skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't think that is a well supported inference from the post in question.

From the post in question:

> [screening portion] The bulk of the time is spent on coding exercises. The interviewer will send you a link to a collaborative editor and ask you to solve some programming problems.

> We will ask you to do a lot of coding during the interview process, because programming ability tends to correlate strongly with how well people perform as employees. We even have a large set of take-home questions. It can't hurt to check them out and maybe solve a couple before you even submit your resume.

> Take your time preparing. Do code katas and practice interviewing with friends. Try solving the interview questions on our site.

> Hard training makes for an easy battle. Brush up on techniques that you may not use every day, but are very useful when you need them: recursion, graph theory, tree traversal, combinatorial problems, etc.

> You might be asked to implement some well-known library functions.

Being asked to implement some well-known library functions is why I said re-re-re-implement merge-bubble sort-reduce. The rest is why I said FB seems more interested in this than anything else on the list.

Code katas? Take-home questions? Maybe it isn't this way in practice, but the post certainly makes it sound like a bizarro SAT. Needing to "prep" and "practice" coding questions in the way encouraged seems rather odd to me.
I would actually not be surprised if Google Maps looked like this someday.

Except, you know...more useful. Like street names? :)

I truly believe that this was made to satisfy some requirement of a project, or it might have been just for fun. Either way, it's not a bad way to embed a map in a site designed using the "flat" aesthetic.

...But you probably should link to the real Google Maps so people can see where in the hell they are!
Abysmal multicore performance, especially on AMD processors
> In my opinion, stuff that someone has made should probably be considered the most important thing by miles. It doesn't have to be open-source code, but that certainly helps.

Problem is, a lot of good engineers (especially at big companies) may have spent a lot of time working on something that wasn't very important or good. They may have been a sparkling diamond in a sea of mediocrity.

One of my first jobs I spent the best part of a year working on something pretty dumb that was mired in bureaucracy and most people considered a bad idea from the start.

Yet that is what I worked on for around a year because that was where I was assigned, and it was considered important by edict of a person who earned approx 1000x my salary.

They eventually scrapped the project altogether.
I think you're referring to the prediction of "secondary structure" of proteins, which was attempted using neural network models as early as 1989. [1] Predicting secondary structure is child's play compared to predicting the folded tertiary structure of a protein, hence the continued use of insanely computationally expensive ab initio folding efforts like Folding@Home.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC286422/
I checked your profile. One of those. Still butthurt that I exposed calibration scores and embarrassed "your" company?

His overall message is how companies and management can improve -- advice for a position he's never been in and has no experience with.

Wait, so watching idiots incinerate hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of value through horrible business decisions when I could have done their jobs better at 17 is not direct experience?

I'm good at learning from failures-- my own (I've made plenty of mistakes, despite your claim that I don't acknowledge error on my part) and other peoples'.

a frank discussion of why such a high proportion of his employment experiences have been bad compared to typical HNers or engineers

What has astonished me is to learn that my horrible experiences are not atypical. I thought I was the only person to be screwed over so badly, and found out that there are hundreds of people with similar stories.

I won't claim that it's the norm, but it's not shockingly rare. People just don't fucking admit to these experience because they internalize their losses when the reality is that most people have shitty careers not because they are human garbage (as their bosses want them to think) but simply because they have been lied-to, exploited, and fucking robbed blind by their extortionist, criminal managers who have demolished their careers through bad work allocation and political malfeasance.

I wouldn't put myself so far out there on these issues if I hadn't realized that there's a whole corrupt system whose malignancies are underreported. If it was just me having bad experiences, I wouldn't go out there and point out how awful it is. Too embarrassing, no point. Unfortunately, the abuses of talent by the well-connected criminals are commonplace and it's time to fight back. Technology is our territory by rights and we should take it back from those assholes.
You're greatly underestimating the complexity of Facebook. I bet they have greater than 200,000 machines. Creating the infrastructure to just manage and deploy to those machines would already go beyond your 'small team'.

Not sure how you imagine a 'small team' managing a system that has an exabyte of data. From network infrastructure all the way down to cold storage, a 'small team' would be needed for each.
I was just thinking about something like this today (or at least what I think this might be, since I really can't tell from the page).

Here is what I want... I want a way to query and download Wikipedia metadata easily.

For example, I recently saw the Burke Museum released an Wildflower App, but none for Windows Phone. I was thinking I could use Wikipedia to build a very similar app, but I needed to get access to hierarchical metadata (flower type, color, region of the world, environment, etc...). I suspect it's largely there in Wikipedia, but it's not structured (or at least I don't know how to query it).

