skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've taught some very intillegent third graders. No. No they wouldn't have under the time constraints and pressures. People blank with pressure. The first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak.

First easy thing to do which isn't describe. Tell the person to sit down with a pen and paper. And then talk about the why and how. That was the demeaning part. Antoi-collaborative, very scary.
Boys and their Toys: Tools the 7th Kingdom
http://www.buy.com/prod/apple-iphone-3gs-32gb-never-locked-l...
This is all true, yet I feel the above advice is a bit shortsighted.

It comes down to how you really feel about the job. If you really believe you are being taken advantage of, and management is unresponsive to requests for raises or additional equity then you have a choice. You can passive-aggressively coast along being mediocre to milk a paycheck or you can find something better. I refer to the former choice disparagingly because once you adopt this attitude then you have stopped training yourself for a startup environment. Instead you are preparing yourself for the ass-covering world of corporate employment. Maybe you can use this tactic to build a nice little nest egg to start your own business, but you will effectively have stopped learning about how to make a startup succeed.

The bottom line is that when you go to work for an entrepreneur, if they are any good they are going to milk you for all you're worth and its up to you to negotiate for what you think you deserve. You wouldn't want to work for a startup where the entrepreneur gave away cash and equity like candy because those companies are orders of magnitude more likely to fail.

Ultimately if you want double-digit equity you need to become a founder yourself. Whether to do this now, or continue working in other people's startups to gain experience is a strategic question that everyone needs to answer for themselves. However whatever choice you make you shouldn't be bitter with the outcome unless promises were actually broken, and even then you just need to shake it off and chalk it up to experience. A lot of people go the cynical route and I believe that is a huge mistake.

BTW I say this as a two-year 80-hour-a-week family-having 31-year-old working for someone else on less then 2% equity. If we achieve some kind of exit I'll probably do my own thing next, otherwise I'll probably join another startup.
Depends on how the data model got created.

If there was sufficient refactoring, you should be able to run most enterprises on a small-ish number of tables. Say 100-200 (not including lookups) I'd almost bet that you could go <100, but I'll hedge my bets a bit.

If you don't refactor, and most enterprises don't, then yes, you can run easily into the 1500-3000+ range. You can also get this big if you buy a one-size-fits-all data model, which has to be God's punishment to mankind for being able to draw boxes and lines. You can also grow fast in a hurry if you have a team who love "patterns" and are not afraid to plop them in everywhere.

Most enterprise problem domains do not require anywhere near the number of tables they use to do their business.
It is always hard to check these longish proofs. For this one it takes a bit of digging to find what the proof method is (versus what parts are the survey). The method of this write-up seems to be at the end of section 3 on page 20 where Jin Xu has cut a general graph up into smaller parts (which are claimed to be 4-colorable by induction hypothesis) and then needs to show they can be glued back together without ruining the coloring. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the 4-color theorem is true- so you can't expect to whip up an over all counter-example. You would have to show some step fails to meet the assumptions of the next step.
It's pointed out explicitly in the article that such action does not work.

Feel free to try the following:
Have her hit the button.
Don't hit End; let the phone do its thing and reply that you don't have data access.
Consult your monthly bill.
What a dumb article. Wikipedia has always had promotions at the top of the page, for pledge drives. There's nothing contradictory about not running ads while still running promos for your own organization. NPR and PBS do it all the time.
I have my users sign up before they can add any content, but I'm going to be implementing "lazy registration" soon, so that they can add their content, see how they like it, and then sign up if they'd like to. It's less of a barrier of entry and I think it will help drive more content being added.

See #1 here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/23/10-ui-design-patt...
Great thoughts - thanks. I don't agree with them all, but you've given me to think, and I'll adopt most of them.

I hope others provide their opinions too.
The Dumbing Down of the Technologist
I have a bit of experience here, as I run a website builder app for bands.

I launched Bandzoogle.com in 2003, around the same time that MySpace came out. I thought we were dead; they were offering all the stuff we did (a guestbook, music player, photo gallery) for FREE. How could we compete with that?

We decided to focus on being a "premium" service, and kept adding stuff that bands wanted. To my surprise MySpace actually helped our business. Bands would sign up because they wanted something more than "just a myspace page", or "without all those ads". We're the SmugMug to their Photobucket. It worked for us, we have 10 employees and have been profitable since 2004.

That said, social networks like MySpace are still necessary for bands. Potential fans will stumble across an artist's profile page, often from links from other bands they are playing a gig with. The goal is to hook them, then get them over to the artist's .COM site. There, they own the fan list, and can present a much more compelling experience than on a profile page alone. It is a bit more work to have to maintain profiles everywhere, but companies like ArtistData, Reverbnation, and my own (Bandzoogle) are making this a lot simpler.
I've heard multiple people say something similar to what you just said: "I don't actually want a large house, but that's what I need in order to sell it." Perhaps fashion trends will change, but "Bigger is better" seems pretty ingrained into human thinking.

