skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All one really needs to know about Big-O is that nested data lists can be exponentially harder to process. If you understand that then you understand the need for it and when the time arises for you to create these type of structures you'll calculate the time needed to process them accordingly using said method. In turn helping you predict future performance and avoiding bottlenecks.
We personally have a closed garden (Canada), so we don't have to worry about this. In Europe, most people have closed garden.
Does any one else think a big host file slows down browsing? It there any way to fix that beside flushing the cache at random times?
Oh boy, here we go...

Norm Matloff's H1B web page should be required reading for anyone who wants to discuss this:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

He definitely falls on one side of the issue, but he's the leading academic researcher on the subject.
Depends on the country and how much the population is mixed.

Yes, it may sound evil or anti-immigrant, but it does not matter where, if the location has people of uniform ethnic identity, they tend to treat everyone around them as distant cousins (and there are biological reasons for that) and some negative actions people don't feel like doing it.

In places with lots of random ethinic identities mixed, leaving your baby outside is BAAAAAAD idea.
The same sentiment exists in Russia.
"Just how does this Make The Internet Not Suck? (damn it's even more annoying to write incorrect casing than read it.) "

With the exception of "The" the titling is just a proper use of titling case. Do you find it annoying to read newspapers? I imagine it is the awkward phrasing that you (and I) find annoying.
A book that "details every blunder and betrayal that led to the doom of the motion picture - and that left countless Hollywood careers in the wreckage" was written titled John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood - http://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Gods-Hollywood-ebook/dp/B0....
No...I don't make the assumption they know anything about those games. I start off talking to them about some of the above games.. One could just as simply walk through other games (checkers, tick-tack-toe, hangman, etc.). Or...if they've never played games, then you could walk through other somewhat classic problems (how should one load an airplane, the back of a car when travelling).

My point was largely that there are a variety of problems out there which have "no right answer" yet are fairly intuitive to get started on...and figuring out modeling of the problem space in combination with decision logic is an excellent example of problem solving which may help one see how a candidate attacks problems, optimizes, etc.
Carver Mead On The Future of Science
May I ask where you work? I'd love to interview at a company like yours.

I'm in the process of changing careers to programming in my late 30s. I dabbled in coding on and off for most of my life, but two years ago I started taking it seriously, read K&R, etc, and completely fell in love with programming. And so I start thinking about working full-time as a developer, and schedule an interview for a programming position for a company in the industry where I've worked for the past decade. I've always been a confident interviewer, but I totally froze in this phone interview. They started the interview off with a tough algorithm problem that I probably could have solved on my own in 30-40 minutes, but couldn't possibly solve on the spot in a conference call, with several people listening in and quizzing me. From there, things went downhill quickly, and I struggled to answer questions that I could have easily answered on my own at my desk. Since then, I've been burned on two freelance programming assignments (that I should have known better than to take given the level of desperation involved), which was quite a blow after spending a decade freelancing for dozens of clients without incident in another industry.

I love programming, and so I continue to code whenever I get the chance (and have two rather large projects underway), but these experiences have shaken my confidence. If most programming jobs involve similar interview processes, I'm not sure this would be the best move for me.

However, this comment has given me hope. If there are companies out there like this, then I stand a fighting chance -- I would excel at an interview where I'm given a problem, a time limit, vim, and then told to go solve it with no whiteboard or group of people watching. Let it be a hard problem, but make it realistic -- not some obscure puzzle or algorithm -- and let me use my own tools. I wish there were some job board where companies with this type of interview process posted jobs.
I've been using Go a lot lately. It's difficult to overstate just how much simpler it makes writing highly-concurrent server-type programs. Entire classes of bugs, issues, and puzzles just vanish.
My kids routinely go outside in sub-zero temperatures with just sweaters on. I can't keep clothes on them for love nor money... every time I turn around they're missing socks and shoes. When I try and put a coat on them they're like "but we wanna be freezing"... I swear, kids are born without pain or cold receptors. Insane really.
If you were malevolent and stupid enough, you could 'remotely' hack yourself (and set your own HP printer on fire).
Yeah, just like every Samurai developed serious mental illness just when he had to commit suicide.
Mhm the usual markets don't work arguments... lets apply the same points to the current corporatist system:

1) We have the highest inequality in recent history... while still having the high tax expenditure in recent history

2) Rich people and large corporations hold massive power while lacking the stabilizing reduction in wealth via competition thanks to government protectionism

3) Hows that regulation working out for banks, pharma companies and food companies?

