skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interviewing leaves me depressed. I just spent most of an hour proving I can't verify whether a tree is binary. Mostly, we didn't focus on anything relating directly to the position or talk about my experience in any way. We proved that there are holes in my education pertaining to basic CS, that I never encounter on a daily basis as a web developer. I guess the rest of the stuff was taken for granted.

I understand that these tests can be important, but I can't help but feel that I will fail to qualify for any position that requires me to hold a host of basic CS algorithms in my head, but that I could still do a good job in the position - because I'm very good at learn as you go, and have learned lots of higher level stuff while building elegant, complex systems - without knowing how to verify a tree's binary nature.
Upgrade to iWork '09, which uses single files.
Eric Schmidt on Where Google Is Headed
China Behind the Headlines: Xu Zhiyong
The comments the from first time this was posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741438 (three whole days ago) might be interesting.
> One thing to watch out for though, is competent developers who are unreliable over time. They have the skills, but they spend their time surfing.

I think this is more a problem of motivation. I think if you throw enough interesting projects into the pipe (with the boring, necessary ones, of course) it helps keep them on task.
Says the guy who's replying to a HN thread at work...
I usually think about this, and reading this post made me think about it some more: How do people like Elon Musk operate? How does one person start hyper-successful companies in completely different fields and stay on top of his game? This isn't something that can be taught; I wonder what in his life happened that made him take these challenges on.

My usual thread of thought before I take on anything interesting: Well, I'm smart but by far not the smartest or the more experienced. People with more experience probably had the thought to build this and decided it wasn't worth their time. Thus, it's probably not worth the time. This pattern of thought is extremely self-destructive and I've been trying to figure out a way to escape it.
The issue is that the investors are overwhelmingly public and corporate pension funds, endowments, fund-of-funds, etc.
Oops! Sorry, don't know how I missed that!
I like this article, and I think it's a good reminder, but it's also a reminder that you need to weigh each and every business and idea individually.

For example, Google and Amazon were definitely idea companies. Neither made any money -- and, in Google's case, wasn't even sure about how they'd make money -- for quite some time. But, both have seem to have done acceptably well.
> if you used an RDBMS in a non trivial app

Depends on what you mean by "trivial".

You can use a database for most of the things most websites use them for without ever using a JOIN. It just takes application logic instead of SQL.

Sites like this aren't exactly heavy on the SQL. This site doesn't even use SQL. Something like Reddit or Slashdot would, but still wouldn't need JOINs.

> I've never yet seen a non trivial RDBMS based app where the existence of an ORM absolved developers from having a good grasp of SQL when they needed to drop below the abstraction layer provided by the ORM.

You don't have to drop below it; you can go "above" it into the application layer.

> If you have a PhD' from MIT and/or have a strong track record of writing Open Source software, creating and selling a startup, build robots (and electric unicylces ) for fun etc, [...] But then if you could do all that why would you look for a job?

Let's consider the case of someone with a PhD who ISN'T famous, and then you give him some kind of SQL test and he fails. "Man, what a load of bullcrap his PhD is! He can't even do a simple JOIN!"

There are a lot of people who aren't "PhD millionaires" or famous open-source magnates and yet are vastly capable. A lot of them don't write joins. And a lot of people who CAN write joins can't do a bunch of other stuff.

You know what else PG doesn't do? CSS. He runs a website but doesn't use CSS or SQL.

So, once again, the danger of using any litmus test is you can end up filtering out extremely capable people who don't do X (but could obviously pick it up quickly), while passing minimally-capable people who CAN do X.
"A lot of people use languages where recursion is unusual (i.e. NOT Lisp). Even a senior developer (especially of something like PHP) might not recall this, not having actually written a recursive function for years."

There are tons of languages that support recursion. Whether or not you use it is a function of the problem, not the language. (I'm not counting tail recursion since I consider tail recursion to be a functional way of expressing iteration.)

"Representing a car as an object: A lot of software people don't know hardware, so the confounding part might be recalling various attributes of cars and how they relate to each other."

Well, if I was given this question in an interview, I would ask, "are we building a CAD program or a car-racing game"? CAD programs (I've never written one) would probably have a CADObject class for all drafted objects that the car parts and the car itself would inherit from, and you'd have to discuss not only what was in the car but where it was connected, so just saying that it's a composition of "engine, body, brakes, air filter, etc." would be insufficient. A car-racing game would just have a car object with a shape, performance characteristics, and be able to hold states for its physical motion at a given time, as well as being able to take messages/method calls for things like "pressing the turbo button" or "emergency brake" or "shoot a missile" (depending on the racing game). You can build an entirely sensible object model for a car and be totally wrong if you don't know what you're building it for.
Portland Incubator Experiment
That's not the case anymore, since the introduction of parental controls in iPhone OS 3.0. That should have been more than clear from the article, Schiller and Gruber both emphasize precisely that point.
dropbox and spotify.
It looks like a nice distributed datastore. I can't tell how fast it is (my guess is 'pretty slow right now'), but it has all the right scaling properties.

