skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I applied for a summer internship with Google between 2009-2010 (remember: Australian summer!). I ended up making it through but even for an intern there were four rounds of phone interviews. To be honest I actually enjoyed those interviews though I did spend a long time preparing for them. I also enjoyed being able to poke and prod and ask questions.

The process was grueling however and I know a large number of my highly competent friends never made it through. Some of it is due to Google having a policy of "assume the worst" in order to try and reduce the number of bad hires but I think some of them was as the interviewers were too harsh. One of them had a phone interview ended almost immediately if not getting (what to me seems like a trick) question.

"Given an infinitely long linked list which you can only traverse once select a random item with O(1) storage."

Google tried to get me as an intern again the following summer but I'd decided to instead intern at a local startup[1] that are doing well. The CEO trusts me, gives me enough power to really help the company and is showing me how a real startup works, both good and bad. It's an atmosphere that Google just doesn't have anymore.

To be honest I do miss a number of things from Google, such as the stunning internal developer tools, the academic/computer sciencey atmosphere and the amazing people but I still far prefer the startup I'm in currently. I just don't think Google registers as a startup anymore.

[1] http://www.freelancer.com/
I'm trying very hard to keep my answer brief. :-)

I started about six years ago. My initial experiences were positively brutal, and I hated (nearly) every moment of every class for the first month. I stuck with it, though.

Over the course of the next few years, I experimented with different styles and teachers, ultimately working my way up to three or four classes per week (I had to be careful due to several chronic injuries -- I had to work with my teachers to develop technique modifications to suite me). There are many different styles, and every teacher is different. I generally prefer the more repetitive, physically challenging varieties (like Ashtanga), and I tend to find overly spiritual or pseudo-science-y teachers to be a bit irritating.

Over time, I found that my mood was generally much better when I regularly attended yoga classes. Partly this is simply due to getting a set amount of exercise, but there's a lot to be said for the mental aspects of it. I wouldn't say I meditated, per se, but the break from responsibilities and external stress really does seem to benefit my mental health.
So Why Should You Care About NFC?
I think that Android needs it to go a bit further by differentiating between required permissions and optional ones. Having them all optional could cause the app to plain not work (no, Handcent can't send messages) or users would just block apps that request internet access for fetching adverts from doing so.

However, I'd welcome annotations for exactly why an app requires each permission.
It is really a telling point of Google's internals about how much better the site (http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html) works in Chrome vs. Firefox/IE.
Definitely more readable, thanks. The horizontal scrollbars in that version are somewhat annoying, but nothing's perfect.
Um, postmark? It's an extremely simple API to implement.
Were the physical benefits enough or would you still need to do other exercise to stay fit?
That's actually not a trick question, and one that I've actually encountered in my job a few years ago. Email me if you want to know the answer.
Show HN: remaildr.com, my pet project
Hello HN!

Let me introduce a side project I've been working on: http://remaildr.com

I thought it might be of interest (and useful) to fellow hackers. So here we are!

If you have any comment, advice or opinion, please, do tell! I've only had feedback from close friends so far, and I suspect they may be quite partial.

(NB: I already submitted a link to remaildr in late December, but it didn't get any interest — let's put that on the post-Christmas food coma. I hope re-posting it won't be considered bad manners :) In any case, if people still don't find it interesting, I'll stop there.)

Hope you find it useful!
I'd prefer it lighter as well
Springloops 2.0 Release Candidate Open for everone
from November 2009

Yes. There should have been professional follow-up on this by now, and it's odd that a BBC story from more than a year ago is the submitted link for this study.
He makes an excellent point about being first to market - being first isn't great if you don't have a decent product to sell. Chinese knockoffs often show us how well that works in the real world. Aside from that though, the most important thing that he's shown is that getting sales is a constant struggle. You aren't magically going to become, and more importantly stay, popular overnight. A featured app slot is wonderful, but there's still a lot of work to be done even after something like that happens.
Anyone else notice that the headline authoritatively declares that it was a hack, then the article copy indicates that they're not sure?

Shocker, right?
Kids Explain Cloud Computing
What makes you think Zuck likes money? I think he likes building a business, and I think his ideas about the future of social networking may involve a lot less privacy than you (or I) would like, but really the only significant thing he's done with his money so far is to give a lot of it away.
i don't have a college degree, so i just assumed i'd never even make it past the resume filter.
As usual, it's important to point out that this was not an experimental study design (there was no random assignment to treatment and control groups). Peter Norvig's online article about what to look for in research studies

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

suggests other issues to examine here.
I am sure it must be the same in America as here in England, seeing as you guys basically adopted our legal system wholesale. Here in England, you can not just refuse a case because you want to, so, if a paedophile instructed a barrister, he is not allowed to turn him down just because it does not look good to others. It is not simply that it is advisable that he should not refuse him, it is rather, he actually can not refuse him or gets disciplined otherwise.
Keyboard shortcuts to boost your bash & zsh productivity
Will.i.am Named Intel’s Director of Creative Innovation
Payments revolution in next two years?
We might as well extend this to hospitals too! Achievments like "metal detector" for leaving tools inside bodies, or "No your other left" for operating on the wrong leg.

