skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say those are the reasons the questions suck. The idea of asking it is not to get a good answer but to discover the process by which someone would approach an unsolvable or half-solvable problem. In other words, they use it to see how you think through the problem.

The issue I have is, if you don't know that when you're asked that question, it's easy for a good candidate to freeze up because they don't know what is really being asked of them. In other words, it's like taking someone off the street and giving them the SATs. Their score is going to suck compared to if they prepared for it. So what you're really doing is testing their ability to take an arbitrary test, or jump through hoops. Since Google prefers advanced degrees, they probably are already pretty good at jumping through hoops, so it's a bit of a pointless exercise that can throw off great candidates completely if they aren't prepared for it.
Should you friend your boss on Facebook?
Palm used to allow syncing through iTunes as well. Every time Apple updated iTunes, it would lock out the Palm Pre; Palm, then, would issue a software update that re-enabled the functionality:

> Since the Palm Pre first became available this summer, Palm has issued several updates to its mobile operating system, causing iTunes software to recognize the phone as an Apple music player, allowing it to synchronize and transfer files between the phone and a personal computer. Apple has repeatedly disabled the syncing feature in subsequent software updates to iTunes. [1]

Eventually, "Palm filed a complaint with the USB Implementers Forum", but the forum "rebuffed" Palm's claims. From then on, the Palm Pre could no longer sync with iTunes.

I see that Microsoft isn't masquerading their phone as an iPod (or iPhone?) like Palm did, and is instead releasing a separate app on their own (MacSync, according to Wired [2]), so it's harder for Apple to stop them. I would guess that they're directly importing the iTunes files on the disk, but if the idea is so simple, why didn't Palm do the same thing? Why would they risk going through iTunes?

The harder it was for Microsoft to implement, the easier it will be for Apple to disable. I wonder what Apple will do now.

1. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/palm-drops-itunes-w...

2. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/liveblog-microsoft-ro...
Also these kinds of mouse hover events are useless on touch interfaces.
Well, your anecdotal data doesn't line up with the facts. There's a Verge article from a month ago[0] that contains LTE coverage information for Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. There's simply no comparison - Verizon is leaps and bounds ahead of AT&T. Just because you have AT&T LTE in your neck of the woods doesn't mean that the vast majority of Americans do.

0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367602/iphone-5-lte-marke...
>The ability to earn a livelihood is an inalienable right, and I don't understand how it's legally enforceable to have a contractual clause that negates that right.

If I pay you $325k to sit on your hands for a year and you take a job requiring you to clap all day, you're in breach of contract.. the fact is that the employee is violating the terms of the severance package, not the employment contract. I think there is a meaningful distinction here.
It's obvious that seniority rules increase the number of laid-off teachers. Teachers with seniority are more expensive than new teachers.

Teachers unions see seniority concessions as a way for school administrators to cut costs by shedding senior teachers and replacing them with underqualified junior teachers.

This, by the way, is a good example of how complex teacher labor issues are. Not every unionized teacher shares the objectives of the teachers union. Younger teachers might favor merit pay and looser seniority rules.
The problem is that people who aren't familiar with golf balls, etc, might be so put off by the question it impairs their ability to think through the problem. You're biasing the question against specific groups of people, on criteria that are completely irrelevant to the job.

I used ask "can you break down the problem" questions all the time. I'd base them on programming tasks. Because, you know, I was interviewing programmers.
Unless new (read: first purchase) customers start buying this thing in droves, I suspect he's dead wrong on his bet 'the iPad Mini will be the best-selling iPad from now on'. Most people who already have an iPad love the large screen, and won't 'downgrade'.
The signup page is indeed Very Good, and I didn't even realize that I could actually drag and drop things until I read this comment and went back. So, for that, thanks!

If any of the propellor guys are lurking, I signed up and have need to use this very soon. Please launch quickly! If it's worth anything, I'm barry.melton@gmail, and am happy to help however I can.
So, if you aren't a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have.

