skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there any kind of a demoscene community alive today in the SF area? Everything I can find seems Europe-centric.
Never interviewed at Facebook but have been offered roles at similarly hard to get places. Though I am working at my own startup now, the absurdness of the interviewing process at majority of such places confounds me.

In short, I can't cope up with them well without going through quite a few glassdoor type questions of that respective company. And partially it is because most interviewers already have a set of solutions that they are looking for, and can't appreciate novel solutions and at times even better time/space complexity if they do not fit the standard mold. In my experience only some very hot startups had smart/ open enough interviewers to appreciate new solutions or see the relevance of new CS research results that may solve their question.

Before one starts attacking me on being a CS philistine, I want you to ponder on my background- current work involves designing & implementing pretty intricate & complex algorithms, and earlier research & publications in a range of ML related sub-fields, mainly NLP & recommender systems. I also read CS papers for pleasure, code in multiple languages and did reasonably well in programming competitions- no longer participate, latter is many years ago.

For a similar experience, though from a far more accomplished person, see Tanya Khovanova's blog post on hiring 'the smartest people in the world':
http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=402

Also, FYI I don't resent the system a lot. It is better than it being an old-boys-club; I just dread going through the bootcamp of memorizing/ revisiting trivial stuff in case I ever have to look for a job again.
Not amongst the kind of people who read HN. You might get some traction with semi-skilled PHP developers, but they rarely have much of a budget to work with and will generally use whatever is the cheapest acceptable solution.
Distrowatch pulled it when it announced it was going EOL, prior to that it had been in ranked anywhere between 14 and 30 over 2 years.

Popularity: 26 (453 hits per day)
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fuduntu
> I guess I don't see the point of a Redis clone in Erlang

The only reason to do it if you already have something written that uses Redis and just want to build on that.
Their version is hipper marketing.
damn it.

I hate chemistry.
Yep! I moved my blog over to Github pages which is just using Jekyll and it's been great. You can also pull in various JS widgets to add comments, etc.
Please keep in mind the difference between science and social science.
Part of selling "the product" is exactly "selling the dream". How boring is it when I sit down to try and sell somebody something and start rattling off lists of detailed technical specifications:

Well, this is built on the JVM, using Groovy and Grails, and implements all the relevant technical standards, including Atom 1.0, RSS 1.0, WSDL 2.0, SOAP 1.13, GRDDL 11.9, FOAF 1.0, RuleML, SWRL, OAGIS, and UMBEL, and it has great features, like application integration over JMS, FTP, REST, SOAP and AMQ using Camel and an Enterprise Service Bus, and there's an Integrated Activity Stream using the activitystrea.ms protocol, and did I mention that you can make semantic assertions and store them in RDF using Jena and then query them using SPARQL...

are you asleep yet? No? Well most customers eyes would have glazed over after about the second acronym.

OTOH, what about:

Are you worried about how your company will survive, and the legacy you will leave behind? Nobody wants to be known as "CEO of a company that went bankrupt". The thing is, you have a ton of potential here, you just need a way to unleash it. Imagine if... all of your employees were enabled to easily and conveniently share, transfer, remix and create knowledge, based on their experiences and the experiences of their co-workers. Imagine if innovations developed in the R&D labs made it into new, profitable product lines 5x faster than they do now. Imagine if you had the ability to have your whole company sense important signals from the environment you operate in, and react to those signals in a agile, adaptive manner.. never letting a competitor get the jump on you, and serving new customer needs before even the customer realizes them. Wouldn't that be a nice thing, Mr. CEO? Yeah? Well then great, we have some gnarly knowledge management and collaboration products that I'd like to tell you about...

Of course, if you really want to get tricky, throw in some NLP "time distortion" pattern language:

You know, Mr. CEO, in five years, when your company is more profitable than ever, and you've won the State Chamber of Commerce "CEO of the Year" award, you're going to look back on today and see that this was the beginning of a very beneficial partnership, aren't you?
Pricing aside, we were stunned at the performance difference. Never expected 3.2X improved performance from DigitalOcean.
Spamhaus attacker used a van and a bunker
Direct from Google, yes, but only the Nexus 4 currently (and historically a few others). On other popular devices, no, but there are extremely well-supported community distributions of Android for them (usually CyanogenMod or AOKP). (Note that your phone has to have an unlocked bootloader for that option, but most can be officially unlocked these days.)
I was thinking of applying, but... is it really 70 hours a week? Because that's not going to fly with me. I don't do more than 45 as a worst-case average no matter who the employer is.
I disagree with the article, it's quite easy to move countries actually.
Original post from the Meebo team
http://www.meebo.com/support/article/176/
So which of these have a good complement of Unicode points?
Its not a commonly accepted "definition" - threads are a general concept that encompass several different forms of concurrency. It may be commonly assumed that the term "thread", in absence of any other qualifier, refers to OS-level threads, however even that is context dependent. The Wikipedia page introduction is poorly written.