Seriously, this is beyond a dumb idea. Programming is a profession, not a game, and you do not reward malpractice (more than 10 parameters? 30 line Linq statements?) We already have achievements in our industry and it's called a C.V.
> For starters, some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past

Not being in EE, I didn't know that this was possible; and, with the knowledge that a bright flash erases EPROMs, that they'd be left in a position where this could occur. More interestingly, the NRO has a notice about it: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-...

The government verbiage for the hack here (tape over the window) is amusing in itself:

> They also confirmed that the light from the Canon flash and the Polaroid flashbulb could be effectively blocked by "black bagging" the flash, or by blocking the EPROM window with "tin foil" held in place by clear cellulose tape, or by blocking the EPROM window with "standard electrical tape."
The Office group at Microsoft actually did something like this. http://www.writersua.com/articles/ribbon_hero/index.html

But, in answer to the question, I would probably jeer at my old friends on the VS IDE team ;)
Obviously if there has been a 'meta' process of refinement, such that the test set has been used in model development, then its not a clean test set any more, and shouldn't be regarded as such. That's something for any researchers to watch out for, and be sure they don't do. And good researchers are well aware of these pitfalls.

That's why I mentioned the validation sets, and that the test set must never have been looked at, or used before.

But the point stands - if the method works on a clean test set, even if the test set is in the past, then it should be taken seriously.

Would I trust such a model to predict the stock market in Q2 2010?
No, because my prior belief is that the stock market is very hard to predict, so I would need very strong evidence to the contrary.
But that has nothing to do with having confidence in models that have been tested on historical data.
That irrelevance is exactly what I'm referring to. Sometimes it doesn't come in the form of a direct competitor. Sometimes, open protocols route around walled gardens.

It may not be a Facebook clone built in a distributed fashion that forces Facebook to open up, it may instead be a whole new approach to social applications that nobody's thought of yet. That's fine.
Forget VS, someone should make an emacs extension that does this.
Successfully Ported Number to Google Voice
> About a month later, I got a bill for $60 from amazon.

...sounds like you launched the wrong instance type (specifically "small" instead of "micro"). Unfortunately that's easy to do, since small is the default in most cases. From what I remember the docs regarding free usage aren't too emphatic about this issue.

It's hard to out-and-out call this "user error", but I also don't think it's bait and switch. Mostly just poor documentation on amazon's part that contributed to a less-than-sufficient level of understanding on yours.
Seems like they have a pretty serious perception problem to address. They've set themselves up so high people, obviously some worthy and some not, simply won't apply. I wonder how sustainable it is..are there enough CS PHDs (essentially what people think is the only thing Google will even interview) interested in working at Google to keep their staffing where they want? I hope not.
I have to say I have been using OpenOffice/LibreOffice for the past 4 months on my office Windows XP machine for the last 3 months and have not needed Microsoft Office at all. It's nice to know that their good work is continuing.
No, the Department of Commerce wants to help create a standard. It's a damn hard task, but even harder when the net's FUD is the feds want to create an identity system. No, no they don't. And their process is pretty great. But they will fail, in no small part due to FUD, and we'll all be using Facebook Login Plus soon and wondering why we never got an open standard.
Thoughts on building a feed reader
Is this the first technology to appear first on Android and then be copied to iPhone? If so it is good news as it means that we have a truly competitive market.
Good ol' Monaco...

Some more discussion here:
http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts

And then there's this:
http://www.lowing.org/fonts/
it is a small bubble, they put a few ppl in a bubble and just blow that particular bubble big.
Zuckerberg's probably got an iPhone, and 3G GSM encryption's been cracked: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/15/3g-gsm-encryption-cracked...
I've done it, busted a port on the back of my computer where I was inserting blind. Plus it's on it's side, so you aren't sure which end is "up".
Trash like, they could recite some programming knowledge from books/classes, but once you asked them to start thinking on their own, they fell apart. For example, asking them to model a simple, scenario, such as orders, line items, customers, etc.... (but one in the domain I was hiring for). They had no clue how model it in a way that would work. Or, asking them to work through a problem, logically trying to solve something, or going through the steps they would use to solve a problem.

