that pass-reference-by-value can't do: normal Java semantics let you mutate the object passed in, but you can't make the variable in the calling frame actually point to an entirely new object.

Make sense?
"[From the Stuxnet virus] we learned that experts can indeed create undetectable viruses..."

But Stuxnet was detected... viruses are not magic.
France President Sarkozy is self-censoring on China issues.
Calculus is not taught to everyone in high school. Many students only make it as far as precalculus and many more, even if they take calculus in high school do not learn integration. At the college level, many biology students do not take calculus. As far as calculus being a requirement for entrance into med school, in many cases I am afraid you are incorrect.

http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/additional_math_reqs.pdf

Most pre-meds do not have the time in their undergraduate careers to take a two semester series in calculus, especially if they need to also take remedial courses such as precalculus first, and many do.
I'm a doctor who majored in physics, and I agree with this post. Watching these folks come up with formulas in physiology was excruciating. People get their names on things that physicists wouldn't even bother noticing as something other than a single step in a derivation. Hacker News and Python have been come my group therapy and secret addiction, respectively.
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A straw man is when someone doesn't argue against a given claim, but argues against a different claim that's easier to defeat.

An anecdote cannot be a straw man, and the OP was obviously replying to the claim made by the article.
> 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it

I just so happen to be starting out. Do you mean generating cases like "prefix-[i+1]” ?
No, it's a onepercent tax to use any old ATM out there. Use your bank's or credit union's and you done have to pay a thing (outside the normal fees incured by using any finacial institution).

Its also probably worth noting that most will reimburse you for a numer of ATM fees a month...
Putting upvote and downvote buttons on opposite sides of the screen to is ingenious.

(Explanation: this fixes the "I meant to upvote you but I tapped the wrong tiny button" problem.)
It's hilarious that some commenters here refer to the author as a guy.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity? Guess not. More like Money, Money, Money.
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I didn't have that impression (and I have been a hiring manager for 10 years+). It gave me the impression of someone senior. What I would then try to determine in the interview is whether that person has grown to become a strong developer, or rather has reached a level of incompetency.

But I wouldn't pass judgment either way based on that blog post.