It works like a hashtable where the keys are distributed onto nodes based on their hash values. Each node takes a subset of the keyspace, and this subset can be dynamically reconfigured (so you can add nodes later and not have to move everything). You can also replicate each key onto several different nodes for fault-tolerance.

It doesn't attempt to address transactions; instead, when people make branching updates, it keeps all the branches. (Think how Git works -- it deals with fast-forward automatically.) You have to merge them yourself -- when you do a get and there are multiple branches, you get all the heads.

It's based on Erlang and has a pluggable backend storage system, so you don't have to deal with ETS if you don't want to. (Hooray)

It has a builtin mapreduce framework. The docs suggest that it does as much of the work as possible for a given set of keys on the node which contains those keys, minimizing transfer costs. That's a very nice property.

I'm sort of excited about this project. I still want a non-relational distributed database that can do fast range queries over arbitrary properties -- I hate to be iterating over millions of items when I just want the latest 10. Give me the tools to define those indices over my data, and I'll be a happy man. (CouchDB comes the closest for me so far...)
A Reason To Buy An iPhone- Google Wave Mobile App | My Philly Network
From the article: Treasury’s position is that if it doesn’t drag VC firms into the bureaucratic swamp, then high-rolling hedge funds playing with borrowed money will present themselves as venture funds to avoid regulation.

How does this work? Isn't there a clear distinction between hedge funds and venture funds?
I'm sorry, I know the man is a celebrated inventor and all, but this is hogwash. He's talking about how making health care accessible to all will make it accessible to none - an interesting thesis, but ultimately one that has been soundly disproved by the success of public health systems in most of Europe and Canada.

He is partially right - the lack of extreme-expense health care drives out extreme high-end solutions such as the article's highlighted "Luke" arm, a prosthetic that is almost as good as the real thing.

But really, what do we want as a society? For a two-digit number of extremely wealthy people to have access to the world's best prosthetics, stuff that is in the realm of sci-fi? Or for everyone to have access to "good enough" prosthetic technology that advances more slowly?

"if talented people are given resources they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems"

Absolutely false, and proven by his own highest-profile project; the Segway hasn't gotten significantly cheaper or more accessible despite years of R&D, and is unlikely to become affordable anytime soon. This man's own business is a textbook case of the lie behind this claim. In order for solutions to get cheaper there must be market pressure to reduce cost: this is something that doesn't exist in America's current health care system.

Health care providers don't care about cost - it's passed along to insurance companies and consumers anyway. Insurance companies care about cost, but not really - it's easily passed to sponsoring employers or individual buyers anyway. Really, the only people that truly want cost reduced are the endpoint patients and their employers, who generally lack the clout and influence to push for real cost reductions. The entire system is broken. Costs have not lowered for health care, and will not lower, until the system is reorganized such that cost reduction becomes advantageous to all stakeholders.

He does make a cogent point in the end: more R&D will lead to better solutions and lower costs (given the right structure and incentives). But this argument is really independent of the affordability issue that plagues America today. Where I come from (Canada) we do a huge amount of pharmaceutical research (in fact, we invented the insulin injection) on government funds. I personally know very talented people working every day on cancer research.

Yet we can still afford to give everyone health care. Imagine that. A person can still get a major disease without going broke. Imagine that.

I really do think Dean Kamen is conflating two unrelated issues. The lack of R&D funding is an issue, but increasing R&D need not come from the pockets of consumers. Just look at the existing private system - a third of every health care dollar spent is just on administrative costs. Imagine if we took this money and threw it into R&D.
Taking the rationing argument to the extreme, suppose we could take a painless treatment once a year that would stop all aging and disease but costs $1 million. Would we still innovate in cheaper, less effective methods? We couldn't possibly pay for the treatments for everyone, but should they be subsidized for some? Would there be pressure to make the treatments illegal for those who can afford them? What if for a quarter of the price you get half the effects, but you can still only take it once a year. What would be the optimal time to not age/be disease free a month, a week, a day?
That's a major difference in the "culture" (which was discussed on here yesterday), that probably shouldn't be changed (and you're right - it probably never will). Windows and Macs cater to WYSIWYG more because they focus on the end user. Unix is very much made for other developers, and when you add WYSIWYG into apps it complicates the situation. The UNIX philosophy explicitly states a preference for plain text.
That's one of the problems when you start accepting money. Everyone expects something in return when they give you money, and it is impossible to please everyone, so you always have a certain percentage of paid users that feel shortchanged.
This theory may also apply to VC funding.
It would be nice to see who's upvoting this so I could add them to an IDIOTS file.

