skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just bought it. I'm researching ways to teach computer science and this has come up in so many threads it's not even funny. :)

(Despite it being a free ebook I vastly prefer print, another problem I'm trying to figure out and solve...)
Yeah? What i your "extremely easy" mechanism for avoiding SQLI? Is it, as I surmise from your previous comment, "using prepared statements for everything"? Because that isn't bulletproof.
It's a nice book. I wish I'd had the time to review it like your publisher requested :)
There is no stock market bubble.

News flash: coupons are still boring and I don’t want to give out my email address to a service I don’t even know I’ll benefit from. So now we have an App Store that serves nothing but candy, and we all love candy don’t we?

The OP is not the intended audience for most/all of the apps he's talking about. I don't think he understands that.

There are apps and companies that seem to be absolutely superfluous -- how many Groupon clones do we need? (Do we even really need Groupon?)

But the market will decide that. Not us nerds.
> I got an internship with The New York Times
> the following week.

Did the internship involve 41m$ in compensations and the instruction to build a pay wall secure enough to fend off toddlers?

In any case, well done. Technical interviews are hit-and-miss at any stage in your career, although I have to say that a coder worth his salt should be able to code up a binary search in no time at all. Even a college sophomore.
Yes, that's essentially it...
An Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age
Actually, I beg to differ. Most angels do require business plans. The only exceptions I have seen are the really smart investors particularly in the tech space.
I usually charge $10,000 per gig, 4-6 hour work. If you are good at something charge more, others may do the same for $500, you can either charge 10 customers at $500, or charge $10000, believe me 6 out of the same 10 will pay u $10000.
My story: After my technical phone interviews, I got "accepted" as an intern, meaning I was in the Intern Pool of Rot, where I waded and waited for a team to fish me out. I waded and waded for a couple of months, hoping for a kind suitor. The HR woman always told me that she was "optimistic" about my prospects, so I rejected offers from other companies.

Then a really cool opportunity came, and I accepted that offer because you can't just sit in a rotting pool for two months.

A friend of mine stayed in the rotting pool and was told at the beginning of summer that no one at Google wanted him.

This was 2009-2010. I hope Google changed their ways.
I have no idea if they are, hence "I hope their web login doesn't have drop permissions".
Fuck grad school. You're just putting off learning something useful. Learn you the basics of some trade you like - programming, plumbing, piñata making, what have you - and apply for jobs. Network.
You can hide items and product categories you’ll never eat.

I hate eating processed foods, too. Just click the hide buttons next to those categories (Snacks, Canned Foods, et all), and you won’t see them again.

Unfortunately we don’t have Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods yet, though :(
Asperger's precludes anyone from having the necessary toolbox to be even remotely considered 'streetsmart', as is mentioned in the article.

Interesting perspective however.
The other factor is cost. Healthy food costs more, often significantly more.
I never said that. I said that there are real problems worth solving, and not all of them are in the social space. There is still plenty of value to be added to the social landscape, just don't forget the domains that aren't the bees knees at the moment.
A better principle is that you can not trust the client. Not only can javascript be disabled, it can also be modified, a new web page can be created posting to this endpoint, or one can send raw HTTP requests without a browser at all.
He also has qualifiers on what "food" is, most of which are reasonable; stuff you can pronounce, stuff that your great-great grandmother would recognize as food (put away the chemistry set!)
Beyond the amazing presentation, I was lucky enough to get some behind the scenes insight last year and there were some really incredible minds melding together in whacky/awesome ways. Really cool event!
Tools and resources to make your website faster
I found this interesting because I went through part of Google's internship process not too long ago.

If you're just a sophomore, you shouldn't feel bad about not getting an internship at Google.

Another reason not to "feel bad" about it is that AFAIK the people interviewing you just take notes, and then other people review those notes to decide whether or not to take you. So the people you interviewed with weren't even the ones that made the decision.