Sometimes if they made it far enough, I'd sit with them at a computer and ask them to do something fairly simple, but something they most likely hadn't done before, so they need to figure out how to... then watch how the interact with the IDE, how they figure out how to do something (they can use the internet, any tools, ask me, etc). And most of the time, they just fall flat on their face.
Can someone explain the image? So it's the hipmunk chipmunk stalking somebody in a kayak... Surface great airfare... EDIT: Wait, I get it. Setting sights on kayak.com. :)
Semi-dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2139972
It's how a lot of technological changes roll out.

The spectacle is long over by the time the war is done.
My Students Laugh, HaHa, Laugh, at the HN Naysayers ;)
Plus, you are _charging_ them to collect the intelligence for you!
An unregistered version, alongside a pile of unregistered shareware like StuffIt!

That's not really how Apple work these days.
Perhaps you're right. But I think that the article could be summed up in a few bullet points without losing detail.
Ray tracer written in more than 30 lines of Linq (using a y combinator), malpractice perhaps but I learned from it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lukeh/archive/2007/10/01/taking-linq...
You never want to 'rewrite' the codebase, but you do want to 'refactor' it. The concepts are basically the same, but you gain the incremental benefits by not starting from a new codebase. Rewrites always suffer from second system effect and disperse your efforts away from the actual problem. Rewrites are the economic equivalent of quantitative easing, it's just a nice way to avoid dealing with the actual problem while pretending to fix it.

The process I always use for refactoring an existing project is to first isolate the code that you want to remove, then create an interface that so that the new interface is EXACTLY the same as the isolated code and then build a new implementation that utilizes the same interface. Then you change the interface so that the leaky abstractions from the old interface are gone.

This is the process I used to migrate from OpenLDAP to SQL Server. And yes, there was a DN field in SQL Server for many years that emulated the DN structure of LDAP, and we had a bunch of hacky stored procs that would emulate LDAP semantics for search.

Rewriting is the 'easy' answer, but its usually not the best. Even if you're 'refactoring' your app to another language it's usually best to create some bridges so that both work in parallel, if you have a web app use some proxy hackery, if you have a desktop app, use IPC. I've switched apps from Perl to ASP.NET using this method.

The other thing that refactoring in this manner benefits is team cohesion, by switching languages slowly it allows the people proficient in the old language to add a lot of value to the new team, transfer knowledge slowly, and also get up to speed on the new language. When people feel like they are going to be out of a job when the rewrite is complete they will not be thrilled about it. When they have an opportunity to learn a new language, contribute meaningfully to getting rid of things they always hated, they will be much more engaged.
Is the font rendering on this guy's site screwed up for anyone else? The "t"'s have something wrong with them: http://ompldr.org/vNzVrZg/why_i_wrote_a_programmers_text_edi...

Firefox 3.6 on Linux.
PJ Eby Hacking Your Mind Again
The Microsoft keyboard and mouse I have, not only have the USB symbol embossed, they also sport a raised dot to help identify the correct side. Wish more manufacturers did that.

On the other hand, PC manufacturers have defeated that purpose by creating vertically aligned USB ports. Which side is the right side now? Just goes to say that intelligent specs are not enough. You can't hand a brilliant spec to a monkey and expect good implementation.
There was an old image editing program that gave points for using new features and unlocked additional features at certain point levels. I want to say it was Kai's Power Goo (which ran incredibly well on a 233MHz Pentium MMX), but that doesn't seem quite right.
I've done a lot of writing and analysis in health sciences. My very strong intuition is that there is a study flaw here of one form or another.

What this seems to say, to me, is that people who choose to eat healthy also tend to be less depressed than those who choose to not eat healthy.

Population bias may be a problem here - that eating unhealthy may not necessarily cause depression, but rather those who are eating unhealthy are also likely to be suffering from depression.

There is limited data on diet and its impact on health in general - except in obvious cases of frank deficiency.

This could be like saying "People who go jogging daily tend to be happier in general." You could say that jogging then causes happiness. Or you could say that people who tend to jog are demographically likely to also do happy inducing things.
Well, damn, I'm not getting any sleep tonight. That's brilliant, I'll have to find a way to make it work.
Why Is Chinese Web Design So Bad?
I don't think real spies have very good graphic design either. Maybe European spies at least use Helvetica instead of Courier.
I just finished the process of moving my number over. I had some issues calling the ported number from Skype, and as has been mentioned, there is no support from google. More on my experience here:

http://www.mikolayczyk.com/2011/01/successfully-ported-numbe...
Parody of http://www.google.com/images?q=shark+kayak
Come on, it's right there in section 6.5.1 of the specification which you'd know if you searched the web, downloaded 11MB of data, unzipped it and sorted through it for the "Universal Serial Bus Specification Revision 2.0", then read all 622 pages of that.

