skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Market cap is a nearly useless measure, especially on a large company.

Apple's stock price is based not on current or even future value, but on being big and a low-risk investment for mutual funds and other institutional investors. Can we stop pretending it's a measure of success, value, or consumer preference?

Let's end this silliness. Do we really believe Apple is more valuable than Google + Microsoft? Do we really think they impact more users, or have a greater reach than those two companies combined? Nearly every computer in the world runs Windows, and Google organizes the world's information and delivers it to more people than anyone else.

Apple sells phones, and occasionally a computer, but not very many of either relative to their markets. Roughly 60% of their valuation and revenue come from a rapidly-aging product in a mature market.

If I were on Apple's board, I'd be terrified of what that stock price represents - that my job is now only to continue existing. Not to do great things, not to risk everything on a new product, and not to have vision or leadership. Just to continue existing.
Astronomers spot pair of 'Tatooine' planets orbiting twin suns
So having some respect to yourself, your time (and time of those doing inteviews) is now seen as being rude, prima dona and burning bridges? Interesting.

Is economy being different ten years ago valid reason to pretend that you like what you don't really like, waste time and engage in ass-licking? Because, you know, thing may turn up differently someday?
> I'm not sure what a correct system should be, but I know that it can't be based on the Earth, the sun, or any one galaxy. In order to have accurate time, it must be external to all of these things, like a meter stick is to an object.

But Einstein's theory of relativity makes that impossible -- there is no absolute time. The larger reason for debates like this is because any timekeeping convention is relative.

As to a "meter stick", that's also relative, and therefore arbitrary, for the same reason -- relativity theory.
Besides the slowness of such a solution, that condition is not enough to ensure the first five decimal places are correct.
I was thinking that you'd want to pair the terms, but going further didn't happen to tickle my curiosity. Of course after seeing your answer, it looks quite obvious.

My larger conclusion is that either the OP didn't intend to require this analysis or he's surprised that people in an interview+coding mindset are going to get stuck thinking there is a straightforward algorithm. Since he refers to the question as simple for any "seasoned developer" (read: has forgotten algebra ;), I presume he actually misstated the problem and really expected one of the simplifications people have come up with. Either way, I think it says more about the interviewer than the interviewees.
It's just like dumping a girlfriend. Just say it's not working out, you don't have to point out all her flaws.
FYI, the link to raining.fm at the bottom of the page doesn't work :)
Originally, I read the first few paragraphs, noticed it was mostly fluff journalism and immediately jumped to the HN comments and posted a question asking about the use of lasers to melt the metal either pre- or post-deposition to fuse it to already deposited metal. I then went back to the original article and read to the end of it just to make sure it didn't mention that this was the technique used, since I have made this mistake before. Lo and behold it was exactly the technique used. I quickly went back and deleted the question I posted before I was downvoted with a comment like "didn't you read the article. it said that the process used lasers as you described".

The reason this is interesting is because this is exactly the type of process that ends up being patented. Chances are that the scientists that perfected this stereolithography technique are going to apply for a patent and probably get it, even though it was an obvious approach to use to me, someone who has zero experience with stereolithography. If it is obvious to me, then it is certainly obvious to someone with familiar with the field of stereolithography. Too often people say "Ohh, everything is obvious after the fact", but like this approach using lasers and stereolithography it is very obvious before the fact too. Most things that are obvious in hindsight are just as obvious before sight.

Anyways, sorry to be OT with this comment. It's not meant to be flamebaity, it's just relevant because my original naive question was made on this post.
Learning business skills as a developer
There's a saying I've heard that it's easier to teach business to a developer, than to teach coding to a businessman.

I'm thinking specifically things like marketing(get more users), or learning different ways to monetize a product(get more money).
Brutally honest: if you can't get basic things like mixed content issues worked out, how do I trust you with the security of my money? First impressions are really important.
Screenshots of ecommerce sites before they became popular
Example:Dell, Apple, Netflix..etc..
Sounds reasonable indeed. Nevertheless a little confusing since both my profiles would be at least partially public.

What's your experience at Google? Do all off you habe 2 accounts and if so, don't you have problems making sure that your not work related friends etc. don connect with the wrong profile?
Really? I see heavy internal Google+ use as a good thing: it means people like each other enough to network internally.