However the more salient point here is the OP was either being lazy by saying "goroutines are not threads", or actually doesn't understand the concept of lightweight threads. Along the lines of Rob Pike's own explanation on the matter, he maybe should have said "goroutines provide concurrency but not parallelization".
No, they're real flight itineraries. I checked. Also, they're made out to the same people who keep misusing my address.
You make a lot of outdated assumptions about Google engineering.

And they have basically the same policy: Fancy Macs, but MS Windows is frowned upon.
i didnt know much about construct 2, but the screenshots/feature sets make it look quite nice. Can you write a bit about what features, limitations and other facets that's in construct 2?
Across the globe, thousands of free software advocates are completely unaffected.
Oh, wow, I had no idea you had to hit 'enter' to submit the buffer you'd typed.
Does anyone remember Mind Bowling?

It was a biofeedback bowling game, I'm not even sure what decade it was released.
Downvoting me doesn't change the fact that your OS sends search strings to Amazon
Those comments at the end... geeze.

"pls give me job at facebook call me 5551231234"

"send link to aplication to email@email.com"
A lot of people commented on the original submission in which he asked for feedback on his site and ... nothing's improved, not even the grammatical errors!

The only thing that's changed is the site's migration to S3 from Linode, and the addition of Cloudfront!
Ive used FPDF/FPDI most of the time I used it to generate preformatted mailing labels (the best output method that is compatible with any printer, just format it with scaling "off" in mind.) Maybe a letter or report or two...

But the main thing that drew me to PDF utilities was to programmatically fill out pre-existing PDF forms. With FPDI i would load in the form and then overlay the data on top of it. Not as easy as charts and tables, as some data exists as one line per row and other might have several lines per row of data. different positions, etc. (here's a fun form I had worked with: http://www.cdss.ca.gov/cdssweb/entres/forms/English/CD9600.P... depending of family size or care situation could be multiple pages...) If you can crack stuff like that in an easy-ish to use API, I think you would catch more developers interest.
Their IPv6 support looks iffy: http://wiki.chunkhost.com/ipv6
I beg to differ. I changed a lot of stuff which was recommended by HN. What errors do you see? The main thing I didn't change was I kept the open source stuff highlighted because the vast majority of people visiting the site will want to find those resources.
Also, it's unreasonable to expect the author to make every change which is recommended. Some things are judgement calls. I really appreciated the feedback of HN and acted on most things suggested, but not everything.
I remember some time ago when chunk host first launched. They advertised that the service was "free during beta", when what they really meant was "free beta test" (more accurately: "free 30 day trial"). Since that blatant act of false advertisement I've never spoken well of this company to people looking for hosting. I don't expect they'll be any less scuzzy with this current deal.
I hope this doesn't sound facetious, but what I hear over and over again is that places like Facebook have difficult technical interviews that are algorithm focused to create more false negatives than false positives because they work on hard problems.

What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions and why are algorithms problems the best way to find the people qualified to solve them?

I know these seem like a naive questions, but these two things seem to be taken for granted in every interview discussion (or even if someone argues against them it's mostly a "this is how I find good people" argument). I think it's pretty clear this isn't the only way to find good people, I'd just love to hear more about the thinking behind this interview style and what it really means to these companies when they say "we deal with hard problems." The only concrete example I've ever been given is someone at another big Valley company speaking about difficulty of master-master writes between data centers at a large scale. Which certainly qualifies but I'd love to hear what other "hard problems" are out there.
I would no-hire anyone with the poor judgment and prioritization skills to use Linux on a laptop.

I even had Linux on a laptop, around 2000
What decision do you think they could possibly make that would get enough people seriously upset in the direction you suggest (especially enough to match the intensity of the RKBA side)?

I mean, they're not even willing to deal with the question of whether we have a right to bear arms (cert denied in the NY state may issue appeal). That said, it will get very interesting when Illinois goes full Constitutional Carry on June 9th, or, well, after the District courts enjoin the state from enforcing its unique besides Hawaii absolutely no issue law. And we'll have to see if they and the Circuit court will play wack-a-mole with all the localities that will ban or unduly restrict concealed carry.

