skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It'll take a lot for them to be very profitable. Look at Alice.com: a lot of hype a few years ago and now struggling. When you're talking about groceries, you're already in low margin market. Now add discounts? commissions? % cut? lower margins
It's probably more likely that it means you didn't graduate in CS within the past couplefew years, which I suspect is really the purpose of these filters.

Would you rather be tested on your ability to comprehend a multi-kloc codebase and make correctness-preserving modifications to it?

That depends on how rigorous and well-maintained the existing test suite is, or even worse, that it is only half done. Which half? Guess, I think you'll be surprised.
Your solution is less important than your process for getting there. The interviewer wants to determine how you think about problem solving. He wants to make sure that you do not just hack at the code until it seems to work. The amount of time required is generally not important unless it becomes excessive. For a problem like this 10 to 15 minutes is probably reasonable, 30 minutes might be a red flag and 45 minutes might end the interview (these times are very rough estimates and might be longer depending on the amount of discussion that takes place). Once a working solution is developed it is common (in general, I do not work at Google) to ask an applicant how they might improve or optimize it without actually having them do the additional work.
Your frienemy the ORM
They give you an option of putting in a release date, or immediate release after approval.
On both Linux and OS X, you can 'freeze' an app by sending it the old-style unix signal SIGSTOP. I've done this before, and it sort-of-works, but it doesn't tend to play very well with GUIs. If an app has a window up when you SIGSTOP it, the window will hang until you send the app SIGCONT to continue. And under OS X, at least, if you leave an app stopped for too long it seems to make the rest of the GUI become unresponsive; so I wouldn't really recommend it. But it's something you can experiment with.
I am personally offended at the loss of my karma and will be downvoting you in reveng--DAMMIT I MISSED.

you win this round.
"It seems to me that the popularity of activism and protesting do little to affect change, whereas more commonly yes than no they simply represent an inconvenience to everyone else who can't be bothered with another struggle/burden in their lives. There must be more mature and effective means of defeating SOPA than having a group of web services throwing a temper tantrum."

It seems that way to you, but it is false. If it weren't for activism and protesting we'd be living in a situation where only rich white males from certain families have any rights and everyone is a slave or near-slave. You know, how the country started working before blacks, women, labor, etc. activists started making noise.

Your approach means everyone turns into slaves again.
EC2 is Basically One Big Rip-Off
This comic seemed super low-budget and cheesy from the website, but after reading the preview and laughing out loud I am forced to part with ~$1 to continue reading. Touche comic book writer genius, touche.
Sharing information is the only way to advance human progress. I'm not religious at all, but I certainly consider sharing to be a fundamental aspect of humanity and an important right we should all defend and help to advance. Richard Stallman, with his opposition to the "war on sharing" would probably agree. Are we Kopimists? To what extent is this actually a religion?
Wow, clarity.

Changing your state of mind is a beautiful way to put it.

I'm sure I've flirted or experienced some form of burnout without knowing it to be such.

I've been thinking about how you put it for the last hour.
I work at McGraw-Hill and had no clue they supported SOPA. Ah well....
Is it really that bad to be a great developer and have a degree at the same time?
On thing you may consider doing, if you aren't already, is using one of the many libraries available which ask users to rate your app.

In the last release of one of my apps I implemented one of the libraries and I saw the amount of ratings soar. Especially the positive ratings.
Too Much Efficiency
I didn't work on that one, no, but I wouldn't assume the time was fake either. :)

We often had internal solutions (and externally-submitted solutions as well) that were orders of magnitude faster than the average. There was a very wide range of execution times. E.g., we had solutions to the Queens & Knights puzzle (in the archive) that ran in tens of milliseconds, if I recall correctly. Typical solutions we received took orders of magnitude longer.

