skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a broken culture of companies thinking they should only hire the smartest people in the world. Most companies don't need brilliant people, they need competent people who will work great together.

[Disclaimer of bitterness: I'm not one of the smartest people in the world. I get rejected after one to three interviews all the time. The author of the post is right: nobody ever looks at your online code and your resume only gets read once by HR to set up the initial pre-interview.]

Testing for concrete intro-to-CS level drivel may give you a company full of people who spend 30 hours a week doing topcoder or project euler, but... you don't need that (if you do need that, good for you, but most companies don't).

It also tricks the interviewee a bit -- "Oh, they're asking algorithms questions! Maybe this'll be a fun CS research job." [six months into the job] "Uh... all I've done is write SQL and fully library-driven backend website code. Boring."
Anyone seen this startup? large claims but intriguing still. 
I was just offered a board role with this startup yesterday. While admittingly interesting you just can't help but be skeptical with claims as large as theirs (billions to charity and still retaining 200 mil in rev, yr 1, amongst others.) However my researchers tell me its pretty sound and they're qualified to carry out something this large. Anyone have an opinion? I don't want to loose out on a huge opportunity because of my skepticism.

Www.socialmarketresearchforcharity.org
So, this is like the machine spirit from WH40K? That's sorta awesome.
As for the whole religious \ racist thing, I've been around computer scientists and mathematician long enough to know a great many of them tend to favor one theory \ paradigm over the next for the most irrational reasons...
Take it up with Apple, on android there's an API apps can use to launch themselves for certain web requests. However, there's no way to do this with iOS.
Holacracy have been voting on salaries and many other things for a while now. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.
Willful misunderstanding is of course always an option, I guess.
Also, mental illness can sometimes be a conscious choice as well. We can talk ourselves into a very unhealthy mental state -- or out of one.

Lest anyone believe this, let me emphasize that this project's author is suffering from schizophrenia, and schizophrenia is a physical disease. Your brain physically deteriorates.
Good ol' maliciously incompetent B-of-A!
So someone abducted your cat, imprisoned it, mutilated it and... You didn't go to the police?
Losethos has a mental illness. There was a great write up about the situation by someone who knew him, here: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html

But it's down now. I can't find a cache of it because I'm on mobile.
Did you look at his site? There is stuff on there just as crazy as the stuff he posts here. The simpler explanation is that he is genuinely not well, not that somebody is pretending to be him and faking it.
Yes, you can use an application URL handler.
Seems like Bullshit.
If you just know the lookup times of various data structures,

The problem isn't knowing complexity, but rather with expecting someone to code something elaborate from memory while being timed, watched, and judged by a stranger. "Code a Fibonacci heap right now, live, with no references. Begin."

Nobody is arguing you shouldn't know the complexity of everything off the top of your head. You absolutely should [1], but you should also be able to figure it out pretty quickly if you don't know it. That means understanding what lg n means and understand what 2^n means, etc. (Yes, we're agreeing here, I'm just reiterating.)

[1]: http://bigocheatsheet.com
In the trials, the control group and the trial group were being treated with the same sets of drugs. In the control group in one of the trials, for instance, patients were assigned to one of two sets of drugs randomly. In the test group, they were assigned to one of those same two sets of drugs using Potti's research.

Note that people in the test group received one of the treatments they could have received had they been in the control group. Since Potti's research was fake, there was effectively no difference between the test group and the control group.
side note: so nice to see the classic maps again - feel the speed!
http://web.archive.org/web/20130116195743/http://qaa.ath.cx/...
Ask HN: Interview as a Service – Any interest?
Hello Everyone,

TL;DR

I am offering interview as a service (taking first round on your behalf) for technical roles (0-8 yrs exp) for $150 each. Would you be interested?

Generally (assumption) even after the resume has been filtered by HR folks (who are mostly non-tech), you end up with 1 out of 5 candidate cleared after the telephonic rounds. This is definitely time consuming as developers are getting involved here and their hours are getting wasted.

If you do the calculation (assumption here), so to hire 1 candidate, you end up wasting 15-20 hours (at least) of developers time on unsuccessful interviews.

My proposal:

I will study your company, team and requirements beforehand.

Once you have identified a candidate, you can let me know and I will conduct the first round and give you a feedback.

My assumption again, this will improve the ratio to 1 out of 2. My confidence is that it will be far better than 0.5

Who can I interview: Technical (hands on) roles for software development (for startups and bigger corporations). Experience 0-8 yrs.

What can I interview: CS fundamentals (OS, systems, networking, DB, Algorithms, Data Structures etc.), Technologies: C/C++, Ruby, RoR, HTML, Javascript.

I believe that cs fundamentals are the key though.

Pricing: $150 per interview (payable by paypal or direct account transfer to bank of america)

I think this proposal suits small to medium sized startups.

