skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"My experience was similar to yours. I interviewed at YouTube, and I was flown over from New Zealand for the interview. When I returned the next day, I got my generic rejection letter with Dear {Full Name}. While I got the general solutions to the 5 questions throughout the day correct; I struggled to code them on a whiteboard with someone watching me; I can never think well in those situations when solving problems, but I find that the optimal solution clicks to me when I'm in the shower or wake up in the middle of the night."

I agree wholeheartedly, see my above comment about optimizing a solution being more of an art, and can take a varying amount of time.
Matt, the founder of WP, has his own way of dealing with feedback and objections
> "Coke tasted far superior to Pepsi, how could there even be a competition?"

Actually, double-blind taste tests was reputedly in favor of Pepsi. Pepsi, for a long time, used this in their marketing, and Coke confirmed the results for themselves, which was the main driving force behind the creation of the disastrously failed New Coke.

It would seem that the tasted of Coke is affected as much by its branding as by its recipe!
The university you are from pretty much doesn't matter for most software companies
Really nice piece.
The police were totally rude. Perhaps even mildly abusive. And police are always authoritarian.

But --- and this isn't a moral judgement --- that and $4.00 will get you a cup of coffee in NYC. It's one of the largest cities in the world. It is incredibly difficult to police. I have a hard time mustering sympathy for the drunk guy who got yelled at while being ticketed for an open container. There are real police abuse issues (for instance, people's doors getting kicked down because the police get the wrong address on a no-knock warrant). I'll save my energy for them, and I'll keep not getting tickets by being nice to police officers. That trick will work for you too, and if you're like me when I was in my 20s, you'll find it's surprisingly easy to do once you get over yourself.
Well I haven't done any studies on it but I'd assume that the number of people going to the toilet and then immediately touching the way-out door handle without washing their hands is probably higher than the number of people going to the toilet outside the bathroom and then touching the door handle on the way in...

Not to mention that bathroom door handles are pretty good conditions for germs: warm (indoors), damp (from people who haven't dried properly), lots of new germs from people who haven't washed.
I am reserving most of my replies for the comment section of my own blog

I don't think you should post it here if you aren't prepared to discuss it here. That seems disrespectful to the community.

For example, I'd like to hear your response to this objection: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633596.
I really like the Soulver program that he mentions on the page for the "Scrubbing Calculator". I found a similar Windows/.NET program called OpalCalc: http://www.skytopia.com/software/opalcalc/

Time to do a web edition? Surely it already exists. Somebody help me out :P
Assuming that the story is true, what I don't really get is police using all the f* words and saying things like "don't come in America then" or "go back to your country". I would feel offended by that.

"I'm still eating my sandwich while watching the scene. The mighty authority doesn't seem to like it, grab my sandwich and throw it on the ground." - first thing that came to my mind after reading this was "Threw It On The Ground" song by lonely island. That must've been a pretty evil sandwich ;)
'ruthlessly aggressive' led to success but destroyed his life
It's dangerous to have doors swinging out into hallways (which is usually what you exit to in an office building).
I was hoping the piece would truly stick to the title point: that stealing != copying. But after a page or so into it it became clear he was just another person trying to make a distinction between two degrees of copying.

Good rule of thumb: if someone steals something from you, you don't have it anymore. If someone copies something from you, you still have it.
The title here is misleading. The article is talking about a 25 Year Old Scam Artist.
Lessons I Learned from Shark Tank
New York doesn't send a ticket to a collections agency. If you fail to deal with a ticket or appear as ordered before the judge, an arrest warrant will be issued. Next time you're in NY, you'll be arrested for contempt and shipped to whatever court you are in contempt of. (You'll pick up more fines too)

Dumb kids get in trouble like this all of the time.
Language Detection and Internationalization in PHP
Except that the Israeli Palestinian conflict is interesting to a lot of people and Hacker News tends to have more civilized discussions than some other places
The touchtyping keyboard layouts are based on n-grams in real words
This is why I think Capitalism is failing. As we move into a more virtual world, where the means of production are owned by all, value derived from utility (the principle tenet of neoclassical thought) becomes almost meaningless, less a few required cases.

Look at Communism, it began to crumble when Labour as value stopped making sense, i.e. intellectual work was the driving force of the economy during the cold war. Just ask Doctors in Cuba, where farmers often earn more.

As we move into a more virtual world, where work is no longer connected to sweat labour, or direct utility, when everyone owns a machine capable of digital and physical reproduction our fundamental understanding of value will shift; bringing about new economic principles.

