skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They did, four years later, and no. I followed up multiple times. The recruiter i talked to a couple weeks ago apologized for their lack of followup. I still have no idea what happened on their end.
I've been thinking about interview questions recently. One interview technique no one's used with me: "identify the problem." For example, let's say I asked the following question:

What I need is a high-traffic scalable document store. The churn of documents is going to be very high and the documents can be very large. I'm going to need to regularly retrieve documents, but mostly only the documents with the closest expire time. How would you go about solving this problem?

Now, there are so many variables in this question that asking for a specific solution is practically useless. Instead, it would focus on an interviewee's ability to parse the computer science problem from the stated problem. I would be looking for answers that include possibly building an index of the documents stored in a distributed priority queue architecture. I'd ask them where they expect pain points to be. Good answers would include things like providing document synchronicity across a distributed architecture, providing good failover in case of machine failure, and working out a sane and minimalist communication API between machines.

Basically, I'm asking candidates what they should Google if they were trying to solve this problem. The answer given when many coding questions are asked is "I'd Google it," but I've learned that recognizing what to Google is an incredibly hard question. When you start dealing with problems harder than "what was that function in the standard library called again?" it becomes even more useful, because the question now isn't "what do I Google?", it's "What papers do I need to read to understand succesful models of this problem?"

I'm just an interviewee still so I've never been able to give this method a try, but I'd be interested to see if results are better or worse than current methods.
The 4-5 things on vegetarian/vegan were platitudish but everything else in the list gave me the impression of deep insight coming from clear thinking and lots of introspecting. I think he has assembled a nice list.

The parent comment should be downvoted; this list is deserving of supporting arguments attacking its quality, and you have none.
Nice. Message me via twitter (@becomevocal). Anyone else do the same and if we get a couple people in the area I'll set something up.
Every time I think about donating to Wikilieaks, I give to the ACLU [1] and EFF [2] instead. ;D For the sake of the future, fixing the law in the USA _matters_, and I trust them.

[1] https://www.eff.org/
[2] https://www.eff.org/
exactly. thats why point B does not work in most government facilities nowadays. try to pay a court case, get drivers license, pay for taxes or your license plate with cash --- a nice clerk will tell you "check, money order or credit card only".
Most currencies have traditionally been managed by gentlemen with gentlemen's agreements, to the extent they've been managed.

This currency is unmanaged, but has a lot of Russians hanging around it, checking it out, DDOSing the exchanges now.

I am curious what Satoshi thinks of this; I imagine he would back some of the distributed p2p exchange proposals out there, but this is one of those circumstances where benevolent oligarchies would work better than what's happening.

I predict bitcoin exchange price spike when mtgox comes back online.
Also, when I'm back in the Bay at the end of May, I'll be doing something similar (though maybe on a different day).

If you're interested, sign up for the east bay hacker news list: http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news
It all depends what deal you have with your credit card processor. Large companies with a long history of low fraud rates can do things which small/new/riskier companies aren't allowed to do. (Including charging a credit card after its recorded expiry date, as I recently discovered when I forgot to update the credit card attached to one of my development accounts at AWS).

For companies in the middle of the risk spectrum, it can sometimes depend on how much you're willing to pay in fees -- I've seen e.g., "2.15% without CVV codes, or 2.05% with CVV codes" advertised.
thats why he will rot behind bars on tax payers money, just like every one american out of 10.

because his eagle was too similar looking to golder eagle. America -- land of free (from common sense and fairness of try)
I have heard unverifiable stories of similar "personal favors" in San Francisco, too. Not to mention the legal wild-west that is China and India...
Would love to take part. I'm in Santa Monica.
I don't think the algorithmic questions are half as valuable as the questions about which algorithms to actually use use in a given situation.

Even just a simple a question as: "We're doing XYZ. To handle this situation what would you do?" is incredibly telling.

To my mind, being able to apply knowledge is the valuable skill, otherwise it is just trivia that a person knows.
> What "the hell" should he have done?

There are numerous forms of communication available. Send the email again 3 times asking for escalation to a supervisor. Call them. Send them a letter. Send them a certified letter with return receipt. This is how grown ups conduct business.
Google shows 62 hits for this link on this site
Objective-C's niche: it's the core of two popular operating systems.

A lot of strange programming languages survive because of inertia. Emacs Lisp exists because Emacs was written by Lisp hackers. It survives because Emacs ships with a few million lines of Lisp. Replacing it would take hundreds of man-years.

