skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unless you're young and have little to no experience, that attitude will and should fly

I can only see you coming across as an unpleasant person if you just start asking the interviewer how many golf balls fit into a bus right after they ask you why man hole covers are that size. And then there are companies like google (and the many who blindly copy what they know about google's process) and the few available details about their interview process all point to the fact that these brain teasers are really important to them for various reasons, so that attitude or just not answering these questions at all or asking them in return will very likely rule you out there - which is ok, of course, if you do not really care much about working for them or not. But in most companies, especially those using these dreaded brain teasers, I doubt this will "fly" and in most startups they will just talk shop with you anyway.

And while these brain teasers might or might not tell them something about you, you asking the interviewer a brain teaser is most certainly not going to tell you anything about the company other than, well, they have a pretty default and quaint approach to interviews. So what remains is definitely a bad after-taste and if that is what you are going for then good for you. But don't forget, most HR drones are pitiable people who have to make impossible decisions about people they don't know based on all sorts of nonsense and lies and then they are responsible when the new hire turns out really bad... so, no wonder they rely on superstition and obscure magic to tell them the future they can't possibly know.

Most importantly: If you are really that good and they all want you, you shouldn't even have to deal with HR to begin with; you should be aiming for that. So the whole thing is a completely moot point and the OP comes across as quite arrogant.
I've always wondered how they managed to pack so much information into so small a space. Obviously it's all algorithms which generates everything at run time. But still, it's very impressive!
I personally don't view sales that way. For me sales is a narrowly defined role whose job is to close individual sales - so you can't really do it "to the masses".
I enter all the grocery stores in town to buy a loaf. Every grocer asks to see my passport, i am not american, they say no can do. I ask to pay them extra, they say not an option, i have to wait till the summer to buy my loaf when it's stale. An american customer hands me a loaf, i take it without paying and leave. Nothing is right in this situation.
Demoscene!
Here is another good read (from few days ago on HackerNews) on "How Uservoice use Trello & Google Docs to make UserVoice better every day." - http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-pr...

We're following this rather closely and is pretty good so far. Once you master a decent tool, you can do lots with it. So, if you're an Asana guys, go with it but then if you've started with Trello, make the best of it. You do not need to get swayed here and there trying to find the best tool ready-made for you.
Knowing the right people always helps things happen. Reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People" has been fundamental to any success I've managed to find.
I saw this as. "Let me think of how I can not pay you."

It's a (thinly) veiled threat. Of course, it's irrelevant to what's being discussed, but it's a way of saying "I can embarrass you with this irrelevant issue if you press this" without actually saying it. Classic extortion tactic.

Since Josh printed the exchange in full, they no longer have this on him. Still, I don't know if it's a smart move on his part. He could have left that out entirely, and if they brought it into the public, he'd have more than $10,000 to talk about.

Actually, I'm sure there are two sides to the database story. He could have been poorly trained, or working 80 hours per week-- at which point mistakes are inevitable-- or given bad tools. These kinds of fuckups rarely have only one person at fault, especially in the sloppier startups where management is thinly-spread and incompetent and there are too many moving parts (startups are hard to keep track of when well-run, and many aren't). I'm surprised he didn't get into detail of what happened there.
With no paper trail, can science determine age?
There is no lack of people willing to try to climb Mt Everest and this is probably a lot safer than that.
Software developers are not carpenters
Great post but I take issue with calling Andreessen Horowitz the #1 VC firm. I've had an interaction with Marc that made me question whether I'd ever want to work with him.

I'd argue that Social+Capital (who took 100% of our A-Round at http://teamtreehouse.com) is really leading the industry now.
One does not simply telnet into node
It could also be a culture question. I worked on a trading floor and we'd make "markets" on when lunch would arrive, the cost of an airline ticket, the number of times I would injure myself in a week, etc. While there are more precise ways to ascertain a potential hire's arithmetic and estimation skills, this is more fun (especially since the interviewee's answer would usually kick off a round of bets being placed by the team on what they thought the answer was - this had the added benefit of giving us a relevant distribution to test the candidate's answer against).

It also drew out people who may not be a fit for our desk's culture of camaraderie where answers to banter along the lines of "that's personal" or "that's not relevant to my job description" would be awkward at best.

Additionally, I have heard from consulting buddies (the heathens!) that it's can good way to see how well a candidate can bullshit on little to no relevant data.

In any case, I don't think it's empirically valid to conclude someone a moron for asking brain teasers in interviews. I never asked them whereas many people much smarter than me did.
"Even if you worked for a software company, coming up with new cat food would belong to them."

As would any terrorist plans or child porn. This has come up a couple times in contracts with employers in the past, and I tell them they really don't want to own everything I develop, and I've had that clause struck from a contract with a bit of pushing.
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The interviewer cannot guess what's in your brain. Part of being a good communicator is being able to actually spell out your thoughts when necessary.

