skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can find the code we wrote here, along with the testing infrastructure:

https://github.com/erichocean/appengine-geospatial-lookups

Like Foursquare, mobile clients send their current location, plus a search radius, and App Engine code returns a result set ordered by distance.

We were getting query times with realistic data set sizes in the ~13 second range from the code you linked to. With the code above, we're ~40x faster. YMMV.
Even toy apps can be had for free on other platforms. Dotcloud, Heroku, and AppHarbor all don't charge for the first instance.
Something a bit different: I got a real boost in learning English and later French by reading Tintin and Asterix comics!
Do you have some sort of evidence for this reasoning?
Yes. Visit http://asciiexpress.net/diskserver. That is exactly what it does. It's in beta now. I plan to have 1000s of disk images soon.
Interview with Igor Sysoev, author of NGINX
My "choice & behavior" focus in college was pretty obscure at the time so it's cool to see Prospect Theory and other concepts start to go mainstream.
Seriously, who gives a fuck?

99% of the Hollywood output is filler. I've got over a hundred DVDs in my Netflix queue. The 3 I have at home might get watched this weekend, or they might idle for 2 or 3 weeks until we get a chance to watch them. I can barely remember the titles, and much less care about the release dates. At the rate I'm going DVD players won't even made manufacturered anymore before I get through my queue. And I'm supposed to care about a 2 month DVD release delay?

Hollywood shoots itself in the foot, and then insists on finder bigger guns with which to do so. Eventually they'll delay the release dates so long nobody will remember they wanted to see the movies anyway.
If preconceptions of domain users tend to not care about women being sexual objects or animals being shot, then I don't see how GoDaddy will be affected.

Now, legislation that means the domain users can have their domains taken from under their feet; you bet any sane domain user is angry, if not at least worried.

That said, they do have a lot of issues, exacerbated by limited support and up-selling.
True, and using %1$s style references in the format in order to change their ordering is a lot uglier than overriding a method. In my last example, I did provide a formatMessage() which was the equivalent of the createLogMessage() for purposes of overriding. Best of both worlds :)
1) You are making an assumption that the original design decision was made around cost. I bet the more likely fact is that they made the change and found out that it cost them $160. Remember, that was when AppEngine was a _beta_ product and it seems they got lucky the first time.

2) They seem to have an extreme use case. No one is going to argue that maybe AppEngine doesn't fit the bill for them. Or, one could argue that doing 6.5 billion writes times a large number of customers, across multiple datacenters is something that a lot of databases would choke on.

3) Running more queries, while admittedly hacky is less expensive than doing more writes.
new MyClass('bacon', 'eggs')

is perfectly possible, or am I misunderstanding your sentence?

How about exposing creation via `P.create`, `P.inherit` or something like it?
Sure I'm more than happy to code with someone assessing me.
I do not. I’m in the process of getting my own app developed and in my research I found that if you sign up for the iTunes Affiliate Program (www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/) , use your unique link where ever you send people to the iTunes Store or App store and you get a commission on anything they buy within a 24 hour session or until they click another affiliate link. So even if they don’t end up buying your app if they buy anything you’ll get a commission! So, make sure you include affiliate links inside your app too.

I’m not sure what type of analytics they provide back to you for any purchases or activity but hopeful it’s something to overcome the data disconnect once inside the App Store.
"Because a candidate with a mediocre background yet a strong showing on the whiteboard will get the job."

Is there evidence that this happens a lot? Does this happen at Google, where whiteboard programming during interviews is common?

"The problem is the over reliance on the whiteboard signal, despite a history of contradictory evidence (either positive or negative). If you are going to use typical whiteboard problems as a signal, it is really really hard to not heavily weigh the results, especially when sour."

What history of contradictory evidence? Do you have any suggestions for other signals that have proven effective in your experience?

