skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) If the whiteboard and lack of tools is the problem, what would you think about projecting your monitor?

2) Nobody cares how good your solution is, they care about seeing your thought process while solving it. They are likely waiting breathlessly to ask you follow up questions about your poor implementation that will further enlighten them about the way you think. It would be a downright shame to disappoint them by writing a great solution right away.

3) This is a legitimately big problem. Everyone responds to the pressure of interviews differently and it is definitely not necessarily correlated to their response to the pressures of the workplace. Ideally you would notify the interviewer(s) of your anxiety beforehand and they would be willing to work with you on either a short take-home (which a lot of people also hate for other reasons), or some type of working interview (which is often infeasible).

The original article was about a specific-language whiteboard problem, which is open to arguments about tooling and internet access, but many people ask these sorts of questions in terms of pseudocode, structured written english, or even discourse out-loud, and the goal is not to determine programming language or algorithm knowledge, but problem solving skills.

edit: phrasing
> Your company doesn't do performance reviews for employees?

Every performance review I ever attended was a bad joke, for the same reasons companies have problems filtering between candidates.

Seriously, if there's a problem with the hiring process (it was just an example btw, I'm not saying there is one at your company), then why do you think performance reviews work out well?
Because a candidate with a mediocre background yet a strong showing on the whiteboard will get the job. The problem isn't not hiring somebody having a bad day. The problem is the over reliance on the whiteboard signal, despite a candidate's 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.
I think it's fantastic - meets my requirements and is free - I'd probably pay a small fee for it though, very useful.
Proust.com being closed without any information on why
That is exactly what post.fm is all about. Check it out - we'd love for you to become a beta tester and perhaps pick your brain a bit ;)
As a fan I urge you not to shut it down. Please consider selling it or something!
My main issue with this type of question is that people will take this (or other popular questions) as the catch-all type of problem to ask in any interview for any candidate.

If you are hiring a generalist or you are in a company that writes code in everything under the sun (Experience in Java, Ruby, Python, iOS, and Javascript preferred!), these questions are probably appropriate.

But when you are hiring a web developer to work on your Rails app - the interview question should not revolve around optimizing space complexity or a recursive algorithm that exploits symmetry. The question should be more targeted to what the day in and out work will be - write some RSpec tests, fill in some controller methods, create a simple model. Use that as the filter.

I don't think anyone applying to a Rails gig is going to balk at doing that kind of interview and I think it will be a better predictor than if they can find the largest substring palidrome in O(n).
On and off kernel hacker here. Compile and test the release candidates Linus puts out every fortnight. When the inevitable breakage happens, use `git bisect` to track down the offending commit.

It's tedious and time consuming but you will make people very happy. The only way to test something as big and critical as the kernel is by having users actually run it.
Ruby gem (without scraper): https://github.com/michaeldv/gabbler
Taylormade rbz driver
I'm intrigued by the stream wrapper idea, but I don't think your "change the format" is general enough... sure, you can change the format, as long as you change it to something that uses the other arguments sprintf is being passed, but that's a pretty strong restriction. Maybe it would be workable if you had log() take optional argument(s) that represent the args to sprintf, too, but I'm not sure that it's worth it.
It is real-time, it's just that current email clients aren't designed to be efficient, it's purely UI's fault. Again this is something we've fixed at post.fm, cant wait to show you guys.
Proper Care and Maintenance for Wigs
With Amazon AWS you can handle the scaling yourself, when you need it, with components tailored to your use cases, and better latency.

And with Heroku you can have it taken care for you, following a few simple rules.

So, why exactly would one use the crippled GAE platform, that constantly breaks its promises (re: reliability),
forces you to code with very little flexibility (and, no, not every app that needs to automatically and massively scale "has to be coded exactly like a GAE app anyway"), costs a fortune (and sometimes an unexpected fortune), and breaks for you as soon as you need a technology not on offer?
We hire based on personality. Before we bring an interviewee in we have looked at their bitbucket, github, portfolio, etc.. By time they get to the interview we know they are good enough to work for us, so we just talk technology with them and gauge based on that.

If the person is inexperienced or does not have a very public profile (no opensource projects), then we will drop back and throw them some random problems to solve but never a puzzle, since most people just memorize the solutions to puzzles or learn the solutions after doing enough interviews.

We prefer giving them problems like writing a text based guess the number game or tic tac toe. Mindless easy to solve project. They could spit it out in the shortest number of lines, which is what the bad puzzle questions encourage, but we are looking for how well the design/architect code. So the person who creates a good class structure and writes tests for his/her game is the one who gets hired, not the person who prefers shortest lines of code.
A better way to store and search on people's names
We're built on appengine at Getaround.
I hesitate to post this, because I think current copyright law is ridiculous, as is SOPA, and I love mash-ups and mix-culture, etc.