(In theory the legislature could fix this, but a supermajority is needed to override Chicago home rule, and that's not happening. And the most the rest of the state is willing to give to Chicago failed.)

And thus we have a circuit split, with another decision from Maryland being appealed to the Supremes.
The site needs to make it clearer which font is the best, it looks initially like it's a countdown from 50 of the best fonts (the second font has 49) and then when I get to the bottom there is a ton of them on 0 so I presume now they are votes.. pretty confusing
My approach is not so much your interaction to control a machine, more so how machines interact with your brain and body to guide your decision making. So think about BCIs and more broadly human machine interfaces for things like persistent heuristic mapping for memory augmentation (think along the lines of "tagging" events to neural activity - this might help with focused tDCS during recall) and in-stream blood toxin monitoring.
Convicted criminals go to prison AS punishment not FOR punishment. That's fundamental to a free civilized society. Prison isn't to mete out some kind of dysfunctional revenge fantasy on those who transgress our complex legal code.
But no explanation of what the colours are for, where they're from, what happens if you hit Reload. My assumption was that there was some clever algorithm to choose a "nice" set of colours from a wide palette, not that it was little more than a single colour swatch.

As I said: too minimal.

Now, if someone did have a web app that would choose nice colours that go well together according to clearly-defined, documented algorithm, I'd be very happy with that. As long as there was some text somewhere to explain what it did.
I don't think anybody who trivializes Facebook is speaking to the problems they have to tackle at the scale they're at. I think the real cynicism comes from the real added value coming from Facebook at the cost to society it brings (i.e. lost time, ad sales, impact on human interaction, etc.).
I don't know many Facebook employees, and I don't know any in California, but 40-45 is what I hear, not 70. I don't know if that's representative of what a normal employee does, but 70 sounds implausible.
I got this wrong. std::async should not return an int.
It's should be std::future
Yes, but no. Since moving to HipHip which is a translated/compiled version of PHP, we have been able to fork the language to clean it up. We have a strongly typed version, Generators, etc.

Syntactically it looks a lot like PHP and is backward compatible for many thing, but it's not really PHP anymore. The HipHop team has done a ton to make the language a lot more enjoyable to work in.
Another method, if you decide against a statically generated site, is microcaching [1] with nginx. Your backend only needs to render the page once each second and subsequent requests see the cached version. You should be able to easily handle 2000 req/s using this method.

[1] http://fennb.com/microcaching-speed-your-app-up-250x-with-no...
"Get Perks at Local Restaurants & Bars" shouldn't be title cased. It should be "early beta" not "early Beta". The ellipsis after the "etc" should be a period. There are many others too.

There were a ton of comments that were incredibly constructive and valid. I appreciate it's your site and you're not beholden to anybody, but almost all the criticism that was given was ignored.

Also, you can edit comments on HN rather than leaving a second as an afterthought.
tx. I was curious how it'd look like to replicate an example full stack of a Python project and you basically covered it. I remeber looking around some time ago and then Noir looked like the go to framework for Clojure, but now it seems discontinued. gotta try CL some day.
While the sentiment is clear, I had an uncached Wordpress site on shared hosting withstand #2 or #3 (I forget where exactly it peaked). HN isn't all that huge a traffic deliverer. It's just about the quality of that traffic.
Improving signups by 125% with a simple wording change
They are getting vilified for two reasons.

#1. It implies women are delicate breakable flowers who can't take any criticism.

#2. It implies men are tough and not delicate and don't need this protection.

Both of those things are judging people only by their gender and ridiculous.

EDIT: Also, creating an anonymous github account is easy, and use the name Pat Smith. Let there be a million Pat Smiths... then you won't be judged by your gender, just your work.
The thing that really bothers me about these postings is the advice that you should 'prep'. Conceivably, many applicants will already have a job that requires them to code 8 hours a day. But somehow, the skills required to pass their interview are so out of line with what a programmer does day to day, that extracurricular studying is required.

It would suggest that the interview itself selects for mostly irrelevant skills if that is a problem they're having with the process.
one I was given in an interview:

You're working on the front-end development for a chatting website. Each conversation gets it's own 100x200px div and they are placed on the screen such that two conversation windows are never intersecting.

We want to display a new conversation window, write an algorithm to determine where a conversation can be placed such that it does not overlap with any current conversations. Assume that the website is being displayed at 1024x1280px.
There must be a few (I am one). There are a few gatherings for like minded individuals such as http://teamcamp.ca and http://startupottawa.com. Also there are many meet ups advertisedon meetup.com
How is the interview for a product manager?
Private Life: Tuning Your Social Media Life Out to Strangers
I agree. Vanilla Wordpress plus cache doesn't even sweat on HN traffic. I would guess that without cache it would still work.
I think you meant mutually exclusive?

