skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went through something sort-of-kind-of similar almost ten years ago. I got a good full-time job as a programmer/sysadmin before I was even out of high school, moved across the country and got another job with a large corporation where I became one of their lead techs while working on a few other projects for them. I made more money than I knew what to do with and I should have been happy.

But, I kept getting more and more unhappy instead, and finally decided that I needed to do something really different. I decided that I'd had it too easy, so I was going to set out to make life really hard for a while. (I had no idea what I was getting myself into. All the same, I'd do it all over again even if I knew.)

Anyway, I left the computer industry entirely, moved back across country, tried to become a forest service ranger and ended up becoming a climbing instructor after having a few other odd jobs. I was broke, but happy. I returned to the tech industry several years later and now I'm much more comfortable with it and well-balanced.

You have resources and you sound like you're a lot smarter than I was, so you could probably do something similar without the kind of hardships I experienced. If you're not sure of what you want to do next, then go out and experience the world in a completely different way until you find the next thing you want to do. Go and do things you've never done before, then come back and start another company.

The main thing with this advice is just to make sure that you don't do nothing -- make sure you keep pushing yourself to do something every day. But I doubt that you'll really have that problem from the sounds of it.
My suggestion is identical to #1 here.
It's been a very long time since people outside the US have seen it as a "bearer of democracy."

The USTR has long been a bully that pushes for trade terms advantageous to the US, even if it tramples human rights.
Sorry, but that's a reasonable question for assessing a particular type of skill. That you seem to think they're looking for you to remember some particular parallel sorting algorithm from college tells me that this probably isn't your strongest skill. That doesn't mean you're a bad programmer.
No reason not to call this eta reduction, so you don't have to google Greek alphabert, and remember performance implications:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Let_vs._Where
Your absolutely right. Lets face it, who would you protect if you were in office - the guys paying you - or the guys who aren't?

Money in politics = not safe for 99%
Can you say more about the Google Latitude "continuing to run" thing? Are you maybe just getting Push Notifications for Latitude? If so, they're entirely handled by the system - the process doesn't need to be running.
Plus they obviously wont pull down paid services like google apps or AWS, etc.
Also helps if you were diagnosed with Dyslexia & Disgraphia in middle school and have a paper trial. ;)
Kanye West Hiring App Guys and Tech Guys
Ex-Employee left me without access to Facebook Page
We had a former employee who set-up two Facebook pages for my company. After he left we were not able to retrieve the passwords or user account info from them. Without info to reset the passwords how do I gain control of the pages? If there is not option for reset what is the process to submit a DMCA take-down request? These pages are being controlled by someone other than the corporation whose copyrights the pages display.
This shows one more reason why we need a united Europe: taken one at a time, European countries are too little to be able to raise their voices.
Every Time i see these posts on here, I get a sad face. I am a SQL Server DBA and most of these puzzles don't translate well to SQL. That doesn't stop me from trying!
Actually, it's at least six months.

This is not a break, it's recovering from burnout.

(I took 5 and change months off between Yahoo and Google. It wasn't enough.)
I don't see how this is relevant. Where did the parent poster say that you should be doing this 20 times per month?
My thoughts exactly. Cerf uses a strictly technical, near autistic definition of the Internet.

The social meaning of the Internet as a human right can be defined as the right to globally interconnect any means of communication that doesn't involve the physical transport of people or objects. I.e., uncensored communication without borders.

That's what the word Internet means to ordinary people today. Protocols, networking layers or physical networks are irrelevant, it's about the right to do what we do via the Internet today.
I'd love to hear more about the contract issues.
"The right way to do things the first time is the way that gets it working the fastest so you can see if your solution even makes sense.

The right way to rewrite it once that works is to make it fault-tolerant and scalable.

The wrong thing to do is build a giant system first, and try to account for every possibility."

Great quotes. There are exceptions, such as when you're making a libarary, utilities, or APIs, but in most cases, you ain't gonna need it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aint_gonna_need_it).
You know what? I just tried implementing the Pascal's Triangle function. I implemented the general algorithm, recursively, but I had a bunch of logic errors that took me about 25 minutes to fix (one was obvious and embarrassing) - in the privacy of my own office and with a debugger.

I have over 10 years of programming experience and I probably would have miserably failed your "litmus test", especially if it were in an interview situation in front of a whiteboard. Maybe this just means I'm a bad programmer, but I tend to think that problems like "Pascal's Triangle" don't represent what we work on day-to-day.
Also, drop me a line if you want to brainstorm or introductions.
One small step: NASA launches open source portal, aims to open more code
> Consistently over time, the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve seen weren’t fighting the world – they were merely building the best sails to move faster than anybody else.