[1] see bank bailouts and moral hazards of last 4 yrs. Almost all big banks are still in business.

[2] this happens yearly, small government lawsuit settlements then business as usual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_... + The FDA helped keep the same 8 pharma companies in business since the 1800s by making competition impossible.

[3] FDA is becoming less relevant thanks to information availability.

It's possible to have food safety done via organizations/associations... so you buy food brands based on the fact it's been verified by x food safety board.
I think the swapping two variables has a bit more going for it if they do not know the trick. Explain the concept of invertible functions. Hopefully they would be able to come up with plus and minus - even if you have to walk them through the
a=f(a,b)
b=g(a,b)
a=g(a,b)

From there you can say that works fine with pen and paper but why might it go wrong in a program? So how do you avoid integer overflow? If the signs are the same then use subtract first else use addition first. After we have done that. After this step assume I have returned to the main flow. How do I check if I should use addition or subtraction? If a is bigger than b I must have added so use subtraction. Writing the algorithm this way is trickier than xor. The problems to be solved are to do with understanding concepts

Next you have the xor solution but more important than getting the answer to that might be to see if they can see that the two functions are like encrypt and decrypt where a is the message and b is a key and a + b is the ciphertext c - so that f(m,k) is encrypt and g(c,k) gives the message and g(c,m) gives the key. If they have had any exposure to cryptography then xor should present itself.

If they give xor straight off then you can work backwards.
That looks extremely interesting and it might very well be something we could use for a project we're just starting.
Could be a pretty handy service. Though an intruder cutting the power would essentially render the cameras useless unless you're running your home computer off a UPS. Not sure how common that scenario would be, but don't standard alarm systems typically have backup/battery power?
I've really enjoyed talking to my family and strangers about their irrational fears that exist around children. It's incredibly fascinating to me. That said, I have been totally terrified to board an airplane for the last 3 years (use to fly once a month) so I don't have much of a leg to stand on.
I'm not really agreeing with their practice nor do I disagree with what you're saying.

It's kind of a classic trojan horse. We will provide you with this awesome service, and get nothing in return. Nothing in life is truly free, it always come with a different motive. People can't turn down anything that's free. Especially people in the US Of course people should have a right to know what depths your analyzing them, but particularly in the US people don't seem to care as long as they don't have to pay for it.
While terrifying, I think the real danger is hiring someone who can code, but can't do it in a maintainable way. I'd much rather have someone not write a single line of code, rather than have them write 6 months of unmaintainable spaghetti code. Zero contribution is bad, but it's much worse if they have a negative multiplier on the future of the team (if what should take a day to do takes a week to do because of unmaintainable code).
it's hella faster than making a network connection for DNS
Amdahl's law in reverse: the wimpy core advantage
It is a poor choice of word. I'd suggest the reason for calling them "logic" is that the process by which you explain what you're thinking and why to the interview gives them an insight into your ability to use logic. The puzzles themselves are categorically NOT logic puzzles.
Didn't know about the napping. at the pre-school we have in Ottawa, children go outside to play everyday unless it's colder than -15C.
This is the direct result of the news. The news reports things like child molesters and terrorists when your child is far more likely to be hit by a car or something.

I'm sure theres a name for this kind of thing.

I've always found the following saying a good rule to live by. "Theres no truth in the news and no news in the truth."
"There is no bad weather, only bad clothing."

Love that. Growing up with Patagonia clothes (family works there) we had constant proof. Skiing in sub-zero temperatures was always fine for us, just put on more layers. Meanwhile everyone around us was freezing their hands off. The other secret is that gloves are always cold because the fingers are separated; wear mittens instead.
How To Change And Control The Behavior Of Windows 8 And 7 Taskbar
I also made a little thing for adding additional zones to the list when I was playing a little with Bootstrap. I wrote a little page to add, enable and disable (if I blocked something important) entries. Then a cron job to pull the enabled domains, build the conf file and reload BIND.
I started maintaining a hosts file (simple heuristic: if I see the browser status bar is waiting for a given domain, it gets added to the hosts file), but at some point it was less maintenance effort to simply install adblock.
I've been interviewing pretty much non-stop since last April. I feel like I've become somewhat of an expert when it comes to interviewing processes.

First off, as I've become a better programmer, I feel this fact is best shown in my opinions. When I first started out, if you had asked me my opinion of PHP vs Python, I would not have been able to say anything coherent. Now that I've worked with both technologies, my opinion is much more coherent.

