skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Years ago I went in for some job where they were advertising a salary of something like GBP35k-40k. I met with their tech guy, got passed up to the CEO and everything is going well.

CEO says something like "You'd be a great fit. Just take this coding test and go complete it in that meeting room over there. And BTW, we can only afford to pay you 25k." "I thought it said 35k." "Yes, but we can't afford that and no one will come for interviews if we say 25k."

I took the test and sat in the meeting room by myself for a few minutes, then went back to the CEO and said I wasn't interested. He kinda shrugged and said fair enough, and gave me a coffee cup with their logo on it for my troubles.

I think they ended up going public a few years later. It might have actually worked out OK for me in the end, ironically enough.
Yes, this was my reaction, too, but after some thought, the first question is about seeing a pattern and converting it to an algorithm. I don't have a background in CS or math, so my initial reaction to a problem like that is "math! No fair!" but after some thought, it is just about patterns.

And, yes, if you've had high school geometry, you should be able to answer question #2 without much trouble.
It took me 6 minutes to code something that I think solves this, mainly spent on thinking about what the end condition of the loop should be.
'FIRST ever' Linux, Mac OS X-only password sniffing virus spotted
IPhone 5 replica released in China; looks promisingly real
Her stuff is also produced without lasers - it's the ProMetal process which requires a bulk firing of parts to sinter the metal/adhesive composite the printer deposits.
I remember playing with one at Bell Labs in 82 or 83. The mouse was gigantic but looked AWESOME (black orb with red buttons). Not sure if the commercial version had the same issue, but it was slow, especially when spawning a new layer. Favorite thing: the "wait" cursor was a cute little coffee cup with steam rising from it (i.e. "this is going to take a while so grab yourself some coffee").
Some people are helped by visual metaphors. Others learn by hearing; other by reading.

And then there was that thread about some people never, ever 'getting it' and being as hopeless after a semester class as the first day. I've even met folks who, after years of computer classes, still hadn't figured out that code is executed in sequence.
They did not. I've read in a German newspaper today that a piece of the metal casing has been found 300 meters off, near one of the main roads of Munich. They coated the bomb in straw and sandbags to minimize the shrapnel as best as possible, though.
The google apps accounts are completely separate from the non-apps accounts. There's no need to merge personal and work personas.
Privacy warriors win right to fight Google's itty-bitty FTC payout
As a researcher, your work day is your free time to do fun stuff! Similar for people who have 20% Time. The rest of us need an occasional outlet for creativity that isn't part of the narrow junk we get paid for.
If it's useful in shell pipelines, show examples of actual shell pipelines, instead of a useless use of cat(1).

cat /etc/issue.logo | skypipe gentoologo # no
skypipe gentoologo < /etc/issue.logo # yes

http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#cat
I've been playing around with the Aggregation Framework lately (using the release candidate). The performance seems to be pretty reasonable, especially when compared to similar tasks with the old MR framework. A quick and dirty benchmark number in case anyone is interested:

* Obligatory unscientific, probably not meaningful, etc. disclaimer.

Mongo Version: 2.2.0-rc1

Hardware: MBP, Snow Leapord, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB mem

Data: Single collection with 500k records (machine generated time-series event data)

Query Pipeline:

[
{
$match: { ts: { $gte: 1293858000000, $lt: 1296536400000 } }
},
{
$group: {
_id: 'aggregations',
sum: { $sum: '$foo' },
num: { $sum: 1 },
avg: { $avg: '$bar' }
}
}
]

Results: The time range matched against above matches 42,466 documents within the collection. The average response time over 50 runs is 419ms. Not exactly "Big Data OLAP" stuff just yet, but plenty fast enough for most use cases involving reasonably small sets of data. Great job to the MongoDB team!
Thank you for this! :)

maybe 100 customers still use it today

Indeed it does seem like there are only a few companies that use this stuff. Like you said, you had to be a pretty big company with massive amounts of transactions to merit it. He's actually contracting with the IRS right working on some newer systems to handle your tax returns. (He tells me every year it's a miracle you get your tax returns every year on the old system)

Whenever he's looking for a new gig he basically has a set list of contacts he goes through. It seems like almost all the developers of these systems know each other.
I don't think that was the disagreement, I think it was more about the false comparison. I mean, do you honestly think that Samsung never acquires small businesses and Apple never copies?
It might have been easier for the interviewer to fill out his evaluation form with "Did not answer the provided questions" (or similar) rather than "Not interested in working for us".

HR might not have got the full story.

Still weird that they'd make a point of saying he wasn't welcome to come back and try again.
I only found this http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4218914/IBM-plants-t...

any other info?
Gracefully leaving earlier saves time for the interviewee and the interviewers.

