skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if they actually meant for you to recurse down and swap

While only the person asking this question knows for sure I'd assume that was the intention.

It's not a _terrible_ question - it's just a recursive equivalent of FizzBuzz. You would treat this as a way of making a (good) candidate gain some confidence. And that alone is extremely important since the more at ease the candidate is the better the signal that you're getting. What I was trying to say there was that if I asked that as a warm-up and didn't get a satisfactory response very very soon I'd realise that your man has no clue about recursion and would move to the main question, choosing one that does not involve it. It would be something easier than I'd ask otherwise and would be closer to real-life scenarios - like first solving a simple problem, then parallelising the solution and correctly managing concurrent access.
I forgot to mention - fixed bids help build your skill-set way more than hourly because you are incentivized and you will be challenged more to figure out the simplest thing that works. You won't find yourself straying off on a overly-complicated solution to deliver something the client or users don't care about. You'll be forced to stay up on the latest and greatest, not because you nerd out about it, but because it makes your life easier and you can then deliver things of huge value at market rate while maintaining nice margins. :)

When you have more experience and your estimates are strong, you can do hourly and give clients all-in prices with +- 15% difference and everyone will be happy no matter what happens.
I strongly believe that the best kind of technical interview is to talk with the person about things they have done in the past, go into details and see if they are telling you bullshit. If the things are interesting, at least somehow relevant to what the company is doing and the person knows what they are talking about, it's a good hire.

One problem is that only experienced developers can do these kind of interviews, because you need wide experience, be able to talk about various technical topics and tell whether the other person is telling you stories from their own experience or some quickly learned facts.

It's funny, but the best experience I had interviewing at Google and Amazon was talking with the managers.
Reasons I don't care for Closure (currently using it in a production project):

1) Depends on both Java and Python. Ugh
2) It's big, and has to be setup anywhere you are doing builds (i.e. continuous deployment)
3) Hard to setup, understand, compose tasks (none of that is impossible to figure out, just harder than many of the alternatives)

The article made a minor mistake about Angular - Google is using Angular in over 1,400 internal and production apps (I know, the article just mentioned production, but the number should signify how all-in on Angular Google really is). Oh, and fun side point - they are using the master branch version of Angular (1.x) - the Angular team needs to run not only all of their Angular tests, but also all of the tests for all of the projects that use Angular to ensure they didn't cause any regressions.

Overall, Closure is that library you really want to love, but it just rubs you the wrong way over and over again until you decide it isn't for you. (in my experience)
I think this is spot on. I have seen 30 person teams composed of 30 one dimensional people, and 3 person teams composed of 10 dimensional people. With few communication barriers and everyone thinking about everything all the time, I take the small tight team. It does depend on the project, though, because a) sometimes the problems can be parallelized and many people working is good and b) 10 dimensional people don't typically like boring problems.
No. The ad picture can use the same URL scheme as the normal pictures of the website. The ad binary app can inform the ad network server which Url links serve the ads, so only the website owner and the ad network know which URLs are ad pics. The same for links. The URLs could also change every few hours. Adblockers work with regex based on URL and usually block third party files (different domain) from ad networks.

I would also encourage new "good ad blockers" that only block bad ads (CPU/memory intense ads that crash your browser on iipad)
Without tracking there also wouldn't be ad fraud detection and that would hurt the group of honest publishers financially.
Yes, it's not a tree any more. Which is why I believe this was not the question.
"Unless > 50% of the miners, by hash capacity, make a change that affects the blockchain, it doesn't happen."

This is not true at all. If the top 4 pools start accepting and mining 20MB blocks, no one else in the network will accept the blocks, even if that chain is longer, because it would violate the fundamental rule, hard coded in their Bitcoin implementation, that blocks must be < 1MB. It would effectively fork the block chain.
If they said "swap left & right at each node" it would have been easy. But they used a term that doesn't even yield an example in google searches - what kind of "inversion" do they have in mind? It's as if everyone is on the same page but me.
Like the Amazon suggestions system that after buying one bicycle pump tries to sell me more of the same because obviously collecting bicycle pumps is a hobby of mine. Exchange bicycle pump with vibrator for an even less welcome example.

Even worse: the social graph mining derived suggestion systems that recommend wares based on the bad taste of my friends instead of my bad taste.
I think it's because, so far, the reach of ad-blocking is quite small so there hasn't been a significant need to invest in anti-blocking measures.

An arms race in blocking ads designed not to be blocked would be interesting to watch. While it would be very easy to introduce text/images/video in such a way that hides the fact it's an advert (there will be heuristics, of course); I suspect it'll be more difficult to measure the viewership/click-through-rate of such ads, as that's what will give the game away and make signal the presence of an ad.

Ultimately it might come down to old-fashioned offline measures, similar to how billboards/magazines use third-parties to measure the reach of an advert without any tracking on the advert itself.

