skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I put tech interviews down fifty/fifty to "We don't know any better way of doing this" and "The unavoidable reality is that if a position is advertised openly then 98% of candidates are screamingly inappropriate for it and after applying a few filters to the resume we've gotten that to a more manageable 90% or so for interviews."

Happily, there is a simple opt out mechanism. There are two ways to get into any company: through HR and the resume -> interview -> offer process, and the other way. (Convince a decisionmaker within the company that you, specifically, are the answer to their prayers. Get hired. Skip slush pile.)

Pick door number two. If you get your jollies off of sorting linked lists you can do so after having received the moral equivalent of an offer (which should decrease the stress to the point where you can successfully sort a linked list).
How does that have any impact on the cost of a favicon? Unless they were charged per FTP transfer...
After reading this I have no idea how he actually discovered the vulnerability, aside from a handwavy statement about messing with form input.

Most of the writeup is just a narrative about what he saw and who he talked to afterwards. I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping for more technical detail.
Fantastical coincidence: the most expensive favicon.ico was charged to an organization whose branding is a lowercase 'ico'
I believe that's by design. My grandmother doesn't see so well, but still likes to use the internets.

Next time you're in the phone isle in Walmart, note that they still sell wall-mount telephones with huge number buttons. There are also cell-phones designed the same way, specifically for seniors.
and white boards, lots of white boards
I'm not seeing HN HideIt on there: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dibillbafbngeiloeh...

That's an extension I just installed, and I quite like it. Amongst other things, it lets me hide articles on the front page that I've already seen or don't want to revisit, so I am more efficient at finding new articles later (and don't keep re-scanning old ones).
Hey, Greg -

I wound up in a similar situation as you after college a while ago, although mine wasn't exactly the same. What you need to recognize, and your last paragraph is a good sign of this, is that you have bigger fish to fry than 'doing what you want'. 'Doing what you want' is important, but as I read your activities - got a Geography degree, road tripped the US, tried to get a book deal, applying to YC as a front-end web designer, trying to work in the gaming industry - I don't see a clear picture of 'what you want'. I see a lot of energy and ideas, but you remind me a bit of Dean Moriarity from On the Road - all sail and no compass, so to speak.

That aside, I also think you have more to worry about than 'doing what you want'. You've got student loans to deal with now, as well as an uncertain living situation with your parents. I think those take precedence over figuring out what you want to do with your life. You need to figure out how to get regular money to take steps towards self-sufficiency. A huge plus would be to build something like a 'career' while doing that - because that will make your next steps towards the things I listed above easier.

What I'd suggest is that you look into teaching. At least in the US, there are numerous programs to get new teachers into schools.I don't know when they take applicants, but I would imagine now is a good time to look since it's February and you've got time before next school year. Some pay for a masters in education, which would defer your student loans (you're back in an educational program), but they will definitely give you a salary and let you regroup while you figure out your next move. Teachers also regularly leave education after a few years, so you won't stand out if you do get the urge to chase something else once you're back on your feet. Teaching can give you a creative outlet, which you might enjoy, and it definitely beats living at home with your parents or couch surfing while you wait for your shift at Subway. I'd give this a serious look if I were you.

My e-mail address should be visible in my profile - feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you have ?'s or want to chat more. Like I said, I went through something similar and came out pretty well, so I think I can offer pertinent advice.

Best of luck!
Apple's always had the shitty no-kindle type rule, just only enforced it on little guys.

As a developer, I guess this is an evening of the landscape, as a consumer who's main use of iOS devices is reading kindle books, I hate it.
RPN Ever 4
Get your nerdon.
Maybe this is a euphemism for "bunch of old people who don't know how the internet works but were put on the web site steering committee anyway and made a bunch of of absurd requests that had to be fulfilled in order to get approval".
We hire people based on enthusiasm, general intelligence (you can usually tell after a few minutes) and a low level of demonstrated proficiency - we'll ask them to explain a code sample they wrote, or ask for a verbal description of how to solve a problem. We choose the person we like best, and if they don't work out after 2 weeks we fire them.

Hot seat quizzing produces way too many false negatives. We are not google. We can't do 5+ rounds in search of yeoman geniuses. We have to spend time making money. Some companies don't seem to have this inconvenient little problem, but we do.

And besides, most of our hires have come from existing networks where none of this is even necessary. Having an extensive professional network should be a feature of anyone you consider bringing on as founder or employee or contractor.
If you've never done work on a government contract you can imagine how this simple favicon might've gone through fifty revisions. On highly technical projects people with no technical skill tend to latch on to the little things they do understand and want to meddle with them endlessly.

