skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that may be an unfair assumption on my part. i just assumed that when people ask these abstract riddles, they're really looking for some way of testing your intuition and not something this mundane and boring.

it really boils down to basic algebra with some constant fudge factors. meanwhile, cs people have a host of sophisticated tools to estimate asymptotic behavior for the worst, best, and average case, or error bounds on solutions to NP complete problems as a function of the number of iterations of approximation algorithms, or trade-offs when certain pre and post conditions on the data influence the run-time of canonical algorithms (think searching).

the basic toolset of computer scientists is so advanced i guess i'm shocked anyone would ask such a relatively simple problem when there are much better ones out there.
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None of these are syntax. `printf` in C or scala/groovy is a function call, which relates to the language's API, the C++ use of streams is an API decision, Java being funky is due to its API (and its semantics to a lesser extent). The only language I can think of off the top of my head where print would be syntax would be python, and even then 1) that's only for versions <=2, and 2) the formatting would still be an API choice.
There's still a lookup hit of log-b32n versus contiguous memory immutable vector with O(1). Locality can also an issue with tree-like structures but muted with the large branch factor. Of course the flip side scala gives you the kitchen sink for persistance.
Interviews are as much a chance for a candidate to disqualify the interviewer/company because they asked stupid questions

Is this really true? Generally candidates know far more about the company than the company knows about the candidates. I think any notion that it's a meeting of equal interests is self-empowered fantasy.

"as they are for the interviewer to ask stupid questions.*

I ask "stupid" questions of candidates. One of the reasons I ask those questions is, quite honestly, because I want to exclude those people who have an attitude about "stupid" questions. Those who can't professionally humor simple questions are seldom the people anyone wants to work with.

And for the record the people who are really in a position to essentially set the terms we don't even interview (beyond meeting with senior management to give them the sales pitch).
Why is this notable? Should Apple capture all variations of "best smartphone" and say "latest iPhone"?
Despite the questionable wisdom of it, right there in your answer is exactly why these questions get asked: you've just given the interviewer a mountain of information about you.

I've probably sat through 500 or more interviews over the last 15 years, and the percentage of candidates who would approach such a question with a blank, not incredulous, but blank look is utterly astounding.
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> I certainly don't see an issue (yet) with Apple blocking alternative browsers. Don't like it? Buy an Android. Or a Windows Phone 7. Or a Blackberry

You are clearly looking at phones. The tablet market is actually pretty unbalanced right now. If Windows 8 fails to shake it up AND tablets manage to keep their momentum, it could actually get ugly, especially with Apple eyeing the education market.
I'm intrigued - you put a comment on a public forum, and then days later want to go back and change and/or delete it?

I guess this is simply a time to learn about what happens when you make comments in public. This, by the way, is why politicians never say anything interesting. There's no way to go back and change or delete it.

If you regret what you said, then say so. If you've changed your mind, then say so. the audience here is generally accepting of the fact that people change their mind. If done appropriately, it's a sign of strength.

Owning up to it even more so.
How about, I'm picky who I talk to and what I am prepared to discuss with relative strangers?

I am confident and comfortable in social settings but a lot of these things are frankly boring and I'd rather just not get involved. It's just a form of preserving one's sanity.
10 controversial programming opinions?
CISCO also sells Monitoring-aaS, which will do discovery, monitoring and upgrade for $xxx/device/yr.
3D it - Turn any website into 3D
I agree completely. It is surprising how many Python developers are unfamiliar with it.
These type of questions belong in the "Weekly Puzzler" part of the Car Talk radio show.

Honestly, what's the deal with them? Do you have an urge to somehow feel smarter than the person you are interviewing?

Why don't you instead do the following:

Sit the programmer down and show him your source code. If he can make any sense out of your spaghetti, then hire him/her. That's all you are looking for, right? Someone who can understand what it is you are doing so he/she canhelp you to do it faster.

No other industry has to deal with this nonsense. Imagine if auto mechanics had to guess how many miles does the average Formula One engine piston travel in a scheduled race. We would be riding around in bycicles because no mechanic would take that.
Because we presume that an interviewee is desperate enough that they won't give the "honest" answer - well, I'll google that and see if I can't find someone else who has already found the answer.

Seriously, between Google and Wolfram Alpha, do you think that any of these inane questions can't be answered within a reasonable level of proximity?

Don't believe me? I just googled "golf balls in a school bus" and had a page full of answers in seconds including how they solved it as well as the number.
https://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&#...

