skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Maybe it's because none of my personal projects have gotten popular enough to be subjected to the kind of load that reveals such problems.

That's probably the case, and there's no shame in that. The companies who ask these questions do so because their engineers deal with these kinds of scaling challenges every day. They can't afford to have people casually slip in an O(n^2) algorithm when an O(n lg n) or O(n) algorithm would do. If you don't have the experience of working in this kind of environment it's not a dealbreaker, you just need to show an awareness of the big-O implications of your algorithms, which will most likely come from some combination of study and practice.

> Is my lack of fluency preventing me from understanding just how important it is

Probably not -- if you're working at a small scale, then big-O probably truly is one of your lesser concerns (unless you write an O(2^n) algorithm, which is less common to happen accidentally).
Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"
In the era when users had to pay $50 and install software upgrades, these kinds of interface changes and feature additions were viewed as greedy "planned obsolescence". But now that web apps are updated seamlessly and without cost (and often with painstaking user education), developers are somehow exerting control over end-users. I guess the pundit class needs to justify their existence somehow.
I completely agree, though I find that reality quite sad, but yes bad products often do succeed in spite of themselves.

What I'm just saying there is definitely huge value, sales wise, in having a good well built product. The bold statement the parent made that the backend of Facebook doesn't matter to the people or advertisers who use it is flat wrong. If it was slow, constantly crashing or down it would become a ghost town relatively quickly. In the end sales cannot compensate for a bad product, the product is always king in the end.

As to your comment, I like to use the analogy of a land rush to describe the software technology landscape right now. There is a lot of open land and so many people get away without having to seriously compete, particularly if they are solving niche problems. There is still a lot of land out there, this is also a reason that makes forming start-ups so attractive right now.
Attempts at Analyzing 19 million documents using MongoDB map/reduce
Exactly what I was thinking. I keep reading about all these small machine shops all across the US desperate for work, even taking work on at a loss so they can pay part of their overhead.

My guess is that they looked mainly at larger outfits that couldn't take on a small job, or they just didn't look very hard. Not blaming them: if you don't know where to get something made, it can be hard to figure out where to start looking.
That is true, but one generally doesn't care about the best case. It's a good point though.

(Also, if data is a linked-list, length() could be an O(n) operation. That would make this O(n^3) or O(n^4) ;))
I visited the site during the affected time on Mac OS X 10.7, with Safari - I'm worried I might be infected. How can I check?
> From reading John's letter, I was thinking bet you these guys are going to interpret it as him seeking some sort of endorsement. I don't think he should have mentioned Raspberry Pi. It takes the letter into areas that you wouldn't want to discuss.

From a point of view of the sort of people who in fact would read the letter, you might be right.

But from the point of view of the ideal recipient of the letter -- someone who cares about computing education -- giving examples of relevant projects is the right thing to do, because examples help to get the point across. Unfortunately politicians don't get computers or the internet, which is why we need new ones who do.

Next May, Pirate Party UK will contest elections across the country; I myself intend to stand as a candidate for Edinburgh Council. We're hoping to duplicate our recent success in Berlin across the UK.

If Pirates are elected and we receive similar letters about computing education, we won't simply ignore them, we'll act on them.
Without actually registering on the site to verify, it looks like that's the Exploit.IN forum.
I tend to take the advice of people who have run more companies than I have, and they would not agree:

"I used to fall in love with everyone I interviewed and I'd say, 'We can make anybody successful' or 'We can find a job for any talented person.' And that's just completely wrong and a really bad idea. HR people should figure out job descriptions. God forbid I should ever do that."

- Howard Tullman, founder of Experiencia, Tribeca Flashpoint Academy, The Cobalt Group and Tunes.com (Tullman sold his first company in 1987 for $100 million)
I'm definitely watching it and hope I can contribute in some way to the project.
Marketing Multinivel – Una Idea Fácil para Ganar Dinero en Internet
That reminds me of a little fable I've always found humorous:
The Parable of the Two Programmers http://www.csd.uwo.ca/staff/magi/personal/humour/Computer_Au...
> Hire the engineer and HR person at the same time and have the HR candidates evaluate the engineering candidates.

Demetri Martin's "Important Things" TV show had a comedy sketch about two interview candidates inadvertently interviewing each other, each thinking the other candidate was the hiring manager. :)

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=2686...
Does anyone know how this compares to Armadillo Airspace's VTOL technology, and what Armadillo's long term strategy is for its technology?
The use of italic Adobe Caslon Pro (from Typekit) gives this site a clean look that fits with the video's visual style and the project's general theme.

