skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Holy mackerel, does this ring true!

Long ago, I had an internship at a company that focused primarily on daily revenue. An email would go out in the morning with yesterday's sales figures. It omitted (for reasons I don't know) the gross margins.

Someone high up figured out "Hey, we can goose the numbers by running sales!" and so the sales went up - almost daily - and yes, indeed, the daily revenue $ went up and up.

I'm not sure what happened to the business, but I'm sure if you want to maximize daily revenue you can but if you don't pay attention to margin, well - you're in trouble.

I thought this was an isolated case but clearly anyone can fall into that trap. Very weird, especially when the data is staring you in the face. Reality distortion field? Incompetence? Willful ignorance? Some of each?
> indicative of a hair-splitting, underhanded mentality

I believe you may be wrong about that. But it appears you've now found a good match in Spark! On the down side, it may then be the only game in town for you, there are good reasons for the 'company pays fees' rule, see elsewhere in this thread for one possible reason.
> What you don't see in the news is the zillions of times a day the system protects peoples' rights through criminal appeals, etc, and the massive overhead that arises from actual criminals abusing those protections in order to try and get out on technicalities.

Good. Better criminals abuse the system than the system abuse people.

> My friends who have clerked for judges talk about how frustrating it is to deal with appeal after appeal from people who are clearly guilty and just abusing the system.

I don't trust your friends view of clearly guilty, sounds like bias to me.
The geography imbalance, which exists, is not even close to explaining the disparity between general population and Ivy League attendees.
All anecdotal evidence is rubbish. :)
Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this? As a recruiter who gets recruiting emails to come recruit engineers at other companies quite often, I have a hard time believing this.
The stigma comes from an attitude that the judicial system's responsibility is to produce convictions, so it appears that defendants who are not convicted are merely certainly-guilty people against whom the prosecution didn't have the tools necessary to convict. Down this path lies lowered standards for due process and evidence and a higher incidence of false positives.
My experience makes me think otherwise. I didn't attend an elite university, but visited friends that did. I saw a disproportionate number of gifted and extremely hard working people. More so than at my college, which itself was highly ranked.
Again you keep trying to position Go as a C successor, I don't understand why you are so hellbent on that.

Look where C is being written today, mainly in libraries or very/extremely performance oriented applications and low level systems programming where any kind of unecessary overhead (performance, footprint, dependencies) is actively being avoided. Where does Go fit in here?

Instead Go has mainly seen an uptake in web oriented development, I personally think it also has great future in desktop style application development, but that remains to be seen.
This (and the discussion around it) are bullshit. They somehow think on STEM job is equivalent to another, which is lunacy.

- Talking about all STEM graduates as equal is pointless, because some people are useless and some are amazing.

- Talking about STEM in general is useless, because software is booming, and nothing else really is.

- Talking about all H1B jobs as the same is also bollox: half are employed by infosys (etc) as low cost (and low quality) contractors to avoid paying a fair wage (against the rules of the H1B program as I understand it). However, Google and Facebook (etc) are paying them great salaries, equal to what they pay US employees (even though the expenses are higher with visa and relocation costs).

So startups and high growth companies are being starved of great talent, because chemists can't find jobs and Infosys is trying to depress wages of low-quality IT workers? Makes no sense.
Funny? It's an ad...

:P
By what metric are they unequal? Crime rates? Economic output? Level of corruption? Degree of political freedom? What?

You cannot name a single way in which Switzerland is not the equal, and often the superior, of the countries that comprise the European Union. It even has the highest per capita rate of Nobel Prize winners

On the other hand, Turkey is known for Islamic fundamentalism, ethnic wars, military coups, violence against women, and a level of intellectual accomplishment that ranks somewhere between D+ and C-.
Are you referring to Asian-Americans, or Asian international students?

Public schools love the international student tuition money these days, it's such a farce, turning "public" education on its head.
Did you check out the "search the data" link?

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-or...

The above link lists all the high level gov organizations. I am not sure where you can get a list of the 1,271 smaller organizations. As far as who each organization is accountable to that is pretty easy...
I don't know how serious you are being, but the purpose of the interview question may not have anything to do with the job whatsoever, or it may.

Either way, questions of this nature are intended to filter out people who are not interested in getting to the root of a problem, and solving that problem practically.

The interviewee should be looking to determine constraints, limitations, expectations, requirements, use cases, problem scale.

The interview for any job should be looking for someone looking for those things.

In what way would any job that requires critical thinking be considered boring?
This is of course much better, to avoid AA going to rich black kids over poor white kids.
because software is booming

Do you have statistics for this? While the need for STEM is obviously rising, I feel like a lot of this conversation devolves into an echo chamber: I'd love to see hard statistics about STEM career demand.
Blue Like Jazz

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2128223578/save-blue-lik...