I can imagine this being of use for a lot of things: plants, birds, fish, basketball, football, countries, presidents, trees, foods, etc...

Has this been done already? Is it a solved problem with Wikipedia already?
You might want to dig into the documentation on the Wikimedia Meta site: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
Not sure why I have to defend the number. I think any #1 post would see 287 concurrents. http://imgur.com/yfn9Dnd (look at the 30 day max). I was a little off, it was 282 concurrents.
Thanks so much for the awesome replies, all! I'm looking forward to discussing a few of them more with my team. :)
Measuring the ROI of Your Employer Branding Strategy
Simple crimes, not simple criminals. Compare modern organised criminal organisations: they're nowhere near simple, but at the end of the day, the crime itself is simple.
> "...so I just put the site on my Linode 512 (512 Mb of RAM). I usually do most of my development in Ruby and Rails and deploy to Heroku but I was lazy and already had a linode setup and configured for PHP."

That will get real sideways real fast. I do concur that 287 concurrent requests with 3k page views over a day doesn't even make sense mathematically.
Yep, it feel scuzzy to me when they wait till after I've authorized their facebook app to have access to my friend list and profile before letting me know that the deal is now off.

Thanks for signing up!

Sadly, we are at capacity at the moment, but we're fixing that ASAP!

Your pal,
ChunkHost
Let the candidate bring a laptop?
Weekend Project - HTML5 RTS
I participated in the Ludum Dare game competition this weekend. The prompt was "minimalism" so I made the simplest strategy game possible in 48hrs. All feedback welcome!

You'll get the best experience with Chrome.

Contest Entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22099
Another line of defense it to install an ad-blocker, so even if Facebook somehow knows the perfect ad to show you, you probably won't see it.

Why wouldn't you want to see it? A perfect ad is a win for the consumer.
Venture Capitalists Are Making Bigger Bets on Food Start-Ups
I'm sort of disappointed that this is #1 on the board.

I don't have a problem with the piece per se, I just have the general feeling that an article on how to impress mid level managers to get a job at some giant established company is considered "hacker" news is.. I mean, am I the only one that thinks that's the antithesis of hacker ethos? There's no "hack" to this, it's like reading a pamphlet on how to get a job after college or something. It's not /wrong/, per se, but there's no real special insight here, and it basically reads like a PR piece.
Are you saying that jeff or whoever algo genius can come up with a solution to all those problems given say a couple of hours?

Of course not. Those problems and solutions were the result of years of work, by one of the best programmers on the planet. (Inside of Google, Jeff is a legend.) The question was what real problems faced by real companies require an algorithm person to solve, and that is an answer.

But any toy algorithm problem that you could be given in an interview, he could solve instantly. I guarantee it.

Heck, I'm nothing on his scale. Yet most algorithm questions that I see people complain about having been given in an interview I can figure out a decent solution to in under 2 minutes. When I hear people talking about prepping for that sort of question, it seems to me like they are missing the point.
Using the term thread interchangeably with goroutine causes confusion, otherwise why bother having a different name for them in the first place?
I smoke Blu's and here are the ingredients in the Vanilla flavor; Distilled Water, Nicotine, Natural & Artificial Flavors, Glycerin and Citric Acid.

There is absolutely nothing, in this ingredient list, that is harmful to humans on the level that actual cigarettes (or rightly named, "cancer sticks") are. The glycerin the is only cause for concern, but glycerin is used in so many different products that it is healthy enough for human consumption.

"E-cigs are NOT just water, nicotine, and flavoring"
Ya, they basically are just that.
Apps to Improve Work Productivity
Care to put the quora link to see what the guy said and not a possibly altered version?
Aussie Bank & Crowdfunding Site join forces to launch new venture
>>there are cram shops in India which 'train' you to clear Google/ Microsoft interviews.

This is so true, that I can't even find ways how to assert it more.

As a fresher, I attended a off campus interview here in Bangalore(Those who don't know- these are generally mass hiring drives, where hundreds/thousands get hired) where I happened to talk to a guy between written test sessions who even had taken very elaborate 'class notes' on clearing these interviews. He had gone through something like a 3 months coaching class just to attend these interviews. There are standard coaching materials, which are updated pretty frequently. Pretty much anything that they can ask you in these interviews will be covered. They have made you hard practice it so much it will be cake walk to you make it through.

>>And this has been going for at least 6 years

I can assure this has been going on for a very long time now.

>>It's all very funny and ironic.

