skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? Perhaps the British Library, yes, but not my local. Not even my university has access to most journals. Thankfully I have two separate accounts at different universities so I can usually find what I'm looking for.
Depends which country you are in - UK libraries don't usually have access to academic journals.
Obama Signs 1st Major Patent Law Change Since 1952
Can it be configured to use other sources?

Does this mean that if I've got a server with no mouse/keyboard attached, /dev/random will block forever?

Logging into my slicehost server, and running cat /dev/random | hexdump -C seems to support this, more or less - only a few lines get output unless I start typing into the terminal - then it goes marginally faster.
For folks who doubt the numbers people are quoting here: remember, if half the pool can't program to save their lives, guess which half of the pool will still be sending out job applications next week.

At a previous company where, for cultural reasons, lack of programming skill was not a barrier to being hired as a software engineer, approximately half of our software engineers could FizzBuzz. Of our outsourced coders, I'd put the number at one of the twenty I knew, and he would need extensive coaching to make it happen.

Some of these folks were at least moderately productive at tasks which you and I do every day which theoretically happen in an IDE but do not require much abstract thinking, such as changing labels on UI elements, adding new columns to tables (by copy/pasting a line which worked and tweaking it until output matched expectations), and the like.
His first question is very straightforward if you've ever encountered permutations in a math class (and you should have, if you're a programmer). Even if you haven't, it shouldn't be that difficult.

His second is trickier, but solvable. And, no, I've never seen that (particular) question before.
Awesome. Was just talking to mike about this last night over beers.
ars technica did this and the result was sad http://i.imgur.com/K9jIy.jpg
a word-problem about performance

Would you be able to share that? Simple programming/algorithm questions are a dime a dozen, but I'm curious what a word probably that's appropriate to coders would look like.
Of people who get to the interview stage, I'd say around %75 at least successfully do the FizzBuzz question on our test.

But we've cherry picked the CVs a little. And probably only interviewed 50 people over the past couple of years. (And hired 5)
Guess which language has the most samples for Windows 8 Metro apps?
Windows 8 Tablet vs iPad Running iOS 5 (Video)
I think in general the "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" attitude by startups is overblown. It's a big world out there. That's not to say you should launch something that sucks, but get it out there if it's interesting.
People don't read. They scan.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Your scrolling js metric is clever, but that doesn't mean they've read a thing. All it means is they've scrolled to the bottom of the page.
That's interesting. So when you say that it's more than 40 hours (at least $X cost), do you still give a high end range or just say "we'll see how it goes?"
This is a pretty abrupt way to start off an interview. And I don't understand the point of this question w.r.t assessing someone's coding ability. Though I'd be curious to see if the success rate on that question and on a fizz buzz correlate.
Next time include that it's by Charles Stross in the title - I almost didn't click through to the article! As an aside, anyone who enjoyed this will surely enjoy his novel, "Glasshouse", and I highly reccomend it for anyone vaguely interested in the SciFi genre.
As an atheist who is mildly antireligious: that was a good article. The author has a position, but he dismisses crazy arguments in favor of it, and the arguments that he constructs are targetted towards the people most likely to disagree with him. He doesn't come across as self entitled. He doesn't make generalisations about atheists.

I haven't fully thought about his arguments; perhaps they don't really hold water. So I guess on some level I'm talking about form rather than content.
The SCOTUS recently affirmed that not only are such clauses legal, but that individual States cannot pass laws to forbid them.

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/att-mobility-v-co...
Because then you have to admin the real queueing system. If it's something simple, sometimes the one-time cost of re-solving the problem is less than the ongoing cost of dealing with that damn queueing system every time someone wants to set the app up on a new host, or a new dev wants to work with it, or it crashes, etc.

Fine line for when either approach is appropriate.
It’s complicated but I think many countries have pretty strong protections for consumers against unusual or unexpected clauses in contracts. I would be very surprised if this part of the terms would be enforceable, for example, in Germany.
Yes they apply. Yes, when you send you CV into companies you are competing with these people.

There are people with degrees in Computer Science who can't pass FizzBuzz. They think they aren't very good at programming, but think that the company will train them. There are all kinds of reasons why people who can't FizzBuzz apply for programming jobs.
AirBnB for dogs
Thanks Josh. If you don't mind sharing, how was your approach different? Maybe there is a hybrid idea in there somewhere that makes better sense that I haven't thought of.

What I currently have on the books is to allow following of individuals (e.g. "Every time tbob posts something, let me know!") as well as following New submissions that meet a certain threshold.

I know I don't spend enough time ranking new stories, if I could set a base threshold like "New story with at least 5 votes" I would probably participate more.

