skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not "all your fault".

The problem is that there is a belief in the industry that 15-30 minutes of technical interviewing tells more about a candidate than that person's entire career history. I have seen no actual data to support this belief.

I think someone who has a history of having built successful applications is far more likely to be qualified than someone who happens to have a good memory for algorithmic solutions and performs well under the stress of an interview situation.

This interviewing approach may make sense for entry level candidates who have nothing more to show than what they have learned in their CS classes but applying it to an experienced professional is simply brain-dead.
It would a stretch to equate the current state of climate science with the current state of physics in terms of the reliability of its' predictive models.
* Are you happy ? ( Seems like you are not )
* Do you love what you do ? ( You were )
* Do you see yourself with the project within the next 3 months as they are right now ?
* Can you or your friends take charge in the project ? Are you gonna be able to make change ?
* Is there anything else important you might want to spend your energy & precious time ? Learning another language/ framework etc ?

If your answers are ( No, No, No, No, Yes); move on my friend. I'm so sure you will find something else to work on.
I may be an average HN reader, but I only vaguely know what Tinder is, and how it works. Don't rely on my own half-baked idea of what another app is to make me understand your own - straight up tell me first. Good luck!
You have me confused. The usual "Russian Peasant Multiplication" can be adapted to produce fast exponentiation, or "exponentiation by squaring". Your code appears to be doing exactly that.

Further, that is then exactly what is quoted in reference [11], just as leephillips says. There it is then taken a step further and specialized to the calculation of the Fibonacci numbers.

So the referenced paper seems to cover what you have said, and go even further. To that end, I'm confused as to what you are saying. Are you agreeing that the paper does what your code does? Or are you disagreeing, in which case, could you be more explicit?

Thanks.
> People are entitled to sell their work for the price that they can get for it,

Yes, but being entitled to get the protection of the police to enforce an impossible-to-enfore monopoly is another story.

The idea that you can publish copies of your music in the nature and expect people not to duplicate it is artificial. Besides, what's the reasonable cost the collectivity is willing to pay to enforce it? What if we charged the price of investigating and punishing pirates to the people whose content is protected?

There's a lot of innovation (both technologies and business models) to come from a world where copy is not punished by law, as seen in the other comments of this thread.

Heck, how did the software industry managed the ability to copy software? Is the BSA our unique tool? No. We created SAAS. Some companies sell one-year upgrades. Some do better: They sell happiness, beer and knowledge, and binaries are a side-effect. Patrick McKenzie insists enough: "The customer doesn't want your software, they want the built-in knowledge."

Criminilazing piracy is the worst thing for innovation.
If you had chosen to buy that movie from Amazon or Google Play instead, you could play it on all of those devices (yes, Google purchases can be watched on iOS devices). Amazon even gives you a WMV file for your Windows Media Player in addition to the streaming rights. The studios didn't force you to choose a more restrictive seller. You can't play a DVD from Wal-Mart on your phone either, but making more choices available to you is not a bad thing.
It's not clear to me, are you saying this was bitched by the US justice department? From the perspective of a New Zealander, I'd say it was well played. The dirty work was carried out over here by willing participants. The only down side has been that a few politicians who could not be more America friendly, mainly Banks and Key, have come out looking a touch dirty.
My own BS guess: 2 per produced rifle seems extremely high to me. I think .2 per produced rifle would still be high.
> Are algorithm questions really that useful when looking for a candidate?

I go back and forth on this. I do machine learning/backend large scale engineering stuff. I have typically found that very rarely do companies actually really grill me on these things. It is mostly computer science theory (a.k.a algorithms/data structures). It used to annoy me a bit especially many questions have embedded tricks that make them dramatically easier. E.g. checking the validity of a BST is as simple as checking that the invariant left subtree is smaller than the root and right subtree is larger than the root is maintained. How you choose to implement that might trip you up, even if you stumble upon the fact that recursion is necessary and key.

On the other hand, once you intensively go through the process of studying these problems. You become aware of how incredibly rich the field of practical usage is. For example, order statistics can be efficiently organized using a rank tree. These are clever tricks that it is nice to have floating about in memory. Because they help you know what to google for.
ZFS is great. But one thing scares me away from using it. With ZFS, you can't just simply add a new disk raidz set. You have to either build a new pool to send your data to, or :

1. Buy the same amount of (but larger) hard-disks
2. Replace them one by one
3. After the last disk is done, the size will grow.
4. Sell your old hard-disks.

Much more painful then other raid solutions.
It's neither. AK47 assault rifle + inventor. What's not to get?
Google’s Cloud Platform now lets programmatic access to billing data via API
???

The Bank Secrecy Act carries with it an enormous amount of different regulations and different laws and different penalties. The exact part is what you need to make your "point". If you can't produce it, no point has been made.