I have very, very little experience as an interviewer and no experience dealing with and evaluating the success of new hires in the long term, so I definitely don't claim to have the answers here.
Yes, blame the operators. The operators designed their apps based on the original pricing incentive published by Google but got the rug pulled under them when Google hiked the price to completely change the pricing incentive and invalidate their design.

I got burnt by AppEng, too. Picking AppEng as a platform is one of my worst technical decisions.
I just started playing around with Geocoder on a side project. I'm still a little confused as to exactly how you are trying to implement this, but if you are working in ruby, it may help you get started.

Tutorial: http://railscasts.com/episodes/273-geocoder?view=asciicast

Geocoder Gem: http://www.rubygeocoder.com/

Good luck.
Did you get data on how other students did? I received an A in a science/tech/policy class which I didn't do half the assignments for. Talking around a bit, everyone else I knew got an A as well.
grellas - Thanks for one of the best HN comments I've read in a long time.

Do you have thoughts on a solution more reasonable than SOPA to enforce copyright overseas? If I set up piratedwindows7downloads.com in China (or Sealand), it's hard to see how I can be held accountable for my infringement via the DMCA.

(To clarify: I don't think SOPA is the right solution to this problem.)
About 2:

It's funny you cite the DMCA of all things as an example of "good" copyright protection. The DMCA is almost as bad a clusterfuck of a legislation as SOPA, if on a much smaller scale. DMCA takedowns are often without due process either (just look at all the mistaken and automated takedowns on Youtube, or the fact that it's largely abused to try to gain an edge over competitors) and safe havens are a broken concept in the first place. Also, as far as I am aware the DMCA places the burden of proof on the receiver of the takedown notice to show that there was no infringement taking place (correct me if I should be wrong). That's ridiculous.

Additionally, the DMCA doesn't address the core problem of copyright either, which is that it's the core foundation of an outdated business model that needs to go the way of the dinosaur, and it needs to do so fast before it does any more incredibly difficult to to reverse damage on our future society.

We as a society need to find ways to rewards the creation of culture and art. Copyright isn't and will not ever be the solution. It probably never was.

A final remark:

>While copyright acts dating back hundreds of years to England were sometimes used as instruments of government oppression

That's a funny thing to say, especially the "sometimes". Oppression (censorship) was basically the reason copyright was invented in the advent of printing presses slowly becoming widely available in the middle of the 16th century.
Why continuous deployment?
I used to know a Chinese man who learned English by watching American television shows with Chinese subtitles. He watched something like 40 hours of television a week this way for six months, and on the other side of it he was conversant in English.
Columbia Sportswear Boundary Run II
DOM4 Draft Published
mammal = cow; // [1]
pig = mammal; // [2] Checks OK statically, but now pig holds a Cow.
print(pig.oink()); // [3] NoSuchMethodException if we get this far.

As far as I understand this means that no precondition can be encoded in the variable type. A function with a Pig argument can still cause a NoSuchMethodException exception because the argument can actually hold a Cow instance.
I should have set a timer on this one but I think it took 10 mins. This is what I ended up with in javascript - notice that it can print the whole triangle as a by-product of the implementation, but also because I have a (bad) habit of doing more than just what was required. Most of the implementation (testing) issues I suffered were due to lack of js knowledge (where is clone?) but the original skeleton of code that I wrote just thinking about the problem didn't need to change. I wouldn't have got it exactly right without a debugger though.

function printPascal(x, triangle) {
var row = [];
while (x) {
var next = clone(row);
next.push(1);
for (var i = 0; i < row.length - 1; i++)
next[i + 1] = row[i] + row[i + 1];
row = next;
x--;
if (triangle)
print(whitespace(x) + row);
}
if (!triangle)
print(row);
}

function clone(list) {
var clone = [];
for (i in list)
clone.push(list[i]);
return clone;
}

function whitespace(x) {
var white = " ";
while (x) {
white += " ";
x--;
}
return white;
}

printPascal(10);

Ignoring the whitespace and clone functions, is there a much simpler way of doing this?
Pulse is pretty big: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kin...