I know that Wyld, based on Caslon, is available for "private purpose" with TTFs at http://www.orbitals.com/programs/index.html but can anyone recommend any open/libre versions of Caslon?
I've bookmarked this for myself later on- I'm a developer with no design chops whatsoever. There's a big space for apps that make it easier for developers to push out aesthetically pleasing front ends.
I will :)
Created in partnership with Google:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/from-desert-to-web-br...
What's the alternative for a small company? Our ISP's mail servers?

Where does one draw the line?
Just looking at the title of this post made me think "well, by definition (companies in the top 100) are not clueless"
I was just wondering who were the "professional" editors. Some credentials might increase the trust in your service.
Definitely unsettling but this has been a part of Facebook you could hack since they opened up those features last f8. I think the Facebook team does a pretty good job following up on spam reports and shutting down pages/developers that abuse their system. What I usually do to protect myself as a user is connect to Facebook in one browser when I want to use Facebook features and use another browser for most other web browsing.
Our interviews at Palantir test for these for two reasons:

We evaluate a lot of people coming straight out of school in CS. They don't have much experience in development. Thus, the best way to test if a candidate is smart is to see if he's learned his course material well. We do a lot of heavy algorithms and distributed systems, so we ask that, but it also happens to be what students learn.

Running time and Oh, however, in addition to systems knowledge, is extremely important to creating good software in general. If you can't determine how your software will scale with big data, and you can't understand why efficient code that runs quickly with small operations does so, you simply can't write good software.

I realize a lot of people on HN take offense at these claims because they've written programs without this knowledge and claim they are self taught. The reality, however, is that they aren't good programmers. You don't need a good programmer to write a prototype that works and determines market fit. You do need good programmers to scale your product, add features efficiently, and architect solutions without making a crippling mess of your code.

Edit: I realize the above comment sounds a little condescending. It wasn't meant to be. I have met self taught programmers that are amazing. Most people just don't have the self discipline to fully learn a subject matter (I many times don't). So a lot of "self taught" programmers have only taught themselves 10% of what they need to know and never bother learning the other 90%.
The Good Enough Developer (Part 1)
That's precisely how we look at it internally -- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. We speak in terms of "the cloud", as coarse and imprecise a term as it is, because that's what a lot of the people we're trying to reach are thinking in terms of and looking for. Plus, it just flows more smoothly than "IaaS/PaaS/SaaS" in a headline. :)
US senator wants FTC to put heat on "brazen" OnStar for privacy changes
This is the coffeescript equivalent, not sure how to get it working in the visualisation though as it doesn't involve swaps.

VA = [4, 2, 5, 7]
for y in VA
setTimeout('console.log(' + y + ')', y*1000)
Geoffrey K Pullum has a delightful article tearing Strunk and White's prescription and examples to pieces. While there's some truth to the advice, it is often simplistically presented and ludicrously overapplied (uh, I mean, "style guides often present it simplistically, and editors often overapply it"). There's plenty of room for the passive voice, and even more so when you consider what Strunk and White consider to be passive even though it isn't.

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
I'm glad to see this here, but if you're going to submit your own stuff - even if you're a big shot writer for The Motherfucking Atlantic - I think it's not too much to ask that you engage with us in the comments. Dan Frommer, Fred Wilson, and others do it, and I think it'd be a nice social norm around here.
I think you're correct as well.

I'm just saying most paid programmers are not dealing with the problem of how to handle processes that involve millions of users, but they do have problems with marketing their app or monetising it. Therefore spending their weekend learning something like Dijkstra's Algorithm may not be the best use of their time, but finding ways to better understand the needs of their paying users probably would be time well spent.
Microsoft became dominant because Gates is the most ruthless businessman on the planet.

Facebook is becoming dominant because humanity in general can not grow up from its glory days in college-rules.com
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I think this is a common occurrence with government IT spending too. I worked as an electronics engineer for a short time as a contractor. They paid huge sums for some software archiving / source control / versioning program that can't actually handle merging (if I work on version 2 and check in my version becomes version 3. If you were also working on version 2 and check in version 3, you overwrite my changes, unless we worked on different files. It is as if the people who implemented it didn't really know what version control is supposed to do). So everyone ignores it and uses git or svn ti develop, and only copies to the expensive official program when coerced. When we tried to explain to management why we used svn instead, management flatly refused to believe merging source control a la svn could work in principle.
I like the play on the words, but wary of headlines like "Can the Kindle Fire kindle fire in the tablet market?"
I think of cloud using @davenielsen's OSSM description: services that are On-Demand, Self-Service, Scalable, Measureable. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/d8...
I assume it just computes every step, and then displays them all.
fonts are totally free google puts them
I understand that it's very possible the FPGA is the problem. However, it's a cakewalk to continuously monitor and calibrate FPGA latencies. In fact, it's probably done in conjunction with the calibration of APDs/PMTs. If they aren't doing this, then the whole experiment has much bigger problems. My point is that I personally feel it's incredibly wrong to single out the FPGA DAQ systems, as the discrepancy of 60ns is so incredibly large compared to what is easily attainable, and the delay is something that's always compensated for in calibration. I think that there's some other error in the system, and my gut feeling is that it's due either to geometry or calibration.
Check out the middle of the last picture on the page. It looks like it didn't go up as far as it needed two about twice in the same line, causing a noticeable gap. Not at all trying to knock it here, amazing work for sure, just wanted to point that out. It could be intentional as well.
And what are they going to do? Shut down your fake account?

