skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before actively looking for my second job, I really had no idea how to interview folks effectively. After going through the process many times over the last month, I've come to the conclusion that there were essentially 3 good ways to evaluate me:

1) Give me a take home problem.

Granted, a couple of the companies that gave me these problems clearly didn't know how to interpret what I gave back to them. One of the comments I got back actually offered as a criticism that my code looked "too sparse." But if you actually have the ability to make sound judgments, this seems to me to be the ideal way to judge a candidate.

No one is coding over the phone (ever) or with someone watching over their shoulder even most of the time, so if you reject someone just because they can't perform under such pressure, you're going to have a lot of false negatives.

2) Ask a breadth of questions.

One of the other interviews which I excelled at was a series of 20 questions that asked me about things ranging from what happens when a browser makes a request to a server, to what a CDN was, to what the difference between UDP and TCP was. This was only a small part of the range of what was asked, but the fact that I was able to speak with confidence on most of the issues showed that I had a strong foundation of knowledge. They also asked my confidence in each area before asking me the questions, which I imagine helped them gauge whether I was down to earth enough to even recognize the things I didn't know.

3) Ask a depth question.

Drill down deep into a specific problem that the interviewee seems comfortable enough in. For this one, it could be entirely theoretical, such as how one might build a particular system to solve a problem. The key is that you want to dig into why they make any particular choice along the way.

You should look for someone willing to say "I don't know about X, I'd probably look for the reference to learn if there's a data structure to solve Y" if you end up getting too deep. That being said, not all personalities will understand that this is okay during an interview, as by the same token, a selection of interviewers won't understand that this is a sign of strength, not weakness.
I'd expect it to provide about the same value as a book, and be browseable; not something that is purely linear one after the other (e.g., I could skip to dynamic programming, graph algorithms, or whatever topics there happen to be). I think that a basic interview puzzle book should be in the range of $25-$40, and depending on that price point be from 150 to 300 pages, with roughly 50-100 problems.

Though, admittedly, I wouldn't pay for this at the moment because I'm happily employed. I did spend about $100 on books to brush up when I was interviewing in late 2011. I found actually the best practice for interviewing was going on interviews (I ended up interviewing at around dozen companies over the span of a month after I was laid off).
I think the "if they wanted to they would have argument" misses some nuance of how business actually works. The impression from the stories available was that this deal was inked very quickly. I think that people at Microsoft are probably equally as stunned as the rest of us that this company was acquired. People from Facebook were actively hanging out at Oculus and watching development, you don't get the impression that other companies had this type of access.

I wouldn't be to fast to leap to expecting a Microsoft competitor. The botched Sony launch combined with uncertainty about this purchase by Facebook may make them more likely to pursue other products in the next year and avoid seeming like a band-waggoner.
Winning Words Match Games – Fun and Free Vocabulary Games
Honestly, your characterization of Drupal is just plain BS, and I say that as someone who worked on Drupal sites for about 5 years, and am glad to no longer be.

To say it's less powerful than "plain PHP" is just wrong, since via custom modules, which you'll be writing at least a half dozen of for a real non-trivial (e.g. the kind of thing you wouldn't just do in WP, just you can essentially just sprinkle in 100% custom "plain PHP" whereever you need it, while still being able to leverage things Drupal does right, like form handling and batch operations.
I recall many a purchase that was killed. Modern day, Google has taken over that role.

Look at Microsoft acquisitions of late - Yammer and Skype being two of the larger ones that come to mind. Still there and running.
I agree it is a bit mind-boggling, they have the users who love their service. I love having my history there and they are the only ones other than iTunes that know so much about my music tastes.

Bands have even got big on last.fm, MGMT pretty much hit it big on there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGMT
"Upper bounds are information about what you know your package works with."

Not really; the upper bounds generally are speculative. They specify that the package will not work with particular versions when typically those versions have not yet been released. Often when those versions are released they work fine, which prompts a useless flurry of dependency bumping.