(Not surprisingly, people often find something to do with that space, and then they really do need the space, a sad loop.)
I'm in Adwords Hell
Although some parts are similar to mac....I disagree on windows 7 borrowing its appearance from Mac. For me, windows 7 is much more upgraded and more cool than Mac. Factors like, being a user friendly and many more......Just correct me guys.....I'm accepting both negative and positive feedback.
I think if you and I go point for point on modern web vs. '97 web, you will lose pretty quickly. The things you remember from the halcyon days of the Internet (Archie, Gopher, anonymous FTP sites, Sendmail vulnerabilities, and Usenet) aren't even better than the individual things that have replaced them today.

Quick. What's the site you most miss that the modern "corporate" web has destroyed?
Well, if they did try to copy the mac in design, they clearly failed.

I love my windows machine, hate my mac, but from a design perspective the mac is prettier than Windows 7.
For me, Windows still significantly trumps Mac in usability. Nothing but keyboard shortcuts is so 1980s.
Erlang is based on message passing ala Actors. Very different things.

Take a look at this if you don't believe that their approach hasn't changed: http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/
Direct links to handouts:

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...
I would support a decision by Wikipedia to run ads, so I'm disappointed they've decided to declare themselves "Ad-Free Forever".

Never say never, I'd say: there could be a tasteful model, perhaps with community review and liberal opt-out, that would help magnify the project's impact many times over.

See also:

http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2007/01/02/wikipedia-advertisin...

(Maybe someday they'll decide they mean "forever so far", and it will become like PBS -- ads in all but name.)
> rather than some half-assed assessment of me as a person
> made in an interview.

Any judgement made in a 45-minute (or less!) interview is going to be half-assed. That's the unfortunate way of the world. How do you think people should interview?

(Genuinely curious; I do interviews, and I think I do pretty well, but it's difficult to honestly examine one's own methods without feedback.)
Neat base idea, but the blog post is just business porn. He's just restating the old adage about getting stuck in ruts.

The key skills is being able to tell when you're stuck using hammer because it's what you're familiar with, and he doesn't discuss that at all.
OpenMRS is pretty big. I don't know the exact number of tables, but it's up there. http://openmrs.org/wiki/Data_Model
Maybe you forgot to mention it, but how did you go from "discussing an intentionally impossible problem" to "misguided, silly behavior"? If your ego makes it upsetting to work with people who "jab repeatedly, critiquing [your] logic", or find it upsetting not being able to answer a question, that says quite a lot about what kind of work environment you'd be a good fit for.
I grew up in Glen Ellyn and remember having a birthday party at the Big Banjo. I thought it was the coolest place when I was a kid.
Yeah, it's easy. When you deal with logic problems all day. Or if you're used to solving problems in your head.

Personally, I solved it easily in my head. But, I had to read the problem the first time, then read it again slowly getting all the numbers into the proper places in my head. An interview is a stressful place, so easy things can get a lot harder.
Ask HN: What are the top technology aggregation sites?
We all know and love HN, but I was wondering: what other article aggregation sites are out there? A place that provided user-ranking and comments.

The three that obviously come to mind are Reddit, Digg, and DZone. Slashdot does aggregation but I don't think they report the upvotes of articles, so they're out.

Any others come to mind?
Here are a few resources for Couchdb:

* an intro: http://aimee.mychores.co.uk/2008/09/07/post/320

* a use case: http://kore-nordmann.de/blog/couchdb_a_use_case.html

* CouchDB Implementation: http://horicky.blogspot.com/2008/10/couchdb-implementation.h...

* joins in couchdb: http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2007/10/couchdb-joins

* peepcode: http://peepcode.com/products/couchdb-with-rails
Hagiographic is Greek, from "hagios" = saint + "graph" = writing, meaning "writing about someone as if they were a saint".

DH0. Name-calling.

This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. We've all seen comments like this:

u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!

But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. A comment like

The author is a self-important dilettante.

is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag."
Oh, please. Perhaps they care about pedigree and GPA for new grads, but what else do they have to go on? I'm 40, and they didn't seem to care at all where I went to school nor what my grades were. The interview was challenging, but a lot of fun (the good kind of challenging), and certainly not a "nightmare."
What gets me is the "I'll keep an open mind" type of comments

I think the 'open mind' is indeed the correct attitude here. If a very experienced programmer with stellar credentials comes along and says 'this is a good solution to the problems I've faced in my career', I'm inclined to listen very patiently even if my first impressions are negative.

