skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Yes, that's exactly it. node := node.next.next

2) Yes, you could, and that is a valid way to discover a loop. However, consider that your linked list is already a store of the contents of the list. Rather than copying values out, you may as well use the list itself.

If you could assume that the loop contains all members of the list, then you could detect the loop by iterating through the list and checking to see if the node is the same as the head of the list. Unfortunately, the loop doesn't always point back to the head of the list, so you may have something like this:

1 -> 2 -> 3
| |
^ \/
5 <- 4

By maintaining two node references, and advancing one of them twice as quickly as the other, you are effectively doing the exact same check, but eliminating the problem that the loop may not include the head. In both tests, the separation between the two referenced nodes increases by one every time, but only in the second test is the "head" reference guaranteed to eventually be in the loop.
I believe all GTK3 themes are CSS so you might be able to edit the padding manually. However, this goes against it being easy to customize.
> I'd say these are more industry standard practices than leading edge.

Yeah, that's sort of what "best practices" are all about. They are for teaching outsiders what insiders have learned through practice. The intended audience is everyone who doesn't already know this.

If you consider the article of no practical interest for a seasoned insider, that's about the highest praise you can give.
We used to have a role called "systems analyst", who's job (amongst other things) was to look at the existing system and figure out how it could be improved by software. Of course, that role's kinda fallen out of favour these days...
I like this for introductory SQL:

http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/

It was written specific to Oracle (and vintage 1990s Oracle at that), but for the most part that's not terribly significant.
Such laws aren't necessarily designed to give you an out when police are looking for incriminating evidence.

It's also there to prevent a government agency from accessing your personal materials to find something to hold against you in a form of retaliation for some transgression or power play.
If you argued that many programming languages already provide list.size() or equivalent (more so if I told you "in a language of your choice" before), I'd swallow my pride and accept it.

Then I'd suggest you try the other way, but it's a perfectly good answer.
The problem with using this as a meta-question, is that someone who knows the answer may treat it as such.

That is, the person who comes to realize the canonical way of solving it may truly be brilliant and having been hinted and helped along the way came up with the solution, or he might have already known it and just played a metagame, assuming that's what you wanted.

Basically, you have four possible outcomes:

People who have never heard of it, don't come up with the canonical solution.

People who have heard of it and just blurt out the answer.

People who have never heard of it, but who come to realize it over the course of the interview.

People who have heard of it and who play it as a game, working towards it and then suddenly having an epiphany.

The first is interesting. The second you hopefully dispense with the question as being useful. The third would be a great hire, but is indistinguishable from the fourth, who you've learned nothing about except they know how to play your interview process. Which may or may not be the criteria you're looking for.
German government ends Verizon contract
unless the interviewer plans to move the goal posts, there was no specified memory restriction in the original question.
The simple link building technique most SEOs get wrong
If you do not change - some people will complain, if you do change - other people will complain. Some people will always complain. This is open source product and if enough designers/developers will feel it is going into wrong direction, I am pretty sure it will be forked. And for people who like gnome2 experience - there is mate desktop. So it looks like most cases are covered.
To add to this: Torvalds has definitely let changes into the kernel which he was initially against (particularly when changes moved away from the "UNIX way" of doing things to more complex, but more efficient, solutions). However he can be talked into things with reason (and data!), he can snap at people, but then the conversation continues and progress is made.
(Possible) Evidence that the IRS specifically targeted groups affiliated with the tea party movement.
They look straight out of Gnome 3/GTK+3/Adwaita for sure, especially the new Safari
Indeed, a "silly puzzler" is "any question I couldn't solve when I tried".
My experience with TDD is that it is very helpful from a design perspective because it gets you to think about the code before you write it. How is the API going to work? What should I name this method? As an industry we use to dedicate too much time to this (RUP, etc). Now, we don't think about it enough.

As far as actually improving code quality... not so much. For the money, I would much rather see an hour of functional test development rather than an hour of unit test development (and I put TDD in the unit test category). I think functional tests provide more value and our industry has put way too much emphasis on unit tests.

100% unit test coverage says nothing about code quality. 100% functional coverage does. Functional tests also tend to be less brittle – which is a nice bonus.
It solves the buzzword-compliance requirements.
Wikipedia redesigns are becoming the new Hello World.
But why? One puzzling thing about our industry is our obsession with finding suitable proxy indicators for programming ability.

But we can test for programming ability directly.
UX Design “Fails” In Star Wars
Great stuff, thanks a lot!
Then just come up with an algorithm that proves if the program will halt or not. Easy peasy.
My experience with ExtJS is terrible...I will actively run away from any future positions that even remotely consider it.

