skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Being a great business web developer and being a great algorithm developer are not mutually exclusive, but they are also not interdependent. The type of developer that would perform well at this kind of challenge is potentially a recent graduate, fresh from an algorithms class or one that is more focused on micro-optimizations than the big picture."

Oh, good grief. Being able to answer basic algorithmic questions in an interview isn't a high bar, folks. It's not as if a basic tree-traversal question is going to trip up everyone but Don Knuth.

The biggest danger you have as an interviewer is allowing a Stealth Incompetent on your team. These folks all have Github profiles, points on Stackoverflow, fancy blogs, webpages, etc. They might even have nice-looking, public-facing projects. You can even argue that these people Get Things Done (for some value of "things"). But they're still bad hires.

Stealth Incompetent programmers are great at using other people's code. They can install gems, download jQuery libraries, and stick them all together. They can make websites with Rails or Django or some other framework, and know enough to be able to piece together functional "products" from parts. All fine. But unlike actual engineers, Stealth Incompetents fall on their face the first time you ask them to do anything that requires taste or independent thought. They're the people who will introduce a horrible dependency on a bad gem, or architect a solution that takes quadratic time, when they could have trivially done better with a tiny bit of thought.

Algorithmic questions are designed to catch incompetent people before they can infiltrate your team. The "relevancy" of the questions to the day-to-day work is immaterial.
If you're looking for people with the proverbial "smart and gets things done" properties, you need to give them something to do and see how smart their solution is.

I give a task, like "write some code to store data in X; here's the interface I'd like to use" or "write some code to find X given data set Y". The problem should have "layers" and follow up questions.

Some devs recognize the task and says "this looks like an application for $FOO" and apply some $FOO. Others do not know the name of the optimal technique, but are able to derive it on the spot from first principles.

Junior devs should at least be able to come up with a brute force solution that solves the problem, even if they can't take it to the next level. If the problem requires some deep "ah-ha" moment then it's not a great test; the whole point is to separate applicants into strata.
Your comment implies that (a) everyone on HN is an atheist and (b) religious people are incapable of logical/rational thought.

I don't think that's true.
His brain is physically deteriorating. It's schizophrenia. His brain matter is rotting away. It's not an illness like the flu. His thoughts are not his own in the same way yours or mine are. We are all just collections of cells, but his are haywire. He is incapable of choosing to give respect in the same way he's incapable of not hearing voices.
Being able to tell whether the app is installed sounds like a privacy violation. There is a mechanism for linking to apps in iOS; Google should be using it.
[JavaScript] The Amazing Power Of JavaScript
I think you're coming at this from the wrong direction.

Peers is a lobbying organization for SV companies that are trying to enter long regulated industries with a business model that does not work when regulated.

They attempted the "This market needs disruption! We're cool and big government regulation is lame!" message at the beginning, and it was working alright. Then there is backlash after some AirBNB users trashed and robbed a house and an Uber driver in DC was arrested for sexual assault (charges dropped), etc. People are being reminded of why the regulation is there in the first place and that's not going to get those regulations relaxed in the american party politics system.

Peers is an alternate strategy emphasizing a positive (sharing is great!) instead of a negative (regulation is bad!) and they appropriated the language and vocabulary of the existing culture/movement/whatever-you-want-to-call-it because it's great language and already tested as having a positive emotional impact on people. The American right gets the anti-regulation angle and the American left gets the "sharing culture" angle now.

This guy is taking that appropriation personally, since some of these businesses are not at all compatible with the core tenants of the sub culture he belongs to. I can't blame him for that, he's absolutely right about that part. They are appropriating the language of a movement they are fundamentally at odds with for marketing/political purposes.

> I can say with certainty that this article is heavily biased, ignorant of how most nonprofits work, and ignorant of the public policy process

It's a personal blog post so of course it's biased, it doesn't pretend not to be, and there are no nonprofit groups involved (although there are a few non-profit groups that have partnered with peers) so throwing around the word "ignorant" when you have got your basic facts backwards is unwarranted.
What I've Learned After 13 Years of Web Engineering
Slightly off topic for this post, but since it is mentioned here: there is one part of that link which may appear slightly misleading without context. A twitter feed is mentioned, which ended up consisting of posts such as "and then God said", followed by some gibberish. This is actually a reference to a feature in one of his programs (a game I think) which allows one to "talk to God". When you press the button, it simply randomly spits out words. On Reddit, the author asks people repeatedly to tell him what God said to them. He's referring to this feature in his OS and obviously finds entertainment in hearing what words his program came up with for other people. This is reminiscent of fortune cookies. Strange behaviour perhaps, but not so nonsensical when placed in its context. As other people have pointed out, illness or not, this guy has managed to succeed at something highly nontrivial which most people will never do, at the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, namely "Pursue inner talent; creativity; fulfillment". And whether or not some of his writings may be unintelligible, his code certainly passes a strict syntactic check. I mention this here because I have met individuals with the same illness who have not managed to achieve even the bottom level of Maslow's pyramid. So it really is a credit to him that he has achieved so highly despite his illness.
Semco in Brazil has been doing this for over 20 years and they are not a small company.
Go to Javascript Compiler
They omitted a large part of the law in their statement. You can't say "Endorsed by the NSA" on your product. You can say "The NSA Sucks." The use of the logo is allowed in the latter.
Frankly after 6 months we began to realize that it would be nearly impossible to earn any meaningful revenue from users or from the bars themselves.

