skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps the underlying process is just so noisy, better models are not really possible. It would be interesting to see confidence intervals on those predictions - I am relatively confident they would overlap. My intuition tells me that the confidence intervals would be huge and there is very little statistically significant differentiation between the best and worst teams in the tournament - upsets happen in soccer many times every tournament.

I think how successful a model is depends on your purpose too - if you have a model that predicts only 60% of games correctly, while technically you're not very "good", you're doing much better than those gambling on the sport (usually the favorite in sports betting wins at a rate of 52-54% I think) or probably conventional 'sports analysts' (no data to support the second point, that's an educated guess based on the gambling statistic).
You are mixing up cyclical linked lists with loops in a graph. The reason why the question is bad stems from the fact that it's specifically about linked lists.
Hi! I feel you, bailing out at this point would not be great.

This stood out for me: "This attitude, day in, day out." from everyone on the team. This sounds great, it means that you have built a culture that sticks.

Also, it means that you can turn things around: getting people on the same page is hard; it sounds like you only need to sit down and think where you want to be, then shift gears and change the team's attitude towards the new goals. If you establish common goals, it sounds like you'll be able to create a company culture around them pretty easily.

Oh, and have fun! There is light at the end of this!
Agree. The anti-pattern here is expecting a specific answer for a question. The goal should be, "how does this candidate think through problems?" If they arrive at a logic solution and can critique it, then I would consider the question completed.

Some questions are better than others here, specifically ones that have many correct implementations and varying levels of optimal-ness. I'm a big fan of asking for Fibonacci implementations, for instance.

Since this question can have different correct implementations, then I would not consider it a bad question to ask.

It's upon the interviewer to be open to different answers, evaluate them fairly and ask smart follow-up questions. "Ok, so what's the complexity of your answer? Do you think it's possible to do better?" or "Compare your answer with this implementation".
I don't trust them, nor anyone, to keep any "intimate personal details" (whatever that means) secret. But that's not the point.

I don't give them access to information to keep it secure. They shouldn't even need permission to access it. I share information with the world to make it a better place. There's no point in living in the dark.

To keep information for yourself is selfish. To expect that others will keep it secret for you is foolish.

I'm in favor of complete transparency, and I do not favor individuals or corporations in that matter.
The GNOME Devs did the right thing though. They are open source so the community can fork anything they want and there are plenty of other really similar DEs. Ubuntu and GNOME can't compete with modern UIs without making something that's multi-platform oriented. I believe GNOME 3 and Unity actually have the right ideas when it comes to convergent interfaces, whereas Microsoft just basically gives you two UIs. Traditional interfaces are great for traditional computers, but to compete with the big dogs, which is, I think, what Canonical and GNOME (to a lesser extent) want to do, they need to create interfaces which can work on anything.
There will always be a new freshman class. Every year, someone joins HN (or the community at large) knowing next to nothing. We should welcome those people, not make them feel bad for being new.
There's http://www.djangosuit.com and https://github.com/douglasmiranda/django-admin-bootstrap

Both are trivial to set up and install.
Keep in mind that Etienne is French, there might be some bias here given our recent soccer history ;)
Will look into this, thanks
Had that exact question given to me before, but it was in the form of a closed book "pre-screening" written test.

I simply put down my pen, walked out of the room and told the recruiter if this company was hiring based on these type of questions I would be a terrible fit :)
OEM or sane?

(As can be seen from my comment history I like Windows 8)
I don't know about your code quality assertion. My experience has been that it produces code right off the bat that is equivalent to code that has been through 1 or 2 rounds of functional testing. I ignore code coverage, though. It's not a good metric.
Where do you see that @transaction.atomic is deprecated? It's not in the release notes[1] and if I recall correctly, was only introduced in 1.6 as a means to come up with a consistent API for nested transactions and savepoints. Are you implying that it's deprecated as a decorator? Even if that's the case, I still can't find a source.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.7/
I have absolutely zero problems with experimentation, I like doing that as well.

My primary concern is with people (and I'm not claiming that you are one of them) publishing such experiments without huge "This should not be used in production!!!" warnings and some poor fool deploys it and gets pwned 3 months later.

TLS does have some overhead because of its flexibility, yes. But it's still incredibly fast and should not be a bottleneck in most scenarios. Given that it has been battle-tested with very little flaws found (most bugs are implementation bugs, not protocol bugs), it is and will be for the foreseeable future the #1 option for anyone looking for a encrypt-data-while-in-transit solution.
So, if the guy "got close", but then proved that you were wrong, was his answer was actually right, but that you thought it was wrong?
Well there was a complication during his birth that caused extended oxygen deprivation, and he'll never be quite right his entire life. Then people gave him millions worth of their savings. That's what went wrong.

