skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very nice write-up. Side-note: It's really interesting to see code written in Italian.
Is a College Education Worth the Cost? You Decide [video]
Well, if we know how human nature acts, there should be ways to draft up a better, iron-clad constitution. But I suppose human nature has ways to go around everything.
Turning Big Data into Better Security
A slide deck on a recent talk by Risk I/O's Ryan Huber on using big data to make your organization's security program better.
One of the good things about this is it's easy to change the definition of "multiple_of_3" to reflect changing requirements. For example, suppose we wanted Fizz to be printed with multiples of 7 instead. Easy! Just change:

def multiple_of_3(number):
number % 3 == 0
end

to

def multiple_of_3(number):
number % 7 == 0
end

Now perhaps he sees the advantage: no refactoring necessary.

(* I feel I should say that I am being sarcastic. Anyone who thinks it's ok to have a function called "multiple_of_3" that checks if it is a multiple of 7 should probably be fired immediately.)
> You know about this country in witch death penalty is still applied

The U.S.?
Minor quibble, there is a difference between being in a state of shock, and being shocked by an occurrence.

Makes no difference, most articles about this sort of thing tend to be on the level or reading tea leaves anyway.
Bob marley pictures
bob marley pictures - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/15/bob-marley-pictures/
bob marley pictures - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/15/bob-marley-pictures/
bob marley pictures - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/15/bob-marley-pictures/
bob marley pictures - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/15/bob-marley-pictures/
> Being snob about the interview question is not going to help things.

Isn't "because you need the job" snob? The interviewer could have very well said "We start with simple problems, and then we expand on it. So let's start with this fizzbuzz problem."
Even then, the set of circumstances it took for this to be revealed was quite the bizarre one. A socialite who's flirting with another general, a jealous reporter who's sleeping with the subject of her book, an FBI agent who wants to sleep with the socialite...
That and being able to add any credit card to an Amazon account with a little social engineering. That was rather important.
How are we supposed to interview candidates at all, if their interview specific stress is so crippling? What sort of things can they answer, if not at least FizzBuzz?
Lots of interesting stuff going on in this space. Shadow cities is another one that's doing pretty well. The big question to me is, where's the Zynga of this world? Can you make casual location aware ARGs?
Very cool, I've been talking about something like this on and off for several years now with friends. I've been continually fascinated with the possibilities of AR since about the time of Eye of Judgement [1] and even more after fooling with Layar [2] on my OG Droid back in 2009.

The possibilities seem endless, not just games or gamification but public safety, education - all sorts of things.

I'm a bit disappointed to find that this project is invite only, but I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4TjzUfOeU

2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08
Au contraire - price change is a fundamental aspect of economics. Why would a new competitor selling the same commodity ever expect to be successful? Because they've figured out how to provide the same product for less expense. So even ignoring expected price decreases due to technological progress, we'd still expect to see prices occasionally decreasing due to organizational progress.
You're an exception. Most people are not as well-protected. Being key-logged is not as unlikely as you seem to think, even if you're protected from all known attacks, new ones could result in your password being harvested along with thousands of other people's.

If you're the target of a directed attack, you have even more to worry about.
Nope.

Throughout the relevant 70 year timespan, Coke was priced in an environment of first, the gold standard, and second, Bretton Woods.

The USD was not fully disconnected from gold until 1971, which is after the timespan the article talks about.
The difference is that until fairly recently, no nation had a coherent monetary policy. One of the reasons is that economics did not really understand what money was until fairly recently. For a long time, people looked at money primarily as an asset that could be used for trade. Because of this, they viewed precious metals such as gold and silver as having intrinsic value. When they do not. Today, we understand that the primary backing of money is trust. Trust in gold, trust in governments, trust in economies.
> I wonder if schoolchildren in 100 years from now will find quantum mechanics and instantaneous transportation similarly rudimentary and easy to understand.

They will. And, to some extent, they will be wrong. There's nothing rudimentary about a nuclear reactor, yet indeed the basic concepts are now available for a bright primary school student to grasp.

I think we just got better at creating a more accessible mythology that stands in place of rigorous math for the laypeople.
But come on, this is trivial, a 10 liner in C (for instance).

If folks can't get past that quickly and easily, do you really want them around?
> I was surprised to find that only one of the candidates had heard of FizzBuzz.

If you were being handed a high fastball over the plate, would you let the interviewer know it was a high fastball over the plate?
FizzBuzz seems to get a lot of people simply because they aren't familiar with the remainder (Modulo) operator.

I have to admit that I myself rarely need to use it. When I first read about FizzBuzz I tried to solve it by division and then comparing the floating point result to a rounded int result (i.e. circular way to get the remainder).

I'd be interested to see how many people pass if you simply remove the remainder operator part of it entirely. My guess is that near 100%.