This is the "Bike Shed Principle" or Parkinson's Law of Triviality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality)
Actually, most deployment recommendations expect, that ISP will allocate something larger than /64 to each customer, with /48 being the ideal scenario and something like /56 being reasonable.
It's times like these that I wrap myself in Google's neglect for the Android marketplace like a warm blanket.
The first four are basically "get the best tools for your employees, and stay out of the way".

And location-based achievements? No thanks, I'm not here to punch a time clock.

The rest of these seem like an odd choice. If you're going to get into these sorts of specifics (share a music playlist!), there's probably hundreds, if not thousands of possible suggestions (eat lunch together! respect your employees privacy! flexible working hours! nice chairs! holiday party! etc. etc. etc.)
Bingo! (from the author). I wrote this late at night at the end of a long day, but that's the point.
High end graphics and lots of battery... riiight

Myself, only portables are netbooks with ssd.
Somewhat ironic that the favicon was for an organisation called ICO.
What was your plan had this flopped and you only had a few sales by the time you had to start shipping items? could you have brought down to a per-unit basis? did you have an exit strategy if it didn't seem worth your time?
That's actually something I've been having a hard time finding: What percentage of IPv4 addresses are currently in use.
based out of the UK

Why? The seem willing to pay for favicons :)

favicon generation: £0
installation: £200
1-year email support: £200
--------------------------
TOTAL (*): £400
Savings (*): £185

* VAT not included
£0.57 ($0.92) per pixel (it was 32x32 :)
It's a complicated issue. I think the reason people donate is based on this logic:

An old t-shirt here is essentially worthless. We see somewhere that a demand exists for a worthless item (to us), so we give it to them because they are much poorer than us (rather than sell it to them). We think we save them the work for the t-shirt assuming they will be able to concentrate on something else productive rather than acquiring clothing. Everyone wins (although not necessarily the case).

In addition to making us feel better about our excesses, it makes logical sense, although the logic is based upon possibly inaccurate assumptions.
Yes, I guess I could say "it has been hypothesized that the world was created in 6 days 5,000 years ago", and I wouldn't be wrong :)

Inaccurate-yet-accepted with 0-2 upvotes: Not damaging.

Inaccurate-yet-accepted with 25 upvotes: Has the potential to widely perpetuate false beliefs.
I think I might happened upon a domain that you might like in your name's neighborhood. -It's not registered; I don't want to post it. Send me an email.
My point is that I do not consider the net sum negative. It is so small that it is inconsequential to my life. It does not affect my finances whatsoever. Only hitting the jackpot would, and that would be a definite positive effect to me. Like I said life-changing.

I consider that the Pascal's Wager :) Everything to gain, nothing to lose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager
I launched a new daily deals site
How Split-Testing Our Opt-In Form Increased Our Conversion Rate by 102.2%
I think an upvote is basically equivalent to saying 'I concur'. It's not equivalent to a '+' grade.

The problem is other people (rightly) have their own opinion about the meaning of an upvote.

--

I think voting serves a dual purpose; 1) to moderate via community consensus and 2) provide a meta-game designed to entertain members.

I don't think voting should be taken too seriously .. in the end - points and karma are just a distraction. I don't think it's worth taking it too seriously.
A friend and I just had a discussion about this last night. I can't say I've bothered to do it, but she says she just adjusts her privacy filter so that everyone in her company network can only see her picture and where she lives. I've been nervous to friend anyone I've met through work, but she doesn't seem to stress at all about this issue. Thoughts?
Design Basics For Programmers
Related to this, I'd love to see developers who work on porn sites speaking at conferences, to hear about your particular experiences in design, marketing, SEO, hosting, and scaling. Seems like you'd have an interesting perspective on all that.
You clearly know more than I do about these things, but:

0 < sqrt(2)^a <= a for all a in 0..2)

is not true. It fails for a=1. If you can make it right, could you explain the reasoning that gets you there? I never know how to tackle sequences like x, x^x, x^(x^x),...
It would have only cost £146.25 if they had gone for 16x16 :)
Tell HN: Hacker News Atom Feed Provided by Kalimba
Verizon Plans to Throttle Its Heaviest Data Users
Genetic Algorithms are rarely covered in (recent) Machine Learning books. They are more often considered as optimization algorithms.
Well yes, that and the original maintenance cost doubled.

PS: if you pay attention, right now I am laughing really, really loud, so you might hear me.
I had to lookup what itoa is not being a C programmer. Which got me interested - how would you implement this?

