skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We decided that until there are working implementations of Django running on heavily trafficked Python 3 site, it would be best to focus on Python 2.7. Heck, for that matter, Python 3 is experimental in Django 1.5. We wanted to keep our readers in a safe spot and advocate safety over cutting edge.

That said, we tried to make things as Python 3 friendly as possible. :-)
Having been hiring developers, designers, and product managers for the better part of the last ten years ..... I agree.

I also hate the actual interview itself. So little time to try and learn something that for the most part cannot be learned in a high pressure, nervous, anxiety ridden situation (I realize I am also being interviewed, assessed, and reviewed). However, this is a different point altogether from what the author is discussing.

I do think it's great to try and understand how someone

1 - Problem solves
2 - Approaches asking questions, interacting with other people, etc

And quizes can sometimes be a way to figure that out.

I've just found that when using quizzes it's better to openly communicate with the person what you, the interviewer, are trying to better understand. I always pre-amble a quiz (if and when I do use one)

"hey, I'm going to ask you a question/quiz/riddle. It's important to note I could CARE LESS about the answer. I'm really looking to better understand how you would go about solving this. So please, make sure to walk me through your thought process and don't hesitate to ask me any questions along the way".

I also like to make it clear how it ties into what the person will be working on. For example

"the reason I ask, is one of the first projects you will be working on is ___________, so knowing how you approach nebulous problems will be important"

The best response I had to this is

Well, I might do X,Y,and Z, but to your real question, I have a great example, mind if I share that?

Also, this is just a data point. Going back to my second paragraph, I've never once "not hired" someone based on how well they think on their feet in an anxiety ridden, pressure filed, hour of their life in a room with total strangers.
Rent control. A lot of people are living/stuck in apartments and paying much, much less in rent. The high rent only applies to new people moving in, and I'd suspect that less new non-tech people are moving in these days.
So someone with 50k/yr of expenses should be making 100k, 250k, and 500k respectively?
I just bought the PDF. But since I plan to read it on my iPhone, an ePub version that looks good would be a great.

(Reading an A4 PDF on an iPhone isn't really comfortable.)
You can still do it, it doesn't have to involve a complicated CS topics such as self-balancing trees or graph theories or anything, but I've seen plenty of good algorithm questions that the solution involve nothing more than understanding of Strings and for-loops.

You can also test the interviewee's knowledge of Big-O, time efficiency vs space efficiency, etc without going into obscure data structures.
You can conservatively spend 3% of a lump sum each year and the earnings will keep up with inflation. So if you had $1m in savings, you could spend $30k/year in today's dollars forever (and still have $1m at the end).

If you want to spend down the principal, the calculation becomes more complex and you need to use software rather than a rule of thumb.
Whenever I cross the boarder from NJ or Maryland or Ohio into PA, I suddenly feel like I'm off roading. PA roads are so garbage.
I found that people from the west coast, esp. LA and SF are more happy-go-lucky types - meaning that if you were to meet a girl at a party or a new bro, the person of interest might be very enthusiastic or affectionate - "leading on" that there's specific chemistry between you or that person; when in fact that person is just very spontaneous, in the sense of being open and fun in any social situation. This is a bit different from the Northeast Coast frigid weather which causes most people to be irritated and singular-minded on roads/public transports, but causes people to find "cuddle-buddies" during the winter; once you make a friend, that friend becomes a best friend.

I used to be upset about this. But now I'm more understanding that for some people, they don't necessarily value their individual friendships as they value their own belonging/membership in a clique (SF vegan-foodie who works in SOMA startup who rides single-fixed gear) and also the necessity of forging temporary social/professional alliances in an transient yuppie community where most people moved to for professional advancement (marketing guys from frattier backgrounds fraternizing with engineers with more diverse backgrounds to advance everyone's careers).
The company I work for could be very interested in testing this service. I requested a beta invite and filled out the survey. Any idea when you might start letting people test it out / accept beta invites?
Only _some_ people from the city proper frown upon "San Fran", frisco, etc. Most people don't care and more over people that I know from elsewhere in the Bay area do some times call it San Fran or Frisco, if only to annoy people who get annoyed by the monikers.

I couldn't care less what people call it. When I lived in towns closer to San Jose, 'San Jose' was the reference 'city'.
The only people who seem to get annoyed with the term "San Fran" and Frisco are either transplants or hipsters(which are usually transplants to begin with). Some of the old schoolers and hip hop community still use the term Frisco.
I would be interested in seeing something on common Rails mistakes.
Actually, a lot of it is pretty similar, especially if coming from the east coast.

* Weather - replace fog with overcast/drizzle.