FizzBuzz is still less "unfair" than a lot of the trick programming questions, riddles, or random CompSci trivia that many companies (Google, Microsoft, etc) do.

This is one of the reasons I would never even apply at a Google. I don't perform well programming wise under that level of pressure and my "random trivia" reserves are low.
What people aren't really mentioning on this thread is what sort of burden a non-password system adds to the average site developer

What's the answer? Have all sites use OAuth and delegate to sites like FB / Twitter and hope they get more secure?

I've seen sites like http://www.loginprompt.com that try to provide authentication as a service, but they're all still fairly rudimentary or expensive.
Ron Paul's Last Speech to Congress: 30+ Strangely Ordered Questions
I see an incorrect algorithm in your solution but I don't really see what would be called an edge case (just to explain: anything divisible by 3 will enter the first conditional and omit the last, hence the algorithm you've used is incorrect). Or maybe we're talking about different things. Could you please explain to me in words what a fizzbuzz edge case would be ?
Relevant paragraph, in case you're thinking of trying this next year:

> The year-over-year growth of TBFA had been extraordinary until this 2012 Black Friday because of a Google penalty. (Yes, I tried removing bad links, uploaded a disavow list, apologized and then resubmitted the site for reconsideration, but I have a feeling Google is putting off the reconsideration until they know it's too late for me this year... I submitted the reconsideration request on Oct 19th and followed up again on Oct 31, but still have not heard a word from Google.) This year, organic traffic is down 95% due to the penalty. It doesn't help either that Yahoo/Bing decided to globally deindex almost any site that had the words "Black Friday" in its domain name too.

It sounds like he was making good money until this year, and now he's scrambling to get reconsidered by Google after they penalized his site. I wish him luck.
I wonder what would happen if you gave the interviewer a piece of code that's not familiar to him, e.g...

val translation = List(3 -> "Fizz", 5 -> "Buzz")

val numbers = {
def start(from: Int): Stream[Int] =
from #:: start(from+1)
start(1)
}

val fizzbuzz = numbers.map(nr =>
translation.collect {
case (k,value) if nr % k == 0 =>
value
}
.reduceLeftOption(_+_)
.getOrElse(nr.toString))

println( fizzbuzz.take(100).mkString("\n") )
It looks like a potential banana skin for customers.

Trial must be redeemed by 15/11/2012. Offer available only to existing Skype users who have been registered with Skype more than 29 days. To qualify for the offer, you must provide valid payment details. After the first month, your subscription will automatically continue and payments will be taken monthly unless you cancel within 27 days of the start date. Only one free Unlimited World subscription can be claimed per customer. Offer not available in China, Korea, Russia or Taiwan.
I'm not saying they're impartial parties but the fact that he's been punished everywhere suggests to me that it used to be pretty low value at least before he made changes trying to get back on google.

it's not some across the board black friday penalty either, as four of his competitors rank above him for the terms in his url despite him being the only one that's using g+; https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=thanksgiving...
I have to agree with this one. It sounds absolutely crazy that the average engineer can't write fizzbuzz during an interview.

But if you take a second and think about it, how the hell could these same people who fail fizzbuzz write production code in previous companies? Are you really saying that you believe that fizzbuzz is more complicated/difficult than their previous work?

As someone who's run lab experiments and who's seen a bunch of surprising results, trust me when I say that shocking results usually mean that you're running a test that you don't understand.

In this case, you're probably testing for a host of things that have nothing to do with day-to-day engineer performance.
Link isn't working... based on the title it sounds like filepicker.io -- is it different?
>So they asked the U.S. Treasury to issue a 7.5-cent coin. At one point, the head of Coca-Cola asked President Eisenhower for help. (They were hunting buddies.) No luck.

I don't get it. Wouldn't a .5 cent coin make more sense?
Sadly it seems to require an invite at this time. :(
The State of Mozilla: 2011 Annual Report
While I agree that the form of this comment was too harsh (so, your second paragraph largely rings true for me), I was wondering why robomartin's comment was at the top in the first place: it starts with a general insult to commenters ("C'mon kids. Not again.") and then continues with a "proof by how much money I made using it" against the apparent strawman "if you don't use OOP you can't do things that are useful (such as make a lot of money)".

The article that Rob Pike was responding to, and Rob Pike's response, were about whether people who use (or do not use) OOP somehow fundamentally better understand "the nature of computation". There are people out there, some of whom I have on my list of "personal heroes", whom are quite clear when asked that they know very little about computation or computers, and yet they wrote a bunch of code and made tons of money anyway; that is simply irrelevant to a discussion about understanding "the nature of computation".