Objective-C survives for the same reason; Cocoa was expensive to write and rewriting it would serve no purpose. So it remains. Is anyone using Objective-C for some reason other than writing OS X or iOS apps?
Yeah, sure -- in theory. In practice, most people don't care.

I can't tell you the number of times I've had an interviewer come into the room and clearly state that they haven't even read my resume yet (so excuse them if they take a minute to look at it first), much less looked up my projects or my website. This has happened everywhere, from tiny startups and Google/Microsoft/Facebook to banks and contract positions. Even when I've worked on projects related to the company (e.g., Twitter and Facebook apps when I interviewed at them), the interviewers had no clue (and I mentioned them quite prominently on my cover letter/resume/site). They don't look them up afterwards, either (using Google Analytics, I can tell whether they've visited).

There have been a couple times when the interviewer has looked up and liked my projects, and we've had fun discussing them, but this has been quite rare.

So unless you're directly using your projects to market yourself (i.e., you're purposely using them to network, rather than just doing them for fun and "passion"), I find this advice rather naive.

But maybe I'm just Doing It Wrong, and YMMV.
Interviewing at Google is definitely an experience.

One guy came in and without introducing himself started to write numbers on the whiteboard. He drew borders around some of them. Then he sat down, introduced himself, and said that what he wrote on the whiteboard was machine code. After explaining some of his nomenclature he asked me what I think that code was doing.

Another guy asked me to solve a problem (don't want to say what specifically it was, because they may still use that question)... Anyway, I could not for the heck of me solve that problem. After 45 frustrating minutes of this he started to write down the solution, then hesitated, then stopped, saying something like "Hmm... It's not quite as easy as I thought".

In the end I ended up declining their offer. I spent some time on their campus, and the vibe just did not feel right. Can't put my finger on it, though.
Ah, sorry about that.
What a terrible article. The guy got fired! Isn't that sufficient? Buffett has always railed against the ridiculous processes that cripple other companies. Why would or should he behave differently?
After starting to read a bunch of objective C, I have to say there are some constructs that are very nice compared to an OO language like java -- for example, selectors and the target action design pattern. There's definitely some nice dynamic properties, but at the same time, some of the basic "methods/messages" for the Foundation APIs aren't very convenient to write and are strangely named. For example, compare NSString to strings in Java, Python, Ruby, etc.
Right..not a problem in Java/C# and no compiler benefit either way in a dynamic language. The "x".equals(x) might be slightly more relevant (no fear of x being null).

Cheers.
Shhh! Nobody say the M-word!
I think Joyent's Node.js cloud service should probably be added, considering that's where it's being actively developed right now.
Why I Hung Up on a New York Times Reporter
We routinely hire college grads. Primarily we look for smart people and not necessarily for people who have done exactly what we need. (Bay Area)
No one has mentioned this book yet? It's what I expected this article to be like.

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PUHbK9h-44
But smile bashfully, as if you weren't expecting the compliment and are a little embarrassed by the attention. Do your basking in the glorious glow on the inside only.
And why, exactly, is that a horror?

The whole point of the GPL is that if you use software, you deserve to have access to its source code. It originated in an era where there was little software in use that lived on someone else's servers which you never touched. And so ignoring that didn't affect the GPL's intended purpose.

With the rise of the web, it is now very common to be dependent on software that you only interact with remotely, through a website. The Affero GPL returns the original intent of the GPL. It puts websites on the same grounds with respect to the GPL that native applications have always been. Every argument you can come up with against the Affero GPL was already made about the original GPL.

If you don't like the intent of the GPL, don't apply it to things that you create. If you don't like the effect of the GPL, don't use GPLed code in your software. In the meantime don't bother complaining that it does exactly what it was intended to do.
A teacher charting the heights of students in the class or showing a movie is not revolutionary. Insisting that it is both makes the author look stupid, and avoids the real issues troubling public education in America -- among the worst of which are sweeping national regulation and standardized testing.
I think he's got a little math problem. Many browsers will open up to 4 connections (possibly more, if config tweaked) to overlap requests for content, so you might want to consider this when configuring your worker_connections.
There's clearly something stymieing you here, and you're the common denominator.

We're not psychic, if you aren't upfront with your lack of social skills, your potential to be dunning-krugering yourself, or your unwillingness to write code on your own time for the sake of it, we can't do much for you.

I had a rough start to my career (I have no degree and spent the latter half of my senior year of HS trying to avoid getting slapped with a felony charge), but I still managed to make it because when it came down to it, I enjoy programming.