The DOJ hasn't bothered to produce any reason to throw executives in jail, and I bet you can't either. Blithe self-righteousness is not a reason. A vague reference to a multi-hundred-page set of laws and regulations is not a reason.
I think ve was saying, ve doesn't see the difference between python's `sort(key=...)` and perl6's `sort { one-arg block }`. (At any rate, I don't see that difference.)
I've been in this position also. Same question. I also added what the difference between setTimeout() and setInterval() is, and example usages of both. It's incredible that a question where the primary answer is right there in the function names causes such confusion on people that are supposedly "front end engineers with years of experience".

Off course, disaster is an understatement. All three questions where the demise of 100% of our interviewees. We ended up hiring a sql programmer and teaching him what he needed to know.
I meant I didn't understand the difference between Python's sort(key=..) and what's described here for Perl.
I think you're drastically overestimating how much action weapons see. Consider the amount of rifles belonging to collectors, military, how many are used in training, how many are in weapons stockpile.

Maybe 1 in 5 rifles have even been used in action. Probably 1 in 5 of those rifles have ever hit someone. It's going to be a number several orders of magnitude lower than 200 million that's for sure.
People tend to remember things that they do, not what they read, much less from what they hear in lecture. The odds that I'm right is high because nobody was able to answer the question satisfactorily.
eMail is a lot like SMS within cell/mobile phone networks, it was never made extensible and therefore inherently lacks some functionality that would be fairly simple to implement using todays ideas and tools, for example simple encryption and reliable end to end delivery for eMail would be great!

In the cell/mobile networks we are seeing legacy services like SMS been slowly replaced with better alternatives like Facetime, Whatsapp & Skype etc... However this change is been driven by users partly because of the increased functionality that these services have to offer, but most of all because of the cheaper cost to the end user.

Unfortunately because eMail is natively free the majority of users will just make do with what they already are successfully using, even if it's a bit clunky and lacking features.

Ultimately 99% of people on the web probably have an eMail account, which provides a massive barrier to any new alternatives out there, no matter what feature set that they have.
Work in Health IT and with Big Data
Join the Medical Informatics team where you will find a rare startup feel but with the funding of a corporation. We work in a cozy office in beautiful Carmel Valley/Del Mar in San Diego and we are a jog away from the beach. Self autonomy is appreciated and provided, and as a team member you get the opportunity to contribute wherever you see fit. You will work in an environment that almost resembles academia and team members range from professors to physicians.

Email Theodore.X.Lee@kp.org

Job description details via pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/LuzfGcP1
> The problem is that there is a belief in the industry that 15-30 minutes of technical interviewing tells more about a candidate than that person's entire career history. I have seen no actual data to support this belief.

Actually, this is only true when there is no social proof. Once you have people who can vouch for your successful application building prowess in some form or the other, you will find interviewing to be dramatically easier.
We live in a strange world. I guess because we are a strange species. Humans have been good at killing (each other) since the dawn of time (well... since we were able push, hit, bite, etc. each other). So I don't doubt that if it wasn't for AK-47 then something else would have taken its place but it is, nonetheless, a very creepy thing to have your name becoming popular thanks to the one of the most popular killing tools/machines out there.
Is this the logic here? Organization X received $Y in funding. Organization X in some part denies climate change. Therefore $Y is spent on fighting climate change.

This seems analogous to someone on the right looking at Planned Parenthood's budget $Z and saying that PP spends $Z on abortion.

Am I missing something?
Yay pedantry. You're right; I meant paid parental leave that employers must make available to their employees.
If only more people created more efficient weapons the world would be a better place
My favorite gmail search tip: "has:nouserlabels" (via https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en)
Look at This Amazing Animated Typography, Built by a Google Whiz
Python - I'm doing far too much stuff in PHP just because that's what I know, seems to be fairly simple to learn as well, and quick which should help in the $dayjob efficiency.
I think the root problem of our disagreement would be that you think I am making a formal engineering prediction and is therefore held to an extremely high standard, which is a wee bit higher than I was aiming (I was aiming for a little higher than "the green bay packers are going to the superbowl" but not too much higher).

On the other hand your outlook is falsification of a formal hypothesis merely requires repeating over and over "illogic" "paranoid" and such as though they're magic incantations which in and of themselves will convince others, which is highly unlikely. Practice argumentation and debate. Repeated incantations just don't work.

Needless to say we aren't agreeing on a mutually acceptable, and equally applied, level of "proof". Oh well. Makes for a boring debate if we can't even agree on the rules of the road (thats a pun, you guys drive on the wrong side of the road you see)

I also sense a bit of bias toward a belief that large groups of people tend to behave in a rational and logical manner, whereas my extensive observational experience and historical reading tends toward the exact opposite. Sure would be a nice planet if you were not completely incorrect!