But.. the fact of the matter is that for music at least, I'm pretty sure that without copyright in the early days, we would never have had the variety and originality we've seen over the past 100 years or so. I remember an anecdote about the Rolling Stones, that they only started writing originals when they realized they could make money off of the publishing. I also notice that lots of early church hymns and political songs were merely new sets of lyrics put on the same melody over and over again. There was no incentive to make new melodies, so people reused. It was a far cry from the diversity we see in music today. People are pretty much forced to make something new all the time.

That said, I love artists like Girl Talk, etc. I just don't know where the right line is.
I should clarify: I neglected to mention that I've accepted a job at an agency in NYC doing some (pretty cool) iOS projects. I'm not sure why I did that so soon, given all I've said here, but I figured I'd give it a fair try, turn around some projects for them, and see if it gives me new perspective.

They gave me a very strong offer and pitched me on the idea that some people leave and come back, and that that's okay (within reason), so I think that's what made the decision.

I posted this today not because I was thinking of skipping out, but because I know that it's not the real next step for me 1-2 years down the road, and I could really benefit from the HN perspective. Thanks to everyone who has posted their comments/contacted me!
We are only going backwards. I've spent hours (x2 after having to re-do with de-interlace) ripping my HBO boxsets only to have to spend more time hunting down SRT files. Give me direct downloads already.
I would rather like governments to punish abusers of copyright if the intent of it was to promote innovation and creativity.

Since there had not been any attempts to punish or reduce such disproportionate abuses, there's no place for more copyright legislation until that happens. And I'm not talking about people's perception of piracy. If I have my grandmother's birthday video on Youtube automatically taken down, the judge will ask, what damages did you suffer? Is law really asking for damages for freely sharing memories?

It's a good catch-22 to kill free sharing. Lose the ability to share or force people to sell their content in order to claim damages against companies abusing DMCA.

Continuing to push it further will paint a view of the proponents having draconian intents. Especially when such myopic legislation including restricting Internet goes against the original aims of copyright; promoting innovation and creativity.
Instruments is a frontend to dtrace, I think the closest equivalent to strace on OS X is dtruss.

Additionally, OS X has several useful stock dtrace scripts, check 'apropos dtrace' for a listing
And hopefully no other similar bill in the future, too.
Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base like everyone else.
If you watch it again you'll see he steps on the bush as he walks up pushing down and out of the frame.
Project my monitor/screen sharing actually works very well.

I got an interview in 2006 for Microsoft. I typed my C solution with Notepad via share screen over DSL. The code is "to find out the depth of leaf nodes in a binary tree and find out which leaf node is the shallowest/deepest" or something like that. I did that in 20 minutes and return solution to find out depths for all leaf nodes and sorted them by depth. And the interviewer saw how I worked during the session and laughed I was the first one to solve the problem in that way and much better than what they expect.

At the other hand, I got interviewed in Amazon around the same time. I completely choked on whiteboard because I did not prepare for session before like that and I still had a jet lag due to lack of sleep during flight in previous night. Then I got another interview in Bloomberg and I complete couldn't write code with pencil and paper.

My mind flows when I typed but chokes when I worked on paper/whiteboard. I guess the fluidity of editor is the key.

Later when I interview software engineers. I tried to let them to have a computer so they can write code during the session. I feel much better grasp for their potential and habit during the session than whiteboard and pencil paper test.
The biggest issue with these puzzle questions is they are easy to memorize and encourage solving in the shortest amount of lines of code.

I don't know why people rely on them at all because most candidates they hire probably have just went on pythonchallenge or interviewstreet and learned all the solutions to popular problems and then went to the interview or even learned the solutions by going to enough interviews.

I want someone who can think on their own (not memorization) and can write good code (read: not shortest lines possible).
I wouldn't call those two "serious" examples -- especially since the competitors (Amazon, Heroku, Rackspace etc) have orders of magnitude more popular, complex and profitable services running on them.

This is like saying, "Famous actors frequent my restaurant" and point to a picture of Ralph Macchio. OK, somewhat known, but De Niro, Brad Pitt, Clooney and co eat at the joint across the street.
Would it not be possible to load a disk-writer program into ram, which prompts you to insert a blank disk, and then proceeds to buffer and write subsequent audio data onto the disk, such as a disk image?
That's a terrible programming question. You might as well just ask "Hey, did you take combinatorics in school? Ok, cool."
But thats just another popular interview question that all developers have memorized. So in python every developer you ask will just say s[::-1], they aren't even going to think about it.