About me:
I have BS (IIT G) and MS (USC) in computer science with more than 8 years of work experience. 2-3 years on RoR.

I have given tons of interview and taken tons of them too during my career.

You can checkout more about me at: http://shail2.co
Contact me at: shail2@live.com, if interested.
A billion poor people with internet != people with a billion dollars.
Big words and not quite respectful either.

For me? This is unacceptable. Any technical project that is tied into religion is already, by definition, not for me. TempleOS and its weird language are already far off the scale of sanity.

Believe is something very personal and I never attack someone for that. Unless.. they try to spread it, claim that this madness is superior in some sort of way.

So - that guy here might have medical issues. That's really sad and I do believe that he's impressive as a programmer.

But this submission cannot judge the OS without the bag of insults and religious madness it includes. I'm close to invoke Godwin (hey, at least I'm German. Now that'd be new..) to convince you that "But that's a neat project" isn't good enough if the message, the whole idea behind that thing is totally, fatally flawed and unacceptable.

I'm not trying to insult the man behind the project. Still, the project itself is worthless and not even remotely interesting to me, _because_ of the man behind that project.

People start judging startups because of the CEO here everyday. We still have anti-MS zealots, that throw Bill Gates jokes around. This project isn't 'protected' from being considered inacceptable, just because the guy behind it has a medical condition.

I flagged the submission. I heavily disagree with your idea of appreciating a piece of work while ignoring the dangerous ideas and opinions the creator shouts out - even if no one _wants_ to listen.
Patent trolls put brakes on S.F. transit app
It's in Boston a fair amount, I see people using it.
HTML has strict implementation requirements and loose authoring requirements. I recall that it is a goal of HTML that a significant percentage of "anyone" can create useable documents with it, but the closest I can come to a citation at the moment is this: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_does_this_new_HTML_spec_...
I don't think this is a good use of time.

All we need is the Win32 subsystem, I see little use for other parts of the project. The two major pushed besides Windows compatibility are hardware drivers that aren't supported on Linux and supposed performance gains by removing a layer of abstraction. The later is rarely an issue and it can be solved at a later time.

The driver thing is absurd because unless the OS is 100% identical, they will not be compatible causing random crashes. Imagine how unstable your system will be if you are running a driver that wasn't tested on your system? I don't want buggy drivers form 2003 on my computer! If this was my requirement I would install Windows XP.

This project has the functionality of a wrapper for Wine, why not just wrap Wine into something more useful like a Linux?

More time on Wine and less time on this.
Not being able to tell whether the app is installed is Apple's fault. Redirecting to the homepage rather than the specific link is not.
I'm not sure you can call him a racist. He has an unintrospectable (by us at least) mental state, and the things he says can't be taken as representations of his opinions. He literally can't either control what he's saying, or perceive reality clear enough to get a usable picture of it.

To be racist, I think it should be clear that the person is making value judgments about others based solely or primarily on the target's race. Nobody knows what Terry is thinking.

Either way, please don't hold it against him for prolific use of the n-word and other slurs. Isn't it obvious he has no clue what he's saying? He lives in a world where everyone is a potential attacker/saboteur.
It's alright to work from home once you get past the wanking stage.
K-means of color trends in Oscar nominee posters
The winners, the people who provide the best set of predictions based on an analysis of a database of millions of text questions, will get jobs at Facebook.

Actually, it looks like the winners will just get interviews at Facebook.

I think Kaggle is a very interesting site and company, but I think it's a stretch say they hold "data science" competitions. Most of their contest are extremely limited in scope to applying machine learning to pre-sanitized data sets. This really covers only a small part of what practicing data scientists do.
If that misconception is the "only one thing" you know about getting a certification, then why do you feel it appropriate to comment on the process?

You don't need to buy the books in order to pass the certification exams. Experience is often far more useful. A list of topics covered by the exam is often provided, too. So somebody with experience can often easily supplement their existing knowledge by reading some online articles or documentation, without ever looking at one of the official books.

And one of the core aspects of certifications is that they usually very specifically target a given product or topic. This is one of the things that differentiates them from college degrees and other ways of suggesting qualification. A certification can help an employer gauge a candidate's abilities in a far more specific manner than a Comp. Sci. degree can, for example.

Certification may not always have the value or reliability that it's claimed to have, but let's not misrepresent it or its process out of ignorance, either.
It tends to be easier to fix bugs that you caused yourself.
You see something blow up and you can think "yea, that's because I did thing X in Y to achieve Z".

So it's possible that the other programmers are actually just causing more bugs than this person, jumping in to band aid a fix and maybe causing another bug in the process.

This sort of whack-a-mole looks very productive on a bug tracker.
Spritual Successor to Mega Man from Creator Keiji Inafune lands on Kickstarter
That's not recent news: it was announced in June, but today was first day that connection to GPF DNS server was not working.

