skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I interview, I use this question is a reverse fashion.

I asks how would you implement a b-tree index (for example). The right answer is -- "I wouldn't. DB vendors put years into getting this right.".

If you want this sort of gimmick to stop, when you are in an interview, you should just have the balls to ask how it is relevant to your potential job. Their response will give you a good idea if you really want to work there.

As an interviewer, you litmus-tests on questions like this is that they should be (a) answerable by all your existing employees and (b) reveal the thought process of the applicant. If they don't do that, find some better questions.
There are questions that are actually fun and I can sort of see them starting a conversation with the right kind of interviewer that tells both parties a lot about who they're dealing with. From the article:

> How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Basic economics estimating - probably not that useful and a bit dull, but hey why not. At least the problem has several angles to it that might be fun to explore.

> Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco

That's a nice one. Kind of open-ended, a lot of things to consider, a lot of ideas to be had.

> How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

Why? What happens to the interview after you counted them (possibly on a whiteboard)? It's a dead end and the question is dull.

> A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

Now this has the potential to be great or absolutely horrible, depending on the intent behind the question and the nature of the interviewer. If it's taken as a "fill in the blanks" kind of challenge it would be a fun way to explore the candidate's imagination. But I'm guessing it's not. It's probably one of those "clever" questions that have only one "right" answer that makes no real sense except creating a few moments of uncomfortable silence.

> You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so
> as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender.
> The blades will< start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Again, this could be a fun physics and chemistry question and I see a couple of possible solutions that might or might not work out - might be fun exploring them. But again, it sounds more like a trick question with one standardized answer. Bad.

The problem with trick questions and standardized answers is that the nature of the question makes the candidate uneasy and even if they eventually figure it out, nobody will have learned anything during the process. It's more like a hazing, not a hiring interview.
Oh, I forgot one of my favourite quotes:

"Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal…A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all…I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where…Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off."
~ Otto von Bismarck
HIV testing is largely a fraud, though, as it's conclusions are based on unscientific claims that HIV and AIDS are the same thing or even scientifically proven correlated.

The field is laughable, really. It's sad that people making important decisions in the medical and pharmaceutical fields cannot correctly interpret a confusion matrix, or if they can they are corrupt and decide to ignore it anyway.

You really don't want to apply the same standards to law enforcement, as they are appalling.

EDIT: to the downvoters, I'd suggest doing some reading. In particular, check on the existence of any verifiable testing that proves any semblance of correlation between HIV and AIDS. The standard is appalling for any scientist who's willing to check on the numbers. In general, the standard in medical science is rather low compared to say physics, but in this case it's astonishingly low considering the accolades Montagnier got for his research. I understand it's easy to dismiss this as conspiranoia but it really is not. There are dubious claims passed as truths with very specific interests behind. Not making an assertion either way on the HIV<->AIDS relationship, just pointing out that the standard of the research is shocking and the statistics skills of the people involved are incredibly poor, if not intentionally corrupt.
The Stasi were the secret police for Eastern Germany, nothing to do with the Nazis as far as I know.

The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi wasn't really as extensive as (for example) collecting all phone records for the entire country, so in some ways the US has surpassed the Stasi in surveillance, while in others obviously it's nowhere near the same situation (e.g. in-person surveillance and recruiting ordinary citizens as spies), and in other areas it's similar - secret courts and sweeping warrants etc.

I suppose the point of the comparison is to shock, and then perhaps point out that there are some areas in which the current situation is worse than it was in Eastern Germany.
I guess it's to rub it in the faces of Adobe and everyone else who supported this move "because it would help against piracy", when in reality they've just made it worse for normal customers, and also more expensive (which was probably what they really wanted anyway, and the anti-piracy thing was just the public excuse for doing it).
I've noticed that people seem to think DDG is the only good privacy-conscious search engine out there. Lately I've been using StartPage[1], which simply passes through anonymized Google search results. So you don't have the same quality degradation as using DDG, and therefore never need to degrade your privacy for better results with !g.

[1] https://startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html
For me it would be when people disappear. Being spied on is one thing but being afraid of getting arrested is another.

I grew up in Western Germany and visited the East several times. Living in the US now I have to say that it feels an order of magnitude "freer" than either of the Germanies of my youth. However, I'm very concerned about the NSA thing.
So what? That does not mean that he should look into math to understand the physics behind this demo.

Yeah, geometry is pretty much math (that's why I separated it in the parent comment) but physics justs uses math to model and express the physic concepts.