As far as I can tell, they are only doing checks against obvious spammers. It's not like they have a team of people doing detailed background checks on each and every signup that comes through. That would be impossible to do. As long as you create a reasonable persona, they are not going to hunt you down. There will be no serious repercussions.
Spotify really is tiny. They make "a profit of €5m or less" -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/28/spotify-on-...
Arcade games are a good analogy for MVC. The controller is the joystick, buttons, etc. The view is the CRT screen. The model represents the game state.
Traditional 'healthy' diet (low fat, low salt, high on carbs and grains) is very bad for health.

Your diet seems to be mostly keto (I assume your coffee and tea are sugarless). The diet of ern is very far from keto.

There are two very active community of redditors (keto and Paleo) with very good info on diets and foods that work to have good health, and bibliographies with explanations of why it works.
Do you have a source for this? It sounds quite likely, but any time law gets discussed I always try to find the relevant texts. I'm having trouble finding anything other than laws about carrying firearms on your person while on a commercial airliner.
>I'll worry about the time my code takes once it's notieably slow.

the Dunning-Kruger is exactly about ability to notice

It seems like you are saying that every programmer ought to go out of his way to become fluent in algorithms, because without fluency he or she will never notice when their code is running slowly.

If so, I disagree. It requires no skill to notice whether code is running slowly--you needn't look further than my techno-skeptical dad muttering, "Jeez, this thing takes forever to boot up" as he regards his desktop with disappointment. I think this is what the grandparent commenter was talking about: if I'm not fluent in algorithms, but my dad doesn't think it's slow, then where's the problem?

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
I have a iPad 2, maybe that does the speed difference, I don't have speed issues and pinch to zoom is smooth.
That is true, by not telling the user what they are and aren't doing they can do anything within the bounds of the law anyway.
Tumblr Raises $85 Million from Greylock and Insight Venture Partners
The interview process at this point, at least in Silicon Valley, is broken.

There's an arms race between interview "gamers" that memorize all the answers to every single question out there, vs interviewers that are asking increasingly ridiculous questions. It's naive to think these days that not knowing the answer to a common question, but coming up with the answer will work. It won't. If 9 candidates know the answer right away, and you don't, but you figure it out, do you honestly think the interviewer will care? I've talked to plenty of interviewers at my company and that's the unwritten rule.

For example, over the phone, one of my friends was asked to design and give an algorithm to solve a maze. It took 10+ mins just to understand exactly what the interviewer wanted, and at that point, time was up, the interviewer was frustrated, and my friend didn't get the job, even though he's better than me, technically.

The only way to interview these days, it to know everything.
Try this:

VA = [4, 2, 5, 7]
for y in VA
setTimeout "console.log(#{y})", y*1000
and this is relevant to hacker news because?
Frankly, I find this type of interview insulting. Let's face it. Unless you work with "algorithms" on a dialy basis, I'm willing to bet that most who do not cannot regurgitate a red black tree at the drop of a hat. I work in this field off in on as an embedded developer and I'm always going to various texts on the subject to align my thinking with the code I'm writing (C++ in my case). It's one thing to talk through these scenarios in an interview and it's yet another to judge one's ability to solve problems on how well they come up with a solution to an interview question. I give merit to the "talking through" and this is what I do. I find that if a candidate can carry on an intelligent conversation about a particular problem domain, he's hirable material and in 15 years of running my own company I've had only 2 out of 43 people leave my company.
Assuming Spotify is not run by stupid people, money would be the obvious reason (and the only one I can think of off hand).
That's an interesting angle that I don't know enough about. For example, do the laws governing SaaS data provision to law enforcement also apply to data centers? If they do, then you're giving up some privacy from the gov't for the convenience of outsourcing server management.

I guess what's interesting about your idea is that it presents control as a continuum as opposed to a binary. There are varying degrees of control/convenience possible, but most of the current options are heavily weighted away from user control.

Also, I don't think this thread is really about the cheese-moving/silent-upgrade phenomenon so much as data and identity ownership.
Thank you! I came here to post this. I was really disappointed when an alternative wasn't presented after they declared algorithm quizzes useless.