This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the entire issue in question, and then just blithely assuming you are correct.

In fact, the evidence which is staring us in the face indicates that you are not correct, and that we were far better off before we decided to let No Child Left Behind and a group of for-profit "education" companies co-opt our system and turn it into a giant standardized-test machine.

You want an alternative that works better? No problem. Go back to doing things the way we did them before January 2001. By the way, this would emphatically NOT mean that we had "no metric at all", of course...we had testing before 2001. We just didn't structure our entire system around constant standardized testing and force teachers to teach to those tests, that's all. We also had other metrics, such as observing how students do in college.
Lance Armstrong shows why the disruption in journalism matters
Marvel's new game dev plan: forget the movie deadline
In the era of beautiful Surface and iPads why oh why did the Nexus 10 have to be so ugly, when Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 are pretty.
The specs on Nexus 10 make me want to buy it, but the shape is just not helping me make that decision.
That's what I was thinking. And in that case, why do we even need 42mbps. My home internet is fast enough and is only 15mbps.
No one gets near the theoretical maximums.
Think about this. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive.
I've been a happy iPhone customer since the first model, but I think a good low-price competitor is going to be a real challenge for Apple - an affordable and desirable unlocked phone strikes me as a big breakthrough. Whether Google is going to make a push to spell out the saving to contract-happy U.S. (and risk alienating carriers and competing handset makers) is the real question.
It's not working for me on Chrome or IE and just barely almost working on my android.
The greatest product in the world isn't the greatest if nobody knows about it. On the other hand, you could have everybody knowing about it but nothing actually worth knowing about.

I find it's a delicate balance. You have to work on the product but you need to go out and meet people too.
Ah yeah, using CSS3 would be a lot smoother, We'll definitely tweak it. Thanks for the info, really appreciate it!
How does being part of an elite come into play when it comes to parents wanting their children educated in the manner of their choosing?
Nexus 4 is available in Canada for $309 and $359.
Village Voice sues Yelp for using “Best of”
ARMv5 dropped support for the 26-bit-addressing mode back-compatibility, so v5 and above definitely can't run ARM1/ARM2 binaries. (Even in v4 the back-compat support was optional.)
Funny, I was asked that exact question at Google. Granted, it was ping pong balls, and it was an airplane, but same thing. It was also 2005, for an APM position, coming straight out of college.

Truthfully, for a kid coming straight out of college, that's not such a terrible question to ask. (No, I didn't get the job. :P) It allows you to start from a totally neutral knowledge position, and lets you see how a person thinks critically about an unorthodox problem - one they almost certainly haven't seen before.

The problem comes when kids start training for such problems, instead of just tackling the sorts of interesting challenges that would inadvertently cause them to approach this question well...
That's a fair critique, and pretty much what I said the first time I was asked to join the interviews to evaluate the answers.

Regardless, I do believe that being able to ask "how big is a golf ball" when you don't know is a crucial skill to possess, and I've found (anecdotally) that the people who threw their hands up, but were hired anyway, generally had poorer work performance because they either didn't know how to ask for help, or weren't willing to admit that they didn't know something.

Humility is a very good skill for any programmer I think.
Good for Dr. Atkinson! Anyone who doesn't think teachers work hard enough, care enough, or are skilled enough is full of it. When I go to my kids' after school activities and see teachers there night after night, on their own time and dime. When I see teachers buying supplies out of their own pockets. When I see teachers in school weeks before start to ready their classrooms. When I see these things I have little tolerance for the sentiment that teachers just slack off. All that happens with this approach is that the best teachers say, "I don't need this crap" and leave.
If you used the OS-provided SWIs to get the base address of the screen memory, OS_ReadVduVariables for 148 IIRC, and similarly use SWIs to wait for the VSync and switch buffers then I'd have thought it works just fine.