Besides, if you had said "then I search the number online" then it's plausible the interviewer would ask what would you do if you didn't find anything relevant right away. For instance, if you search for my cell phone number, you get 0 results connected with me.
I wasn't saying that C++ had no use. I'm saying that its domain is narrower that what's commonly believed.

It is false that C "will make everything MUCH harder". How hard something is to implement in a particular language depends on the problem and the people doing the implementation. C is only perceived to be much harder because people have become overly-dependent on language features (aka "syntactic sugar") and cannot reason about problems in terms that do not require those features.

I'm not talking about using assembly here. It is not a matter of an unstructured language vs. a structured one. I'm talking about features. This is particularly relevant because in many places where C++ is used, the coding standards prohibit the use of more than a limited subset of the language, effectively transforming it into "C with classes".
A gated, centralised and unscalable Internet community whose lofty goals are directly undermined by cost and the core principles of security: weakest link.

Also, I cannot see how they could achieve critical mass without government intervention. I expect if they really do mean business to see some intense political lobbying or sidedoor via some government regulator or commission. It could even be that the intelligence services will love and push for this proposal for the centralisation of so many channels may make their work significantly easier.

No non-trivial corporate will go to the lengths requested without being required to or strong tangible benefits over what they already do and can cost-effectively procure in future. After all, there is nothing in the proposal that corporates cannot already do themselves.

In short, this seems to be at best a security industry playground and the founding companies business model as a play on security concerns subsidised by others, or at worst, security theater.

It would be very interesting to know Bruce Schneier's take on this...
He has requested pardon, not been granted it. I find it highly unlikely he will be pardoned, at least using the business interest argument.
I find locking people away from their life for more than a day or two absolutely barbaric. I'm surprised a country often rated most democratic in the world locks people away for non-violent offenses.
Chinese students use IV drips while test cramming
Totally agree. Use whatever tool works best for you.
Android Vault: Creating an Android Widget
WHY Daily Deal Script or Clone Script?
Bestbuyshoping space
bestbuyshoping space
bestbuyshoping space Description WarpiaTV Wireless Edition revolutionizes the way PC content can be viewed on Television bestbuyshoping space
Swedish mail box: http://www.fotoakuten.se/albums/userpics/brevlaada.jpg
Facebook's new ’highlight' feature, lets users pay to promote status updates
Does D not aim to fill this niche? (I suppose in terms of exposure and infrastructure, D is lacking relative to C and C++).
What a piece of art!
As a coder I too feel intimidated by these impossible 4 KB Demos. It is also important to remind oneself that the optimizations to do this stuff are mostly meaningless for making a game. You are mostly constrained by time in a project, and shouldn't distract oneself in being cute with neat tricks.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3957347
LinkedIn Today Has A New Look
I wouldn't call it "surprising" to see the only client web language increasing in popularity.
One of the things I've learned in life is that We're All Just Folk. There's no magical divinely-inspired programmer out there creating firmware for your pacemaker. The difference between him and me is process, and little else. If I'm given access to the same testing processes they use as part of the open source package, I see no reason to believe my code is going to be worse than anybody else's. Sure, I'd think twice before installing it, but in some sense that's irrational; I should think twice before anything like that because We're All Just Folk, and it's just some guys writing all the firmware we all depend on.

In some ways, it's best not to think too hard about this.
Artichoke Crab Pizza Recipe
Third teen TeamPoison hack suspect quizzed by cyber-cops
Couldn't agree more. Thanks for this.
What advantages does joining it before it gets "BIG" bring? Seriously, this is the wrong way to advertise..
>> And to bring things back to this earth
Let's end this with a Asimov short story. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Yeah, I think you got the int 10h right (not sure I remember this as well)

But then came VESA which was a little bit more complex and of course, screen sizes bigger than a segment (ouch)

About audio, IMHO it's much easier now, dealing with those interrupt handlers and dma controllers wasn't easy. Of course, once the library worked it was ok.
pictures and more here http://offbeatchina.com/eye-opening-senior-high-school-class...
There are other avenues like trying to pressure VC / board members, court, probably more.

The problem is that lawsuits often take years. These startups are likely going to be (a) 10 times their current size, or (b) out of business, by then. So they can take a "we'll worry about it then" approach, in which case they collect interest on what they should have paid, and offload the risk.

These kinds of unethical startup executives don't fear lawsuits. Not in the least. The suit will be against the company, not the person-- it's very hard to pierce the corporate veil on this sort of issue-- and the individual executive will either be no longer with the company, or very wealthy and successful by then (in which case it's a hired attorney's PITA). Either way, it's not going to hurt him much.

