skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are many kinds of technical interviews, and the optimal way to prepare for each is pretty different. So the first thing I'd do is try to figure out how the interview system for any given prospective employer works.

Some places just ask relatively formulaic questions that you can just prepare for with a couple of web searches. Visit a random page for 'technologyX interview questions', and you'll cover that kind of technical screening. That said, I personally consider that an employer that resorts to that kind of interview is probably not really all that good at hiring, and a company that isn't good at hiring is rarely a company worth working for.

Another common kind of technical interview will, instead of going through random technology questions, follow a similar pattern but with more 'book questions' than practical questions. Algorithms and all that. While this kind of interview is harder to game than the first, it's still IMO relatively low quality, because it has to either be very basic, or rely on information that, if actually needed on the job, you could just figure out by going to a reference. It's not as if there's that much to gain by having employees that have memorized The Art Of Programming. What I really want, algorithms-wise, is someone that can research an algorithm, or choose one from some alternatives. I do not care if you do not know how to build an optimal quadtree to calculate collisions in 2d space: What is valuable is that if I tell you that you should calculate said collisions, you can actually find an algorithm that works, and could explain it if asked.

So all in all, that kind of technical interview if often a crapshoot, as you can never know exactly which kinds of algorithms the interviewer will be interested on that day. Which is why the best you can do to prepare for that kind of interview is to just figure out what specific kind of questions are going to be asked.

And finally, there's my favorite kind of technical interview: Actual live coding, either from a well defined problem statement, or by working on an existing codebase, which one hopes has been handed to you a little bit in advance. This approach is straight out of Peopleware: You'd not hire a juggler if you've not seen him juggle, right?

So, in short. depending on the interview type, either try one of the many random sites on the internet that dole out technical questions, read some basic algorithms book, or if handed a codebase, study the heck out of it.
best version yet. you see and hear your progress
Currently, the downvote button is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments - drivel, and the like. Of course, people use it to show their disagreement (even though that's not how it's meant to be used).

No, that's wrong. Downvoting for disagreement is how downvoting is meant to be used, as pg has made clear on HN many times over the years.

[I edited the previous sentence to make it less ambiguous.]

The confusion persists because Reddit's rules are different, and people remember those and mistakenly assume they apply to HN.
I like this idea; perhaps it could be a continuous function. There's already some sort of velocity-like calculation, with a time coefficient, so stories have to kick increasingly hard to keep their heads above water. It seems logical to attach the posting threshold -- a new cooling saucer dimension -- to that same calculation.
Wow do I ever disagree with that. Comments on HN have gotten genuinely awful.
Cellphones and the Internet were adopted on a person by person basis. It became easy to imagine yourself with them once the neighbour got it.

Basic Income takes much more buy in from more people to get off the ground.

I like the idea of it being attempted on the city level though, I'd never thought of that. It's likely the smallest scale that would work with the least amount of individual buy in required.
I feel this takes away a lot of the fun. There won't be mixing and matching of sets and peices; no experimenting nor creating new things. Partially because it won't be allowed (what parent will want to re-sort the sets), but mostly because it's impossible (you only get one set at a time).

Legos were awesome because you could experiment and build and create new things. Now, they're just a paint-by-numbers, follow the instructions, build something Hollywood designed type toy.
So, will this be only for top-level comments, or will each and every reply in a thread require this sort of endorsement?
Out of 15M brackets, none remains to win Warren Buffet's $1B March Madness bet
Original title: Out of 15M brackets, only 1 remains to win Warren Buffet's $1B March Madness bet

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are-no-longer-any-perfect-brackets-left-in-the-billion-dollar-bracket-challenge-003853949.html
But that's the problem. It's going to shut me up and out of conversations. I can ask a question but someone else may have already and I can't / don't want to risk not getting endorsed and not being able to comment else where.

I see this new feature as being a reason I stop participating altogether. I get not wanting reddit like comments and threads, but I fear this swings too much towards a "good old boys" club.
Censorship is not always a bad thing, when used in moderation.
> Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother.

That is already the case. Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old. You're already walking into an empty room and having a conversation with yourself; all this change does is lock the door.
Free from wage slavery? Technology is so much further along than it was 1000 years ago people barely have to work to have the same living standard as they had then.

People generally only work for 8 hours a day. They can't spend the rest of their time doing that right now? Everyone is free to start a business. Tons of people do it while working a full time job. Tons of people go to college while they have a full time job. Those who are lazy won't and I see no reason why I should reward such behavior with my tax dollars.
Some background: Warren Buffett Offers $1 Billion For Perfect March Madness Bracket

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/01/21/warr...
> You can currently beat the system by posting an innocuous comment, waiting for it to be endorsed, and then after it's live, changing it to say something worse. We explicitly ask people not to do this. While we have no software for catching it, humans will notice, and we'll ban you.