* Rent & Cost of living - Seattle is not cheap by any means, and rent and house prices are really steep until you get quite far from the city.

* Canine-friendliness - Definitely a west coast thing, there are tons of dogs in Seattle, dog parks, and companies that allow dogs at work.

* Commuting and public transit - Commuting is bad here, I-5 and its interchanges with I-90 and WA-520 are pathetic. On top of that, native Seattleites are terrible drivers - driving below the speed limit in the left lanes, blindly changing lanes, and don't know how to use a 4-way stop. Then there is the layout of Seattle, with bad east-west travel and the ongoing road construction.

Coming from not the west coast, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle do have some similarities - and aptly described as 'west coast' feel.
I lived downtown in Vancouver for 5 years - I think I had my car broken into about 200 times, no exaggeration. It got so bad I just left the damn thing open.

Everything in the US is basically X 10, so you have to allow for that in the similarities.
Delivery for Mr.Assange - Delivered
They also don't include nearly the amount of deductions and exemptions that Americans actually use.

For the most recent year of data, the average American paid 7.2% of income in Federal income tax. Even the Top 1% of income earners only paid 21% and the next 4% paid 14.6% [1]

[1] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
Alternatively, call it San Fran all the time to annoy everyone. Also, 'Frisco'.

Frisco frisco crisco frisco.
Short answer it's a pretty arbitrary cutoff.

16 is the largest number of nodes we've done sufficiently rigorous tests on to be sure that things go smoothly. So that's the highest number we're comfortable citing on our site. It's a conservative estimate though so you should be fine straying past it.

We know of a few things which becoming scalability concerns with a large numbers of machines but we're talking close to 100 machines. These will hopefully be addressed soon.
Documented source? I don't think companies publish their interview processes.

Personal sources? The guy who interviewed me at MS a couple years ago told me himself, I also currently work for Google.
People get less prison time for rape and attempted murder. Come on.
Hearing about how expensive it is to live out here is much different than getting here and confronting the reality of it. I had heard (and seen) how expensive rent was, but I was blown away when I got here to have the rent + parking + taxes + food costs all compounded. There's a lot of things you don't take into account into you're actually in it. In addition, in the year and a half I've been here, rents have increased significantly and continue to be on the rise.
I've definitely noticed that. It's strange going from talking to a bunch of Java meetup people who are well versed in the history of the language and know how Spring and dependency injection took Java by storm and a ton of other things like that - to talking to Googlers who often don't even know what it is, don't know the benefits, and fight to keep it out of projects.
Purchased! This looks awesome, I literally just set up django yesterday and had a huge amount of unanswered questions while setting it up. Like you have mentioned, I had a real hard time finding the 'best' practices to set up the environment. Anxious to get home and start reading.
That's a vary unusual view of the middle class as by definition of Median and your bands more than half of all households below the middle class. It's true that the original definitions of middle class was not peasant and not aristocracy but the US does not have peasants or aristocracy so the definitions changed with the times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class
An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US Security (2003)
Congrats Danny and Audrey on the launch. I'm excited to read this. It sounds like a valuable resource.
Me too, I don't have headphones with me and I would love to read this on the bus...
Small states can get lots of pork, too. Just look at what Byrd did for West Virginia.
"I really love Clojure, but it still feels a bit heavy-weight for anything but numerical computation."

That is really weird. If there's one area where Clojure feels a bit strange to me it is numerical computation. I haven't fully looked into it yet but there's the whole underlying Java idiosynchrasies issue : for example where you need to wrap inside unchecked-int to dodge overflow issue or the fact that you need to be careful to be sure to fall back to primitives if you don't want to kill your perfs, etc.

In addition to that a lot of intensive computation do work really best when using mutable data structure. Which is sharp contrast with Clojure's main philosophy that favors avoiding mutability. Note that it cannot be done, it can, but it kinda feels "weird".

Then your question gets weirder: you ask about the advantages of ClojureScript server-side templating when the article specifically mentions using Clojure on the server and ClojureScript on the front-end (if I'm not mistaken).
I've heard this a couple times now, and it worries me. I've got an on-site interview with Google soon, and my impression from the recruiter is that I would know which team I was joining at the offer stage.

Can you go into some detail on what happened between your offer and joining Google that resulted in you feeling like it was a "bait and switch"?

