skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was a flourish announcing my anti-Wall Street screed didn't come from sympathy with "Rolling Stone" or Matt Taibbi. But it is Randian in its concern about abuse of government, under color of public benefit but for private purposes!

But again, limitations on bank capital ownership would be an anti-Randian regulation. And the analysis hasn't occurred to prominent Randian Alan Greenspan.

No, I'm not a Rand cultist. She's important for her notice of the distortion of values and language by self-interest posing as selflessness. But it's a mistake to justify outright selfishness on the basis of those dangers.

I did notice it was downvoted! Because it suggested a limit to the efficacy of regulation? Are there similar knee-jerk downvotes to progressive opinions?

EDIT: Downvote HERE! For mentioning downvoting?

When I'm downvoted for politics, that ain't the rules, not as I understand them. And I'm gonna break'em to let people know it's happening.

If not's politics, tell me why so I can stop whatever it is I'm doing wrong. But it _always_ happens on comments expressing right-wing opinions.
You think this "evil"? In other markets Chrome doesn't have a default search engine, in this one it does.
If trying to protect your investment while keeping choice and providing an opensource browser is "evil" then your standards are too fucking high.
GNU gcc? Or did you mean to say "mobile" when you wrote "modern"?
An atheist? Hardly. I belong to a synagogue, and it's hard to get more traditional than Judaism, which has been around for thousands of years.

The only reason why you think there's irony in what I said about Judaism is your ignorance of Judaism. Judaism has always stressed ritual observance, not articles of faith. It's perfectly possible to be a practicing Jew while having serious questions about the nature of God. And what I said about my religion and proselytizing above is absolutely correct. (Seriously, try to become a Jew. We probably won't take you - unless, of course, you're already ethnically Jewish.)

For that matter, since you used the word ideology, there's no ideological consensus in Judaism. There is a organized community and there are rituals. It's a thinking person's religion. We argue a lot. We're not much for dogma.

Naturally parents raise their children how they prefer, but that's parental influence, not organized religion's influence. They're quite distinct.

Our religion has traditionally had minimal to no influence in the broader society. For centuries there were very real incentives to convert away from my religion once you were free of parental influence. We've been the subject of discrimination, pogroms, and genocide. And yet here we are, having somehow 'permeated' successfully, and we're doing just fine. How does that tie into your theories about influence and the propagation of religion - since, for many centuries, our organized religion had zero influence? Perhaps there might be something more to it, hmmm?

Of course I'm being condescending to you. I get tired of listening to people who have no knowledge or experience of my religion spout off about it. You can't really talk about religion online without having some ignoramus come along and do the 'religion is dumb hurr hurr hurr' routine.

Anyhow, there's your counter-example.
Hmmm.. I see. Is this done on a whiteboard? If you let them
use an editor and run it and they fixed it right away
would that be acceptable?

I wonder if people are getting such bad results on this because it's always the first question they ask and the
candidate isn't comfortable yet.
One of the tremendous values of being in a masters program is having access to JSTOR and all the other journal sources.

Before I would email the professor and request a copy, usually they would oblige.
You're removing i+1 elements here :)
Sharing with fellow groksters
Friends,

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Just go to http://www.dobango.com, select an offer like Amazon $50 gift card and play a casual game to win your loot!

You get an additional $1 for sharing it with friends when they join the site.

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Robby
Joel Spolsky is answering questions about Trello, right now (3pm GMT/11am EDT)
Harry the Ex-Pat Dog Starts Online Reading Glasses Business
I really hate this title. How do you want me to respond, welcome to linux?
How to find the location with GSM cells | Open Electronics
4 candidates, 2 passed FizzBuzz. Oddly, the two that failed had a Masters in CS (albeit no BS in CS).

Of those that passed: one had Masters in Library Science looking to change careers. The other was a fresh out of college CS major from Illinois State.

Next batch, I think we'll add another trivial question: count the number of vowels (a, e, i, o, u) in a string.
Agreed. When we see people trip up it's often becaues of this.

I think the problem is the old adage about not being able to to see the forest for the trees.

They break it down to the simple components and write those fairly easily but the forget about big picture of all 3 conditions working together.
Surely the right answer would be something to the effect of "If this code survived in the source base until deployment, all is lost anyway."

The point of code review is to catch monsters like this when they are written. If that doesn't happen, what's the point?
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On a side note, is it true that Rand is treated seriously by top level people in Silicon Valley?
Buiding Data Science Teams
That's one reasonable answer, yeah.
This is perfectly valid code. You cannot modify a collection which is being iterated safely so it's the best way to handle the situation.
Badges do Not equal Gamification
I wouldn't call them flaws, I'd call them "unimplemented inevitabilities", but it's good to get people blogging about shortcomings in this DP.