Does Heroku have any particularly high-traffic sites?
Snooping around Wolfram Alpha's API: The sig parameter.
'but I tend to think that problems like "Pascal's Triangle" don't represent what we work on day-to-day'

There are plenty of software jobs where that statement is absolutely true. I am not interviewing people for those jobs.

Taking a well-defined problem such as "write code to print the Nth row of pascal's triangle" is substantially easier than most of what we deal with on a day to day basis. The hard part is discovering and defining the problem well enough to get the point where it is as easy as "here is what we need to do, write some code to do it". Once you get there, whipping out the code needs to be second nature.

As cletus said in his post - a problem like this is a negative filter. If someone has a hard time whipping out the code for a well-defined problem like that, they will have a very hard time here.

If they can't, it doesn't mean they are a bad programmer. It doesn't mean they can't be successful in the industry.

It is simply a strong signal that they would not be successful at Google. And since I'm interviewing people for jobs at Google that's what I care about :-)
Glog: A 350 line blog engine in NodeJS
def pascal(i):
o=[1]
for j in xrange(1,i):
o.append(o[-1] * (i - j) / j)
return o

Recursion's nice, but this isn't really the place for it. Especially since python has a maximum stack depth.
Its not much good to those people who cant afford it. In fact it might as well not be there at all. I think that is the point.

Steven has said he owes his life to a FREE healthcare system provided by the government and you want to dismiss this claim with a rant about how great the US system is. Just typical.

Why can't you just accept that 'socialised care' has worked for someone and has done some good. He would have got the same treatment if he had been rich or poor. Like millions of other people in the UK.

Its not about who's money pays for it, its about respecting the value of all human life equally regardless of wealth. In this respect the American system does not even come close to competing.
Ask HN: What do you think of our new iOS app? Promo codes inside
We've made a new app called Reminders with Friends that uses Gamecenter multiplayer instead of our server to send and receive time and GPS triggered reminders. I really like this community and wanted to get some feedback. We do recognize there are some UI changes we can do to streamline the app, but any feedback would be great.

App Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reminders-with-friends/id486230629?mt=8

Website Link: www.slyceapps.com/reminders

Promo Codes (If you take a promo code, please leave a comment):

MPNE93EYN9T4

3WEALE4HR7H9

FK7WXRT74JLW

N37WJFPE46EY

FXYXJERAM6TE

99WXPKPRRRW7

XKFJA939MY4X
The Savaria Infinity elevator can easily blend with any kind of home décor
The Savaria Infinity elevator offers the ultimate in luxury and reliability. This home elevator ensures smooth, whisper-soft operation and is specially designed to meet elevator and building safety guidelines.
Very likely that they already explained to their relatives after bringing it up.

I even heard that people in IT have said that other people they work with have no idea about the ramifications of SOPA and many other anti-Internet bills.
"My appeal isn't to give people a reason to be lazy, but to admit that we don't know how the brain learns or re-learns things."
If we dont know how the brain learns why should we hurriedly conclude that it is genetic and fixed.Why cant we adopt an attitude that will make us better and work our butts off?
Exactly. Also, I always like to ask people making that claim how they explain the apparently miraculous existence of art before 1557 (or 1710, depending on whether you consider the Stationer's Charter or the Statute of Anne to be the first real instance of copyright law).
10 minutes? That's it? That's barely time enough to get introduced, let alone get solid, specific advice. An instant reaction to my start-up might be nice, but it won't be substantial information that I could truly act on. He would probably just have to fall back on the same information that I could find on his blog or Slideshare in order to fit into the 10 minute window.

However, 30 minutes or more, and I'd definitely consider bidding.
Facebook, nueva función llamada "Ver amistades”
Because having something "fun" and "lighthearted" in the space occasionally might drive higher cpm's when they actually sell ads for the space.
HelloFax is hiring a VP of Marketing & Business Development
We've been growing organically since launch. But, we're now looking to be more systematic.