Perhaps for the C program, you should have done something simpler than a binary search, at least to begin with. The way you described it, they didn't require you to do a binary search.
Google's loss is some other company's gain. Apply to places like Facebook or Microsoft or Amazon instead. Or in your case The New York Times.

Personally I was in between jobs recently, so I sent Google my resume using their online application site. After about a month, Google still didn't get back to me -- meanwhile I managed to interview at 6 different places (all the way) and found a new job.

"I heard nothing for a month and a half" is the key problem I think. It's going to be very hard for any full time employees that are any good to stay off the market that long, they'd have to apply to Google before quitting their last job.

As for interns, I am not overly surprised since you applied in December. At my school we had the hiring booms in October/November and then again in March/April (that's when we had the 2 engineering job fairs), so anytime between that people weren't really finding a new internship (unless it was on their own).

One last thing, what exactly is a Google spreadsheet beta candidate form? Is that the same one as the optional Google "survey" where you had to rank your skills (1-5 or 1-10 was it)?
They use javascript to submit the form, so that's not a vulnerability for them.
Great comment by Dave Binetti on the original post:

"Napkin Entrepreneurs" build products.
Founders build business models.
Products are part of a business model (the fun part)
but are not the whole story.

I like his summary that starting with the napkin is necessary but not sufficient. What muddies the water is that sometimes the "built to flip" approach can sell a napkin.
The track record for making any choices based on a rational weighing of available information is not too encouraging.
There is something wrong when the music industry thinks it is illegal for Amazon to hold music I buy from Amazon and send it to me when I want to listen to it. Really, what is the difference between "downloading" when I buy it and "streaming" it some time later?
Since people on Reddit are apparently actually poking this thing, I just want to get in the warning: DON'T DO THAT.
Nice article. It'd be great to have some numbers that indicate the size/scale of the system and its components.
True, but you could die of scurvey.
I've often hated writing implementations of searching and sorting algorithms with someone looking over my shoulder.

I think it tests specific knowledge of an algorithm more-so than anything else.
Many candidates wrongly assume they failed to get a position because they got a question wrong. Unless the question was trivial (i.e. what is the height of a tree?), most of the time these questions are intended to see how well you can carefully think through, create, clarify, and debug your code.

For example, when I was reading your writeup as a former interviewer (lots and lots of college candidates for MSFT -- I was a dev manager and did both my own hiring and was flown to colleges for those "interview days" for several years), I was far more worried that you had trouble finding the bug in binary search than that you got it wrong. Everyone gets problems wrong the first time unless they have just implemented them recently. Superior candidates are good at rapidly trying good normal and edge cases, hammering out a good solution, and writing inspired code when given hints at how to improve their solutions.
Am I the only one that felt like he was holding the Afghanistan people up as a model of health because they lack fat? Their life expectancy is a mere ~44 years (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...). Neighboring Pakistan is 66 years (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...).
The garage is definitely a step in the right direction. It needs to be better publicized internally. I had heard whispers of it when I was at Microsoft but it was not mainstream.
Mirrors my internship experience almost exactly. Three rapid-fire technical interviews that I thought went quite well, then a "sorry, no dice" email. Someone else I know just went through the same thing, also for an internship.

Google sure makes a lot of noise about how they are hiring and competing for talent, but continue to turn away good people for unknown reasons.
From the Crunchbase Licensing Policy:

"We permit anyone to republish our content in accordance with this licensing policy.

"We provide CrunchBase’s content under the Creative Commons Attribution License [CC-BY]..."

from http://www.crunchbase.com/help/licensing-policy

So the information in Crunchbase could be copied elsewhere, so long as the new publisher gives credit (attribution) to the original sources.

