skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting them to write code is actually pretty good.

As for binary search, I wouldn't necessarily be able to bang it out in two hours in C, but I'd easily be able to bang it out in that time for any language I use regularly. And with sufficient testing I'd take a good stab at converting to C.

Though I agree sometimes it can be a coin toss. Once I was asked to write some code that would take dates as inputs and do something with them, it was supposed to take two hours and run on a bunch of test cases they gave you. I spent much more than two hours on it, nailed all the edge cases and boundary conditions that I could think of (basically nuked it from orbit) and turned in something which ran on their test cases and also a much longer list of much more challenging test cases. I got that job.

I missed one where they wanted something written by TDD. Unfortunately, I only know how to design something that works, I don't know how to fake a bad design that organically grows into a workable design. As above I nuked all the boundary conditions I could think of, but didn't get that job.

(Probably wouldn't have been happy there, my experience is that people who do TDD or automated unit testing have way too much faith in those forms of testing, and they neglect other forms of testing, so their actual net amount of testing is well below my standards. Things like: every single programmer I've ever worked with who claims that automated testing is sufficient has always produced code that when they claim they've finished the task it fails the eyeball test. E.g. you run their code and within 10-30 seconds of looking at the result you can spot something wrong with it.)
Budget cuts ;)
No, 9 1/2. That 1/2 a thing is killing. Great article! When DVCS's would be compared, GitHub would be a great plus in Git's favor.
I believe you are talking about The Event (please, remain indoors)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_rCnueID8
If you're a company or organization in Boston and using Django, please submit your company to this form by 3/29 so we can include you in Kevin's next article "Boston Companies Using Django" coming out this thursday. Thanks! http://noderabbit.wufoo.com/forms/companies-using-django-in-...
Why the hell would you want to work a company that runs you through the gauntlet like this, only to give you the chance that maybe you'll get hired? I mean, this is obviously a really skilled guy who has lots of prospects.

Because at this point in your career, you have no degree, no experience, and no income? He's a sophomore in college, not someone with 30 years of industry experience.

In my experience, though, I would make someone with 30 years of industry experience answer the same questions. Because I've asked people like that those questions and they have absolutely no fucking idea. The number of people that can start with a blank file and start writing a computer program is probably somewhere around 5% of programmers.
Remember the milk competitor is shutting down
This is insane.

Can this information be used in court?

The information here is inconclusive ( https://www.eff.org/issues/cell-tracking ), but I'm surprised I've not heard of a case where this sort of data was presented as evidence?
FBI asks public for help breaking encrypted notes tied to 1999 murder
Uh... speaking of being the next Mark Zuckerberg have you heard of Facemash? It's exactly the kind of crap the lean startup movement is trying to foster. That's exactly the idea, that any idiot can make a website, scrape some content and become a billionaire.

Yes, today Facebook has scaling issues but seriously any idiot with a book on PHP could make the original Facebook (the tech side, Facebook is all about execution and not tech).

Regarding companies being the app, have you heard of Microsoft, Oracle or SAP? Ok, granted Microsoft has two apps Windows AND Office, but why do you think Microsoft started branding everything Windows? All those companies are built off of a single 'app'.

Microsoft = DOS then Windows
Oracle = Oracle DB
SAP = SAP

One company who embodies the one app.
Glad you like the non-boring names for nameservers. There's actually method to why we use them and not boring names. There are 101 of names (50 women, 51 men) all between 2 - 4 letters long (Ed, Sara, John, etc.). They actually map to globally distributed clusters of servers, so each name doesn't correspond to a physical server in a single location. Instead of mapping to a physical server, we use the unique names to help verify you are the true owner of a domain you sign up in a way that is similar to how Google Apps uses a TXT record you add to your DNS to show you own a domain.