I actually happen to think doing interviews with him, struggling to explain the unexplainable is quite pointless. It's cruel entertainment. It's like asking a baby why are those pants pooped.
I'm by no means an expert, but usually when a web browser makes a request for a resource it includes a referral header which tells the server where it came from. This header is probably sent both to the initial javascript request and to the tracking pixels it requests to send new info to Google. At a first glance I feel like if you change the tracking id, and the referrals, you may have some success messing with their system.

But again, not an expert and I could easily be missing something crucial.
I don't ask for significant problems, just anything about the language that they would change if they could. A common answer when discussing Java is verbosity, for example.
do you happen to know where one could find data on this? Not just bookmakers' odds, but volume of bets? This would make for interesting research
list.size()

The problem is, in Java and probably many others, that method computes the size in linear time by traversing the list. The javadocs for java.util.LinkedList note that this was a decision taken so that splitting a list at an arbitrary node, etc. could be a constant-time operation.
Should be pretty easy to find aggregate stats on both.

Law follows a bimodal distribution, though, so you'd need to factor that into account. Basically, there are two types of law degrees, and two types of lawyers: those from top-N schools, and everyone else. Those who land prestigious clerkships, and go on to practice things like securities or corporate M&A at top BigLaw firms, and those who don't.

When we speak of a "JD," we can't really speak of it as a homogeneous class. You could argue that this effect could be found with any degree, for instance, that a CS degree from Stanford leads to much better outcomes than a CS degree from a mid-tier university. But the effects of school, class rank, career track, and prestige in the legal profession are near-total, and the divide in outcomes is quite dramatic.
Now that you said it, it certainly does.
Great story! I did something like this for Epson about 14 years ago. I was a support person for printers and I one day overheard some grumbling by someone who was collating ink cartridge information.

Apparently they had "modified" a clipper database and added new records, but it was one record per file, with each field delimited by new line and field/values in ini format (key=value). They were opening each file in notepad, then copying each value into a spreadsheet. They had over 20,000 thousand files^H^H^H^H^H records, needless to say this took a long time to compile the excel file which they used for reporting. Like 9 weeks long.

I was mucking around with Perl at the time, and I casually mentioned this is what Perl is good for, I got this skeptical look, so I said I'd prove it. They gave me 100 sample files, and then I spent some time using file globbing and some regexes to split out the data. Whilst I was about it, I fiddled with hashes and worked out how to use refs, mainly because I was a bit bored and learning some Perl concepts.

I then returned the next day with a working program, installed a Windows version of Perl, then copied the 10,000 records locally, ran my script, tweaked it, then emailed the guy the CSV file I created. The script took about 45 seconds to run (it was a bit inefficient).

I then walked over to the guy, asked him to open his email and watched his eyes bulge a little. I then walked to my desk and took some more calls about printers.

A few weeks later, I was surprised to discover I had been made employee of the quarter by Epson Australia.
> Never think that you're blowing the interview.

How do you that? Because that's all I ever think about once I mess up during interviews, and it's all downhill from there.
The US lost, but it was Germany that was knocked out.
For me the underlying question is still: was he initially just incredibly incompetent, or always a scam using incompetence as a cover?

Even in the case of just pure incompetence, there was a failure of ethics/law in how problems were handled, but if it was just incompetence fundamentally, bringing in a good partner early on might have saved it.
I had this in an interview (back '96). Came up with a linear time constant space solution: create a new node, push it on the front, reverse the list, check if the 1st node is the same one you pushed, if so it has a loop, otherwise it doesn't. The downside is you need to reverse again to get the original list.

Another answer is to mark nodes using the low bits of the next pointer. Also linear time, but also requiring clean up. I can see how not knowing c would cause people to think this question was somewhat unfair, but I didn't see it that way.
Apps that are provided with for free on Google Play, IAP or no IAP, don't have any fear of piracy from being installed from another source. If Google Play is not available when your app runs, if the user could use that app for some purpose, it is a really good idea to make sure it doesn't crash. Indeed, most free apps with IAPs don't require you to buy the IAP immediately at launch, you can use the app to some degree.
ExtJs has been a pain where I work. I remember being horrified at how it takes over and starts adding styles all over, even to the body tag even if all you were doing was displaying a grid in a div. Why would it leak out of your div and take over the whole page like that?
Yep. There are times when server-side is the right thing to do (mainly content-based sites - especially if SEO and accessibility are major concerns) and times when client side is (SPAs and the more 'app-like' end of the spectrum).