Maybe this is a business opportunity --- something too small for AOL to care about but big enough for a smaller company.
Original article

http://lifehacker.com/#!5786538/trim-enabler-increases-solid...
Chromium: Getting smoother animated web content while reducing CPU usage
Once we realize that obesity is (by and large) a modern lifestyle disease caused by needless stress and a diet consisting of mostly fake food perhaps we'll return to eating a whole food diet consisting of real food?

e.g. margarine (which has color added to it to make it look yellow, otherwise it'd be gray) is NOT a healthy alternative to butter.
Rumor | Google building Android-exclusive social gaming network?
Learn how to code. I think the best start would be to do a couple of fun websites (in Python or Ruby) or a few fun mobile apps (Android, iPhone). Eventually you'll get better and better ideas, and something will stick.

PS: Your post is way too long. Try to convey that information in a third of that -- it would surely get more traction.
Entreposeurs - Sincerity is the key. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
I had a pretty similar experience just recently (so I guess they haven't changed their ways). Sounds like the process was a bit different but basically the same net result of Google telling me they wanted me, then not actually matching me up with any group in time for me to take an offer from them.
I'd substitute "crazy" with "inexperienced" for this particular anecdote.

The intel e1000 family is the safe default for NICs and using something else without an explicit reason is just not a good idea.
Accepted organizations for Google Summer of Code 2011
How about them not feeling charitable enough to offer any reward for something they've probably wasted many thousand man-hours on?
Without twinkie apps he wouldn't have a hipster 8-bit twitter profile pic:

https://twitter.com/adam_conrad
Color.com was bought for about 1/80th of the money raised. The name color.com will most likely keep its value so it's not wasted money, or not 100% wasted.

p.s. the URL of the color.com basher is idealprojectgroup.com
There is an API to get a lot of data out of CrunchBase even now and people are doing interesting mashups of the data. I'm not sure business opportunity is the right word since Michael's vision for CB is/was an open, wiki-style research/analysis tool.
I recently wanted to break into the freelancing market and had some success with this chain of events:

1) I joined my local programming mailing lists - e.g. the nearest Hacker Space, Ruby Ireland.
2) I went to a local tech conference.
3) I went to local tech meet ups and made a lot of noise. I paid extra attention to the non techies.
4) I followed everyone I met at said events.

After a few months of doing this I understand the local freelancing scene much better, have a good idea of market rates and am exposed to lots of freelancing opportunities.
To be fair, binary search is pretty simple. It's not like he was asked to code max-flow (e.g. Ford-Fulkerson) off the top of his head.

The problem I'm sure, was being rusty at C, not the algorithm implementation. I make all kinds of silly mistakes on the whiteboard if it's with a language I haven't used for a while.
When my friends ask about nutrition, explaining fat is the very first thing I try to do.

Eating fat does not necessarily make you fat, nor is it in itself a bad at all. Many fats are among the best things for your brain and heart. At the same time, fat-free foods can quite easily be bullshit.

A pound of sugar is fat-free, after all, but has an insane calorific value. (110 per oz)

Sugar is 100% total carbs.

A ounce of feta cheese has plenty of fat, and less calories per ounce than zero-fat sugar (feta is 75 per oz).

Feta cheese is 75% fat, 20% protein, 5% total carbs.

Then I try to show them some fat-free products that nonetheless has immense amounts of sugar and calories.

I think that using this topic as a lead-in has been the most effective way to get my friends to change their diets and consider what they eat.
Try Dolphin Mini
Not bad actually and a funny deck: http://www.hcp.com/content88010
The article is mostly about Inuits. Their traditional diet was pretty much 100% meat and was healthy.

So maybe Michael Pollan's advice has to be reduced to "Eat food. Not too much."
Reminds me of the movie 'Spider' - maybe it's just nonsense.
I think we need to make it cheaper (via subsidizing fresh produce instead of the corn and cattle industry) relative to processed food and the rest will take care of itself. Funny thing is, people will scream "social engineering" if you say this, yet they're perfectly content to ignore the current social engineering.
If you use type-safe SQL parameters everywhere and no string concatenation you'll be fine.

http://taylorza.blogspot.com/2009/04/sql-injection-are-param...
Anybody have a copy of the legible characters so each of us doesn't need to transcribe the same text?
Or realize that healthy food actually tastes better than unhealthy foods
Lessons from GitHub's First Year
True to the cryptic.
It's bulletproof if you don't use string concatenation in your prepared statements.

