skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hacker steal 3.6 million Social Security numbers
It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes!
API Quirks: a new blog series documenting weird web API behavior
“Describe how you would implement the tinyurl.com website.” preferably without realising you have the technical skills to do far better on your own than wage-slaving yourself for us.
When Apple said Samsung could avoid infringing by making their tablet ugly, I didn't imagine Samsung would take them seriously. :-(
Turing is amazing, but I've often felt the Turing Test had no real scientific or mathematical basis, and if proposed by a far less famous and influential person, would be largely (and rightly) ignored.
I think they consider everyone that apply. I am not a MIT/Stanford grad but I was given consideration but passed over because I am not close to SF. After talking a bit with them, and stating I am willing to relocate, I was told I'd be reconsidered in the next auction. They were very patient with me too. I'd certainly give it a try even if you are not MIT/Stanford grad.
libeio makes some strides in this direction.

http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libeio.html
I agree -- but it doesn't seem to me that "treat return characters as hard line breaks" equates to "throwing away the ability to have visually formatted source text," unless one is using an editor that is unable to deal with soft-wrapped text gracefully.
Yes.

I suspect that in XXII computer industry will be epitomized by Jobbs. "Jobbs did computer industry".

Laughable, but surely possible
Isn't this related to Ext4 bug that was found recently? [1]

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxN...
As an end user myself on Linux, I was worried to read this. I keep teaching materials in the Dropbox folder so only a small file size, but they are important. As mentioned below at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704176 I have developed the bad habit of editing files directly in Dropbox. I may need to revisit this and use Dropbox as a sync only, edit elsewhere and copy over.

The command

find /home/keith/Dropbox -size 0

shows only cache files for deleted files, and some backup files that I saved while empty (I know those should be zero bytes).

A personal work around is a simple bash script to copy Dropbox directory to another with the date as directory name, I'm running this once a day or so. Then my normal old-school backup onto an external drive will catch each day's dropbox.

Surprising how convenient I found automatic file sync, and how quickly I came to trust the dropbox daemon running in the background on 3 computers!
The thing is that someone who is listing their services on TaskRabbit wants to exchange their time for money. If it's an amount of money that's worth it to you, it's not you who valued their time less then your own, it's they who did it. Why do law firms have janitors? Because lawyers' time is economically, if not morally, more expensive than janitors' time.

It's not a cultural failure to hire someone to do something you could do yourself, but rather wouldn't. Someone who is on TaskRabbit delivering groceries probably isn't using a bicycle, can get better at it than you can by combining deliveries, and can make money at the same time. It's a win for both parties.
> Seriously, they say there are no stupid questions but if X is impossible then "is X illegal" is probably not a productive question to ask.

The point of asking such a ridiculous question is to show the silliness of attaching __so_much__ value to what are, essentially, very large numbers.

Here's a less ridiculous question for your consideration: What if a team of Mathematicians accidentally generate a copyrighted commercial MP3 during research? Is it illegal for them to hold on to that very large number? Furthermore, is it illegal for them to publish it?
South Carolina Department of Revenue hacked.
I feel like developer interviews are a cover for conducting an IQ test in a manner that is politically passable.

And only people like developers would put up with being tested like lab mice in this manner for a job.
Real-world examples tend to be subtler, and not quite as easy to explain in an introductory article. Of course you wouldn't really use the for-demonstration-only regex I mentioned. Instead, you would write something reasonable-looking that works just fine unless it encounters a highly unlikely bad input. That's the way I've always seen it happen.
Dropbox has lost my files as well. I had kept some very important private files there which I just wanted to keep there without the need of updating them/syncing them. After uploading, I removed the local copy of that private top level folder, as I didn't want to keep a local copy in my computer. With the next sync, this STUPID SH*T removed the folder from their server as well, without any warning of any sort! Any system which deletes the files without asking, should just not be used or depended on.
Reading Jeff Bezos
Actually, it was invite-only when I was there. But that's sort of besides the point. It's irrelevant whether or not it's an "honor" to be on the hiring committee. The point is that being on the hiring committee does give you some insight as to why people tend to get rejected. Without being on the hiring committee, you really only see why you're rejecting people -- smaller sample size, biased, less diversity of questions, etc. But, for hiring committee members, you see the results of many people's interviews.
This is most definitely interesting. I really liked visiting the yahoo page to get everything done from mail to chat to news etc.