Better, why not ask me to pseudo-code a problem you've faced recently? Wouldn't that tell you a LOT more about whether my skills and your needs align?
news:yc [1] allows you to vote without a problem on iPad

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id434787119?mt=8&...
These reader-oriented top-level Blogspot domains are really starting to piss me off.

(The posted URL is blogspot.se, while the author is Pike, who is in the U.S. and most likely uses blogspot.com for his access.)

What, again, is the rationale for this? Other than enabling some sort of lame country-specific filtering?

P.S. Or is it in part specifically to provide a route around the U.S.'s arbitrary domination/control of .com domains? Symbolic as well, if practically speaking the U.S. government is unlikely to just shut down blogspot.com .

So, I guess I'm going from pissed off to trying to remember past conversation/explanation around this change.
Dear StackExchange: Thank You
Magento CE 1.7 forked on github by the community
This judge isn't so much corrupt as politically and ideologically motivated. This became most clear in his judgement in which he described the Pirate Party as a radical party because they favor copyright reform and transparent government.

He actually believes in draconian copyright protection, and considers himself to have the right to take measures the government fails to take, and to use ISP's as his on private anti-piracy police force.
BRACIOLA DI MAIALE AL CARTOCCIO PROFUMATA ALLA CANNELLA:RICETTA SALATA
There's an additional blog post discussing the why of this fork on http://blog.mayflower.de/archives/868-Magento-CE-1.7-forked-...
How many idiotic interviewers does this company have?

At least 1.
Lessons from torvalds/GitHub commits discussion
I can zoom in fine in android 2.2.

Why don't the YC people open up the site code and put it on github so we can contribute into making a better site?
Rails doesn't have a method_missing, Ruby does, it copied it from Smalltalk's #doesNotUnderstand:. Rails is a framework, not a language.
Who said that the fear isn't justified?

The problem being pointed out is exactly that the fear is justified. It is fucked up beyond belief that half of our population has, as the parent post puts it, "a constant and unending fear of sexual assault."
Seriously, golf balls on a bus? Why not ask about a relevant problem to be solved?

Asking about an irrelevant problem makes it clear that this question is about your logical process and not about your knowledge related to this job. It's a way of isolating variables.

The actual golf ball/bus question is a bit too much of a cliche to actually use, though. I'd rather ask how many raccoons you could put in a battleship.
I have a Verizon iPhone 3GS, which I bought specifically so that I could use it in the US and the UK. After three months, which is Verizon's minimum wait period, I called them up and had them unlock the phone for an international SIM. On traveling to the UK, I cut my trusty Orange SIM card down to size and inserted it. Everything worked perfectly.
BREIN has shopped around all over the country, using different courts every time. Most of the time they lost. But suddenly they stopped, and brought all their cases to the same court in The Hague where they started winning cases most people considered absurd.

You do the math.
Check out macgap
https://github.com/maccman/macgap
Oh god.. I got your comment mixed up with someone elses.. you never even mentioned theft. My sincerest apologies!
I think this is really what it is. There's this trend in the valley of everyone thinking they need ninja zombie pirate rockstar gurus who can solve P=NP and interviewing accordingly, when they're really writing simple CRUD apps and just need someone that knows how to do solid architecture and design.

Asking stupid questions like golfballs on a bus sends a signal of "we need geniuses for some reason" and is intended to make the candidate think "wow, the interview questions were so hard, everyone that works here must be really smart!"
There's a new California Pirate Party springing up too: http://www.calpirateparty.org/
How do you mean "subjective"? There is an objective answer to the question "how many golf balls can fit in a double decker bus" and while I suppose you could call it "trivial", being able to make that kind of estimate efficiently really is an important skill for programmers (and scientists, and engineers) to have.

That said, this is another FizzBuzz sort of test, and should not be made unnecessarily complicated. This is what you're trying to filter out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhm7-LEBznk
I don't expect you to know the answer. I expect you to tell me how you would research it.

An answer I like: "I'd search on amazon and a few other top fashion sites to get per-vendor count, as well as some of the lower end."

At that point I'd tell them that ShopBop and Net-a-porter are two typical bigger sites, and they each have about 20-50k items. I'd also point out there is a longer tail of much smaller sites.

If your answer is 3M or 20M to my 10M, I don't much care. This isn't a question with a definite answer, it's a question about whether you can think on your feet and get started on poorly defined problems.