PJAX is a great compromise between the two approaches: https://github.com/jacobian/django-pjax https://readthedocs.org/projects/django-easy-pjax/
The general effect of basic income and a living minimal wage is fairly similar, and not incompatible with each other (figuring out the 'right' mix between the two is an interesting problem, and I am surprised more work hasn't been done on it).
I disagree. Betteridge's law is useful.
I think you need to factor some other datapoints too:

- probable weather - some teams play differently depending on conditions

- yellow and red cards - some major player could miss a match. If team A is missing a defender, might be that is more vulnerable and thus, may lose a match.

and so on.
My understanding is that it's all automated for level 1 trust where you can only generate basic single-domain SSL certs. I don't remember getting a call.
The truth about obesity: shocking things you need to know
I've always thought of Bower as an easier-to-use Git submodule manager.
My personal experience is that any code that I write that I haven't tested has a bug in it. Usually a NPE/SegFault.
Explore the Louvre collections.
Android Auto | Android Developers
"Q: Why didn’t you hire experienced professionals?
A: We tried, but we didn’t have money and also often they turned us down. A former Financial Services Agency bureaucrat approached us once last year, but he declined our offer at the end."

I'm pretty sure what happened here is a professional was interested in helping out, got a look at the books and ran.
A huge plus is being able to use Python. I'm not completely anti-javascript but given the choice - I'd rather use Python for the bulk of my application logic. I'm sure Ruby people feel similar. As great as the strides in js have been, it's just not as nice a language as many of the alternatives.
I was asked a puzzle question that I hadn't heard before. I answered it directly almost immediately. In a later interview with the CEO he asked if I had heard the problem before because the interviewers were sure I had with such a fast answer. I said I had not and just left it at that. Playing the whole thing back in my head, I think this cost me the job for "lying" to them. I might have been able to convince them on how quickly I got the problem if I had taken this as a questioning of my integrity.

"There are 128 chairs on a ski lift. You get on at the bottom, and ride it all the way to the top. On your trip up, how many do you pass on their way down?"

There may have been some distracting info of distances and speeds in there to make get you going in the wrong direction.

My experience with puzzlers is that average people like to feel superior for knowing the answers to a puzzle that someone else doesn't know. The people who can solve these easily are thrilled to find a puzzle they don't know the answer to. Then there is the group who can make a good puzzle.
Android TV | Android Developers
Not as life-saving, but a friend of mine got a job for the federal or provincial government in NB, I forgot which.

His job was fairly simple: controlling access to information. Other departments would send him requests for information about certain individuals, and his job was to send them the data that they required, but only that data, to prevent other departments from intentionally or inadvertently accessing the wrong data (and violating privacy laws).

So his day consisted of getting an e-mail with a request for data X about person Y, and then sending them that data. A fairly straightforward task, but when he was hired there was a three-month backlog.

After a week or two, he wrote an application in VB that would access the database directly; he could type in a name, choose a result, select fields, generate a PDF, and e-mail it to a given e-mail address. What used to be a 5-10 minute job became a 30 second job. His three-month backlog turned into a three-month headway. People were getting their results within minutes of sending the request, rather than hours, days, or weeks, and productivity everywhere increased.

At this point, his job consisted of sitting at his desk watching anime on his netbook until a request came in, typing for a few seconds, clicking a button, then watching anime again.

He was bored constantly; he asked his boss for more work, something else to do, automation or paperwork or anything, but his boss refused. Union job, defined role, can't give you more work.

Haven't talked to him in ages. For all I know he's linked his app into Outlook to pre-fill fields by now and he's running a startup out of his office in his eight hours a day of extra spare time.
I've added a few screen-shots of Bitstamped.io to our blog here.

Might help someone who just wants to see what's inside without creating an account:-
http://www.inkfactory.com/blog/bitstamped/ink-factory-launch...
For coarse data, the PricewaterhouseCoopers annual patent lit studies are pretty good: http://www.pwc.com/us/en/forensic-services/publications/2013....
Aaron Swartz clip from 'America' the movie
Please put your contact information and skill set in your profile. Are you available for working remotely?
How would you reverse a linked list with a loop?
This occurred to me as well: the graph data model is one of the few areas in which you might practically need to address this problem. Again, however, a lot of these issues specific to the graph data model are open research questions and not really appropriate to an engineering interview.
Finding the loop in a graph is a much more valid scenario and any candidate aware of traversal algorithms will have a much better chance of dealing with it than finding loop in a LL.
Ask HN: Progress through Technology: Accelerating or Decelerating?
I came across an interesting debate on this very question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZbWnIALeE

My question to HN: is technological innovation and its impact still booming as it's been from the beginnings of Silicon Valley post-WWII? Or are we slowing down in a sense, and picking all the low-hanging fruit we can, as a result focusing more on finance and short-term 'app lotteries' that we build on top of the mobile duopoly?