When you sign up for CloudFlare we provide you two unique nameservers when you sign up as part of the verification process. We can tell you are the owner of the domain you're registering if you change the nameservers to the two we provide you. In that way, it adds a layer of security in case two people register the exact same domain at the same time and we can't tell who should be authoritative. We figured that it was easier to remember and not typo two names rather than two random numbers (ns23 & ns67).

We commissioned an artist to draw 101 ninjas to represent CloudFlare's "Ninja nameservers." You can read more about them on the CloudFlare blog, including links to the Facebook page with all 101 illustrations:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-igor-alex-phil-isla-a...
I don't think what Dropbox does can be considered a version control. It has versioning of some kind but is very mediocre.

I have had problems syncing large files using Dropbox between computers.

Plus I would never be able to afford $99 for 50GB for a year.
Relevant Skeptics.SE link here: What's wrong with processed food? (http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/whats-wrong...)
http://ycpages.info is developed using CrunchBase API. It is only for YC funded companies at the moment. I have plans for adding more Seed Accelerators though.
Well I guess roaming charges are getting a bit passe these days, but I could still see someone arguing they were never in Niagara Falls, or that they were on the American Side (normal rate) and not the Canadian Side (crazy rate.)

But in principal, I can see why a company would think any and all info they have might be useful in a dispute.
Custom vinyl decals are The Best Tool to Increase your Business Identity
Idsketch.com is the company that offers you attractive custom vinyl decals. We offer custom vinyl decal to our valued customers all over the world in stylish designs.
Quoted:

The bureau isn't offering any reward for assistance in solving the case at this time, but the FBI is asking people who believe they may have some insight into the notes write to the address below:

FBI Laboratory
Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit
2501 Investigation Parkway
Quantico, VA 22135
Attn: Ricky McCormick Case
It was on reddit yesterday I believe which means tons of kiddies saw that. People were guessing that it included sanity checking on both sides because it wasnt down yet.
The job security is an illusion anyway.
Really interesting insight into a really huge opportunity. Think twitter but with photos. It's quite the experience
Check out (non-aff link) http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract...

It's a good summary on a several techniques, how to apply them, and how to pick how in depth of a one to do, as well as how to talk with people who try to negotiate with them.
Hmmm, I wonder if there's already people out there working this angle? Maybe I should get a team of shuckster-nontech-cofounder-wannabes together, create a big list of relatively obvious ideas, propose the ideas to every up and coming programmer/founder I can swindle a meeting with (and very carefully document the meeting), then just sit back and wait for one of them to get wildly successful with their variation on one of the obvious ideas and point some no-win-no-fee lawyer at them...
A list of use cases could fill an entire encyclopedia
FizzBuzz = objective

ZuckWink = subjective
Some very light criticism of this book: sometimes the author makes things a little too easy by spelling out stuff that I’d rather have to work out myself. It’s easy to fall into the temptation of just reading and reading without really trying out what you’ve learnt because everything always seems so easy to understand but you don’t really internalize it properly until you’ve actually used it a lot.

So these days I prefer other texts but I turn to LYAH when I’m really confused.

All that said it is a great work, as many have said, and a great boon to Haskell and the functional programming world.
I used to think that microkernels would eventually become the architecture of choice for desktops and it's nice to see that Hurd is still making progress in that direction. It seems like such an obvious reliability improvement to move as much as possible to user space and as hardware progresses we should be able to make the performance good enough.
Weird story here. MS, Qualcomm, Intel etc. everyone shows up really early @ our school. Google comes 2 months later after the offer deadlines have passed. What gives ? I couldn't even interview because I had to accept another offer.

Compared to MS, Qualcomm, AMZN (I'm headed to MS) Google's process is pretty weird.
What would you like me to ask David Hansson at 37 Signals?
On Thursday I'm doing a 20 min podcast with DHH.

Do you guys have any burning questions that you would like me to ask him?

Hoping to launch our podcast site next week...once we have some cool interviews. www.beta.dormroomtycoon.com

General feedback and suggestions are welcome also....