It might have made sense 6 or 7 years ago...but these days it is mostly a pain in the ass.
I have had this problem in real life. I had a graph database, and I needed to find the end of a path in the graph. If the the path looped back on itself, my program would not terminate.
What would you choose now? taking into account open source and commercial products.

I am feeling a Windows GUI development deja vu with the current web UI state of the art. You could see excellent or nice user interfaces (e.g. winamp) but at the end they are custom made. Even Microsoft didn't provide the basic widgets (thinking in MFC) to build a basic application.
DEC, yes :) the book looks very intriguing, much appreciated!
When I interview for data scientist positions I ask your favorite question, but with "programming language" replaced by "statistical analysis package". (There's overlap between the two sets; their intersection includes Python, with the SciPy stack being what it is now.) I honestly don't care what package they name; it's more a way to get them talking about how they use whatever package they respond with, which reveals quite a bit.

Or, at least, I think it does. I'd love to have data on which interview questions actually elicit signal-containing answers...
Your app is I think the perfect use case for ExtJS.You need widgets,charts .... all in one place ready for use.No directives or jQuery plugins to write. That's why the framework was created as first place ,LOB apps in JS instead of flex/silverlight.

They just forgot the declarative part that made flex and silverlight easy to work with. I personally dont like these huge JSON like scripts to configure a component. But I guess that's also why they sell a IDE.

How about unit testing? does ExtJS provides tools for that today?
> With all of those hundreds and hundreds of minds, this problem remained open for 12 years.

A very good point. Some people just forget that while solution can look simple when it's already known, actually finding it can be extremely hard and more akin to invention breakthrough. So such question is more similar to asking to prove some difficult theorem really, than to anything else.
The coin won't get any advantage from playing in its home field, for example. I specifically said that I'm not arguing that this is the case here, but one can conceive of an example where it would.
Andrew Godwin, the creator of South built the new migrations feature for Django 1.7. Here is a presentation he gave on the topic at PyCon US 2014: http://pyvideo.org/video/2630/designing-djangos-migrations
Ask HN: How to arrange offices when growing?
Question for those that are in the same situation as we are, probably most of you :-) We've grown from 2 to 15 people and are hiring 3 to 5 more in the next two months. When we went from 2 to 5 we just moved from flex spots to a large rectangular office. While growing we've basically just added 10 more desks so they're all in little islands of 3 or 4 in the same rectangular space.

Of course growing also means we're no longer just a big development-team, but also have account managers, customer support and consultants, which due to many phonecalls etc cause a lot more noise than a bunch of developers with headphones.

So how did others deal with this? We're not big enough yet to get an office with lots of separate rooms. We also really want to keep the collaborative/pairing culture we have in the development team, people move around and share keyboards all the time. But we do need to get them a bit more quite environment somehow, preferably without splitting the team entirely because there is a lot of collaboration.
Complexity optimization is a generally useful skill.

"moving the goal posts" is called "every month at work, when you finish 1 task and then move on to another task, instead of going home and getting paid to rest on your laurels"
A Concept that Helps you Shape your Game’s Present and Future
I liked the part where he quotes himself
At my company, we're using graph-based models for most of our NLP stuff (mainly entity extraction ATM) and our ANNs (mainly object classifiers).

- Jonathan
I haven't used it but I have found most of these demos to look very staged and there is too much magic going on. Isn't the whole point of this to blur the lines between language and cloud so you are eternally dependent on their system and have to pay them when you need to seriously scale or deploy something?
In terms of readability, I actually much rather prefer this one.
Have there been any proposals aimed at reducing the transferability of patents? Perhaps the lifetime of the patent could halve each time it is transferred to a new legal entity along with some reduction in possible damages.
Same here. Was showing $43.99 for the bundle, ends up as $54.99 when checking out. Going back to the main page still shows it at $43.99 (but it says "Print cover: $54.99" in small print, whatever this means).
Thats the one thing ExtJS has going for it...a full suite of widgets that make it so any jackass can plop in a data table and move on.

The problem is when you want anything outside the realm of those widgets, or actual proper program structure and html/css...then you are in for the fun.

But as far as a replacement where you have a full suite of ready-made widgets you just wire up? I am not sure there is anything else out there near as comprehensive. Everything else will require you to wire up the logic for each of your widgets at the least...there are some html/css frameworks that will get you your widget on the page, but behavior? That's up to you.
I am the guy who asks that question on every interview. You can hate on me now!
Let me clarify. I don't expect the candidate to get to the "a-ha" moment at all. I make my expectations very clear upfront so that the other side wouldn't panic. However, I expect to see how the candidate would approach the problem with the right attitude so I could get some insight of his/hers thinking patterns.
I personally wouldn’t mind if an interviewer asked me something in the lines of "how would you build a nuclear plant?", although I have no knowledge on the matter.
The Home Computer Wars is excellent, great insight into Tramiel, his various experiences prior, and how he made Commodore so successful during that period.

