skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I interviewed some months ago, I had one telephone interview and five on-site interviews. If I understood them correctly, some candidates also go through a second telephone interview. So a maximum of seven if you include phone interviews.

The interviews were quite challenging (and of increasing difficulty), but there was nothing even resembling a trick question or a mind teaser. I researched a bit before the interviews, and credible results consistently said that Google always had a policy against such questions. I wonder how the head of HR can then talk about it as if they were asking such questions recently?

All in all, the hiring process was challenging and exhausting, but never felt unfair or sloppy/undirected.
At the moment of writing this comment, this app has 88 likes and 446 tweets. I wonder if people don't click "Like" in order not to reveal that they're interested in using the application ;).
I work in both setting up merchant accounts and offer PCI compliance services. Penetratation testing and something called the SAQ WIZARD which makes the SAQ understandable.

The pain involved is high here are some quick tips:

1) most new startups might as well forget about applying. Unless you have prior trading history which you can prove your chargebacks are < 1% then you will most likely get a NO.

2) The business volume should be at least 5K + per month to make if worth your while (and theirs) and figures below this will probably not be worth their while = a NO.

3) Trying to get a good rate is only going to be possible if your a mum a pop store selling shoes etc., anything online will generally be high risk and have fees north of 3.5 %

4) if your transaction value is high > 500$ + then you will be high risk.

5) anything travel = high risk

6) video, gambling, adult, coupons, gift vouchers, warranties, etc are all a general NO.

7) dating = very high charge backs, block every Proxy IP and non UK non USA. Or all markets you are not targeting.

8) PCI compliance is easy if you use the gateways checkout page, However, if you want to incorporate payments direct into your own site, thus using the API (needed for recurring billing or for repeat clients where you don't want to ask for card number again and again) then PCI compliance is a big task, making sure your servers can pass about 3k5 tests and about 400 questions and standards adopted as part of the SAQ (self assessment questionnaire) + you will need to make sure your app is secure from sql injection etc. etc.
The bottom line here is that though today's interviewers' repertoire is a little bit different, it only takes a small practice to excel in the questions they ask. Author seem to make the same point.

Usual comments from "ninjas" in this thread are very amusing though.
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Who else remembers the singlestat.us? IIRC, facebook killed the service.
JNDI is ugly, but after some trying around it generally does what its supposed to. I tried the Apache LDAP API and it is by far easier, but the "experimental"-state was a turnoff for me.

The nicest solution is Spring LDAP, but it requires the spring jars, which can be a bit too heavy, if you dont have it on your CP already and just want to connect to an AD without adding Spring to your project.
Flagged as sensationalist political spam.
I think the point that it was a she and not he is particularly important

Why? I don't see why it should be relevant at all!
How Reddit Algorithm Works
Finally, a classic Jon Stokes "get off my lawn" piece. It's been a while. Maybe the winter weather is getting to him.

Personally, the tablet is the ideal "sitting on the couch browsing the web during commercials or boring moments" device, for which my iPhone had served previously. That and maybe a few casual games or acting as a rich remote for other media center devices. I'd imagine once a front-facing camera is standard, it'll be a common Skype device as well. I really don't know what Jon would be contented with given his issues with tablets, other than a brain implant. As for me, I loves me some tablets, and I've bought my last laptop; it's all desktops and tablets from here on out.
What’s the Difference Between a Blu-Ray & a DVD
Forget the competition, focus on your product (don't be that rabbit)
Yes, it's because it's limited to two failures. If you drop the first bulb at floor 50 and it breaks, you have only one bulb left, so you MUST not break it until you have limited the possible range to 1, so you have to just incrementally test 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. If you went straight to floor 25 and it broke, all you know is 0 < x < 25, and you have no bulbs left.
The secret life of punctuation - ¶ (The Pilcrow)
I googled for the proper spelling of "Reuleaux triangle", and Wikipedia's article has this:

> Because all diameters are the same length, the Reuleaux triangle,
> with all other curves of constant width, is an answer to the question
> "Other than a circle, what shape can you make a manhole cover so that
> it cannot fall down through the hole?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle
The first time I used Windows 3.11 it was a toy compared with the real work you could do with DOS and all their programs. In Windows, you could use the mouse to paint, that is, all the big games and programs were still DOS.

Ipad today is a toy like iphone 1.0 was, but this will change as the technology matures.
MINECRAFT: The Last Minecart
Thought experiment contradicting limit of Speed of Light
Imagine a large volume of empty space. Approximately in the middle is a very small light source which produces exactly 2 photons. These photons each move away from the light in opposite directions in the same plane.