The small-claim lawsuit doesn't have an incentive effect on such a startup because of this binary payoff. The advantage of a PR hit, as a punitive measure, is that it actually reduces the probability of success (rather than trivially reducing the amount of payoff in event of success).
Ask HN:  Should I continue development of my iOS app
I currently have an app on the iOS App Store, that makes me about $30 a month. It took me quite a long time to make, but I did it half for fun and half for the chance that it might make me some money!

Most of my users feedback has been positive, with requests for additional features, which I try to get in with updates.

The problem is that time is short, and the app doesn't make very much money at all.

I don't want to stop supporting the people who have already bought the app, but at the same time I want to try and do some other more successful apps.

So my question is how should I drop support without annoying current users who have been really positive to me?

The other solution of course is to keep adding features and improve it and hope that one day it kicks off, but it just feels like a waste of time now.
Unfortunately as the number of new projects involving C++ keeps going down, the fields in which C++ jobs are available are getting narrower every year.

Almost all middleware is now written in Java. C# took over the frontend development on Windows. New openings in C++ seem limited to quant fields (bank backends on linux) and driver development.
What is the point of the 11$ million debt?

They can use it to put a lien on his future earnings, basically extending his punishment for as long as they feel like it.
How is this different/better than Arduino + xBee?
Show HN: First Project - Personalized New Album Notifications
Once an interviewer asked me, how would you design a telephone for blind people and is there something already on our phones today for it. My answer was short, i said "Braille". He turned the landline phone towards me and asked to take a look. The middle keys sometimes have this bevel shape(just like a keyboard). Since i'd already said braille, i thought he meant something else now. I said i don't know.

He's like 'notice the small bevel at the bottom of the center key". Apparently he didn't know what it was called and that it was named after the inventor. Well, technically it's not proper Braille, but i would have taken that as a correct answer.
anyone that's done business with a fortune 500 company or the government is going to rely on fax like it's their lifeboat in a river of turds.
So what should the punishment be for non-violent offenses?
Tig 1.0 released - ncurses text-mode interface for git
> Yeah, I think you got the int 10h right (not sure I remember this as well)

10h is correct. The contents of ax register might not be. Is the graphics mode (13h) supposed to be in the al or ah part? That I can't remember.

> But then came VESA which was a little bit more complex and of course, screen sizes bigger than a segment (ouch)

Yeah, early VESA Bios extensions were hairy. With VBE 2.0 you can get a simple linear framebuffer with a high resolution quite easily.

> About audio, IMHO it's much easier now, dealing with those interrupt handlers and dma controllers wasn't easy. Of course, once the library worked it was ok.

Interrupt handlers and DMA controllers were used for PCM audio. I agree that writing that stuff by hand was harder than doing it today with libraries. And you'd still have to write the PCM-emitting synth.

But chip synths were generally programmed with simpler memory mapped I/O and they did the actual audio synthesis for you, not only PCM output.
> These kinds of fuckups rarely have only one person at fault

Fat fingering an rm -rf or corrupting a DB, if you have good backup policies, should generally not cause End of Days.
Why is everyone so unfriendly
Make it open-source, make the app free (or at least cheaper) and then every so often package it up and deploy to the app-store?
spam content. don't bother reading
Just read that post from UserVoice. Wow, very insightful. Thank you!
the third rule is there so that they can say that they were right to not pay this guy.

that's all.

they don't think they've done wrong here. in the same situation they want to be able to do the same and get away with it. these aren't people who have learnt something about keeping their word - they're paying because it's the best way to manage the crisis. the third rule is to justify their actions: they don't feel wrong; they regret that they were caught without a good excuse.

they have come out of this looking appalling. worst of all, they don't get the idea that people - good, committed engineers - don't stay or leave because of salaries and bonuses. they leave because management sucks.
I know there was a big fuss when Firefox moved over to the rapid release model, but it really seems to have energised the developers. We're seeing a lot of improvements in areas that never seemed to get the love before, and I suspect that knowing the users will get their hands on your changes in 6 weeks is responsible for a lot of that.
No offense, but wouldn't that imply that you are stupid when not drunk, as you consciously decide to get drunk?
Forced public service.
Good reply. We could likely refactor the story based on all manner of different startup and corporate perspectives. One might involve the developer pointing his bear-rifle at the salesperson out of sheer frustration! (Personal experience perspective.)
Thoughts on Adobe Creative Cloud
Short Film about the Acceleration of Time: The Eagleman Stag
I can confirm, that one alredy bit me.