I enjoy programming so much that regardless of what happens in my career, I will code.

I will code hungry, tired, or homeless.

I will code at night, in the morning, and in the afternoon.

Getting paid to code is a plus, but not the point.

This attitude showed, and I was eventually given a shot.

Where's your code? Why do you want to be in this industry?

Good luck sorting yourself out. The early years are usually rough.

I'm going to go get some night riding in.

2nd edit before I go: You shouldn't give a fuck if anybody, including an interviewer, sees your code. One of the quirkiest but most interesting programmers I've ever known is a 50-something year old that has worked as a line cook his whole life (other than a brief stint in the military). No formal education.

Rough around the edges, maybe 5 people in the whole world have seen his code, and he's probably better at programming than you are...

...because he codes. His latest project? A pseudo-stack machine JIT runtime thingamajobber. The man amazes and amuses me regularly.
Isn't it interesting to seee, that this thread got so many points, without actually beeing a good post? Every comment I read is actually disagreeing with the author. And yet the topic is so interesting to everyone that the result is exciting for everyone and the post a success for the author.

There is a big lecture here for everyone. You can actually do something awkward if the direction is somehow important to the other people around you. Because in the end your social success is not about you. It is about what is important for the other people.
Touché. I'll just pretend I said "changed upward". ;)
This gets mentally filed under the same category as, "you should be checking to see if a library does it for you before you start coding".
An argument by symmetry is that something shouldn't change when some irrelevant bit is changed -- such as the identity of the actors. Yes, the preconditions for using "If I X then Y" when trying to argue that "when someone else X', then Y' " is wrong are that X' is relevantly similar enough to X, and Y' is distinctly different than Y.
I was threatened with firing once unless I started coming in at 9 am. I had never come in before 10 am and I suspect it was because the company figured I couldn't risk my job after having some legal problems. Didn't bother showing up at their requested time and a couple months later (on the ides of march, you can't say I'm not poetic) I tendered my resignation after another star programmer quit. I got yelled at because apparently I wasn't supposed to call their bluff when they were in no position to back it up.

The day before my notice was up they decided it was ok for me to continue my normal schedule.
I usually chat with a candidate about past experience or coursework. Sometimes I do a high level problem (no coding on the whiteboard, just chatting), to gauge his skills of looking at a problem.

We also have a programming test. Everybody is subjected to it. In the beginning (when I had to do it :) ), thought it was stupid, but now I find this a valuable tool to aid with the decision (we frequently hire people who did not finish the test). The problems are relatively simple. You get 2 hours alone in a room, a programming language of your choice, and internet connection (so you can search for stuff).
Note the absence of any particular setting which will cause it to crash if you get a link to your blog retweeted.

glares at Apache
We ended up starting a similar thing at Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It began as a group of friends coding together, and over the past year or so it has developed into a series of Hack Nights and we get sponsors sometimes. We've even done a few Hackathons, one of which is happening right now. 24 hours of straight hacking! http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=119736848105223&in...
He wasn't fired, he resigned.
It's not pronouncing "blue" as "blur", but extending or duplicating the r.
Oh goodie, another part of our economy that ignores the true cost of energy creation. Has anyone looked at models of how this system might work if the miners had to pay significantly more money for electricity?
The smartest man in the room is a fool if he makes others look foolish.

-Ancient Chinese proverb
Dude has a much better attitude about it than some other guys who ended up in a similar situation. (The Konfabulator tantrum comes to mind)
> When in a social situation, other than silence, how am I suppose to participate or excuse myself from participating in a discussion about american idol or some other topic to which I have no knowledge and may perhaps despise?

Try expressing curiosity in the other person's interest. Admit that you don't know the subject, but keep your opinion of it to yourself, and just ask questions about it. For example, what interests you about American Idol?
Ok, since it seems there's remarkably little interest in this idea as it stands: why not try it out as a Bitcoin startup?
Washington Post has lost all journalistic integrity
cool will do, (Glendale)
Install a greasemonkey script that modifies the text of the TOS to something more suitable to you. Ensure you document your modifications to the TOS, since no one submits the TOS to check it it would be an interesting legal point to argue as to whether the computer is an agent of the company as it's allowed to bind the company to a non-modified TOS.
"If I don't drink beer or coffee is there anything else to ask someone out to do in order to have some bonding time?"

You can tell them you're looking for something new to read/watch/listen to, and ask if they have any recommendations. Having a new person interested in your opinion is flattering. You can easily bond over shared tastes and experiences, and it's fun to learn new stuff. If you're interested in food, it's quite natural for a foodie chat to turn into dinner plans.