Why can't you make the edited comment go through same cycle \process\flow as the original comment went through? that way you don't have to assume - no one will try to hack\fool the system
It's easier to understand people like this if you study how religious fundamentalism works. The key is in understanding that everything in the world, in their point of view, boils down to a basic set of axioms. This simplified reality allows them to extrapolate claims outwards that are otherwise absurd if approached from another direction, because contrary facts have already been discarded as irrelevant; it gives them the comfort of feeling that their beliefs are "holy" or "logical", which reinforces it in an infinite loop.
Although cameras have built-in filters that block UV and IR light, the IR portion is often weak and allows some light through. By adding a filter[1] that blocks visible light, there is often enough IR left to expose a photo[2]. With some caveats[3], it can be a cheap way to see the world in a different part of the spectrum.

[1] Hoya R72 for example

[2] A tripod is usually necessary since only a fraction of the light makes it through the filters. Even in bright sunlight a long exposure time may be required.

[3] Not all lenses work well in IR. Some have internal reflections that lead to "hot spots" or white patches, and some have bad optics for IR that causes blur. Similarly, some cameras' IR cut filters are too strong to be useable.
There's a huge difference between doing that on the front page and doing that on an article that's already 3 days old.
The most striking aspect I can see is how consistent almost all comments are: I’d made the same reproach to TED, or any ‘democracy’ without a scandal. Everyone agrees that MtGox are clueless and ill-intended, women founders are too few because female hackers are, Musk is a hero… I believe that too, to be honest. But it feels like too little surprises to my taste. I like being wrong; I rarely change my mind on HN, certainly not in the comment sections. Comments are great for the moment if you want implementation details, gritty bug fixes and it’s fine in a community of doers where thinkers aren’t the priority.

The only recent examples that I can give -- because I only have access to number for those -- are my own comments. I get 5 or more points for saying something obvious that I know most of HN agrees with and knows; I get nothing for saying something original, or based on my own exclusive work; I get downvoted for challenging (with an argument line and question marks all along) what I consider to be… local bias. That’s often under the guise of being negative, while I clearly offer constructive solution. I don’t really expect upvotes for the later kind, just response that don’t miss my point.
I agree. I hope I'm wrong and I certainly hope the best tech win in the long run. Now looking at history of WebRTC, which was also initially drafted by Google, I have hope.
This will fix a lot of the random bickering back and forth, but I'm not sure it will fix the issue of snide remarks always being the number one comment.

I think the comment I received the most karma on was when I misunderstood an article and bashed it due to my misunderstanding. I was wrong, but apparently others shared in my misunderstanding because it had a lot of upvotes.

I think this will probably be a net positive though in terms of comment quality here.
Free-to-Play Is Not What You Think It Is, Says Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney (Q&A)
> Studying human systems is one of the best ways of studying complex systems and systems engineering, which are already crucial for complex engineering projects, like developing a complex AI.

What does it mean to study a generic 'complex system' and 'systems engineering' and what does this have to do with estimating the potential risks and dangers?

> we will have to study how basic, but constantly developing, AI integrates and plays off of human social systems.

This presumes you already know all about what the AI will be and is putting the cart before the horse.

> We have to gather quantified data about how two distinct forms of intelligence interact and what, if any, conclusions can be generalized to a future where humans are no longer the species with the highest intelligence.

Consider an aborigine making this argument: 'we have observed their firearms and firewater, and know there are many unknowns about these white men in their large canoes; if we look at their capabilities, our best analyses and research and extrapolations certainly suggest they could be a serious threat to us, but we must reserve judgement and quantify data about how our forms of intelligence will interact with theirs'.

> You have no data about how real AI's would behave in our society except for fiction, which contains no more guidance now than the Bible did for 16th century astrophysics

Really? We know nothing about AI and our best guesses are literally as good as random tribal superstitions?

> We have no consistent models that explain our own intelligence, let alone an artificial one that has yet to exist.

Someone tell the psychologists and the field of AI they have learned nothing at all which could possibly inform our attempts to understand these issues.
I find 4D much, much easier to control and visualize than 3D. Maybe if 3D was somehow presented in three dimensions I'd have an easier time of it, but the 4D one was easier to grok.

That probably says something about how humans relate to interfaces that map higher dimensions to 2D planes, or maybe it's just the way the 4D layout maps to the screen.
100% inheritance tax is a bit ridiculous - if I'd die today in a car accident, my family already would lose it's main income and suffer; and you'd suggest taking away my savings from my widow&toddlers at that point?

