skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You actually indirectly highlighted one of the problems with these types of "brain teaser" questions.

Condition 1: If you are actually as brilliant as Donald Knuth, and independently derive the Floyd's cycle-detection algorithm, then obviously you must have cheated, because only Donald Knuth could have come up with that sort of thing in 20 minutes.

Condition 2: If, on the other hand, you aren't brilliant like Donald Knuth, you'll probably come with the naive solution using a visited data structure of some sort, in which case you're stupid because you can't come up with the optimal algorithm.

In either case, you bombed with that interviewer.

Condition 3: Cheat. Do the naive algorithm first, then have an "ah-ha" moment that magically gives you the optimal algorithm, because you actually knew it before hand. I suspect, but can't prove, that some hires get in this way. During my time as a PhD researcher studying deception under a related NSA grant, I routinely found that a) people are horrible at lie detection, and b) people greatly overestimate their ability to detect lies.* The perfect way to game the system!

Alternatively:

Condition 4: Inform the interviewer that you're aware of the cycle detection algorithm, and get another brain teaser that reduces you to Condition 1 or Condition 2 (and if less than ethical, Condition 3). Oops.

Ideally, you want interview questions from which you can start at Condition 1, and without deus ex machina, eventually get to Condition 2, perhaps having the interviewer give some hints along the way. Better is to start with a problem that has a reasonable Condition 1 solution, and then slowly modify the problem specification for increasingly complexity ("Now pretend this is an arbitrary graph instead of a tree, what would you have to change?").

Finally, Google maintains a list of banned questions which have such brain teasers (technically, they have an entire question pool), but unfortunately, interviewers don't seem to check them frequently enough and so brain teasers continue to persist (even in 2015).

* If you're fascinated by lie detection, start with scholarly publications from Aldert Vrij, and work from there.
... bring on the down-votes!
This is a question for experiences paying the fine, not so much for advice.

I've added to the question to make it clear.
Statements like this are the problem. You've heard one side's version and have very few facts.

What is an employer to do? Never fire anyone in a protected class?

You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.

You're defending a company that fired a woman who was 9 months pregnant.

I did not downvote your comment. I downvoted you as a person for your comment.
I don't, but I'm new here. I'll just hide behind my dry British wit; it's done me sterling service so far.
you are probably being sarcastic, but as someone in their late 20s, I do not believe I will every get a social security payout. either the age requirements will keep getting pushed back as people live longer or the whole program will be abolished by the time I qualify.

I don't think I should pay into a system that I will never receive benefit from.
It's a lie. There's a glut of science and math PhDs, and there's only a "shortage" of engineering and technology workers willing to accept low wages.

The "STEM shortage" meme is pushed by capitalists who want a cheap and compliant workforce.
An Introduction to HTTP with Unix Sockets
Overcoming Missing Values in a Random Forest Classifier
How dare someone exploit the benefits that are legally available! Employers can insure against the economic risk of having someone become pregnant. And you know what, just budget for that in your cost of hiring once you are big enough to have a full time payroll and HR person on staff. And start planning to give fathers leave as well.

If you (qua hypothetical business owner) can't cope with the fact that your employees are human being and that human beings have reasonable needs, then what good are you?
You've linked an 1 year old article. Pretty sure is valid for 2015 though
Epic 2013 Colorado rainstorm accomplished centuries’ worth of erosion
What other reason is there for keeping something locked down?
For the Internet of Things? Abolishing DRM will do it.
Ask HN: (why) Does upvoting get disabled for old submissions and comments?
I am going through some quite old submissions (eg the "passive income" ones from previous years) and I just noticed that upvoting them and their comments doesn't work. Is that a bug or a desired functionality and if so what's the idea behind it?

P.S: (not criticising or anything, just curious)
Wow, 30s? I have a dumb TV (Viara plasma) and an AppleTV 3rd generation.

The AppleTV is practically instant on, the Viara is PDQ, not instant, but way less than 30s.

30s is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but considering how quickly my current setup is ready, if I had to wait 30s with a new TV, I would take it back.
It doesn't seem like it. My read is that 50% of the windfall is distributed evenly and 50% is distributed according to the existing equity disbursement. It's like a basic income. It's designed so that in a company of N employees, no one gets less than 1/2*N of the payout.

It's a great idea because it means that average employees will actually be motivated by the equity; let's be honest, 0.05%, vesting over 4 years, of a 100-person company isn't enough to motivate anyone except for a starry-eyed young kid on his first startup.

If Silicon Valley ever wants to grow up and remain innovative, that's the sort of thing we'll need. A 0.05% slice is just a bonus and, compared to Wall Street, a pretty weak one.
From the rest of your copy it seems you are probably already quite confident as to the reasons for your poor performance.

From my reading I wouls say the actual banner image is most likely the issue. There was nothing on the banner which would let me know this was a local event at my local library and would be suitable for me as a local small business orator.

I think the current banner image didn't stand out and even if I read it I would assume it was an online course or product.

Would be good to see your conversion funnel as that would show where the biggest drop came.

Well written article by the way.
This is very cool. One thing I've also wondered about is letting talent adjust compensation on floating scale between $$$ and equity... also, as in "earn-in"! I thought this could be an great way to attract high-impact team members.

It's tough sell to leave a high-paying stable job for a risky lower paying job... but what if you could adjust your salary and "earn-in" more equity... It could lower the burn and align interests better. Thoughts?

Also, can I get paid in Megadonks ?
My distribution maintainers deal with the cabal hell so I don't have to. I just use the xmonad package and it just works, including with a configuration file.
Hard puzzles are fine. Unskippable hard puzzles are less fine.

You might want to make it much clearer what the aim is, and if there are multiple solutions. Bullet points might be useful? I don't know what I'm supposed to be lining up - vertical colours? Horizontal colours? Vertical shapes? Horizontal shapes? Vertical colours and horizontal shapes (etc etc).

Sliding block puzzles normally start with very simple levels - move one block to win. Perhaps if I'd played a couple of tutorial levels I might stick at it.

Sorry this all seems negative! I'm trying to at least be constructive.
Evolution isn't intentional. That which does not kill you gets passed on to the next generation.

"Your body" doesn't have anything like the ability to analyze good or bad. Some mysterious emergent phenomena in your brain does, but the overall mechanisms we reused from other species don't.
It's 500'ing for me, anyone else seeing this?
Yes, following a non-violent protest.

The police charged a group of us (with batons out etc), punched and tackled me and threw me in a paddy wagon.
After a good cop/bad cop type interview I sat in jail all night.

I ended up only having like a $300 fine for a traffic violation or something since I was on my bike.

This happened in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001.
> This is what happens when the criminal justice system is run by politicking judges and prosecutors elected by a public

The same stupidity is on display in states that don't elect their judges or prosecutors.

The problem is that there is no incentive for actual justice. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor pay for the incarceration. Nor do they care for how long the individual is incarcerated.

Might be nice if they were given a limited number of years to distribute among their convicts. A little scarcity might to do the system some good.
It's not considered trademark infringement if you use it to criticize the company and you don't profit off of confusion with their mark. See paypalsucks.com which has won lawsuits against PayPal.

If it's <company>.app or something then you're right. But 'sucks' is a unique case with precedent.
Inability to detect it?
Considering the Zuckerberg comment, we have to realize that ageism in tech is not only wrong, it's not sustainable.

What we have to do is make sure that all of the older engineers who "age out of" the Valley move to the same place: could be Chicago, Boulder, Austin, maybe Portland or even Minneapolis. Probably not NYC (I'm fond of it, but it's too expensive to raise a family). Doesn't matter where so much as that the place exists. If any one urban area can capture 15% of the programmers who age out of the Valley, for a decade or two, it'll have more talent than that shithole and be able to out-compete it.
Sorry but I believe it is mental illness.
Looks like a lot of requirements added over time.
Soylent 1.4 formula changes taste, ditches oils, swizzles nutrients
Because most people don't get most people's jokes. It's why we have TV comedians: to create a collective reservoir of commonly-known humor, no matter how low-brow.
Slack's Stewart Butterfield, in His Own Words
This looks like Mike Moyer's Slicing Pie

http://www.slicingpie.com/

He might not be as successful in promoting it but it is trying to solve same issue.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a good GUI tool to read mailman archives? (offline usage + indexing/search)
Personally, I find Hacker News to be a breath of fresh air in that regard. Every other discussion area on the Internet is full of jokes - some funny, many not - and it frankly becomes tiresome after a while, everyone trying to come up with a witty comment. There's definitely a place for that (I love a good joke too) but I think it's great that there's a place for mainly serious discussion. If you want a laugh, there's everywhere else on the Internet.
I don't think you've met the average of-voting-age American. :) They're more interested in how they look than in how their country is run.
The harder you make it to fire someone, the more reticent the employer will be to hire that person in the first place. This may apply to employees generally, or to a specific race, gender, or subclass.

For example, after the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed, it led to a decrease in the employment of people with disabilities. If the employer has a higher likelihood of lawsuit in the event that the employee must be let go, they have to make damn sure they can't find someone else (who isn't disabled) to fill the position in the first place.

The existence of this sort of legislation actually exacerbates the employment problem for minorities and women in tech!

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/re...
That was my first thought, as well: Ottawa was wicked cold this past February ("extreme cold and wind chill warning again? fml..."), so it would have required a basement full of servers to have meaningful impact...

...and we can expect our usual stupid hot, "be nice to be in Houston right about now" peak couple of weeks, when the basement is nicest part of the house and the AC runs pretty much non stop.
It's good overall but sometimes the ranking is weird. For example, if you search for "ByteString", what you'd expect is only the #3 hit.

For beginners who are likely to be searching for core libraries, the other Hoogle might be more useful.
Good read, but didn't need to tell me to watch the video at the end of the post; I know it was long because I read it (on the bus, which is also why video wasn't an option).

I'll also agree with evolve2k; your first ad graphic was far superior. The second looked like it was rushed.
If these are still available, could I get one?
ETA: Disregard this post.
This indeed is one of the problems with "race" classification. As the Census Bureau itself says, "The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm

I was a recipient of the official American Community Survey from the Census just in the last week. I filled out the survey according to questions I was asked. For race, for all of my family members, I put in "other" as the race and filled in "human" for the response below that. (For the decennial census back in 2010, we filled out the form in the expected way by the federal definitions, holding our noses while we did that.) Both times, we filled in national ancestry according to the known countries of origin of ancestors, which is quite a diverse mixture for my children.

As Henry Harpending wrote back in 2006: "On the other hand, information about the race of patients will be useless as soon as we discover and can type cheaply the underlying genes that are responsible for the associations. Can races be enumerated in any unambiguous way? Of course not, and this is well known not only to scientists but also to anyone on the street." Chapter 16: Anthropological Genetics: Present and Future in Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications (2006), edited by Michael Crawford.
There are lots of avenues for humorous programming jokes, Twitter and reddit being the most common. HN's system isn't exactly robust so I figure people stick to those other avenues because they get the most gratification (through upvotes and retweets).

HN's always been sort of a refuge from those sites for that reason. It's a place to discuss software seriously.
HN users don't avoid humor, but most humor in internet comments is repetitive, obvious, or otherwise a bit lame, so it tends to lower the signal/noise ratio and get downvoted.

This is controversial because people overestimate how funny their jokes are, especially to a large general audience, and prefer to interpret downvotes as humorlessness of others. I think scott_s described this best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289. (Note the phrase, "When you have N people"—it explains many things about HN.)

HN's culture is probably also influenced by Reddit loss aversion syndrome, given that it started as a kind of alt-Reddit (I don't want to say anti-Reddit!) and still has the younger sibling's tendency to compare. As a Canadian I'm tempted to say we're Canada to Reddit's U.S., but I may not be allowed to say things like that any more.
Shapes and colors (independent of each other) can be matched horizontally and vertically. Maybe I should somehow indicate when they are "locked" and that would be enough.

Actually it's a one-off puzzle to unlock a door to another level and it does not repeat. So, there's no time for tutorials.

I guess I will make this one optional, and maybe just create a simpler puzzle (say, colors only) for the unskippable door lock.

Thanks.
If you're at a start-up and some unforeseen problem occurs that needs to get fixed right now, and you're the only person who can fix it: yes the start-up expects you to fix it before you can pick up little Suzie from soccer practice. Yes, they will hire the person most likely to make that choice. If they don't do that, their chance of failure is much higher.

We make sacrifices to work in some areas of tech, and we get paid well to put work before most other priorities because that's what's needed in some (not all) tech jobs. If you want to put kids as a priority before work, that's fine. There are plenty of jobs in tech you can take, but don't expect the same positions as the lady who puts work above all else and consistently delivers when stuff's on fire. She's devoting more of her life to the company and deserves a better title and more pay.
Because HN users are afraid of downvotes.
As long as there is truth in your humor or humor in your truth then I think it has a place here. I don't avoid it, myself.
Did you pay this fee online or at an establishment?

Could you pay down this fee or was it all due at one time?
If there are better mailing list software, what are they?
These were intended to cover my line of work to newcomers in the industry:
devopsme.com
sysadminme.com
I worked for a company a few years back that followed a similar idea. We had a bottom line for operating costs (salary, benefits, rent, utilities, other general expenses) plus a flat 25% being invested back into the company. Everything else left over at the end of the month was distributed to the employees based on their roles. It took a while to iron out. At first we had issues as the money was rolled out as a quarterly bonus, which caused a lot of tax to be taken off the top. It changed a lot over the first year, and ended up being abandoned in favor of giving consistent raises.
I don't think that follows.

You might as well infer that the european rate is lower because we release murderers.

The statistics you quote don't support either view, I believe.
Google Play scraper for Node.js
You're leaving out the legislators that put these laws on the books in the first place, and often require mandatory minimum sentences because voters like politicians who are 'tough on crime.'
In Stillness, Movement
I have no background or interest in Haskell but have no particular problem configuring Xmonad. I just cut and paste. The only thing I needed to learn was how the separators nested in Haskell.

It would be different if there was a lot of configuration to do, but simplicity is the whole point here.
Because it's hard to be funny, most people aren't funny.
You don't have to give them your private key -- it's just for convenience, if you happen to trust Keybase.

You don't have to run it in the browser, either; you can just install the command-line tool via NPM and know exactly what code you're running.
What "new methods" are you thinking of?

What let Java get ahead of Smalltalk for me personally, as someone getting into programming in 1996, was that i could write it in the text editor i already had, compile it with a compiler i could get for free, and then post the source code on Geocities (actually, Xoom - remember that?) to share with others.

Whereas when i tried to get into Smalltalk, the first thing i had to do was learn my way around this wacky environment with its strange class browser and ultra-retro window manager, and get my head around the fact that my source code wasn't anywhere particular, and yet was everywhere, and that if i wanted to share your code, i had to somehow "file out", and then hope that my internet friends could successfully "file in" to their own potentially modified images. Once i'd got hold of the tools at all, that is.

Which is not to say that the Smalltalk environment was not better than Notepad/DOS box/javac, because of course it was. It just didn't lend itself to adoption and spread nearly as well. It was a tool for masters, with affordance for apprentices.

Also, Java had pretty good networking right in the standard library, and networking was really exciting in 1996.
"What is an employer to do?"

Don't be a fuckhead? I can't honestly say I care about their "problems" in this situation.
Has anyone read the book Slicing Pie? What do you think of the scheme presented there, with the "Grunt fund"?
English restaurants have to by law know about a range of allergens and to provide that information to anyone who asks.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30395142

> "We'd both like the chef's choice please. But no tuna for her, she's allergic to tuna."

> "No substitutions!"

They're probably doing the right thing there. You've said that she risks death if she eats tuna. That then becomes the most important thing to them. Keeping the "no tuna" part of your order correct through the various parts of the kitchen is tricky. It's worth it if an error means a bit of grumbling; it's not worth it if an error means a noisy visable death and ambo call out and press coverage.
Interactive guide to pro photo editing
Early Uber Architect Launches Carpooling App ‘Ride’
I used to take news stories like this more or less at face value, but not anymore.

I am not sure what we (USA) get out of this but it seems to me like we have been encroaching on Russia's space for a while. Part of the deal we made with Russia when the Germany was reunited was that the USA and Nato would not start moving military bases and military capability up to Russia's borders. I think we have been doing that. Why? Is Russia really a threat to us?

The other thing that I find troubling is that many of our allies (Germany, France) don't seem at all enthusiastic over the sanctions against Russia. Why? I would like to understand the difference in what we (USA) want and Europe does.
The issue isn't that Hacker News isn't a more serious site; the real issue is that most people are bad at humor. HN submissions like "My startup is the Uber for hipsters!" or "Top 10 ways to #disrupt" done ironically is not biting satire. (please don't do ether unironically.)

Posts and comments which are more lighthearted but still provide additional insight are fine, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8140290

Yes, I am being a little hypocritical with that example. :p
I can sue you, if I wanted. It doesn't mean you're guilty of wrongdoing. It means I'm exercising my right to use the legal process to resolve conflict.

I really don't see how you think that's the problem.

PS: The UNNAMED employer was really vilified here. Damn them!
HN prides itself on the insightful comment section. Each and every comment adds depth to the conversation. No other web site fosters this culture.

I guess users avoid it for the same reason you don't tell naughty jokes in the workplace: It's just not the right place.

On the other hand, I read many comments who were funny AND insightful, especially in XKCD and Dilbert threads.
Flaw in WP-Super-Cache plugin threatens million of WordPress websites
Why Millennials Are Less Urban Than You Think
That belief exists only in your head; why should I care about your delusions?

(Sorry I'm giving you a hard time, but I'm trying to make a point that took me a long time to learn but drastically improved my effectiveness as a human being. Things that exist inside other peoples' heads are every bit as real as things that exist in your head. And as far as can be empirically proven, everything exists inside somebody's head. We have this notion of objective reality because it's convenient to have it and it works most of the time - as Peter Norvig says, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." But objective reality itself exists inside our heads, and when - empirically - clinging to reality gets worse outcomes than bending reality to accommodate the people we interact with, why bother?)