"If I and all my dependencies had followed the PVP and specified correct upper bounds everywhere, I would still be able to build my app today."

I now distribute my packages with the output of the ghc-pkg command so you can see the exact versions the library builds with. That solves your problem without using speculative upper bounds.

I wouldn't expect it to work for "years to come" in any event, though: Haskell changes too much. You probably won't be able to get today's package to work with the compiler and base package that will exist years hence. It's hard to even get an old GHC to build: today's GHC won't build it because of...dependency problems.
Should "Yes, delete it" be red, or green?
Interesting, since I heard Paul Steinhardt give a talk not too long ago concerning some skepticism towards the inflationary model's ability to explain the issues that it set out to model (such as the horizon problem, etc.). I wonder if the skepticism on the theoretical side will still linger given some empirical data.
Changing Trends in Email Marketing
Because the Mozilla Foundation board underestimated the amount of flak they were going to get for appointing someone who is anti-LGBT as their CEO.

This is inflamed by the fact that Eich has refused to apologize for this. Therefore, everyone is making the, quite justified, assumption that he believes in his anti-LGBT positions quite strongly.
Show HN: Pokemon Color Palettes
This is a little toy that lets you play around with color schemes based on pokemon sprites. It could be a nice source of inspiration but it's mostly for fun.
I think I was too focused on the specifics of the analogy to realize it was a general statement. Thank you for clearing that up for me.

I did not mean to delete the comment you replied to. I have included it below:

It is terribly confusing analogy for me. Initially I thought the computer engine analogy was what was intended. But then I started thinking about someone rated 2100, down two bishops playing stockfish on a decent box with 3-4-5 EGTBs and a two bishop advantage. That seemed like a no brainer so I moved on to crafty, and then GNU chess and then what? I realized that I could not think of an engine that would consider a win with two bishops an accomplishment. As far as "maybe 2600 is a better target" goes you have to go all the way down to #88 on the CCRL in order to get to 2600.[^1] That is with even material and definitely not using 64 cores (the CCRL uses a AMD X2 4600+ at 2.4GHz benchmark).

I am sorry but thinking about a chess engine running on 64 cores with a two bishop advantage against a 2100 rated human is not reasonable. If I knew nothing about computers and Go I could reasonably read the 2-bishops/2100-ELO analogy and conclude that CrazyStone was laughable. I do not know much about computers and Go but I do know enough that I do not consider CrazyStone's performance laughable.

[^1]: http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/
I read a lot of this with my brow raised.
In the long term there are potentially other technological solutions to these issues.

Evolutions in sandboxing (broadly construed, everything from what we see with mobile apps up to full virtualization) may give us a point at which an IT department can, for most businesses/purposes, reasonably satisfy itself of the security of the "enterprise apps" running on a non-malicious employee's laptop, without completely taking over the system image.
A Primer On Showing Empathy in the Tech Industry
I'll never go back to that site. Absolutely atrocious.
Pretty much any conversation about AngularJS that gets stuck on "dirty checking" makes my eyes glaze over. As for "black magic" DI, if you're uncomfortable with a framework extending the basic language, it's perfectly possible to do DI explicitly in Angular 1.2. This is a project-level choice.
and the 2 posts (so far) of supplemental .. err theory?

> Simple and easy, a vocabulary for describing software complexity

http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-de...

> How complexity affects your software

http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/how-complexity-affects-software
Unfortunately consultants have to read between the lines and understand what the real motivations are. Of course, on paper the goals are to produce functional, profitable products, that are cost effective and easy to maintain in the long term. Sure, what it is important to realize that just as them being a contractor the layers or middle managers are also contractors in a way and you just sub-contract for them. They have internalized the incentive structure where they get paid to do work. To look busy. To find a lowest bidder and so on. And, this is important, they found a way to not get punished if they fail to deliver a product as promised. This goes all the way to the CEO.