What causes the winds to change? There must be some new innovation for people to want sails in the first place (to butcher your analogy).

> That’s why Groupon clones are making millions a month with unoriginal ideas. The business model is already well understood and customers are familiar with it. The Groupon model is a trend that extends well beyond the company.

This is all true but ignores the fact that until Groupon started the social coupon trend, no companies made any money with this business model (because there were none, or none popular enough to matter).

> Those who built great iPhone apps at the time also know about these trends. Their success had more to do with a “force of nature” (millions of users thirsty for apps) than with their talent designing apps.

Again, yes, but no one wanted any apps (or even knew what an "app" was) before Apple decided to invent the iPhone.
Why I won't work for you:

1) You are a self-important douche who writes lengthy blog posts on all the reasons you deem people unworthy of working with you.
tl;dr: YAGNI

I am skeptical that this kind of pathology can ever really be avoided unless you have enlightened management. A game designed entirely in UML? I'm sure the smart dudes on the team protested. But I've worked for organizations where the common-sense approach simply doesn't have any weight, because the "right way" was decreed from on high (or from the last consultant who dropped by).

If you are a three-man team of highly competent developers and you find yourself in a mess like this, chances are it's your fault. So shame on you and remember not to do that next time!

But more likely, you are a talented developer with a cozy job at a "traditional" company with ego-driven non-technical management that dictates technical approaches to people who know better. You'll never win that battle. But the question is, why even try? If you find yourself constantly saying "but this is so unnecessary!" and are continuously being proved right, it's time to move on. Scary, but necessary for your sanity.

Creative, technical people just don't thrive in a Dilbert environment. Survive, maybe. But not thrive.
I've noticed the last few years of supercomputer announcements has focused less on raw performance and more balanced performance/energy.

Small world, I'm also a '03 alum. I was just going through my address book and a Scott S. was in the list with a 540 area code. We might have been in a study group at one point.
Ask HN: Seeking Mac Developer
We're looking for a freelance Mac App Developer for a new project we are working on.

We're a small 2 person startup based out of the UK and we'd love to work with an individual or firm from within the HN community, or via a recommendation from someone here (as we know that means the quality is likely to be higher).

Unfortunately I can't say too much about the project at this stage (hence the throwaway account), other than that we're at the early wireframing stage, and the dev work should be both interesting and challenging. It's probably a 1-2 person month piece of work.

If you're interested drop us a mail at maxkleberson@hotmail.com with examples of previous Mac App development work - We'll get back in touch with everyone who responds.
Agreed. I think it would even make sense to hire accomplished authors, editors, and academics for the narrative portions of chapters/lessons. It would likely make sense to have fairly coarse units which would be the responsibility of a particular author.

I skimmed through some of the CK12 content. While some of it might be good (I am not qualified to determine whether or not the content is high quality or affective) - the presentation is really poor. In addition to authors, I think you need designers who will present the information in an attractive and engaging way.
I'm sure it's very impressive.
Go on a sabbatical. Don't just drive into something else without a chance to decompress, learn from what you've just accomplished, and find a new direction you can be just as passionate about.

How long does this take? Depends on your personality.
Could you please stop propagating the myth, that android stole anything from ios? Thank you.
The ultimate Ruby on Rails installation guide on Ubuntu
I would prefer a combination approach: general, but with a list of specific examples. It's the best of both worlds, albeit more verbose than either.
The Mayor of NYC Makes a New Years Resolution to Learn How to Code
i often look for simple stuff like that, my job is a mixture of C++ MFC, ASP.NET C#, JavaScript, JQuery, Underscore, Java SWT, T-SQL and sometimes VBScript. I do Scheme, Lua and C for fun.

Once in a while i have to look on how to format a string and how to use map, reduce, etc..

do i have to go to school because of that? heck i dont even remember what i had for breakfast yesterday
But that's exactly what everyone is saying and the OP was trying to get at. The Google Search before this WASN'T broken with this 'imperfect product' like it is now. It worked really well and that's why it became #1.

You guys wouldn't have to do all this social rigging if you hadn't broken the web's tried-and-true link graph in the first place by making sites' feel like they had to 'hoard' pagerank and link-condom every outgoing link citation with a no-follow flag.

Unintended consequences for sure, as no-follow was well-intentioned and designed to help with blog comment spam, but unintended consequences can be a bugger. The result is still sad.

I'm sure there's no rolling back now to the 'old' google with 10 blue links, but I sure miss it.
Why US will never repay the debt to China
22 Free Handwritten Fonts Collection
Earlier, there were limited handwritten fonts available but now there are more than hundreds of fonts that the web designers can make use of in their project.
Are You Really looking for a Gift for Your Soul Mate in The Year 2012
My experience with gung-ho githubbers is the same. It's great to try out new technologies, but gitguys take it to an extreme. They'll shoehorn any new technology into their stack without a second thought about product stability.

