skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of those questions seem reasonable.

Put in other terms: they threw you a situation that you would probably have to handle if you were working there, and then asked what you would do in their situation.

I do this a lot when I come across problems because it lets me see how others think (I of course ask the questions after having solved the problem myself). And each of the answers to the questions have useful implications:

- Anticipated risks: have you thoroughly analyzed the possibilities, and do you understand the implications of your decision?

- Barriers: did you actually try this? [If you've tried to put a solution together yourself, you will come across most of the barriers anyway]

- Tools: did you use a tool with the constraints in mind? (one time, a person suggested that I take a million-line CSV file, put it into excel, and use the interface to find the sum of a column of numbers.)

It's easy to assume that, with a specific situation, the company may not have found a solution to the problem. However, more likely than not the developer you are interviewing with actually was the one who had to hobble together a solution, and he wants to see if you could do something similar if it happened to you.

The reason why I asked about which companies you interviewed with: many types of jobs in NYC are either client-facing or front-desk-support, both of which require mission-critical temperament and mental agility. You can't blame EC2 for failures ...
I instantly dismiss people who complain about this as morons. Why add people you don't know and _then_ complain about it?

If you only add your actual friends, Facebook is a pretty good experience. It's not perfect, you still have a to block a few apps, but once done it's not a bad place.
This is fantastic! I've been waiting and waiting for Web Fonts to expand, and now I have a lot more choices than Syncopate and Raleway.
Happily, that's just a mockup. The real thing is HTML.
Hmm, that's strange... I'm not seeing it. The way Google rolls out tests and betas though there is never any way of knowing if you might be in a test group seeing something different from other people. Many times I've seen random features pop up and then disappear. (I assume because Google was testing something with a subset of people.) In one case I even received an email from Google telling me I was in a private beta of a new feature that I was not supposed to tell other people about it. I'm still pretty proud of that actually.
Doing starting strength to get to crossfit seems a bit...backwards...to me.
Not sure what you'd consider evidence, but the Wired article by Steven Levy (the guy who wrote In the Plex) contains this quote:

No one expects an instant success. But even if this week’s launch evokes snark or yawns, Google will keep at it. Google+ is not a product like Buzz or Wave where the company’s leaders can chalk off a failure to laudable ambition and then move on. “We’re in this for the long run,” says Ben-Yair. “This isn’t like an experiment. We’re betting on this, so if obstacles arise, we’ll adapt.”

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-so...
Hah, I had the opposite reaction. Finally a social network where I don't have to accept friend requests from my relatives =)
Presentation Zen: Storytelling lessons from Bill Cosby
> The ones where it's a person, /iama/ already verifies those.

Trolls have successfully gotten fake IAMAs from celebrities like Emilia Clarke verified by the moderation team. The fake Emilia Clarke IAMA got close to 1,000 comments before the ruse was discovered. [1]

> Unverified IAMAs tend to be the I am a doctor etc...which can't be verified.

It's an incorrect assumption that verification is only useful for specific people. There was an amazing AMA by a Navy Seal a week or two back [2] and verification was crucial in that case (for some odd reason, lots of people like to claim to be a SEAL). Verification is certainly possible for most AMAs, including professions like doctors. Another example that comes to mind was an AMA by a law school professor [3], which was verified as well.

> what moderation?

Successful moderation is a critical part of running a community in this area. The moderation in /r/iama is extensive and they do good work there. I'm simply saying someone who is getting paid to do it will do a better job.

> Seems like this is a money grab.