Remember: G+ does not replace mailing lists (which you get with Groups); they're two different types of communication. Mailing lists are good for threaded discussions. G+ is good for "look at this thing I just made".
I am pretty sure, that the candidate would get no detailed reasoning why he was rejected if he were get no offer.
Why do you think he owes explanation?
NYT isn't paywalled. You just signup for a free account and you can view articles.
"I'd modify "Programmers who don’t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do", to be "Programmers who don't code in their spare time for fun will never be as good as they would if they did". I definitely believe coding for fun helps your skills, but I've seen too many "just-a-job" programmers code circles around others on the same teams who had side projects and kept up with the trendy languages. It's not a clear differentiator, just a data point."

Yeah, as originally written it basically reduces to "programmers with more experience are always better than those with less experience" and that's just not true. Side projects are a good sign that someone cares, and a good way to get experience faster than others and (potentially, unless you're just repeating stuff you already know in them) keep your experience diverse, but that's all.
Lawyers and financial analyst are not similar to programmers at all. I don't disagree with you - I too think that how we're perceived could be damaging. But your examples are not well chosen.

In short: find me a journalist or a writer or a musician or a sportsman who does NOT do some kind of side-project for fun or without being paid. They probably exist, but I bet there's not many of them - and I can suspect that they're viewed just as 9-17 programmers by the rest of their fields.
We just had a leap second June 30 so the proposal must have been scrapped.

edit to add link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Proposal_to_abolish...
Both chips (and displays) are made by Samsung though...
Transport, work clothes, work lunch, daycare and even rent/mortgage# must be paid simply to go to work.

I disagree on work clothes and rent, and transport to some extent. You must wear some clothes and have some shelter, and you eventually will need to travel somewhere, even if just to the store for food.
Shattered Genius - Grigori Perelman
Yeah well it's not conducive to making software in an agile way and if releases are going to take two months to be approved and then probably rejected, I'm looking at 1/4 year tacked onto already lengthy scopes. That's a fiscal quarter someone blew, or one tenth of someone's daughter's life. Not to mention I totally lost my "updated for Mountain Lion" and "updated for Retina" feature chances. It's not something want to accept as "common"! I'd like to have a daughter someday.
Regardless of whether you want to make the market as free as possible, or whether you want as many people to be as well-fed as possible, the long-run solution is the same for both [1]. The more the market is allowed to work, the better off people will be, and the more food they will be able to buy. Welfare systems offer a temporary solution at the expense of long-term growth, and so are overall negatives to making sure as many people can be as well-fed as possible. Importantly, efforts to artificially solve the high unemployment rates will similarly just increase poverty.

This reasoning is separate from the effects of welfare dependence. While they are also important considerations, they are hardly the only ones. The core consideration is as above: there exists a fundamental problem in the market, and throwing money at those most affected by it doesn't solve it, but instead just prolongs it and distributes the issue to those whose money is being thrown. In the long run, things get worse. India's growth is not helped by its programs, but hindered by them; its growth and its poverty levels would be better, not worse, without the programs.

So basically, there's no part of any of the calculus that involves ethics or anything. It's purely that we find, scientifically, that if you want the most people to be the most well-fed, market policies and low/no subsidies are the way to go. See: the Washington Consensus point 2 [2].

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4449397

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus#Original_s...
Heh, not me! Just thought it should be mentioned.

But, I never have more than about 7 tabs per window, and rarely more than 3 windows open, so for me, tab management isn't much of an issue.
Appreciate the downmod, would appreciate a reason/discussion about the above even more
The point of Fizzbuzz is that some people simply cannot write any code at all.

It's not necessarily looking for the best possible answer. In fact, I completely expect (as both interviewee and interviewer) that the candidate will write a first pass on paper, we will look at it, figure out it's big-O, and then go on to improve it to be better.
Sounds like a perfect first thing that should be on their website.
I know it's a joke, but it's lazy programming/lazy thoughts like this that caused the issues with the systems in the first place :)

Although I still don't fully understand why leap seconds caused such a problem - we can handle leap years and we can handle daylight savings, surely this is just another clock correction action such as these?
Well said. Normally, a best practice becomes known as a best practice because it is the right choice most of the time. It probably won't be the right choice all of the time and the truly successful can excel by knowing when to creatively deviate from the "best practices", but they make for good baseline to adjust and customize from.
I thought the Lumias were pretty well marketed in the USA (I don't have a TV and tend not to look at web ads [though I don't block them] so I could be wrong...).

It's hard to see WinPho (sounds tasty!) gaining due to an Apple patent shakedown. It's just not a very interesting platform; Android has reached critical mass and is well understood. Phone makers are just going to license or work around the damage -- they already do this for other patents.

