skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comment said the person felt people didn't know about battery warranties. But their existence is written on the side of the battery for brand names. Many Prorated ones like this Sears one have a period over which the prorated value is 100%. After the 3 years, the 100% declines on a linear slope, ending at 0% at 100 months. You could of course have looked this up rather than ranting and making dumb comments.
As far as releasing interview scores goes, that isn't going to happen for good reason.

This is true, but it sure would be helpful if they could give qualitative feedback like "the impression was that you were strong in a and b, but weak in x and y." That doesn't seem like too much to ask. (In fact, if he had good rapport with the recruiter I'm surprised that they didn't give that much information.)
Thank you. Exactly what I wanted to convey.
People are so grossed out by a doorknob they refuse to touch it, only to immediately walk to their desk to type on their keyboard. A keyboard which is typically far dirtier than the bathroom they just avoided touching[1]. Oh, the irony.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Germs/story?id=4774746&page...
I will have to disagree. Not that I think that the people in charge of the MPAA and co. are altruistic, nice people. But I don't think they act the way they act because they are looking for immediate profit, or rather this is not the principal reason.

There was an excellent comment on HN a month or so ago (during the SOPA madness, I can't find it though) from a guy from the industry that explained that the main problem was "ignorance and misunderstanding". And this echos what the OP explained so well: the MPAA think they are right, and don't understand why people are downloading illegally (they most likely think it's just about money).
by saying this, I know you are not a progarmmer
I read the Wikipedia entry on BD+ to see what made it special. Sounds like it's essentially a way to implement DRM on the disc rather than in the player by having the player provide a virtual machine which executes arbitrary DRM code on the disc. However, it seems like this would be defeated permanently by simply implementing the virtual machine in the hypothetical DRM unlocker. Has it simply been too difficult to fully reverse engineer, or is there some other hurdle in the way beyond that?
(Haven't looked at the OP, yet.)

I think something that is too often missed is that for some if not all the motivation is not simply a "selfless" altruism. True, helping others brings a deep satisfaction. But it also is an individual step in creating the kind of world we want to inhabit. One of cooperation, to mutual benefit and enjoyment.

I think some people get hung up on the term "selfless". For me, it's not selfless -- it's the essence of self. A self that seeks to be connected with and of use to other people. (And perhaps hopes a bit, but doesn't specifically expect on a case by case basis, for the same in return.)

P,S. Looked at the link, but it's Flash. So, not viewing it, for now.
> All pirated material, movies, etc are forcibly taken by someone.

Really? What force was used to take them?
Much like you should
Excellent - I'm planning to use this with Z-Type (http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/) to learn Colemak. Thanks!
The physics of marketing.
> Making the door open outwards is the right thing to do anyway with regards to fire safety

You've got that backwards. You want the door to open inward, in case there is an obstruction. If it opens outward, there may be something on the ground blocking the path of the door. It may be too heavy (or hot!) to push away, but small enough to climb over or around. Furthermore, it's dangerous to open a door outward into the path of people walking.

Think about the front door on your house or apartment, the door to your bedroom, your bathroom door, etc. They all open in to the room, away from the hallway.
Understood. Technically there has always been a harder way available to all of us. You acquire a book or some other documentation. Then you sit down at keyboard and write the bare minimum code/syntax to test if you understood how some things work, or just play around it. The terminals on Mac, Windows, Linux have allowed us to do this for decades, as far back as my own childhood, to give one example. So yeah, I think the "hard way" is good, and iterative feedback and experiment is good, and that's been available for a long time even without Zed's things. I'm still learning new things even in the last few days, using this approach, except without some third-party playbook I have to follow. Learn Redis the hard way? Download it. Install it. Start it. Enter client. Type things. See what happens. Repeat. This is fairly obvious.

Agreed O'Reilly is probably more famous for their "completeness" rather than effectiveness at teaching.
I've encountered it before and I agree that it is very annoying.
When I last encountered it I did some looking around and found that a specific company dealt with providing the service on several websites and on my windows machine by adding the ip of their server to my hosts file I could stop it happening.
I hate it when this happens but I just can't remember what company it was and I've been searching for a small bit and can't get anything due to vague keywords.
Fun post, but I don't think it supports its own conclusion. Given the tangle of dependancies involved in a properly functioning human, why put focused effort into patching something as easily remediated as the inability to synthesize Vitamin C, given the opportunity for unforeseen side effects?

I think he just doesn't want to eat his applesauce like a good wittle man.
> You don't need to go to an Ivy League or otherwise top school [..] I didn't even go to school in the US.

Because there are no good schools outside the US?
Wow, 1200 resumes for 3 positions, I didn't know that getting recruited by Google was that competitive, good for them that they can afford being that competitive.