If it matters, I am not interviewing as a college hire, but as a senior engineer from another large tech company.
Mr. Assange has received his parcel
I assume he is implying that the technical incompetence caused people to second-guess what they heard when confusion arose. This confusion can be misunderstood by the interviewer as confusion over the subject matter. I know I've had that problem before over poor telephone connections.
'We thought we'd sell 1,000': The inside story of the Raspberry Pi
The similarity, in my experience, is more visible when held in relation to the East Coast. For west coast cities, you're probably right, but I'd bet most people would consider Seattle closer to SF than to NYC or Boston. Someone from the east coast would never call NYC and Boston similar, but they're closer to each other than they are to SF or Seattle.
From reading the blog post the author does in-fact seem to be against challenging coding problems. Note that the examples given as good questions where all general that didn't require one to demonstrate any actual ability to solve problems by applying algorithms and logic. This is exactly what programming and logic "riddles" are designed to test.
Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bitnk

Live Webcam: http://54.243.29.30/assange/
I think there is some value in trying to see if a person can have a Columbus moment. After all the simplest solutions are hard to find. And it is nice to see how a person deals with problem outside his domain of knowledge. We don't want to hire someone that can have a nickname like Complicator or Rube Goldberg. But the questions must be rooted in reality. The correct answer to how much a Boing weights is check the manual.

Аsk them how to minimize datacenter flooding or how to lift fuel 20 floors upwards with no pumps working - that were real things that real people had to solve just a few months ago. And they weren't hired for that.
I believe this means you should have $50,000 in the bank or investments at 30 if you have a $50,000 salary by then, $250,000 at 40, $500,000 at 50 (if income doesn't change)
Aside from the obvious, what exactly doesn't apply?
To be fair, 90% of the Google SWE interns last summer were given chromebooks (instead of MBP) as their laptops (to supplement their workstations). They were extremely disliked.
Well below that.. and my mortgage payment is reasonable for the area (Austin, TX) but ridiculously low compared to SF, DC, etc.

I don't think it's the raw dollars that matter but what the alternative for those dollars are (aka opportunity cost).
So here's been my experience with Siri since getting the iPhone 4S:

- Try all sorts of stupid things, like you would when you're chatting with an AI bot online for amusement

- Once or twice try to ask the weather, or some other trivial information that you're not sure how you could elsehow get more quickly

- Become frustrated with inaccuracy, and high chance of the information you're looking for being unavailable

- Not use Siri again, and eventually forget about it

Very, very interestingly, I did start using the Google Now app... which works more responsively, and gives tremendously better results (in my estimation). If I'm not in a public space and don't care about looking like an overzealous geek trying to talk to my phone, I use the Google app and ask very basic information.
A focus on the prosecutor helps distract attention from the question of whether and how Swartz was mistreated by being made a (somewhat artificial) "tech celebrity" at a very young age only to become a kind of semi-outcast in some tech circles just a few years later.
Government to install lie detectors on the US border
Very valid concerns I think, but it's not quite that bad. A few points:

- Goroutines are not garbage collected.

- In this case and many others, you can just use a buffered channel. But of course in many other cases it doesn't solve the problem.

- If you solve this with a "quit" channel but don't use it, obviously you have a problem

- Several goroutines can try to send to the same "quit" channel. Make it buffered and have every goroutine try to send.

- In the case of several listeners, you can just close the channel and all receivers will return.

- However if you have several senders and several receivers on the "quit" channel, then you have a problem: closing a closed channel will panic.

See also:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/golang-nut...

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/golang-nut...
Downvoted, why does everyone need to bring up the gun issue when somebody talks about the maker revolution? Big gun manufactures have been making guns for a long time. I don't see how people making themselves matters at all.
Just bought a copy--hope it's useful for my next intern :-)
Congratulations, it's great to see a new Django book and it looks like you've nailed a really important topic. Looking forward to reading it!
We discussed this in a course I took a few years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuhn_poker
? Chez Panisse and Gather are in Berkeley.
Exactly this. I've always said the Google and Microsoft "riddle" interview questions were IQ tests using CS concepts as their medium. And this is precisely why so many people dislike them. In many cases its not about what you know or how many years experience, but how much raw brainpower you have.
They should both be required reading for those interested in the aaronsw case IMHO. There's a reason the consensus about the case (even on HN!) before Aaron's suicide was so wildly different from the current witchhunt, and the reason is contained in those two Kerr writeups.
Morally you are not obligated to pay taxes. Forced taxation (redundant) violates the non-aggression principle. Forget the propaganda you hear; taxation is theft, regardless of the perceived benefits or ex post facto justification for the theft. People in a situation of coercion and force crave propaganda so they can feel like they still have some sort of control and that the violations of their property rights are justified.