Its all about the volumes. A recruiter told me, if a resumes falls down during a mass hiring drive they don't even bother to pick it up. We live in an era where recruiters search monster.com based on some keywords and pick up candidates based on that. So we are now down to SEO optimization for resumes. And then coaching classes to game the interviews.

As a side note, in all major IT services companies in India you have to take 'certification exams' for pay hikes and promotions. I've seen people drop everything they do and practice clearing these for months. The worst part is you have to 'memorize' the whole material. Later I would see those people go on to get promotions and hikes, while the actual who go the work done fail(due to lack of time to practice) in the certification exams.
Aha. It'd also be nice to know the sample size along with the confidence interval.

For conversion, I'd suggest to stop asking for a first name and last name (and possibly even the password field).
That is what happens when a plethora of cultures have migrated to a region, each culture growing it's own little bubble. India has been a recipient of migrants from Central Asia, North Asia and Europe over the last two thousand years. India to it's smallest unit is a hive of ghettos, each ghetto not caring about the other one, while striving in the futile exercise of ensuring it's own survival. People don't care about cleanliness or have general civic sense because they don't see themselves as one community. The lack of the sense of "India" is appalling. We have Kashmiris, Biharis, Marathis, Gujaratis. Oriyas, Nagas, Tamils, Other South Indians, Bhaiyyas(from Uttar Pradesh), Punjabis and a thousand of other sub-cultures. India has not had Independence long enough to have that sense spread in it's massive population.

From the heights of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataliputra, and later http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayanagara_Empire, India has been seizing to become a more "me and my tribe first" civilization due to the always constant influx of foreigners looking to settle. In 2013, it's just, "me and my 1000 square feet flat first".

Indians are in for a massive shock when they realize they can't keep themselves prosperous for long without thinking of the community first. The "Red Revolution"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite) and the massive protests in the big cities are indications of a society in great distress. It's going to implode. In any case, it's going to get much worse before it get's any better.

The 10th century chronicler, observed this about India:
"The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner ... Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they traveled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is."
--http://www.shunya.net/Text/Blog/AlBeruniIndia.htm
I'm immensely skeptical. I think it's only true insofar as you redefine "great developer" as being someone who can pump out the same kind of CRUD app really really quickly and redefine "great designer" as being someone who can add a degree of visual polish and refinement to that same kind of CRUD app.

The tools have made it such that it's now much, much easier to get enough competence at both to ship profitable product but what it hasn't done is made any easier the essential complexity of both design and engineering.
> Give feedback. We regularly survey candidates about the interview process and take feedback seriously.

Yet so few companies give feedback.
Google Glass kernel software goes public
What most people do not realize is this: Mumbai also has the most expensive house in the world - thats right, in the world:

http://statspotting.com/the-most-expensive-home-in-the-world...
You are right, and the reason that people don't care enough is because they have so much on their plate. I live in India, and I have realized that apathy is prevalent here because it is the only way to survive for the educated middle class Indian.

If you start thinking about the abject poverty, mind boggling corruption, lack of infrastructure, the safety of women, the general social practices, crime, population bomb (just to name a few) you will go crazy. Instead, the average Indian believes he lives in a super developed city, wears his / her goggles, pulls up the car window, turns on the AC and listens to Bollywood or American music. Simple, problem solved (at least for the day).
Thanks everyone! The clear signal is: Run for the hills!
There is definitely a unique mindset to each role and it can be a tremendous challenge to switch between the two productively at work.
Yep, I've unblocked Disquis but everything else is blacklisted, and I've had no problems with things breaking.
So which Android phone do you buy if you want unsubsidized on Verizon/LTE? Sincere question.
Audible Magic Receives Patent for Automated TV Ad Recognition
Facebook deserted by millions of users in biggest markets
Yes, this easily solves many problems. Plus I get to see exactly how they are used to working, neatly avoiding many "tell me about your environment" questions.
What's more worrying is that this number seems like it can only go down, not up. To build a company that could compete in this market would require both a mind-boggling amount of investment as well as the acquisition of decades of institutional knowledge.
If a person is well understood and their actions can be predicted, they can be manipulated.

The real question is: why aren't you?
Why don't you use Compojure?
> "I'm positive it can be done if the political will exists."

In your lifetime, what major problem had the political will existed to solve it? As Moldbug says, we have a large government, but not a strong one.
Spamhaus cyberattack suspect rolled around Spain in 'hacking van' command center
It seems that there was good reason to challenge your numbers: you are using "concurrent users hitting my site" in a way that people in a website optimization context would not ever expect. This screenshot is talking about "concurrent visits", and has a figure for the average time that users were "engaged" (over 45 minutes). These are not performance measurements: they are the kinds of metrics you use to determine how interesting and sticky the content of your site is (along with things like your bounce rate and content flow).