Do you mind telling us if in the first interview you aced all your interviews, because I surely didn't.
Jennifer Widom's db-class Retrospective: From 100 Students to 100,000
"Or it could have been that I might have not paid attention to little details which I thought were not important"

I think you are underestimating the importance of this. I have hired people before and this is a critical thing I look for. Attention to detail is very important as a developer, if you don't showcase it while on your best behaviour during an interview, I would be concerned what you are like day to day.

I think as a general rule you can assume every detail is important in an interview test.
This reminds me of the story of the paving the walkways story http://sivers.org/walkways
I live in Philadelphia, PA.

http://idea-sandbox.com/blog/2007/11/cocktail-napkin-noteboo...
Calling out bacteria as parasites is pretty silly. One might as well call out the appendix (which is composed entirely of human cells) as parasitic. Bacteria are much more like shared libraries. Libraries can of course have malicious code embedded in them, and human systems are prepared for that inevitability, but that doesn't mean the wholesale removal of shared libraries is very desirable.
| Or we replace our cashiers with an automated money-taking and distribution system ?

That's an ATM. We did it already for 90%+ of cash-handling interactions.

| But I still feel we are far behind

Far behind what?

It's hard to find things that robots are good for when you factor in the cost. When you optimize for price/performance, you get for example your dishwasher. It's a robot that does 90% of your dishwashing, for cheap. The other 10% is the tricky stuff and you can't afford the robot that can do it. Even if we had the software for cheap, machines that can do accurate manipulation with a strong grip are expensive to make, requiring high-quality motors with strong magnets, for example.

The current killer app for robots is manufacturing. They already do a lot of it, and have done for 20 years. You just don't see them.

The next huge killer app for robots is the self-driving car. This will come eventually, and it'll save tens of thousands of lives every year. It'll come gradually, and at first it will drive you 95% of the time while you handle the tricky bits. This is how Google does it and they have driven tens (maybe hundreds now) of thousands of miles around California.

Otherwise, you'll soon see flying robots doing geophysical surveys, checking power lines, etc. This is current done by people in helicopters and is expensive. UAVs are getting very cheap and we can control them well.

There are opportunities too in labour-intensive business like order fulfilment. Amazon uses lots of people and could replace some of them with robots like Kiva Systems. Amazon is interesting since they will probably do it cheaply and cleverly, now that Kiva has invested and shown that it can be done.

In summary: the robots you see every day are ATMs, dishwashers, etc. The more robot-like robots are hidden away working for you. Down the road you'll see automated cars. You won't think of them as robots either.
> I know no one who isn't a PL grad student (guilty) has ever even heard of ML

I am not a PL grad student. I have heard of ML. These days I imagine many programmers have heard of ML and Haskell.
Are you typing "own" instead of "owe"? Why?

Typo, sorry.

Also—"people offering" you something doesn't mean it wasn't "forcibly taken."

All pirated material, movies, etc are forcibly taken by someone. They're ripped from DVDs, captured from telecasts, etc. Just because they're offering it to you doesn't mean that it's free.

They did not forcibly took it: they bought the DVD, Blueray and/or access to the telecast. It's theirs.

If I steal something from a store and then give it to you, the item's still stolen.

Yes, but it's not what's happening here, so that's irrelevant.
No. The point has been made over and over and one more restating, however short, sweet, and to the point, will not materially change the situation.
Goon Does Canada Proud
The owner of the copy is voluntarily sharing it with me.

The author may not be, but then again when Renault sold me a car, they don't get to tell me who I can share it with.
Yeah, I was just about to post that I'd found it was Tynt via ghostery.
I'm reminded of school, where the bathrooms had no doors. Yet they were designed in a way that you walked in, around one partition to get to the sink, and a second partition to use the bathroom. The sounds and smells of the bathroom never seemed to be an issue there.
I can't comment in any detail here, but the problem of implementing the particular VM that BD+ programs are written to is not a trivial one, more akin to implementing a simulator for an entire X86 execution stack including the chipset, microarchitecture, and all the MSRs than it is to writing a JVM. Get anything wrong and you fail to derive keys.
Honestly, if you want to do well on Google interviews, do enough Topcoder until you hit something like a 1500 rating steadily, and then I am pretty sure you'll make it through the interview.

Google style interviews are about being able to solve and code the solution to small, well defined problems quickly and correctly. This is really only tangentially related to being a good software engineer, where problems are not very small or well defined, and you are often working with large, complicated existing code bases. The interview process is not a great measure, it's just the best thing Google has come up with.

On the other hand, the interview process is basically the same exact thing that Topcoder is testing.