The Archimedes had ARM 2 BTW, ARM 1 was just in the Tube co-processor for the BBC B. Some instructions are different with the RasPi, mainly to do with the PC register no longer having bits spare for Negative, Carry, etc. http://www.heyrick.co.uk/assembler/32bit.html has more details. There are external programs that detect and trap old 26-bit instructions when on 32-bit RO and allow old games to run but I know little about them; my last Acorn ARM machine was their R140 running RISC iX (a BSD port).
Some richer countries are also not included (Switzerland).
The specs say "NETWORK Unlocked GSM/UMTS/HSPA+ GSM/EDGE/GPRS (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) 3G (850, 900, 1700, 1900, 2100 MHz) HSPA+ 21". So I'm also assuming this means you can use it worldwide with any SIM, I've used my older LG android all over the world (AT&T or T-Mobile in the US).
It's pretty much unmaintained.

Every host it's installed on has to be properly tuned. Fine for large setups where finely tuned TCP stacks are the norm and maintaining your own ssh isn't much overhead, probably not fine for most setups where the 2MB buffer does the job.
"To compute the BDP, we need to know the speed of the slowest link in the path and the Round Trip Time (RTT)". Do you know the slowest link in the path for everything you want to conceivably connect to?

The patches were an exercise in trying to max out high bandwidth connections using scp under ideal lab conditions, nothing more.
"partly because of low pay"

Teachers are actually some of the highest paid people in society. When you don't include benefits teachers make about $40/hr while engineers make $42/hr. If you do include benefits, a teachers compensation far exceeds that of an engineer due to their pensions. Source, BLS via Forbes.
Marco.org
No, the malicious page could simply send you a HTTP redirect header to basically achieve the same result (redirecting you to a URL you didn't intend to go) without Javascript.
Hey James, sorry to post here but I used the wrapbootstrap.com contact form 2 or 3 days ago and haven't received a reply in regards to not being able to download the theme I purchased.
Dreaming of being an investor: Pemo Theodore helps you learn from the best
> I ate 20 hot dogs in one sitting.

Wow, does this really happen? I wonder what percentage of applications have obviously bad answers like this.
One of the big tragedies here is the seniority based tenure system that caused a beloved energetic teacher such as this to have to leave the west coast. There was an interesting discussion about this in an interview on reddit with a teachers union president: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_presid...
It's nice that they've enabled this on their servers, but it comes with some caveats at the moment.

First, not all browsers support it. For example, no version of Firefox supports it at this time (see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360420).

Second, OCSP stapling was originally conceived for only the end entity cert. This means that if the browser wants to check intermediates for revocation that payload can't be stapled, but will still require an additional check. There are several in progress proposals (spearheaded by Opera) to resolve this, but it's not finalized yet. This negates some of the speed gain on browsers that do choose to do revocation checking with this level of rigor.

But guess what, you can join the stapling party even if you aren't a CloudFlare customer! If you're using Apache (2.3+) you can configure OCSP stapling for your own website with the SSLUseStapling directive. nginx also plans to support stapling with the 1.3 release (initial preview released early this month). You can also do stapling with IIS 7.5+ on Windows.

Edit: Others have asked what browsers currently support stapling. I believe only Opera and IE9+ (probably schannel in Win7, but possibly in Vista?) at this time. Chrome is publicly moving away from OCSP/CRL entirely in favor of aggregating that data themselves and pushing it down to clients via their own infrastructure, Firefox has that open bug, and Apple's roadmap for ocspd/securityd is obviously not known.
Um, Obama created the hurricane to win the election, obviously.
Silverlight is dead?

Funny, I believe that is what Netflix uses to stream to the desktop. Also, given the install base of Windows, I am pretty sure most everyday users have it installed.

I'm a Mac person myself and only fire up Chrome when I need Flash. I've got silverlight installed across all browsers -- mainly due to netflix. That said, I see "web designers" doing more annoying sites with Flash (mmm...embedded video that auto plays with volume) than I do with Silverlight.