I'm all for code walk-throughs and explanations. You can't bullshit your problem solving process, but you can memorize (or forget) algorithm trivia.

For what it's worth I've failed and succeeded at these kinds of algorithms on the whiteboard interviews. Even after nailing it I felt uncomfortable and disrespected. I think there is a real problem with continuing to do these interviews because it's the cool thing to do, and these smart people don't feel like turning their problem solving skills towards the hiring problem.
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Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? Physics Luminaries Voice Doubts
Should I check parameter types in Python
This is EPIC! Amazing...
Yep! What have the Romans ever done for us?
The diagram being discussed is labeled "LNGS" so I'm pretty sure it both green and blue relates to one end (receiving), just different parts of the receiving end.
Show HN: Spontaneus.com
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I'm not a premium user but this page
http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/premium/
implies that it's part of the package
"Add Spotify to your mobile phone and you’ll have immediate access to all that music - wherever you are, on or offline."
Web apps updated seamlessly without cost to the end user are great, however that doesn't mean developers aren't exerting control over end users. And whether charging $50 for feature additions and changes was greedy or not is completely irrelevant to the point.
Is Spotify going to start giving a discount on subscriptions for all this marketing/advertising information they're pushing to Facebook?
Email and Twitter Messages Censored in US and UK | AlterNet
Facebook iPad App Developer Quits After Repeated Launch Delays
I had no idea he was a UMD guy.
At the point where it makes more sense to focus on monetization rather than growing the user-base in order to maximize the lifetime revenue of the company (as opposed to current revenue). It's silly to put some arbitrary deadline on something which should clearly be based upon company metrics.
a better name would be "the kindle tablet"
The DSS have been online for a while now, and this is only a few of the scrolls. However, it is very nicely done, and clearly the best online edition of these particular scrolls.
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From the article:

"The Facebook iPhone app is the most downloaded app of all time."

Is this really true? I don't recall seeing it at the top of the charts.
I like the Spotify UI much better, but Grooveshark is pretty good too.
Probably, but think of all those times when you checked and double-checked your code, only to find out that it was a simple typo causing the bug.

This will need to be experimentally verified (preferably with a completely different set of equipment), but it doesn't hurt to double-check and triple-check the simple stuff.
Alternatively you can insert this code for the median of 3 version:

centre = (left + right) / 2;
if VA.lt(left, centre)
if VA.lt(centre, right)
VA.swap(left, centre)
else if VA.lt(left, right)
VA.swap(left, right)
else
if VA.lt(centre, right)
VA.swap(left, centre)
else if VA.lt(left, right)
VA.swap(left, right)
Are "general users" using textmate though? Vim and Emacs are both primarily programmers' editors, and my impression is that Textmate is as well.
Are you in my head or something? :)
I agree 100% with everything you wrote.

It was very difficult to explain my concept in one minute - it took 42 takes, and I still feel like I left out something important.

My application felt robotic and very technical, which is not at all like me. I tried to have more of myself come through where I could.

There was so much I wanted to say about my passion for people, and how I want to create a fun, interesting, and contemporary work environment that fosters innovation and creativity.

I want to be challenged, work with experienced people, and learn everything I can about running the best business possible.
I am also confident of my skills and drive, and getting this company up and running is my life goal. All of my other goals and ideas revolve around it (except for breathing, etc).
I can't say I'd seen that, but its pretty awesome.
You could do some problems at topcoder or some acm problems. They require knowledge of algorithms and data structures, so its a good way to learn it.
That would only be a risk if we were talking about a typical high school multiple choice test. I would think that a cheater would be filtered out by this point in their career (this point being applying to a high tech company). However, collaborating on a solution is not necessarily a bad thing. I think the goal here is to find candidates which can deliver unique, valuable, and insightful problem solving skills. To go ahead and bottle that process up into a pre determined steps or a 1 hour drill doesnt serve your goals very well. Who knows, maybe these guys have a recipe which works for them. From my own experiences, I would disagree.
I was kind of in the same boat; the UI is there, but the way to open a folder (compared to vim) is semi non-obvious. Project > Add Folder to Project.

Once you do that, you get the sidebar view typical of textmate, and the extremely handy Ctrl-(or Command, depending on platform)-P. Slap that combo, start typing in a file, and it'll filter out the one you want from within the project. It makes navigating around for snap edits very quick :).
Only taking input by text box is pretty bad. You need to be able to accept common word processor file formats.

Targeting students is also ethically questionable. Planning to open a sideline where you help "proofread" math homework next?
After waiting for this for a long time, I'm disappointed to hear the specs of the fire. I hope it really isn't android 2.1 with their own UI. I have faith in cyanogen to fix it though :)