Microsoft asked for feedback, let's give it to them, but keep in mind, it's not even a beta yet. If you've used the DP, you know there is still a lot of work to be done.
Back in the days when I did this (1990s) we did the C/C++ reverse a linked list and compute the factorial of a number. And, yeah, people made mistakes on a dry erase board under interview pressure, but it was very clear who has a clue vs. who couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag.

These sorts of tests are low pass filters, they're not designed to find good or great programmers, just confirm that the person can program at all (as we define it). Since most people who call themselves programmers really aren't, they're highly useful. Anyone who's looking for perfection of this nature in an interview and who fails a candidate for lacking that is doing the latter a favor by not hiring them.
Without justifying any of this, since the Schwartz incident JSTOR has made all of the out-of-copyright content freely available: http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-j...
What would be difficult to implement in a single gesture/key stroke?

1. app switching
2. closing apps
3. (not really a complaint, just a difference)
4. preform a reboot
5. (again, not really a complaint, just a difference)

I dont think there is a single issue raised that couldn't be updated in a single version. As to whether or not they actually do of course is another issue.
I saw nothing here that I didn't already assume they'd fix in a future alpha/beta.
More likely, some exotic bacteria gets in the cut and you develop necrotizing fascitis.

Learning from your own mistakes instead of others' is a high-variance strategy. Our culture is better off because of the people that do it, but if you're selfishly looking to maximize your own expected value, you'll put great weight on the majoritarian view.
This preview is just about testing metro apps and hardware integration. It's not about comparing cut and paste touch gestures with iOS/Android. The window switching fix is probably being developed in another branch/build by another Windows team. The full list of teams is available @ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/17/introducing-th...
Do take notice that you can't just come to the US and work there. Your employer-to-be has to arrange a H-1B visa for you. This can be a drawback, albeit not a big one.
> He knows trade show girls.

Of the dozens of trade shows I've been to, trade-show girls are good for one thing: Collecting contact info of horny guys.

The resulting lead lists had incredibly low signal-to-noise. Then again, I've never worked in the adult game arena.
Point made. I am often astounded by what stupid can do when acting in concert.

BTW, it appears they have replaced said file with real data

curl -H "Range: bytes=0-100,bytes=100000-100100" https://leap.singlehop.com/speedtest/500megabytefile.tar.gz | hexdump

looks like real data now
I'm interested to see what your percentage of completed reads of this post is :)
This shouldn't even be legal.

Since it probably is; I think these days most people are probably buying a PS3 for PSN so if users can no longer access it they should bring the device back and demand their money bag. If Sony gets away with this expect more companies to follow suit.
Hmm, I like that idea, but only if it's limited to the big lecture-style courses. Having taught some smaller classes, I'd be sort of annoyed if one of my lectures showed up online, without me having really prepared for it to be polished or well-thought-out enough to be permanently archived for worldwide broadcast. Talking to a group of 20-30 people somewhat informally would be hard to do if I knew that it were being recorded. Students might be more reticent with questions/discussion as well, if they knew that those would also be showing up on the internet.

With, say, conference keynotes it's different because those are consciously supposed to be public performances, and arguably the big Physics 101 lectures in a 300-person auditorium are pretty similar as well, especially if they're by a prof who's given the lecture several times, so has a sort of "standard" rehearsed performance of it.
I assure you that feature was very well tested and the high-pressure shopping cart tactic was deemed more revenue-promoting than the user-friendly alternative.
The author can't decide if he's criticizing Windows 8 as a PC OS or as a Tablet OS.

His first point explicitly says "unless you have a keyboard attached" which makes me think he's criticizing Windows 8 as a Tablet OS. But his complaint is that it's hard to manage 10+ open apps at once. This is a deal-breaker for a tablet, really? Someone needs to tell Apple!
Improving Resque's Memory Efficiency 6800%
Indeed; if you interview at a company that doesn't to this sort of thing if you have any choice you're well advised to avoid them. There's simply going to be little joy working with people who can't program and can either stick around or who have to get fired. And things can get ugly for those who do have a clue, from envy to having to do others work to avoid project or company failure and losing your job.
Be sure to click through the slides. The blog post may not be overwhelmingly useful, but the presentation has plenty of helpful examples of interface copywriting done right (and wrong, too).
There's a certain fetishization of the Launch that's been happening lately. What should be one (small) step in an iterative process, has become (for many), their startup's raison d'etre. It's something that needs to happen, and it's certainly an easy milestone to point out, but focusing on it is rarely productive.

Building a company is more like watering a plant than birthing a baby. Emphasis on the Launch is built around the idea that there wasn't anything and then, poof, the business is fully formed and developed. Businesses are rarely, if ever, made like that, so building in those assumptions in your marketing and development process are going to start you down the wrong path from the start.
> What if the child isn't a native English speaker?