There are plenty of government services I don't want or need but am forced to pay for, or at least my grandchildren will be forced to pay for (wars, welfare state, war on drugs, etc). It's not right and we need to evolve beyond using such violence.
How much do web designers make in Somalia? How much do construction workers make in Somalia? Compute the incremental benefit for each of those people in moving from Somalia to NYC and you have your answer.
"I refuse to live in a state with such a dysfunctional government"...so you picked Texas..hahahah

You can absolutely do tech anywhere. But it is a very different experience. I had the exact same rationale before moving to the bay area. It was a tough decision to make, even loving the city, was it really worth it. Here, you're surrounded by tech. It is literally everywhere. When you have conversations with people, you no longer have to change your stories, your talking points, your vocab, people actually understand what you're talking about here. Sitting in a coffee shop, or on the bus, almost all you hear is tech conversations. If it's a passion, if it's what you love, it's worth every single penny to be in the heart of it. I've never been more motivated in my life.
Show HN: We collect atmosphere data from Android phones [open source]
Wow, I didn't even notice you were one of the editors to this book. Glad I bought it even more now! See you in heapify ;).
When you say things like "we don't know the full story" or "suicide is tricky", you aren't taking a reasonable middle-of-the-road position you're effectively endorsing the status quo. By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group. When people are bullied, be it in the schoolyard on by the government, the power difference is immense. That means by default the bully will win. It's just that simple.

We don't have all the information. In life you never have the information you need to make perfect decisions. But we can ask ourselves if we're OK with the status quo, and if not, try to change it.

To reduce the whole affair to simply "Aaron killed himself." is crude and far from reasonable.
How can it be foggy and lack humidity?
Interviews are a two way street, but in any negotiation there's different leverage. Most of the time, in the current job climate, the interviewer is the one with the leverage over the employee.

For many people, a job interview ends up being "how much crap am I willing to put up with to make a living wage" and whether the interviewer (who may not even be someone you will ever work with again if you're hired) asks stupid riddles might factor very little into the equation.

I think this article would be better suited if it targeted the interviewers to say "Look guys, asking riddles is pointless and might turn off the best candidates who /can/ afford to fire you and look for another company to interview with."

On the other hand, you might consider whether you actually even want an employee who is willing to abandon the whole enterprise when they realize that an interviewer has the NERVE to ask them to solve a riddle or logic puzzle.

Like raganwald said, the interviewer is probably not the best interviewer, and you can decide whether you want to work with him and make the best impression. Or you can decide that you will only work under the strictest of conditions, and if someone asks you a question you don't like, that you may as well just walk out of the room right then, because they're obviously an braying alphadog assholey jackass.

If I was conducting an interview, and felt like asking a riddle like the article ("Four people want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have twelve minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time"). If my candidate just said, calmly, and without agitation "Heh, you know, I'm not really good at on-the-spot logic problems like that. I don't know how long it takes for a trip anyways. But 4 people, weird restrictions, would probably take more than 4 and less than 4^2 trips." I would get a lot more out of it than if they blurted out a correct answer.

On the other hand, I'd probably learn a lot if they slammed their hand on the table, called me a braying asshole and stormed out of the interview.
Median family income is extremely deceptive in NYC, because adults typically cannot afford to live without roommates. Median household income is $48,631. The arithmetic average wage is around 37k.

By any measurement, 180k is a hell of a lot of money for two retirees living alone. That's over double the average wages of two working adults. That is quite wealthy, even in NYC. (I just looked it up: median income for a black man over 65 in New York is $14,400 a year. For his female companion, $9,966. These people are earning roughly 8x the median for their demographic.)

Edit: As a local, I'm really, really sick of hearing that the "middle class" in NYC includes 200k households. Because it doesn't. HN posters, such as myself, are privileged individuals. We forget about the veritable sea of average workers underneath us on the income scale.
Your Pagerank Score Means Nothing When you are 8,000,000 on Alexa...
Does rent control help at all?
That sounds like a fun challenge, and if it's at all representative of the sorts of problems they take on, I'd love to know who the company was so I can apply.
Bootstrapping Vagrant – An Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto
I've only heard it happens around SF and NYC. Certainly nobody in Redmond was calling Seattle "the city" when I was there.
> These are slides for the presenter. [...] Only the presenter has to care.

Irrelevant, the whole thread of inquiry is about seeing the slides locally, you're two comments too late to try that one: you implicitly acknowledged the desire and desirability of personally viewing the slides in your previous comment.

> So you wrote a Go to Javascript compiler?

Also irrelevant (although there likely is no need to, there's an LLVM Go frontend and there's emscripten), the exact same method used here can be used there.

> Can the VM running in the PDF reader implement a web server that can interact with the outside world?

That doesn't even remotely make sense.