"...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything."

"But the plans were on display..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a torch."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of The Leopard'."
I think I've booked at least 10 flights thru Hipmunk. Much easier system for the business traveler to understand and plan.

$7mil in this market for seasoned entrepenuers with a product making over 100k a month (their numbers via recent interviews)... not a bad business to invest in.

Let's see how they scale.
Check the activity usage report. They break down in quite a bit of detail where the charges are. You can break it down even further by hour. I've used the Free Tier with no charges for over a month now, and have been pretty happy with it.

The one thing the Amazon Free Tier does charge for which is strange is regional data transfer (transfer between machines on AWS), but they provide you with 15GB of internet data transfer. Very odd.
The no-details part of it is the worst part!
bubblicious
Plan on putting it in the Mac App Store?
I'll have to check out some of these books personally but I'm curious if anyone has read the "The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit." I'm interested if someone can give a little more detail as to how the author explains and turns into a procedure, the process of understanding and the actions of when to quit.

Two quotes the site claims are, "If you can't be the best in your class, you should quit" and "Quitting does not make you a failure, you quit to avoid failure." It struck me as a little dangerous and possible that if this is the kind of understanding that results from the book, people might skip out too quickly - something that I see in education too often when persistence and effort could have done wonders. In my opinion, it is very important to know when to ADMIT failure (as opposed to avoid failure) and learn from it. Surely it's also good advice that at some points in our lives we should know when to cut our losses and move on to the next thing. Does this book do this in a deep and objective way?

There is a lot of evidence that people are pretty poor at assessing themselves. Second, the idea of failure avoidance is a common trait of people with fixed implicit theories of self and low effort-belief (traits correlated with lower performances, at least on tasks in the domain of education.) Third, people are really good at justifying their actions to preserve their self concepts. Ingredients that unless accounted for, seem like they could be dream killers with a slight push called "go ahead, quit."

Now, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that the actual book probably goes much more in depth as to when and how to make this sort of assessment but I thought I'd bring it up. Your thoughts?
I built a realtime 2D MMO for Android and still got rejected by Google.
I've done it for a little over 2 years now. I also run and lift weights, and I feel like the three complement each other very well (flexibility, endurance, strength).

The hardest part is finding a good teacher that you mesh with. If you go to a class and end up hating it, try another one. In my experience, the teacher matters far more than the label on the class - I've been to "advanced ashtanga" classes where I didn't even break a sweat and "beginner hatha" classes where I felt like I was going to die.

I usually feel much better after a good yoga class than I ever do after a good run or workout - less sore, more alert, more relaxed. I'm also consistently surprised at the new things I'm able to do since starting yoga (proper pullups, headstands, touch toes w/o even feeling a stretch). All in all, I'm a big fan, and would recommend it highly.
Funny story.

I assumed this as well - but while working on a school project I fried a very nice motherboard when our project got a short from a wire that had come loose. Lesson learned - use a separate power supply and keep the USB only for signalling.
Whatever you do, it doesn't matter. A boatload of companies have tried to fiercely combat piracy - not a single success. So why even bother and waste money in various methods, it only delays (in a matter of days ?) the crack.
OK kids, quit the bellyaching. There is only one way to get a USB cable wrong, even if you get it wrong 90% of the time. Remember the PS2. It came with round DIN connectors. There was only one right way to plug it in, but an indefinite number of wrong ways to try it. And we had to do it uphill...in the snow.
Minimalist Gmail (chrome extension)
Can the shell complete text which was rendered with terminal specific escape sequences, i.e. color? Can it complete stdout from child processes (i.e. cat)?
10 flights?!? Email alexis@hipmunk.com and demand swag.
If its full of potential clients looking for creative services, I would do it. It doesn't appear to be that.
Michael Chisari is the lead developer of the Appleseed Project, an open source, distributed social networking framework. Support the project by donating here

Oh dear.
I'd suggest applying again one day in the future if you're still interested.

There might be other reasons unrelated to yourself as to why the panel decided against you - a cutback in hiring quotas for the short-term, perhaps.

There are a lot of anecdotes online of people getting in on the 2nd or 3rd try, I don't think anyone there views re-applying after a period of time as a bad thing - or your rejection as a permanent sign.

Even Steve Yegge didn't get hired on his first attempt.
Due to a long-standing bug in the Twitter API, you can not add write support to an app without deleting it entirely and re-creating the app in their system. It will let you change the flag for future users, but there is no way to request the additional privileges from a user if needed. As such, it unfortunately a "good idea" to always create your Twitter apps as read-write.

Reference: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=669
Came in to say that his "t"s looked really weird. Chrome.
How about one of these? http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/locations/