(I am not an economist)
Coke in Australia is made with sugar, not with corn syrup. It's noticeable different to pepsi.
Thanks Cletus for taking the time to write that up. That really makes me feel better and provides somewhat more insight into the process.

My 5 years of experience was actually divided like 3 between Masters and Bachelors and 2 after Masters here in US, so I thought my Masters grade would matter.

My interviews were 3 before lunch and 2 after. Lunch was good :).

The interview conductor asked for references multiple times, but although I knew some people working in Google, but they had never closely worked with me, so I didn't want to make up references just for the sake of it.

EDIT:
"As far as releasing interview scores goes, that isn't going to happen for good reason. A score, by itself, is meaningless. Interviewers are calibrated against other interviews they've done and other interviewers. This is all in an attempt to make a fair assessment of the candidate. If a particular interviewer gives high marks to candidates where all the other interviewers don't, that gets calibrated. And vice versa."

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.
I remember your blog post[1] about Google interview. Love your answers on SO though.

[1]: http://www.cforcoding.com/2010/07/my-google-interview.html
This doesn't mean that they don't tend secret lime farms on the ocean floor.
Breath-taking 3d Chalk Art
Happy 5th Birthday, Lift
The other takeaway I like from Steve Martin is the idea that it's easy to be great some of the time but hard to be good reliably. You can have 'on' nights, but it's handling your off nights that makes a professional.

dang, now I need to figure out where I read this.

edit: ah, found it.

>It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical. Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.

https://eebatou.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/5-creativity-tips-f...
See also the recurrent laryngeal nerve for more of nature's absurdity.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/the-longe...
What are you afraid of?? Did smth bad happened with you?
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
I went to Stuy and have always believed that requiring people to score high on an exam that tests verbal and mathematical reasoning skills is a good thing.

Now, a score on a single exam is not a particularly great way to admit people for many reasons, but if we accept that it is an objective test of mathematical and verbal reasoning skills, why not help minorities score high enough (or let people know that there is an exam in the first place)?

In college admissions (at least in theory), affirmative action takes effect only after all the candidates have passed some minimum bar in terms of quantifiable things like SATs, grades, etc. Admission to Stuy is based only on a test so one can apply the same principle: Look at people holistically only after they've passed the minimum bar.

I think we should help minorities make the cutoff and then take a closer look at those applicants who scored high enough (though perhaps not using a hard threshold). Of course this is easier said than done, but I think ignoring such a test completely and relying on GPAs or interviews or other things alone would not be a good idea. Most people haven't "done" many things in middle school the way people do things in high school that distinguish them when they apply to college. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this. (And I actually think one of the goals is to make sure that kids have a lot more opportunities and encouragement to distinguish themselves by the time they finish middle school)

Now, perhaps the current cutoff for getting into Stuy is analogous to getting above a 2300 on the SAT, and elite institutions seem to agree that a 2300 is no more predictive of success than a 2200 or a 2100. So it would be interesting to measure how scores on the admission exam correlate to various metrics of success in college and later in life in order to determine a similar threshold above which the score doesn't matter anymore.
I had the same experience, i struggle understanding problems where i can't see concrete examples of cause and effect. Though I believe the problem was that I simply didn't "bother" to understand because it was "hard".
What he doesn't really explain is why, as an introvert who prefers being his own company, he makes such an effort?
pg has steadfastly refused to limit topic discussion beyond the wide ranging and vague 'anything that may be on interest to hackers'.
Five problems in five interviews sounds low. Obviously this is pure speculation, but perhaps the concern was that you didn't solve them fast enough. Interviewers are supposed to ask more than one technical question; the candidates I am enthusiastic about hiring tend to solve 2-3. That said, some problems are multi-facted enough that an interviewer can run with the same basic theme for the whole interview, I just think it would be unusual for that to be the case in all five interviews.
Difficulty is a property of the representation

Not necessarily. There are such things as inherent complexity and accidental complexity. forrestthewoods's point was that some things are inherently complex, which I agree with. Accidental complexity happens when we use a poor representation - such as roman numerals.
The poster I responded to was talking about two seperate things:

1. Linking an image: Here no, copyright probably doesn't apply though attribution would be nice.

2. Copying an image to your server and serving a scaled version, or a complete duplicate of the original. Here copyright applies.
Not sure if this helps, but as an interviewer I found "masters in computer science from a within top 50 state university in US" to be very weak signal of programming skills. Many candidates from schools which I would consider to be top 20 (like USC) even could not even get past a simple programming question a la "fizzbuzz" test. I would probably trust 5-10 US schools, but it seems for many American universities Masters program is just a money making engine.
The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people
who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement. …

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in
the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you
want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you
have the free-and-clear option of not having it.