Removing existing pyc files when deploying sounds sensible, but I'm not sure if -B is really a good idea in this case, as each new worker process will have to parse the code again instead of just using the bytecode.
While that's pretty interesting, I think the next story was even better. Apparently, thinking is impaired in humans when they absolutely have to go to the toilet. Who would have thought it?
Or drive prices down. You would be cutting out a lot of middle men going this route.
"How much would you charge to naturally irrigate the sahara desert"?

"How many golf balls can you fit in a bus"

"How many piano tuners could be employed in Seattle?

These questions do have everything to do with a programming job, it tests your ability to take an abstract problem and break it down logically into reasonable parts. It's called a Fermi problem and if you are incapable of thinking through them, I don't want to work with you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
I guess you haven't heard that the ship has sailed on the Bing front: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/10/3010051/microsoft-new-bing...
If you do, reply here. I'd like one too.
Facebook Instagram deal delayed for up to a year (competition investigation)
> Any employee who leaves 10k behind didn't care enough about it in the first place.

Or he was working 80 hour weeks and had a lot on his mind.
But hey, blame the victim--he had it coming! Come work for me, I will try and stiff you at every turn, and if I manage to, hey you just didn't want it bad enough.
The merits of personalizing Conversion Rate Optimization
I find it ironic how vocal the anti-RMS contingent is being in the same week that Microsoft is locking Firefox out of one of their Windows 8 lines, while we live in a world where Apple rigidly controls what you do with everything not-Mac and continue making strides towards locking down the Macs as well, where consumer electronics like eBook readers are rapidly displacing computers, and where Google's dedication to openness seems to come and go and is held hostage by hostile phone carriers and indifferent-at-best hardware manufacturers. Let us not forget Microsoft's ongoing efforts to ensure BIOSes can only boot approved (read: Microsoft) OSes. I can barely even remember all the ways in which almost every tech company under the sun right now is trying to lock us in a box.

The Open Web Honeymoon is rapidly coming to an end and our ability to ignore his ideas is also rapidly coming to end. His ideas are regaining their importance fast, because the victories circa 2000 that allowed us to pretend he was crazy because our world was comfortable are being walked back. The classic Right to Read [1] is no longer a far-out vision but very nearly a matter of some switches being flipped in existing software and hardware. I see a developing consensus group on HN that we can ignore RMS as a loon, but now's a terrible time for that to take root. We're going to get stomped in the next several years if that happens. The fight for the openness of the next hardware generation has started and we're barely showing up.

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I think your numbers might be conservative. 60k is a low intro-level salary for most metro areas and many recruiters wouldn't bother. Finding intro-level programmers is relatively easy so the burden of proof and stakes are high for the recruiter. It's a gamble and generally not worth his or her reputation.
Is living a fundamental right?
Great Singing Lessons
They have a terrible name, it's impossible to find them via a google search (unless you use their exact name) and the company that does show in the majority of results (http://www.socialcapitalpartners.ca/) invests in lube and trucks. Such a generic term seems a very strange name to use for anything.
Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 (2012/x86/x64/RUS/ENG) (AIO)
Amazon and SAP put All-in-One in the cloud
Fire proof balloon | sciencefeature.com
What happens when we put a balloon filled with water near a source of fire ?
The court says 9 lines of Android code are copied
A tremendous amount of expense where? Servers are cheap, bandwidth is cheap and they don't do trackers or even serve torrent files now, and they don't produce content.

The only thing there's a tremendous amount of is ad impressions.
> After being found guilty of copyright offenses in connection with the operations of The Pirate Bay

Did Sweden fundamentally change their copyright laws or how could the piratebay guys be found guilty, in detail?
Earth’s composition | sciencefeature.com
A century-old assumption about the composition of our planet has been challenged by a new study which suggested that the earth does not have geological composition as a class of meteorites called chondrites.
I just had a play with Asana, which is great in many ways.

But doesn't support a hierarchy other than Project->Task. As I frequently want to break things down into much smaller chunks and subchunks I guess I'll be sticking with Workflowy for the moment.

Shame, really. It's got a great interface.
Note that the article is from 2011 (August 1 if you believe the headers). No direct relation to the "rms collapsed" story posted yesterday.
After DDoSing UStream for about 9 hours this week I wouldn't be surprised if turns to be true.
Could you imagine at the extremes if you had been refused treatment because of your refusal to sign this document, to which you knew to be untrue, and to which they could not provide you with the policy.
I studied law for four years (haven't qualified) , but I'm still not even sure on the liability on this one (if there is any at all in this hypothetical).

It just shows how bureaucratic everything has become when a privacy policy contains 3000 pages, to which they clearly never refer to, and to which you are most likely the first person to have ever asked to actually see the policy.

Best wishes with your health Richard!
$ echo myimage.png | colorific

Seems a slightly odd way to get filenames.
He should be happy that he is not going to prison atleast! (electronically tagged in his apartment)