One can land in the middle of such a situation but what they don't realize that it took decades probably for this kind of incentives and constrains to be internalized. Some industries have this dysfunction in them them more than others. Hoards of "consultants" (read temporary, project based workers) know and understand this. They feed on the bottom of this dysfunction. That is why they over promise just to get the job and then they have strategies to mitigate when it doesn't happen.

Over time crazy and dysfunctional people aggregate together and push the rational and normal people out. It is like the "birds of a feather" idea.

There is a choice to be made, do you want to make money in such an environment at the expense of being infected (affected) by it and becoming a part of this system or do you find something else?
But Go can still be surprisingly hard on tiny board sizes.
There are, for instance, 386,356,909,593 possible 2x2 games.
(under the positional superko rule which says you cannot repeat any earlier position.)
It says free trial but then asks for $35 per month for me.
Doesn't Google Analytics cost money after a certain amount of hits per day/month? If that is the case and the gap was hit, would MLB.com be liable to pay the fees?
in the US, most states allow an LLC formation - this is usually cheaper and offers you some protection against losing your personal assets in a legal dispute. You need to be above board and document all your stuff (expenses, etc), don't mix personal and business use expenses, keep separate bank accounts, etc. To start with for most solo freelancers, this is fine. At some point - "incorporating" might make more sense, but the ceiling would be moderately high. Going for an actual 'incorporation' may make more sense if you have external shareholders and such, or are looking to take investment from outside. Until then, as a solo practitioner, an LLC is usually the simplest combination of protection and minimal legal record keeping.
How King Digital Stacks Up Against Other IPO Duds
There we go, soon will see zombies like in walking dead if something goes wrong.
The majority was on the wrong side of all of those issues for a long time, no?
Actually that's probably similar to what they'll eventually do, and the big three will fly off into the sunset.
The Chaos Company
How to write shit with you elegant Scheme language
Sounds like you are having difficulty discerning between criticism and hate. Criticism is a genuine conversation bringing up new, relevant points. Hate comments regurgitate the same crap over and over. No one learns from it, it's just frothing at the mouth intellectuals who think knowing some random fact is more important than succeeding in life.
i was uncomfortable with the fact that it was being done in core, and I know from personal experience that it will only take a good enough reason to do something even dodgier with that type of thing.

my recommendation was that they remove it from core, and have it be opt-in through the use of ngmin.

they are actually removing it completely from angular 2.0, so it's a moot point really.

http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/complexity-creeps-concerned-for-...

I also stated that I was fine with the dirty checking, because it worked better than it had any real right to. And best of all, it's only 'for now'

http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/why-wrong-to-be-afraid-angular
Meet the manic miner who wants to mint 10% of all new Bitcoins
Test post please ignore...
I'm making sure self posts work in my Hacker News client for Android.
The jokes are pretty lame, to be honest. But at least the sound stops when you click on another tab.
You have to realize that most post-doc's, so people who are in their 30's-40's and have the years of tenure and education as a doctor with residency make like $45-50K; that is, if they're lucky to get it.

So for a code monkey to come in and tap away on his stupid keyboard to make like $75K is a travesty as far as the research academia is concerned.

But in research, you're better than the sell-out's trying to make people click on ads and shit though. So part of your paycheck every week is padded with tokens of self-righteousness and moral superiority that you can redeem in times of needed philosophical consolations.
Replacing all of someone's blood with anything is extremely scary-sounding.