Instead of asking puzzle questions, ask candidates their opinion. "What is your opinion of Mongodb?" I've spent enough time in the trenches with Mongo to have quite an opinion of that technology. Same with Postgres, Django, Javascript, Coffeescript, etc.

I think hands down, the worse type of interview questions are the ones where you're told to solve a problem, but you can only solve the problem in a certain way.

Its become a interview idiom for me. One recently was to reverse the words in a string. In comes "This is a string", out comes "string a is This". No problem. In python this can be done with one line:

the_string.split()[::-1]

It takes me 5 seconds to write that out. The interviewer telle me "good job", then he asks me to do it again, but this time to do it without using any standard library functions such as split or reverse.

At this point, I can almost with 100% certainty that this company will be a terrible place to work. It wouldn't piss me off it it wasn't for the fact that like 90% of all interviews I do end up like this.

I've through about this a lot, and what I've come up with for an explanation as to why I can;t do these types of questions is because my algorithm writing process is very subconscious. When I'm writing code and I come to a problem that requires a lot of thinking, I usually stop, do something else and let the problem float around for a bit in my subconscious. I got my best ideas when I'm in the shower, on my bike riding around time, even while reading a news article. When people are watching me (especially strange people I don't even know) I don't do my best thinking. At this point I'd do anything to be able to think in front of people. Because its keeping me from being able to get jobs.
PolicyMic works well for this. It's like HN for politics. Offers decent-quality discussion from all parts of the spectrum. http://policymic.com
yep, a little fresh air never hurts anyone - true in Minnesota !!!
Kent Beck tweeted a very fitting comment: 'Programming contest problems shouldn't be algorithms, they should be like "set up continuous deployment of a multi-region Django app on AWS"'

https://twitter.com/KentBeck/status/299528659746840576
Flowers have evolved to look, smell and taste in a way that attracts pollinators, some of whom also happen to see colors and appreciate sweet things much like we do. While we, humans, find many wild flowers attractive because we share some of our preferences with their pollinators, some times [1] it's painfully clear that we're not the target audience. On the other hand, domesticated flowers you can buy as at a flower shop today were bred for centuries specifically to better satisfy human tastes, so it's no wonder we like them so much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrion_flower
Working fine for me on 25.0.1364.84 beta
It is a shame that politicians are demagoguing with all this "they need to go to jail" talk

Depending on how cynic you are you could believe this is exactly the message that $wall_street wants them to push. Everyone knows that nobody relevant is going to jail anyway, but it's a nice, superficial "debate" to keep the general public busy with...

Nice in the sense that you can apparently drag it out near infinitely. Remember: Lehmann crashed 5 years ago. Yet when you look at the state of discussion in the mainstream media you'd think it happened just yesterday.
Kickstarting the Creative Funding Future
I'm in Ottawa too and our daughter will often nap in her stroller at temperatures of -10C or more while we're out for a walk. I probably wouldn't specifically stick her outside for a nap but in general the cold (or indeed sleeping in the cold) is no big deal for kids as long as they're dressed well.
The critical point is at 7.4 MPa (74 bars) and 304 K (30 C) - there the density is 470 kg/m^3.

Here's the phase diagram.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=co2+critical+point&...

According to this http://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint%20archive/Files/45_4... the pressures in depleted natural gas wells are 20-40 bars so it's not as bad as I expected.

Never seen any numbers so had to go look.
Nordic countries are just as diverse as the US.
It cannot be a violation of copyright, since no copy occurs. Site A tells browser B where to find a resource on Site C. Site A sends zero bytes of the actual resource to browser B. Site A does not have a copy of the resource. Instead, the resource continues to live on the server under the control of the copyright holder. Browser B then contacts site C, asks for the resource, and site C voluntarily sends those bits. There is no on server A, server A does not transmit a copy to browser B, and therefore there can be no copyright violation.