Usually when one solution was a million times faster than another, it was because the fast solution exploited a clever algorithm or data representation -- e.g., representing an 8x8 chess board mask as a single 64-bit register rather than as an array of bytes.
(a) This is great. I've been using Maps+, which is a really impressive little app, but it's complexity often makes it cumbersome. Yours is very barebones, but in playing around with it, that's an asset.

(b) With (a) in mind, there really needs to be a way to plot to/from somewhere other than (what the iPhone thinks is) your current location.

(c) It would be great to be able to see bike lanes, but I understand how much extra effort that would require; so don't sweat it, but if this does rise to the level of a business...

(d) Get rid of the icon-sheen in the App store. It's not enabled on the actual phone icon, and it looks so much better that way. It looks cheap with the sheen in the App-store: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4087500/does-itunes-store...
My winner is Veronica Mars's Mac whose scheme to get a new car was downright evil genius (scalable too, but she chose to limit herself). Of course, Burn was right, RISC changed everything, though not yet in desktop PCs.
Sadly, for baseball, this is far from the case :(
Agreed. While there is some good, open tech out there (OmegaT, MemoQ - for open formats, at least), there seems to be lots of room for improvement. Email should be in your mailbox now.
Important Economic Trends: (Re)emergence Of The Entrepreneurial Small Business
Do I think that SOPA and PIPA (please don't forget about mentioning PIPA - Google, Facebook, etc!) are so bad that a complete blackout would be appropriate? Yes, I do.

But I also think that a call to action is even more important, so hopefully they don't just go offline, but present the visitors with an overlay or a widget or something to call their representatives, and with some clear explanation in layman terms of what SOPA and PIPA do.
It's exactly the opposite, actually. Most US citizens, not engaged in debate on international forums, get really pissed off at the arrogance of foreigners for expressing opinions on US politics. How dare they, they think.
If your abstractions are beautiful and clean, then you're absolutely right -- hiding the complexity is great! But you know what? 99% of the time, your abstractions are shitty and leaky. And then I need to know what's under them in order to work with them confidently.

So yes, absolutely hide complexity. But hide it judiciously; hide it only when you know you have a clean, well-designed and well-constructed abstraction that won't leak to the outside. But if you hide complexity behind a leaky abstraction, which most of them are; then now, as they say, you have two problems.
Tumblr Is Launching Its Own Journalism Operation
I can envision a situation where the content is free but you can purchase premium versions with enhanced lesson plans and interactivity. Kind of like free and paid apps.

To make this a reality, I'd consider building a platform that serves as a centralized repository for open information/knowledge and gives the information some structure (Ontology). With that in place, people can build applications on top of the open information (interactive apps/charts, etc)

To encourage qualified people to contribute, edit, and update the repositories, consider layering in a Quora/StackOverflow type voting/reputation system with a Kickstarter crowd funding component to fund qualified folks and allow them to dedicate significant time to the project.
How To Grab Attention With Your Website Home Page Introduction
Hm, works just fine on my Galaxy Nexus.
I think deliberately "missing the point" in this case is part of their propaganda strategy.
I mention that so people who dislike that sort of thing don't bother clicking the link
Salvatore, it is great that VMWare supports you and Redis: representative of the best open source model (open source developers paid to concentrate on writing code). Especially great for Redis users since the source code is still open source, can be read, modified, etc.
Opinions on opinions
Is there any software to seamless convert XML to Latex (to PDF) to HTML and vice/versa? That would go a long way to helping with the relatively poor formatting of the current efforts.
Why is it that anyone with any kind of money that needs urgent care comes to the US?

Do they? Here in Ireland people going for specialized treatment would go to private hospitals in the UK.
Ektar is an incredible new stock. That and their new formula 16mm Ektachrome have really impressed me as of late.
How to Work for NASA (In Your Free Time)
There's huge a difference between having to look up syntax/api and what is being discussed here. Everyone will occasionally forget the syntax for something, or the argument order for a function... especially in a language they don't use all the time.