(Yes: I have purposely ignored all of the mentions of an improved CS curriculum in my primary comments here. All of that conversation was off-topic for the argument being made by both the original paper and Rob's response: it doesn't contribute in any way to the argument about whether knowing OOP or not knowing OOP has anything to do with how to best understand "the nature of computation", if nothing else as the things you learn first are often, in pedagogic contexts, either approximations or downright incorrect, and are later updated or replaced by later teachings.)
Well, assuming it's Haskell (given the lack of semicolon and otherwise valid Haskell syntax):

x is an unused variable in the function "int" you're defining. This function returns the ratio (as a ratio, not a float) 5 / 3 for any argument, and is equivalent to "int = const (5 % 3)", which you would be more likely to see (probably inlined).
The same version of Chrome across both platforms can be a control proxy.
Not just one benchmark, but one apparently completely undocumented benchmark run under Windows 8 on a single laptop.

They don't mention how many times the benchmark ran which makes me suspicious that the answer might be one??

Unless they release the benchmarking tool then this result seems pretty worthless to me.

>we’ve developed a benchmark that runs inside of the Lucidchart diagramming application //

So maybe that line for Firefox could as well read "Lucidchart crashed"?
>>What about biometrics? ... the infrastructure to support them doesn’t exist ... any one-factor system<<

80 000 ATMs in Japan use vein scanners.

Biometrics are used as part of a three-factor system.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/the-biometric-wa...
I do, yes. I figure doing so probably looks better than being able to answer the question (or rather, than just being able to answer the question, since you still answer it of course).
I think its pertinent to note that the American successor to Habitat still exists and is live, some 17 years later. (vzones.com) They spun off from compuserve, went public as Avaterra, got delisted, and now are owned by some other company.

If you design your business right, the online life cycle can be very long. Unfortunately the current nature of startups, venture capital, and exits encourage go big or go broke instead of longevity.

From what I've seen, most avatar based passive online worlds have not done very well. Indeed, I think the MMORPG has effectively filled the slots where we imagined a Snow Crash-esque virtual world.
If an Augmented Reality Game is one which add no fictional elements, I'm not sure I agree. Can you elaborate?
Mmm creating user accounts to up-vote you and comment just to get in the front page is an old trick...

The product seems nice, tho.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kmshiori
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=changmason
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=milesthegreat
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BruceLee345
i thought it was called facebook
Yes, I see your point. But in this case if I wanted to change it to do it on 7, I'd have to make a change in 3 places.

1. The function definition (def multiple_of_3)

2. The function contents (number % 3 == 0)

3. The function call(s).

If I didn't try to use functions on this, I'd just have to change a single line (or two at the most) in my program and get on with it.

Your use case is exactly what I meant when I said that breaking such a simple problem into functions actually introduces complexity.
What does "retina-optimized" mean ? Apple's love of closed systems has not yet extended to requiring specially processed images for optimal display on Apple hardware...
I see the point. Still you're not testing how the candidate works. No one knows everything about everything. We are looking for the right team member to solve business problems, full stop. Shipped code always wins over the perfect algorithm sketched on the whiteboard.
Perhaps they shrunk the size of the product to match? I know Hershey resized their chocolate bars to keep the price paid per bar constant for a while.
url is blacklisted
True, I should have clarified I was talking about green tea, as it's the only tea I drink.
It's a joke-in-a-word. I think it's funny.

Anybody here have enough Latin to come up with one for "under the bus"?
The Suburban Education Gap
I wonder if in 50 years only quantum physicists will truly understand how technology works. Perhaps the days of cheap tinkering with electronics are numbered, in the future requiring multi-million dollar quantum labs.
Doh! Just re-listened. You're right. I missed that part the first time, and had instead heard "they abandoned the plan", and figured they might have actually done this for awhile.

It's still the best part of the story. Followed by the request for a 7.5c coin.
The gold (and silver and other metals) standard. When more gold was discovered, all of the sudden, there was a huge increase in the money supply. When no one discovered any gold for a little while, deflation increased.

There are other reasons including weak governments that had much less control over the economy and a lack of knowledge about how the economy worked but the money supply was a big part of it.
Live Sports is 3-D TV’s Toughest Challenge
A better metaphor would be those things happening and your boss saying "solve fizzbuzz in 10 minutes or we'll fire you". (or we'll fire you == not getting the job/failing the interview).

The big difference between the two metaphors is that mine has direct impact on your personal life and negative consequences are gonna be seen as your fault, while yours is a company threat - fixing it will get you seen as a hero, not a disgraced villain.
The github as a resume thing is still fairly new and mostly implemented by people who have been out of work or working for themselves (since a lot of employment contracts stipulate that the company has dibs on anything you write)
So the community here is PG's toy?
"If that is so relevant, we should also kill..."

No, because although some people may get scammed, there is still massive overall benefit to those services.
>> FizzBuzz is famous, but alas it is famous amongst people who could code it without advance knowledge of it.