They will need to cram vocab. - as are their English speaking peers.

> What if teachers of younger students only teach to this test and ignore other important topics?

The teachers explicitly don't teach to this test, and would be sanctioned if they did such that all the other areas of the syllabus were slipping. It is up to the parents to arrange preparation one way or another.

Having said that, the school work does overlap - they start to have time limits on tests, and as always there is a strong emphasis on reading, comprehension and vocabulary. However, the particular mechanics and mindset of the 11+ are not covered.
The "oddness" in question is really due to the mismatch between the way she allegedly ran an authoritarian and extremely hierarchical personality cult and the ideas espoused in her own philosophy.
It's not at all clear to me why Linux in particular ought to be ignored. Recent experiments like humblebundle.com suggest that Linux users are a larger gaming market than Mac users.

Also, obviously the strategy for making a cross-platform title needs to be "use cross-platform tools". It sure worked for Minecraft!

And unlike Mac, in the case of Linux you have a volunteer community ready and eager to help you iron out the kinks. And it's such old news that I'm almost embarrassed to be repeating it, but the position of the WINE team is nearly "let us know what we need to change in our platform to make your existing Windows game run, and we'll do it".

All in all, I'd put Linux deployment ahead of OSX deployment, if it was me. But I admit I'm biased.
Mandatory PS3 update removes right to join in a class-action lawsuit
I think I just met you last night at the Square event, where you pitched this idea briefly. (I introduced Blogic). Hope to hear from you!
I've never asked FizzBuzz but I do regularly ask coding/algorithm questions. They are usually more difficult than FizzBuzz. I'd say around 80-90% can at least come up with a solution in 45 minutes with some help. Probably less than 10% can come up with a good solution entirely on their own.

I attribute this to two things, first I think our phone screenings work well enough to keep out people who really can't do FizzBuzz, and second that I'm fairly generous during interviews. I often don't expect real code, sometimes I'm satisfied with just a discussion of the algorithm (no white board coding at all). I don't expect code to compile and I even let candidates use undefined "helper" functions (although I usually only allow that if I get the feeling that they could implement them if asked).

* For those that are curious I have two favorite questions - print out all the permutations of a given (ASCII) string and describe a search algorithm for a sorted array that has been split in two and the two pieces have been swapped (i.e. - 4,5,6,7,8,1,2,3).
I want this article to be true, but I don't think it is.

Early Twitter was a barebones product, and their brand was the fail whale. Yet they skyrocketed starting with well-planned marketing at SXSW.

FriendFeed was a reliable, slick and sophisticated product. They relied on user advocates for their marketing. They did get bought by Facebook for $50MM, but never grew to more than a million users.
<?php

$string = "aeiouxabcd";
$checkfor = array('a','e','i','o','u');
$count = 0;

for($x = 0; $x < strlen($string); $x++) {
if(in_array($string[$x], $checkfor)) {
$count++;
}
}

echo $count . "\n";

Am I hired? Or do I lose cool points for PHP?
>The Salvation Army is anti-gay

The Salvation Army I'm sure considered themselves to be extremely for people who express themselves as "gay": this is what they say on the point.

http://www.salvationarmy.org/ind%5Cwww_ind.nsf/vw-sublinks/8...

It's a moral judgement. Arguing that opposing the Salvation Army's position is somehow neutral would be wrong.

Considering that, I can't see how they're position impacts on me at the point of need if I get warmth, compassion, food and clothing regardless of who I am.
Wow, +1 for bootstrap. Did not know about this, thank you
TechCrunch Disrupt: The Volunteers
How tough IT security could have stopped $2bn rogue trader
Kindle, Wi-Fi, Graphite, 6" Display with New E Ink Pearl Technology
I have used various interview questions, including FizzBuzz, factorials and other questions, and I would say the success rate I saw was about 20%. My personal favorite question is to have someone write a shuffle function without using any built in randomization functions - however most people give up, and others can't follow simple directions and wrap their head around the problem. This particular question had more of a 5 to 10% success rate.
I suspect higher than average due to the fact that people are being called on it.
This is so bullshit!

Basically, leaves non-security-aware people out in the cold. Instead of trying to champion good security practices and locking down their shit, they are saying "this is a glory hole, buyer beware" in a document that no one reads.

Sigh
I've been with Singlehop since they started, and I have had no complaints whatsoever! I always see them as a great little startup run by friendly and innovative people who worked honestly very hard to get their business to the current level.
I find it hard to believe that they did this intentionally - it would be too easy to get caught. It is really disappointing to see such harsh criticism - can I ask if the author of the article checked with Singlehop first before making such an outlandish accusation?

Edit: Fine, down-vote this all you like, but my comment still stands.
While we don't ask FizzBuzz in particular we have a question my manager asks: If you could fold a piece of paper 50 times, how tall would it be (very rough ballpark figure)?