Well that's because it is. It's a company. It's not like the /r/iama moderation staff couldn't have spun off a company a long time ago. That's what the moderation staff of /r/starcraft ended up doing and it seems to be working. There's nothing wrong with someone trying to make money off of a value added service. When you think about it, AMAs have the appeal of books like Founders/Coders at Work. People like to read that stuff and I can see the benefit is someone trying to start a company around it, rather than do it as a hobby.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/huqug/the_emilia_clark...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i3s61/iama_former_navy...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hnhia/iama_attorney_an...
Which comes back to the problems with the OPs argument. Sure, you can explain continuity in a few simple sentences but sooner or later you will start to hit corner cases and you find that those few simple sentences are really quite ambiguous. It's much like using pseudocode to describe an algorithm. I've found that the best mathematical texts provide both - a 'morally correct' definition in plain english to describe the intention and a mathematical description which defines the precise meaning.
Even Google employees generally don't have access to your data stored at Google, so it's really boss/co-workers/family/spouse vs. a computer.
Looks fantastic!
A little off the track but do you intend to have a "Follow AMA" style button or A favorites button like StackOverflow to follow the interesting ones? It'd help to keep a track of all the conversations flying around the site.
There is no layout engine for Cocoa. If you want two elements to rest side to side, you’ll need to calculate the pixel size of the text, padding, borders, margins — then manually position the next element.

This is getting a lot better in Lion. If you browse the WWDC 2011 videos, look for Session 103 "Cocoa Autolayout".
TSA, is now ignoring warnings of cancer increases among employees.
Harumph. Can't believe they didn't split out "From HN" on the results chart.
I am still hoping for something like wave to do organized work.
This happened on a sunday originally, right? Hence a small number of users logging in to the website. Pinpointing affected users could be as simple as finding the small number of accounts which were logged into from new IP addresses. Alternatively, perhaps the auth server was logging failed attempts, even though the bug resulted in failed attempts being treated as successful attempts. That would make it ridiculously trivial to find all of the accounts compromised - any account accessed with an incorrect password from a new IP address. The number of attackers doesn't matter.

Admittedly, I don't work for Dropbox, and am not aware of the details of how they identifying affected users. I'm just pointing out that it would be very easy to identify affected users with high accuracy and almost no chance of false negatives.
Make your own web mail?
Google Announced their own Social Network called as "Google +"
Opera 11.50 Benchmarked: Faster JavaScript & Graphics Engine
It's perfectly ok to ask about which trading strategies will work, if you are being employed as a strategist. It's also perfectly ok to ask about how they interact with clients. In both cases, a person is being entrusted with the firm's assets or public image, both of which should be carefully guarded.

As a hedge fund, you wouldn't want to bring on a strategist unless you had some clear idea about the trader's process, and in that discussion you must analyze a strategy. Likewise, when you entrust someone to deal with firm clients, you trust that the person will not jeopardize relationships.
Do you find them useful for reference or just feel safe having them?
Farewell to Microsoft
There's no way in the world I'm going to sign up for this, regardless of who you have on there.

This application will be able to:

Read Tweets from your timeline.
See who you follow, and follow new people.
Update your profile.
Post Tweets for you.
Access your direct messages until June 30th, 2011.
I posted yesterday on how Google or Apple could run their own blockchain: http://www.bitrific.com/2011/06/my-eureka-moment-could-be-go...

It'd be great to see a tech giant do crytocurrencies no matter whether it's bitcoin itself (I doubt it for the time being,) based on bitcoin or a whole new system - in all of those cases I think it would support bitcoin as it currently stands.
Releasing this at the same time as Google+ is a very smart PR move. :)
The fonts are delivered from Google in real-time and don't have to be pre-downloaded. That's the beauty of it!

But of course Arial is still a good default.
Okay, tested also how Circle is visible to a receiver. It seems to be like I explained above, i.e. Circle is your private alias for a group of people.

The receiver account was not part of Google+ so things might work differently when sharing between Google+ users. The photo just shows Visibility: "Limited", no visibility who else is seeing the photo.
How many awesome things can Google roll out in a day?
Startup success is more about markets than ideas
Another place to look if you want a structured environment is your local community college. I recently rediscovered my love for playing soccer and was pleasantly surprised to find I could take a twice weekly class as a non-degree-seeking student. We spend most of the class scrimmaging.