Godspeed!
Great conversation!
Ask HN: How to fix Startup Britain?
Yesterday the UK Government launched a new web initiative called startupbritain.org. The premise of the site is to "...provide everything you need to know about start up, in one place".

On the surface this appears to be a site offering useful information. However dig a little deeper and as one prominent blogger puts it "...StartUpBritain is nothing more than a government backed link farm" http://postdesk.com/debates/why-startup-britain-is-nothing-more-than-a-government-backed-link-farm/

How very disappointing and appallingly executed this promising initiative has been. Many potential entrepreneurs and businesses have come away with a bad taste in their mouth - but this need not be the case.

As entrepreneurs shouldn't we try and fix problems? Clearly there is demand for some kind of British focused start up web site. Couldn't we borrow principles from US sites like Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com), et al. and give entrepreneurs a suitable starting point - driven by a community?

Therefore why not make some suggestions and open up a debate.
Startup Britain needs your ideas... and why not let us present the best of these to Mr Cameron?
I think he undercuts his own argument.

If the idea only takes four hours to build, and the result is a commercially value product, then how can he argue the idea isn't the uniquely valuable component, and his labor is really the commodity? Does he really believe that _nobody_else_ can build it in 4 hours or so?

Obviously, execution is important. But if someone has an idea that's great and doesn't require a lot of execution, then the majority of the value of the end product should probably be assigned to the idea.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2384567
Of course, since the original Gmail ad privacy fears were raised, Facebook has come along and gone much further.
Erm... if the server-side was already escaping properly then there would be no way for users to mess with the database. Only if it is not escaping properly is this code vaguely useful.

It's not like you can't store semi-colons in an SQL database :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keTz677OlGI (Lecture 4: Exokernel)
Absolutely brilliant.

I especially like how he just starts giving up on HTML as the essay progresses; all <HTML><HEAD><TITLE> up front; midway down he's on to <CODE>eval<CODE> and then by the end he's like screw it; I'm not gonna close that BODY tag.
It's one of my dreams to see it ship and I use it as my primary OS.
You should never assume that your framework of choice does everything for you. This is by all means no shot at Django, but just in general, always assume what you are working with is insecure and full of bugs - and then account for that - if your framework/programming language of choice accounts for additional things - great.
Keep the JVM, dump the rest ([thoughts on] Scala+Play+MongoDB)
Agreed. It's a childish attitude, to say the least.

Still, the idea an informal insurance fund to pay fare evasion fines is interesting -- this is why I posted it.
Sorry only just saw this, but yes getting businesses to work with them takes a whole team of sales staff in each city who do a mix of cold calling, client mgmt and liason. most of their profits margin comes from uncashed vouchers. Happy to chat more, details on profile page.
Those talking about bubbles generally have serious financial interests in lowering initial valuations.

When you see a VC claim that one of their portfolio companies is overpriced then we MIGHT be in a bubble. Those talking about bubbles generally point to companies they don't own as examples of a bubble.
Start by talking to them about how you think they are really good at solving problems -- and how one of the challenges you hope they can solve is producing work that others on the team can understand and extend. They may need to first hear you acknowledge that they are talented and that you admire their work -- and then that you wish their work was more accessible to the rest of the team. The idea is that most good engineers will want to produce work that others can understand and appreciate. You just need to make it clear that you consider that part of the domain of problems they should be keeping in mind.

If this goes well, you might also want to acknowledge that this may mean taking less sophisticated, less forward-looking approaches. A lot of over-engineering is like over-training a model to historical data, assuming the future will be exactly like the past. Anyone who's worked on software for very long will be acutely aware that needs change over time.
Meh.

Apple first tried to push developers to the web. It was because of the hacking community that apps got popular and they opened up the iPhone OS (now iOS).

Mobile apps are great for small and quick functional tasks. It's not a great interface to do incredibly complicated actions unless they can be done at the press of a button, minimal typing or by a swipe.