Just a thought.
>It doesn't say "Because Windows 8 ships with its own app store, it is not an open platform anymore," so you misinterpreted that.

Then the article was not written clearly. I don't see Valve taking Apple to task for the MAS. There's no other valid way to interpret that sentence.

>Linux doesn't have to have the best driver support to be sufficient as a gaming platform. If it has enough driver support for games to run well, it has a chance.

I'd argue that it already does. There are plenty of games that run on Linux (hardly as many on windows, but you can easily say the drivers are "there").

>Just because Windows has the "majority of the desktop base" doesn't mean it has to be the premiere gaming platform. Gamers are a very select group of people, and there's no reason Valve couldn't target them.

Disagree. Look at the Mac - decent support, decent performance, it has AAA titles on it that are also on other platforms, yet you won't ever see AAA exclusive titles being released on the mac. And why would you? Think like a publisher - you're artificially limiting your audience. The number of people who will jump platforms (or even maintain two platforms) just for your title is infinitesimal. Until such time as that happens, the mac is an also-ran. Same for Linux - and Linux has a huge advantage over Mac in that there's zero cost barrier.
Majority.
I don't think bandwidth is as important. I'd bet that the most waiting is incurred through the inherent large latency in the medium. Did LTE improve in that area?
Which browsers support this? I was under the impression that even the latest version of Chrome (22) doesn't have this.
I'm related to two teachers, and the answer is yes, if not worse.

In IT/CS we're used to extreme pigeon-holing of personnel (So, I'm the guy who was hired to install using LVM and ext2 but we'd never hire a guy who listed ext3 on his resume...) Its all about the pigeon-holing and resume keyword scanning.

In the teaching world, its simpler, more like "we want to hire a grade school teacher". Aside from some HR fluff, that's pretty much it for the hiring ad. If there are 200 districts in your state, all of whom hire "someone" every year because of quitting / retirement / firing / whatever, then you have to send out 200 resumes to each district, just like every other unemployed teacher and/or new grad. The majority of new grads end up as retail clerks or waitresses, of course, but some do get hired. Most get hired because someone knows them... but the eternal hope of being the only applicant somewhere springs eternal, and each application only costs a small amount of time and money, so its a lotto mentality.
A bit OT but what tool did they use to do the deck? Looks gorgeous with the 3D CSS transitions.
> ... a nanotube based transistor would be able to switch 70 times as fast as a silicon based one. Or a quarter of a terrahertz, in other words.

A transistor switching at 250GHz would not be 70 times faster than a silicon transistor. In fact, it would only be a little over 2x faster. Our best production quality silicon transistors are well over 100GHz now.

The clock frequency of a CPU is not the speed that a single transistor in that CPU switches. It's the speed that the longest path of transistors inside a single pipeline stage in that CPU switches. In contemporary CPUs, these paths are ~20 FO4¹ long.

(¹ since the speed of the transistors depend on the load put on them, you need to normalize for that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FO4 )
Google Mobile App Analytics Public Beta Launch
I really think its going to be tough for Square once NFC really kicks in. Of course this won't happen until the iPhone includes it by default but it looks like they are getting there through passport. We will have to see what happens to Square at that point. They would be wise to cash out in the next year.
Netflix has spent a lot of time and energy devising solutions that minimize disruptions. Are any of you Cloud-Savvy folks using Netflix's tools on Amazon? If so, are you using them off-the-shelf or did you need to customize them to suit your site? In particular:

Asgard is cited in the post as making a "zone evacuation" relatively straightforward.

Astyanax (their Cassandra client) is designed with "smarts" that allow it to choose from available nodes should one or more be unavailable.