This is a far cry from 2 mil but they did get it made. I do believe they had one backer, before kickstarter, that was in for 500k and match whatever Kickstarter brought in. I donated 100 bucks after kickstart, so they got more funding not shown on kickstarter, and got a t-shirt and my name in the credits (along with several thousand others).

The movie wasn't great but the book that it is extremely loosely based on is good. Donald Miller wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years while writing the movie version of Blue Like Jazz. That book is even better.
The Stanford & Harvard's of the world have a very real interest in ensuring that their demographics are preserved. "Well rounded" is a cop out, and your anecdote is a false dichotomy.

The high achieving students you're describing aren't not participating in extra curricular activities. That just sounds bizarre. Anyone who's intensely focused on getting into a top school also has their application filled with extra curricular engagements.
While I'd agree that most people who end up with massive wealth do some harm on the way, suggesting it's totally unavoidable or has never been avoided is basically unprovable and, in any case, not a reasonable assumption.

I'm on the same page with your cynicism, but sentiment like this should eschew absolutes.
Wait, this one is news to me. How does Clojure break this? It still supports car/cdr, if I recall correctly, right?
Question-

I had a idea about how to make this type of punishment non feasible.

Replace the standard truecrypt bootloader with one of a design that has a 'self destruct'

What I mean by that is, when you turn on your computer and the boot loader is initialized it actually deletes its keyfile from disk and only keeps it in ram. If you dont enter the correct password in xxx minutes or if you restart the computer, that data is lost and restoring it becomes impossible.

There could be another option as well, a 'extra' unlock code that you could not prove the existence of, which could overwrite the deletion of the above.

Basically its a way to say "The FBI turned on my computer without asking me for instructions and destroyed my data- Its not possible for me to restore it, but this WAS my password"
I wonder if the higher friends count of Brazilian users is caused by the previous use of Orkut, where it was popular to try to have as many friends as possible.
Thanks :). Yeah, embedding and exposing functions to Lua is very simple. Sandboxing it too: the I/O functions are confined to a few modules you can easily disable, which is a huge plus.

And it's a fast, small language with no "complicated" symbols to type (no C-like braces and stuff) and a nice learning curve, great for beginners / less-technical people.
Care to guess how many African-American college applicants are white Jewish South Africans? Plenty.
Do you really think this is a meaningful risk here? Would be a huge hit to his reputation if he broke $2M and bolted. With a risk of $1-75 for most folks, that risk/reward ratio seems fairly trivial.
I'm surprised no one has brought up testing, or am I just too obsessed with testing?

I'd argue you should have good test coverage and a well thought out API such that you can easily swap out the searching algorithm as needed to meet your needs without worries of breaking the component or things that depend on it. What if the function is handed a pointer to the array, and the caller doesn't want the data sorted?

Beyond that, I'd strongly argue the answer is: whatever can get me the answer with the most readable and simplest code. If this part of the program later proves to be a bottleneck, then consider different algorithms. Which again, good test coverage plays a roll in.
College is broken in many ways. By definition this isn't a solution because you cannot do this for more than a tiny number of people. It's interesting that it appears desirable to return to college anyway afterwards, which suggests it's really just a resume builder and not much of an alternative at all. Still, I am always interested in anything which tries to shake up the status quo because the current college system isn't working, and the idea of just chucking more people through college really doesn't solve anything to solve our long term problems.
Say, for the sake of argument, that I have an external SSD with 5 partitions, 2 of which are filled with random data (passing a chi-square test), the remaining 3 are TrueCrypt volumes.

The way I understand it, I have plausible deniability that I have any encrypted data on this disk. Failing that, wouldn't being forced to divulge which of the partitions are actual encrypted volumes be self-incrimination?
Was posted and killed a few hours ago
I played football over the strenuous objections of my parents, who would have preferred I be involved in music.

You play sports to get laid, not because your parents make you.
one justification I've heard is that doctor like to serve communities they came from. thus, affirmative action ensures minorities have access to doctors.
Asian internationals. I hear rumblings that U.S. schools are falling out of favor with Chinese, but I haven't seen evidence and my colleagues have more applicants than ever.
How Much Does It Cost To Buy Your Child In? (2003)
I really don't see why \ has anything do with escaping when not in the context of a string (or regex) literal. There is no ambiguity whatsoever. It's a shame more languages don't use it because it's easy to type (no shift required).
Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Game Theory Exam
Is your fund sales tax exempt? (In other words are you able to deduct sales tax from your earnings before taxes?)