So I apologize for implying you were an inexperienced troll, in that I missed the root cause that we have mutually dramatically incompatible outlooks on life (although note I'm a little more of a gentleman WRT not suggesting medical treatment).

So have a nice day, and good luck with the whole fascism thing, hope it works out for the UK better than famous historical examples and I hope their cultural phase ends better than some awful historical examples. I'm sure civilization will maintain itself despite people burying their heads in the sand when faced with what boils down to evil and/or a cultural/political hygiene issue.
Amazon allows you to purchase recent movies individually for both "buying" and "renting."
I know it's a bit off-topic, but I'm a student so anything about interviews interests me a lot. For the Bacon Number question, I'm struggling a bit to get my head around a good way to do it.

My immediate idea is to derive a graph where nodes are actors and an edge between 2 actors means they've been in 1 or more films together. I believe the shortest path between them and Bacon could then be found by breadth-first search.

It looks like that graph would be quite slow to derive though - my naive pseudocode being something like:

for bucket in hashtable:
for actor in bucket:
if actor not in graph, add a node for actor
for other_actor in bucket (up to actor):
add an edge between other_actor and actor

That looks pretty slow without deriving a running time, so I'm guessing there's some optimisation that can be made from the current structure of the hashtable. Could anybody give me a pointer in the right direction please?
AK47 is a masterpiece of design, I bet it will still be in wide use when all of the people reading this are long dead.
This is very well explained at the book moon lander, it's an amazing inside story of the problems they encountered during the design and comstruction of the modules. What has surpriced me is that the design effort was minor compared with the management and quality control. They had to multiply the budgets severaltimes to be able to correct unexpected problems.
>> You don't send an executive to jail because a guy several layers down did something wrong

First , they are responsible as managers like others said.

But we're talking about serious allegations of supporting terrorism. For a common citizen , any strong link to terrorism means some extra legal horrible torture . But for HSBC's managers , even repeated offenses and warnings mean nothing.
I am only someone with a cursory introduction to docker, but I do believe that a 6 month old introduction is very old for something that has changed so rapidly.
My guess would be the RSA wanted more government contracts and the NSA said they would have to implement the government preferred algo as the default. The NSA will also pay you for these efforts. RSA would see that is win-win. They are getting paid to implement the gov standard AND it will help them win contracts in the future. Only a fool would say no to that.
I agree, this wasn't a point about Python vs Perl.

All I'm saying is that the author bills it as not wanting to run { .lc } twice per comparison. What I'm adding is that the comparison function itself, even if trivial, arguably has a bit of an overhead just from calling it. Thus, having O(n) calls to a key function { .lc } may be better than O(n log n) calls to a comparison function {.lc <=> .lc}.

At least that's how people convinced me to use key= instead of cmp= in Python.
Is Dogecoin tipping real? I assumed it was just a parody of Bitcoin tipping.
Hey. I work at Twitter. I think that at certain companies the "front-end" role is not as specialized as assumed, and you tend to interview for a specific team that has an opening, rather than for a generic position among a hoard of similar developers.

Having said that, I'm surprised there was only one CSS question, and the suggestion to combine questions with front-end specific knowledge might be a good way to ease into the interview.
Perhaps, but breaking laws to get evidence usually results in it being inadmissible. And wow did they break laws, all the way up to the PM. And they still are with the tracking and bugging that is going on.
Python ... requires methods to take self as an argument.

Unlike... Perl?
I would say a bigger problem with not knowing the foundations of any field well, is you can fall victim to the errors of the people who do understand it and interpret it for you.

In the case of recursion, I think the author does not go far enough. The problem with recursion is that the fact that a given recursion is O(n) is usually quite opaque, while for a loop it is obvious. This is a much more significant concern than the fact that the change of state from one iteration to the next is implicit, rather than explicit. However, you can avoid both recursion and mutable state by using map and reduce, e.g.

def fibonacci(n):
initial_state = (0, 1)
state_change = lambda s: (s[1], s[0] + s[1])
final_state = reduce(lambda s, _: state_change(s), xrange(n), initial_state)
return final_state[0]

The problem arises because even though recursion is relied on heavily in the foundations of mathematics, mathematicians also like to use the weakest axiom system they can in a given situation. Therefore they use set theory when they really have to, and first order arithmetic (which includes recursion) most of the time. But computer programming does not usually even need recursion, and so we shouldn't use it except when we have to.

EDIT: seeing the O(log(n)) solutions, I started to wonder if there is a way to see this without knowing about numbers of the form a + b * sqrt(5). There is, and you can also see it clearly from my solution.

