skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Asking math questions might exclude some good candidates.

Every question can exclude a good candidate, especially if you only ask the question and tick the "correct/incorrect answer" box. However, often you can learn the most interesting trait from asking a question which the candidate can't answer right off the bat: How does the candidate deal with failure or lack of knowledge. Does she/he start guessing? Does she/he ask the right questions moving in the general direction of solving the problem?

I'm not checking for academic knowledge in interviews.

> and even learn new paradigms when necessary.

This often requires knowledge about the stuff you don't know. That is a value of formal education: Not the stuff that you memorize, the bigger value I derive from my formal education is all that "I know that there's a solution to the problem but can't remember exactly" kind of knowledge. I can't remember all the sort algorithms I had to code, but I remember there's more than one and that there are tradeoffs between all of them. So if I'm constrained on memory and have a pre-sorted list I can go luck up how bubblesort is implemented exactly. That's a knowledge that self-taught programmers often lack [1].

> being good with maths and being a productive programmer are not necessarily two things that always come together.

No, nobody proclaimed so. But having a trait for problem solving and logical puzzles certainly helps :)

[1] n.b: often. Some of them have read and digested tons of theory books which could count as formal education.
I used to believe that as well. Now I'm not so sure, mainly through my own personal experience.

For 5.5 years (2004-2009), I was a core developer and maintainer over at Xfce. Over that span of time I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code, perhaps more. I did this in addition to my job, which morphed from engineering project management to programming tasks that I didn't find very challenging.

After I left that job, I joined a tiny, early startup. The programming work there I found very challenging, and the insane hours quickly ate up any spare time I might put toward Xfce. Eventually I realized that lacking a life outside of work made me sad, so I left. Fast forward a little bit, and now I'm at another startup, which (while demanding, challenging, and rewarding) gives me time for outside pursuits and a social life. But I don't feel the desire to work on personal coding projects anymore. The job fulfills my desire to write code, and outside of that I'd rather be, well... outside.

It's interesting, because all my Xfce contributions are on git.xfce.org, and not on GitHub. My GitHub account contains 2 personal projects: a semi-finished Android UI library (which was really only relevant and useful in the 2.x days), and a script for building a Gentoo image for a Raspberry Pi (which I've since abandoned as I mainly run Debian nowadays). Looking at my GH account would be fairly unimpressive, and might even be worse than not having a GH account at all.

So I'd easily fail the GitHub test. If a particular company was making that a no-go for getting through an interview pipeline, well... their loss, I guess.

I'm responsible for a fair bit of hiring at my current company, and I rarely ask about personal projects anymore, unless a candidate has one listed on their resume. While I'm not always happy with the coding problems I usually give (they tend to be data-structure/algo problems that I'd probably have trouble solving in an interview setting), they do at least clearly show whether or not the candidate can write code, and I also get a rough idea of how cleanly they code, not to mention insights in how they approach and solve problems. And not being able to completely solve the problem isn't an auto-fail in my book either, as long as they tried to work on it and their approach (and whatever code they did write) was sound.

I do very strongly believe in the aptitude test + work sample formula as the best way to evaluate candidates, but the problem is more that it's not always so easy to apply those tests in a traditional interview setting. Maybe that just means we need to come up with a different way of interviewing, though.
doesn't hbase persist in the transaction log every update, using append on hdfs ? or did you have a version of hdfs that didn't have append ?
Sitenizin Verilerini Analiz Edin
And what about when all your work is internal only, so you can't show it off on GitHub?
well actually while I get where you're coming from, that's still correct. if AOSP was more open he wouldn't have left.
Google doesn't give a damn about openness right now.
Easycomplete - General autocomplete library for python
I planned for this to get downvoted. Damn! Turns out I'm not the only one thinking so then ;-)
+1 for Istanbul.
Champaign, IL
I'm pretty sure it's 7 years. After that they're suspose to
remove the information. They don't really care though.
You need to call and have it removed. Sometimes you need
to really hassel them.

If you have old debt, some buyers of that old debt are
fraudlently trying to make it look like new debt by
filing it with credit agencies--fight it. It's all about
statue of limitations.

Oh, I've noticed some of you are very protective of our
credit system. I've always felt most credit cards are
very unfair. No real control over your rate of interest
has alwalys bothered me.

While, I'm on a rant. The Credit Agencies need some
competition? It would be a great start up? A credit agency
that actually looks at an individuals ability to pay back
a loan.

It shouldn't be a crime to pay off your bills without using
a credit card. Oh yes, they claim to look at utility bills,
etc, but in order to get the really good credit terms they
want to see you used high interest credit cards through out
your life.