My inital thought is to do something like (in pseudo code):

str = '';
while (i > 0 ) {
# least significant digit
r = i % 10;
# throw away the least significant digit
i = i / 10;
case
when r = 0 then
str = '0' << str
when r == 1 then
str = '1' << str
... etc
end
}
return str;

Would I pass with that? Is there a better way?
Yup ... I'll make the hyphens optional. Thanks for the feedback!
"socialistic contrarian splendour"

They're really post-scarcity; they have no need for capitalism or socialism.
You know, making an effective favicon probably would take a lot of time. There is just not enough room. I would say it is akin to shoving a complex program into a handful of bytes.

That being said, this particular favicon was not so much designed as resized, and so I totally agree that they got ripped off!
What better way to foster a community than interact with it, eh? :)
I do the same - buy I use visual patterns on the keyboard.

Think swipe, but to make a shape or pattern with shift pressed at specific intersections.
£1 for the new favicon, £584 for knowing how to do it.
I once tried giving out a homework problem to interviewees and a surprising number of people flat-out cheated!

I absolutely hate "trivia" questions, but I feel like I have to ask people to actually write code during an interview even though it's unrealistic and a bit unfair.

(I also think that if a candidate is flying to the interview, the employer should cover the airfare... but maybe that's why I don't get to hire many people)
I would suggest people to filter out like riotgames does. They ask job applicants to answer some questions and implement a small project in Java. See http://pastebin.com/zhCxcRds for the questions and http://riotgames.com/careers/software-engineer-java-pvpnet-p... for the job post.
Congratulations! That's a very impressive achievement. Certainly a much faster growth rate than reddit!
Not to be glib, but did Rockefeller have many friends? I'd bet he didn't say this.
Very Cool. It made me immediately think of my grandmother.
Let me start off by saying I completely agree with what you are saying as I think in a lot of problem solving (not just programming) there are underlying assumptions that turn into group mentality (just look at real estate in the U.S. as an example as a majority of people assumed that prices would continue to rise indefinitely) so the true underlying problem gets missed.

The one aspect of your discussion that I tend to disagree with is that these apps you were searching for weren't providing what most people are looking for - motivation. I think based on the fact they are searching for the apps in the first place shows they already have motivation or they would not be searching for such help. I'm not exactly sure how an app would motivate a person to exercise besides being an alarm clock letting them know to get up an hour early to exercise. I probably am missing a potential solution here but I am interested in seeing your app.
I have found that for technical interviews, the following pattern works very well (hiring side):

0. Explain to the candidate this algorithm and why. It isn't magic, there are no right or wrong answers, just testing "fit". This is a case where foreknowledge does not change the outcome!

1. Get a basic grasp of technologies both interviewer and candidate have in common, via say, just chatting. This is vital -- find an area where you are both somewhat competent.

2. State a problem you don't know the answer to, something you are currently working out for your own projects, in terms of the mutual tech. VERY IMPORTANT: you must not have the best solution in mind when you bring up the topic.

3. Brainstorm on it together.

This provides more feedback in a valuable way than the classic brainteaser. You find out how the person thinks and problem solves -- you know, that thing you are hiring her to do. You find out how you and her work together. Even if no solution is reached, it is OK because there was no solution going it -- just a problem to be worked.

Your job in the interview is then to make sure you steer the discussion towards various tech and deep problems, coding issues, etc. Afterwards you will have a pretty strong idea of how it is to work with the candidate, which is quite useful for deciding if you want to continue to work with the candidate as an employee. Further if you've done well at the steering of the discussion, you have learned about candidate's technical depth, without setting up test/interview anxiety situations.
A subscription service for men's clothing is an excellent idea! There is so much not to like about the current experience of shopping for clothes now.
The Apps Are Here: World Bank Apps for Development Challenge Now Open for Voting
You're right. The headline on your site is "How I Discovered A Security Vulnerability In Twitter"; the "I found another security vulnerability that impacted 1-1.5 million Twitter accounts." copy is in your subhed. My mistake.
The UBB decision is separate, but the major providers have coincidentally decided to start enforcing the caps simultaneously. The two are linked since they can now charge whatever they want for bandwidth without worrying about competition.
Do you need a secret handshake or something?
Obligatory, especially when all of HN is being called in to correct it: http://xkcd.com/386/
Very nice! That's a very small setup for so many pageviews. Quite impressive. Shoot me an email sometime, I'd love to talk shop. jedberg@reddit.com
a lot of those things you're asking for just don't exist together.

you can't have a powerful processor and graphics card and have long battery life. and you especially can't have all 3 AND be weightless.
I've been working on something like this in my spare time. I'd be interested in reviewing what you've got so far.