For this sort of test, all that is necessary is that you understand the basic idea of a for-loop...the basic idea of how to format a string...remember there's a good chance you're writing in pseudo-code.

Presumably however if you are a programmer, there is at least one language where you should be able to complete this task without looking anything up. It requires only the simplest of language constructs/library functions.

The exception of course is if this is a job for say, a Python programmer...and on your resume you say you are a "Python expert". The fact that you have to look up the syntax for basic constructs in Python would suggest you were lying on your resume. That's one of the things this exercise tests for.

If you said in your resume "I have experience with other languages, but I can learn Python"...then just being able to do this exercise in pseudo-code or any language of your choice would show you have basic programming skills and should be able to pick up Python.

If you really have to remind yourself what a for-loop is then yes, maybe you do have to go back to school/hit the books and study harder.
Wake up, cook breakfast, work from home
I'm sure someone knows that ratio, but not me. :)

But the puzzle process, as originally conceived, (in 2000!) was not necessarily supposed to be a hard filter. As an applicant, you had several ways to stand out, and doing a great job on a puzzle was one. Having someone who already worked for us say you were awesome was another. Being an open source superhero was another. Etc.

In actual implementation, though, it probably was/is used as a hard filter.
I work for a web development agency, which develops projects for some of the largest companies. We generally work on App Engine (python).

At the day of my interview, they didn't really ask me any brain teasers.

They asked if I knew App Engine, I showed them my open source project for App Engine.

They asked if I knew django-nonrel, again I showed them another open source project of mine, that used django-nonrel.

That was it.

Since the day I was hired, I did plenty of good work. Now I'm entrusted with a global CMS project which is being used by hundreds people and viewed by millions.

If they had asked me brainteasers, I would probably have failed most of them, as I don't really practise with those kind of problems. But I like building web apps. And that's what I am doing right now.

If your company earns money by solving brainteasers, then you should ask them during interview.
I agree that performances are bad on EC2. That's because of the overhead of virtualization.

It's not a "Big Scam" though, it's just bad performances. It still has lots of pros, instant deployment to name only one.
There is also a potential synergy with dangover's incubator idea.

dangover, quite impressed with your accomplishment. This is perhaps a wrong headed idea (edit: but I would do it if I had your business and product skills):

Take your (iOS/Obj-C) engineering, product development, business development, and startup skills and experience, and combine them with your incubator idea. There is a gap (and not a new one at that) that has many startups and even established businesses in NYC feeling the pain, and that is finding and keeping tech talent. An incubator that, for example, also provided a shared framework for rolling out prototypes and 1st cut products, and had a core staff of experienced engineers to triage, could crank things out, get the products out in front of the customers, and then you can weed out the wheat from the chaff.

All the best to you. Enjoy your well earned success.
Epic Games denounces SOPA, despite its ESA membership
The more I learned the more I realized that the bulk of his intelligence and his performance just came from study and practice

Bullshit. When a 3rd grader masters differential calculus it is almost entirely hard-core innate intelligence combined with an innate ability to concentrate. No normal 3rd grade has the ability to study at that level. People who succeed often want to think it was entirely their hard work, and that lucky genes had no real influence.

Think about it.

If you take someone of average intelligence, he could spend his entire life, sweating and studying like crazy every day,
and not get through MIT. Even Bill Gates went from Theory to Applied math at Harvard when he realized how difficult it was. If you think he isn't a determined, hard-working person, well... The truth is, he just didn't have the freakish IQ required for the work.
It might be useful to be able to toggle a "Details of next election" overlay, bringing up info on how vulnerable each representative is in his or her next primary and general elections. This would allow people to focus attention on the few representatives who have close races coming up.

My guess is these candidates will be by far the most receptive to public opinion.

Even better would be to include information on challengers and their stance on SOPA as well. That would make it easy to focus attention on ideal candidates: those who are for SOPA and have close races coming up against challengers who are against it. Maybe we can get a couple of them to switch.