You can also propose to try out a new place to get lunch. Lunch seems to be considered way less intimate than dinner, and has a naturally shortish time window so you can break it off without awkwardness.
> There are no alternatives if you want to distribute on the most popular mobile platform.

Symbian, Blackberry and Android don't support Objective-C as far as I know. Only iOS does, which is far from the "most popular" mobile platform, especially if you look outside Silicon Valley just for a minute.

[Edit] Also, for the record, you can program in C++ and distribute on iOS with minimal Objective C. I thought I'd point this out given my login name.
Semantics. When your boss asks you to resign, you've been fired.
All I got out of this article is that Buffett is kind of old and will probably die someday. I guess that means the party will be over someday, but it's not really newsworthy because pretty much everyone dies.
I'm socially awkward and after reading lots of books on this topic I've come to realize that social skills are just that, skills. You get better at social situations the more time you spend in them. You'll never get good at them by sitting at a computer reading books about how to get good at them.

Most of us geeks do not have social skills because we haven't spent as much time as 'normal' people interacting with others. I have spent thousands of hours on computers, time I could have spent doing things with other human beings. Instead of being great at interacting with others, I'm predictably good at interacting with computers.

There is no shortcut for gaining social skills[0], and no book is going to solve all of our 'problems', or even a quarter of them. I'd say if you read a book on better friendships or public speaking and this improves your skills by 3% then it must have been a truly fantastic book.

The only solution is for us to engage in a lot of interactions with others, if for some reason we deem it worthy of our time. For example, if a guy is terribly shy during business lunches, the only solution is for him to keep throwing himself into that situation again and again.

After 100 or 200, or 1000 lunches most of his business lunch awkwardness will have gone away.

But is getting better at interacting with people worth the time we could have spent getting better at interacting with computers[1]? Maybe for some[2].

[0] None that I have found.

[1] Through learning more about a programming language or an OS, etc.

[2] For example if you decide to choose a career that greatly depends on effective human interaction.
Paypal is both a credit card processor and an online wallet (stored value, digital cash, etc), both aspects of which complicated their anti-fraud and regulatory efforts.

There exists money in my Paypal account which can be spent or transferred at my direction and which does not exist elsewhere at an account under my control.
Each worker can handle many thousands of concurrent connections so this isn't really an issue. This is where nginx and Apache differ. Generally you want one worker per CPU core.
What's your point? The hard part is writing the code, not saying, "I'd like a spreadsheet and word processor."
Ordered atomic broadcast capabilities to Riak
No, and if there was an easy way to bind UIKit with out Obj-C I'd use it in a heartbeat. I'm seriously considering WAX for LUA. Obj-C has the flexibility of C with the speed of small talk.
The article talks as if this one act of misconduct (which we only know about because Buffet announced it) proves that Buffet is always letting stuff like this happen, which frankly there's no evidence of whatsoever.

The only piece of the article that could be used to justify the bait-headline is the fact that he is growing old and can't live for ever - in fact, that was the only statement in there worth making at all.

Not exactly grounbreaking journalism to reveal that a man who is 80 years old won't be able to keep doing his job for the rest of eternity. Frankly, I expect better of the NY Times.
http://watchlaterapp.com/ will do offline caching (including Flash videos) to your iPad, but it's only a web/iPad service, so I'm not sure it ticks the "multiple device" box.
Re: past experience, I agree, but this is harder for college hires. It's not unreasonable for a student to have only taken the standard courses and done nothing especially interesting. I could ask about his job writing PHP or what he thinks of Compilers, but really, there's not a huge amount of depth there.

As for programming tests, I think you're playing into my bias about how everyone thinks the questions are stupid until they pass, at which point the questions become the arbiter of all intelligence and merit. ;) It's that sort of hazing ritual sociology that enshrines questions about moving Mt. Fuji or printing n to the power of 100 in decimal form.
Normally, yeah, it would be semantics. Except in this case Buffett gave the appearance of being soft on the situation up until the audit committee at Berkshire released the damning report against Sokol. I believe this article is drawing the connection between the way Buffett manages and the problems that could create for shareholders down the road.
Assange said he would release incriminating information about some banks by a couple months ago. Has he done it yet?
i've been wanting to do something like this forever! let me know if there is any way i (we?) can contribute

(im currently doing a/b with resumes - sort of the same thing)
Selling Access to My Google Analytics to the Highest Bidder
programming problem? algorithms?

math problem? systems problem?