skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Fullscreen support is now there.
If that's the hardest question they ask you, then maybe you're right to leave. You're at least right not to take the job in that case.

Actually leaving is a bit harsh, though, since you don't know why they're asking the question. And you're definitely burning a bridge, which is probably a bad idea.

Why don't you ask the interviewer why they're using that question - after you answer it correctly and quickly? That will get you more insight into the company or at least the interviewer.

I sometimes use questions like that very early in an interview to make sure candidates didn't fake their way through the phone screen to get to the on-site interview. People who can't do the simple stuff do sometimes slip through.

I'm not trying to insult the intelligence or skills of the candidate, I'm just trying to see if they can pass that low bar before getting to the interesting questions.
I can't tell if this article is completely serious or partially tongue-in-cheek. The bit that really stuck out at me:

"If I don’t use sugar ... then I simply get ... very low on energy. ... I’m not sure what the link is here, all I know is that without that chemical in my bloodstream for some reason I can’t get my head in first gear, let alone second or third."

I found it hard to take that seriously, given that your body will put sugar in your bloodstream regardless of what you eat, and without any sugar in your bloodstream you would quickly die.

Of course, the overall point of the article still stands.
Almost all aspects of a physical object are "functional", so this is a strange distinction to make.

For example, the rich Corinthian leather of a desk calendar functions as an arm rest and also functions as a binding mechanism for the calendar pages within. The stitching of said leather functions to hold the piece together.
No, but they have aggressively applied them to self balancing robots which have many of the same issues as the author is dealing with (isolating actual up vector from acceleration vectors etc)
Thanks, rustynails77. I also agree it's very difficult to measure, which is why it fails to qualify as the optimal solution.

There is no magical solution, but the contours of the ideal system will account for the capital requirements of an invention. Areas with low capital requirements, such as "slide to unlock" and "one-click buying," should not warrant patent protection.

Not because they require less ingenuity, but because even absent patent protection, companies would still continue to differentiate through new features and ideas.

It's very similar to music and movies. Artists continue to introduce new sounds and new films even though success spawns a host of copycats.

Would Apple cease innovation on software features -- like "slide to unlock" -- if they weren't granted patent protection? I think it's reasonable to assume not because of the relatively small capital requirements and because of their passion to advance technology.
Working remotely doesn't have to mean traveling while you work. You can live wherever you want and have an office at home. Being able to choose where you want to live based on factors other than your ability to find employment there greatly increases quality of life (and a happy programmer is a productive programmer).
To make it worse, delayed horizontal scrolling on my iPhone 4.

I used an iPhone 3G up until the 4S was released. At that point it was pretty unusable. I guess I have one release to go before the same happens to my iPhone 4.
I write a fair amount of Python 3 and I don't agree at all.

If your concern is that code written for 2.x won't work in the future, it will be some years until 2.7 is no longer getting security fixes etc. The mere existence of 3.x doesn't prevent you from using 2.7.
I also love interesting teas and find that Red Rose orange pekoe tea is delightful without any sweeteners. It used to advertise as being "only available in Canada" but surely that's no longer true. (What fool would limit their business to such a small market?)
I paid for Optimal Layout and have loved it for a while. It seems likely I'll be switching to this (and perhaps adding all the Optimal Layout commands to my config file). This is much more flexible (steeper learning curve), and a huge draw is being able to define preset window configurations for multiple applications at once.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property, types of intellectual property other than patents include copyright, trademarks, industrial design rights, and trade secrets. You could get rid of patents while keeping those other types of intellectual property.
I've been doing FizzBuzz and a few other code-related tests for the last few years. It was an odd shock when I realized that was the /only/ part of the interview process that had any value to me whatsoever. I mean it. I have seen people display radically different personality traits between the interview and work on Monday. The guy who was almost too nervous to speak in the interview won't stop talking peoples' ears off. The guy who really sold himself well is very shy and quiet now that he has to show up every day. I wouldn't believe if it I hadn't seen it. Not to mention language lawyers, etc. But coding tests have predictive value. YMMV of course.

I'm also surprised how many people get it wrong. I see a lot of this (pseudocode):

for (i = 0; i < 21; i++) {
if (i % 3 == 0) {
print "fizz";
} else if (i % 5 == 0) {
print "buzz";
} else if (i % 3 == 0 && i % 5 == 0) {
print "fizzbuzz";
}
}

Yeah, see, one of those branches is never going to be reached.
For anyone interested in getting into the general swing of things with this subreddit, I encourage you to read the original post which spawned the subreddit in the first place:

http://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/10h6o4/wou...
Ask HN: What do you want to know?
Fellow hackers,

I started something called "The Open Startup Project." In which I aim to develop a startup and document it in a blog[1]. I've been going at it for about a week. All has been moving along nicely, but I hit a wall. I don't know what is it that you want to know about the experience. May you tell me what is it that you would like to know?