This isn't any kind of counterargument. No, the world doesn't owe me¹ that, but I'm not forcibly taking it either.People are voluntarily sharing it with me. So what I'm owed is irrelevant. YCombinator doesn't owe me access to HN either, but I'm not a bad person for using it if they're offering it to me.

¹ completely hypothetically and for the sake of argument. For all you know I'm just playing devil's advocate, so let's keep the personal attacks to a minimum, please.

EDIT: fixed typo.
Thanks, the site is melting under all the clicks.

Good to know it's not that important...
Seems to be blog spam and the article is very short, with the site unresponsive I've pasted it below:

> Jesse Willms - Scam Artist

> 25 Year old Jesse Willms has earned $359 million since since 2007 selling bogus products online using deceptive marketing. This week, the Federal Trade Commission effectively wiped out his assets, obtaining a $359 judgment against him that will be suspended only when Willms turns over his assets including bank account funds, proceeds from the sale of his house, and even his fish tank and fur coat.

> Willms and his companies sold “free trials” of online products including weight loss pills, teeth whiteners, work at home programs, and more. Little did his customers know that the trials weren’t really “free”. Buried deep in the fine print was an explanation that customers would be billed a monthly fee, usually of around $80, if they did not cancel their “subscription”.

> This week’s ruling also limits the types of business practices that Willms can engage in in the future.

> The FTC’s official release can be found at: http://ftc.gov/opa/2012/02/willms.shtm
Nomad bacteria carrying planets
Ya that is the other thing, I too felt that anything else didn't matter or mattered very less other than your performance on that day.
People are sick. When I see people throwing a paper or anything on the floor it really drives me mad. This is the worst act of disrespect for janitors. There are not too many thing I like about Singapore but giving fines to people who throw garbage on the ground is something I like.
If he had stopped at a more reasonable number, say 50mm or 100mm. Would this outcome (seizure of all assets) still be just as likely?
If you checked here before reading the article, it's a short intro to the X Prize, starting with a concept called "Dematerialization":

"...dematerialization, the reduction in the quantity of stuff needed to produce a product. An iPhone, for example, weighs 1/100th and costs 1/10th as much as an Osborne Executive computer did in 1982, but it has 150 times the processing speed and 100,000 times the memory."
Media Query & Asset Downloading Tests
In the guidelines [0], immediately after the aforementioned vague comment, pg gives some specific restrictions:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Instead, since there is mass piracy, I'm just going to try to stop that first"

I didn't say the _incumbents_ would necessarily innovate; new competition will if they do not.

There are people that say piracy is a symptom of a broken business model. I tend to agree with that.
Right now, the strategy of the media industry appears to be to spend money under the presumption that the amount of money they spend enforcing/lobbying/trying to pass laws to prevent piracy makes economic sense: they will gain/save more money than they spend. This seems unlikely, but probably people have punched the numbers for these companies and concluded that this is the case.

Of course it's the case: their endgame is to get governments to criminalize all copyright infringement and get the taxpayer to pay for all that. Of course, the balance for society as a whole is well in the red, but why should they care?

But the worst is not the economic costs, but the (much more important IMHO) costs in terms of human rights, such as freedom from censorship, privacy, access to a indispensable medium, etc.
What kind of cellular machinery would be required? Where would this cellular machinery exist? Would we have a vitamin-C creating gland? How susceptible would this gland be to outright failure a la diabetes? The body could do a lot of things, but without a working alternative model simply saying the existing model is faulty suggests a deep understanding we clearly lack.
Does being at the top of your class in one of the Top 50 Universities in the nation, with a near perfect GPA matter? I actually liked the CS program at my university, and being a state university the fees were pretty low compared to other universities, so I wouldn't call it a money making machine.
The territories under question are not occupied, but disputed.