After 1 year, mark the position of each photon. Measure the distance between the 2 photons. The distance will be 2 light years. Yet according to relativity, the speed of 1 photon relative to the other could never be more than the Speed of Light, in this case 1 light year.

So now we have a contradiction, or do we?
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This clarified a few questions I had.

Hope you can help me with a couple: why is there even a limit? how do we know there is an insuperable barrier nothing can cross for sure?
Depreciation != deprecation...
No.

http://conduit9sr.tripod.com/ (Intro to relativity)
XML is like violence. If you see too much of it early on, you will start to think it's normal. It will scar you for life.
i've heard of fb/tw/zynga bubble, but huffpo?

oh, it's fortune magazine saying!..
Jacques Mattheij on: Networking without going places
"P.S. Why does everyone who says "if you have a .ly domain, you are supporting the Gaddafi regime!" assume that the .ly TLD is managed directly by Libya? [2] Many smaller, less Internet-involved (if not wholly Internet-unconnected) countries outsource management and use of their TLD to foreign companies in exchange for licensing fees."

If this is the case, and someone is paying for a .ly domain, then their payments go to Libya in the form of licensing fees, thus supporting the regime.
I'm getting really sick of the number of Google employees on this site voting down any story that criticises Google.
In a broad sense, perhaps, but this implies a 1:1 correlation about the licensing arrangement that remains to be established.

More importantly, Mr. Muammar has been in power since the 1969 coup. Now we are supposed to start caring about his trafficking in adverb suffixes?
That must be where they get the 20 figure from. My way has a shorter worst case even than that though, 14 vs 19
"Fortunately, I don't expect to wait too long for this; the advantages are too obvious. When such a device is announced, I feel confident it will be more exciting than a new luxury gel ink pen, even for Jon Stokes."

There are already tablet prototypes with pen input, it does not have tilt and rotation like wacom does but normal ink pen have not either. I bet on Apple being the first to make it mass produced as usual.
Suppose that bulbs have a tolerance of 8.5. Doing a naive binary search causes you to drop at floor 50, breaking a bulb, and then at floor 25, breaking your second bulb. You have no more bulbs, and cannot discriminate between 25 possible values for the tolerance, so your naive strategy was not a good idea.

The binary search strategy which works is to binary search with the first bulb until you break it, then exhaustively search with the second bulb starting from the lowest possible tolerance and increasing until it breaks, thus identifying the precise breaking point with the minimum number of drops. This has a worse case performance of 50 drops, for when the bulb had a tolerance of 49.5: one drop with the first bulb, bulb breaks, 49 drops with the second bulb. (1 + 48 = 49 if we assume that it can't break on the first floor.)

Your solution is very good, but I do not believe it to be optimal. I am working on a better one.
It's to identify those that have 'architect potential'. If you pick the simple, easy to implement and blindingly obvious answer you don't make the cut, sorry. :D
In my experience, seeing something brandished ostentatiously on certain street corners in london, but nowhere else (which is my experience,) is evidence in favor of it being a fad of little relevance.
Creating jobs through technology - The Costa Rican model
This sequence, by the way, is called the look-and-say sequence. If you like it, you might be interested in this blog post on the length of the terms:

http://www.nathanieljohnston.com/2010/10/a-derivation-of-con...
kind of proves his point, doesn't it?
Show HN: J, a dead simple but colorful task manager inspired by t-
Update: Just made the FB log-in compatible with IE6-8!
My stab at this (its still so alpha it hurts), try http://www.startupbeanbags.com - the idea is practical promotion for start ups via the medium of beanbags :)
That's called "vulching" among folks I know. (If you aren't familiar with it, the word refers to "circling like a vulture" -- at least in this case. A quick search turns up different uses of the word which are similar but not identical.)
Don't let them make you feel like that. What matters is what you make and how you interact with people around you.

I've met geniuses who don't make anything interesting out of their lives. They just play mind games and show off. Nobody really likes them or their "high standards." Usually they just criticize everybody and everything in some way or another, instead of helping out. And they are often lazy, covering themselves by stating things are not "challenging" or worthy of their highness.

They remind me of those rich guys with sports cars. They wouldn't win any race. What matters is how you do with what you have. The house of cards of arrogants falls down if enough people just ignore them. Like the typical high school hotness scenario.

My ideal hiring test:

- What do you code for fun?
- How do you help people around you?
- Favorite non-fiction books?
- Would you like to come over for a hackathon next saturday?