Here are some suggestions receieved:

- Traffic stats.
- Stack details, including libraries used, etc.
- Financials.

What else do you want to know? I'd like to know specifics. Give me examples.

*

Right now I'm developing the first iteration of the MVP. I can't say what I'm building due to how stupidly ambitious the idea is, but I will talk about the process if you want to know about it.

Private suggestions are welcome. Just email me (address in profile).

[1]http://theopenstartup.blogspot.com/
Thailand is expensive to get to, but once you're there, it's the best travel value anywhere in the world, in my opinion.
Made Android work with native controls. Similarl to iPhone. Here is a demo:

http://flowplayer.github.com/demo/seek/

This is for upcoming 5.0.1 version.
of course, but then eating food in general is mind altering. Sugar, like this article is actually about.
Hi, I'm Michael Fine, a 15 year old web developer. I'm not it the bay area, but maybe we could talk? My email is in my profile.
> Newegg.com does not currently ship internationally; we only deliver to locations within the United States and to Puerto Rico.

Granted, Newegg are retailers rather than manufacturers, but country-based product restrictions are surprisingly common[0].

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22we+only+ship+to+locations...
I use foundation at work. We have the rule that "make the site look fine in IE7", where it has to work but it doesn't have to be perfect.

You can use foundation 3.1 with the htc boxing fix [1] that fixes the grid problems with IE7.

I love use foundation over BS, since BS (to me atleast) is more of a UI decision, where you build your site from scratch with foundation).

[1] https://github.com/Schepp/box-sizing-polyfill
If you enjoy watching videos, I'd recommend starting with the CS101 Udacity course (Intro to Computer Science: Building a Search Engine), which you can find here:

http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr20...

This courses will introduce you to the Python programming language and will also explain you how search engines work. It's a perfect course for a beginner, because it assumes no prior programming knowledge. It's also very interactive, because you often have to answer questions or to implement your own procedures in Python (you can write you code, run it to see the output and submit it for validation directly in your web browser).

Looking at the syllabus, you can get a very good idea of what exactly you will learn throughout the course:

Unit 1: How to Get Started
(Your first program: Extracting a link)

Unit 2: How to Repeat
(Finding all of the links on a page)

Unit 3: How to Manage Data (Crawling the web)

Unit 4: How to Solve Problems (Responding to search queries)

Unit 5: How Programs Run (Making things fast)

Unit 6: How to Have Infinite Power (Ranking search results)

Unit 7: Where to Go from Here (Exam testing your knowledge)

I took this class a few months ago and I found it extremely interesting! Especially Unit 5, where you will learn how to implement hash tables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table).
For everyone here that says "sell it":

The better approach is to meticulously disassemble it, and patent the crap out of everything inside.

Then replicate it and sell them!

After 10 years you should license the patent for free.
You can always host your own email services.
People with this argument (that Android is SO. MUCH. BETTER. because of $COOL_HACKABLE_FEATURES) completely and totally miss the point.

99% of the general public simply do not care about those features. Only hackers do. The hackers are not the market Apple is targeting.

Most people use very limited functionality in their phones, and just want them to work... and stay out of their way. Apple does this well, historically.

So... to say you're leaving iOS dev for Android dev... with all due respect, it's not going to matter in the market.

Good luck.
How CSS3 hyphenation works in different browsers.
Honestly, I was interested up until you said you weren't sharing what you're actually building. There's plenty of generic startup info out there and without some context I doubt I'll follow this.

Good luck though! Let us know if you decide to share what you're up to.
I know several charismatic "type-A" personality people who are amazing programmers...flat out amazing. Just because you have social skills doesn't mean that you automatically suck at programming. These are extreme over generalizations and don't actually correlate with reality.

It seemed in many ways to me that this article was written in a rather bitter mood. The core of the article is really summed up with this sentence:

Despite my awkwardness at the interview, I still was hired.
But after 4 months, it had become obvious that I wasn't
a cultural fit and my employment was terminated.
Yes, Austin Meyer (creator of X-Plane) is a bit of a loon, but if you can see past the ALL CAPS he does give some pretty good explanations of interesting aviation-related stuff.

More Austin Meyer goodness: http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/austins_adventures/

Building his own airplane (in incredible detail): http://www.x-plane.com/hardware/evo/evo.html

Incredible in-flight engine failure autoland device: http://www.x-plane.com/hardware/evo/9_seeker/Seeker.html

A rather convincing explanation of why very small jets just don't make sense: http://www.x-plane.com/hardware/evo/0_nojet.html
It's amazing how much effect comments like this have on a developer. You sir, just made my day. Have a hi-five.
hi-five
Wow. I mean wow. Somehow they convinced a bunch of smart people that working remotely is like a vacation. And to brag to their friends about it! That's amazing.