I'll never forget the look on my fathers face when he was
refused a credit card, because he never saw the need to
use credit until he was in his 60's. This was after paying
off a morgage.
Bon dia pel matí!
Now what? Another $600 million down the drain to fix the problems of the first $600 million?
Most are, but (from what I understand) there are ways items can stay on for longer. For example, if your account is sold or resold to a collection agency, I believe the clock resets under the new creditor.
Interesting read. I did not expect online games to be up there. For a lot of games, there really isn't much of a profit to be made, considering that all the chinese gold farmers are competing with one another and making the real money (the exchange rate in MapleStory is awful and you would make more money panhandling). A lot of these methods seem to require a lot of work to clean a little bit of money, though. I would wager that actual drug lords use something a little more clever in practice; after all, that's what they pay their lawyers for.
Hello,

I'm not from Sweden but if you could post an approximation of the salary they offered maybe someone who lives there might better answer how you will manage. Good luck!
It takes me a month or two to be comfortable with a new language.

How long do you expect your interview to last?
That is the exact opposite of how I like to read. I much prefer lower contrast with dark background or, if I am forced to read a white background, to use f.lux to mute it in amber.
Thanks for downvoting me, government employees.
I would put it out there by suggesting that you probably have low standards when it comes to databases. Have you used anything else other than MongoDB and MySQL? These are basically two of the worst NoSQL and SQL implementations in existence.

Recommendation: Stop following all the hype and what all the other blind sheep are doing.

Regarding filesystems... yes they do. Tons of information out there about filesystems you just have to look for it. Read up about ZFS, ReFS and that should get you started.
Learning a new language is fairly easy. Learning the language's standard library to the point that you don't have to look at the reference docs every 30 seconds takes a bit more time.
"Southern Africa", by most definitions, excludes populous countries like Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Africa

I think a better term would be "Sub-Saharan Africa": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Saharan_Africa

Also, missing: "South Asia (excluding India)", which would cover an area with around 390 million people.
What the guy in charge for money said was something around $4-$5k per month before taxes which seems quite low to me.
Be wary of extrapolation. As more of the economy gets concentrated in knowledge industries, it's likely that more and more people will just keep working until they die.

My mom's been "retired" for almost a decade now. She's had 2 part-time jobs and usually a volunteer gig too for nearly the entire time.
Android is open enough to replace all Google apps with your own (Samsung) and open your own appstore (Amazon). Also companies are completely free to not pick Android (Tizen / Firefox OS / ?) and they are free not to license the Google apps and put their own or (other) open source ones. It would be hard to make Google out to be a monopolist via that route.

MS was different; there weren't much alternatives and the alternatives which were there were squashed by MS. People currently want the apps in the appstore; they want to play clash of clans; they don't care about the Google gmail app. This being the same bubble world as the chromebook thread on HN yesterday; tech people think non tech people actually notice what they are running; they generally don't. If they can play the games their friends are playing and if they can use 'the software' they are used to they are happy. What brand it is is not important.

As an example; when I sit with any of my family members (they are all non tech), they will say 'I will open up Word now' or ' I will open up Excel now' to me when we need to organize something or go over numbers of one of the companies. What pops up definitely never is Word or Excel but rather Libre Office or Google Docs or some free Android/iPad variety. No-one I know actually has or uses MS Office; they use the terms because they don't know 'spreadsheet' and 'word processor' is a mouthful. They don't miss Windows and would even mostly hate it if they had to work with it now (after tablets or chromebooks and even Macs, Windows for non-tech people Windows seems incredibly hard and tech to use).

All these alternatives and Android being deployed by many different companies in different forms would make it hard to call Google a monopolist on that grounds. Samsung could turn into one though.
Youtube doesnt belong organizationally to Search AFAIK.
Xcode Launch Arguments & Environment Variables
#Giveaway: Win 3 Copies of jQuery Mobile Web Development Essentials
To divide it culturally, I would say you would have to go along the lines of Nordic (I've always been told including Finland in Scandinavia is a good way to piss Fins off), Latin, Slavic etcetera.
I can tell you a little about Sweden's culture, as I've just moved to Sweden as part of a study abroad program at my university in the USA. Sweden is amazing; it's very clean, and there is very little crime here. The average standard of living here is very high, and as a result, Sweden is crazy expensive. Also, Swedes can be kind of cold. Someone in one of my classes told me that it is uncommon for Swedes to make new friends after 21. Maybe that person was exaggerating, but I have noticed that people here are less open. The tech scene is very welcoming though. I've been to a few tech events around the city, and the people there have been very helpful and nice. I think Stockholm is a great place to live, and if you have a salary that matches the standard of living here (unlike my student budget), I think you will enjoy it.
New Orleans, Louisiana
I see we are converging on "where do you live in the Bay Area", which is what I was disappointed the original poll was not.
I wonder how bias this poll is going to be by the fact that it was started at 12:30am on the West Coast, 3:30am for the East.
In abstract terms, I would say single payer systems could (and should) work well. It sounds nice to me on paper.