What exactly is the upside of staying longer in this case?
It's the same for me, Firefox & Chrome (Ubuntu) :(
Yes, basically, the only economic exchange at that point is bulk cheap food and that's at close to the same exchange rates. The real differences is how it's almost hard to be that poor in the US, even though so many people are that poor in India.

PS: There are places where houses sell for less than 1,000$ in the US.
Conservatorium Hotel em Amesterdão - Holanda
Whilst I know it's possible to have multiple google accounts, I always thought google+ was supposed to be restricted to 1 account per human being?
No matter what, leaving early has to be done in front of the other candidates. They're bound to notice your absence anyway. Know a way to do this right?
(2)

If you do not feed starving people you then have dead people. This is the end state we wish to avoid. Setting up a system so that you do not need to keep feeding them yourself is a good idea. It does not negate the need to feed them now to avoid them being dead.
> But it's not OK to let people abuse you.

Yes of course. But what specifically in this story do you think constitutes abuse? The situation could at worst be described as a lack of tact by some of the interviewers. If your bar for abuse is that low, you're going to have a bad time in this industry. Or any industry for that matter! Pulling the ripcord because, surprise, a few 20-something engineers don't have flawless social skills is simply a mistake. Far better to figure out how to navigate the situation to mutual advantage, as Patrick's straightforward algorithm demonstrates.
The bigger problem is the vast decrease in mechanical properties.
BitCoin Competitor MINTCHIP Gives First Look At Winning Applications
Bolt – An open source App.Net clone
As a sinister plot to trick other people into making the same mistake he did?
Oh I'm sure! His examples usually revolved around his days working on credit card processing systems. But I can't even start to imagine the systems required to handle requests for VISA which can supply the needed response-time and up-time demands.
There really is no point in continuing an interview in an environment you find toxic. Allies? I don't think so; this guy clearly felt that the people he had spoken to were damaged, and I doubt he'd want them to be allies of any kind. Be polite, sure. But I'd get out, too, if I really felt this way.
I read the question again and I don't think he was "abused". The strongest event, prior to him abruptly (and as he describes it, ineptly) ending the interview, was He was criticized as being wrong for not following very dogmatic principles to the letter of the law.
i thought this was silly until i let it play for about 20 minutes. it's strangely calming.
This is a great move for G+, only concerns having not tried it yet are the following:

1) Free until end of the year, so in effect open roll-out beta testing and once we have it how you like it and enough hooked, then we charge you a unknown amount. Not sure in what depths of society that marketing model is drawn upon but it is something that stood out.

2) Garantee's - when you share data in a closed circle (company or select group of friends) withing a enviroment that allows open/public sharing and the identifiers being user changable parameters then I would ask and suggest one big addition. Make all interface changes approval acceptance only and by that I mean allow a company to have a technical social person for the whatever changes are needed but have the ability for all impacting changes (level of changes definable even) needing approval of at least another person, maybe even a few down to some needing CEO approval. You may have situations were you have a internal post and later on wish that to be made fully public in just the case that you dont want some internal posts ever publicly leaked and whilst the permisions to say who can see things is there. Perhaps the ability to add NEVERFORPUBLIC tags indicating that nomater what is changed down the line with facebook style permision bias in whatever fasion, they will never ever change unless the user who created them changes them. Also need to have orga chart ability for higher ups to change incase a person leaves.

3) Think Murdoch - What legal aspects do social media posts have in comparision to emails and do you have the ability to blind copy people into posts as you would say BCC your lawyer on emails. Some companies like that approach and how does G+ cater for them if it is going in the direction many think it is.
Based on the company's behavior in the story, the candidate saw no need to maintain a bridge with such toxic people. So what positive results would have came from wasting more of your time and their time?

I don't understand the deferential view towards the company doing the interview, as if a company itself could never be considered rude, myopic, inconsiderate or wrong.

Also it doesn't sound like a referral (the OP doesn't work there), just a recommendation of the candidate's skills and experience.
I completely agree with your reasoning, and how we as adults should be able to keep emotions and thoughts in check. However...

Where this particular situation differs is that this was an all-day interview. I've been at these and they are taxing on the mind and body, to say the least. If you know you aren't a good fit, there must be a good way to end the interview part-way and explain the differences. While I don't agree with getting up and leaving, I think it is wrong to waste people's time with a fruitless prospect.
On how companies lose it to their founders’ ego!
This is the first blog post I have promoted, so any feedback gratefully received.
Insane due dillengence by an investor
The straw was there to prevent shrapnel damage. Unfortunatel the straw ignited and started fires in a couple of surrounding buildings.