They offer all sorts of sports like basketball, swimming, weight lifting, martial arts, dance, etc.
...or attractiveness.
Why does this application need this much access?
Or use a userscript to override the toolbar's CSS?
Google+ Screenshots
> One would think that YC would pick a company that didn't need to be in YC to succeed.

I don't think that holds up here. Like it or not, reputation is the name of the game when it comes to media. It doesn't matter if you are as good of a writer as those on staff at the Times, you simply wont get the same opportunities. I think it would be silly for YC to discount this fact when funding media companies.
Friends Bunch?
Interesting, IBM recently introduced a dark gray title bar before Google. http://www.ibm.com/us/en/
It doesn't seem to work for me. I tried to create an archive for all my data and it just shows 'Files: 0, Size: 0B' on everything.

Edit: Tried a second time and it works now.

But as it was said, the most important thing I miss is a way to extract the mails (in the way they are stored in GMail with all tags and other meta information).
When my husband joined a parent group, it was through an event aimed at seeking out and welcoming full-time dads. The group gained a few cool guys, the guys gained things to do with their little ones, everyone won.
When confronted with porting a previous Win32 app to the Mac, we ended up just rewriting every piece of UI we could in HTML+CSS. It was literally easier to embed Gecko into our app than it would have been to get the UI up and running in Cocoa.

HTML+CSS being easier and more expressive than Win32 didn't hurt either. Shared codebase!
IPO values Zynga at $15 billion to $20 billion
Thanks for the link to Sensible. Are there any well-known apps using this stuff?
I think it's competing more with formspring, than reddit.
Poll: Have you been Google black-barred yet?
Google has started rolling out its black navigation bar to a few users (http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/googles-experimental-black-navigation.html).
Yes, and I like it.
No, but I like it.
The man who planted trees:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Man_Who_P...

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=man+who+planted+...
That's a fantastic idea! I didn't realize you could take sports as a class...
Maybe the invites they release will specifically be to people who signed up with gmail accounts that have a significant number of contacts who also signed up. That's what I'd do: do your small scale test, but make it as meaningful as possible with highly connected beta testers.
Start lifting weights. As someone else suggested, Starting Strength is a good place to begin with. Get someone to coach you so that your progress is kept under control and you don't hurt yourself with bad form.
How to Get Killed at 120 mph
What was wrong with the way it was? I preferred the simplicity of the previous title bar.
yes, but only on .co.uk domains, not on .com
Chin up man, I've been studying behavioral decision making as it relates to marketing "nudging" for years and am still learning everyday. The only thing I've found that consistently works with any meaningful probability is being different. Just like this post. Yet another iOS game doesn't though I do feel the gyroscope is the most underutilized piece of hardware with the most potential for ios devs...
Dropbox Grabs Another Googler, Ramsey Homsany, For Exec Role
Yes, and I don't like it.
Putting money in the bank.
> Death of the SSH key. People should be able to connect to GitHub with their GitHub username and password.

This sounds like a wrong design decision. I wish nobody could log into my github account using anything but my SSH keys.

This is also true of my AWS account: my ec2 instances are protected by SSH keypairs, but if anyone gets my AWS password, he has full control over everything.

I'm not a security expert, but SSH keys feel way safer than passwords, especially with all those recents article showing how easy it can be to bruteforce passwords.
No, and I won't like it when it happens.
Not true, I am using it right now through Google.com
At a proposed valuation of $15+bn I really really hope they are doing something like $1bn in revenue or this is just not going to end well.
Wait, Lincoln was murdered by "existing bankers and the British ruling class"?
What I really miss about the golden age of games is that I was the golden age of 15. The same thing that 15 year old down the hall is going to miss in 20 years.
If you are in the high school - college - internships - jobs life stage that lots of Facebook users are in, you have a high friend turnover rate. You meet lots of people who you want to add on Facebook, then later maybe you want to keep them around so you can see what they're up to but don't want their posts mixed in with posts from your current close friends. And there's a thousand variations and stages in between.
‘Amazon Tax’ Would Kill 25,000 CA Businesses
The favicon for Google Calendar is now less useful. It's reverted to the standard Google favicon; previously it was the day of the month.
Wouldn't you want a large amount of on-site water to drive your cooling loops in the event local utilities break down?
> Simplify the git fetch, pull (--rebase), push interaction. Synchronize — don’t make the user figure out what they need to do to get their local commits remote and remote commits local.