At this level in this subtree, hoggle's recommendations of Accidental Empires is strong endorsed, if for no other reason than the anecdote about how Intel, by then a very big company in revenues, possibly Fortune 500, was almost killed by a single well intentioned low level employee. Emphasizes how much more fragile tech companies are than old fashioned Fortune 500 companies.

The Cuckoo's Egg is a fantastic story in and of itself, about how a starving astrophysics grad student given a temporary sysadmin job went from a less than $1 accounting discrepancy to nailing down a KGB plot. One of the more interesting things is how the always publicity oriented FBI (best known way back when for bank robberies and kidnappings, infamous but easy to solve crimes), under who's remit this sort of counterintelligence was/is, wouldn't give the author the time of day (it didn't meet their $100K lost threshold). His best government contact was a delightfully colorful CIA guy (you'll love his snail mail address), who could only supply advice and connections.
As to the "Long live DEC!" I know of a company here in Austria which still deploys VMS machines (albeit not any more on Alpha but Itanium/HP Hardware iirc). Thanks for the book recommendation!
I really like the questions about programming languages. What's their favorite, just favorite language, features, etc. If the candidate says they've only ever used one, or they don't have any features they dis/like, that's a flag. If they point out a feature, you can use it to dive into a deeper discussion about something they say they know about.
Ask HN: How to Find a Developer Job with a Felony? 
Background: In 2011, I was arrested for violating the CFAA (I found that Sylint Corporation [usinfosec.com] was running a very out-of-date and publicly vulnerable DotNetNuke for the Infragard Tampa Bay website and raised the alarm publicly, and well, they didn't quite appreciate that) and sentenced to probation in 2012. I'm currently in a period of limbo following the end of the contract portion of a temp-to-perm gig, and I've been trying to find something a little more certain.

I live in Orlando, FL, and I never have the opportunity to speak with a company directly. Instead, everyone outsources their talent acquisition to IT recruiters/headhunters that, as a third party, refuse to represent me to prospective employers because of this blemish on my record. The recruiters' oligarchy on the job openings in the area have created a sort of impenetrable barrier. (Ironically, many of the recruiters I have spoken with are from all over the country.)

So what should someone in my situation do? What's the best way to find a company in Orlando that hires directly?
Duplicate?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951853
> My favorite question is completely different. "What do you like best about your favorite programming language and what would you change about it if you could?" Anyone who doesn't see any flaws in their favorite language, particularly if it's Java, gets politely shown the door.

What about the poor people who've found a language that they actually like, and understand the tradeoffs that were made? I suspect I recently failed an interview for not having a good answer to that question, but really, what am I supposed to say? If I thought there were significant problems with my favourite language, I'd find a better one.
It's very, very hard to make a model that outperforms bookmakers in the long run. If you find some sort of inefficiency in the betting market, maybe. But it turns out that most often the betting market is inefficient at the points where casual betters outnumber the "sharps," which tends to be the points at which the bookmakers have the highest juice on their odds, so you're not likely to come out ahead anyway.
My hope is that React is going to be the foundation for the next generation ExtJS-like project. It has been designed with both components and speed in mind.
I have. I had help, but the process was just like any other problem. State constraints. Look for a violation of constraints. Sort of like proof by contradiction.

I can't remember the actual hints. I blitzed through 3 or 4 naive solutions first. My favorite was using tagged pointers to mark visited nodes. Eventually through a combination of hints and exploration I got to the idea of using two cursors. At that point it was a simple constraint about which cursor would be in front of the other and if there was a violation of that constraint it could only be because of a cycle.

It made for a good interview, but there was good chemistry between myself and my interviewer. Any question would have worked in reality.
The naive way to do it is just create a hashset that stores pointer to next, walk the linked list, and if you get a collision you have a cycle. The problem is that it requires O(n) memory, where the tortoise and hare method only needs O(1).
How many times has this been on HN..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822983
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652333

I know it's more times but I haven't found those threads..
Meet Google's futurist-in-chief
It also quite undocumented so you spend a day or two googling around and breaks on random minor updates when the package manager overwrites your changes again. Sounds fun.
After a few months of diving into the technical details, I'm bullish on ethereum (or maybe I should say bullish on block chain technology). Any thoughts on it?
Yes, I did figure it out. Actually, the answer I came up with was slightly different: it was pretty clear that I had to move the first pointer to get inside the cycle. Once I was inside, I thought the second pointer would need to move a lot to find the cycle, rather than just going two hops. So I proposed to advance the first pointer by n, and the second one by exp(n). Maybe it would go faster, who knows.