About us:

- We're building the paperless office

- We're based in San Francisco. We have an awesome office in Lower Haight, near Toronado

About you

- You're execution focused

- You love to find & build distribution channels.

- You have a track record of building predictable revenue growth

- You can identify key partnerships

- People tell stories of how you pulled off the ultimate hustle

What we offer:

- A competitive salary

- Health and dental insurance

- Generous equity

- An awesome work environment

- The opportunity to join an early stage startup as our sixth member

Email us at jobs at hellofax dot com and we'll go from there!
Lovely design, but unfortunately loading times are super slow for me... The header and footer loads fine, but the loading graphic for the middle section was turning for approx. 60-90 seconds before the content loaded :(

Then, once the content is loaded, the animation between the "About Framous > Select a layout > Select Photos > Select a Frame > Get Framous!" pages also takes too long, which spoils the user experience in my opinion.

Great start though. If you can improve these issues, I think you will have a really nice site.
> Correctness is easier to achieve for a VM that doesn't
> rely on static soundness guarantees, because you don't
> need the complexity of bytecode verification.

I don't follow. You only need to verify bytecode if a), you have bytecode in the first place, and b), you assume the existence of a hostile compiler or other external bytecode source. Neither of these apply to Dart.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/developers-start-your...

"Google App Engine is free to use during the preview release, but the amount of computing resources any app can use is limited. In the future, developers will be able to purchase additional computing resources as needed, but Google App Engine will always be free to get started."

You got 2+ years of use for 'free' and now they decided to turn it into a supported business model and are asking you to pay for what you use. Seems reasonable to me.

I don't disagree that they fubar'd their original pricing release announcement and should have had multithreading Python 2.7 for those folks.

But they did listen to the (loud) feedback, made adjustments and even apologized (were you there at the ThirstyBear meetup where they bought us all beers?).

Not having to hire an IT staff or be woken up in the middle of the night when AWS decides to reboot the host and your servers go down is worth its weight in gold.
Assembly for C Programmers
Wasn't art then mostly paid for by the Church, the government, or wealthy patrons?
This is an awful interview question. It falls into the same trap that a lot of questions fall into: this is not something that would likely turn up in every-day work. Why are you asking a candidate questions about work they will never do?

It's also too Computer Science. They're not interviewing for a CS course. They're interviewing to write, debug, maintain and ship code. What you should be exploring is code style, correctness, error catching, and the thought process that goes into it. Expand the question in that manner.

Code golf is a very poor signal for a good engineer.

Edit: For example, ask "Will this work for all input values of n?". Negative values might have issues, and as 'n' increases it either takes too long to complete or runs out of memory. It's surprising how many candidates don't understand that - and the way this question is asked would not discover it.
Got a citation? If that's the case then it isn't the case world wide. My mother is the author of two reasonably successful high school textbooks and did all the writing, image selection, etc long before an editor gets their hands on it to polish.
Hulu has horribly obnoxious ads - repeated multiple times per episode of the show. Voting "not relevant" on an ad doesn't prevent it from appearing. There was an ad my wife found quite disturbing (about exorcism), and it played almost every ad segment. I had to mute and tab away.

And this is on a free trial of the Hulu Plus paid subscription service.

I just can't see paying a subscription fee for that user experience. In contrast, with Netflix, every time the program hits one of the advertisement breaks, you get the little psychological reward: "Hurray! No ads!"
Tech startups don't use ERP systems. Pretty much everyone starts with QuickOoks.
Yes, super slow for me as well. Love the concept though!
Stigler’s law and Avogadro’s number
You should write this up somewhere and post it to HN and the App Engine Reddit. Getting geospatial right is hard, and it sounds like you've done a good job.
Factorials risk integer overflow in the intermediate calculations, though something similar can work.
Server seems severely overloaded -- here's the latest archive.org mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20101017092822/http://www.jamesmo...
Using paper to clean the anus is not only wasteful, it's unpleasant and ineffective. The universal solvent is clearly the superior option for this daily task.