In the page they also announced that now:
" The Swiss Privacy Foundation operates uncensored DNS server, which is also the test domain welcome.gpf.
See: http://www.privacyfoundation.ch/de/service/server.html "

What do you guys think? Does this changes something in terms of trustworthiness?
But algorithm coding is just about personal programming ability.
What if the company is using a non-opensource lib?
I don't know how difficult the string parsing problem is. But interviewer may just unsatisfied about your slow implementation.
What you say is very true. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that code associated with somebody's GitHub account was actually written by that individual. It's useless to gauge the ability of a developer based on code in his or her GitHub account that somebody else wrote.
This sounds like 20th Century Motors all over again.
Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment?
Indeed. From https://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-recruiting-iii-keyword-ext...:

Highly ranked contestants who indicate their interest will be considered by Facebook for interviews, based on their work in the competition and additional background.

Not much of a prize.
It's more than teaching... it's a test of your passion for the customers.

The worst thing is to get into a market and realize you really can't get excited about your customers' issues. Better to discover that about yourself earlier.
[pedantic]
Technically, look up on a balanced binary tree is still O(n) as it says nothing about the ordering.
If it was a balanced binary search tree then it would be O(log(n)) which I guess is the answer you gave.
[/pedantic]

A part from that I totally agree with you on the importance of knowing by heart the implications of some technical choices.
If the robot doesn't make a mess, and forgets about everything that is irrelevant (IE. not covered by the warrent), then go ahead.
Hi refurb,

Thanks for bringing up the point about the homelessness and the health care. Its a solid thought to bring to attention.

Sincerely,

Guy who does not give a shit if its a rebuttal or not :)
I'm also one of the founders of Flowtab. When we started the company we made a lot of assumptions about the demand for our product and the ease in which we were going to change bar culture. The demand for the product was there (people used it, they often had a good experience) but it wasn't memorable or valuable enough to make them use it EVERY TIME. That was the hardest thing to do.

Sure we were saving people time, and making the drink ordering experience more efficient (no cash, cards, open tabs and an easily-accessable drink menu), but what we learned is that people in bars are there primarily so socialize, and they don't always need maximum efficiency like you do when you need a ride home (enter Lyft, Uber) or want lunch delivered (Seamless, GrubHub). People in bars like the social friction, and we were offering them a solution that took the social aspect out of the drink ordering process. Hindsight 20/20.

Hopefully other entrepreneurs read our story before dedicating valuable years of their life to a similar product in the space.

Kyle H.
Everything About Java 8
Is this a question, or a statement?
In general international agreements don't override national law, they just oblige the countries in question to pass laws that bring them in line with the agreement. Which they commonly fail to do in all sorts of interesting ways. Part of the mechanism in the New Zealand case has been closer to redefining what software is rather than what patents are.

For New Zealand to add software patents back in would require back tracking and quite a loss of political capital.
What was done was done. I looked it up and most legal cases of this type are concerned with awarding property damages. The damages top off at around $2-4k iirc, and that's for special cases like breeder animals (used in the context of a business) being harmed, or show animals. Pretty much any animal that you're making money from, you can get damages for. Society doesn't value pet life like human life, and wasting my time exacting revenge on that worthless excuse of a human wasn't my priority, no. At least I got to spend another 1.5 years with him before he died of cancer.

One argument is that I should have gone to the police to make them think twice about doing this to other cats. But paying $1k worth of damages would not dissuade people like that.
Yes, it seems I overstated their dependence somewhat. Obviously water is important, so you want redundant systems so you have water in both rainy and dry times. Multiple systems on different scales (family, village, and island) is a possible explanation for the disparate accounts. Even today most human systems come in different scales.

>Since the 1910 inhabitants didn't use this tree as a water source, I presume that cisterns and those small springs were enough for them, and so would have been enough for the Bimbache.

That depends on how many inhabitants and what they're doing. I can't find historical population numbers, unfortunately. Today's population of ~10,000 uses industrial desalination.

>But I don't see anything in those accounts about channels or pipes leading the water to people's homes.

Check out pp 156: "It falls into a pond made of brick, floored with stones very tight, by pipes of lead conveyed from the tree to it, and thence divided into several ponds through all the island. They which dwell up-hill fetch it in barrels."

All in all, a fascinating technology. It's amusing how the western accounts attribute everything to luck/God, but that's colonialism for ya. ;)

(If you can't tell, I'm a fan of Clarke's [revised] Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature." It's even been proposed as a solution to the Fermi paradox: http://www.nextnature.net/2012/02/any-sufficiently-advanced-...)
Idempotence in math and computing
Aside from the main point of this article, could anybody recommend a good algorithms/data structures book?