The math behind the physics on this demo is just addition, subtraction, multiplication... He shouldn't be concerned about the math, but about the physics... unless he doesn't know elementary math of course.

The math behind the basic Newtonian Physics is damn simple. The geometry is very simple too (basic Euclidean Geometry, Bezier curves and that's pretty much it).
Considering how complacent Adobe is right now it worries me how bad things will get when they no longer have to entice an upgrade every year.
A few years ago Yahoo! Erased my mail account because I hadn't logged for 3 month. It was my secondary mail account, so I in some periods I didn't use it. It happened twice! After the second time I never bothered to create the email account again, I went to Gmail. They continue to do this kind of things, so it's difficult to trust Yahoo!.
And people can download music for free yet Apple sells billions of songs on iTunes.

People are more than happy to pay if the price/convenience is right.
Google knows what you searched for and what sites you visited on 06/20/2012. DDG, I doubt it. Guess which one is NSA #1 love?
Indeed; in fact this update issues an E_DEPRECATED warning when you attempt to connect to a MySQL database using the old MySQL extension.
Programming on Early Microcomputers: A Retrospective
The devil is in the details. Big Data is really a massive cluster of VMs running maxed out Excel spreadsheets, and instrumented to restart automatically and restore from redundant backup, a la RAID, when the Excel process crashes one of the Windows VMs.
I have said it before and I will say it again, we don't need a post every time a site goes down.
From the original New York Times article that Quartz has linkspammed here: "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

Long before this was reported in the New York Times, this was the finding of research in industrial and organizational psychology. A valid hiring procedure is a procedure that actually finds better workers than some different procedure, not a hiring procedure that some interviewer can make up a rationale for because it seems logical to the interviewer. We have been discussing home-brew trick interview questions here on Hacker News for more than a year now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879803

Brain-teaser or life-of-the-mind interview questions do nothing but stroke the ego of the interviewer, without doing anything to identify job applicants who will do a good job. The FAQ on company hiring procedures at the Hacker News discussion linked here provides many more details about this.
HackEDA: Electronics for your project. Easy.
I doubt you can deliver what you say you can, and it's clear you don't completely understand execution, or you wouldn't be trying to pitch some, "I'll send you a PSD" half-assed plan.

You write like a know-it-all and everything about this post rubs me the wrong way. You delivered a piss poor pitch while making crazy promises. Your offer did not come off strong - in fact, it's the furthest thing from strong. And you not realizing that is even worse.

Then you provide a throwaway e-mail, and no information on yourself or past experience. In its current form, this belongs on Craigslist not Hacker News.

Better luck next time. You'll get better communicating, just keep practicing and try not to be so arrogant. You might have a great offer, but your delivery sucks.

Reading your post made me think of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
For the last one, won't people just move to the mysqli_* function group instead? It's almost identical API-wise.
"We're here to help you. And watch you succeed, friend!"
Not only are there "task managers" in other operating systems (and Chrome itself), but plenty of people aren't allowed to install Ubuntu server addition on their work machines.

That said, he should just replace "task manager" with "top" or whatever to get him over the OS snobbery stuff that I thought sailed into the sunset years ago. It's really, really dumb to judge someone by the OS they happen to be using at any given moment, especially when they're commenting on a cross-platform technology.
But we're not talking about other countries, are we? The title of the article is "Has the US Started an Internet War?" Why is the only choice between the US starting a cyber war and a hot war?
Tips on Getting Traction in Local From Ryan Jeffrey VP of BD at Belly
Until the NSA requires them to save it.
Programming contests show nothing about your organizational skills, which is what companies should be looking for.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911235

Mathematicians perform very well on programming contests, but they are usually terrible software engineers.

Anyways, I was just kidding :)
Out of interest, what do you find wrong with the documentation? I've always found it pretty comprehensive and relatively easy to navigate.
Nah if things get tough, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft etc store it, and NSA can access the data on demand.
It has been a long time since I managed to push Firefox down to its kneels again. Ever since i got my Core i5 and a Crucial SSD, Firefox has been ( or any Apps ) snappy. Chrome was still noticeable faster on my machine. But the difference were small enough.

Today i was research on topics and shopping around for price. It has been a long time i have had more then 150 Tabs opened. Many of those has lots of image as well. Firefox nearly slow to crawl. Scrolling was no longer smooth, nothing were snappy.
Ask HN: Fix for a Chrome phishing filter false positive?
I've written a post about banking on my blog (it's Tumblr). Hit the homepage, no issue:

http://gosullivan.co/

Hit the article directly, "The website at gosullivan.co contains elements from sites which have been reported as “phishing” sites."

http://gosullivan.co/post/53282541091/simplify-money-with-pocketbook

Has anyone been through this before?
You might wish to read "The Ominous Parallels" by Leonard Peikoff.
What’s Your Growth Ratio?
In this case, piracy is in Adobe's interest. It allows people to learn their tools, which they'll then buy once they're working.