Okay, it was 5 years back, but Yahoo just got stuck there. And, well, we all moved on.
Another piece of advice: Think carefully and don't assume that the obvious algorithm is the best one. Interviewers will usually be satisfied if you notice that they're describing an instance of 3SUM and give them the obvious O(n^2) solution; they'll be impressed if you notice that the problem they're describing is actually a dense special case and can be solved faster using an FFT-based convolution.
I've interviewed a lot of people (at Microsoft). I don't claim to be good at it, I think that I do OK, but that's why one interviewers opinion should never be the be all.

I've definitely encountered people who were clearly good, and equally clearly sucked at interviewing, as an interviewer I had to ask myself the question "why?"

I encountered the following cases (among others)...

The ill-prepared - This may come down to background, some candidates didn't seem to know that they should prepare for an interview - this can be excusable, but in a world where advice about this is one web-search away is increasingly tough. Usually (but not always) this is a barrier to recommending hire.

The chronically nervous - This is always at least 50% my fault. I believe in asymmetric responsibility, as the person with more "power" in the situation, I feel part of my job is to help a candidate past their nerves; if this means my interview is entirely spent putting them at their ease to (potentially) do better with the next person in line, so be it. This has rarely been a barrier to recommending a hire.

The arrogant - "I can't believe you asked me such a demeaning coding question when I'm applying for a senior role, clearly my resume tells you all you need to know about my coding chops" - sorry, if I can't pierce this, no hire.

The inarticulate - often in this case the code speaks, even if the candidate can't, I usually associate this with nerves, sometimes it is language issues, sometimes stress sensitive speech impediments. I'm pretty sympathetic to this if the code speaks, but communication is part of the role so this is always a judgement call.

Can't code on a whiteboard - I'm inclined to call this ill-prepared, you should expect to have to do this coming into the interview, but I do get that this is equivalent and opposite from "inarticulate" - I will take a coherent and detailed description of a solution as being nearly as good as the whiteboard code, but there is a bottom line, you have to be able to show me your ability - sometimes one really insightful question or observation is all that it takes...
I believe we have similar conclusions but differ on the facts, I don't vote because it's pointless because education has revealed that...

What politicians and the media say are mostly lies (intentional or not). It's difficult to tell what is a lie from what is the truth.

I don't live in an area that can affect the outcome of the election.

Considering the entire spectrum of choices available the two or three options you have are almost identical: Democrats are the left wing of the plutocratic party and Republicans are the right wing. Tide or Sunlight isn't a choice either way you're buying soap from P&G.

Any time, including writing this point, spend worrying about politics is time I could have spent improving my life or the lives of others.
I don't know what it was, but my browser didn't like it.
> Given a cube with sides length n, write code to print all possible paths from the center to the surface.

What is a path through a cube? This seems like some weird combination of graph theory and geometry.
I got that book. While the questions and answers are useful, in my experience this book alone is nowhere near enough to get prepared for a Google interview (not that the author claims that).

I studied CLRS's Introduction to Algorithms and a couple of other books for about 2 months. Even then I could not answer the hardest questions during the onsite interview. And if you cannot come up with an optimal algorithm for a given problem, all of the items mentioned in the article (communication, clear coding, testing) don't really matter.
And I'm not OK with ONLY Turing occupying this position.

Von Neumann, Curry, Kholmogorov, McCartey, Armstrong, Norvig, many others (yes, I'm mixing alive and dead) - are they really not standing near Turing?
Am in the only 30 year old coder here, who earns around £300 a day coding, but would fucking die in one of these interviews?
Don't do this. I had some critical files which this stupid Dropbox sync system deleted without asking because I had removed the local copy of the folder on my machine. I couldn't even find a simple setting there, which says "don't delete files while syncing", or even something like "warn before deleting files". It totally sucks.
Architecture and MVP I setup for a startup:

- database: PostgreSQL

- API server: JEE6 app (EJB, JPA, JAX-RS, Jackson, Jasypt)

- Web server: JEE6 app (JSF, Primefaces, PrettyFaces, Jackson, commons-http)

All packaged with maven, and deployed on two glassfish instances on a dedicated server, but it could have been deployed on the cloud with Jelastic.

Better that embedded Jetty/Tomcat, you'd better use a more classical approach to remain compatible with the hostings providers. Also targeting a full JEE6 server is not insane anymore (light for some values of light, fast, well documented)

Please, make an API server, even basic, from the start and keep the web front-end as much stateless as possible.