If so you may just end up making the tax man happy and reducing the amount you can invest by whatever sales tax applies in your location. Depending on your process costs and deal-flow this could add up over time.
> Good. Better criminals abuse the system than the system abuse people.

That's a trope. In reality, the justice system is about striking a balance between the need to preserve order and security and the need to protect peoples' rights. That's why the Constitution uses "balance-y" words like "reasonable" when talking about 4th amendment rights.

> I don't trust your friends view of clearly guilty, sounds like bias to me.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but most people the police catch are "clearly guilty." Even my PD friends acknowledge that most of their clients are "clearly guilty" (they see their jobs as more watching out for the ones that aren't and making sure the ones that are get at least a proportionate punishment). The media likes to cover edge cases, but for every one of those, there are a dozens of people who rob a liquor store and leave video evidence of themselves doing it.

It is interesting to note that even most of the cases that are central to defining 4th amendment rights, ones where judges have come down in favor of the defendant, are nonetheless ones where the defendant did actually commit the crime he was accused of committing. Ernesto Miranda was convicted the second time around, for rape, even with his confession excluded, served time, and was ultimately killed in a bar fight.
People who clerk have a skewed view of the judicial system compared to someone who has been convicted.

No they don't, just a different one. Read a lot of appeals and it's obvious that a lot of the arguments are completely, utterly bogus. There are technicalities that are unfair to people who are appealing, like having appeals rejected for failure to timely file when the appellant didn't have access to admissible evidence in time to file, and so forth. Those are the kind of cases that tend to work their way up through en banc review and onto the SC eventually.

But a lot of other appeals are so ridiculous as to be desperate or amount to judicial trolling. The fact is that some prisoners have nothing better to do than file appeals to make the time go by faster.
Yeah, I probably have about 10 years on "the guy," myself.

I guess it was the casual assumption that a man would be the one filling the position. In a lot of ways those unintentional biases are worse than intentional ones.
The checklist motivates the automation. This advice is for people who have neither, to get started.
> People who clerk have a skewed view of the judicial system compared to someone who has been convicted.

I'd argue it's a much less biased view that incorporates more and better information.
The demand for skilled programmers is unevenly distributed. There's huge demand in the Bay Area and then a much smaller smattering of demand elsewhere. If you are a skilled dev who doesn't live in the Bay Area, it can very much feel like you aren't in demand. I don't know if that is what he meant, or if he was just being contrarian.
Everything you say rings true to me. However, the notion of "well rounded and compassionate because that's what it takes" makes me feel a little queasy.
I know that when I sent an email to the YC founders list cause I needed a job (2 years ago, but that's recent), I got 100 replies. I also know I find it hard to find really good devs for CircleCI. But those are just anecdotes...
Did Google ever come right out into the open and bash another company? No. There are much more subtle ways to get your point across. Targeting another brand, stealing happy users right in the middle of using their using the software, right out in the open for everyone to see? It doesn't matter who it is.

It's so aggressive it makes Microsoft look heartless and as if they're trying too hard.

Maybe the downvotes don't understand what I said or what's actually going on here.
Seriously. I spend a large fraction of my day in ein. Great for exploratory data analysis.
I'd be really interested in finding out how that study defines "IT". And also how it defines "STEM job". Would being a quant on Wall Street be considered a "STEM job", for instance?
"Not applicable" or "0/0 UI elements are correct" is a fine response to checklist.
glad to hear it, they are so incomprehensibly bad it is hard to put into words. They took a beautiful thing and ruined it for what I do not see. A new building? Higher profit margins? A desire to keep-up with the aspirations of the other corporate boards they are on?
My BS detector went off when I read:

Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry.

In other words, wages haven't risen because the reduction in the number of domestic STEM workers has been offset by the increase in the number of foreign STEM workers; the total supply of STEM workers has remained the same, but more of them are foreign.

Note that if you remove the word "domestic" in front of "labor shortage", the above quote would be correct; but it includes that word, which makes it worse than wrong.
If it helps, this type of problem has come up precisely zero times ever. Use a built in function, loop through the array, and if in the future it's running slow, _then_ optimise
Spark decides to cover its own legal fees
What does any of that have to do with the question? This is a performance question. I'll accept readability/simplicity as an afterthought, but if you answer in this manner you've missed the (quite clear) point of the question.
the judicial system's responsibility is to produce convictions

No, that's the responsibility of prosecutors. Trial courts are 'finders of fact,' whether or not those facts suit the prosecution.
Would re-introducing a half-penny coin increase the money supply? No. Basically, as long as you maintain proportionality, you can re-denominate currency (or shares for that matter) at will.
The procedure you describe was declared illegal in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, so I doubt that the statement you heard accurately describes the medical school's admission procedure. The first comment I posted in this thread, which links to an extensive FAQ about college admission procedures in the United States, gives the citation for the Supreme Court cases on the issue and the current federal regulations.