I had a high GPA from a probably not quite top 50 university (Rutgers) and got into Google. I saw a friend of mine with a perfect 4.0 GPA get rejected. I am sure you have the aptitude to get hired, you just need better luck or better training.
That can be dealt with, just like nitrogen fixing bacteria in legumes are punished if they try to cheat. All you need is some method of signaling who cheats and who doesn't.
How to make a fool of yourself in sixty nanoseconds
Their own keyboard may be dirty but it's not transmitting any diseases.
I think in some european countries the regulation says the doors must always open in the direction towards the exit. So in this case it would open outwards.
| How do we start preparing, start programming on microcontrollers with servos, motors and actuators ?

No, get a CS degree and then go to grad school. Mechatronics is cool and all, but the main advances in robotics in the last 20 years have been in software based on exploiting new state estimation techniques. Stanford's robot car was just a normal car and computer.

On the other hand, you could work on battery chemistry. Advances in batteries will make robots better, along with everything else.
Funny that you mention the appendix in a post about bacteria - because that is the function of the appendix: To tend to and maintain bacteria during times of intestinal illness.
I would suggest that anyone who wants to apply have someone within the company refer you. For one thing they'll be able to guide you through the process better and (hopefully) set your expectations correctly.

I want to underscore this. I have two friends (who didn't know each other), one who works at Google, another who applied at Google. The applicant had a similar experience (though he had two sets of phone interviews, since he wasn't in town), and he didn't get an offer. My Googler friend, however, was able to provide very good feedback, and the applicant walked away feeling motivated to try again in 6-12 months.
> For me, ads are a necessary evil because I don't want to ever pay for every content I consume on the internet.

I can understand, sort of (even though the parts of the Internet I use most are community supported, not ad supported so I don't think less effective ads will suddenly destroy the Internets even if a large majority currently is ad supported)

> So, If third party cookies are used to serve me better ads, ads that actually interest me, then I'm all for it.

But this I do disagree with. I surf the Internet a lot, and there's already more than enough stuff distracting me that I wasn't looking for. No matter how useful it may seem to be, it cuts deeply into my productivity if every venture into some research or just surfing gets sidetracked by extremely interesting ads. Extremely interesting (but non-relevant to the topic at hand) links are already enough of a problem, slurping bits off my willpower to not click them, that I don't need any ads hypertargeted at my personality to draw away my attention from what I was looking for in the first place.

No really, I prefer ads that don't apply to me at all.
I believe https://github.com/oo7ph/Trello-Clone another chrome extension, uses backbone as well. But I haven't studied this one (yet).
Wii Hdmi
I don't believe it actually helps them economically, though Hollywood has a pretty funky take on accounting so you never know. I can't imagine a sane business being glad that they were able to successfully delay selling things for X months.

I understand the rational explanations for that, but I'm just as sure that people aren't that rational. Essentially, they're trying to be too good at the negotiating game. Ever been too good at a game? Nobody wants to play with you any more.
Shameless plug: we go through HTML + CSS with WeasyPrint to make PDF from Markdown: http://weasyprint.org/

CSS is so much more designer-friendly than LaTeX stylesheets...
It'll have to wait for something better than Lillyhammer to come along...
I flagged this post. It's not a problem to discuss politics, but it should have a value. Do the HN community want to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Fine, submit an article about that.

But submitting such an article will only trigger a flame-war. The content of the article is of the kind that triggers 'oh, ass-hole Israeli', and 'oh, Palestinians uses this to kill innocents'.

These are details. Not the actual problem. I'd be happy to see a good discussion about this conflict (although I'm not sure I'd contribute as I have little knowledge about it) certainly, if the community up-voted a related article.
The dirty tricks of academic journals
There is tablet Android device. If tablet is the way the world going for, a bittorrent client for that makes sense.
Excellent point - I completely agree. (Interesting choice of HN name by the way, "no needs".)

I often tell people the following:

The world only works if you think of others first, and yourself second.

If everyone thought of your needs, they'd be met by now. If you only think about your needs, you have long road ahead of you.
All cleaned up now: http://git.zx2c4.com/Stripe-CTF/tree/
His autobiography probably covers much of the same ground as this essay he wrote called "Being Funny": http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/funny-martin-2008...

Something I took away from that essay is that he performed over and over, night after night. And that's what it took to be competent, not good.
Google employee here. Let me clear something for you: your rejection has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with your education.

As for not giving feedback, like you hinted, it's purely for legal reasons. It sucks, but that's how things work in the US.
> So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. I surely didn't feel like that after the interview, but who knows, since I still don't have a way to know if that is the case. Then this really sucks.

No, I don't believe that's what he's saying at all. All he's saying is that without knowing the past scoring of the interviewers, and the scores of other interview candidates, the numbers are meaningless. I could rate you a 6 on a scale of 1 - 10. This seems fairly average at first glance, but perhaps my median interview score is a 3. Now it's starting to look pretty good.