Here's an interesting thought: the emergence of the 'sharing economy' (AirBnB, Lyft, etc) as a way to provide value and earn profits through efficiency, probably came about because there was little innovation happening in the fundamental fields in which they were born (housing and automobiles, respectively). To be clear, this is not necessarily a bad thing - in fact, it's definitely a net positive. But you might imagine being a bit worried when we start doing this with our computer devices (say, perhaps, some scheme in which we share processing cycles on devices not being used) because it means our compute devices are fundamentally not getting better as they've been.
Blog – Job Simulation Assessment Centre
I thought the same! My first impression reading the title of this submission was: is now bitstamp acting like gox?
For a more permanent timestamp, just post your hash in a newspaper's classified ads.
The difference being that we know the first one is happening right now.

The average user will probably not be MITM'd. There simply are too many users and not enough attackers. Additionally, the attacker must hit the user during their first visit to the site or never.
Are they all running on just hopes and dreams?

Well, yeah. Being the "biggest" puts you in a good spot to ride out the growth of bitcoin, but bitcoin is currently tiny. All the exchanges are tiny.
I proved that my solution had optimal time complexity using discrete calculus, for a highly non-trivial problem that requires to come up with unexpected ideas under huge stress.

They saw my own open-space real-time software 3D rendering engine with texturing and shading (C++/Asm) at SourceForge already, they saw my own SQL server (many students at my first university were ripping it off for their own class projects in the next years so it was a mistake to make it open) as well as other projects I did prior to that interview so they were familiar with my coding style and quality.

Also, before that while working at SUN I did some work on a test suite with 10,000s of tests, many of them for SUN's own compliance with one of their standards, making sure it was executing on a distributed cluster every day for every branch they had in order to ship the best quality to customers. Many of these tests were for obscure cluster failure cases using custom bleeding-edge test frameworks. So the answer is no, I didn't write any test at Google interview, it wasn't required.

How can you prove you can code in a team during an one-on-one interview? At best you can give hints that you are willing to discuss stuff and change your progress on input from the interviewer and explore if there is any sort of chemistry between you two, which is about all you can do.

I really hate this kind of nitpicking, averaging everyone to a "normal" level, trying to find something wrong in someone because she or he goes against (IMO) lazy typical stereotype. Enjoy your mediocrity! Are there still hackers on HN?
+1 to that. Most programming jobs are about integrating a bunch of different technologies together to solve a business problem. In 20 years I've never written a linked-list or sorting algorithm for work yet interviews are increasingly narrowly scoped to algorithm questions. I've found that these questions are usually asked by young people because they are fresh out of school and have been led to believe that knowledge of algorithms is the most important consideration. Give them a decade of creating products based on css, html, node.js, nosql, yessql, etc and they will come to realize that programming is more about understanding what a customer needs and finding the most efficient way of delivering a solution. Ability to work with other, lead a team, write clearly, explain to customers the tradeoffs and costs of different solutions are actually way more important than knowing how to find a cycle in a linked list.
I'm no fan of this particular interview question, but the article takes it too far. You can figure out tortoise-and-hare algorithm by reasoning (I'm pretty sure I did the first time I've seen the problem - although not in an interview setting). The key is to recognize that there's a very limited number of things you can do given all the constraints: moving pointers is pretty much the only tool you have.

If it indeed took 12 years for the algorithm to appear, it's likely because finding loops in a linked list isn't a very common problem, not because the algorithm itself is that hard.
"Algorithms" is Not a Four-Letter Word (Jamis Buck)
The Long Tail of The Cloud
Mala fama, just my new blog. thank you
An algorithmic approach to GitHub exploration
Help me get my app to Top 100 and I'll donate my $1000 ad budget to Red Cross.
Honestly, I've found just acknowledging the hard work and effort they've put in, while in an all team context, is more rewarding than a trinket.

The best reward you can give is your respect and appreciation, especially if given publicly, signaling that you value that person. You'll be a stronger team if you can show true appreciation for one another.

(PS: Take the team out for beer too, obviously :) )
Basically you're saying that I'm playing with fire with SSH because I trust a host on first view: everything not stamped by a third party is rogue.

Trust is not a commodity to be exchanged by money!
I don't mean to be coy and snide, but I bet they'd appreciate a raise if you think they are worth it. Kind of goes up against, 'Need to keep it cheap'. If money isn't an option, then as was mentioned, some honest, sincere and public acknowledgement of their work is a great way to thank them.
Just approach companies directly, your 'crime' if you can call it that was more the mistake of Sylint Corporation, not yours. Employers will understand that good people in our industry tend to be 'curious' and will want to work with your skills etc :)