Let me know if you think that's a good idea and want help implementing it. My email's in my profile.
My wife and I homeschool, and I've had her detail resources and whatnot here: http://homeschooly.com/blog/

Disclaimer: The links there are Amazon affiliate "enhanced" and I've experimented with other advertising on the site.
Pen.io founders had pretty much the same experience: http://devinterviews.pen.io/
Here's the main thing that fucks this all up: there are a very limited set of brainteasers out there.

This means that if someone gets your brainteaser right in an interview, there's, say, a 90% chance that they've heard a question just like it before (or one with a similar "trick"). The false positive rate is too high. Many people know the answers to brainteasers far beyond their ability.

If you were to ask a completely new brainteaser, as difficult as the canonical ones, but requiring a different trick, you would get a very low success rate.

Side note: there's too much criticism on HN about "what does this question have to do with my day-to-day job". This is a bullshit point. The point of a brainteaser is to test problem solving ability, creativity, etc. It may not do a very good job of that, but just because you won't be "reversing sentences in place" in your job doesn't mean that the question is invalid. Think about what the question is trying to test.
Especially with games, in the prototyping stage a lot of programmers fall into the trap of trying to abstract as much as they can out of everything they do. Though this makes sense in certain situations, it hurts the game prototype by slowing it down and weighing it down with limitations of the abstractions.
This. We use this extensively for our nine year old and it's been fantastic.
I agree that it is much more flexible. However, is it really worth paying 10-20 times more? I'm not sure.

The price I got at Joe's is not even "that" cheap. You can get a MUCH faster box at Softlayer for not much more, making EC2 look even more pathetic.

Performance/price wise, I think EC2 is definitely a scam. The flexibility aspect of it is what makes the comparison more difficult.
Oh I see, I misread their free tier instructions. That's good to know.
I don't want to put words in the OPs mouth, but in my experience knowing that you should use a recursive solution probably puts you ahead of the curve. Being able to produce a solution which has the correct general form possibly after a little prompting would count as a reasonable pass.
re: "...Couch just doesn't scale...": I am curious, did you try using the BigCouch project, open source released from Cloudant? I have never used BigCouch on a customer project, but have experimented with it and it is easy to setup and is the scaling architecture that Cloudant uses for their data store as a service business.
Why is it that anyone with any kind of money that needs urgent care comes to the US? I will give you a hint: it's not because of nationalized health care.

Many of the inbound medical tourists to the U.S. are coming from countries that don't have nationalized health care or are coming because their nationalized health care system is paying most of the cost of their care and trip. Relatively few are buying their way into better care vs. a nationalized health system.

Also, the number of inbound U.S. medical tourists is around 70,000[1], while the number of outbound U.S. medical tourists is around 650,000[2] (surgery dominates). There are many factors involved here, but as a basic matter, it would be simpler to say that people leave the U.S. for medical care much more than they visit for it.

[1] 2008 number: http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/25/health-hospitals-care-forbe...

[2] 2009 number: http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/article1079824.ece
Israel Uses Facebook Timeline to Show an Addict's Descent Over Time
Obviously, the sophisticated pirates of today use telepathy now and thus have no need for files.
Ya, effort is required for sure, but I think the papers should be marked according to categories that actually can be marked, such as grammar and spelling, factual correctness etc. There is still some subjectivity, but it's way more fair.
Drop by http://tex.stackexchange.com/
The Great Phone Swap
It's a tough business, you're right. But the nice thing about partnering with existing, main-line grocery retailers is that there's capacity to scale more quickly than a site that's wholly direct-to-consumer. And there's no inventory or shipping to mess with in this model.
Flagged for a linkbait title that isn't supported by the body of the article.