I want something that gives examples of when you should use particular techniques/theory and the benefits and trade-offs of doing so? That is, as opposed to learning the rote implementations and time complexities, I want to understand the practical application of knowledge...

I recently looked at some coding tests for Spotify [0] and found an interesting article talking about the solution for one of these. It was interesting to me since he just pointed out that something was a maximum cardinality problem on a bipartite graph and then applies the Hopcroft-Karp algorithm [1]. Now I don't care at all about being able to code any of those things from scratch, but I'd love it if there was a book which I could read to try and learn the names of different techniques and when/why they are applicable. I want a better map and I want it to be written in english.

Any ideas?

[0] https://www.spotify.com/uk/jobs/tech/catvsdog/

[1] http://alonso-vidales.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/new-spotify-puz...
To the gentleman who called me a depreciating asset
An American Cyberoperations Offensive
The previous Facebook competition didn't provide sanitized data for that reason. https://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-ii/data
How will this "baffle normal people"? If by normal people you mean people who aren't data scientists, then sure, it will. It'll baffle them in the same way the bar exam will baffle "normal" people, those who aren't trying to practice law.

Anyway, this sounds like a great way of candidate hunting, and a refreshing solution to all of the "interviews are broken" posts that have been around lately.
I'm pretty sure chez17 was talking about the author. The comments here are despicable in regards to how they talk about him, especially when it was someone else that posted this.

By "appreciate it for what it is" it means you can appreciate it at 0 or even less, that's your prerogative. But we shouldn't be attacking this man. Judge the project for what it is, but the personal attacks against the man are unnecessary.
Doom 3 BFG Technical Documentation
I was consciously trying not to misunderstand you. I can't parse what you said in any way except "this guy is a nutcase and should be denied praise since he's ill."

I mean, how would you want to be treated if your genes were a little less signal and a little more noise?
> Why is a finite set not random?

First, for a given finite set, one cannot say it's not random, only that its randomness cannot be proven.

Let's think a bit about what we mean by "random".

* Is an even distribution of the digits 0-9, and no preferred sequential order, evidence for randomness? Yes, but not very good evidence.

* How about sequences of digits taken two at a time -- if each pair of digits is equally likely and shows no discernible pattern in their order, then we can say that the set meets the twin test.

* Now to triplets -- does each set of three digits show a complete absence of pattern, i.e. are 000, 001, etc. equally likely and have no preferred ordering?

Do you see where this is going? For any finite set size, the randomness tests must end when the digit sequence size to be tested equals the set's finite size. That means we cannot fully test the set, and the reason is that it's finite in size.

> What if it's a random selection from the set of all sets?

Well,

* Typical examples drawn from an infinite random set won't themselves be provably random. Consider if we draw three digits from an infinite, random set -- they won't be likely to be random in isolation. Extend this to a selection of N digits from an infinite, random set -- as N increases, the probability of the selected set being random increases, but cannot be truly, provably random for any finite value of N.

* A random selection isn't the same as a random set. If I randomly select a location within an infinite set, I have no assurance that my random choice of N digits will itself prove to be be random, therefore my having chosen a random starting point doesn't either aid or hinder the process.

Consider these seeming paradoxes (not really paradoxical):

* Within an infinite random set, there will be an infinite number of examples (and repetitions) of infinitely repeating digits, i.e. infinite sequences of 1111 ... , 2222 ..., etc. In fact, if we accept the premise that the infinite set is in fact random, such repeating sequences must exist somewhere in the set, or the set is not random.

* Within an infinite random set, with appropriate search tools, we will find every book ever written or to be written, every state secret, every mathematical equation ever written or to be written, essentially everything. It's a simple matter of knowing where to look.

Given these examples, if we choose an arbitrary index within the infinite random set from which to extract 40,000 numbers in base 26, we cannot be sure the extract will not be a work of Shakespeare with every word spelled correctly. Obviously that's not a random subset. Therefore we cannot have any assurance that a subset of a random set is itself random.

Consider the infinite sequence represented by the digits of Pi. If we examine the digits of Pi expressed in base 26, where A = 0, B = 1, etc., it should be obvious that we will begin to see dictionary words of increasing size rather quickly in a practical search using present-day tools. To get a work of Shakespeare, one need only search more deeply.
Sure, have the code better organized
and documented with good test buckets
at each level of integration. And
when that approach is widely taken
by supervisors who ask such questions,
a person can get rich selling cast
iron umbrellas to protect against
the giant flocks of flying pigs.
I love this project no matter in which iteration it's sent (just hate the inevitable wtf comments from those who don't bother to do the minimal dig-in) It's as if it was taken from some (good) psychological thriller/hacker movie. A genius schizophrenic writes an OS that will bring him closer to God, sprinkled with esoteric religiously sounded phrases throughout.
Maybe, or maybe he's just a guy with a strange sense of humour. One can never tell on the internet.