So I figured I would add something like that.
Check 1-2, check 1-2 :)
JSTOR releasing some of its content store
We made a tool for annotating time series -- it is intended for keeping remarks with explanations of influencing factors. Not that sophisticated but does what it does - http://explainum.com
It's an alternative to overlapping windows, a fundamental of the desktop metaphor.

I seem to recall seeing a demo of something similar, that was also from PARC (or maybe just in the same era, i.e. the 60's). Of course, the desktop metaphor won, and work didn't continue on the other. I mention it not to preempt you, but because seeing that work would give you an extra perspective, and a bunch of experiments for free to see what works/doesn't work.

Or maybe it was an infinite desktop, where you could zoom in/out to find things. Would that count as "fluid"? Sorry, think I'm rambling.
Could you tell us what you think about the concept behind NoBadGift.com (kickstarter for gifts and events) and flaws you can see in our approach. Also any suggestions for our home page to draw in users. Thanks a lot
Show HN: Tweet versus Tweet mashup
Obviously, your rate would be low. The implied domain of the question would throw people off. The question isn't a good indicator if someone can program.

Why don't you ask your manager the following.

If 1/2x +1/2(1/2x + 1/2(1/2x +1/2(1/2x + ... = y,
then x = ?

If can't get it in 5 minutes, he is not fit for his job.
Quibbles: the strlen() example is poorly explained. It doesn't hoist it because it's "built-in", it hoists it because strlen() is marked "pure" (i.e. without side effects) in the declaration. Any function can get that attribute.
Casual games that pay
At my local library (largest in my state) you have to be on one of the library computers to access any pay journals. Which is annoying, especially since I would have to wait for a spot.
Who cares? They have such a bad reputation with security that only a fool would give them usable info.

What's left? Downtime? Don't play their games or use their network if you don't like it. They lose in the end not you.

Identity theft? You're stupid if that happened to you. (used the same password for PSN as home email, bank info... etc, gave them your credit card and didn't cancel it immediately...)

What's left to possibly sue about?
The blog post referenced by this article (http://nbickford.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/pi/) is amazing. It's not just the math and not just the C# code; he throws in all sorts of offhand references to a paper here, a record-holder there, a plot point of Carl Sagan's Contact... the kinds of things that most people accumulate over many years. While this isn't high-level mathematics, if I'd read the post without seeing the Wolfram story, I'd have guessed the author to be a 30+ year old enthusiast.
That means we can sue over prior security breaches?
You're being a bit obtuse there. At some times jumping up and down is dancing; I'll assume that wasn't your point?
but removing from the beginning of any array-based growable structure rather than the beginning will turn a O(n) operation into an O(n^2) operation.

I'll bite: in arrays, front deletion (like back deletion) can be done in O(1) time. Keep a pointer to the first element, and just increment it upon front deletion (and free the element if necessary). Obviously, you may want to be smart to avoid memory use getting out of hand.

And you don't know what's going into those tabs.

If the array stores references (pointers), which you'd expect with tabs, that is orthogonal to the discussion. Whatever is going into those tabs, a pointer is a pointer.
If you cannot programme, you would not be able to do this problem. There are people who cannot programme applying for programming jobs. Shocking, but true.
It would be very interesting to see how something like this compares to running Wordpress at http://wpengine.com
I think the title of this submission is particularly bad, considering the content of the source post, but - I agree completely with it :)

As a developer I too feel as though everything has already been done. I just cannot find any ideas that are remotely interesting to me to try out.
By the time I come up with something I think is great, I see something is already done - and done better than I had intended with my own idea.

It's quite a kick in the teeth really. Maybe it's just because we're doers, and not the idea men?
That doesn't really fix the problem, what if that random data happened to compress well? The solution is to not compress anything while downloading.
I'm sure this makes perfect sense to their legal department, but it's yet another reason why I'll never buy another Sony product.
It sounds like you can't do some nice things like alpha channel transparency on the video with this method. Not a big deal, but a shame that this sort of innovation is being stifled legally.
Thankfully since then the HotSpot JVM has become one of the most advanced VMs in terms of JIT optimization, doing things that are so wild and crazy that other JITs can only dream of.
As an answer, Sony headquarters should be enclosed in a huge airtight balloon and only let breathing air in if they agree to stop fucking people.
Usability is the Key to Healthcare Innovation
IIRC, if you have the .NET Framework on a Windows computer, you've got a command-line C# compiler, csc.exe, usually located in in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\vWhatever
I'm concerned about this as well. As someone who has their email on their profile, I'm afraid of pissing someone off and getting the troll treatment.
> Either the company lost $2B and is now pinning it on a 'rogue' trader or their security is flat out incompetent. Either way, all of the CxO positions should be tossed out.

That's a good point.

Let me ask a serious question.

What if some rogue google employee some how changed the search index so image searches always returned porn.