I think an issue is that America has a system of government that lacks a long-term focus. Every 4 to 8 years, we get a new 40-100 year agenda. This leads to tinkering with these social programs and the original goals can get lost, muddled.

That, and our government is not structured very well to deliver services with a largely unaccountable bureaucracy overseen by a divided and paralyzed government. Our government in the process of failing to deliver a service right here (with the exchanges at healthcare.gov).

I could see single payer systems working well elsewhere. In the states, I think it would be implemented badly at 10x the cost. Just my opinion, but I think we should try developing a competitive market for healthcare and reduce government regulation in it and see how that goes. Then, when that flops, we can try out socialized medicine.
I think you vastly underestimate the time it takes to learn these sorts of things. Sure, you can teach someone to write a simple, passable iOS app that does a few basic things in a couple weeks. But they're still going to be a raw-novice iOS developer. Maybe the app you need them to build is super simple, but if not, you're doing yourself and your company a disservice by not hiring someone who's done iOS before.

I'm speaking from experience here: I learned iOS (even after having previous MacOS X desktop devel experience) on the job, when a friend asked me to write an iOS app for her startup. I learned quickly, but made a lot of mistakes in how I structured the app that came back to bite me months later. If I'd had the time to start over from scratch, I would have done things quite differently and the whole thing would have been a lot easier.

And I was slow. Every new framework I had to learn slowed me down and added days to implementing the part of the app that needed it. A seasoned iOS developer wouldn't have run into problems like that.
In every go thread I see all these favourable comments, but they only seem to ever compare to dynamic languages. Where's the comparison of go with OCaml/Haskell/Scala/F#?
I'm from sweden,

I would say that in Stockholm that would be a average salary for a front-end developer.
Can you ask them to pay you sufficiently?
The problem with that argument is that prototyping rarely needs a database. Just store stuff in memory. Who the fk in the real world is seriously writing data-layer code for a prototype?
Does anyone remember the old days when Stallman was an over the top tin foil hat crackpot?
Dependency Injection in Objective-C with Blood and Magic
Don't forget Portugal! Lisbon checking in
There was a mass shooting by a gang in one of the Ghettos yesterday. Before that a couple of clicks east of there, a guy got stabbed in a tunnel. Before that a lady who passed out outside her door (forgot her keys, was drunk) got dragged into her apartment and raped by her neighbours (who ended up bragging about it to other neighbours)
All in a Sunday.

There's more Crime in Sweden than you think.
Making search better with AI
Maybe. I think there is a value running a 5-10 seconds show. It's supposed to be funny, capturing attention. Youtube to me and possibly to many people is formal, it's a website you go to for a full talk. You would watch a 5 minutes show instead. This is why you don't blog on twitter. You write status and you chat and that's "blog" for some people.

Since vine is a twitter company, I am sure twitter is trying to monetize it.
If you consider sets and trees from CompSci 101 to be "quite sophisticated".
Suggest someone actually in the bay area starts a poll at a sensible time for pacific time people.

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
We can certainly agree to disagree. But as has been pointed out, the following wasn't really necessary:

> Before your pop your Macbook Air in a backpack, read my points.

> Yes, you can live in a concrete block with plastic furniture and eat noodles on the street every day.

> Once you're sick of your local noodle vendor you'll find food prices quite high as well.

> If you can stomach the local swill (think Budweiser without the quality control) knock yourself out.

> When you're sick of taking taxis and the BTS/MRT, have fun buying a car at 50% - 300% above US prices.

> If you really want to fake it here it means constantly traveling in and out of the country.

> To not do it properly means breaking the law in a country where you most likely don't speak the language. Have fun with that.

> If it's not someone you've known for a decade then, well, good luck with that.

I think it's worthwhile quoting the HN guidelines, because they are simple to follow and increase the quality if discussions here:

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." [1]

1. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> However, often you can learn the most interesting trait from asking a question which the candidate can't answer right off the bat: How does the candidate deal with failure or lack of knowledge.

Some research suggests that tests are much better at predicting performance than informal grading.
A student for life
[video] Why people don't become Entrepreneurs.
Be ready to pay up for a place to stay in Stockholm, I'm native and I gotta stay in queue in order to get to rent. There is no free market for apartments - at least not for rentals. You can take your chance at the Swedish equivalent of Craigs List or get to know someone. I've given up and decided to buy.

Taxes aren't as high as people complain about, unless you're a freelancer. Small businesses get screwed royally and don't get much support compared to larger ones, but as an employee you will have it decent. You get what you pay for.
Compared to say in Singapore, where you pay nada, and get nada. Some people like it.