For me, visiting foreign lands does not mean staying with my coworkers in an apartment all day long working and then maybe having a drink after work in a different climate. Call me crazy, but living with my coworkers for upwards of six weeks in paradise that I can't really spend real time in sounds kind of awful.
The fundamental issue that people are oblivious to is this.

If you pay for the whole pipeline, then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about their brand. This gives them incentives to get the news right.

If you pay piecemeal (with money or eyeballs, doesn't matter), then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about how effective the headline is at grabbing your attention. The quality of the article doesn't matter so much because it doesn't affect your buy decision. And what people don't care about, gets shortchanged.

The internet has caused us to move from a subscription model to a piecemeal model, and the quality of news has suffered. But this is not new. A hundred years ago the "yellow press" was also on a piecemeal model. So, more recently, were British tabloids. And they were crap in the same way that the internet news today is crap.

Unless you're either relying on a third party curation that you trust, or are purchasing the brand, quality is going to suffer.
This is one of the most naive articles I've seen on HN. And that's saying a lot.

"CEO: Dumb as hell / Compulsive Liar

Engineer: Compulsively Honest / Genius"

Have you heard of Bill Gates? Eric Schmidt? Is Mark Zuckerberg dumb as hell?

Flagged.
This reminds me of the SOPA discussions when some of the panel members openly stated (I think with a chuckle) that they weren't sure how this whole "Internet" thing worked... I don't know much about Napolitano's abilities in this arena, but it seems to me that an important part of being an influencer and a decision maker is knowledge not entirely gleaned from research, briefings, and PSAs.
Flight search engines don't include budget carriers. Most flightfox contests are won by a combination of low cost carriers like airasia or airberlin.
That actually seems like a really interesting observation. I've never specifically thought of systems in terms of UI v. AI before, but it makes sense if you think of all operations in any computational system as the result of data manipulation by some "intelligence", and user interface as more specifically the interface between that data and user intelligence.

In a computational system, computational intelligence will be used in all instances possible, until such a point as it is either insufficiently advanced or insufficiently informed to continue without making a call to the user intelligence. Thus, the more advanced a computational intelligence and the more information at its disposal, the less interface with user intelligence necessary. By that reasoning, it follows that the ideal or perfect interface would be one which treats the user purely as a data source (more precisely, as the absolute last data source in the pecking order – one to use when absolutely no other data source accessible could possibly provide the same data or make the same decision with reasonable confidence).

In that sense, it's likely that going forward we'll see UIs moving more in the direction of Now / Wolfram Alpha / Siri and using such mechanisms to manipulate and return greater amounts of information.
My point is against doing nothing. Having incorporated recently, I firmly believe incorporation is the way to go. Although, my lawyer is friendly, gets thing done fast and charges very low.
At macys.com, we use http://www.fiftyone.com/.
I can only speak for myself, but this is exactly what happens when I consume artificial sweeteners. I get tired, cranky, and hungry about 30 minutes afterwards. I switched from the 'milkshake' style protein drinks after workouts to pure whey isolate and my late night food cravings stopped completely. Too bad the whey isolate tastes, well, awful isn't strong enough of a word.
Finally! But of course IE doesn't support it. And I'm surprised Chrome doesn't.
There's that and the typos. He clearly just needed to get something off his chest. A great counter-example is Bill Gates. He's obviously a great business guy and I'm told was a great programmer.

I still enjoyed reading it though. I especially like the Pinky and the Brain analogy. It made me think that Steve Wozniak was Brain and Steve Jobs was Pinky.
You misunderstand the demographic of people who apply to programming jobs.

The vast majority (in my experience, 80%+) have no business writing code at any level. We're not talking about bad programmers here, we're talking about people who cannot program, full stop.

I can deal with "I'm not nearly as good as I say I am", I cannot deal with "What's an if statement?", but yet the majority of applicants at most large software firms are like this.

If you are a competent dev, FizzBuzz isn't designed to trap you, it's designed to trap someone far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far less competent than you. Just jump through this hoop and we can start the real interview.

You also make the mistake that FizzBuzz is the whole interview. It isn't. I've run many highly rigorous interviews, FizzBuzz is just the bar for me to talk to you past the 5 minute mark.