I agree there's a lot of crud out there but I'd like to see where Adam Conrad has solved world hunger, ended climate change or stopped wars. He calls everyone else out. Where's his contribution to solving HUGE problems? :)

I think small apps by small teams have to start from somewhere. However, we probably don't need any more fart or lighter apps.
Aside from the reading material others have suggested, I strongly recommend the #haskell channel on Freenode. The people there are extremely helpful and friendly.
Like the author, I'd be interested in hearing about better ways to handle Scala's `Option` type.
I'd also be interested in what you have to write about it.

Off-topic: what books do you recommend on chemical engineering? What's the equivalent of The Art of Electronics for analog electronics, or HDL Chip Design for digital chip design, or Code Complete or Algorithms in C or CLRS or The Pragmatic Programmer or SICP or TAOCP for software?
7 Reasons Why A Blog Is A Startup’s Most Valuable Investment
> but if you remove the option to drive, then you get around this problem

Isn't it nice to dream about removing options people have?
No Privacy on Amazon’s Cloud Drive
Poor old Bobby Drop Tables will be out of luck again.
Facebook Deals to take on Groupon
These projects violate the spirit and traditions of GNU Hurd, by not including a 'rewrite the system to change the underlying microkernel to something else' project.

We are way overdue for one of these changes. Who will step up to add to the long list (Mach / L4 / Coyotos / Viegoos / back to Mach) of Hurd would-be microkernels?

Bonus points for multiple competing projects in that space...
CarWoo! - Director of Marketing
That's a valid point. I appreciate that it may be nothing, but that won't discourage me from having a little play with it.

Here's a CSV containing the frequency of all words from 2 upto 10 letters http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv if anyone's interested.

"rcbrnse" five times?!
There are more websites than competent admins so this kind of thing is inevitable. If you were a nice guy you would have reported it to the admin and left it at that.
Well at least form & function are equals.
Just to be clear: the original face appeared to have multiple variations required within a single system; you were expected to know when to use the serif (!) face, and when you needed to use the wide sans (because the normal sans face has lots of fine detail that doesn't work in adverse environments).

It wasn't just that they had "display type" and "copy"; users of the Spiekermann face might have needed to know a fair bit of typography to make things look good in it. It was intrinsically complicated, beyond the complexity of Nokia's needs.
Noah is the man.
I'd also like to know whether this information can be or has ever been used in court as evidence. "Where were you on the night of such and such...?" may become a question of the past. Frightening.
That's not what you should use (though it's what is currently used in production at Mozilla). There's a reimplementation in Python; the README: http://hg.mozilla.org/services/server-full/file/db2d0dbc0a79...

(The Python implementation will eventually replace the PHP implementation in production as well.)
Google hires Java founder James Gosling amid Oracle infringement suit
Even today Woz is not regarded as CTO material for a large company.

Mad scientist with lots of cool toys? Definitely.

Stick him in a suit and make him give presentations to the board? Definitely not.

Woz should be the guy in the basement in the lab coat who occasionally makes the lights in the building flicker with some bitchin' tesla coils... the guy that the CTO goes to in order to find out what is going to be important in tech trends, and who occasionally coughs up a wonderful invention that revolutionises everyone's life.

I think it is important to note that Woz is still listed as an Apple employee as an engineer
Mac OS X is using a Mach microkernel.
Ask HN: How to find clients/contracts/work
I've been programming for the last 5 or 6 years and I'm pretty good at what I do. I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit (Attempted to start over 5 companies between 12 and 17) and would love to get my own thing going. I've been trying to build up work on the side this whole time, but I can never find any decent clients or send invoices for over $200.

How do you guys find your clients? Find contracts? Find work? I know I have the ability to run a company, especially if I just start being a one man show, but my lack of sales skills, experience and abilities always has me struggling to find work.
2011 is the year of the Hurd desktop.
Not exactly news:
http://blogs.forbes.com/mikeisaac/2010/11/03/facebook-announ...