As for, "human solutions to human problems" the agonistic form of most western legal systems, where professionals advocate for their clients and present opposing views to someone who is supposed to be an impartial arbiter, but whose decisions can be appealed; would be an example. It is imperfect, but able to deal with changing circumstances. And notably human judgment is involved at every step.
Agreed, I've hit the front page a number of times. There's nothing about HN that even a cheap VPS running jekyll (like I have) can't handle.
I'm not sure why this is such a common misconception. I almost never work 70, or 60 hour weeks. 50, often, but that's usually my own fault for making promises to others I want to keep.

I've managed inside Engineering at Facebook and am now back to just being a straight Engineer, and my advice to everyone I work with is the same: Don't kill yourself working 70/80 hour weeks. We pay you to give 40 solid hours, and that is what I want. What I ask of you is that you set expectations for the people and teams around you as accurately as you can. Don't make a bunch of promises you have to work crazy hours to keep.

The majority of our most successful engineers have a very good work-life balance.
I have a few other people's bank accounts from foreign countries (mainly the US) emailing me. I really couldn't believe that banks have no email verification at all...
Fixed those errors. Thanks.

I did make a lot of changes suggested. I changed my about page a lot, and made copy changes to much of the stuff on the homepage. Keep in mind that this site is still a work in progress and I got caught up with other stuff the rest of the week. I will probably make more of the HN suggested changes later. I'm just saying that not all recommendations fit in with the author's view on something.
Your're in luck there's still an Amiga group in the general area (San Jose) http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1/ If no one replies here directly, this would be a good avenue to check out.

Otherwise this is the best I could find for US demoparties
http://magfest.org/demoparty
All Facebook blog comments are of similar nature. It's pretty astounding.
If you're not super keen on spending time on this yourself and don't want to give up any convenience of a fully dynamic site, that's part of what we built Webpop (http://www.webpop.com) for...

Of course tweaking web servers and playing with your stack can be fun, but if you just want to build your site and let someone else handle the back-end performance and scaling issues, then there are solutions for that.
On Being A Designer And A Developer: Not Quite Unicorn Rare
I interviewed at Facebook (a while ago - they were still on University Ave). This article is a pretty accurate description of the interview process that I remember, but could apply equally well to technical interviews most places.

The "fit" category is fairly vague, but a better description of it (and what I think about when interviewing candidates) is "how would I feel if I had to stay late fixing a live site issue with this person?" Ideally that doesn't happen, but I find it helpful framing question.

For coding questions, I generally have a pretty low bar - and it's gotten lower. Generally I look for understanding of basic data structures, and the ability to manipulate them. I realize that's slightly biased towards recent grads, but I think linked-lists, binary trees, and pointers are fair game even for experienced candidates. I'm sometimes amazed at how many people have problems with what I think are simple questions.

SQL and schema design questions are also good, and lend themselves very well to iterative questions. It's easy to start with simple problem statement, have someone get a reasonable solution, and then throw additional requirements in.
Time to Bring Bank Staff Back Onshore
> that threads are related to the OS scheduler

It is actually common for people to talk about green threads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_threads) in the same vain as OS threads.
Network Economics of TrueView Ads
Hm, I clicked all around the site and wasn't able to get a .php in any of my URLs. They were all "clean" or "pretty" URLs, as I would expect from a profesional, large web app. I wonder why we have different URLs.
They're not saturated yet.

DO's CPU performance has generally been worse than Linode's in benchmarks and that was before the recent Linode upgrade so they're probably even further behind now.

It's not that DO is good, it's that SoftLayer is terrible. Don't use SoftLayer as a benchmark for anything but wasting your money.

Also these kinds of blog posts are a waste of time.

http://serverbear.com/
I think people are re-discovering/re-inventing Berners-Lee's semantic web and "linked data" descriptions (having the epiphany on their own) in part because Berners-Lee, for all his excitement, often fails at presenting the very basic idea, and I think it's because he takes the idea of a static URI for granted.

By using a URI like a globally-unique primary key - a symbolic link - into "the database of the web," in place of the content itself (not just as a pointer to a the next page page with cats) you can begin to use all of the web as the data set and something like XPath/XQuery as the query language.

Before any of that can happen, people need to really accept that URIs/URLs can't change their semantic content and rarely-if-ever go away. That's a big problem with the current approaches to displaying content: the references they generate are presumed to be forgettable.