AFTER EDIT: If, on the other hand, the statement is factually correct about that school's procedure, some denied applicant has a very good basis for a lawsuit under current federal law.
Anything that increases bitcoin liquidity is good for bitcoin. Anything that increases PayPal's market opportunity is good for PayPal.

A lot of people want to purchase bitcoins with their PayPal accounts, and since PayPal is already licensed as a MSB, this just requires technology. They can build or buy (Coinbase), and make a pretty significant revenue on conversion fees. They could also charge a small fee for bitcoin transactions over a certain amount, in exchange for convenience, or, for example, transaction insurance, which can be underwritten, eliminating the risk.

PayPal can do a lot for Bitcoin, and vice versa. If Bitcoin continues to be successful, PayPal can continue to have a significant portion of the online transaction pie.
The two things IDEs do well are debugging and code refactoring.

To help implement these types of features the IDE embeds a version of the language inside of itself.

The problem with this is you then need a new IDE for each new language.

Because a good programmer's editor will try to be language neutral it does not have that luxury.

But as a bonus, because the editor is not carrying around all that extra language baggage the editor will always be faster than the IDE.
I am SQA Engineer for Autodesk Simulation CFD and our recent 2014 version has free surface modeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNKHf937Qt0. It does make pretty pictures but as you mentioned solving navier-stokes equations can get complicated :)
I get what you're saying, but there's a line interviewing crosses when it becomes less about trying to figure out if the person is right for the job and more about trying to outsmart them by painting them into some sort of technical corner.
Really? Are there really 180 open positions at Google in the sense that they are desperate for hires? If they wanted to hire people by the droves they could simply make it a little easier to get a job there. It's misleading that they even list positions.
Companies that aren't in the tech industry usually lump their programmers (for their web site, or internal process tools) into the IT dept. Still, the conflation of terms in this article makes it hard to understand what it's really saying; most interpretations I can make are just hard to believe.
In medium to large companies, this trap typically emerges in situations where someone responsible for top-line revenue is not responsible for bottom-line revenue (i.e., sometimes in organizations where Sales has little contact with, or accountability to, the other departments).

In startups and small companies, the problem has been exacerbated by a relatively recent obsession with growth uber alles. Growth, growth, growth, with little regard to whether growth is sustainable, or to how costs scale with revenue. Groupon is the ultimate lesson in the dangers of putting financial growth on a pedestal at the expense of all other considerations.

The problem is also made worse whenever founders run a company solely expecting to exit with a strategic buyout. If you're not really running the company as a going concern, you have less incentive to work toward long-term sustainable margins. We tend to glorify the big exit, and there's certainly a lot of hard work and skill that goes into achieving one -- but the highest peaks on the mountain of glory belong to whose who develop and run lasting businesses.

A professor in a business class in college used to put it this way, and I'll paraphrase: "If I want to start the world's fastest growing company, I can do that right now. It's not hard. I'll just start a business selling $100 bills for $90."

The metaphor was purposefully simplistic, but it's amazing how people seem to fall into similar business models without even considering that they have.
That's an oldie but a goodie.

Saturday Night Live Clip (First CityWide Change Bank 2)
http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi416284697/
This is not about privacy, it's about self incrimination which is far, far more important.

You can be compelled to testify under oath for many reasons none of which involve doing anything wrong. When you testify under oath, you must answer the questions asked truthfully or face unlimited jail-time for contempt.

The fifth amendment is the only form of protection you have from being called to testify and being grilled about any random topic. It's a balance to the otherwise tremendous power that a court has.

The prosecution must be able to make their case without the defendants assistance. This is a fundamental aspect of our legal system.
Why I turned down investor money for my startup
The I-94 (or I-797C) indicates which employer you can work for on an H1. When you transfer you don't get a new visa and the new I-94 invalidates the previous I-94. So you never hold two visas or two valid I-94s and are not authorized to work for two employers.
Probably a quicker way to get a developer to generate this same list of considerations is to say "explain the tradeoffs in adding an index to a column in a database table." We tend to search large tables much more frequently than large in-memory lists these days, so that's where any discussions you'll find on the topic are focused.
Who ever said he wasn't smart? This fad was created by comedians such as Letterman and bares absolutely no truth.
Before startups or the Internet existed, the old joke was "Lose a little on every sale and make it up in volume".