What I still don't get is how these people even exist. It's like showing up to an accountant's interview with a box of crayons and a bib. It's disturbing.
What problem is this supposed to fix?
And they're not the only ones to have done so. Adruinos aren't the be-all and end-all of embedded systems, and most projects do not need to give them any credit whatsoever.
> If these sellers are only lacking capital in order to see growth, wouldn't they be getting it from others by now, even in a tight lending market?

As an ex bonds guy, I can say for sure that the lending market isn't close to efficient. One anecdote - the Fed has extended a ton of credit to banks (large and small) in the last 4 years. They've also been concerned in the process because those banks have hoarded the capital to cover loan default losses.

Small and Medium sized businesses are often unable to get capital because a. there's far too much friction in the application process, and b. banks often use the same metrics to evaluate large and small businesses, but oftentimes the credit of a small business aligns better with the credit of it's proprietor, than it does with any other factors.
Agreed. I have no worries about Amazon covering themselves. They will surely benefit from this. Will the sellers? Will the customers? This is what I'm wondering about.
For what it's worth, your complaint seems legitimate to me. However, if there are only two routes to get to a freeway, that sounds like poor urban design to begin with. Street connectivity is a virtue, and suburbs are designed to avoid it at all costs. You want fewer routes to the freeway to fix your problem, but having more routes would probably be the optimal solution to balance both your street's interests and your city's. Given your description of the neighborhood, I'm guessing that's not even possible anymore.

Anyway, take a video of people barreling down the hill and send it to a city council member. Newspapers also like this sort of thing when it's egregious enough.
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP) by Abelson and Sussman is a must read.

Some other foundational texts I'd recommend:

* "How to Solve It" is a (the?) classic introduction to mathematical problem solving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

* CLRS ("Introduction to Algorithms") is the classic introduction to solving problems through computation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms

Those texts are useful for "programming in the small." [1] As you get closer to "programming in the large" (basically putting together non-trivial software systems), some good things to look at are:

* The "Gang of Four" book ("Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software") introduced the idea of design patterns to software engineering and provides a useful toolbox and vocabulary for thinking and talking about putting programs together.

* Joshua Bloch's "Effective Java" is an insightful set of heuristics on writing good code. Like with Gang of Four, you can get a lot out of this book by looking past the implementation language and thinking critically about the rationale behind the prescriptions in the book. I'd also recommend Bloch's talk, "How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design).

* A recent talk I found insightful is Rich Hickey's talk, "Simple Made Easy" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy). In this talk, Hickey makes a strong argument for simplicity in software and the ramifications for the working programmer. I'd also recommend his talk, "Hammock Driven Development."

*I would highly recommend the "Destroy All Software" screencast series by Gary Bernhardt (https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts). These screencasts show an experienced developer working through small programming problems in a test driven style and explaining the reasoning behind his decisions as he goes along.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_in_the_large_and_pr...
Consider yourself fortunate, I've screened candidates who didn't get past the "for" keyword because they couldn't construct a loop in a language of their own choosing, even after I reminded them that perfect syntax is not necessary.

I've had a surprising number of candidates who did not know about the existence of the modulo operator. Not just "I completely forgot about it", but more like "what's the % sign mean?".
"The best business guys are dumb as hell" -- this generalization in particular is egregious.

It's easy to dismiss something that you don't understand.

This article may have been the least thoughtful one I read on HN this year.
There are external GPS receivers specifically to improve iPad GPS performance in aviation.

For example: http://www.mygoflight.com/external-gps/
I'm a CEO and the part that I take issue with is not any of the bad characterizations of CEOs (my engineers are absolutely 10x smarter than me) but the insinuation that all engineers need to be "Type Bs" that don't know how to talk to people. My co-founder is probably the best engineer I know and he brought in one of our biggest investments because he's capable of communicating our vision as a company and talking to people.
Thank you! This needs to be much more obvious.
The DHS should be broken back up and most of the sub-agencies should be done away with (I'm looking at you TSA).

Much like the military, it's a solution in search of a problem, and it'll manage to find problems in places where none exist, or where it's presence is inappropriate and unjustified.
If you buy packaged food from stores, you're regularly consuming dozens of compounds that have been around for a comparable amount of time to sucralose and whose long term effects are comparably poorly known. If you drive a car more than 10 miles a day, your cost benefit analysis would be better spent on figuring out how to reduce that than on trying to mitigate the tiny odds that a randomly singled-out food additive might be causing some marginal health effect.

Also, you can't really compare the way things were vetted for safety over a century ago to how they are vetted today.
There's no law or constitutional amendment _preventing_ the government from compelling people to lie, is there?

In the contents of an already-secret national security letter sent to rsync.net, what prevents the government from saying "You may not tell anyone about this letter; this means you must continue updating the canary as if you hadn't received this letter"?