Nowhere in there did he say that you have to do poorly with all interviewers, or even most, just that they won't release numbers because without extra information those numbers are meaningless.
Nice. My hope is that the market for eBooks (and Video) end up going the way of digitally distributed music and ends up DRM free.
Having to Start Over
Site Map Page 1 - Generated by www.xml-sitemaps.com
> This is true, but it sure would be helpful if they could give qualitative feedback like "the impression was that you were strong in a and b, but weak in x and y." That doesn't seem like too much to ask

Sadly, even this kind of feedback exposes the company on a legal front. There is a lot of precedent coming from rejected candidates who ended up suing the company because of this kind of feedback.

The only sane thing that a company can do from a legal standpoint is say "Sorry, we don't have a position for you at the moment, good luck in your search".
It's not only those two.

The Rabbi who provides the Kosher certification for Coke also knows what the ingredients are. See:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Kasherin...
I think it would really suck to go through life worrying about every surface I touched and the gems it contained.
We already have the mechanism built into us. Other creatures do it. It's just broken in humans and our near relatives.
The mathematical term you're looking for is Idempotence [1].

I'm speculating that the difficulty of such a feat depends on how many free variables an encoder has to choose from.

For example, in the case of a compressor, there are probably quite a few arbitrary choices that can be made at the compressor side that make little difference to compression quality in general -- but may make reproducing the exact same result difficult. The search-space might be very large.

I'll also speculate, though, that even if perfect reproduction is not possible, a compressor that's designed to work on the digital output of a decompressor of the same algorithm can probably be designed to do a better job on that particular example.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence
The problem with silence is that it is inconsistent with the premise of the Google Interview (that it finds good programmers) and the unofficial Google Motto ("Don't be evil"). If these are true, then there's an opportunity for us to learn about our strengths and weaknesses, at least according to Google's POV.

If liability is an issue, have us sign a waiver.

Actually there are 4 possible attitudes about the Google Interview, according to what you believe:
1. Both claims are true: you don't have any problem with Google.
2. Only the utility claim is false: the interview is pointless, and can't be learned from.
3. Only the evil claim is false: the interview is not pointless, but Google is being evil by withholding valuable information
4. Both claims are false: you probably won't be interviewing for Google, and if you do you're a total cynic!

I think that the OP's position, and mine, is tentative support for category 3. I think there is value in the Google interview process, and after a long day of answering questions on a whiteboard, I feel like Google is being needlessly evil in withholding their feedback.
What if the DVD they brought comes with terms preventing them from distributing it?
Stephen Hawking on "Time Travel to the Future" (Today's Most Popular)
I felt great when I first got my own apartment. So much freedom! Nobody borrowing and misplacing my tools. None of my food missing from the fridge. Nobody slamming the door at 6am or bringing home a loud groups of strangers at midnight on a Wednesday.

After a few years it got old. I realized I actually really like living with people, I just happened to have been living with selfish assholes. :-)
Suicide in Success, Race and Social Media
I'm not a fire safety expert by any means, which is why I added the "as far as I understand" qualifier. That said, don't you have the possibility of something blocking the path of the door regardless of which way it swings? I guess if it's on your side of the door, there is a greater chance that you can move it out of the way as long as it's not too hot or bulky. Then again, if something unexpected is blocking the way in a fire I'd expect there is a very good chance that it is hot or bulky.

So far I was under the impression that doors should generally open towards the exit (as the sibling already noted) in order to make it as easy as possible to exit the building. But maybe that is a misconception. I find this a very interesting topic, if you have more information to share I'd be very curious.

EDIT: Also, aren't hot door handles a big issue in case of a fire? I'd imagine that the ability to push the door open (assuming it doesn't lock when closed) rather than having to pull the handle is a plus. And I guess a door that swings both ways is ideal with regard to blockage.
Can it save anything to the filesystem (within its own sandbox?)
"The signs never worked. Instead, they just annoyed and angered people. Some people even threw more paper towels on the floor because they didn’t like the condescending way they were being instructed."

"This pattern is common. We often try to fight problems by yelling at them instead of accepting the reality of what people do, from controversial national legislation to passive-aggressive office signs. Such efforts usually fail, often with a lot of collateral damage, much like Prohibition and the ongoing “war” on “drugs”."

This is something I've learned in when trying to convince people to do something that's for their own good. Often times, it all too easy to yell. But human nature is such that if you 'attack' a person's beliefs or actions, (rational or not) they will defend them, further entrenching them and encouraging the person to continue if even out of spite.

Sure, sometimes an 'intervention' is necessary. But I've found that in most cases, it's more strategic to boil a person as a frog rather than a lobster.
Per the HN guidelines, I'd suggest you rename the title to "Lessons I Learned from Shark Tank"