Edit: I know one counter-example within Google, though. YMMV
Towards Browse-Based Browsing with Home Dash
Personally I hate allowing applications to use my facebook account. (not your issue, just a personal thing) In good spirit, I tried it out and deleted it quickly after. I have 750 friends. It took about 30-40s to load them all up. Not a problem, since it did it all in real time, so I wasn't inpatient - good job on that part of the UX. I have friends all over the world so it's pretty cool to see those connections, but don't really have a particular use for this other than a one-time view. My friends who know I'm "worldly" dont need me to prove it to them :)

Your little team of hackers are on to some cool things. Good luck to you guys, you're on the right track!
Yeah, I believe he proved a correspondence between the arrows and the Schroedinger equation (not in that book) at some point (and it's not hard to come up with a character of the proof). The grandparent is referring to something like this video, though, which you mentioned at the end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM

Bringing in arrows where they don't belong, or in the magnet case "rubber bands", is cheating the asker. I'm not familiar enough with GR to know if arrows are a useful representation like they are with complex amplitudes.
I was learning Mandarin/simplified for a while and it took me some time to identify whether I should be listening in on a conversation or reading a sign or not. I don't have a good guide on Canto/Mandarin (it doesn't help that many phrases sound similar in both to a Western ear) but for writing I zeroed in on identifying the 'i' on the left side of simplified 'shuo' (说) versus the 'stack of pancakes' in traditional shuo (說). Since the 'i' appears frequently enough in characters in signs, I found it to be a pretty good signifier that what I was looking at was simplified.
Wow thanks so much for the kind words! It really means a lot and the encouragement is what keeps us going.

We do realize that it does happen to be a one-time view thing, and hopefully its still cool for the one-time!

The load time worried us in the beginning. We cut it down DRASTICALLY switching from Facebook REST API to using Fbql. We decided to load 20 users at a time and hoped people would enjoy watching it in real time.

Glad you liked it though :) Let us know if you have any more suggestions!
Technology ‘firsts’ that made a President’s day
No more desktop Linux systems in the German Foreign Office
75,000 applications a week? Guess I shouldn't be surprised with how big of a company Google is, but still crazy to see that number.
Thanks a lot for your response we appreciate the comments. And thanks for your thoughts on the UX a lot of time an effort went into making it load in real-time :)
Social Media, Genomics Driving Data Tsunami
Often it isn't even that. It is just that someone has made a generalization, and there is an obvious exception that everyone knows about and normal people would just take as given, and then someone writes a one line 'toss off' reply, and rakes in the free karma. This is the utmost BS.

Giving someone that puts thought, time and effort into a response a tiny bit of karma - and then having the 'correction' which involves neither time, nor effort, nor thought 10x the amount of karma indicates a couple of things:

(1) Hacker News will rapidly descend into one line reply chaos where it is nigh impossible to have an interesting discussion

(2) Hacker news does not value time effort and thought

(3) Hacker news greatly rewards the absence of time, effort and thought

How can any of those be good? (#2) is the antithesis of reasoned debate, (#3) is actively rewarding anti-intellectualism. (#1) indicates that HN is either just a poorly implemented version of Slashdot (which would be sad) or it is going to descend into diggery (which is horrifying).

Put some thought into it and you might see why we have a problem with that.
Wrote this to flex my ruby skills, There's nothing special about it except the following:

* Decorated text
* Marking tasks as done and deleting them is easier with a one digit key instead of 3 digit key.

If you already have text files with tasks in the following format:

<status> <task>

then you can just rename it to .todo and fireup j
Also, the article doesn't mention that native speakers (especially ones born recently) are often able to speak or read some part of the 'other' language. It's a similar situation to French Swiss knowing some German and vice-versa.
I am not comparing HR departments between IT and non-IT companies. I know only IT and was just stating my experience with that.
"Someone replies to it only to correct that inaccuracy."

Correction:

"Someone replies to it only to nitpick"

/humour
You can just close that...
What is the best advice for a startup applying to Y Combinator?
Well, depends on how you count. Is 4 one-two hour interviews by different people on the same day considered one interview or four? (Assuming, of course, a preliminary phone interview would constitute the fifth)
Encouragement for Entrepreneurs: Make Big Plans
At the risk oif not being labeled a troll, you suggestion was that simeine had nor considered the very difficult circumstances whic made you accept a deal about which you feel compelled to complain on HN.

I have made an exceptional number of bad gambles in my life, butg I have never felt the ned to either justify or disclaim responsibility for the choices I made on a public forum.

If this sounds dickish, I apologize, sincerely. I have made the best decsions of which I was capable at any moment in time... my failings do not tepresent a failure on the part of those who depend on me.
I think people tend to forget how much "background work" goes into UX. I saw the pins flying down and I stayed on the page the whole time. If it was simply a progress bar that said "We are currently loading XYZ, which is X%" I would have left the page and then came back later (and maybe even forgotten). You kept my attention, that's important.
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They're focusing on the wrong things.