Gitguy: "I used EC2, Blazboo and Chingbang to create an HA job queue that will never fail! It uses counting Bloom filters and I wrote it in Brainfuck."

Me: "What do you use it for?"

Gitguy: "Sending password reset emails."

These Rube Goldberg wannabes are generally more trouble than they're worth. You end up with a system that's a technological pastiche. The drawback is apparent when you try to hire new teammates. It turns out you can't find someone who knows the 12 esoteric packages your business is running on.
I'm sorry but it really seems like you are making a mountain out of a molehill here just to be argumentative.

Do you think this accurately reflects the working conditions of a developer?

Who said anything about trying to simulate a normal development day? This is about finding out some of their thought processes and if they can solve an exceedingly simple coding problem.

They may blank, they may freeze and they may just be the type of person that reflects on an issue for a while before the set out to code.

Where did they say you can't reflect on the issue? That's exactly what they want is you reflecting on the problem and describing how you'd go about solving it.

If someone tells you to write a function that takes a number N and prints out 1..N in pseudo code(Which is basically what the pascal problem asks when they provide the formula for a row) and you can't even talk your way through a possible solution you're not going to be able to complete any interview process, no matter how gentle.

I personally would search for the mathematical formula and a text description that I could put on my second monitor as reference.

So you're complaining that you can't search for something that the interviewer is already providing?

I personally never work from verbal descriptions, I document the issue, and place it into a ticket system in which I work the tickets based on priority.

If you are this incapable of listening to a two or three sentence problem description, ask the interviewer to print it out for you and write "ticket #1" on it? I mean is your nitpick really "They told me the problem out loud instead of writing it down?"

This is even ignoring the fact that taking verbal problem descriptions is an incredibly useful skill as a software engineer. I mean I guess I could tell people to file another ticket and I could have the joy of e-mail tag as I have to send off clarifying questions further delaying the task.
Groupon is in about 250 markets I think. So, that is 40 people per market. If half are customer support, that would be like 20 people per market in sales. That would mean the average salesperson, sets up 1 deal/month. Although, they probably churn through sales-people. So, if half the sales people are totally incompetent, that might be two deals per salesperson per month. Plus, there is probably some other stuff with Groupon Now.
Big Data and the infinite possibilities for the travel industry
This is a false dichotomy, and not even a particularly subtle one. Do you really believe what you're saying? There is no reason you must either give religions no privileges whatsoever or give them anything they want.

Do you think this is the first religion to have an objectionable practice? We already don't let religions do human sacrifice or many kinds of animal sacrifice, we don't allow them to encourage rape — heck, most countries don't even allow polygamy. Nobody takes much flack for any of this.
Startup Weekend pulls plug on Startup Foundation pilot
Education is required before a boycott could possibly be effective. As it stands, a boycott would amount to a headline resembling:

"Hacker News Boycotts Media over SOPA." When questioned, [media exec] responded "We didn't Notice a thing - as a matter of fact, sales were up for the week. Who the hell is Hacker News? Sounds like the group of pirates we're trying to protect ourselves from."

Once everyone understands what SOPA actually is and how it could affect them, a boycott would make sense.

* Fixed Typo.
Isn't the WebGL stuff done by Navteq, that's who the copyright says.
It was terrible for me, but that's because my app is educational, and winter/summer breaks show obvious troughs in my sales charts.
Was that a smaller plot point of the book or have I looked up the wrong one?

http://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Eric-S-Nylund/dp/03807929...
I'm in high school right now and I agree with this a lot. It's not as much in high school, but in middle school, almost every assignment had an effort mark, and it always annoyed. I mean, how are they going to know how much effort I put in it? They could look at the quality of the final product, but a few times, I would screw up completely so I had to redo the whole thing and then what I handed in would not look as good. Obviously, there was some merit to the idea having an effort mark, as that would reward hard work, but it annoyed me personally.
Nobody likes "Don't change the world", but a lot of people love "Find and solve a customer's existing, urgent problem".
Find a Girlfriend Online
Yup. The only thing that wasn't clear is that when there is a conflict of interest, such as when the submitter is also the author, that one should look out for the commons first.
This is a well written introduction to Bayes classifiers & the NLTK API. It does leave out some important aspects, like tokenisation and testing. Perhaps add hyperlinks to further references, like the NLTK book (http://www.nltk.org/book)?

Also, does anyone know where the 600/600 tweets comes from? It seems fairly arbitrary.
Time for Courts to Catch up with Technology
> In reality, they may not be dead/suspended

Hence "likely".