By the way, this was the question at my first interview ever, so I do remember it quite well.

PS: I interviewed many candidates since, and I would never ask such a question.
I completely disagree that this question is irrelevant. I can imagine this exact situation in compiler design where you have dependent types that can't have infinite loops (in pseudo-code where forward declarations are not needed or implied):

type a = b

type b = a

If a program has a structure like this with cyclic dependencies, then the compiler must be aware of this and break. (At least, I can imagine a situation where this could be a desired attribute.)
Once in an interview I was asked to implement a synchronization mechanism between processes using shared memory. It turns out this is the petersons algorithm. I mean if I could solve this, I would be Peterson :) heck, even smarter because I would do it in 20 mins.
"minimalist"
Can you tell us what that question is? Not details, but the general idea.

Me, I'd ask them this:

1. Write a function that takes a string of hex digits and converts them to a long (or equivalent in the language). Keep code minimal.

2. The opposite. Keep code minimal.

3. Write a function that reverses a UTF-8 encoded string (provide a good reference to the UTF-8 format), keeping combining characters in the reversed string in the same order they were in the original. I.e. aüç should be çüa, not ¸c¨ua. Assume the string of bytes is a proper utf-8 string, that only combining characters have to be order-preserved and that the only combining characters are the ones with unicode character codes in these ranges: (give them some standard ranges). Keep code minimal.

Anybody who can do these three things should be able to learn most any other tech stack you throw at them. If on the other hand you're looking for people with specific expertise with a given branch of computer science, then you need a different set of tests. The central question is - do you need a developer or a mathematician specialising in discrete mathematics. Those are two different sets of people, though they tend to overlap.
Too Many Signals – Resque on Heroku
Hypothetically, if when asked this question in an interview I were to reply "I'd look up the canonical solution on the internet and just implement that. I have better things to keep in my brain than linked-list algorithms, and there's no way I'm going to beat decades of phd work off the top of my head", what would happen?

Obviously it depends on the job I was interviewing for. Let's assume I'm not angling for a position as lead on a distributed load balancing layer or something.

I suppose if they're looking to see my problem solving workflow then I'd look like kindof a dick. But then, as the article points out, so would they.
Yes, I had it during 1st phone screen with Microsoft, coding it in their interviewing system and I figured out the two pointer version without a prior knowledge.
> 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.

This is disturbing. For an organisation that promoted itself as a focal point for Bitcoin trading, claiming to be the largest, what does this mean for the other exchanges and services out there? Are they all running on just hopes and dreams?

Overall this article is quite light and it would have been nice to see more questions asked. It seemed rather softball. Like where were the questions about his falsifying of his employment history? How did he go from running a gaming service (not Magic, but Ragnarok Online) to running a currency exchange?

These questions should be asked and they should be asked in a hardball sort of fashion.
Good to know. I have never seen breakage since I use mint :)
>Serve these through a CDN that is optimised for serving static files to ensure high transfer speeds and therefore increased user happiness.

I was not aware this was that common or even considered always the best practice. Is this really the best practice for any website? How exactly is a CDN more optimized than nginx on a dedicated server with 1GB connection?
Slaughter-Free Milk: Will Customers Pay More to Put Cows Out to Pasture?
Because we want to maintain compatibility with 3rd party admin extensions which often depend on the specific markup, we've had a lot of luck with CSS-only reskinning. The markup really isn't terrible so we've made sure no Django CSS is loaded (just create 0 byte CSS files matching each built in CSS file).

We then add in Bootstrap CSS+JS so we can some of the handy UI components and then our own CSS on top of that.
moving goal posts, is "I asked you for x, you provided me with x, but I really wanted y, so now I'm going to tell you you're wrong"

You want someone to answer a programming question within a particular set of boundaries, you set those boundaries.
True, although you'd be surprised to see how many people fail to provide proper docs, or use git for source control, still in 2014. I agree with others in here, maybe the title is just misleading more than anything else.
So the consensus on here seems to be that KDE (like GNOME) is too busy doing their own things, while not really catering to the needs of actual users.

Not having used KDE in a while (since the plasma disaster) I'm obviously not that into current details, but I remember advocating KDE over GNOME because it just worked and have what I needed.

Since Ubuntu those days are definitely gone. But now GNOME + unity is slipping too.

My next desktop may be cinnamon. I just wish I didn't have to be desktop-hopping like this to keep a nice, simple and working desktop. (and no, lxde and xfce is not for me. I find then too minimal and underpolished)