As nice a thing as it is, it doesn't take a $400 bidet to wash your ass with water. Use your imagination. You can even do it in the woods, like a bear with a water bottle.

And if you insist on using paper, I humbly recommend the delicate tissues of the Christian Bible, which should be a fine alternative to such old darlings of western bathroom culture as the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, and are available for free all over the damned place.
Also, writing this:

> We don't want Dart to be a testbed for active programming
> languages research, but I think we're open to taking up
> ideas after they become well understood and unsurprising,
> a.k.a. a little bit boring.

... after saying this in the first paragraph:

> Dart uses types in a way that might seem strange. Most
> popular languages that offer a type system use it very
> differently. If you're familiar with types in Java, Haskell,
> Scala, or any statically typed language, you may wonder
> why on earth Dart makes the choices that it does.

... makes me wonder why on earth Dart makes the type system choices that it does ;)
So instead of learning how to admin a server - a skill that is transferable anywhere and is pretty much a commodity skill for most web-based startups when they're - you know, "starting up" - you suggest people tie themselves to a proprietary app engine and datastore which limits what you can do in ways that aren't really transportable anywhere else? Spending time learning about GAE oddities, pricing limits, language limits/restrictions and such... seems a pretty horrible waste of time for people to engage in.
I see this as awful for "real-world" because of the privacy concerns. Think Amazon won't analyze the heck out of that traffic? Uhh.

Also, before, gov't would need to install wiretapping stuff at central offices. With this, Amazon or whatever SPDY provider could just let them have "virtual wiretaps" which I'm sure won't be abused.

From an engineering standpoint, this is cool, but I can't see how this would function without introducing way worse privacy problems. In a world where we'll most likely need to rely on a decentralized Internet that is impossible to regulate, this is a step in the wrong direction.
Like any other tool "the cloud", as you say, can be the right fit for the right job.
Also see http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, an automatic CS paper generator. One of their papers was accepted to a conference, and they gave some hilarious speeches (also in link).
The site won't even load for me. I've been trying on and off over a few hours... What gives?
Sorry for the delayed response -- I do want to respond to several points. First, you're sort of correct that you need the 2to3 tool for a program to target Python 2 and Python 3. There are certain programming techniques (such as "from __future__ import *) that will allow you to write you code in such a way that it will run on both Python 2 and 3, although I've not used these on any project of size. But if you wrote your code using plain vanilla 2.x, then you'd need to use the 2to3 tool, although again I've not used it myself and have heard mixed reviews.
Unicode is probably the biggest change from Python 2 to 3 that introduces incompatibilities, although I think there are tricks for dealing with that as well. I like Ruby's approach to Unicode based on what you described. Why do you think this is a mistake?
I expect you are correct that Ruby is much further along in moving from 1.8 to 1.9, because it sounds like Ruby has handled the upgrade path well (to be honest, I'm not sure Python has).
Sorry, the 'history of contradictory evidence' should have read the 'candidate's history of contradictory evidence' (e.g. having a really strong portfolio and work history to contradict a poor showing on the whiteboard).

I try to interview a candidate like he is a friend I haven't caught up with in many years. I want to have as honest and interesting of a conversation as possible, hear all his opinions, and learn all about what he has done and can do. If I feel the conversation was honest, the personalities were compatible, and there is evidence of good work and reliability in the past, I will likely consider the candidate a hire.

The problem with this method can be

1) It relies on the candidate having some sort of tangible history (referrals, solid portfolio or resume, open source projects, etc...), so new grads are tougher for example.

2) Having an 'on the level' conversation with somebody who knows they are being interviewed is not always possible. Nor are all interviewers capable of extracting useful information this way.
> North Koreans think their country is the best too.

I often see many similarities between the USA and North Korea too.
Flex SDK accepted by Apache, enters incubation phase