> Google Latitude for example can 'run' (I'm not actually sure what code is executed, if any) even after being removed from the 'tray'.

That simply is not possible, once it's been removed from the switcher it can not be running unless it's the currently active application.

Furthermore location-aware applications are actually the easiest possible offenders to manage: they'll keep the location marker enabled in the status bar (although that can conflict with genuine users of the API such as Reminders) and they will appear with a purple arrow in Settings > Location Services.
Cletus - I had never coded (or even thought) of this problem before, but your post intrigued me enough to try it out.

I put something out in Java in about 20 minutes and 50 lines using a PT class, a newRow() method that swaps the current row with the previous row and sets up the new current off of the previous (prev[element] + prev[element -1]), and a printRow() method.

My solution works well, but I'm curious how you would assess this solution during an interview. Would my language choice be a pro/con? What is the avg time you see it take an interviewee to complete this problem and how many LOC is it usually accomplished in under the pressure of an interview?
If no one makes a popular Android tablet, then why do I have to wait 4-7 weeks for my ASUS Transformer Prime?

http://www.amazon.com/Transformer-TF201-C1-CG-10-1-Inch-Tabl...

The hardware innovation that Android enables in the tablet market is going to prove to be one of the best things to happen to portable computing.

The Tegra 3 would not have happened without Android around.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-superchip.html
Agree that a basic test can be useful, but I think two points need to be made here.

1. It falls on the interviewer to be helpful and clear enough to help a candidate understand what is being asked. Often, a brainteaser of any sort explained poorly can be a death knell for anybody, no matter how smart they are. It's imperative that the interviewer is able to thoughtfully analyze a person's line of thinking moreso than whether or not they can get to a right answer.

2. Which brings me to the second point... The issue with a lot of brainteasers for poor interviewers is that it's a binary outcome. Either the candidate already knows the answer and comes off looking like a genius, or the candidate stumbles around in no man's land with no clue what you're talking about. Again, it's key here that the interviewer is able to guide a candidate through the thinking instead of sitting back and enjoying the show (which is admittedly sometimes fun).

I definitely think there is space for brainteasers, but it really requires an interviewer with the right training to get it right (which a company like Google does not have to worry about, but a start-up may). What I've actually heard is an interesting approach for start-ups recruiting is to just have the candidate sit and try to tackle a recent problem the company has faced with the interviewer.
Depends on what your definition of "std lib" is.

If you say a "std lib" is something that is installed along with the language, then CPAN fits the bill.

$ corelist CPAN

CPAN was first released with perl 5.004
New Virus Reinstalls IE6 on Infected Machines
A new computer virus called KaBlueE is spreading havoc around the internet by re-installing IE6 on infected machines. The timing of this pandemic is especially devastating in light of the fact that IE6 usage has finally dropped below 1%.
Becoming an Entrepreneur After a Billion Dollar Exit - Gilt's Kevin Ryan
OAuth Tutorial 5: Leverage a CA SiteMinder Session in an OAuth 2.0 Handshake
http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Main_Page looks like a good start.

I hope that open source curriculum takes off - IMO there are fact-based topics that translate easily to software learning, where a child's mastery can be measured accurately to provide a useful custom teaching plan.
SOPA Actions - I just emailed a friend at McGraw-Hill
I am very concerned about SOPA and similar legislation. Though I am in Canada, I will be affected by this legislation.

As I am sure many of you do, I have some friends at some of the organizations that support this bill. I decided to email one of them, though this will not change the tide, making young people in these organizations aware of the bill and its negative impacts is one avenue for influencing the higher ups and getting them to remove their support.

Anyways, here is what I sent, feel free to copy or comment.

Hey Matt,

Hope all is well. I don't usually do this, but I wanted to send you a quick email. You might be aware that the US Congress is currently debating the SOPA Bill against online piracy.

This is a horrible bill that will fundamentally alter the internet and society.

McGraw-Hill Education is a main sponsor of the bill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_that_support_the_Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

and as such, I wanted to bring this legislation to your attention. I do not know if you have the influence or power within the organization to change anything, but I think it is worth raising with your peers and superiors. While I understand McGraw-Hill and other publishers wish to prevent piracy of their copyrighted materials online, this bill goes way too far.

I won't bore you with details, but I think it is important that McGraw Hill re-evaluate their support of this bill that will wreak havoc on the internet and do serious damage to freedom of speech.

One good thread on the issue, along with video can be found here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3425973

Hope to see you soon!

Cheers,

Jonathan
I find it ironic (and a bit annoying) that the logic used in the article's title is the same logic that led to the high unemployment rate for architects: If a profession is in high demand today, it will still be in high demand four years from now. And conversely, if a profession is in low demand now, then it will remain so for the next four years (hence the title of the article).