Shameless plug: I'm a freelance, I rock in JEE6 and I'm a Ror padawan.
Now ticketing, that reminds me of the ITIL standards and reamedy fun (slang for nightmares). If a company has ITIL I always ask them what proactive support measures do you have in place, always a good question that as ITIL is in essence more reactionary/event driven and as such does not lend itself well by design for catering for proactivity. I was in a server room once, smelt burned solder type smell, traced to a server that smelt like something had blown. All services/diagnostics/monitoring checked out fine and indeed it was working fine. I wanted to plan a changing of the server/have a hot standby ready for it being proactive as literly something smelt wrong. Alas the ticketing system did not alow such a ticket to be rasied as the server was not faulty and there was no issue showing. Two days later that very server failed, turned out PSU had died and taken out the raid controller on the motherboard in the process. The impact of this was more work than had it not been proactivly addressed. That is why when they say ITIL, then I fear how it is implemented and as such ask how do they proactivly deal issues. At the very least they should have root cause analysis mentioned, idealy they will sing all about there great Q&A processes and how that is all catered though open to suggestions.

Your right about the canned marketing responses, most of those forget the interview is a two-way process sadly and deem any question you ask as a waste of there time, that is a sign you should take note of.
Yes, sync != backup [1].

I do agree with you but, I can tell you that selling backup service is harder than you think. Also as pointed by paper [2], the human error accounts for ~50% of all system failures. And the worst thing is that majority of users who accidentally delete data, don't even notice data loss until lost data is needed and they don't recollect doing something wrong.

What I found out interesting that people (i.e., small business owners) will are scared of losing a credit card (even though you can call the bank and cancel your lost credit card and get a new one - inconvenience but not a big deal), but they will not backup critical company documents and data (even if they lose them the company will be pretty much closed - there is no "bank" to go to and get data back).

[1] http://blog.cloudhq.net/post/33844549768/the-difference-in-d...
[2] http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/talks/pdf/HP.pdf
Doing something like this before tackling the Dragon book [1] is a great idea. Formal theory will make a lot more sense once you've run into some of the practical problems yourself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniqu...
Consultants are asked case studies. Writers are asked to write something (or submit writing samples). Actors are asked to audition. And programmers are asked to program.

Why shouldn't you validate if a programmer is, in fact, a good programmer (which is a mix of many things, including intelligence)?
It doesn't necessarily hold. You can write a system which handles huge volumes of traffic simply by scaling horizontally with N servers. For some languages N is just a lot larger. Unless your startup has unlimited hardware resources like Google you can't make that assumption.
You have to be more sneaky. Rather than asking something as generic as

>What's it like working here?

ask them

>What do you like the most about working here?

If they give you something like "the stability" or "the high pay" those are generally bad signs. Better signs would for example be "the great people I get to work with every day" or "the autonomy to get to choose what I work on".
Please. I did not imply anything of the sort. If you're not going to participate in honest discussion, and instead try to score argument-points, please don't participate.
Anand,
You should take more care with your redaction; I was able to figure out one of the twitter users (and hence the rest) just by looking at the blurred image, i.e. less than 15 seconds work.
From looking at the source code, Go's regexp package uses O(n) NFA-based matching, as described here:

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html

It isn't nearly as highly optimized as RE2, but it works in a similar way.
It surprises me that someone would rely entirely on dropbox as their backup tool AND primary file location, especially when it happy manipulates the files locally.

I backup to an external HDD and to the cloud and still have the originals (as well as having extra copies again of my music and photos synced across my computers) - the more redundancy you have the better.

It sucks that so many people need bad stuff to happen to them to do something about it - I'm so thankful that storage became so cheap before anything really catastrophic happened to me. I've lost data in the past but it was back when so many things were offline, nowadays it's CRITICAL to have a good backup plan.
You deleted the folder, and dropbox synced the deletion. This is expected behaviour. I don't know why you entrusted crucial private files to a service you didn't fully understand.
"How stable is the team (meaning, how frequently does the team change members)"
To me, this doesn't seem like technology enabling friends to be rude so much as technology-assisted blurring of the line between actual friends and acquaintances.
I work on Google's CDN. I have an intimate understanding of what's running here.
Actually, I don't think Coinbase is hurting themselves. Sure, smart people are running away, but the muppets[1] are happy to enter their bank passwords. But they're hurting their own customers by training them in unsafe practices. I guess it's a lost cause if Paypal does the same thing, though.

[1] since we're on the topic of finance
TLS and Key Exchange
From some of the other comments, it sounds like (asking for bank passwords) is a semi-common practise [in the US]. Is that accurate? I'm absolutely stunned that anyone could think that (a) it's a good idea, and that (b) anyone would be so unbelievably stupid to actually provide them!

I can't imagine the banks are thrilled with this either - and if they're not actively blocking this sort of activity, they probably should be. I'd be careful that providing your password doesn't invokes various liability clauses in your banking agreement.