With me, it's a good sign if I'm asking you the poorly defined questions with unclear answers. If I reach this point, I've already decided you probably know how to code, and I want to determine if you can figure out what to code.
Work harder on yourself than you do on your startup
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Ctrl-Shift-Alt-V will toggle ViEmu on/off to help with that.
Your home carrier is mostly just passing on the roaming cost billed to them from whatever network you were using while abroad. How much leverage do you think Apple would have over carriers around the world? Keep in mind that in many places cellular service is a government-run monopoly. If you want your phone to work, you have to take their prices.
Ironically, the linked site is unusable on iPhone. The page width is twice the size of the screen AND it cannot be zoomed out. Lovely stuff, can't wait to read what the author has to say on usability of other's people work.
Free Register Software
Hearing your clever answers is the entire point of asking the question.
And there are some people who are perfectly well socialized who are also sexist jerks.

Okay. I maintain that in the tech community, it's horrible social skills that's driving the majority of what appears to be gender bias, sexual harassment, etc. I also maintain that focusing on developing better social skills, empathy, etc. will do far, far more to solve the problem than simply pointing out over and over again the sex-related symptoms.

I just don't buy the thesis that sexism is now suddenly extinct

Who said anything of the sort? Please don't put words in my mouth, I don't like what you're attempting to project onto me.

jumping into a discussion of sexism with "but that happens to me too!"

I made no attempt whatsoever to derail anything. I was providing examples, from the opposite side of the gender fence, of how I saw social ineptitude causing apparent gender bias.
Ahh, I didn't know that about Engelfriet, so thanks for the link. If there's truly not that many judges, I suppose their hands are tied. Still, there's that "Ehhhhhhh...." feeling associated with the whole thing, regardless. Some of that is irrational.

As far as freedom of speech, I find the instance you mentioned to be equally insane.. but given the choice between the USA and the Netherlands, I'll still take the Netherlands (or almost any other European country) every time, despite being a US citizen.
I've encountered several contracts in California where they ask you to list everything you created outside of the company. The implication is that anything you don't list was then created while working for the company and hence implicitly owned by them. They explained the provision is for my benefit. I finally just started putting in "Numerous past and future works identified with my personal copyright".
And solve that expired link bug!
> Plus he likes to laugh about and feel superior to other people and rectify their "mistakes" - 100% definitely German."

well, as a German, I'd like to point out that this might have something to do with the fact that he is kind of an asshole. There are nice and well-mannered people here too.
MacOS KenDensed: Google, HP & AT&T Rant-a-paloosa
I'll stop looking at womens' chests when they stop looking at men's arms, legs, groin and ass. That said, both men and women can look in appropriate glancing ways or inappropriate staring ways.
So it is; I stand corrected, and learned something.
"The reason for their quick growth is that they are new and that's enough at the moment. But not in the long run."
Gero Neugebauer
Political scientist, Free University Berlin

So what? To paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we are all dead.

I really dislike such dismissal without some sort of context such as whether a short term gain might or might not have any effect and why. But then again the journalist only wanted a contrary quote for 'balance'.
So let me boil this down. You don't believe women in general have to deal with "shit" - you think it's attractive women that deal with that shit. And moreover the fact that they're women has nothing to do with it; the only bias here is against attractive people in general.

If I'm reading this correctly, you're saying sexism is not a problem at all in the real world. Did I make a mistake in reading your comment?
I always use the integer representation. I believe (no testing) that it is faster due to the lack of a conversion step, math is always in seconds, and as long as the number you store is based on UTC (or GMT), there are no timezone issues.

For @gregjor's answer (having the DB create the date for you), it seems that if you actually need to know the timestamp of a newly inserted or updated record, you will actually need to make 2 SQL calls, since the record itself is not returned by UPDATE or INSERT.
It's pretty simple really. The answer does not have to be right. Just talk your thought process through... how big is a golf ball... maybe 2 cubic inches. I wonder how many cubic inches are on a bus... how big is the bus? Well, it doesn't matter... assuming the bus is 20 feet long and 7 feet wide, and 8 feet tall there would be X cubic feet in the bus some of which would be taken up by seats and other things so we'll say X minus that to get the total number of cubic feet that we can put the golf balls in. Now the question becomes, "How many 2 cubic inch things can you fit into X cubic feet?"

That's it really. Just think it out and solve it like you would any other problem. If you can't talk it out and sort of layout how you'd go about solving it, then you're likely not a good candidate for some jobs.
Did you ever think that I was there and might have taken note of such a thing? There's a difference between "I don't eat meat" and "I don't like corned beef." Do you ever give people the benefit of the doubt, or do you always exploit omissions in order to paint the other in a negative light?
Like FizzBuzz, you over-estimate people's ability to do this. I know many programmers who are able to knock out a Rails App without breaking a sweat, but ask them to think about throughput, or simultaneous connections, or machine load, or disk access, or anything else requiring ballpark estimates and general arithmetic and they're lost.