Only two of our bars in Denver actually paid for the product ($1,500 for license + hardware upfront, plus $99/month), which wasn't enough to justify the $3.5 million valuation we raised on. What got our investors excited is tapping into the $3 billion of advertising dollars spent by the liquor companies every year. In 2012 less than 3% of this was actually dedicated to mobile, these were the deals we wanted to go after. So it became more about user growth and number of orders than revenue.

I still think there is an opportunity there -- giving liquor companies a better way of marketing their products on-premise through mobile. But I doubt it will be a mobile ordering app that cracks the nut.

Kyle H.
Tatooine
Intricap LLC business plan
Does this mean spambots that get trained on a corpus containing racism are racists? Can you be a racist without knowing what race is? (This tangent brought to you by "things I'd rather HN talk about than this topic")
Why the development shop in India at all?

Is it just a cost benefit - cheaper developers?

Because there is some truth in "you get what you pay for". The ratio of good to bad programmers in India is the same as anywhere else[1]. But the pool is quite a bit larger than anywhere else, and there is a massive push of people into IT and IS because of the disproportionate pay. This combines to make very, very difficult to find significant talent[2]. It's comparable to the sudden influx of people into comp sci tracks in the US in the late 90s, but with a population base that's triple the size.

If you're looking for people to follow an exact, detailed, spec that you or other senior developer has written -- without exercising any independent though[3]; or if you have already located skilled individuals then it's worth going ahead.

Otherwise, make sure it's the right move for your business. The cost can easily run deeper than expenses. The talent is there, but you're going to have a hell of a time finding it if you don't have an connections.

[1], [2]: experience in hiring while working for a large US company that employed multiple large indian hiring mills, most notably TCS and InfoSys.
[3] the vast majority of the remote hires out of India that I've worked with both at the company above, and subsequent employment.
> Lest anyone believe this, let me emphasize that this project's author is suffering from schizophrenia

That doesn't contradict the idea that many mental illnesses have no physical or biological connection, indeed many are inventions of psychologists for their own personal benefit, and were created by votes, not research.

> and schizophrenia is a physical disease. Your brain physically deteriorates.

Very true, which is why schizophrenia isn't a mental illness, it's physical illness with mental symptoms. This isn't remotely controversial.
And it's probably correct; access to Treasure Island is restricted until the new bridge is opened.
You can make someone schizophrenic.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Schizophrenia is a physical illness. Your brain physically deteriorates. You can't make anyone schizophrenic any more than you can make them lose an arm. In fact, making them lose an arm would be much easier than making them schizophrenic.
Try Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual" [0]. Another nice book would be "Programming Pearls" [1].

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena/...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-Edition-Bentley...
Right but the T-shirt is saying, in effect, "The Supreme Court said this was free speech." It is arguably only expounding how far the boundaries of free speech go.

This is an interesting question because it gets to the heart of the question of how far free speech goes in school. I have trouble imagining a court holding that summarizing and quoting from a Supreme Court opinion is not free speech and protected (and the hypothetical T-shirt clearly does this), but I am also pretty sure the Southern Poverty Law Center would sue in a second if the school didn't take action.

This is an example of a hypothetical where significant legal arguments could mean both that the school must act and also that the school must not act. It's even possible a school could be sued and lose on both sides.

BTW, the states rights argument regarding the Civil Rights Act is more complex and it has to do with unconstitutional efforts to ensure ratification (refusing to seat Senators from non-ratifying states). My view however is that these could have been raised early on and weren't. I think latches doctrine needs to apply at some point. Otherwise we get to nitpick everything in history all the time. The Equal Protection Clause should be included as a restriction of states' rights. (On States' Rights issues I generally agree with Sandra Day O'Connor.)
Agreed, this place can be really disgusting in its intolerance of mental illness. Backgrounds and persepectives represented in a tech/startup-specific community aren't bound to be the most diverse. Most people here are successful Americans.