By observing that the way I use reduce is just applying a function n times, you only need to see that the function is a linear transformation on R^2, to see that the problem is just calculating a matrix power. It is trivial to construct the matrix power in log(n) using the usual tricks.
A Holiday Message from Unbounce to the Buffer Team
STUG 44 was the inspiration for the AK though
Would probably be easier to estimate the number from getting number of killed in all wars in last 60 years. Separating by type of war and then applying fraction killed by small arms
What the heck is August?

http://www.agst.co/

I can't figure out what it is. Is it a social network? An iphone app? A subscription service?

The website tells me it's where the worlds most talented artists forge relationships with their fans. But it neglects to say how this is accomplished.
To add to this, their extension has an option to save HN links from the homepage if you spot an article to read later.
This kind of knowledge is super basic, so yes, I'd expect anyone interviewing for a front-end position to know the meaning of 'this.'
Zero; a firearm has neither agency nor volition. The question, in order to be sensible, would have to be one of how many people were killed, by other people, who used a firearm of Gospodin Kalashnikov's design to do so.
I have to agree with you about dealing with the Soviet Union it made accounting an after thought. Now the war has moved to an economic front (if it was not always that). And a fighting force that cannot effectively keep track of its resource usage is a vulnerable one.
PC-BASIC 3.23 - an emulator for GW-BASIC
Probably ends up being less than 2. If you're doing any meaningful amount of volume on an exchange you try to get rebates for your trading fees. Most exchanges are willing to negotiate this point as you are helping them generate revenue.
Nope, it is 100% real. Source: https://github.com/mohland/dogetipbot
Piracy still has a much better product to offer. No restrictions at all.
If you're looking for Boomerang functionality without the security/privacy implications, I wrote an open-source version that is designed to be self-hosted: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/go-yo

It's written in Go; there's no external dependency except a service that downloads emails to a Mailbox-type directory (I recommend offlineimap).

I've been dogfooding it myself for the last few months - I haven't actually "released" it officially yet, but if anybody is interested in beta testing it, I'd love some feedback.
Autopen: impersonal and inefficient. The epitome of compromise!
Google Glass Application in Work Doing Solar Panel Installs in California
All the laws, all the money spent enforcing them, lives ruined, and we still believe that the "war on drugs" can be won. There is a huge industry based on production and trade in banned substances. Anyone who wants one of those substances can find it easily, though at artificially high prices and questionable quality, and often by taking some personal risk.

Maybe we should try another approach? This one clearly isn't working.

Of course, arrayed against alternative approaches is a massive law enforcement enterprise with a lot to lose from ending this "war".
Banks don't have the same access to your clients that you do. Their fraud monitors are giant machine-learning racks of computers.

If one were to adopt the position that it is the responsibility of business to prevent fraud, well, you have a unique ability to do that that no other institution has. This is why I think your post is hypocrisy. Banks aren't lawyers, they don't know your clients like you do, and if you adopt the principle that "people should be responsible for the actions of their customers", you're going to have a significant amount of responsibility that nobody else can handle.
You are aware that there are still costs for keeping non-producing employees around, right?

For example, either their work goes undone, or else you need to hire someone who might become superfluous if they return. In the meantime their skills might atrophy or they may become unnecessary (but getting rid of them in this case is legally risky).

(The latter is not hypothetical - I know of a specific case, namely a large but shrinking company that is firing everyone who is either below average or has been pregnant recently. )
The trend is meaningless without a reference. For example:

http://i.imgur.com/zXkkJw4.png

vs.

http://i.imgur.com/f6A84ds.png

It's the same exact data (which I made up, by the way) but the first one tells a very different story from the second.
Foundation 35 // Brian Armstrong CEO Coinbase (YouTube)
I agree.

I also find it's easier to tip Bitcoins. Emotionally, it doesn't feel like I am spending money, and as a recipient it also feels more novel (we got a few donations for some of our other projects). It is almost like a star on github but so much better. Like, "wow, they really like my project". It is very satisfying

There has been a lot of talks on micro-transactions in cryptocurrency. I think there is going to be a long time before a micropayment paywall will become effective. Not enough people have bitcoins.

I believe though that micropayment could grow out of tipping. When authors like yourself start accepting bitcoin donations, and one day there will be enough donations that someone would think, "oh wait, I don't need to need to spam my users with Google ads anymore."

Personally, I would like to see services like Gary Bernhardt's screencasts to start accepting micropayments in Bitcoin. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog
Mathematical Book Reviews
> although note I'm a little more of a gentleman WRT not suggesting medical treatment

I'm not saying that to hurt you or your reputation. From my perspective your views are paranoid and illogical. From extensive experience debating people with similar beliefs I believe the best solution is to discuss your feelings with a doctor.

The chance of this system ever getting any further is incredibly small. The public backlash has been almost universal and the filters are already being exploited publicly. I honestly have no idea how you could rationally extrapolate 'scarlet P' letters stamped onto licenses.