This would make small content producers suffer the most. While everyone knows and trusts the reach of a newspaper site, a blog that suddenly gets 20,000 HN visitors in one afternoon, what's that worth?
Very good analysis. In the end, this combined with Spotlight having more and deeper search results displayed, means that Google is under threat to both the search and ad business.
Game, Set... match?
Google always has the option to change its ranking algorithm. The more your pay, the higher your ranking. Someone clicks on your link, you pay.

It used to be Google that was different from the other search engines by putting its advertisings next to its search results instead of the search results being the advertising.
I would take you to task on the statement that jQuery and Angular are obsolete already. That is an in-the-bubble statement, and nothing to do with what people are really using across our industry.
Do you find it equally immoral not to pay/donate for all the open source that you use?
You can do this now by tapping the address bar > Request Desktop Site in Safari on iOS 8. Would be nice to have it be automatic though.
Normally I agree with this point, but in this case it seemed like the "if" might actually be correct: because the time from invitation to rescission was so short, it's entirely possible that the invitation caused Yarvin no inconvenience; that he had not yet, for example, bought plane tickets to St. Louis.
I'm not sure it is fatalism. Could the past fifty years or so just be an anomaly? Is it that liberal democracies are inherently unstable as they scale up? Already, it's basically impossible to have a single-earner family, whereas I think that was pretty common in the post WWII years. And education costs continue to rise (my parents were paid a stipend to become doctors in the UK... those times are long gone now).
FizzBuzz is not about the modulo operator. You can write it pretty easily without it, in several different ways. If you can't figure out how pretty quickly, you're not a good programmer. Sorry.

It is even kind of reasonable to just substitute a call to some black-box is_divisible_by() if you can't figure out how to do that test ...
Angular is entirely open-source, all of the meeting notes are public (maybe the meetings also, not sure). They actively engage and welcome community participation.
There is one positive aspect of ads on the internet. They provide an initial cash flow for start ups, where the consumers do not yet see the value proposition of the product/website. Sadly the transition for ad driven to user supported almost never happen.

If you even listen to the No Agenda podcast, which is 100% listener supported, you'd know how hard it can be to get people to pay, even for a product they love.
Support fingerprint reader login in kd – 10 year old feature request in KDE
> It will cheer as Charlie Hebdo mocks the prophet of a quarter of the living people on Earth.

I think the gentlemen shooting bullets at the Charlie Hebdo authors contributed quite a bit to this attitude of defiance.
Your story can't be true because interviewers do not make hiring decisions at Google.
Ask HN: Visiting LA, want to know the tech neighbourhoods
I am visiting LA end of the month and would love to know areas where I will be close to the tech scene.
I didn't downvote, but I think your point is weak nonetheless. Spending should be a function of available resources. If you have $100k you're going to spend it more or less the same as if you had $1mil and the gov. taxed you heavily leaving you with $100k. Also, the spending function (as a fraction of income) is generally understood to decrease (as far as I know) -- the wealthy spend less of their income due to lower marginal expenses. That goes for the 'stripping wealth from the people' claim.

I also generally don't believe artisanal products or organic produce can meaningfully reverse this trend. And if an artisanal product has no measurable distinction from a mass-manufactured one, and wealthy people may more for them, I'd say that's one mechanism for income boosting (albeit a very inefficient one I suppose).
> Internet hate can often turn into real life hate

> I have no idea why people think it's socially acceptable to say things on the internet to people that you wouldn't say to them IRL in front of a police officer.

Whoa. Incredibly hypocritical of you to lecture others on hate, harassment and tone policing. You have routinely said awful things online and harassed people.

- You tell people to "set themselves on fire", a favorite phrase of yours used to those that disagree with you (http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/8-579... & https://twitter.com/search?q=%22set%20yourself%20on%20fire%2...)

- You harassed a data scientist, Chris von Csefalvay, and set your followers on him to the point he quit Twitter after he conducted some research that didn't suit your narrative. (http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.jp... via http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/the-hidden-face-of-hypocrisy-ran...)

- You wrote a non-review on Amazon to bully an author you disagreed with: (http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2015/06/01/randi-harpers-bul... & http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/06/03/renowned-author-c...)

... just the tip of the iceberg. Now you are posting on HN and masquerading as an online anti-harassment activist. Unreal.
Paris has over 400 of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette

They're free to use, not drug dealer proof, and close at night. I'd say they work well, but they're rather ugly.
Isn't that the entire point of AdBlock's default allowing of non-intrusive ads? People like to rant about them "selling out," but IMO it's a reasonable approach to allow decent sites to make a living, is a good monetization strategy, and they seem to have reasonable and global requirements for what constitutes a "non-intrusive" ad. (i.e.: It's not just a case of "pay us enough to blast loud popup videos in the user's face.")
Not to poke holes in this but is this actually that hard ?

import pandas as pd
from sklearn.linear import SVC

df = pd.read_csv('/home/me/programming/data.csv')
y = df['label']
X = df.drop('label', axis=1)

clf = SVC()
clf.fit(X, y)

... Most of the things have a similar API, except for when I veer off into say deep-learning land.