EDIT: No this doesn't limit you to 'simple queries'! How do you figure that? There are only a VERY small subset of problems you can't solve like this. So small that in 10 years I've only had to do it once and I write SQL Server 5 hours a day.

Want to give me an example please?
There is an API for getting data out of Crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/help/api

I used it a few months back for a personal project where I thought the Crunchbase data set of summary information about startups would be useful - turned out this data wasn't useful for what I wanted to do; I was hoping to built up a corpus of words for a "startup idea Markov generator" but I found that the submissions ended up resembling regular English too much.

I don't recall any type of rate-limiting by the API, nor does it seem like you need to register to use it.

API documentation (from the above link): http://groups.google.com/group/crunchbase-api/web/api-v1-doc...
Haha, I laughed so hard I pee'd a lil.

This is something that keeps me up at night. It gives me anxiety to think that more and more useless apps are not only being developed, but funded. What the fuck. The thing is, building something today that solves a problem, isn't going to make you a "rockstar" if it's not sexy and social :(
It would be more interesting to limit the comparison to those who die of causes other than, say, gunshot wounds. It would also be interesting to see a comparison of health, rather than just length of life.
I think this just shows that they are fearful, ill informed fools that were lucky to have made their fortunes off the backs of talent to begin with.

'They' won't be happy until we have to pay for every song virtually every time we play it. That's what they really want.

It's not enough I've already bought Beatles Revolver 5-6 times during my life on different formats or 'newly remasted' editions. No they have to get even more out of me, and if I try to make my life easier by simply putting it online so I - and only I - can always get to it, look out, you are a dastardly pirate who aims to destroy them!

Man can you imagine working in an industry run by these kinds of paranoid fools?
C++ object model and other internals explained with simple C code
Stuff labeled "healthy" tends to be, but you can make healthy food for cheap. You can make a lot of meals out of a couple dollars in ingredients.

Example: http://imgur.com/RYSLX [1] and http://imgur.com/xjJXR [2]

That could be made for a dollar or two, and it's easy to make stuff like that quickly and with different ingredients. I'd feel pretty content eating like that every day, and most of the parts are things you can freeze.

[1] Tuna + slightly melted shredded cheddar + cucumbers + salad mix + hot salsa + boiled egg + pepper

[2] Cabbage base, tuna, carrots, mozarella cheese, bell pepper
I'm surprised by the rapid succesion of the interviews. When I applied for an internship at Google, I think the entire process lasted about three months until I got a final acceptance email. Only had 2 technical phone interviews spread over a month period and they were both decisive (aka if you failed the first one, you didn't get in the second one).

This was quite a contrast to my Facebook experience, where I had a contract signed after I think 3 weeks. :)

I'm really quite surprised that binary search is considered difficult, have you ever tried to implement quick sort? I can write AVLs with less bugs than quick sort.
How to Die in Order to Live
Contamination in Goiânia
I just read your last two comments carefully. If you hadn't mentioned it, I would have thought that you were a native speaker of English.

The lam/lamb mistake is exactly the sort of thing that even native speakers would screw up. You also have an extra comma in "appreciate it, when" but that's minor.

It's probably because you invite people to correct you that you're so good.
To make money you need to do something that you love, my advice is to talk with a good career counselor. You need to match your skills/interests to what the market is looking + what's required to hone your skill set. By the way a great podcast is "48 days to the work you love" if you can't afford a career counselor.
"Spending $500k on a domain out the gate instead of getting 5 badass developers working on making your product rock, is stupid to me, but thats just me."