Our success rate is surprisingly low.
Oops, although this won't help your mind ^_^, the correct expression is "... out of a wet paper bag". From more apropos usage about fighting or escaping from such a flimsy thing.

And now that you mention it, I have no idea either ^_^ ... except that it ought to be easy. In that last company where I was part of the hiring process I myself got the job only because I was the only one they interviewed who could pass their dry erase board tests (at the time they didn't have good pre-screening or access to a good candidate pool; I myself answered a want-ad). Tests that were to me so simple I barely remembered them (two decades of experience by then).
Whilst "No True Scotsman" is a logical fallacy it doesn't mean that a Scotsman would actually wear an England shirt at Murrayfield on a match day. That is it is not a logical proof but that does not mean that the assertion it counters is false. Just FWIW.
That's a very purist view of the world.

This code works and, as he says, was produced by a coder under time pressure. You show me a system and pretty much I'll show you a system that has poor (but working) code in it produced by a competent developer under pressure.

And code review is a useful process but it's no guarantee that issues will be caught any more than system testing or user acceptance testing.

And yet the world keeps on spinning and all is not lost.

I agree, you'd hope this was caught, but if someone gave that answer in an interview even aside from the tone, I'd wonder how much real world experience they had.
Well, when working on a code base, the first thing I think is who wrote this and when. When they wrote this how experienced was the developer? What's there coding style or was it written after coding standards were introduced? I've had this misfortune of inheriting a lot of bad legacy code in the past and when you see a chunk of bad code, you can either spend a good chunk of time figuring what it's really doing or less time figuring out the intent. Depending on who wrote the code, what it does, and various other factors you can decide which path to take.

With this code snippet it's obvious that the intent is to remove all the elements. So it can be fixed with a .Clear();

From a higher level, you can see that the snippet smells bad, and will need some attention.

I didn't say I'm smarter than all the developers I encounter. I've just encountered a lot of bad developers in my time.
even resellers have nice standard apple desks to present Apple products. The iPads have range of demo applications pre-installed to showcase what it is capable of. Meanwhile, Honeycomb tablets just feel like a chunk of metal.
Seen this somewhere before, it's call JoliOS. And that's the name of the version that you can actually install as an, you know, OS. The one that runs in the browser is called JoliCloud. Figures this would be on Techcrunch...

Oh, and webOS.
Can anyone explain how it is possible for people applying for these jobs to fail?

I dabble in code, but am no where near the level I would have to be to do any job in this area, I mean seriously. Took my two minutes to do it with a pen and paper in PHP, same with in JS, same in bash scripting.

How can anyone who isn't able to do this pretend to even have an interest, yet alone the ability to do the job?
Continued fractions are fascinating; however, I think they fell through the curriculum cracks: deemed a bit advanced for high school and too elementary for college level.

Neil appears to be extremely intelligent; however, I think this is also testament that great intuitive tools lead to great achievements.
I suspect replying to you is a waste of time. That said, on the off-chance that you actually will think about what I'm saying, here goes:

* The organized religious group I'm a member of, through ceremony, gives certain major life events and certain times of the week more importance and significance than they would otherwise have. I'm not sure you'd understand the word 'sacred' - so let me describe it as a peaceful, calm feeling, where your mind is clear and the concerns of everyday life are simply not present. These ceremonies require an organization.

* The organized religious group I'm a member of helps and supports each other. In an atomizing society where we often don't know our neighbors, I belong to a community that is there for me when I'm in need. Obviously this requires some organization.

* The organized religious group I'm a member of emphasizes scholarship and pushes me to learn new things. We think deeply about the meaning of texts; we study languages. Because we do this in an organized fashion, we push and support each other, and we get new insights that we wouldn't get as individuals. Obviously, we can't do this without an organization.

* The organized religious group that I'm a member of pushes me to be a better, more moral person. We frequently discuss and debate values and morality, and challenge ourselves to do better. Without others in the community acting as role-models, I doubt I would be the person I am - still highly-flawed, but better than I would be.

* The organized religious group I'm a part of conveys a culture that I very much want my (not-yet-existing) children and future descendants to have. We value scholarship and learning and entrepreneurship, and we've done very well over the centuries despite persecution. The reason for this success isn't 100% genetic - and the one common cultural constant, no matter where you are in the world, is our religion. By immersing myself and my family in my religion, I hope to inculcate in my family and descendants a culture that demonstrably works well.

That's just a handful, but you get the idea. If you were to chat with my rabbi, you might get a slightly different set - I'm going to ask him about this the next time I see him. But I guarantee 'influence' wouldn't come up - that's not at all why we have our shul.
No it's true, they send javascript to the southbridge to control your Uart