Well, the UN security council, the UN general assembly, the US, the EU, and the International Court of Justice, among others, disagree with you there.
And Skype! half the width is devoted to the contacts list, cramming the actual conversation into as much space as you get on your standard smart-phone. Do they really expect you to be devoting that much time to gazing longingly at your list of contacts, instead of communicating?
If I may ask; how many are there that downloads using torrents on mobile devices?
Are there any good apps for the iPad that let you manipulate variables and equations in a tactile manner? I have Ovium which is a calculator where you put your numbers in bubbles and then connect them however you want with different operators. I'd like like something where you could use the value of a slider to change the value of a variable.
Show HN: Send Free Postcards
About 2 years ago I made a webapp to print and mail real-life postcards for a small fee ($1). It never caught on and only had a few customers, mostly family and friends, so now I'm stuck with a bunch of 28 cent stamps and the USPS has increased postage to 32 cents for postcards. I want to just get rid of all the old stamps so I'm offering to send postcards for free until the old stamps run out.

Go to http://bonj.ourbunny.com and use coupon code OB123 to send a free postcard.
Something similar will probably surface for Windows 8 Metro interface.
I would be careful with this tutorial because it's almost one year old and many things changed in Node and Mongoose. But it's a very good tutorial and it helped me a lot to understand how to get things done with Node and MongoDB. Maybe just watch it and get into it but dont copy/paste the code. =)
Are you typing "own" instead of "owe"? Why?

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.

If I steal something from a store and then give it to you, the item's still stolen.
You could try going away for 2 weeks.

It won't result in them washing the whole pile, but they will be forced to wash something and realise that it doesn't hurt that much.

There will still be a pile of dirty plates (plus the boxes from the pizzas they ordered for the first week, until they ran out of cash) when you get back, but at least you will see a slight improvement in your roommate's habits.
How are they breaking REST? What does the method of consumption (e.g. AJAX enhanced pages vs single page apps) have to do with restful API design... at all?

edit: also possible I misunderstand your statements
I actually had a couple of interviews with more than one questions, but not others. I agree this could have been one of the reasons, but again an indication of this in the feedback could have helped.
I don't think there are any hard and fast rules, but I think a simple question that will give you an immediate sense on whether a designer knows their sh*t (pardon my French) is to ask them what their design process is. If there's any hesitation, or if there's a pause and you can tell they're trying to make something up as they go along, they don't have one. Move on. But just pay attention to what they're saying and you'll likely be able to tell how experienced they are and how confident they are of their skills.

Edited to add: this is where you'll find out if UX is part of their process. If they begin with things like mood boards, font selections, color palettes, look & feel, no, no and no. It needs to begin with some form of audience/customer, business goals, content strategy, user flows, functionality. Those other things come after, not first.
Quoting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C :

It is made internally by almost all organisms although notable mammalian group exceptions are most or all of the order chiroptera (bats), guinea pigs, capybaras, and one of the two major primate suborders, the Anthropoidea (Haplorrhini) (tarsiers, monkeys and apes, including human beings).

So not all primates.
Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy
If you live in NYC, I'd actually be glad to meet you for lunch.

But we MUST discuss this idea, using only napkins for paper.
As someone who was rejected by Google the first time, and hired the second time through, I went through a similar range of emotions during that first rejection. (I did not have an Ivy league education and only had a 3.2 GPA)

It was only after I was later hired into Google that I learned from my original recruiter that I had actually done quite well in my first interview process. What I did not know at the time of my rejection letter was that they had narrowed down their pool of potential applicants to about 1200 resumes for three open positions they were looking to fill. Apparently, I made it into the last round of 10-12 applicants and just did not have the experience level with the specific tools for the job as others did. Thus, I received the same rejection letter the other 1196 people received, and never even knew I did as well as I did.

My advice would be to just stay in contact and keep Google updated anytime you have something new added to your resume or skill set. Based on what you have described, it actually sounds like you might have done pretty well. There are too many factors going on behind the scenes to say one way or another why you did not make it through this time.
It's not really like HN though, YCombinator may be voluntarily providing the service and us users are voluntarily providing the content.

The difference with a torrent download (in many cases at least) is that the author is not voluntarily sharing it with you so they're not really offering it. Somebody else may be voluntarily sharing their bandwidth with you but that's about it.
> In my admittedly anecdotal experience, the rate of full grown adults who casually ignore the sinks after finishing up their business and leaving a stall seems to be disturbingly high

I dunno about stalls, but there is some not totally unreasonable (though still mildly icky) argument for not washing your hands after using a urinal: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1987#c...
This argument goes equally well for the war on drugs. Possibly even immigration.
What's interesting is that the human body still does most of the synthesis - it's only the enzymes for the last step that have been disabled.
Not sure why 'hackers' would care about Israel-Palestine drama
In case you need someone to send a postcard to...

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

and you can lookup your representative here:

http://www.contactingthecongress.org/