It doesn't make any sense to me to get all worked up about "rude behavior". The internet is full of people who want to break into your box and take over your system. If you have a server facing the internet you have to expect that people are going to be ruder than you ever dreamed possible, and they are going to do this all the time. Complaining about it won't change anything; just fix your server so it doesn't do things you don't want it to do. I understand that there's this whole big social thing about "hotlinking" which has grown up now, and I've heard all the reasons people use for it, I just look around at the state of the internet and think it's a trivial thing to worry about. Just fix your config and get on with life. Browbeating someone else for using resources which are advertised and provided to the public for free seems like an amazing waste of time.
Learning javascript made me a better designer. But what made me a better programmer wasn't years of programming but reading codinghorror end to end.
It's not at all the same.
By that logic, every contractor hired mainly by government would have to behave like a public organization. I don't think that leads to sensible conclusions, and it's redolent of after-the-fact justification.
I don't believe so, but willing to be proven wrong!
Yep, variable pitch quadcopters aren't very common, they're only used in (research-y) areas where stability is key (speeding up and slowing down propellers is slow compared to changing tilt). I agree that at this point it's approximately as expensive as a heli, just with different dynamics.

RE: Cyclic pitch on quads - I don't think anyone put cyclic pitch on quads before. I think I derived a way to make use of 13DoF for stability and dynamics that are impossible on a heli (hovering while tilting, moving back and forth without tilt, etc). PM me if you're interested in the idea, it's a little hard to describe in words.
>Trivial puzzlers like:write a fizzbuzz program

That isn't a "puzzler", in any way, shape or form. It is quite literally "write the most basic, simple, trivial program possible". There is no trick to it, no gotcha, no special information that makes it suddenly go from hard to easy. It is always easy, and is a practical test of actual programming knowledge.
What is this continuous reference to FizzBuzz from American developers?

Being born in the other side of the Atlantic if it wasn't for HN, I would never heard of FizzBuzz in my 14 years of software development.
Don’t use correlation to track prediction performance
One of the best answers to "when while I ever use this stuff?" a teacher could provide, even when in high school.
I doubt it, but my understanding of the topic is limited.

AFAIK nuclear reactors are popular on naval warships because they dramatically reduce (and in some cases eliminate) the need to refuel. It's one huge factor crossed off of your logistics problems - modern CVNs can go literally decades without refueling, with the only resupply being jet fuel, munitions, and life support.

Doesn't fusion demand constant refueling (like most power plants)?
To write tests or to not write tests...
Writers are not merely new scribes. Writers are people who use the written word for some specific purpose. Very coarsely, I claim that novelists are storytellers, poets are artists (who use words as the medium, like sculptors use marble or bronze), biographers are historians, textbook authors are teachers, journalists are investigators. For all these subtypes of "writer," the process of getting words on paper (or into a Word document, or an Emacs buffer!) is simply a means to an end. They certainly don't "only write" — at least not the ones who produce anything remotely worth reading.
A job interview is going to take at least a day of your time anyway. What does it matter if that time is spent programming, talking over coffee, sketching on a whiteboard, or whatever?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface comes to mind

also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition seems to pop up every couple of months or so in a "Oh they do that with SVD?" way
See other posts referencing D-T and other fuel cycles. The D is deuterium and the T is tritium. Hydrogen-Hydrogen fusion is more challenging than more exotic types. D-T is, in a sense, the easiest, but both ingredients have non-trivial costs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Fuel_cycle

The GP post is erudite on activation. Fusion creates a lot of neutrons, which will render the reactor assembly itself radioactive, especially on short timescales. The waste problem is smaller, especially when compared to non-reprocessed fission waste, but not zero. An upside to fusion is the lack of usable bomb material in the waste stream.

So, safer, yes, but not completely safe.
It depends on what kind, as there aren't any viable fusion designs yet. If they involve gigantic magnets or largish amounts of material at surface-of-the-sun temperatures or incredible amounts of neutron flux, costs are going to be high and safety is going to be a problem even compared to fission.

If they can miniaturize it like the Lockheed guy in the OP wants then not so much but nobody really knows if that's possible.
I don't think it's anything to with insecurity.

I would consider myself a very good programmer compared to the hundreds I've worked directly with - think good quality, clean, well tested code delivered on time that delivers outsized value in production.

I am however useless at these mental gymnastic and logic puzzle things.

Having a high degree of programming skill is weakly correlated with these kind of interview questions, if that.
Of course I wouldn't suggest that you get the best of both worlds — it's clear that you don't. I'm just saying that there's no base for outrage here. (And the status of the railroads themselves, as opposed to the ATOC, is only partly relevant here.)
This is a complicated issue, but in my opinion the google/facebook style of interview is the one that gives you less false positives, even though it gives tons of false negatives. In other words, very few people who can do it are bad coders (false positives), but many good coders can't do it (false negatives).

So, as companies like Google and Facebook have so many applications, they're much more concerned about false positives than false negatives.
The first "Read Later" service