I prefer hiring based on Github or having them design a small project.
Thinking about some of the people I've known who have worked in these roles, I wonder if the dichotomy between engineer and technician can be better described as theoretical vs. practical and design vs. maintenance.

Also, some engineers only have 2 year degrees, the same as many technicians. But the content of the education is different: very broadly speaking, breaking along theoretical vs. practical lines, with some crossover.
I'm pretty sure that without copyright in the early days, we would never have had the variety and originality we've seen over the past 100 years or so

But that's not the question, is it? Conditions have changed, and hence we need to evaluate if copyright still makes sense, regardless of whatever benefits it brought in the past.
They explain it in the making of video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emKttWFcJ_g Basically it's car's with LIDAR and photos, planes and satellites.

The LIDAR data is also used in the Nokia City Scene app http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MxnUAVhdnU Worth noticing is that you can click on every building i.e. 3D information is combined with regular streetview data.
Contrarian thinking isn't a substitute for research. Here is the AIA's 2005 compensation report:

http://www.daapspace.daap.uc.edu/~stedmabn/profprac-base/hot...

The 2008 synopsis is here: http://www.areforum.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=5...

Keep in mind that this was during the boom, and the average department head made less than $100k a year - that would typically be someone with at least 10-15 years of specialized experience and willing to take on personal liability for architectural designs under their seal until the statute of repose (varies by state from seven years to forever).
The Year Ahead: Scrambling for Spectrum
Abstract Algebra for Programmers: The String Monoid
Where do you get money?
The problem is that it’s everywhere and at the top. I don’t mind racism that is filtered out (i.e. either heavily downvoted or deleted by mods) all that much. That’s exactly what makes Reddit attractive: It gets filtered in a good way.

It just seems that Reddit’s filtering mechanisms are not really adept at dealing with it anymore. And Reddit’s demography (white, cis male, hetero†) adds a very special and unique slant to all of this.

—

† Hey, I’m all those things, too. Hanging around with only those people isn’t very fun, though.
I personally don't care how simple a question is or how well it's explained. If I walk into an interview with a portfolio full of samples and completed projects, and a resume full of references and qualifications, it's insulting and leaves me with a bad impression of the employer.
A lot of these AppEngine costs too much notices have been coming up recently, but upon further inspection, they all tend to boil down to operator error.

Unfortunately, AppEngine isn't forgiving of that and there is a real monetary value associated with questionable engineering design. Or, design that wasn't thought through enough in the context of a service like AppEngine.

This leads to a few people getting upset and making a lot of noise when the reality is that AppEngine is actually an amazing service.

So, to boil down the operator error from a quote in the thread:

"We're running a mapreduce to change the geobox sizes/precision for a large number of entities."

That is the real source of the problem. Instead of using geoboxes, they should be using geohashes, which allow arbitrary precision.

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/geospatial.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

Instead of an indexed property that looks like this (what they currently have):

[u'37.3411|-121.8940|37.3395|-121.8926', u'37.3411|-121.8929|37.3395|-121.8916', ...]

They would have an indexed List<String> property that looks like this:

[8, 8f, 8f1, 8f12, 8f12a, 8f12ac, 8f12ac6, 8f12ac60, 8f12ac605, 8f12ac605f, 8f12ac605fb, 8f12ac605fb3, 8f12ac605fb34]

Finding if the location is in a box would be computing the hash from the lat/lng (there is free code out there to do that) and then doing an indexed 'in' query. The indexes would only need to be updated if the location of the entity changes, not when they want varying levels of precision.
Email is a collection of protocols stacked on top of each other, so when we're talking about replacing email you have to be specific about which part you'd like replaced. DNS? SMTP layer? IMAP layer? application / email client layer? spam filtering layer?

What you're suggesting is indeed something that can be,and will be, added to email. But there's nothing wrong in email at a lower level (SMTP say) thats preventing someone from setting this up. One thing that definitely sucks is IMAP though, would love to see that replaced by a restful protocol. But we have no alternative to a ubiquitous distributed and open messaging system that is SMTP.
I'll agree with you that there is some fun in putting the whole thing together. However, "merchandising" is definitely far too strong a word... (1) very few people will create better themes all by themselves than what Tumblr/Posterous/Blogger already made, and (2) the css for each of those sites is completely editable, so you can customize to your heart's content. This makes sense with your testing approaches as well... you can implement A/B testing with a blogging service just as you could with a homebrew solution.

Regard your "isn't designed for long tutorials with code" post:

http://shadyacres.tumblr.com/post/12476205833/learn-git-prog...