Should Larry Page be fired?

Both situations are cases where "security is flat out incompentent"

is this about the lack of accountability or is this strictly about the loss of money?
My point was, his questions, doesn't really indicate if the candidate is a good programmer or not.

It could be the person studied up on all sorts of puzzles and famous algorithms online but hasn't really written or programmed anything.

Not all jobs require that much expertise. You could be doing some really simple programming work.

I think most interviewers ask these type of questions
1.) make themselves feel smart
2.) they get a kick out it
Great post - I can get pretty OCD about the way code is written, but I have a hard time complaining about things like this without feeling like a dick since as you pointed out it's not particularly inefficient (even if there was an O(1) Clear() method, how many TabPages are we really working with that it would matter?) But you've reassured me that it's a reasonable thing to do, especially if I know beforehand that it's a piece of code that will probably be used for a long time.

That said, I've learned that with an early stage startup where you're trying to iterate as quickly as possible in a desperate attempt to get somebody to care about your product, you often have to pick your battles. Just yesterday I came across this:

category_count = []
for i in range(10):
category_count.append( db.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM table WHERE category = %d" % i) )

For one thing, this iterate separately and then append to list approach in Python annoys me slightly (list comprehensions are so much cooler!). But far worse, it hits the DB 10 times instead of once, and no matter how small your site is you obviously can't be having that. How'd it get there? Who knows. It was written in the Django ORM, where the only way to do this is with a pretty obscure command like Object.values('category').annotate(count=Count('category')). At first we were picking up Django as we went, so at the time whoever wrote it probably had no idea that the values() or annotate() methods even existed, and the way it was written got something up on the page and working so we could decide whether or not we'd be throwing it out the next week. But, whatever, you come across something like this, go throw up, fix it and move on. And finding these kinds of issues puts into perspective smaller ones like using a for loop where you meant to use a while loop.

tl;dr - Having the luxury of sexy-ing up your your code as described in the post is strongly dependent on the stage that the project/company is in.
Is there any MUD/MUSH/MOO where this doesn't happen? SMAUG allows you to do that as well.
"As an app developer, I sometimes think all the apps are already built."
I feel exactly the same many times. A friend of mine has an app idea every 30 seconds (exaggeration), but it seems almost every idea he has is already built and if it isn't already built is because there are technical difficulties..
But you said it all, "(...) but there are still so many companies who don’t even have a decent website yet. Let’s help them.". Indeed this is true :) Good post :)
Are damages of more than a few thousand that uncommon as a consequence of identity theft? I suspect not, and if any damages result from a security breach of their service, I believe identity theft is the most likely cause.
Common Applications of Predictive Analytics
One of the companies I consult with loves microsites and uses IIS. In the past we've written those things in PHP, but I could definitely see nudging them towards Node if this is as easy as the article makes it sound.
Space Satellite UARS Adrift and Heading for Earth
If You Could Freeze Your Age, Which Age Would You Choose?
I see a lot of arbitrary changes in this video. I'm not saying all of them were, but I don't see the point in making your web team add 5 pixels here or there, or switch out "us" for "it".

I didn't perceive their strategy as "experimental" but as "erratic". Even if A/B testing showed slight gains or falls, I would prescribe those changes to random chance over the value added/lost. Unless there's a possibility of measurable effects, go with your gut.
It works and it is fast.
What adventages this question has over asking candidate to write factorial, or FizzBuzz, or sth like that?

It only checks if you can estimate the thickness of paper sheet and know powers of 2. Anybody can know that.
It seems one can get the International Edition of the 4th edition from Abe Books at a greatly reduced price:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=003010567...
That wasn't much of a point, on your part. The second question in particular requires some not-entirely-simple breaking down into subproblems. The first one can be handled in such a way if you're unfamiliar with the mathematics behind it; it's easier, as are many things, if you remember combinations and permutations from math class but not at all unsolvable if you don't. His questions aren't bad at demonstrating important aspects of a programmer's problem-solving approach.

And your complaining that "not all jobs require that much expertise" is unfounded. I consider those to be novice questions, personally--and even if they weren't, you don't know what he's hiring for.

He's not being unreasonable. You, on the other hand, seem to be, and seem to be doing so in a rather defensive manner.
He should cut that 9 hours at the office to 6. And yes, I fail at this too :(
>Maybe the SSL compression was enabled on the web server by a sysadmin who likes to tweaks settings. Maybe he doesn't work at the company anymore. Maybe it was a default setting in a previous version of some exotic distro. Who knows?