The compact UI is very confusing. The current UI is fine, don't screw with it just to save an extra 10 pixels of vertical space.

How about freezing feature changes for 3 months and fixing bugs?
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Yes, it's because you're limited to 2 failures, and yes, "binary search" is a dumb way to describe it since you can't actually do a binary search in that situation.

Working in increments of 20 floors gives you a worst case of more than 20 drops. 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 (bang), 81, 82, ..., 99 (bang): that's 24 drops.

Your other solution is better, and indeed dropping first at floor 14 is one of the 6 initial choices that minimize the worst-case number of drops. If, subject to minimizing the worst-case number, you also want to optimize the average case (assuming all possibilities are initially equally likely) then doing floor 14 first is optimal.
This.

People are so accustomed to thinking of themselves as consumers, that it is difficult for some to fathom that they are often the product.

A general rule of thumb: if you're not paying for it, somebody else is-- and what they are paying for just may be you.
The news should be that the core does not really rotate faster. Does it matter if it's one extra degree every million years? Some tectonic plate may move by that distance over the same time.
Your options were landline, cellphone, carphone, suitcase phone, VHF, and CB. Each one had their pros and cons. For example, Nextel IDEN phones had excellent PTT that rivaled VHF. The Nokia/Orange version was inferior in every way. Sprint eventually shutdown that band down and twitter (and facebook) took its place.
What to Look for in a Data Center?
Google Won’t Kill The Chrome URL Bar
I don't like those problems. IMHO, they encourage rationalizing things that probably just evolved/happened over time. The real answer for me is because no better shape happened or showed to be significantly better. Also, since almost all follow the same shape, it's harder for other shapes to enter the market. Winner takes all.
Chouinard was neither the inventor nor the sole proponent of clean climbing, merely one of the most influential. Before it swept the US climbing community clean climbing already had a substantial history in Europe, especially in the UK. A UK climber, Royal Robbins, for example, manufactured artificial chocks several years before Chouinard and also pioneered clean climbing techniques in the US.

That being said, he did have a huge impact, and it's probably for the better that he retained personal control of the company for as long as he did.
Well this sounds the same setup as I'm using now. Except I work for a large consultancy company who takes 10% of my fee when they land a contract.
My gut feeling is that article is dragged :-) into somewhat irrelevant things like Poincare group et al.

Why maximum limit exist at all?
How Universe without this limit will look like?
How Universe with limit which is not equal to speed of light will look like?

Antropic principle inevitably pops up.
I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that while it is good to know these things, they're no longer essential. I graduated two years ago, and have been developing in Ruby since then, I haven't seen a linked list since College. Why?, because I chose to work with a newer language, with a higher level of abstraction. The programmer of the near future will have a different set of challenges to previously. In the same vein, the guys who graduated 10-15 years ago weren't learning Fortran. But 25 or 30 years ago, I'm guessing they were.
Well I use it a ton every single week. I ride the train for about 3 hours per day (total), with connections. With a laptop the start/suspend cycle made it just not worth it to use on some of the connections. I can use the iPad any time I'm still long enough to justify taking it out of the bag. I've recovered most of my travel time for reading or watching movies now.
People keep asking this, and similar things like "if you were travelling in a vehicle at the speed of light and you turned on the headlights, what would happen?"

For me the easiest answer is to understand that from the point of view of the person travelling near the speed of light the beam of light moves away from them at the speed of light. So after ~1 second they are 300,000Km apart.

On the other hand, from the point of view of a 'stationary' observer, the light and the spaceship emitting it are moving at almost exactly the same speed. So after ~1 second they are maybe 1 meter apart.

How can this be? Our minds naturally want to reject this as nonsense. But the thing the gripping hand is holding that makes this true is that to the stationary observer and the person travelling near the speed of light time is moving at different rates.

The person who is moving ~1m slower than the speed of light is experiencing time enormously much slower than the person 'standing still'. The time difference is 300,000,000 times (sic).

Our brains reject this, because we think of time as an absolute rock solid constant, when in fact even with our primitive understanding and slow speeds we can demonstrate experimentally that time is in fact flexible, and it does slow down the faster you get.
Facebook login isn't working for me.

If you post to my wall, just give me a box so that I can opt out.

Also, please make the header blue or something. The orange hurts my eyes.
Waking Up: Looking at my data
What browser are you using? We've been having some issues with IE. We'll definitely add a box to opt out that's a good idea. Sorry you don't like the header I kind of find it fun :)
It may not be important by itself, but it is important to be right. Her nationality may also not be relevant but if someone writes that she is Chinese and she is actually Russian (example), it is important that it gets corrected.
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