If that's true, it's still a good screening test. You either have heard of it but could code it even if you hadn't, so you pass, or you haven't heard of it and couldn't code it even if you had, so you fail.
Give them a unique programming problem before hand and ask them to bring their solution to the interview, and then discuss the solution with them.

Unless they "cheat" this should give you a good idea of what they're capable of. The cheating should also show up if they cannot explain it or why they wrote it the way they did.
The vending machine could only accept one coin.
> they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter.

And this is exactly why I have an offline copy of all important documents. It's just a humble 1 TB USB drive that gets synced once in a while. I keep it at the office, just in case the house gets burglarized.

Actually, two offline copies would be better. Gotta think about that.
>Trial must be redeemed by 15/11/2012. Offer available only to existing Skype users who have been registered with Skype more than 29 days. To qualify for the offer

Is that some sort of joke ?
They could call each other "lustig" or "lecherlich", which often covers what is meant by silly.
I take mine like a builder - milk, and two sugars.
GFS is user space, not kernel space.
This is an interesting play. Normally I'd assume you wouldn't go out and tell everyone, hey I make website X.com and it earns $Y every year during November. Clearly he's concerned about being penalized by Google and is trying to get a link juice boost; would love to see a follow up December 26th with what worked and what didn't.
"and now Hispanics immigrating at record rates driving out white Americans)."

How on earth is the former causally linked to the latter?
Just a home link or a page with the banner would be nice, so you don't have to faff about with your browser to get back to the homepage.
Hidden Opportunities Within The Hype
The author here is very highly respected in this community and already made his big bucks with other projects. If he says that he found something cool and then uses an affiliate link, it's a 99.9% chance that there's nothing more too it.

Searching, finding, and reporting in this style are common place for him.
I think this applies to many technical fields, but what I find is this.
Those who "have what it takes" are just those who are motivated and creative. Everything else falls into place if you know how to get around a problem(fix, troubleshoot, bypass). IMO, that is what makes someone special.

The alternative is to just give up, or say "well, you can't do that", or "those things never work".Negativity, lack of motivation and lack of creativity (which is what really drives the negativity) is what makes someone "Not have it."
This applies to life in general.
Good post. This might be a slight derail, but: I wonder if part of the problem with getting people to accept this is the use of the value-laden word "trust". Many people immediately react to this concept with horror: they don't "trust" the government in the same way they trust their spouse or their parents. I wonder if economists would do better to replace "trust" with "future expectations" or something like that. [Edit: when presenting to mainstream audiences.]
Show HN: Spark + Twine = sensors + lights + API
Hey Hacker News,

My Kickstarter campaign, Spark, just announced a collaboration with Twine that lets you hook up sensors to lights. Add in our REST API and I think it's a pretty cool system. Let me know what you think!

Zach
Why research labs fail at innovation (2007)
Exactly like that! Thanks.
I have to protest, Fizzbuzz is not a puzzle! There's no trick! The entire algorithm is given by the problem description!

If you allow people to google it, you allow copy-paste-coders to pass the test, and you don't want that.

Solving it requires a loop, some conditionals, and some print statements. If you can't write that from scratch, then you can't program. At all.

Also, writing code or pseudo-code on a whiteboard is something we do pretty often at work, I don't think it's an unrealistic demand that your coworkers should be able to join in on such a discussion.
Maybe sometimes we forget, the interview is for BOTH parties. I think it's fair to ask if puzzle like questions are an expectation. It would be simple to answer: "Yes, we know this is a silly puzzle, but it's a fast way for you to show us your real world skill".
Notice that C++AMP is a language extension designed specifically for heterogeneous computing, and it is where this list comes from.

The article you posted was rather extensive and as somebody who works in HPC, I can say that I disagree with many points in link provided. Also it was too god damn long to read. Most notably, that somebody needs to actually write the cloud implementation, will still require models like OpenACC or CUDA.

There is not reason hat whatever mechanism was used to push parallelism onto the GPU can't be used for moving it onto the cloud.

There is an infinite amount of musing that can be made against and possibly in favor of expanding the acceptable language features in threading kernels. Yet, it is safe to say 3 things.

1) Simple kernels run faster
2) Current specifications are closer to C++AMP's restrict(amp)
3) Cloud computing uses GPUs for the data crunching
please try again... we weren't ready for the prime time probably :-) works for us now
If a candidate comes in with previous knowledge of FizzBuzz, that would indicate to me they are probably pretty in touch with the industry. That is, they probably read blogs or forums about development and/or interviewing. That would be a good thing, and they would likely get the problem right.

That would be fine with me. If it does get to the point that _everyone_ knows it, then we have to find a new question.
A hack that we used in my previous startup was to come up with a bunch of names, then send out a survey to friends and potential target customers and asking them how much they like the name. You can also randomize the questions so that people can just choose names that they like, then tell them what the service is about, then have them choose again.

Takes the whole, "I like this name" arguments out of the mix.