This is not to say that R is a bad language, or that R does not have equally nice API's for this stuff; but I feel that in your case its a familiarity of language thing.
When someone says they want to make something "homeless proof" I assume they mean something like this: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/homelessness-...

Hence my comment - if you're worried about homeless people in your precious toilet, you (as a city/society) have bigger problems than public toilets.
> Why do you think you need anything other than the HTTP server logs to find out that number?

All server logs tell you is that some user agent loaded the page. They tell you absolutely nothing about whether that computer was actually a person, or if that person actually read the article.

I don't understand all the hate around analytics. Data is how better decisions are made.
Would be interesting to do this for other other games (that interest me more ;)).

Netrunner ICE generation would be interesting. I'd also like to run some algorithm over all Star Wars LCG cards and have it generate new arrangements of objective sets.
[for those that don't know the game you don't build your deck by picking cards like in Magic but rather predefined bundles of 6 cards (objective sets)]
The link between the content of your GitHub and your ability to ship code is unclear at best. I knew a guy who had a really awesome GitHub profile but turned out to be a mediocre contributor to the codebase. He claimed that coding style guides we used were hurting his creativity to the point that he did not enjoy coding and would avoid it if possible. He'd fix bugs and make small-ish contributions but would never ship major features or libraries "because of the style guide". While I understand the sentiment I always found his attitude juvenile.
Artisanally crafted by delicate robot hands, the highest in precision standards, untouched by human skin until you open the packaging.
Top Best Antivirus Software: A Security Jacket for Your PC
Another point is the fact that mobile Safari wont allow the use of plugins. A wild guess is that ad blockers are the most common plugin that people use, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to add this in the browser itself as an opt-in feature.

I don't really see the difference from using an ad blocker in the form of a plugin, and blocking ads by turning on the feature in the browser itself. Ad blocking is also a feaure built into the latest Firefox release.
Thank you. This is the best advice/explanation on this subject I ever read. This is why I read HN.
What hopefully happens is that either that advertising online becomes what it is offline: dumb and expensive ads displayed to people on billboards and in newspapers. This will effectcively kill the small operations that pay for servers and bandwidth through ads.

or

Ad networks will become content networks: a content provider (such as a blogger) publishes their content to the network who bakes it together with ads and displays it on the site in question. That is, you either get nothing or you get content plus ads.
OneNote already does this (at least the desktop version does). I also really like the web clipper bookmark to send the whole page to OneNote
You're allowed to ask your interviewer for clarification. You'll even get brownie points for asking smart questions.
7 beneficial tips for startups to get free press coverage
What's the third most common element?
Speaking of Rosetta Stone, their market cap is only $189m and they made $260m in revenue last year.

I get that DuoLingo has a nice mobile interface, but do they have a larger marketshare than Rosetta Stone?
The automata is incredibly slow, though it's also incredibly cool. I implemented a trie that allows for Levenshtein distance queries here github.com/jamra/LevenshteinTrie

That was just a fun project, not something I optimized or even tested appropriately.

The theory behind the trie is that the dynamic programming algorithm for Levenshtein distance gets passed to each recursive step, reducing the amount of comparisons needed.

I like this subject so I'm going to read the paper you linked ;)
None of the things you describe are part of the job for a rank and file bigco engineer. They already have filled all the leadership roles.
Google helps launch Sidewalk Labs, a startup focused on improving city living
Maybe the solution is to break the large function into several smaller ones, even if they still make use of for loops.
I'm currently interning at MS (India). I am a physics student with programming as a side hobby. (Not yet sure what to do as a career)

While this may be quite different from interviews for MS Redmond/etc full time jobs, this was my experience:

In my interviews, I mentioned off the bat that I wasn't great at algorithmic stuff. Now, don't get me wrong, I can do them, I'm just far, far behind the curve. (Students, esp. CS students, in India spend lots of time on sites like SPOJ and CodeChef solving algorithmic questions; I prefer to do stuff in open source). The interviewers were understanding. I got asked fun stuff like "what do you enjoy about [project I work on]". "Walk me through some large problems you grappled with on [project] and how you solved them". I got to have great back-and-forths on these things. It wasn't easy explaining nuanced and intricate problems, but I was able to give them a rough picture which I think is what they wanted. Shifting the focus from "can he solve this puzzle" to "what work has he done in the past" was great.