Email me if you'd like some company in Alpha-land.
Some discussion from the photographer, explaining how he shot the images and the equipment/software he used: http://greeksky.gr/GreekSkyForum/index.php?PHPSESSID=39cd80a...
I think this is the company: http://www.readingroom.com
We print our cards glossy front w/ contact info. Matte back with small qr code containing contact info from front and the remaining area blank for quick notes. If someone wants to retain my contact info they can scan the qr code with one of the dozens of scanners currently available without having to worry about typos, data entry etc. It's also a bit of a conversation starter with those that have never seen one or don't know how they work which can make the meeting more memorable if it's a convention type setting.
1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately)

2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that.

3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual designer.

It's easy to say "I could do that in 5 minutes." (cite: from the email exchange) But, could you? Including the design? And making sure after you shrunk it down it still looked okay? There's a good chance you'll need to go in there and draw each pixel by hand to make it look right (and it better be right).

Favicons are important, it's a mistake to believe they are always a 5 minute project.

(edited to add "always" to the last sentence)
Yeah, usually up to about 1200-1300 per second, but that's just from our app servers. Our caches can get up to 2500+ per second at peak.
How InnoDB handles REDO logging
Are there laws that allow/prevent the 2 week trial period for a business?
R in production systems
In a similar vein, my favourite interview (and actually the one that scored me my first real gig) was explaining existing code in some of the products that I would be working on if I got the position.

That way I had not seen the code before, but at the same time this was for real, "live" code. It was awesome, as not only did I get to show I could understand code, but more importantly it showed that I was able to dive into an already existing project and work through what I needed to.

It also gave me a little insight into how those projects were organised, in a way.

I think in all, I was given 5 snippets, all getting 'harder'. The way it worked was the first snippet was a complete function, comments included. That allowed me to infer things from the comments, as well as function and parameter names. By the end, they were showing code with the function name changed and all comments removed, but the rest was still there.

I thought that whole process was quite interesting and having lead some interviews myself since then, I always ensure that I try that with the hires we are looking at...
This hits the nail on the head for me, and I couldn't agree more. If I was interviewed this way for a position, even if I didn't get the job I would have huge respect for the company afterwards.
High end Sony should do all of that:

E.g. VPCZ13AHX/XQ

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDi...
Samsung refutes high Galaxy Tab returns, says rate is 'below 2 percent'
In most places, you're required to notify an infringing party that they are infringing. I've never heard of a requirement to explain the law to them.
I used to go with the 1 secure password for all sites. But then, it became painfully obvious that most sites don't treat your password with the respect it deserves (i.e. hash that shit and never store it in plain text). So, what I do now, is keep one secure password and then modify it based on the url of the site that I'm joining. This way, I just have to remember one password plus my algorithm for modifying it so that it's site specific. It works well until I come across a site (like my broker) that won't let me use "special" characters. It really makes me want to change brokers because if they were handling my passwords correctly - hashing them - they would never know what characters I use.
Well, itoa() stands for "integer to ASCII". You can use the property of sequential numbers (starting at 0x30 in ASCII table) to avoid the case statement.
Clocks and Latency for HFT
The "Linked Lists" chapter from "Programming Interviews Exposed" begins:

"The deceptively simple linked list is the basis for a surprising number of problems regarding the handling of dynamic data. Problems about efficient list traversal, list sorting, and the insertion or removal of data from either end of a list are good tests of basic data-structure concepts... Their simplicity appeals to interviewers, who want to present at least two or three problems over the course of an hour-long interview... You can write a relatively complete implementation of a linked list in less than 10 minutes, leaving you plenty of time to solve the problem... In addition, there is little variation in the way linked lists are implemented, which means that an interviewer can simple say "linked list" and not waste time discussing and clarifying implementation details."

http://www.piexposed.com/
I use my site http://hackerbra.in
Presumably, he submitted a ticket, went to the ticket status page, saw a list of tickets each with a link like "http://support.twitter.com/tickets/1532547, and changed the ticket number in the URL. It's possible that it was slightly more tricky than that (it may be that there's a sub-URL that doesn't enforce access control, and that the root URL always did), but from the writeup that appears to be the whole issue.

In standard Rails, which the Twitter support ticket site may very well be, this is a one line fix; call User.tickets.find_by_id instead of Ticket.find_by_id.
It's not in itself something a C programmer would ever really find themself doing, but as an algorithmic question it's fine - it's testing knowledge of looping, radices, strings etc. In C, you normally have to output the string in reverse and then reverse it, so you need to be aware of that. It's also a problem that's quite easy to explain (programmers are familiar with numbers and strings), but due to it's library availability, most people won't have actually written it themselves so it's not just a case of having done it before.

Coincidentally, I was asked this exact question in a phone interview this week. I didn't have to give exact code, I just walked through the principal of it (loop for each digit, dividing by the radix each time using the leftover specify the character (can be a lookup in an array), possible to use bit shifting in base 2/8/16 situations).
Twitter World Mood Map