For what it's worth, there is a far more interesting and respectful discussion from last fall on Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

My favorite bit:

losethos:
I did a flight simulator but it looks awful, at best.
Boot it in VMWare. Get someone else to run it. It's
called "/LT/Demo/GameStarters/EagleDive.CPZ" It's an
eagle diving for fish. It's just a demo mostly. I often
show restraint in making my demos simple.

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94:
bro i think you can be proud of the flight simulator
you wrote for the operating system you also wrote
Email large attachments
I agree, to a point.
No one should attack the man.

But that project shouldn't be here either. The author is banned from discussing his work. He is considered 'unwanted' already, in a way (and without us, the mere mortals that take part in the discussions here, having a say).

So while you're certainly right in some way (personal attacks are uncalled for), refusing to give him a platform to present his propaganda is still just fine in my book. And please look at the linked page, try to call it anything but that...

A medical condition, severe as it might be, is no reason to accept everything with a 'Ah, but look: That guy has a problem'. He needs help. Not a link to his 'I talk to God and dates start when Jesus was among us' .. thing.
I didn't intend to imply either, it's just directed at those who don't understand (one of) the needs that religion fulfills or what it's about. Of course it is only my own understanding and I'm asserting an opinion.
Interviewing process is constant optimization just like every other workflow process in a company.

Disclaimer: I run interviewstreet.com which helps companies screen & hire programmers using coding challenges. We have had a substantially HUGE number of developers screened (might not be able to reveal the exact number) through the process and using the data points, here's what we found (btw, this is also constantly optimized)

a. Asking a 5-year experienced engineer to solve a graph theory challenge or a complex tree problem is a pretty useless indicator. The goal of such an interview challenge should be to test the problem solving skill of a candidate which is essential across any programmer role.

Can this person actually take an array of objects, perform an operation to get the result such that it works for any size of the array without throwing an exception? The data structures used in the question should be simple enough to start working on the challenge. You will be surprised how many errors, corner cases come up which are often missed. And as you gradually increase constraints, you can check their thought process of how their algorithm changes.

b. Make the problems interesting - put in actual effort to make the problems interesting, sometimes relevant to the problem you are actually solving. I often send this link to our customers(www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html) and also help them design problems like this. That's by far the most interesting publicly available challenges. The other one is Quora, quora.com/challenges which is slightly harder though but very interesting (and has proved very effective!)

c. Calibration: Surely github/bitbucket/SO profiles are important and can serve as a data point. However, it's probably going to be very hard to calibrate. A web server coded in Python vs a new MVC framework written in PHP - who is a better candidate? Who has actually thought through the design of the problem better? It's tough to evaluate. The programming challenge interviews act as a data point (one of the interview rounds) to check these skills in a contained problem/environment helping the company calibrate the performance against the rest of them.

The problems should involve a combination of the ability to write good code, focus on problem solving skills and not on remembering an algorithm from the CLRS text book, intelligent thinking (not to be confused with weird math/geometry problems unless your company is working on that domain) and importantly the ability to catch hints and solve it in a better way. This is a data point, an essential one but there are more to technical interviews.

If used in the right way, it can prove to be hugely effective for your process not only in streamlining but also as a way of generating interest from potentially interested programmers.
Please look up schizophrenia and the connection to brainwashing victims.

(Unfortunately it is difficult to sort through real information vs forum posts written by schizophrenics whose minds are attempting to blame imaginary targets because they cannot determine the real cause.)
Mobile phone charge up stations.

BTW, I use public transit all the time. I don't drive.
"Programming Challenges"[0] by Skiena maybe? "Practical application" of algorithms and data structure knowledge is mostly about recognizing which type of problem you're dealing with, and then implementing the simplest algorithm that solves it fast enough for your specific problem.

[0]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387001638/ref=nosim/...
businessinsider articles are written for those with the attention span and IQ of goldfish
Would you please enlighten me? I've spent a lot of time researching schizophrenia and I've never come across anything that would suggest it's inflictable.
I'm in a school of thought that algo interviews are useful, but not for the knowledge of some particular algorithm.

I was usually asking people to write atoi() implementation without using high-level constructs on the whiteboard, piece of paper or in the browser window. Things I was looking for:

1. If I'm interviewing for C# position and a person chooses VB.NET, that's probably a red flag.

2. If they choose C, hey! show me your pointers arithmetic, strlen() at the beginning of the loop is a huge red flag.

3. There're always giveaways about how person is familiar with the language (and mind you, I do not expect any tricky stuff to be used).