Sure, I know what I'm hiring you for today, but in a small company what you're doing today won't be what you're doing next month, unless you're so limited as to be unable to think outside your own existing speciality.

Ability to adapt is critical. By the time I've got you to interview I already know you can program, and most likely you've already shown an interest in my company. If you're unable to have a hack at something just because you think it's unrealistic, or poorly defined, or just uninteresting, that tells me something about you.

And to be fair, and in the interests of full disclosure, before I ask these questions I ask the candidate's opinion of them. In some cases that's already enough.
Good points.

What does you mother think of this? I'd like to know her take on it, because she is an amazing example of someone who lives in the edge of the bubble. A black woman who became a programmer during the times when there were no women or blacks can put some insight into how to build portable ideas.
I honestly don't understand that. Data structures are just code ... isn't it much more work to change syntax and interfaces instead of adding some decent implementations of data structures to the library?
I was trained to program (Assembly language) twenty five years ago -- by a woman. There were a lot of female software engineers/programmers then and no one even commented on it. My stepfather (an electronics and heavy power engineer) had a very stylish and beautiful lady colleague at Westinghouse and she was a senior engineering lead -- that was more than 35 years ago. I also know lots of male gay engineers and programmers and no one thinks this worthy of comment either.

No one paid attention to this female programmer thing until relatively recently, I've found. The past really is a different country.
Maybe you wouldn't, but many people would. The government is encouraging behavior with law and giving the banks something that drastically lowers the risk of lending; that something is guaranteed access to a persons future earnings. I call that a subsidy, even if it's not a direct cash payment.
Yup, in my previous job that is exactly what we did, we found other Colleges who had done similar stuff and asked them how they did it.

I noticed some went for a 5 year sort of rolling provision making assumptions about increased traffic (but certainly no gold plating like in the original article) and others just bought what would work now and dealt with changes as they arose.

I have to say that the former strategy seemed to provide a more uniform system with less 'catches'. People don't share budgets so I have no idea which came in cheaper.
An Initiate of the Bayesian Conspiracy
If it got some guys thinking about how they would feel if this happened:

"You don't look like a programmer! When did you get into computers? That's kinda hot..."

I'd have no problem with that at all, especially I found the woman attractive. As others have said, just flipping the genders in scenarios like that doesn't often work.

And is that really an awful way for guys to hit on you? They're going to do that anyway, and at least this way they're expressing interest in your interests, rather than just staring at your chest.
Regarding the "Chance for a candidate to disqualify the company", yes you can know a lot about the company, but often you don't know how they work internally. An interview can give you a good idea of how the company works and that not something you really have chance of known, unless you know people how are or have been in the company.

I've never been to a job interview outside Denmark, and the bus with golf ball type questions isn't something I've ever encountered. What I have learned however is that if the interview is conducted by the HR department, something is wrong. HR can be present, but for developer interviews it should be your future boss and technical personal doing the interview.
> More research is needed!

Agreed. And I'm looking forward to more posts on Outlet! I have a project that's similar in that it's a Lisp dialect designed to match my own tastes and to eventually run on a variety of platforms. So far, I've had variants of it running on JavaScript and Go. It's in a rough state at the moment but you can see it here: https://github.com/ebb/lumgua and another, rather different incarnation here: http://norstrulde.org/ilge10/ (with some more description here: http://norstrulde.org/ilge10/about.html)
In LISP!
things may be better now. the trip to london I was speaking about was with a 3GS in 2009-2010, and at that point the (sole) carrier in the US (ATT) apparently couldn't offer unlocked service. i could have unlocked it myself and voided the warranty, i guess, but didn't opt to do that at the time.

of course, now americans can just buy unlocked iphones. so problem solved, i guess. remarkably happy with the nexus and don't plan to go back to the iphone, so i guess i won't find out.
Go use Google and Wolfram Alpha to find the answers to "how many fashion items are for sale on the internet?"

If you can do that, I'm truly impressed by your google-fu. Also, as I said, the fashion items question is a problem I faced at my last job.
> If I reach this point, I've already decided you probably know how to code, and I want to determine if you can figure out what to code.

Well, if that's the case, then it could be a good question.

However, you didn't state or emphasize that in your blog post and from what I've heard, many companies ask such unrelated questions first to filter out completely hopeless candidates and then get to the real interview (technical questions), so I assumes this is what you meant, and I don't owe you an apology ;-)