Creative Cloud is all about forced upgrades, not cutting piracy.
On the bright side, this article will boost the self-esteem of the 100s of thousands of devs like me who didn't get a job offer. "I'm not stupid, their process was stupid!"
The real question here is how often are you displaying enough table rows where the difference in performance really matters?

If an admin panel were outputting let's say a list of users, it might decide to output them in a table format but it'll probably limit it to maybe 50 rows at a time.

Even if you have infinite scrolling where the table gets larger and you scroll down to a few hundred it gets to the point where the user is just not going to continue. Why would you manually scroll down through hundreds/thousands of names when you could just search for the one you want and get it instantly?
Reading your comment, I was reminded of the hypothesis that the 17-18th century cultural shift from alcohol to coffee was a contributing factor in the Enlightenment.
5.3 and 5.4 had significant performance increases. 5.5 has integrated opcode cache. IMO, PHP has one of the best documentations of any programming language. Many bad bits have been deprecated in recent versions and there are PSR recommendations which make it easier to write decent interoperable code. PHP is growing up.

However, if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to use it. Just walk away.
Is the article using "DVD" to mean "a DVD-sized disk", or does it actually mean DVD? Either way, it's impressive.
Which, honestly, it kind of a dumb move on Google's part. I was never a fan of that recovery address process. The 2-factor auth they've implemented since is much better.
They are indeed Government sites! GOV.UK itself is looked after by the Government Digital Service (GDS). A brief history is available on the GDS blog: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/. It's also different in that it's coded in the open. Most of the code behind GOV.UK is on public Github repositories: https://github.com/alphagov.
Java EE servers run some of biggest throughput web services in the world. But your saying its a bad choice?
The fact that these conversations are happening is indicative that we do not have a Stasi.

We have serious problems, as evidence by the unwillingness of any member of Congress to really speak out on the issue, and the sheer scope and reach power of this poorly regulated surveillance regime.

There's no gulag archipelago, but the tools used by repressive totalitarian regimes are being built for other purposes, and many of us believe that these tools are not compatible with a free and democratic society.

Let's focus on the real and stop running down the slippery slope.
The second problem with "nothing to hide" is that it's really "nothing to hide based on today's laws". Laws change. Things become illegal or looked down upon that were previously just fine. What you did with a peaceful conscience today could be used to throw you in jail in 20 years.

The third problem is that due to the complexity of the penal code, this is already the case. You have already done stuff in the last 10 years, that you didn't think was illegal, but somewhere in the tens of thousands of pages of the penal code someone can find a reason to throw you in jail if they have enough information about you. As Richelieu put it, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - the NSA has billions of lines about you. They can hang you a million times over.
This is a very popular argument when blaming woman for being raped.
Neil Postman misses the point by a mile. BNW and 1984 were effectively written about different countries, it's just a curious accident that both are set in London. BNW is a first-world dystopia, 1984 is a second-world dystopia. (While Huxley was living in Hollywood, Orwell was fighting in the Spanish civil war for the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification.) Go visit the Checkpoint Charlie museum in East Berlin and then tell me 1984 is "less true". It fucking already happened there. Just like BNW is starting to happen in Western countries now.
What REITs do you like? What are the most pressing risks you see with REITs right now?
It's probably a honeypot.
And that's exactly what Adobe is looking for. They don't care that you pirate their software. They know that when the time comes for you to choose something to use professionally, you'll have no choice but to buy a license. And if you're not using it professionally, Adobe lost nothing from the pirated version anyway.
This ^

I find the people doing the moaning about PHP are the noobs who are regurgitating what they read or heard elsewhere in order to appear smart, Having moved to PHP 10 years ago after C and Java and .NET development I am happy for having changed direction and have made a bootload of money and saved alot of time thanks to PHP over the years.
As another example, the app behind what powers the Design Principles, which is what this post links to, is here: https://github.com/alphagov/design-principles.
It looks like Digital Ocean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
IPCop - stateful firewall appliance
Webcams Taken Over By Hackers
I think that amount was across a few years.
what are the rules of semicolon/colon use?
I was simply correcting the notion that it's "not math." Understanding something like this can go one of two ways:

1. Reverse engineer it by playing with the code. This is, of course, the very ethos of these code share sites.

2. Learn the basics of physics & geometry on your own and come back to it.

Feel free to choose either method, but for the developer who is curious, option 1 is a lot faster.
No problem. Let me know if/when you're interested!
I find this amusing. Adobe's piracy problem is of it's own making. They've cultivated these pirates for years by keeping their products priced so high, and by ignoring widespread piracy from students and amateurs. They've got their work cut out for them if they want to solve this problem.
LaunchSky: Pitch your app idea to a professional crowd
https://www.digitalocean.com/ is one .
Moniker System-wide Security Breach
It's just me or this kind of comment is one of the most common in HN lately, when any story about data analysis comes up ?

We get it, big data it's not really "big" unless you talk giga(tera?)bytes.

Do not take upon yourself to educate any single person that misuses the term. It's not worth it. :)
Steam's DRM stays out of my way, in the same way iTunes' used to. Microsoft's DRM forced me to play in a way they saw fit.
This is it. It's common for design shops to stop on a version of Adobe that is mature and works for them. After a couple of years, you're spending less than $50 per month.

InDesign .indd compatibility has consistently broken with each new CS version; with this new system, you're either going to have to subscribe or not be able to interchange files in their original, (easily) editable format with clients, other designers, etc.
"How many gas stations in Raleigh?"

I had a couple questions like this at a couple of interviews more than a few years back now. In both cases, I sat for a minute, and asked a few questions back, like "do you mean the city limits of Raleigh, or the metro area?", "how do you define gas station - do we include public-only, or private fueling places?", etc. Part of this was buying some time, because the question caught me off guard, but I think my questions back caught him off guard a bit too.

That interviewer told me I was the only person who asked clarifying questions before blurting out an answer or walk through. Another one was "take this marker and design a house on the whiteboard for me". So I took the marker and asked questions like "how many people will live here, do you want one or two story, do you need a garage/shed/basement, etc?" And again, was told I was the only person who'd asked questions before starting to draw.

I don't think the intention behind those brain teasers was necessarily to determine how you react to those sorts of problems, but it may have been a useful determining factor for some interviewers nonetheless.
Ask: Getting started on marketing
I read hacker news for more than a year now.

As a developer, it gave me a lot of inspiration and motivation into doing stuff.
I've had several side-projects those last months, and learned tons of coding related stuff (and even a tiny bit of design).

But I am a bit tired of spending nights coding something that people are in the end not interested in.

So my question is : What are good ressources to start learning about marketing (digital or not)?

How do I get from developer to startup builder? How do I get traction, and make people interested in my ideas?

For once, I'd like to start hacking something else than my computer :).

Thanks!
> A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

horrible question, it took me a few seconds to figure out they are talking about the game Monopoly.
I don't understand, why would he hack a company with tax info? I really cannot think of one good reason. Did he make any public statements about it? Did he do it from his apartment in Cambodia? Why does his apartment in Cambodia enter the story? I am perplexed.
The Reply Given in Arkell v. Pressdram
You know nothing John Snow.
If the CC's brought in one good thing, it's motivation to finally surgically remove Bridge from PS - I eyed it with suspicion when it came and tried to make itself at home; and I'm not terribly mourning the unceremonious slitting of the umbilical cord. (I am - in short - a miserable, tribal consumer.)
That's always been my theory too. It's best for the industry in general if someone can learn industry-grade tools whilst messing around as a teenager, it means less training is required and it's a form of vendor lock-in for the software makers.
Google is full of engineers that did well on programming contests, they even have their own contest, and i don't think they are all terrible software engineers.
So a lot of "difficult" manager decisions can be equally well solved by the toss of dice.
Didn't they used to wash and reuse bottles?

Are all recycled bottles re-created?
I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent.
I don't really buy the 'more expensive' line. Previously the suite was a prohibitively expensive for me, whereas now I pay $50 a month. Spread over two years (approx range between CS updates), I still come ahead by about $1000.
They're plenty of professionals that use pirated Adobe software... Like the most of the 2nd/3rd world countries.
Think of some the most successful people you know, have lots of friends, charming and charasmatic. Seems to do no work but gets to the top anyway? Always in press releases, and newspapers but the rest of the team gets no reconigtion? Good chance they're a sociopath. Sociopaths also tend to be good at getting funding for start ups ;)

They are lifes hackers.
There are approximately 7 people on earth with an IQ of 190 or higher, so I'm calling bullshit on that requirement.