I do worry that long term the patent system will result in hobbled products shipping in regions where software/UI patents are enforceable and unhobbled versions shipping elsewhere. Hope not, though.
> Ending leap seconds would make the sun start rising later and later by the clock -- a few seconds later each decade. To compensate, the U.S. has proposed adding in a "leap hour" every 500 to 600 years...

So it's not abandoning the shifting so much as putting it off into a larger interval, the leap-hour.

Today, that interval is the second. Today, we don't adjust for partial seconds; this proposal just moves the adjustment interval way out.

Perhaps somewhere in the middle like leap-minutes would be better. This would thus occur every 60-90 years.
This article has several fatal flaws.

It's assuming after the verdict (if and when the case is finally adjudicated), Samsung will simply dust itself off and start pumping great phones back into the market that everybody will want - thus giving us more choices as opposed to less choices. Give the current marketplace, I'm not sure optimistic about their chances of survival.

Also, the whole analogy about the Xbox 360 grabbing market share when the PS3 was delayed? It sure didn't last, how could we forget the "red ring of death" syndrome that caused the console to have a 50% or higher failure rate shortly after its release?
Jeff - Founder/CEO - This will all be made clear. It's a UTMA and very easy to use. We will also be handling everything behind the scenes. Saving for your child can be complicated, but that is what we're going to change.
Its all about point of reference.
When I worked with radar we liked GPS time, always increasing so its easy to get a difference. But for locating the sun and sun rise, earth time is useful (those griping astronomers have a point).

We figured it out, and it wasn't too bad. Some good time libraries would go a long way...
Advice On & Instruction in The Use of Ember.js
"End product is what needs regulation/laws" is, I am afraid, a very narrow view. The degree of difficulty in manufacturing or obtaining (along with operational training) has a significant impact on use (or misuse) of weapons. Printing such objects in your household backyard, for example guns, will surely be a matter of "concern" for authorities who not only have to make laws and design regulation, but also enforce it.
40 extra minutes in a martian day definitely make things interesting. Going further, how will time work when we're stationed around Saturn's moons? We will probably need some universal units of time that work regardless of how long it takes you to rotate around the sun. (Stardates?)
Interviews are complex, but I view part of the process as negotiation. One of the principles of being an effective negotiator is knowing what you desire to be the future relationship between the parties. Typically in the technology space, I don't like burning any bridges.

Thus, I start the interview process out by saying that I value and appreciate directness and honesty in all of my dealings. In keeping with that, if at any time I feel I have enough information to know that this will not be a good fit, that I will be honest about that and we can part on good terms and not waste each other's time. I also ask in return that they be up-front and honest with me (don't bring me in for interview after interview just as a charade when they know they're giving the job to Fred anyway).

I've used this tactic a handful of times and it has never failed to get a positive response. On a negotiation level, it may also give me a slight edge because I broached the topic first and raised the possibility of not seeing the process through to the end, something many interviewers forget is a possibility.
Great, I am looking forward to that!
I think one of the contributions to the "bottom line" of programming for IOS is the fact that Apple users are willing to pay more (regard the Orbitz anecdata on Apple users and hotel bookings).

I'm not as convinced about the asserted higher quality of the IOS apps. I've downloaded an appalling bad app from the app store, with a bad UI and crashy temperment. I wonder how that one got through Apple quality control.
Kurt Varner: A four-month adventure of living from my car in Silicon Valley
Well, we're still using the Gregorian Calendar, and according to Wikipedia, that was released in 1582 [1]. When designing a system as eternal as time, I believe that it should still be easily usable in 100, 600, or 10,000 years; on any planet, and in any galaxy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
Or, the parents wouldn't have had kids they couldn't feed. The parents wouldn't have starved because, without too many kids, they weren't overly dividing the available food.

I think a civilized society should hold parents responsible for their own kids, outside of true emergencies.
at the least you can be sending multipart/alternative to include both a text/plain and html body, so you don't have the horrible situation of people getting html source dumped at them. Most webmail clients these days support 'rich content' to a reasonable degree, but a lot of people still have old desktop clients that'll just give up and throw it all at them.

That said, maintaining 2 templates or deciding exactly how to handle the formatting of the text version can be a hassle. I'm curious how others have handled this problem.
He means to the OEMs. They cannot modify it to look differently from other OEMs.

I think this is more important to carriers though. They want people to walk in and see 5 or 6 different looking phones to choose from. Hence the love of Android.
They were going to waste his whole day with corporate ego trip already. Why not make some productive use of his time then? At least if it doesn't work out, the candidate got some experience, learned how they work on the company, etc.
The article fails to mention the single most effective way to improve math education -- teach mathematics first, then arithmetic later.