What about conflict resolution? That's one of the hairiest, least-user-friendly scenarios in my experience.
Mapping Healthcare - Veritable for Open Data
Hm, looks like Alta-Vista is still around...
didnt see the add, just the resulting comments. am curious to.
What I think part of the problem people have with it is that it doesn't necessarily do what a seasoned git user would expect when syncing remote repositories, such as the fact that it pushes and pulls at the same time, and the pulls aren't normal pulls, they're rebase pulls.
Awesome idea. Local YMCAs often have similar stuff, too.
Yes, and I'm neutral about it.
There's a checkbox to tweet to your followers when you post an AMA or when you ask a question.

I don't know if there's a way to request just the ability to tweet. But we don't use any of those other permissions.
I believe DDG uses a variety of sources for results, including but not limited to Bing.
I have the black bar on Calendar, but the old useful icon.
ITA's app doesn't seem nearly as useful to me for a few reasons:

1) The form at the beginning is much more confusing. Creating a search with Hipmunk is much less complicated.
2) Flights are ordered by price, whereas Hipmunk orders them by "agony", which in my experience, seems to be pretty accurate.
3) Doesn't default to time bar mode, like Hipmunk does.
Good call.

I've lost 25% of my body weight this year (I started on 4 Jan) -- 16 to 12 stone, ~100kg to 75kg. I've run marathons and climbed mountains in the past -- big Himalayan lumps and I've sumitted Denali, for example -- so I know what fit means. Or at least my body does.

Exercise comes naturally after losing weight, It is incredibly hard when you are overweight. At the start of the year I would sweat walking around the supermarket. Now, I run six miles over the local hill for an hour and a half. And it's marvellous. But it isn't easy. It requires single minded, selfish determination.
agreed, who'd be dumb enough to sign up for that...I could see doing that if that was required for actually using some app...but in this case it's just a way for them to spam your followers to promote their site
Mac OS X 10.6.8 Adds TRIM Support for SSD Drives
There are some serious problems with their Picasa export (possibly others, I only tried Picasa). First, a good number of my photos simply didn't download - I only got 1328 of my 2283 photos. Second, I uploaded all my photos at their native sizes to Picasa, but the photos I got from Takeout were resized to around 1200x1600. However, my originals are kept by Google and I can download them individually through the Picasa interface, so they must be resizing them specifically for the download.

The first strikes me as a bug that will eventually be fixed, but the second seems to be an unfortunate design choice - Google can save money on bandwidth if they downsize your photos, and if you know that what you get when you export is downsized you're less likely to do it. I feel sorry, though, for people whose only copy of some photos is in Picasa.
Which will directly affect humanity more?
I use email to network socially. gMail is a pretty good email client.
Every time I see a post about how HTML5+JS+CSS3 is so much better than Flash, they clearly are ignoring major subsets of what Flash does. First and foremost, browser-native audio processing is nearly a decade behind Flash. Not just in theory - toward the end of last year through February of this year, I set about emulating a fairly simple drum machine in HTML + Javascript, and while the fundamentals are basically there, the audio playback is atrocious on every single browser - try it out at http://bitrotten.com/dr110/

It was a fun experience, and maybe later this year I'll grab a trial of Flash and port it there, just to A/B them. But if you think HTML5 is going to replace Flash, you have a limited knowledge of what Flash can do.
Depends on your application.

If you're using ActiveRecord, if the save to redis fails, raise an exception and it'll rollback the transaction.

Note that you'll always want a way to resync the redis copy of the data with what's in your database.
The fact that Sony is a weakling is a problem

It is a problem, sure.