Also, now I can't help but imagine replacing all of someone's blood with things like jello and cream cheese.
In a pinch, coconut water can be used as well:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10674546
Is YC right about solo founders?
Can't you always mechanically convert an iteration into a fold like that?
That's far from an original thought :)

Problem is, it's like a pot of gold in the middle of a minefield. No one seems to be able to put the whole puzzle together in a way that pleases all the stakeholders. Just the other day, Twitter bowed out of the space, as well.
This is really neat. What generation's sprites did you use? Are they all from the same generation? I wonder how, if at all, the palettes change over the years given new sprites coming out.
There is a difference between a fan base and a user base.
If this works, could it give some credibility to cryonics?
I will when the dust settles.
Indeed. Or this becomes an exercise in calling sort().
But x is not necessarily smaller than n though. For example:

Duplicate array: [1,2,2,3,4]. If you do mod 2 sum, then you have 1+0+0+1+0 = 2 mod 0 = 0. But another possible duplicate set can be: [1,2,3,4,4].

10 + x = 0 mod 2
(see 4%2 = 0 and 2%2 = 0? So x can be either 2 or 4.) If you let modulus number N be larger than n (e.g. n = 5 in my example, just let N = 6. Then 10 + x = 0 mod 6 will yield only one possible solution that is 2) then I think your solution will definitely work.

But I think the big problem is: you said x = (b - a) % n. That is true, but how do we get "a" (the sum of all unique numbers from 1 to n) without overflowing? The reason we do modulus summation is for avoiding overflow, granted that can get "b" easily, yet now we have to find "a" still, I find we are still stuck. Any suggestion?

Even if assuming everything will work out and my previous question can be responded, still the modulus function is WAY MORE expensive to compute than xor operation.
Get AdBlock Plus. It blocks 99% of ads. It's like using a different internet.
They don't just start charging you, they warn you that you're at the paid level and need to pay or stop using so much.
A nebulous description of a vitally important quality - someone who your existing team won't hate. It's one-sided to claim that people only use it to unfairly reject candidates. Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment.
Skype may still be running but their service has become significantly worse after the centralized all the servers instead of the previous P2P architecture. At least I can clearly tell the difference.
I don't get it, this isn't similar at all. Why did you lose faith in humanity because they did exactly what you told them they could do?

> our license (MIT)

Why did you MIT your code if you didn't want this to happen?

GPL exists for the exact reason you're bringing up here.

Sorry I don't mean this to be negative in anyway, I just don't get the thought pattern here.

Disclaimer: fan of bsd/mit/asl style licenses, feel gpl is better suited for things which need protection from the big players and enforce participation.

While I can understand your pain I feel it is a necessary pain for the greater good to have unrestrictive open source. (companies can always donate/contribute in other ways after the fact etc)
I didn't mean mad literally. I meant the intent that you mentioned.
>I see this move as FB ensuring a healthy portfolio and healthy future stock price for their investors by getting the jump on patents and technology of a sure fire success emerging market.

That statement is precisely why this is such a big problem. Facebook getting their greedy paws on VR patents will all but limit innovation in VR and squeeze small players out of the market. There is nothing to like about this deal.
Knowing how corporations work, I think it's more likely that MS doesn't really have anything in the works.

VR is a funny technology. It's been around a very long time, and attempts keep being made and failing. That means that most big labs probably have had long running programs. A problem with such projects is that once they build up some codebase or knowledge base, it becomes very very hard to start fresh or change directions.

I think the Sony project suffers from this, the product really is not in the same league as Oculus, both in hardware specs and the software/UI support. It feels like one of those clunky early MP3 players vs. the iPod.
I'm not really sure how you could wedge SQL into a system that doesn't really have the concept of columns without it being, at the least, a distinctly different dialect.

And, really, if you've worked with some of the "higher level" interfaces to SQL like SQLAlchemy or Laravel's QueryBuilder, ReQL doesn't seem that alien; they all tend to work by method chaining as well. (But they usually don't support everything SQL does, unlike ReQL's interfaces.)

Also: unlike my (admittedly limited) exposure to other NoSQL systems, RethinkDB supports relations and joins -- it's actually a lot easier for an SQL fiend to move to Rethink than any of its competitors.
Right. Yes - I missed the workspace specific part of your complaint before replying - sorry about that.
tl;dr The entire community is acting like a bunch of idiots, stop it, you're embarrassing yourselves and showing your business management ignorance.