This doesn't mean that you are wrong about the syntax, but perhaps there is something useful below the surface that's worth digging to discover. Maybe the right solution will be blend of a modern bracket-free syntax and the guts of something like Go.

For me, the syntax isn't really that important. Probably this is just due to my brain damage from coping with C.
I've been reading a bit about small houses, and one point people make over & over is that going small makes it much easier to afford doing things nicely.

Sure, if you're planning on flipping the house in a few years it'll be harder to get the price you think is right, but otherwise, there's a lot to be said for looking at a house as a place to live vs. just as a financial instrument.
Get your act together, Data.gov
I pretty much thought the same thing. Then I came to the conclusion that if it succeeds in its performance goals (10-20% slower than C), it has a good chance of being the language of choice for those hackers that now use C for everything, even when using C means that some memory leak or buffer overflow is likely to going to cause a security flaw in the future. If things like web- and mail servers were implemented in a Go instead of C, many security related bugs in those applications might go away.
I disagree. I actually think the questions in both your example and google's was good in seeing how you approach a problem. The point is not the answer. It is the approach.

I can think back to meetings where questions of similar nature have popped up. You have guys that want the precise numbers and refuse to make any assumption of any sort. You have guys that throw stupid guesses and just want to move forward. You have guys that do a little bit of thinking to come to a quick but critically thought out answer. This seems like a good way to identify which category you fall in and whether your approach is a good fit for the job.
On the other hand, specific data about actual click-through rates, number of users, number of ad impressions, etc. would be required input to any reasonable approach for such judgement. Data, that is, not guesses. Estimates without ballpark cultural knowledge are also just guesses.

For my own part, never having bought Google ads, nor having displayed them, I would rather estimate no more than 1% of people would click on them no more than once per day. That's probably because I'm cynical about ads, use AdBlock, would rather rely on search and recommendation for finding products, and so do my peers. I don't have a good pool of knowledge for answering this question in a way that would be accurate, no matter what my estimation skills are.
Or she was just very nervous. Your cognitive abilities decline if you're put on the spot. Have you ever said something stupid while speaking in front of a group?

The girl goes to Syracuse, which is a somewhat selective University. She would not have gotten in if she couldn't do the math (her SAT scores simply wouldn't be high enough.)

This question would have been easy for me and actually would have probably boosted my confidence during the interview. But that's because I'm a quantitative person. Throw a question I was completely unexpecting though and I could be stuttering and saying stupid things. I'm sure there would be some questions or exercises the author could complete far more smoothly than I could.

Calling her innumerate (and making the analogy of her being illiterate and thus incompetent) for this slip makes me think you haven't been on many interviews yet.
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Chapter 5 of The Art of Unix Programming by esr, "Textuality". That's the reason I haven't used databases for simpler things in years.
Yes. I can attest to that... my enterprise day job product has 1395 tables and 2286 views. It's a real mess actually.
so can i see any of this stuff or is it locked behind corporate doors just like all the other enterprise projects i hear about?
I think that after they add some sort of generics, ie. parametric polymorphism, the language is semantically quite close to a modern ML-style language like OCaml, but with a syntax familiar to C hackers and a native support for concurrency.
Just having math questions written down in front of you without time pressure and dead air makes them about 1000% easier.
SPDY Protocol (HTTP v2?)
From PlayStation to Y Combinator: The Reddit Origin Story, Part 1
Sure.

Get into computers/UNIX/Linux when you're 13. Start working at startups when you're 15 as a junior sysadmin/scripter. Continue doing contract work through college. Become an expert UNIX developer by the time you are 21.

After college, work a few years for a company doing a high-end specialty product such as enterprise search or ERP system. Work on big client accounts. You want to beef up your resume at this point.

After 4 years start your own consulting firm in this space. Earn $150/hr+ for 30 or so hours/week doing consulting work and charge $5k/month/server for managed hardware running aforementioned enterprise platforms.

At this point you'll easily be making $250k, probably closer to $350k.

Or you could learn how to program in college and spend years 21-30 writing shitty web apps for startups, hoping to strike it rich when you're not a founder (stupid). This is what most people do.

Moral of the story: either do high end enterprise work, or be a startup founder. You will surely get screwed otherwise. This is a brutal industry and those who don't choose their paths wisely become wage slaves who make significantly less than blue collar tradesman.
Rigorous interviews will increase the number of false negatives, but decrease the number of false positives. I think your wording doesn't make that clear.

When the cost of a false positive is high, e.g. a bad employee can be very expensive in terms of time and money before he is identified and fired if he is fired at all, then it is worth the cost of a few more false negatives to be more sure that you aren't getting false positives.