EDIT: Title has been changed to something more reasonable, so I've removed my flag.
A tale of Stormy F. Smith, an outstanding manager
Anyone can write it in Python. I think fragsworth did his in J: (-@|. |."_1 [: ":@-.&0"1 !~/~)@i. 5
We participate in a homeschool group (secular) which has a small number of families, as well as a co-operative (which folks teach various classes). We found both through Yahoo groups for our area (hamptonroads, va). I'll admit I was skeptical at first but now can't imagine not homeschooling.
You mentioned you're using google's directions API, what is this doing differently than the walking directions in maps? Doesn't that include bike paths, passages etc?
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind coding a program that solved problems of the river-crossing kind, expressing it as a search through a state space with constraints.
A modest proposal to give Free Software equal legal standing as proprietary.
I still remembered a decent amount of C from high school & college (I'm just old enough to have snuck through before Java took over CS). I brushed up on the ol' K&R and then read about 2/3rds of O'Reilly's Programming iOS 4 book.

Apple's documentation and sample code is excellent, and really nicely integrated into XCode. Once iOS 5 came out, I learned almost exclusively from there. Of course, Stack Overflow is great for very specific gotchas and questions.

I did all the work on a MacBook Pro, with glossy screen, usually plugged in to a 27" Apple display (also glossy). The gloss doesn't cause me any problems unless I sit in very bright sunlight, but all things equal, I would prefer matte. Xcode is a bit of a pig, so it definitely does best on a big display.
Should Everyone be a Programmer?
> For me getting reviews written on sites like MacLife and AppAdvice made all the difference for sales.

How so? The initial traffic from those sites? Other sites picking up the story? Ongoing SEO benefits?
After 15 years of programming one doesn't really remember what the heck Pascal's triangle looks like. You know why? Because knowing about Pascal's triangle doesn't bring in a paycheck.

If you program for a living, ask yourself in the last 5 years how many times did you have to write Pascal's triangle? How many times did you have to solve a brain teaser at work? I'll answer for me -- 0 times.

So I am advocate of posing a relevant problem and taking the candidate on the whiteboard through that problem. Not "let's imagine you have 100 horses, now one dies, blah blah..." but "Here is what we are working on. We have 1000 concurrent users, there is an open TCP connection to each, help us solve this particular latency problem". Yeah they might not know about Pascal's triangle but they if they can understand and show an ability to solve your particular problem then they are a candidate for you.
Congrats with the app :) And thanks for sharing your experience. You're high up on HN, so your marketing skillz are improving. Just keep marketing your app and work on the next one.
But why not? I mean if this bill is really passing, like everyone claims, then where is the official information on how the actual language of the bill "changes the internet " as we know it.. I hate SOPA but it does not seem like anybody is doing anything to really stop it. I mean Google, Facebook, etc should stop all activity, shut down for a month and use all its resources to fight this thing with speeches, commercials, cold calling, blah , blah, blah.. If nobody does that then they really don't care or this bill is not as bad as they (Google,FB,etc) say it is.
This happened with programming/IT a few years ago. Many people entered into college in 1998-2002 with the impression that they would practically have to fight off the job offers. Of course, it didn't quite turn out that way. However, the impression remained and students continued enrolling in CS programs because there was money in programming. A consequence of this was an excess of employees and a relative dearth of jobs (or again that was the impression) so they flooded grad schools instead. Many schools saw record enrollment levels in the 2005-2008 time frame.

This cycle is not new, nor will it cease to occur. People generally follow the trends which means they are typically late to the party.

EDIT: To add another situation. The early 2000s were a great time for the housing market so many builders began ramping up construction projects with the anticipation of sales and no actual sales. The consequence of this is decent housing developments with <150k$ homes that would easily have pushed 200k$ a few years earlier, assuming the builders didn't abandon the projects altogether. Now no one wants to buy (or can't if they've become unemployed or been hit with paycuts/furloughs) and these cheap homes remain on the market.
Advanced Metrics Tracking for Webapps | AddThis Blog
Teksavvy's New Pricing Plan
EC2 is a scam? Are you accusing Amazon of fraud?