I think it's pretty doubtful that the main marketing demo of your site is going to use SSL for a lark.
Their sluggishness in providing these key bits of gear is really infuriating me. How can they be so timely about shipping hardware but so slow about just giving us a damn SDK!?
It will also use other interrupt timings in the creation of the entropy, most notably hard drives since they're rather random on when they reply back due to it having to rotate to the right place. Not sure how this works on an SSD. I also believe if you've got some kind of hardware RNG it will use that too.
This surprises a lot of programmers. A barrel shifter is a big circuit for an ALU. Smaller than a multiplier obviously, but much larger than a ripple carry adder and somewhat larger even than the fancy pipelined adders used in fast CPUs.

It's the kind of thing that got skimped on in Atom. Lots of stuff runs surprisingly slow on Atom. Another one I find striking is that there are two pipes for ADD/SUB instructions, but ADC/SBB (the carry/borrow variants) are not just single-issue, but apparently unpipelined. Intel lists their throughput at 3 instead of 0.5!
How about local university libraries then?
Nice article. In response to the last part I can think of a way to achieve the sort of smart escaping via template you talk about using Haskell and Hamlet (among other templating systems used by yesod). I believe, although I can't absolutely confirm that Hamlet already performs context appropriate escaping, based mostly on the type signatures and the names of a few of the functions.
I'm always wondering whether HN people think this kind of experimenting is a good idea or not.
It exists!

https://www.rover.com/
I disagree! It does not make sense that submitting any text via a form input should in any way interfere with a templating engine, in the same way we dont expect to be able to affect a database by entering SQL into a form field.

The fact that Google brings back an empty result set to me indicates the problem is a bit deeper...
I think the key difference is the implication that Apple's sole intent is to make good products. The people at Apple just want to make damn good products. is very different from Apple makes damn good products.
They're essentially confirming that their systems continue to be insecure and guaranteeing that your personal information will be leaked to third parties again in the future.

Thanks for the clarification Sony.
1/2x +1/2(1/2x + 1/2(1/2x +1/2(1/2x + ... = y
If x = 1,
then the equation likes this:
1/2 +1/2(1/2 + 1/2(1/2 +1/2(1/2 + ... = y
1/2 +1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + ... = y
y = 1 = x
y = x

source: http://library.thinkquest.org/J002235/hard.html

u mad?
Well for one there's no MySQL hosting at Heroku. So unless you've got a server somewhere else this is a non-starter.
You have about 300 ms of my time where I scan the first paragraph and decide whether or not to continue. Maybe that indicates I have terrible reading skills or maybe it means I have an advanced pattern recognition filter.
منوعات اون لاين: مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والترجى التونسى مباشر 16-9- 2011
Female entrepreneurs - #4 Digital Agency on AdAge A-List wants to help
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For three decades, Resource Interactive has created ground-breaking consumer-driven online experiences for Fortune 500 companies like P&G, Limited Brands, and Nestlé. And to celebrate the agency's 30th anniversary, Resource Founder and Chief Culture Officer Nancy Kramer and CEO Kelly Mooney are seeking a new company to add to its 2012 roster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bKbIwnPbQ&feature=mh_lo...

http://www.resource.com/
You're so cute and optimistic, I just want to muss your hair.
I program a fair bit, have a few Android Apps in the market the problem I see with these type of tests is that I have a very hard time remembering syntax and would therefore have a hard time without an IDE.
RSS would be great as well. Reading HN from Google Reader would be really nice.
REQUIN TN NET
So, if they run a soup kitchen or other service from their building they have to let it fall down, at which point they can't offer any further services from the building?

If the roof is repaired, as it is at out church building, by volunteer labour from the Church using their own funds ... presumably then too you'd want to stop supporting any charitable function we perform?

I think the thing people don't seem to understand about [most] Christian churches is that the money comes from the people who are part of the local Church community. It's what they could instead choose to spend on going to a football game every week or buying a new car or going on holiday. It's their money that has already been taxed as income being pooled together for common activities; more often than not those common activities include a large proportion of charitable work.
The main issues with using eval come when eval has access to the scope of whatever is calling it, as it can make unpredictable changes. Just compiling and running code constructed at runtime isn't a bad idea in itself, as long as you use proper techniques to ensure that users can't do code injection.
This is killer for small wordpress sites. You essentially get free custom domain hosting until it hits a traffic level where it needs something more significant, then you can re-evaluate your options.
They are generally not open to the public, and when they are you are rarely allowed to access electronic journals because of the licence agreement which the university has signed with the publisher.
It is part of iOS and has been since iOS 2.0. Every application developer gets to pick their own URL scheme and what any arguments passed to it do. This web site is just showing you the URL schemes for various applications.
Temporary solution: don't buy anything (i.e. give them credit card details) or store anything important (i.e. re-use a password) on PSN...

Yes, I know, we all miss DLC...
Its my Technology.
Having different business strategies for different markets is worthy of criticism?!

The choice is there, you can change the settings, the ballot just doesn't popup.