But the important part is not the code - the important part is to watch how the person attacks this token problem, how much time do they spend on it, where they're when I come back in the room. Then we'll talk about what the did in order to solve the problem and why did they do things they did. I won't be running this problem to check if the output is correct or to see if it compiles at all - we'll just talk it over. Will we talk about technology stack in use at the company, assess person's architectural skills? We sure will. But at the end of the day I'll expect this person to write some code at their job and I need to be sure that they know what they are doing.

Does Github account help? It does to a degree. I'll sure take a peek to see at the coding style or how the projects/code are structured, but honestly, I just don't have time to fully assess someone's capabilities by reading their existing code thoroughly. Plus, it doesn't give me any clues on the thought process when they were writing that code.
Blogspam. Original content here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/197675/is-the...
Thank you... I think it's valuable that entrepreneurs learn everything they can from the fallen soldiers before them before dedicating valuable years of their life to a startup. That's why open sourcing this was so important to us.

I like to think of startup guys as scientists... even if we didn't find the cure for cancer, there's still value in discovering the 100 antidotes that DIDN'T work.

FYI the alpha site is the same as our main site, www.flowtab.com.

Kyle H.
Worrisome Trends in Architecture Education
Malicious mind control techniques (gaslighting, etc) can cause a victim to doubt themselves, damaging the psyche, causing paranoia, and leading to a psychotic state, sometimes semi-permanent. The mind needs to resolve some issues and without doing so it will accumulate cognitive dissonance. Mania induced by these psychotic states can actually cause physical damage to the brain.
It is not known exactly what causes schizophrenia but it is known that it can be the consequence of these sort of psychological stressors, i.e. people lose their shit and have breakdowns when they get too emotionally damaged.
You might not be stopped from going <tag></tag> but you are stopped from going <tag /> 90% of the time, which is annoying.
Why limit a "Stealth Incompetents" to one that is a "web developer"?

A person recently graduate from the U. Perfect scores in algorithms and that stuff.

Now, is in a company. That make web things. Don't know databases well (if any). Don't know JS. Don't know html5. Don't know CSS3. Don't know django, or ruby, or whatever.

But know BIg(O)! Know how do a Black tree!!

And that is almost useless in his job!

You know what is that? A incompetent.

Competence is the match of skills to the tasks.

You will say "A person that know algorithmic stuff can learn web development easy!" (I will say: Why think a web developer can't learn how build a algorithms?)

Real-life disagree. People are not equally good across the full spectrum of skills.

Thinking that "web development" is trivial in contrast with "real engineering" is wrong. Both are hard. Requiere different skills and mind-sets.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/cobol/getting-cobol-to-run

There's no names given, but the people in the picture are most likely the programmers who wrote the first COBOL compiler for the Univac.
I would also like to know if anyone has tried this before. What was the experience? Thoughts?
No. He is not considered unwanted. He's hellbanned because that is the only reasonable course of action for this case. He can post his comments and people can see it if they choose to. He's respected as a human being and fellow programmer suffering from a terrible disease. And I assure you this post would already be dead or buried if the mods didn't explicitly approve of its presence.
Does that mean that some political ideas, like "at some point it will be necessary to overthrow the government"[1] or "someday we should exterminate the blacks and expel the Jews"[2] can be banned from public discourse?

If so, who gets to make these decisions? Isn't it reasonable to conclude that many hot-button issues today, like whether circumcision violates human rights, constitute psychological violence against, among others, Jews and Muslims?

If we end up saying this must protect minority groups, then I think we'd certainly have to say that advocating banning kosher slaughter or circumcision would constitute, particularly in the context of history (which Jews are usually very much aware) continuing psychological violence.

But if we go this route doesn't that basically give the state a way to say "hey we don't like that idea so you can't discuss it?" I think that would destroy what little democracy we have left.

[1] Yates v. United States, holding that the First Amendment protected abstract advocacy for overthrow of the government.

[2] Brandenburg v. Ohio, holding that the line in Yates above extended to protecting abstract advocacy of other violent ends, in that case genocide and expulsion of disliked ethnic and racial groups.
As far as I know, all ARM CPUs are Von Neumann, in that they use the same memory space for instructions and data. The program is often stored in read-only memory (flash), but it's in the same space as SRAM and hardware registers.

AVR, on the other hand, is a Harvard architecture, as the program does not exist in the same address space as data. It is possible to read from program memory, but only using special-purpose instructions. I believe the same goes for PIC, but I'm not as familiar with it.

The description of this machine isn't quite detailed enough for me to say for sure, but I think it may be a Von Neumann architecture, if only because I don't see any labeled instruction memory. I may be misunderstanding how it's supposed to work, though.
step 1) get diagnosed with ADD\ADHD
step 2) take large amounts of legally prescribe stimulants
Accessibility of Computer Science: A Reflection for Faculty Members
You don't have to, if you want to be that paranoid.