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-deals-groupon-video-...
I think you mean mortality, not morbidity.
Goodbye Apple, hello Amazon for music?
Has anyone seen the message on Amazon.com home page regarding their new Cloud Drive and Player? Man if they can convert my itunes library I am in! ;)
OK, so not yet gigabit internet.
The heaviest weight reminds me of Chicago.
The important thing is that they still can't read your mind...right?
If someone isn't working on something in their spare time, it's a big red flag to me. You need to have the hunger. I'm more turned on by what you have in your github account than whether or not you can do a binary search in your choice of languages.
Internet speed is more complicated than that. If you are in a data centre then your connection will be limited by the port speed of the box you are working on. This will likely be 100Mbs or 1Gbs. You may have networking kit connecting at 10Gbps. What really matters at that level and is much more interesting is the quality of your transit and peering agreements. This is hugely important for countries without large internet exchange points.
Perhaps you're right. I will leave at once!
P.S. Learn how to set up a poll, if you want something similar.
To be honest, I hope you're able to monetize soon so you won't have to go looking for an A round, never mind a B because if you're serious you won't be there any more at that point. Also tired of ichc-type people making money of 4chan OC, so anyways, good luck.
You could still keep a record of all calls made, and the tower(s) used to make each call, without getting down to this level of granularity. I might be wrong here, but it seems that they're storing a stream of triangulated location data for a given handset, regardless of the actual network activity like calling.

Let's say that the carriers only stored call records with tower IDs for each call. If there was a dispute every so often because a call was made on a close-by tower that itself happened to be located in a different toll bracket (resulting in an incorrect overcharge to the customer), I'm sure the carrier would happily write off that charge if you disputed them about it, which is probably what they'd do right now anyway.

There must be another reason they're keeping it, even if it's just a case of it being super-cheap to store, and they think that they might figure out something to do with it later.
Why Keyboard Navigation is so Awesome  
One of my favorite recent trends in web design is keyboard navigation. Used correctly, it can greatly enhance the experience of a website. Using the arrow keys on sites like Thinking For A Living and Designspiration make the consumption of large amounts of content quicker, easier and more engaging.
Restaurant fined under Massachusetts data privacy law
It probably also helps that you had a pre-existing social network at the same site right?
While the MiG 21 is a thirsty beast, the max range is given at a considerably more economical cruising speed of about 880km/h. Also, the 1100km max (typical) range is given without the external fuel tanks, so carrying only 2600L fuel. Considering this cuts the fuel cost to about 25% of your figure.

It's also worth noting that if you did fly at top speed, the primary expense would not be fuel, but engines. To put some perspective on it, with the R-25 engine of the MiG 21bis, the aircraft is limited to one minute of full afterburner in training and three minutes in wartime. The engine is subsequently removed and inspected. While I can't find figures for the R-11 engined MiG 21, I suspect that it too will run out of both fuel and engine in just a few minutes if you were to push it that hard.
We support grocery items at Target right now. In the future we'll expand our coverage to include household goods like toilet paper, paper towels, and soap. One non-grocery item that we already cover is diapers, due to popular demand.

Trader Joe's is tricky because they don't have a traditional weekly ad. They do have the Fearless Flier, which includes some pricing information, so we may be able to use that as a source of information. Eventually we'd like to work directly with stores, and if we could do that with Trader Joe's it would be huge.

Whole Foods does offer a list of weekly deals on their website. However, they often use their deals to promote unique / novelty items like salmon candy and "meatloaf cupcakes". If there is enough demand, then we'll add Whole Foods.

Right now we're focusing on the low-hanging fruit of stores that have a traditional weekly ad. The complete list of Bay Area stores that we support is: Safeway, Lucky, Nob Hill, Raley's, Target, Walgreens, and CVS.
Maybe he has the experience of 1000 hackers and 1000 project managers!

Or maybe hes just 21.