There were also algorithmic-y things, but not the usual kind. For example, one interview focused on designing and optimizing a build tool. The idea was that we had a bunch of components, with dependencies on other components, and I had to efficiently generate a viable order of building. There were some other constraints which I forgot. I realized that the problem was similar to a garbage collector (not that I knew how to model that either :P), and did some sort of mark-and-sweep thing. Then, after being asked by the interviewer, I optimized out some for loops and stuff.

I didn't need to know any algorithms beforehand. Sure, if I had known how `make` does dependency management, or had read up on garbage collectors, I would have done it faster. But I didn't need to know anything, and it worked out.

My fellow interns had really rigorous algorithmic interviews. They were okay with that because they were good at them. It's understandable that "solve this puzzle" is the default since not everyone has real world projects they've worked on (students). I don't like the status quo, but I don't think the interviewers will be intent on maintaining it either. If you have stuff you've worked on that you'd prefer to talk about, I think they'd like that.

If you think the interviewer will be open to it, I suggest mentioning it. They will know you're not from CS; you can mention that you don't have much practice with algorithmic stuff.

Major YMMV though. Also I've done very few programming interviews so the advice here could be totally misguided. :)
Another way of looking at it is that they do these kinds of interviews particularly because they do want to hire fresh grads (and ideally, the best 5% of those) over experienced programmers. And if that's the case, then it's not really flawed, it's doing what it's supposed to do.
Cyber attack on Germany's parliament threatens to destroy all IT infrastructure
> Hopefully the future will continue to match the historical precedents

I hope not. Rise of communism, fascism and the two world wars isn't what any of us wants at this time.
Two subreddits I like to browse from time to time are /r/darkenlightenment and /r/natalism, just to see people putting forth views that are very far from mine. I think that's the good side of a free speech stance.

But individuals being singled out to slander and poke fun at is not acceptable in my opinion, regardless of whether you define it as free speech or not. There's a world of difference between simply saying "I hate fat people" and putting up a specific image or video of a fat person and then gathering around to verbally abuse them. Quite happy to see that sort of behaviour banned.
Cyber attack on German parliament still active, could cost millions
Love it!!! great share!
10 signs you're ready to be super successful
They need to improve them by using antimicrobial copper: http://antimicrobialcopper.org/
Standard unix programming with streams and pipes is quite functional-ish. The auto-pausing of pipes and lazy infinite streams it makes possible are quite useful.
Serious question, how do you propose creators are to be paid? Paywall? Paid for content? Internet tax?
Yeah, I find it weird that nobody else can use those cable networks, unlike the phone lines, or build their own. Perhaps those subsidies should have included more strings. Or maybe it should be easy to run cables.
Wow, amazing development and great write up. Thanks.

"Q: Will I need to install the iOS 9 beta/OSX El Capitan?
A: Nope, this will work on any iOS/OSX version."

Has something changed to make Apple feel comfortable to allow this?
You don't need a ramp to squat on tiptoe. I squat with my feet flat on the ground, but I have been told that doing that is hard for most (US) people. Still, Americans do squat. They just don't do it with flat feet.
Create geeky dashboards with python and Pygal
I agree with what you said. I think there's also a third primary reason and maybe a fourth:

3) Developers are expensive. If you have a team of 5 developers each being paid a salary+benefits of $1,500-$3,000 per week and they tell you a feature will take four weeks, management does a little mental math and says holy shit, that's a lot of money and it's understandably tempting for them to want to see if that team really needs four weeks, or if maybe it can be done in three weeks. (Meanwhile, as you said, the feature will probably actually take six weeks because developers cannot reliably estimate...)

4) Developers have a hard time saying "no." We have a culture of working crazy hours. Management knows this and often intentionally or unintentionally exploits it.
The biggest culture shock of visiting the UK was paying to use toilets. Do you want people pissing against walls? Because that's how you get people pissing against walls.
Google hired a lot of grey/black hats and THEY ARE treated differently. All of these people from ADM,w00w00,gobbles,TESO.

And google does not care about real solutions (Grsec/PAX) and did not spend a dime on it. It's an evil hypocritical corporation.
> If you thought that websites’ “Install our app” prompts were annoying before, imagine what’s going to happen when the only way to reliably show ads is via a native app.

I don't understand. If I get linked to a website that requires me to download their iOS app, I'll just close the tab. It's an annoyance, granted, but it's not some new unfathomable horror.
We have nuclear weapons that serve as deterrents, keeping the peace and limiting the fighting between major powers to proxy conflicts.
World Begins Another Day at Mercy of 19-Year-Old Estonian Hacker
Can you hear that? It's the sound of the ad-slingers crying into their breakfast.
Can you hear that? It's the sound of users cheering for a faster, sleeker, less malware drived web experience.
I would say go cry me a ad river, but it doesn't matter - my browser blocks it!