In fact, this number (apparently a feature of Chartbeat) claims to be measuring "concurrent people sitting at a computer looking at pages from your site", not concurrent requests or "hits" to your webserver, or even concurrent HTTP connections (which may be idle for long periods of time). This number is almost entirely meaningless for the purposes of discussing your site's load. Imagine an HTML5 JavaScript game that took an entire day to play: with one request per second you may find yourself with tens of thousands of "concurrent visits".
Seems like a pretty deceptive company. They display the following during the signup process:

"We'll disable signups that don't seem to be a real person, have few friends, or are obviously underage"

I didn't realize there was a minimum age to use a VPS. It also seems that unpopular people with too few friends don't qualify as VPS users.

After I signed up and they had my info (public profile, friends list), I received:

"Sadly, we are at capacity at the moment, but we're fixing that ASAP!"
I don't believe it's a bad thing. Mostly it's a sign that there is a finite number of distinct microchip designs the global economy really needs. These microchips improve all the time.

Now, once there really is a monopoly problem, it's still possible for smaller chip makers to emerge with less efficient or powerful chips, if the market is desperate for "fresh blood".
The gocode autocomplete uses this approach and it works very well.
Configuring the environment shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. You copy the settings files, update them a bit if needed and that's it.
Deleting your account does not stop Facebook from tracking you, unfortunately.
Wikipedia’s Sexism
Henry Ford on usefulness
/What are some concrete examples of hard problems tech companies face that require novel solutions/

I'm a User Interface Engineer at Facebook in the Photos team. One common thing we do is to display photos in a grid. This is one subject that's really important, yet I haven't see any good documentation about it. I've first looked at all the websites that did some interesting image layouts algorithms, reproduced them and documented them.

Google Plus: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-goog...
Lightbox: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-ligh...
Lightbox Android: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-ligh...
500px: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-500p...

Unfortunately, none of them really suited our needs. We wanted to let users have the ability to make any (or all) images bigger. So I started playing around and writing a new image layout. The hardest part was to have an algorithm that was designed such that you could move images around in real time in ways that feel natural to the user, even though we have constraints that are impossible to solve.

Basic algorithm: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-face...
Reordering algorithm: http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/image-layout-algorithm-face...
Are there companies working on a plug-in block (think of something in between a vending machine and shipping container in size) that could convert human excrement to bagged, saleable/usable fertiliser pellets?

Incidentally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil

Someone who knows their shit might be able to tell me what challenges prevent this from existing, but I would've thought that something that could be dumped on site and tapped into somehow could be useful.

Surely one day technology would allow for solar + reliable energy storage + large rain water storage + waste processor to mean that many people could do away with a lot of the typical grid services fixed to a house? (e.g., electricity/water/wastewater would be dealt with)
A picture I took few years back. This was in the heart of the City of Mumbai (Bombay), near residential and lots of commercial establishments.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/1283051163/
I don't think it's really an option at this point. The point the article is making is that you won't get stock android from anything but a phone sold to you by Google, and since the Nexus 4 isn't offered on Verizon, you're kind of out of luck in that department. Personally I'm an iOS guy, but isn't conventional wisdom to stick with the Galaxy S at this point on Verizon? They do seem very solid.
The problem with the US is that if you get a phone from the carrier, your plan will be $X a month with a 2 year contract but if you BYO phone, the plan will still be $X a month with no contract. This significantly reduces the incentive to provide your own phone as you're essentially giving up on a $30 a month subsidy.

Other countries (and T-mobile) have much more reasonable pricing models where BYO gives you the option to avoid the subsidy.
>> where I happened to talk to a guy between written test sessions who even had taken very elaborate 'class notes' on clearing these interviews.

Pretty sure there would be coaching classes to get into coaching classes with higher hit rates of finally clearing the interviews. It's that broken.

Whenever people talk about the madness of India's youth, I can't help not quoting Soumen:

"It's hard to overstress the liability of a nation of a billion people out of which 700 million are functionally illiterate and the rest have no wish to follow instructions, even when they are asking for a favor."

http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/soumen/APKGKAH/illiterate/Applicat...

>> As a side note, in all major IT services companies in India you have to take 'certification exams' for pay hikes and promotions.

Hope you are fortunate enough to be not working for such places anymore.
Universe

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q1

Earth

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q2

Life

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q3
Lifehacker just did a comparison of popular privacy extensions and called Disconnect the best (over Ghostery and others): http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote...