skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Believe me, I tried to do honest optimization—running legitimate flower ads on Valentines Day, Walmart ads on Cyber Monday, auto insurance offers on car racing games, and so forth. For months, I went through over 150 offers across a dozen networks, systematically testing offers, ad copy, targeting, creative templates, and so forth. I couldn’t get a single one to work. And in a previous life I worked on Yahoo!’s internal analytics team—our job was to optimize traffic.

I finally came to this realization: People on Facebook won’t pay for anything. They don’t have credit cards, they don’t want credit cards, and they are not interested in shopping."

I found this out the hard way too. Trying to do legitimate business on a social network is like trying to sell life insurance at a night club. People just aren't in the right frame of mind when they are there to respond to it.

This is why Facebook's self-serve ad platform will never amount to anything. It will only be able to sell to platform games, dating sites, and maybe some t-shirts.
BBC Democracy Live - speech recognition applied to UK Parliamentary Debates
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Watched a presentation on Civil War medicine and surgery and the most interesting aspect was how they did all kinds of things not knowing why they worked. They did use chemicals to sterilize, but had no idea about germs. They had various powders to put in wounds that did actually aid clotting or accelerate healing, but they didn't know why at the time.

The survival rate was surprisingly high. You were dead for sure if you caught one in the guts, but otherwise they could do a lot. They could even do some basic brain surgery and fix your skull with a plate.
They'd be right about that. Experience in and of itself counts for nothing. There are a great many programmers who have years of experience programming badly. Nor have I ever met a great programmer who cared a fig about how many years of experience they or anyone else had.

What counts is the value you can add now.
In fact, in the life sciences, the back and forth is getting more common, and will increasingly get so as the models for research, esp in large scale biology change. On the CS side there are any number of examples as well.
I always ask coding questions and I always ask a question or two that are extremely difficult. The goal is not to get the correct answers (although that is a nice bonus), but instead to see how the candidate thinks a problem through. A candidate's thought process is more important than their mad hacking skillz.
Doing NaNoWriMo?  I wrote a simple story outliner last night ...
A biography of the solid-state disk
Why do you feel insulted if someone asks you to show for an hour that you can do what you intend to do for the next couple years? I mean - it's not like you can't do that, right?
It's really quite straight forward: Buy a Mac if you want OSX.

It's great to spend money on something that you enjoy!
Why would you feel more insulted writing out a bit of pseudo code than answering a technical question?
For Android a similar app is called Calorie Counter(free) and is also very good at making counting calories easier.
My biggest pet peeve with these types of tests is this: there are a lot of companies out there, and I’m sending out resumes to each one that I can find.

That's your first mistake.

Why should a company take you seriously if you don't take them seriously? Every resume you send out should be custom written and carefully crafted to address their requirements, not yours. Do you do any research into the companies you're applying to? You should.

Rather than sending out 50 stock resumes, you'd probably be better off picking the top half dozen or so opportunities and do everything you can to stand out. This includes a custom cover letter, follow up emails, thank you notes, etc., whatever it takes to make the connection.

I simply do not have the time to write fifteen code samples a day, just because you want to evaluate me against your coding test. Period.

There's your second mistake. Misdirected attitude. Again, you should be focused on their needs, not yours. If you don't have time to do 15 poorly, then just do one or two very, very well. No employer or recruiter gives a damn that you've chosen a shotgun approach.

Give of yourself without expectations of something in return. You may be surprised at the "unexpected" dividends you'll reap later.

FWIW: I have conducted over 2500 technical interviews and every single one of them has had to code, regardless of experience or background. What good is a programmer who doesn't want to code at the one point when it would provide the most benefit to everyone involved? In my experience, the best programmers were the most eager to give it a shot.
In the worst case, structural engineers don't produce bridges. I'm sure you could find some poor soul who spent a career drawing up proposals for bridges that were never built.
Hey everyone, yesterday I started my National Novel Writing Month novel, which I'm using as a treatment for a TV show idea I've got.

Anyway, after writing for a bit, I decided to do some outlining, so I wrote this quick and dirty web app to outline the chapters with acts and scenes.

It's probably bug-ridden and definitely incomplete, but I thought I'd share it. Let me know what you think!
I'm sincerely curious to hear your case in defence of critical literary analysis.
Not sure what you mean by logs, resources and changing trees.
But there is logging support (the python logging module).

Resources: There is AMQP QoS which makes sure it only receives as many tasks as it can handle.

Task hard and soft time-limits is coming in 1.0 (patch ready). If the soft timeout is exceeded an exception is raised which the task can catch to do any clean up before the hard time limit is exceeded and the task is forcefully killed.

Rate limit (per task type or global) using the token bucket algorithm (which allows for bursts of data). For 1.0 (patch ready and tested)

Otherwise you have to OS process resource limits (cpu/memory etc).

Monitoring is coming in 1.0 as well, someone is working on
a monitoring system with a web-frontend where you can see the current state of the system (support for deleting already published tasks might be added, but then on an opt-in basis)

The current scheduling system is flawed (it uses the database, which is a dead end in my opinion), a new solution is almost ready which uses a separate centralized service that works like a clock sending out messages at schedule time: http://wiki.github.com/ask/celery/rewriting-the-periodic-tas...

Now for changing trees, I'm not sure what you mean here, please correct me if I misunderstood. Messages can not be changed once they have been published, so the task itself is responsible for changing the execution order. You can chain tasks, so say TaskA launches another task. You can retry tasks if they fail.

Oh and there's the message routing features made available by AMQP, which means you can have different servers/instances handle different tasks.

Celery has a lot of features, and even more is under development, so I don't think I can list them all here. I can't see anything hindering a Celery implementation of Norc, but as I read it you started working on this before celery started. Bad luck when we could have shared a lot of work :(
Good compilers will warn you.

Extend this to functions as well.

I had a bug like

if (foo(b == A))

instead of

if(foo(b) == A)
I would call that the pathological case rather than the average one. Maximizing grades against learning as little as possible is the lowest hurdle you can cross while still technically being successful as a student.

It's also worth remembering that "student" does not always mean "child currently undergoing mandatory education". I would think that adults who return to complete their diplomas/degrees or add a graduate-level program on top of the undergraduate one are comparatively more likely to choose to maximize knowledge rather than just grades. It's mostly commonly expressed as "now that I'm personally paying for it, I want to get my money's worth".
One person doesn't often store two copies of the same file for no good reason.

But the great thing about this is that if operates at the block level - so if two people take a CAD drawing, change a small bit and save it to their home directories, most of the similar data can be stored once and only the changed blocks stored separately.
The one thing that I wish Lose It! and similar weight-tracking apps did is report a moving average. This is crucial to Walker's "Hacker Diet"---otherwise progress looks random rather than, as a (say) ten-day moving average would reveal, steady and encouraging.
Just to follow up: it's compounding.

Like compound interest, it gets big surprisingly fast. Another example is that story of placing one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, and doubling it for each square, so 2 grains on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on. You end up with 2 64 (2 to the power of 16), or about 16 million million million grains of rice.
The article points out an interesting quirk in C#/.Net: the algorithm the C# compiler uses to convert numeric literals like "3.14159" to 64-bit IEEE binary may be different from the algorithm used by .Net framework APIs to do the same conversion. So if you mix the two types of conversion in your code, you may get unexpected results.
Some of these servers seem very cheap when compared to Linode or Slicehost ... I wonder what the catch is? Not so good support? Response to failure?

Eg picking one at random - celeron processor, 2GB ram, 500GB disk - 25 euro a month. Or with the same provider goto 4GB Ram and Quad Core for 40 euro.
Much easier to just avoid people who don't like learning.
Anuar_Chisinau_2009.pdf (obiect application/pdf)
There are lot of use cases wherein 'dedup' helps, and it could be done in a number of ways. For eg: Lets say there is a huge email attachment and it needs to be sent to everybody in the company. Instead of saving a copy of the attachment in everybody's account, only one copy could be saved and others could point to this. Mail systems probably already do this. However, if this support natively existed in the file system layer, application developers could take advantage of this feature instead of rolling out their own 'dedup' applications.
Clever - that goes in the tool box - thanks!
It's surprising how many previously-good-looking candidates cannot write, say, a simple function to walk a tree. Now, part of the problem is certainly the fact that it's harder to write code with a pen and paper or a blackboard, and you have to account for that. It can still give valuable insight.
I've seen this in an old book (Code Complete?) a few aeons ago, and I can't say I like it, but I use it a lot.

In Java/C# this can throw a null pointer exception:

myString.equals("another string");

however this will never throw anything:

"another string".equals(myString); //false if myString is
null, this is what you mean in most cases anyway
Excellent comment. You've elucidated my whole interviewing philosophy in a way that I was never able to. Thank you.
Nice one, never occurred to me even though I sometimes would write my assignments this way. I guess the problem is it doesn't generalise to the case where you are comparing two variables.

Fortunately not a problem with Python (the pedantism works!). I still think I prefer Pascal's := for explicit assignment though. Wish more languages would adopt it.
Leadership Without a Secret Code
This is going to make a lot of people very upset. But really, news like this becomes a lot easier to swallow once you simply accept that Apple is a proprietary platform that works really hard at vendor lock-in.
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I'm in agreement with everything except that it's not a matter of focusing on the company's needs. If you're sending resumes to 15 companies a day you aren't even focusing on your own needs.

Figure out who you want to work for and then figure out how to communicate with someone there who is going to want to hire you.
Intentional or not Apple doesn't sell any system with an ATOM CPU. There are any number of reasons they could have made completely unrelated changes that would break them. Perhaps due to security, or the 64Bit transition, or a simple oversight. Installing OSX on CPU models Apple doesn't sell has always resulted in your CPU being declared as "unknown CPU" so that suggests Apple doesn't simply copy & paste all Intel CPU identifiers. I tend to doubt it was intentional because the Hackintosh community will find a simple work around that will add maybe 1 step to the process. Won't stop anyone who really wants to do it. Seems more likely it was a case of Apple not going out of their way to support hardware they don't sell.
If your site is small enough to run on a $7 webhosting plan then you probably don't need monitoring.
Good compilers will warn you.

Even most bad compilers warn about this now.
scribd link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22022102

(Hi Dan! Hope this is OK to publish in a better format)
Yep. Had a "lead" developer tell me, "Your conditions are backwards." -_-
A detailed analysis of Techcrunch’s Scamville article
I think you can absolutely ask the interviewer to write some code. Right after you show them yours.
It's pointless to downvote the OP as his attitude is pretty common in my experience. There are many programmers who react with disgust if you ask them anything that might be construed as beneath them... embrace that attitude, because it can help to end the interview early and prevent wasting everyone's time.
They do, but what I'm interested in is if it's something that actually occurs in real data (with SHA256, in the article he says that it's of more use with "worse but faster" hashing algorithms).

My initial remedy is to add another hash method and name the data based on the results of both; that way problematic data would need to trigger a collision in two different algorithms at the same time, which "should" be next to impossible. Currently my file fragments are named "{SHA256}.dat", in v2 I could instead name them "{SHA256}{SOME_OTHER_HASH}.dat".
> But asking a programmer to write a complete application for you is like asking an electrician to build a small electrical grid for you before they work on your house. Can you imagine if every plumber had to prove that they could snake pipes before they could work on someone’s plumbing?

I wonder if he realizes that we require electricians and plumbers to be licensed?
It's really depressing to come back from a hamburger (with fries) and read this article on hacker news.
I've been using them for about 6 months? I only monitor three websites that all together get about 2k uniques a day so nothing major. Never had any problems and you can customize some of the notices down to the line, which is nice.
Ask HM: Suggestions for MS hosting services?
We have some legacy ASP code with an MS SQL database that we are essentially going to be putting on life support but continuing to support for archival purposes.

I'm looking for a cheap but reliable shared host for the Microsoft stack to move this code base to. Does anybody have some suggestions or experiences (good or bad)?
How to avoid submit button URL parameters
Take Business Success with a grain of Salt
I picked this up a few years ago:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CompareConstantsFromTheLeft

I've mostly stopped doing it though, because now I usually work in languages that won't let you put an assignment in an if statement, and nobody else really does it.
Yeah, MySQL does that as well. That is one of my big problems. I program 70% of the time in MySQL where "=" is used for comparison, so it is hard to switch to "==" when I occasionally need to.
If you were interviewing to be a juggler, would you find it odd if they asked you to juggle during the interview?

The reason why plumbers and electricians aren't asked to perform on a small scale is that they are required to be licensed. Until developers are licensed (and I don't see that happening any time soon), small-scale tasks are the best way to learn about a candidate.

[Apologies to whoever I stole the juggling analogy from (I think it was on Reddit).]
Absolutely. I've interviewed many "senior" developers who couldn't complete even very basic programming tasks. They could talk your ear off about their "experience", but ask them to actually do something and they were completely lost.
I went to take a look, and the only thing I saw was a sign-up page.

If you want people to take a look at your stuff, you're going to have to find a way to demonstrate what it's about without requiring a sign-in.

I don't mind "bug-ridden and incomplete", but creating a sign-on is too much friction when I don't even know what the potential pay-off is....
I can't find anything that says non-Atom Hackintosh machines are affected.
Avro: A Format for Big Data
We always ask our candidates to write code in our interviews, but is there a reason why many companies seem to do this with pen & paper, or a blackboard?

We sit them in front of a computer with various editors/IDEs and ask them to code a function/class or two there on the machine.

Isn't this better for the candidate (ie less stressful, interviews are stressful enough already) and more realistic, as they can use editor/IDE features and the compiler?
I might be in the minority, but I really don't like that style. Whenever I read:

if (NULL == ptr) { ..

it throws me off, and it doesn't read as well as the other way around. gcc's -Wall will warn you about it (and I'm sure other interpreters/compilers will do the same). I'd rather let the compiler handle things it's good at and stick to authoring code that's easy to read.
How Revenue Models Effect Customer Experience
Digg will be hosting an Avro hackathon on Thursday, November 19. Sign up if you'd like to hack! http://avrohackathon.eventbrite.com/
Fair enough, thanks for the feedback. I'll add an info page when I've got some spare time.
The very premise of an interview is this: I see you're allegedly qualified from your résumé, but I'm skeptical. Prove you are who you say you are. This can be phrased much more tactfully, and it's great if the interviewer does so, but at some deep level every interviewee has to decide if they're comfortable with this dynamic or not. I think a technical question can raise the exact same hackles as requesting code.

If someone isn't comfortable with a complete stranger trying to validate whether they are the person described in the résumé, I suggest that they work hard on their networking so that they are always in a situation where the prospective employer is convinced in advance that they are a good hire.
It's block-level dedupe, not file-level. This is similar to how Data Domain (www.datadomain.com, recently acquired by EMC for $2.2B) does it. In their customer base, mostly medium to large storage operations, the average customer compression is more than 20x. For a small (one-disk) system your mileage will obviously vary, but even a compression factor of 3-4x saves a lot of bits.
As a grad student in neuroscience I think there's some validity to the argument, though. Academic research in my field can be tightly circumscribed by 5 year grant cycles, competition for tenure track positions, etc. I wrote about numerology of this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181

I believe this numerology may be a source of generalized conservatism and incrementalism in academic science. And academic science has a different set of objectives than industry, and perhaps also a larger long-term payoff, when done well.
The article briefly touched on something I find more dangerous: systemic conformity in academia. If you want to be influential, your best bet is to become allied to academia. As the article notes, "independent" researchers are viewed with suspicion, if viewed at all. Since there are incentives to conform (albeit loosely) to some norms while perusing a PH.D. there is a lot of hill climbing and not a lot of long jumps.
Of course! I'm happy to give them the business given how well they've treated me. I've been using them for almost 5 years now with absolutely no serious issues! I don't think there's too many affordable hosts out there these days that are like that.

(edit: I can't recommend them for Rails though. They will hosts Rails apps, but only via a CGI interface which is crazy slow. If you're ever looking for a good Rails host try http://www.blueboxgrp.com/)
I am a bit surprised here, its been 4hours+ but no answers!!
That sounds super interesting! This sentence raises a question:

>You can chain tasks, so say TaskA launches another task. You can retry tasks if they fail.

How does this chaining work? Does each Task define its children? I've found that its cleaner to separate tasks from their place in the tree. For example, a script that downloads a CSV file each hour shouldn't care how that file is used.
This is the truth. I've had candidates walk out of interviews when they learn that they'd be asked to write pseudo code showing some basic algorithmic competence.

It was bizarre.
Does anyone know of any estimates of rates of depression say, 75-100-150 years ago? Depression seems to be a disease of civilization, but as far as I know it's not clear if it's rooted in something chemical (as this article suggests) or psychological (we simply have trouble finding meaning in the sorts of lives we live today).
I dunno, I find that I just don't make these errors these days. I mean, I obviously did when I started out, but it didn't take all that long to internalize the fact that I need to do == to compare and not =.
> The definition of biological advantage is having a large number of offspring rather than a small one! (Simplifying a bit; said offspring should also reproduce, recursively, but it's a decent approximation to just consider offspring.) What kind of weird question is that?

In animals, yes. Humans, especially in affluent societies have more sophisticated goals. Obviously, reproduction is important, but we will also pursue irrational goals, such as self-realization, quality of life, love, ethics and so on. The idea that we consider it a virtue to raise a child with Asbergers syndrome or other genetic defects is evidence to that, and in an evolutionary context decidedly self-destructive. In fact, I feel queasy even writing this, so strong is our opposition to applying our intelligence to raising the quality of our gene pool = eugenics.

My point is, although ill-articulated in a biological context, how does having a large family further any of the goals that a affluent individual in a wealthy society has? I'm not talking material wealth, even though that applies as well, but also the "soft" goals of contributing great ideas, science, arts, all the jazz, to the greater good of humanity. My point is; is a family with 10 kids more likely to foster a Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Obama, Reagan, whatever floats your boat, than a family with one or two?
NetApp and Data Domain are both enterprise-level dedupe vendors who use similar hash functions to find unique strings of bits. Check out their whitepapers. Short answer: not in a million years (and there are further checks in case the hash alg somehow failed.)
Exactly, I wouldn't mind a future employee to ask me for some code samples so as to gauge the quality of our work... After all, I've seen some code from some companies before where I'd just run away if it was my first day at work there...
It's good to know upfront if somebody is dependent on an IDE to get any work done, though.
I disagree. I consider an interpreter that can figure things out on your behalf to be a more intelligent interpreter. It requires me to type less. The "hard to find bugs" pointed out in the article are a (acceptable imo) trade-off for a terser syntax.
And furthermore, this is the reason why we have them licensed.
Why the Motorola Android is a sure-fire hit
Even ruby warns you

puts 'argh' if a = 'b'
warning: found = in conditional, should be ==
I am pretty sure this is a recommendation from Code Complete, too. It's full of great tips like this. If you haven't, you should definitely check it out.