It seems that very often someone who is the victim of being a false negative will rail against the system and claim it is unfair. If you can get them to look at it from the other side they will often agree the practice is quite reasonable.
Hasn't NASA announced new "breaking, clear evidence" of moon water/ ice every year for the past decade?
Great to hear, thanks for the reply. I've had a good experience with Strophe (never tried JSJaC), and the future of it is looking really bright. The lead developer of Strophe, Jack Moffitt, has been creating a jQuery-inspired plugin system for it, which will be awesome.
The interview process in this case worked fine. But it's silly and probably causes them to miss a LOT of good candidates. It's measuring a subjects ability to think critically... quickly and while under a lot of pressure.

Is SPEED of critical thinking important? How many positions at Google require people to think on their feet? How many positions require them to be comfortable/effective talking to strangers on the phone (for this woman's position, it might be the case)?

Check out the War For Talent ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/157851459 )... Andrew Chen has a good blog post talking about it: http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/07/28/what-if-interviews-poor...

Bottom line is that studies show over and over that "if you look at the marks that people get coming out of a hiring process versus the on-the-job marks they get in their first year in a job, they are actually not correlated at all."
Techmeme.com ...
Gang jailed for bank virus fraud
They (allegedly) programmed a computer to generate false records. It's not like they created a trading model that happened to break an esoteric SEC law, it was probably pretty darn clear to these programmers that they were doing something illegal.
Several things about channels.

The first is a random correction to a common meme. Channels can be created buffered or unbuffered. If they are unbuffered, then sender blocks. If buffereed, then sender blocks when the buffer is full. Buffering can improve performance significantly.

Secondly when you set up complicated messes of goroutines talking over channels it is easy to get deadlocks. There is a deadlock detection mechanism, but I don't have any details beyond knowing that some people have run into it.

Thirdly am I the only person in the world who looks at the channel mechanism and thinks how naturally it maps onto a capability style security system? I've pointed that out a few times and nobody seems to bite on it. Odd.
Technically, you can use the TM sign on anything that is covered under trademark law. That indicates that the logo, tagline, etc. is a distinguishable visual cue unique to your business. To gain the most legal protection, however, you must register it with the USPTO and use ®.

Surprisingly, I couldn't find an existing trademark on "Go Commercial" so it appears the OP is in the clear.
"knowing that in the near future I'm jumping to an open platform as quickly as possible"

Assuming that's even possible or realistic, which it often isn't in markets dominated by a single vendor. Supporting vendor lock-in, particularly as a developer, makes it harder for open alternatives to exist. It's common for a single vendor to dominate a market for years. The future of jumping to an open platform could simply never come to pass.
One of our custom applications that was started in the early 90's has about 750 tables and it only handles the order management and part of the manufacturing process for one division of our company. That doesn't include back office stuff like GL, AP, AR, Inventory, Payroll, etc.
So users want a list of items, without massive duplication (many shops selling the same toaster), while at the same time knowing the best price for each item. Seems Amazon have this nailed with their multiple retailer options.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but for the site he describes you'd get a whole ecosystem of "recommendation experts" or similar who will auto-spam replies on ToasterCo's behalf, and you'd also end up with standard keywords emerging, once people start to find words that correlate well with good replies.

It would probably work best in areas where companies sell their products direct, and are small enough to give personalised replies. Large corporations would surely give their sales people a set of model answers and you would end up with replies indistinguishable from spam.
Reading all the comments, I came to the conclusion he probably refers to this coment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940369

It would be great if he can confirm so.
The black text on dark green background makes it quite hard to read. Might want to fix that.
Yeah, the Strophe+Punjab is a little unwieldy (there are some use-cases for it, like federating to many XMPP servers - I just don't have this requirement now).

Are you using just Strophe, or some other js XMPP lib?
If you want to look at enterprise style LAMP you can look at Magentos database. <shudder>. It's 250? tables of pure dba geekery:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/_detail/doc/magento---sa...
Here's what I've learned about whistle blowing: you have little protections.

I was in a situation about 10 years ago where I wanted to report investor fraud to the SEC. My legal counsel told me I had no protections from being sued. My logic was that a contract (e.g. an employment contract) could not hold me liable for damages caused by reporting a crime. I was told my logic was wrong and that there are few protections. There have been various whistle blower laws for reporting specific crimes. Some of these have been repealed or allowed to lapse.
Oh good grief. Use a RDBMS when the relational model makes sense and luxuriate in the declarative power that SQL throws at you.

When your data model doesn't fit the relational idea, use another solution. While I am certainly no expert with ORM tools, I'm beginning to wonder if simply needing an ORM might indicate that you should consider a non-relational solution. At least an ORM is a flag for deeper thought.