These (and several other tools) are available from Netflix at Github:

https://github.com/Netflix
with kid's corner feature to boot so that you can have fine grain control over what the kids have access to.
Yes it's different because there is different content on each website, so it's still useful?
I've been an iOS device guy since the beginning, but these low pricepoints on a flagship Google device make it very, very tempting to at least give Android a try. Well done, Google!
While I personally find it annoying, I know many parents that hand their phone to their young children to play games or music. Multiuser support is very much in demand on phones, even if it offered nothing more than a safe guest account.
God says...

dispenser Elect calamities wasting shortly Palestine dang_it
freely Self enacteth recollection Danae's prescripts preparest
ingrate at Human dispersion due VI look_on_the_brightside
flood replace departed accomplished really infancy's recollect
nature
This is actually a feature of HN. There is a "cool-down" timer between when you make a post and when people can respond to it. It increases exponentially with the level of nesting. The idea is to discourage flame wars by forcing people to think a bit before replying.

I actually think this is a pretty effective strategy. However, it does impede productive discussions and conversations, sometimes. Oh well, c'est la vie.
I wish Google would add time zone conversions to their search. I had to resort to WA[1] to find out what time is the event in Europe.

[1]https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+am+PT+to+GMT
Show HN: Word Generator - thoughts on the frontend?
You are confusing latency with throughput.

If you are downloading 1MB of data the difference in delivery between the two speeds (42mbps vs. 72mbps) is 80ms (190ms vs 111ms) Hardly life-changing.
LTE is mostly about increased capacity - no one reaches the theoretical maximum unless they camp under an antenna. So while LTE will improve the network as a whole, don't expect too much from it as an individual user - and don't break a deal just for that...
Or part of the broke.

You can try and help fix the system (and probably fail) while your children suffer, or you can opt out of the system altogether and make sure your kids have the best education you can provide for them.

Many people make an entirely rational decision that their resources are best spent keeping their kids out of a broken educational system.
When is the best time share links on social media?
I'm assuming they are more like "I know HTML and Java" which is conceivably related to building a tech startup than "I ate 20 hotdogs in one sitting," right?
I hope everyone has a DR plan...and has tested it
Rails 3.2.9.rc1 has been released
Three Fundraising Tips From Branch's Seed Round
Great work. Hope us Israelis can start working more closely with our neighbors. Definitely considering making a version of http://mappedinisrael.com/ for the West Bank.
IEEE Computer issue on the CAP Theorem
dnsmasq is one of these tools that are very handy to carry around on your laptop. Just to reiterate, it can do:

- serve DNS requests (as mentioned in the article)

- ask your upstream DNS for unknown DNS records (as mentioned in the article)

but also:

- be a DHCP server

- be a TFTP server

It seems that the last version of NetworkManager now starts a dnsmasq to redirect queries to the currently active DNS server (instead of rewriting /etc/resolv.conf which seems now to constantly point to localhost as a nameserver) -> So you'll find it on most "default" Ubuntu installs from now on. Very convenient.

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html
Well, it says a lot for you that you admitted your mistake. Hope you will become a regular HNer :) I'm actually quite surprised your post got so many up votes considering this community is mostly dominated by web developers.
The contention here, though, isn't that standardized tests are useless, it's that they're worse than useless and actively cause harm when they're required.

It's a very different proposition.

As for measuring performance, there are ton of ways to do it (some of which incorporate tests) without mandating standardized testing.
You're entirely right that I misspoke there. I meant that the clockspeed for similarly architectured devices would go up to a quarter terrahertz, but I managed to imply something entirely different.
> There are large portions of the United States where parents without any training or knowledge on teaching have very strong opinions on what should or should not be said in the classroom. Getting rid of tenure and academic freedom will, in some areas, lead to ignorant people making important educational decisions.

It's a very slippery slope, denying some people input into "important educational decisions", or any decisions, based on one person's criteria of ignorance.
To expand on tikhonj's comment, you can circumvent this "feature" by clicking on the "link" link next to someone's comment - that will allow you to reply to them regardless of the "cool-down" timer.