Calling anyone who disagrees with you an idiot and an embarrassment isn't good.

The central issue is that when Facebook begins to lose relevance, Zuck is going to yank the reins on Oculus as hard as possible to ensure Facebook stays relevant. You can see how Google did this with G+/YouTube integration.

VR is in its nascent stages, and Oculus has been synonymous with VR. Now instead of VR having a strong an independent company with Carmack near the helm, "VR" is a subservient division of Facebook.

Whether that turns out to be a good thing, well, time will tell. But to call people "ignorant idiots" for being worried is a little extreme, to say the least.

EDIT: You're also mistaken about this part (as I was):

also based on these comments people think Oculus offers software... they don't, you don't play an Oculus VR MMORPG... they provide hardware and an SDK, everything else is up to content producers, the scaling crisis would be purely one of hardware manufacturing and distribution and maintaining a very widely used SDK

The scaling crisis is software, not hardware. They appear to be planning some kind of Oculus VR MMO based on Carmack's tweets. See here for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7471231
On Windows yes, just proceed the number with a 0 to get Unicode. See the "How to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows" page [1] for more details, including one of my favorite tricks, using Alt-X in WordPad. It is especially useful when you want to know what the code point is for a Unicode character.

[1] http://www.fileformat.info/tip/microsoft/enter_unicode.htm
I don't think so. For Microsoft it was natural to make the Xbox. They were involved in the PC so much, and the first Xbox was basically a PC trapped into a black and green colored box. Most of the work they did then was on software, which was their specialty in the first place.

Facebook has no direct connection with hardware, serious 3D gaming, VR or anything close to it. I fail to see how you can draw a comparison between the two. And the Xbox was not an acquisition, it was developed internally by Microsoft.
Android-x86 VM?

Hm. I wonder if anyone is doing the work to get Android apps runnable on desktop Linux systems. Some googling suggests that at this point, Android-x86 can more or less run in a chroot already...
I think you have too little faith in the future. Heck, even if you're right, shouldn't we at least strive toward the unattainable goal of a global "tribe"?
There is a comment on my blog from a developer from MLB.com for anyone who is interested:

"Hi -

Engineer from mlb.com here. It appears this goes a bit deeper down the rabbit hole than meets the eye. Apparently there’s some code laying around in our tests run by a CI setup that randomly generates a tracking code to mock third party scripts (Google analytics, ad tracking, etc) instead of using our actual IDs as to not mess with our marketing guys’ numbers (we run a LOT of tests on CI).

The strange thing is that your IDs aren’t being pulled from your site, but have randomly been generated the same way many, many times and then been shipped out to our production server by mistake.

We can’t figure out why this is happening, but are looking into the build system and how it caches data. Luckily I read HN or we might have never caught this!"
edit: I don't want to hurt anyone's feeling or its not my intention. Having lived in 3 counties , including US and two poor asian countries, I can say that social support & services are far better in US. Though food stamp may not be sufficient considering various point , they do provide at least some support. I also worked with 1000+ people spending my weekends helping them to find jobs , rather disappointed to find hard way that many, if not all, don't want to get come out of poverty cycle.
Again I am coming from global prospective so might have different look than what you propose.
And then you can do nothing about it because MLB.com has outsourced their site and they stole your analytics codes. I guess you could change them, but still the question is: are companies that outsource to shady firms liable for copyright/damages that will result from said decision.
That's good to know, thanks. I've seen too many companies starting to charge you instead of giving you a fair warning.
Thanks! I used Black/White's sprites, a few of which were recycled or tweaked from earlier games.
FYI, for some reason your follow up question is hellbanned. Thought you'd like to know.
Go Home Facebook, Yelp Just Won the Virtual-Reality War
Show HN: Online Mac OS X launchd plist file editor