And even if you'd really want this, it's feasible only if you also have a 100% tax on gifting stuff - otherwise any old/sick person would simply gift their wealth to whoever he wants to leave (generally taxed at the normal income tax rate) or buy/sell stuff at very advantageous terms for the same effect; or take an expensive life insurance policy that'd pay out as much as he'd like to his relatives.
When I will be able to buy a sky car?
The sooner one can wash my dishes and clean my house, the happier I will be. I'm serious on this, what I look forward to the most about AI isn't the leaps and bounds in health-care, it isn't I don't know the scientific advances we'll make as a civilization, it isn't even the thought of a war with the machines for humanities future, it's stuff like a robot maximizing my personal time to pursue other activities.

Yes one could argue the robot and AI could outgrow the chores and mundane tasks of human life but even that is questionable. If an AI see's itself as my partner, and an AI doesn't mind doing these things as it can handle an almost infinite amount of things at once, then people need to realize that eventually this could be a very plausible scenario for us.
It's not that easy to escape from Evolution. We can delay it for a time, if we keep our exponential growth going. Unfortunately, not for a really long time, unless we discover some way to grow beyond our galaxy.

Anyway, basic income is important for this century we are on. For our lifetime. Things will get very ugly very fast if we automate everything and don't have some functional redistributing program before.
Instead of a basic income, let's have a guaranteed minimum wage job, where people can pick up trash and do landscaping on public property. You can have your basic income, but you have to work for it.
If you have a solution to this particular problem, whether in 5 or 500 lines of JS, I think it would be novel.

I've yet to see any discussion forum solve the problem of long threads with lots of useless fluff floating to the top.
I live in Africa, and I've been all over the globe, and I can that, unfortunately, the world is becoming smaller and smaller, and there's no such place as a Developing Country or without competition, especially when it comes to technology.
And with the fact that RocketInternet and some other giants are replicating all the ol' web business models you could think of (classifieds, real estate, e-commerce,...), there's no little chance that you could succeed on the short term without relying on innovation + thinking Global.
This is kind of off-topic, but still kind of relevant I think.

I think the 'killer' for Lego is going to eventually be 3d printers. A subscription service for lego sounds cool and all, but I'd rather be printing exactly the pieces I want (or going to a local vendor using a fancier 3d printer to make them). I kind of see this toy angle being the first probably breakthrough for it once the tech gets good enough.

I've long had a theory that Lego is vulnerable to 3d printers in exactly the same way as Polaroid was to digital cameras. Polaroid also seemed on top of the world for a while, but they clung to their model too long and it was too late.
Right now it almost always means two, because I'm starting with the simplest possible implementation, but there might be optimizations in the future. E.g. the threshold could vary with how active a thread was, or based on the results of applying some classifier to the text.
(Redirects would be the responsibility of, and reflect on, the organization which bought the domain, not the one which sold it.)
This is a poorly thought out, reactionary response to allegations of dreadful comment quality.

1. It doesn't solve any problems of group think, because if pg and the Y Combinator folks think the system is already tilted toward a certain group and set of beliefs - this now empowers them all as citizen moderators.

2. It further empowers this group by giving them the ability to remove other members of the group's ability to moderate comments.

3. It increases the "cost" of commenting far more than most other moderating proposals would. Not commenting on a popular post? Why bother. Continuing a conversation in replies? Again, why bother.

4. It had such a poor specification that cperciva found a critical flaw in the implementation details in mere minutes. If pending comments is an answer to a problem, then it was not the sort of answer that would have been approved by this comment system.
Fórmula para realizar inversión extranjera
Si bien ya hace algunos años desde la crisis mundial que España está sumergida en una crisis de confianza y en la parte económica, este es uno de los motivos por los cuales cada vez son más los inversores que buscan el poder realizar inversión extranjera o lo que es lo mismo fuera de España, pero esto cabe no solo para España sino para todas las personas de cualquier país que quieran realizar inversiones en el extranjero.
1. The plural of Lego is Lego.