They have $40.5 Million left for developers and if need be can raise even more. The question is: would 5 more developers make a difference?
Unfortunately, this has happened to many friends of mine. I much prefer the way Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Zynga do their recruiting. However, if Google actually does accept you, it's a steller experience.
So... how is the tenure committee going to do with the fact that you have nothing in peer-reviewed journals?
Is he trolling the courts as well? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/08/11/prose...
He actually mentions that in the audio clip, not mentioned in the article.
Well, that isn't valid C99 or even C89. It's yet another GNU extension to support. Thanks for the report, though!
Incoherent drivel. I hope this bubble kills the content-free vanity blog post / spam.

Seriously, just don't write this crap. It's no good.
Check out http://www.fundastic.info/
Yeah, me too--I'm actually thinking about writing my first blog post as a LYAH-level intro to monad transformers :)

Here's an article that helped me understand them: http://www.grabmueller.de/martin/www/pub/Transformers.en.htm...
Your reaction to the risks you've mentioned looks like panic. Maximal possible damage doesn't matter. A meteorite hitting the Earth would definitely cause enormous damage but is very unlikely to happen. What matters is the expected value of the damage. What are the numbers in the case of climate change?

I really don't think that trying to preserve as many species as possible is a rational goal. It causes economical harm for example. What's wrong with extinctions?

I often hear about the costs of climate change. What I don't hear about is:

1. possible benefits; what we should assess is benefits - costs, not costs alone,

2. possible benefits and costs of so called solutions. For example introducing electric cars will increase demand for batteries and electricity. That means increased demand for coal, gas or nuclear power. What will be the effects of these?

I'm just very skeptical about models of so complex systems. My skepticism is increased by the involvement of politics and the hype around the topic.
Just my 2 cents (not meant to be an 'answer' at all...).

If you're passionate about business & entrepreneurship I'd say you'd be the perfect person to take your parents' business to the next level. Look at what Gary Vaynerchuk did with his parents' wine business...

Are your parents both taking full time salaries? Are they willing to transition out of the business to allow for increased salary expenses?

Also, if you have any ambitions to become wealthy DON'T give away share options/ownership of the company unless you absolutely have to. I'd suggest working for nothing if it meant you could retain ownership and survive off your ramen profitable start up...
Yeah. It's weird to think about making a lot of money for a small amount of work, but it does make sense in the market.

I mean, if 16 people are willing to pay for an hour of your time on Monday, and you're only going to work 8 hours, how do you decide which lucky 8 people get your services? 1) First come first serve? 2) Pick 8 at random? 3) Pick the 8 who want it most?

#3 is most easily measured in "dollars they will pay," so you raise your price. Of course, it also favors the wealthy, so if you feel badly about that, do some pro bono or find a way to provide tiers of service at different prices.
I wouldn't bother applying. 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.

Why are Google so popular anyway? I genuinely don't get it and would love to know from someone who has specific knowledge. Do they pay better than everyone else? Work on more interesting problems? Better perks, work environment, more status? I can understand it from the perspective of someone who joined years ago, when you got stock options and didn't have to do a full circus performance in order to get in, but not any longer.

The experience would have to be twice as good as the alternatives before I willingly submitted to this kind of process. A long process of interviews like the ones I have heard about hints at more pain and no autonomy once you actually join.

For an _internship_? If you're turning down other offers for the _chance_ to work at Google, you're selling yourself short and not getting full market value.
So, in other words, it's bulletproof if you only use simple queries.

In MySQL, for instance, LIMIT and OFFSET have to be integer constants; the wire protocol won't allow you to bind variables to them. Does your SQL engine allow you to parameterize a table name? Can you parameterize columns? What about ASC and DESC? And this is just simple stuff. What about pages with "Advanced Search" that have to implement query builders?
MIT's Kaashoek receives ACM award for Exokernel Operating Systems, et al.
The question really is, how long will even 40.5 million last if they let money run thru their fingers like that.