Any of the above people could obviously EASILY pick up whatever SQL you happened to be using. RTM could wipe the floor with you, the OP, and everyone else on your team.

If your interview process filters out people like RTM, your filtering is broken.
Well, I only have experience with one college, but Stanford offers an introductory-level class in pure C and x86 assembler.
> Unix abandoned (or never had) any conception of WYSIWYG, and probably never will. I hate it, too.

In this case, the complaint is that what you've got can't be represented by what you see. There are a couple of ways to approximately display what you see, but they're approximations. (One is wrap and the other is "off the edge of the screen".)

In a WYSIWYG, you can't represent a line longer than the screen width. This is a problem when lines matter.

That's why WYSIWYG is more accurately called "What You See Is All You Have".
Another alternative explanation: Female directors disrupt the existing, and lazier, board atmosphere with their better attendance records and stricter monitoring. Social friction, or even a low level power struggle emerges, in the worst cases, directing attention from other directors toward the immediacy of the contentious social situation on the board, in the worst cases fueled by sexism, but possibly just fueled by cultural differences.

(An older version of) the actual study is here:

http://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/rs/bitstream/10086/15730/1/...

The abstract is:

Although some argue that tokenism drives the selection of female directors, we show that they have a significant impact on measures of board effectiveness. In a large panel of data on publicly-traded firms from 1996-2003, we ﬁnd that (1) the likelihood that a female director has attendance problems is 0.29 lower than for a male director, (2) male directors have fewer attendance problems the greater the fraction of female directors on the board, (3) ﬁrms with more diverse boards provide their directors with more pay-performance incentives, and (4) firms with more diverse boards have more board meetings.

We also show that the positive relationship between corporate performance measures and gender diversity documented by previous studies is not robust to attempts to address the endogeneity of diversity. Instead, the average effect of gender diversity on both market valuation and operating performance appears to be negative. This negative effect is driven by companies with greater shareholder rights. In firms with weaker shareholder rights, gender diversity has positive effects. Our results suggest that diverse boards are tougher monitors. Nevertheless, mandating gender quotas in the boardroom may not increase board effectiveness on average, but may reduce it for well-governed firms where additional monitoring is counterproductive.

The fact that diverse boards perform better than homogeneous boards where shareholder rights are weaker seems consistent with the hypothesis that the diminished performance of women directors is stress and contention based: perhaps the tensions between the male and female members of the board, the CEO, and the shareholders, are more difficult to work within than if the board needn't bow to the shareholders as much.
You're right in that it's not mandatory, but the fact that they keep saying it can be easily removed "for the time being" does make me a little suspicious.

"you can disable the extension "Multisearch" in
Tools -> Addons for the time being."

"its just an intermediate thing what you see now and you can always disable it in Tools -> Addons for the time being."

Maybe they're just being cautious with their wording because it's still alpha.
Grooveshark iPhone Application Review: Like Last.fm App But Listen To Anything
I also thought they had licensing deals for their powertrain technology?
You don't know anything yet! Too bad I can't talk about it. :(
but they do explode on rare occasion.
Does anyone know where the "Live Nude Girls" are on his site? The link seems to be broken.
Bjarne Stroustrup on Concepts and the Future of C++
We are currently going through the same daunting process trying to hire a PHP developer at CollegeHumor. I would say 70% of the applicants we interview cant answer basic computer science questions. We don't give a written technical test. We don't expect a developer to be able to code on paper. In a real environment they have access to tools, compilers, docs, etc. It's an unfair and unnecessarily stressful test.

Good luck with your search.

Shameless plug: If your interested in a development position at CollegeHumor in New York City... Email techjobs@connectedventures.com.
Or you could make an argument about the debatable efficacy of secondhand smoke. (I have heard people claiming that secondhand smoke is not as bad as people make it out to be. I do not have sources for this, nor am I particularly arguing it.)

Also, what about all the E&M radiation? If you want to go out on a limb, it's a little less tenuous than finger-cancer...
> Austria for example, and Germany. They have social services that are built in and aren't nearly as bloated as the US government.

It depends on your definition of bloat. They do consume comparable amounts of GDP and they don't do some things that the US govt does.

However, there's an even bigger difference - both are tiny by comparision to the US govt. Germany would be a big state and Austria a middle-size one.
Perhaps more closely 'executive supervision and monitoring is undesirable when the monitoring is done by people bound from the top, such as shareholders on boards, or top executives on underlings.'

From the abstract: "This negative effect is driven
by companies with greater shareholder rights. In firms with weaker shareholder rights, gender diversity has positive effects."
> It had just never occurred to me that people who spend their entire lives talking to databases wouldn't know how to talk to them directly.