2. You get a set with 1273 pieces. You find out there are only 1265 pieces. There is great sadness.

3. When you combine Yellow Tiger and Red Tiger and all their friends you get Voltron. You can play with friends and share, at the end of the day you uncombine and you each have a tiger. Much fun is had. With Lego if you combine Lord of the Rings and Spiderman much fun is had. When you try to uncombine you end up with a lot more red and blue in middle earth than there used to be.
The problem is that if you simply say that, something like "2.6.9 is vulnerable", it might not actually be true. Enterprise Linux vendors might actually be running 2.6.9 but with relevant security patches backported.
5d is a lot of fun and easier than 4d: http://cesarkawakami.github.io/2048-5D/
Check my post history for some fantastic exmaples.
If the pending comments feature is an answer to a problem, it was so poorly thought out and brash that it wouldn't be approved under its own system.
It's funny that while it seems like bowling has died out in the mainstream it has picked up really big in the hip hop community. Especially in the big cities. There are places where they even have a velvet rope to get into the bowling alley. The bowling alleys are hybrid of alleys & clubs. I think the biggest one in NYC right now has to be Brooklyn Bowl. http://www.brooklynbowl.com/bowl and popular DJ's that spin there http://www.brooklynbowl.com/calendar.
One concern is that there's no direct feedback to the endorser, so he or she would have no sense of the relative importance of their endorsement to keeping the discussions rolling along. With visions of the Stack Overflow police, how high a bar should a comment have to pass? Although maybe that's a positive -- after all, we no longer directly see comment scores, only the derivative effect of thread reordering.
It's something that is somewhat worrying, but I believe that there is enough diversity of opinion in the "elite" (somehow I am barely included in that version of counting karma, I doubt anyone remembers my username for than a few minutes) that I don't really believe it will stop people from posting things that THEN get them downvoted to hell.

At least every other day I see someone being downvoted into oblivion for espousing a contrary opinion, and while there is not enough upvotes to save that comment, I still kick one its way if the comment is thought out and posted in good faith.

My biggest concern is still about the overall amount of eyeballs moderating the new comments, and losing interesting or useful information. I almost think there should be a pending "downvote" to limit the number of times that people are reviewing a specific pending comment, so that if it is trash it dies and gets out of the way of newer pending comments worth reviewing, or maybe something where there are subgroups of pending comments so that you don't somehow languish in a low priority queue if no one looks at it, but instead get a chance at someone looking at it.

The 24 hour rule also is a bit sad because as far as I can tell, HN dies down a lot during the weekend, and some interesting articles come out that dont receive the attention they deserve. I imagine the same thing would happen with new comments.
It's all posts by new users only (hence the green user name)
This. I bowled pretty well in college (back in the 90s). Well enough to get invited on Texas a&ms bowling team ~215 avg. I decided against it due to it being barely more than an intramural sport at the collegiate level and the huge time commitment. Then my bowling ball and shoes were stolen out of my car and I never bothered replacing them. Now I bowl 120-160 ish with house balls. Every lane has uv and laser light and bowling is not really that fun anymore. In the 90s I went to an old school smoke riddled over head projector scoring lane and now it's a kids laser show. I think bowling just suffers from being "mainstreamed" and diluted into a drinking game or birthday party activity.
I'm in love with 2048, so I'm going to learn some game development and hopefully make a clone of it.
I'm reading the comments, and surprised at what's missing. What happened to the business approach?

The US government is delivering a large number of products with wildly varying costs, efficiencies, and price points. e.g. unemployment, welfare, food stamps, etc. There is a proposal is to replace those products with only one.

The new product fills (mostly) the same need as the existing ones. It will do so at less cost, with more efficiency (less bureaucracy, administration, fraud, etc.). Previous market studies show that it works.

So... what's the problem?

As a non-US person, this looks a lot like previous discussions on health care. France pays about $10 per person per day for universal health care. The UK pays about $10. Japan pays about $10. Canada pays about $10.

The US (before Obomacare) ? About $20, for care that isn't universal.

You guys are getting ripped off. Yet the bulk of the population sticks their fingers in their ears, and complains about people who may not "deserve" it. Or they complain about fraud.

Who the hell cares about random welfare guy ripping off the system? If you're making over $40K per year, you're getting ripped of by the system. By your system, that you demand to keep in place.

You can get rid of the checks and balances, and just absorb the cost of fraud. And as a bonus, a simpler system is harder to game, which leads to more detectable fraud, and therefore less of it.

This won't happen in the US for a number of reasons. One of which is that the bureaucracy won't voluntarily reduce. Another (as seen here) an unwillingness to deal with these issues in a business-like manner.

Yes, I'm from a socialist country advocating for more capitalism. Not unfettered, but more.
(1) The primary sources of funding usually suggested for BI are cutting existing means-tested benefit programs and increasing high-end income taxes. (Note that many of these existing programs are currently joint federal/state funded programs, so unless BI was done the same way, this would also involve shifting some spending from the states to the federal government.)

(2) The full single-person household federal poverty line is a very high target to aim for per person for BI in an initial implementation. Half of the two-person household FPL per adult citizen and permanent resident (about $7500/each), and, if BI is going to paid to children (or, rather, guardians on their behalf) the full marginal amount for an additional family member (about $4000/each) per child (again citizens and permanent residents) is probably a more reasonable target to aim for, but I'd expect an initial implementation to start out below that and work up.