LulzSec is doing their level best to solve that problem

No, they're just committing random acts of vandalism.
Polish is exactly it.

SlideToPlay's shot [1] at the very top of their review is probably the point where everyone stopped reading the review and left. In the AppStore you are up against "Cut the rope" kind of polish, and that's a plank set very high. First impression really matters and the game fails to make it, hence all the problems.

[1] http://img.slidetoplay.com/screenshots/bullseye-factory_4.jp...
> to open-source/make open protocols for/federate like they tried with Wave and Buzz

What's funny is that everyone (Google included) got preoccupied with the tech demo UI for Wave, but the really interesting stuff was happening under the hood. If you look at what Wave was trying to do with sending arbitrary data between federated servers, all tied into contact management and privacy controls, it basically would have been the perfect foundation for a social network. In fact if you look at projects like OneSocialWeb[1] or Diaspora, they're similarly built on top of XMPP with an approach not entirely dissimilar to what Wave was doing.

I really, really think Google missed the mark marketing wise with Wave, and I wonder how much, if any, code has carried over to Google+.

[1] http://onesocialweb.org/
Do 98% of your facebook friends search on subjects that would be found at Stack Exchange or Experts Exchange?

If the answer is no, then any algorithm that takes into account collective searches and 'likes' will ignore them because they wouldn't fit within the cluster of people relevant to that search term.
You're obviously a windows user (and a flash "developer"), because for people on every other platform it's flash that chews up 80%CPU time and runs dog slow. Maybe if adobe hadnt give every other platform such shitty implementations, there mightn't be so many people working towards killing it.
Even Apple.com has a dark grey bar at the top.
Horse-powered high-speed Internet
I log everything because quite often it is useful to refer back to them.
One can fight and lose all the same.

Friendster fought against MySpace et al, and still lost ground because of its poor architecture.

Facebook being 4th generation social networking won't fail because of poor architecture, nor because of poor UI.

It may fail due to privacy concerns though since its leadership seems fanatical about reducing restrictions to information, rather than allowing its users to segment themselves.
Memo To Peter Thiel: Start-Up CEOs Are Not Heroes
The easy way to persist objects in Objective-C
It seems to mostly work out of the box in Firefox (tested in Aurora 6.0a1), although there were a few elements in some of the demos that did not render correctly.
Can't seem to find it now, but I'm pretty sure I recall seeing +1 mentioned as a feature of Google+ in one of the about pages when I signed up for an invite.
5 Reasons why you should be looking at a Chromebook right now.
If you click or hover over the `Limited` then you can see who it's shared with.

disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Google+
I'm amused that the author felt that he needed to put a disclaimer at the start of the article, that the article constitutes his views and experiences, and your views might vary.

Would he have felt the same about coming out of the closet as a full-time Windows user, kissing his Linux partition goodbye?
Okay, there are way too many posts on Google+ on HN right now, but I do have an opinion I would like to share and this thread seems to be the most appropriate.

When I first heard the news about Google+ today, my initial reaction was wow, Google is going to fail again. I mean, with Wave, and then Buzz, and I figured this was just another in the line of failures.

However, after looking into it and reading about it, it is actually very cool looking. I look forward to trying it out live when it's ready.
Though not mentioned here, you can look forward to some substantial changes in News soon as well, if the tests I have seen are any guide (as a user; I don't speak for Google in any way).
Well I respectfully disagree. I don't think it's too hard to figure out if someone is really a friend or just someone you've met a few times. And if add them just to "see what they're up to" then sure, you're going to get noise.

I also think if you're adding people to your Facebook that have anything to do with your employment you're insane.

But maybe it is because I am 30+ that these distinctions to me seem very clear.
Yesss, finally I'll be able to get off Facebook! Even though I use Facebook lists, circles seems a lot simpler and functional. For me, photos, and comments and discussions generated off photos is really important, so I need a social network that my friends are also on. The only other service that all my friends share is GMail, so this is really great.