The only way I would ever consider doing this, is if I set up a new bank account, preferably with a different bank from my usual transactions, where I specifically put funds for this purpose. In which case, it's probably not worth the hassle.
Lots of people here are right to question the security given the track record of ... well, pretty much everyone involved in BitCoin trading, but I work at a company that has looked into using this type of instant bank account verification and it's not quite as ridiculous as some people are assuming.

To pull money from your account, they are using ACH (Automated Clearing House) sometimes called e-check. The standard way to confirm an ACH relationship is to make two small deposits known as microdeposits into the customers account, and then the customer needs to come back and confirm the amounts.

This requires waiting for what's usually a daily process to send the ACH micro deposits, then waiting until they show up in the customer's account. Thus, the customer needs to wait several days before they can add funds.

Another option is to use a service like By All Accounts which logs in on the users behalf to their their bank account and confirms that they actually have access to the bank account they are trying to draw from and confirms sufficient funds.

Once either of these happens, then the company can pull from your bank account. This is great if you're setting up something like automatic bill pay or hooking up a scheduled deposit into an investment account.

So if you trust this BTC dealer as much as your credit card company or stock broker, this is a reasonable method to get money to them. If you don't trust them, then you probably don't want to give them money anyway.
That block only proves NYT was right.

Wen Jabao might just as well have said - yeah, I stole it.
If you're on windows the following Powershell may help diagnose if you've been affected:

gci $env:USERPROFILE\Dropbox -r | where { $_.Length -eq 0 }
I'm on 3 of our hiring committees, and i've been at google for over 6 years. It hasn't been invite only for as long i've been here, AFAIK. Either that, or I was secretly invited!

It is irrelevant whether it's an honor, but as to whether it gives you insight, you are generally right but you did miss an important point:

The vast majority of people who are "members" of a given hiring committee often don't show up every week.
A lot, in fact, show up never, but are still members.
(for example, they were part of it years ago and nobody removed them, they got asked, said yes, never actually did anything, etc)

So while you are correct that it does give you some insight if you actively participated, simply being a "member" of a hiring committee is a necessary but not sufficient condition to say that you have that insight.
I recall reading an article here a couple months ago that steam found ported games running faster on linux, after some OS optimization, as compared with the more heavilly optimized windows version.
It works for me in all of those.
In more recent interviews, companies I've worked at have had the candidate sit at a laptop and essentially pair program with the interviewer.

This avoids avoid that artificial write code as fast as you can with a whiteboard marker situation. Granted, it's not their regular dev setup and it's probably an unfamiliar keyboard and trackpad, but it seems to be better than the alternative.
For an interresting approach to 3d model diffing, please check this site - http://3drepo.org/ (not affiliated with it, but found it while doing some research on my own)
Hm? Hashing is O(N) unless it's oblivious to some bits. Though the prefix tree part is optional, yes. :-) Better luck next time.

(For some reason programmers really love tries / prefix trees when answering on stackoverflow and such. I'd like to understand why -- tries are neat, but you don't see them nearly as much in actual use.)
I am going to host my projects here instead of Thingiverse.
Go on ebay and search for 2560x1440 monitor. There are tons of IPS displays under $300 of various brands - ACHIEVA Shimian, Matrix, Catleap, LG.
Indeed, sometimes the question is silly and you should not be afriad to question it. I was once asked about video conferencing in detail for some task and explained that recording via VCR and sending the output via tape would be more suitable and cost effective for what they were trying to use it for. You have to look at the initial question and peel of the layers until you find the reason for the question and then you can address the true problem. Sometimes somebody will ask how to computerise this and you will ook at it and sometimes find yourself asking how does it work now and again sometimes saying that what they have is already better or as good as a computerised system to that problem.

In this cube land question you can answear, how are you defining the centre and just revering that process will already give you the code you require. What they are doing you don't know so you have to ask, may be they are trying to reinvent a wheel and with that the best answear may be how to draw a circle as there question is flawed. This is the problem with made up interview questions, if they are based upon real world experience then you get a good question that you can truely answear. You may have a better answear or approach which with them having lived it, makes enough sence to know you would of saved them 2 days debugging that problem and thats from a quick chat walking of the street. If it is a made up question then your approach and alternative answear can be missed and ignored and your genius is not appreicieated.
Show HN: Photo Phrase -- 'Draw Something' Makes a Baby With 'Instagram'
Double Coconut's first game. At first glance it seems like a beefed up 'Draw Something' that also uses photos and stickers. But the attempt here is to be a truly unique photo sharing community where people have an excuse to create and share silly photos of themselves, thereby communicating and having fun together in an entirely new way.