You can find a lot of pictures in german newspapers and magazines, i.e.: http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/bombenfund-experten-spreng...
How easy is it to reshare a "company" post to the wrong people?
It is useful to have a metric of how other humans value your time and ability, true. And storing enough resources so you don't have to go without essentials is just good planning. But it seems nonsensical to base your entire self-valuation as a human on that arbitrary number.

"Monetary freedom" makes limited sense to me - free from what? Free from having to be productive (to other humans in society) in order to get food and keep your shelter?
> If your bar for abuse is that low, you're going to have a bad time in this industry

It shouldn't be like that. Tech industry must grow up.
You have to decide, what makes you happiest? If it is freeing up your time to do something else, then you might even pay a premium to have someone paint your house for you.

Exactly, ultimately these are all pathways to the same question/answer.
Great news. We use MongoDB for call data collection, distributed control, and as a firmware/application fileserver in for telecoms testing.
> When did Apple patent pinch-to-zoom? This video is from 1988.

The video is from 1988, but it appears the work was around 1983. The pinch-to-zoom (on 'portable communication devices') patent[1] was filed in 2006, issued in 2010.

[1] http://goo.gl/gHgEB
I bet someone could write an Apps Script to tweak all incoming calendar events.
I partially agree, but would take it a step further -- your time actually has zero value in and of itself. Because we have companies (or clients) paying us a salary that takes up a portion of our time, we tend to think in those terms, but it's not the correct way to think about it. The end goal of that work we do is not to make money. Money is not a goal in and of itself (or if it is, priorities need to be shifted). The end goal is hopefully a happier, more productive life, which money (sometimes) helps us to obtain.

I work 40 hour weeks so that when I'm not working, I am able to focus 100% on my family and self. By working a job, I can (nearly) guarantee that money will solve those other problems. Leaky roof? No worries, hire a contractor. Car broken down? Call a mechanic and get on with the more important stuff. Need to paint? Pay someone.

If you take money out of the equation, it's just bartering: I do something I'm good at so that I can trade that effort for someone else doing something they're good at, and so on. The end goal is that instead of spending our entire lives worrying about Maslow-ian needs, I can spend a portion of that time doing specialized work that allows me to not worry about those things. It's a trade of quality vs. quantity.
Even after you've developed the method of synthesis, you still have to actually do it at scale, market it, and as you mentioned, get FDA approval. That all counts as execution.
We seem to live in a culture where deference towards corporations and power is the norm.
This is a very interesing note. It is undubitably a real phenomenon. A counterfactual case, however, might exist. Consider a similar non-hierarchical situation. For example, the relationship between a host and guest (at a private party). Where you were the guest of honor. As the guest of honour, you are not at the dis-advantage of power. In fact, just the opposite. But, the same question can be asked..."If you were the guest of honor at a party and the party sucks, is it OK to leave early?" If so, how would you handle it?
> The only “best practice” you should be using all the time is “Use Your Brain”.

This is true, in that very few best practices are universally applicable and you should never stop thinking. The author is also totally right about people jumping on bandwagons and being cargo cult members.

So I'm not really disagreeing with him, but just adding that a lot of best practices actually aid your ability to reason through code. They can help to push repetitive things off to the automatic portions of your brain. They can help to make patterns in your code that are visible and familiar, so you can spend less time thinking about how to implement (or read) some simple thing and more time thinking about how the simple pieces fit together.

Which is not to say all "best practices" are great. But even the questionable ones usually have some interesting problem they are trying to solve that explains why they sprung into being. If a "best practice" is popular enough that it gets called a best practice, it's probably worth paying attention to and thinking about even if you ultimately decide not to use it.
No, I must be a one trick pony who has only ever used one language, on one platform, in one workplace and has no experience on which to base his claims. What sense would it make to post a comment based on personal experience, right?
The only part of the question that required any math knowledge beyond basic arithmetic was knowing the value of pi to 5 decimal places. I'm sure they wouldn't have minded if you'd asked what exactly that was.

You could be right though, in that the high number of developers who failed it freaked out at the site of pi and flubbed it without really thinking further. Although I think that says more about our horrible math education than anything else, i.e., math education is so bad that the mere site of something "mathy" elicits terror in the hearts of otherwise competent programmers.
Damaged? Which behavior of the interviewers qualifies them as damaged?
The first one (find pi to 5 decimal places from the sequence) is asking candidates to remember or invent algorithms - in fact, I'm not immediately sure how to generate the error bound there.
Question: What of the chemical load that a vaccine or schedule of vaccines might carry? What if immune dysregulation has a tipping point? The tipping point could be a variety of things, including a vaccine. A second question: What if we need the full blown disease, along with the fever to properly train our immune systems? Mr. Manoff's article may have been well-written and fascinating and short on citations but it will raise important questions that need to be asked and answered without fear that everybody will skip their vaccines and we will all die of polio. I am certainly NOT directing this last sentence at you Mr. Swift. I am generally noting with a view to the entire discussion above that sometimes the scientific guild, like all of us, has allowed fear of what might happen to shape their answers to important questions.
Years ago the ABC showed the BBC show Absolutely Fabulous, IIRC, the same day that it was shown in the UK, which allowed enough time for UK papers to get details on the shows and publish spoilers in their newspapers.