You're begging the question. Most people who use databases don't "spend their entire lives" talking to them.

Of course I've talked to databases "directly", tuned them, "alter"ed them, indexed them, replicated them, and so forth, but just happened to use logic at the application level instead of the SQL level for JOIN functionality.
The other problem is that despite spending significantly more than any other nation, measures of health care (i.e preventable deaths, access to health care) rank the US well behind other first world nations.

The interview largely ignores that concern, and focuses instead on the strawman of absolute cost.
Makerbot is pretty awesome
Google voice
how is it intrusion? All I am saying is, if the lowest font size (other than the fineprint) in a page is 10, then the fineprint font size should be a minimum of 10.

That said, nothing stops them from adding a single line of useless info, slap the font size at 8, and add the fineprint too as 8 font size.

Something better can be thought of, but there needs to be some law. Those fineprints are read by only those damn lawyers who write them.
This study by Catalyst may contradict your first proposal -- it shows quite a clear trend between increasing Fortune Rank and an increasing percentage of women directors (and corporate officers, to a lesser extent.)

http://www.catalyst.org/etc/Census_app/07COTEUS/C_appendix5....
> There are tons of languages that support recursion

Obviously. But I don't remember ever writing a recursive function in PHP for a website.
That's tremendously difficult given security concerns. Not only would build servers have access to source code, but they would also be running arbitrary user-supplied code of an indeterminate nature.

I'm just surprised they wrote yet-another-build-server with a small feature foot print -- but the more the merrier. More software around automated building is a good thing.
"Depends on what you mean by "trivial". "

Anything that has more than say, 2 tables, is what I meant by "non trivial" ;-)

"Sites like this aren't exactly heavy on the SQL."

Invalid refutation, I said "if you used an RDBMS and ". That "and" was a boolean and.

I never said you had to use an RDBMS to make a useful website. But if I was hiring for an RDBMS backed website , and you claimed to have used an RDBMS "for years" you'd better damned well know the basics. No "I don't know how to do a join across two tables because I did it in the application layer" doesn't cut it. That is a really stupid explanation of your ignorance and blows a big hole in your supposed "experience" with RDBMS.

"You don't have to drop below it; you can go "above" it into the application layer."

Sure you don't have to drop below the ORM. But you'd better know how to and when to . I wouldn't trust a developer with an ORM who didn't know ultra basic SQL. And a join in an RDBMS is ultra basic - someone claiming knowledge of an RDBMS and not knowing how to do a simple join across two tables (the OP's question was aa simple join across two tables) is like someone claiming to be an expert in c and not knowing how to write a for loop (let alone use pointers). Is that possible? I guess, Is it probable? Not at all.

Besides, using an ORM and doing a join in the application layer (without knowing how to do a SQL join) is ... unusual ;-).

"Let's consider the case of someone with a PhD who ISN'T famous, and then you give him some kind of SQL test and he fails. "Man, what a load of bullcrap his PhD is! He can't even do a simple JOIN!""

Well if the PhD applied for a job that needs SQL he'd better know how to use SQL (or learn - it would take what, one day of reading a basic book on SQL to understand what a join is and formulate a query? If the PhD couldn't do that and claimed he had lots of experience with RDBMS and then said he didn't know how to write a join, then I'd write him off as incompetent (and possibly a liar) for this job, irrespective of his degree, sure) .

" A lot of them don't write joins."

as long as they can write a join after claiming to have worked with RDBMS for ages ;-)

"So, once again, the danger of using any litmus test is you can end up filtering out extremely capable people who don't do X (but could obviously pick it up quickly), while passing minimally-capable people who CAN do X."'

The danger of NOT using a quick and easy litmus test is that all kinds of idiots get through to your personal interview stage and you end up wasting a lot of time talking to incompetent people.
This seems intuitive and if its true that the cost is ONLY for that service and not ALSO for the superior research and development, then I would agree.

I don’t know for sure but my hope would be that at least some relatively routine/commoditized stuff is higher in America to pay for things that aren’t being done in other places.

In any case Dean Kamen makes some great points about moving beyond fear based legislation.
Having done the managerial thing in a few companies, I would say that a lot of employees are reluctant to question managers, even if they are encouraged to do so.

I've got several anecdotes of trying to press my team to question technical/design/administrative decisions but for the most part, they were quite. Yes, there would be one or two people who would do so (to my appreciation), but they were the exception.

To generalize, I would say that most people would rather take instruction, follow the rules and not question authority - Its easier.

As far as creating an environment to encourage constructive feedback - Possibly creating a system that provides anonymity might increase the level of feedback.

Though in my opinion, the idea of questioning issues of instinct vs. instruction have to be an intrinsic part of a companies culture. Tough to implement if not there from the beginning.