That's my blog, and it's a tutorial. It's not the best, but it's got code, it's got links, it's got pictures, and I could have put youtube there if I wanted to. You can definitely do heavy lifting using these solutions, and you can use all the time you saved to work on making your actual product that much better.
This totally ignores the fact that people who go to college are more likely to be ambitious and career oriented / smarter. It totally skews all of these results..
Hey I shot you a tweet, I'd be interested in helping migrate the site. Email is in my HN profile, shoot me a message if you're interested.
That's fair. I think we get too bent out of shape trying to figure out what is right for all time.
It will not be similar because unlike architecture (in the US), there are no legal barriers to web development.

In the US, architects are licensed state by state. All states require at least three years of structured experience and a series of tests to demonstrate minimum competency for licensure - one cannot practice without a license.

Most states require an accredited professional degree of at least five years (Bachelor of Architecture) those which do not typically require additional experience beyond three years depending on degree type.
The Importance of a Strong Password
I'm not sure how this is any better than any other annoying cs question asked by 90% of companies nowadays. My best interviewing experience was with a fairly large startup for an iOS programming position. Instead of a phone screening interview, they sent me a small iOS app description and asked me to code it and send it in. The in-person interviews was me and the interviewer, at a computer, coding sample iOS applications and looking through code.

This is directly related to the job and through asking questions about the code and how to accomplish different things, the employer knows all they need to about the candidate's abilities.

I've been asked to write the Fibonacci algorithm so many times that I can literally code every version of it with my eyes closed. Does that mean I'm a good programmer? I'm pretty sure anyone can memorize a dozen lines of text.
It's half this and half that they want to convert DVD buyers to subscribers so they come out with the DVDs a month before the new season starts.

The market for the DVDs is still good (True Blood S3 was the #1 TV show DVD for 2011) and I'm sure they're research tells them they get more from conversions then they lose in DVD sales by opening it up 2 months earlier. And if they started selling DVDs 6 months earlier they'd lose current subscribers like you say.
Results of photograph watermark removal software trial
There was an awful lot of great variety and originality in music in the few centuries before music copyright was enforced as strongly as it is today. Mozart, among others, did make a lot of derivative music but much of that was (and still is) earth-shatteringly fantastic, like most art (and code for that matter) that builds on existing work.

Popular music would survive very well with much reduced copyright laws in the same way that fashion survives today. Jungle -> Drum and Bass -> Grime -> Dubstep, no one wants to listen to the previous trend - pay for access to the latest, pay for it as it comes out, pay for concerts and live events - there are lots of models that would leave music thriving if publishing rights went away tomorrow.
Show HN: Framous - Your Photos. Your Personality.
$0.10 per 100k writes is just a way of them billing you. Sure it's a lot compared to your avarage HDD price, but the data is hosted on at least 3 datacenters at all times, running google's software stack & everything is being constantly monitored by Google's SRE team.

App Engine pricing might seem expensive if you try to do a simple table comparsion with alternatives, but when you get more deeply into it you'll find that a lot of stuff that is included in the service with GAE will cost you extra when you use the alternatives.
The question you should answer instead is "How will he get his foot in the door otherwise?"

University -> Internship -> Employment is a good way to get started. Managers hiring interns more or less know what they're getting.

University -> Employment is more difficult, but possible. Managers hiring people straight out of college also more or less know what to expect, especially if they've hired grads from the school before.

Trying to jump straight into employment will be difficult unless he has previous employment.

If he's currently employed writing code, then 4 years of work experience will probably trump 4 years of schooling. But there are always places that won't even consider a person without a degree.
made with MongoDB
IPad survives fall from ‘space’ with G-Form case
I agree that the real test is how well you do on the real codebase. But (as an interviewer) I'm not going to let you see that codebase or spend time describing its architecture to you until I'm convinced you are worthwhile. Hence, walk me through the steps to generate something programmatically; Pascal's triangle or anything else. I don't give a shit that you found code for it on Google, I'm not looking for a solution - I'm looking to understand how well you can solve problems.
launched today
That depends on which medium you're talking about.

Apps: that's my day job. It pays very well, thank you. But if SOPA passed, I'd be hurting because the internet would change dramatically. I need a working, open internet to be able to compete with large software development companies.

Music, Movies: I "moonlight" this. I'm sure there are tons of software guys who are good at music, video, or a little of both. Live concerts pay enough to make the whole pursuit enjoyable. They wouldn't pay the bills, which opens up another can of worms -- I think our current society discriminates against many forms of art, and disproportionately rewards the few that it does reward. This is in line with the way our society frequently discriminates against women, certain racial stereotypes and many cultures.

This post (and my other writing): I don't make money directly from it. But I think everyone benefits from the free sharing of culture. SOPA can pry it from my cold, dead fingers...
Seems like it would violate the heroku terms of service to wake up the free dyno.