Crime and religious extremism is in all time high. They do correlate to some degree. I lived in SG for two years, and I felt incredibly safe there (not even locking our door) coming back to Sweden, I feel a but more paranoid about having my laptop in my outside compartment of my bag.

I'm too scared to pickup my iPhone from my pocket when walking home late.

Public Transport is amazing. Trains across Sweden, is less so. I got stuck or eleven hours one winter.
They seem incredibly amazed that it snows in Winter... each year.

Dining out is also pretty cool. Not as much variety as I'd like, but the level between fine dining and regular dining on the food quality is pretty similar. So if you're ok not having a waiter, you can pay less and still have decent food.

Language skills... nothing to say here. Every Swede can speak and write English. You won't have problems here.
> No node ever "tells" any information to another.

Yes it does. Nodes "broadcast" information to other nodes. And by information I mean blocks of course. Wanted to keep it as jargon-free as possible.

> There is no trust in Bitcoin, that's the entire point.

This is unfortunately incorrect. You, as a Bitcoin user, require 50% or more trust that the honest nodes in the network can generate blocks at a faster pace than the attackers.

If for whatever reason an attacker generates blocks at a faster pace than the entire network, they could attack you by invalidating your latest payments (simply not accepting them in the block).
I'm hoping it will make it through to the morning Eastern and then be self-sustaining till the West Coast gets up. Thought it was better to post now while the worldwide poll is on the front page though the timing isn't ideal. Interesting that we've got three votes in from NY already.
Like with any such claims, I opened up a tor-browser and looked if the claim can be supported by sources. Demanding sources, is the one rule that Wikipedia can never drop, in the same way that HN can't drop rules against spam. If HN became a cesspool of spam, HN would die. If Wikipedia dropped the requirement for sources, it would die.

Checking the wikipedia talk page of Piers Anthony, not a single editor is brining a source to the discussion. A google search gave a hasty reference in a respectable article (http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-defends-pulls-self-pub...), a newspaper columnists article (http://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-wo...), and a bunch unverifiable blog posts.

So... its a fair chance to include such statement if someone used those sources to support such edit. Without any sources however, any such edit should not be on wikipedia. If you want to complain about whitewashing, please leave out discussions where a bunch of opinionated people are simply voicing their opinions but can't be bothered to do a simple google search.
I'd say this whole regional distinctions thing is utterly mythologized and politically motivated. It's more like branding than anything tangible. No one wants to be associated with the less well off parts of the world and some want to add flair of objectivity to their purely political claims. Like current Russian and Kazakhstani govts pushing all things 'Euroasian', or German strategists inventing Mitteleuropa back then.
I don't disagree with you–but it can be frustrating to know you've improved both your responsibility and your earning power yet only be judged by the past.

For example, I've paid cash for the last 5 cars our family has purchased over the last 6 years. Why doesn't my ability to do that apply to my credit-worthiness? Small things like that annoy me about the agencies/system.

Also, the median home price where we live is $500-600K (depending on the city/neighborhood). 30% of that is quite a down-payment.
Whenever it comes to anything to do with the government, I hear the "44,000 pages of regulations" excuse all the time.

But even if that was the case, there is no excuse for not having an adequate architecture to at least let people register for an account.

It just seems like common sense to me that if someone gave me a 44K page rule book on how to build a site that serves millions of people, the first thing I would worry about is how to, at the bare minimum, get people through the door.

We can't keep letting them get away with the 44K pages of regulation bullshit excuse.
I guess building it first protects for a while until you start getting attention.
I'm sure there are lots of questions and it's hard to address all of them. Some spontaneous thoughts:

- Stockholm is really expensive, housing as well as other living expenses[1]

- Salaries are okay, but probably not as high as in some other places

- Climate is awesome in the summer, and much less so during the winter.

There are some upsides too:

- Lots of tech companies, so switching jobs shouldn't be too difficult should you want to.

- Some would say it's one of the better cities in the world to live in and grow up. As The Economist puts it "If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking." This is great for your children.[2]

- People are good at english, so getting setup should be easy. Low level of bureaucracy as well. I'd still advice that you learn Swedish though.

Many other aspects of course, the actual company you are considering is probably the most important. However, that's hard to speak to in general terms.

(I'm not really neutral, since I'm Swedish)

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/9554951/T...

[2] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571136-politicians-b...
How Google Ads Work
Born and raised in the SF Bay but not currently there, nor in the US.
Seems a shame to get so far that you're even able to apply to YC, only to un-apply, like wasted potential.
I'd guess that there exists a causal relationship between "intelligence" as measured by standardized tests and the sum of dollars poured into someones education.