The ABC ended up being asked to delay transmission by a week to prevent spoilers getting to the larger UK audience.
If income is distributed too unequally, it is extremely common that there just aren't enough jobs to go around at any given time. A wealthy person only needs so many servants. Everyone else has needs too, but if they don't have money to throw around they can't stimulate the economy.

The immediate problem here is corruption and a non-functioning law enforcement and court system. The pervasive root problem is actually that a fair amount of Indians don't have the disposable income to create enough jobs for everyone, or to provide for the sick, elderly, or disabled in their communities.

And letting people die or suffer from malnutrition, whether they're productive or not, is just sick.
74 air raids, 60k bombs plus a few million incendiary devices, about 90% of the city center destroyed.

There was lots of industry (BMW, Dornier) in Munich, a few important airports and it was the Capital of the Movement, i.e. the place where the whole Nazi BS started[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
I've kept an engineering notebook for years. It was something I was told to do in college. It seem that the act of writing down the problem slows me down enough to focus my thoughts more on the task.

I've tried keeping notes on the computer and they are useful. But, I've never gotten the same level of focus from writing in an online journal. I wonder if the focus comes with practice. I type much faster than I write longhand, so perhaps I lose the trigger of slowing myself down.
Bootstrap is a very good friend of Boilerplate.
I wouldn't call it abusive as such, but I would expect to be told upfront if an interview is going to take more than a couple of hours, and would consider it fair game to leave if I haven't been.
Munich is the home of BMW, and a major industrial centre of the southern part of Germany. As such it was a desirable target for the Allied war effort. According to Wikipedia, 42% of the city was destroyed during the bombing campaign:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_...
A lot of companies schedule interviews with a natural break in the process partway through -- basically you do phone screens, with people not progressing beyond those, and the in-person interview can be split to morning, lunch, after-lunch; senior people (or larger groups, or people with more constrained schedules, ...) meet with candidates after lunch, and if someone is a no-hire based on the morning, the candidate doesn't know about the afternoon phase and is told he can go home before or after lunch.

Personally I think it's important to sell no-hire candidates on the company, since even no-hires might be hires in the future (for different roles, or if they add skills), or might be referrers of other, better candidates, or might end up working for a vendor or customer, or just might make negative social media postings about you which dissuade other candidates. So doing morning interviews, lunch (which turns into "selling the company's mission to the candidate", ideally by a senior person who isn't overly busy, not a random HR drone), etc. for the no-hires.
It completely depends on one's typical ride. If you're climbing 10% grades all day in lycra, then 5 lbs makes an enormous difference. If, on the other hand, you're carrying a 10 lbs lock and 40 lbs of stuff in your panniers, then, yeah, the weight of the bike won't matter that much. In the latter case a heavier bike may actually be better.

As much as everyone obsesses over weight, it's not the only difference between a $500 bike an a $5000. The more expensive components are also going to have more-difficult-to-quantify benefits like fit and finish (i.e., look prettier). The higher-end components also work better: shifting will be much more consistent, bearings will roll more freely, brakes won't require as much force, etc.

This is analogous to a car magazine complaining about how a particular model has a "mushy gearbox." You can still drive it, but the experience isn't as nice.
I'm not a Perl addict neither, but I'm using FEX in production and it worked flawlessly for more than a year now and hundreds of users.

Easy to install (inetd/xinetd), easy to upgrade, self cleaning, nice behaviour when you reach the limit, the command line tool are autonomous (just put them in your PATH), the developper is (very) reactive. It just works.

It is as efficient as the website is old-school =) I'm an enthousiastic FEX administrator and user !
Newry employees to lose jobs after collapse of Target Express
Fair point, and I'd agree with you - I'd defo go over clearer code than something purely for premature optimization... except I think the examples given were MORE readable afterwards, at worst you've ended up with optimised code!

Problem with JS is that there is not as many optimization tools, aside from Firebug that I can think of. On top of that, personally, I'm a C# guy that does some JS and most people I know are like me. The other guys that do JS work for design agencies that are more front-end/HTML guys. Most of us aren't tooled up like in the C# world for optimization and rely on optimization tips - it's a lot easier to do these as you go along rather than retrospectively like you can with server languages. (I may well be missing a whole toolset here somewhere - be good to find more resources)
ArXiv’s funding future boosted by hedge fund charity : Nature News Blog