What do I mean by that? This is mathematics: http://www.hdwallpapers.in/walls/jake_sully_avatar_2009-norm...

And this is arithmetic: http://www.scielo.br/img/revistas/bjp/v37n2a/a07frma1.gif

The second part (arithmetic) is required for the first, but it doesn't need to be presented first.

The problem is easy to state -- we're teaching mathematics in the wrong order.
Why Google’s homepage antics are more serious than they appear
HN has a very diverse set of readers; is anyone knowledgeable able to provide insight as to why we would want to open a trust, and any implications it would have?

As a single-father I am very interested in any knowledge that can be shared on this subject.
Technical jobs present a unique opportunity for HR to screw up. Once, HR sent us a candidate for a data warehousing job because the guy used to work at a warehouse.
True, but the schadenfreude in me secretly hopes he sues the bejeezus out of Apple and then donates all the money to people who need to defend themselves against Apple's patent trolling.

Apple, more than any other company, not only exhibits but flaunts the "long-nose of innovation" in everything they say or do. They need a healthy dose of reality.

I think the best illustrative art they could have used in the trial is to hand everyone a rubber band and asked them to make it larger using one hand. I bet you 99% of them would place the band between their index finger and thumb or thumb and all four fingers. They are the two most obvious solutions for any creature with an opposable thumb.
Now if only that would happen here in the US. I simply don't understand why I should have to pay to get something the next day when I could get it for free minutes after it airs.
Python and Flask framework. You could try Django as well but I personally found Django to be too bloated for me (not trying to start flame war here). The beauty of Flask is that it comes with just about enough core functionality to get you started and you can always use their extensions to add on top as needed.
Also I imagine many wouldn't customize 404 too much
Your first sentence implies that the interviewee wasn't acting professionally. I didn't get this impression from the post. It sounded like he just politely tried to end the interview process. Without more details and perhaps both sides of the story it's a mistake to label his behavior as inept.

You make a good point about moving careers forward. Gaining a useful industry contact is probably worth putting up with just a few hours of unwanted technical interviews (which are good, free practice like you said). This is true even if the culture is not a good fit. However the company was hostile and rude. They should have calmly and casually abided by the interviewee's request then followed-up with a non-confrontational email. The company's behavior during the interview process (when they should be on their best behavior) makes me highly doubt their value as a useful industry contact going forward.
Guy did not to work there so he walked out. What's the problem?
Great app !
Ask Steve Yegge.
There was a huge (and costly) marketing campaign for the Lumia 800/900, and that resulted in very few sales. The problem isn't the amount of marketing (as WP and Apple can both attest to), its the product. Average users just aren't interested in Windows Phone, and the Windows name does not inspire user confidence (or desire).
There's some free stuff for mac - http://www.techsmith.com/download/camtasia/default.asp - 30 day trial and so on
I think what he means is the ability for manufacturers to 'differentiate' their product- that is, add stuff like Sense, or TouchWiz, or MotoBlur. Us techies may hate them, but carriers love them because it means they are selling something other than a generic Android phone that makes them sound interchangable with another manufacturer.
It seems plausible to me that a new distribution model could be borne from this tech. With a few large-scale 3D printing sites deployed geographically, delivery times for products drop to next-day or so. Alternatively, a community-based or government-sourced set of facilities allows for arbitrary production of items (replacement parts for washing machines, light-rail components, etc.). Manufacturing might not be as tied to volume-of-scale issues, so that bespoke articles are still inexpensive. It's conceivable as well that parts for obsolesced machines could still be produced (my previous oven need just a heating unit, but the whole thing had to be replaced since none were available).

With knowing admittedly little about the field, I'm hopeful that the issue of producing multi-material or bonded objects is tractable. Current 3D printers are akin to black-and-white dot-matrix machines. Nowadays, we have photo-realistic full-color desktop printers (which are given away for free at this point).

I'm very excited about this technology, as it seems to have very practical (and marketable) uses that we're only beginning to touch on.
Sounds like you made the right decision for you.
I just looked at the page, and I don't believe any normal person would think that.
James Bond can't wait for iPhone 5, goes with Sony phone in "Skyfall"
Somewhere along the line, it changed from "do you program in your spare time?" to "show us your side projects."

I program in my spare time. I like it. But when interviewers want to pour over my "spare time" code before I get a job, it stops being fun. It becomes more work.