skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter interview went sideways, I got one shot with a question (that I won't share) that required finding Hamiltonian path in a tree, over the phone of course. I am not sure what is the mindset of the interviewer.

I am hiring engineers (systems, software and security) in the last 5 years, got trained up on recruiting by Amazon, so I would say I have a pretty good understanding on hiring.

The right approach with these interviews to find out the best of the candidate. In order to achieve that you always start with simple questions like what is a variable, what sort of data is out there, do you use version control etc. After that you switch gears.

On the subject of inverting binary trees on a whiteboard. Is this the core of your business? How many times did you need to do that last week? If it is irrelevant for your daily operations than why are you asking this question?

The problem is that (especially companies like Google) like to hire Stanford graduates and those guys think after being in the job for few months that the best way on interviewing is to measure how well the candidate would have done during the last semester in theoretical CS class at the university. While we probably all know that running a service for millions of users in production in a distributed environment requires many other skills that are not represented too much in the interviews, yet this is what you can run into during the interview loops.

I think at certain extent this is known to the Google recruiting team and they are ok with it. The way to beat the interview is to read books like Cracking the Coding Interview and train up extremely well on those trees and search algos and all, if you are really committed to work there. There are several very senior guys turned down by Google simple because they failed one or two of these ridiculous questions.

I think the last incident kind of a good example of this:

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Now I get back to my read about how the heck I am inverting a binary tree.
Love it! Nice job. I like the UI as well.
Democracy, where the intention for 'safety' and 'protecting children' is valued above the actual results.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...
There were earlier versions of that article as well. Joel kinda popularized the notion of those kind of problems
Beset with Failures, Google Tries to Breathe New Life into Android One
They're about equivalent IMO, which yes, means golf.

However, I don't see what's so terrible about learning 3 new functions. Sorry it doesn't look like Javascript anymore.
Want to improve your creative skills? Keep an art journal
I was about to try to talk about the genuine elegance of Applicatives—and I'm more than happy to defend them in general—but then, yeah. In this instance, I'm not sure I'd be able to argue that the change was such a good choice.

liftIO (liftA2 (,) randomIO getCurrentTime)

Eh, I'm not sure I could defend it. I'd honestly probably actually do

bid <- liftIO randomIO
now <- liftIO getCurrentTime
Uber nears 1m trips every day in China
Make sure to check out the perfectly circular ones, too! http://goo.gl/zilq50
My guess is MIT is in the title, and a pretty large subset of the HN userbase went to MIT or similar institutions.
Duh....of course you use a payphone to call ISIS......oh my apologies it says ASIS, sorry i do have a mild dyslexia
15 years in the enterprise. Not everyone is like ATT.

They DO care about what products do. Obviously engineers/managers wan't the best technology they can get. The difference is they also care very much about support, long term roadmap, company health, ability to hire staff etc. They are often dealing with systems which tend to stick around for a decade or longer.

I can put an ad up for Oracle and get a lot of really good people or I can hire a consultancy or get support from Oracle. I can't do that with many open source technologies.
Direct Download Links Cydia for iOS 8.3,8.4 with PanGu iOS 8.4 Jailbreak
The amount of growth for Apple, Uber, etc in China for luxury products is astounding. Where do the new Chinese upper middle class work? Why is this not happening in other growing economies like India or Brazil? (or is it happening and I'm just not seeing it?)
The main difference (besides overhead) is that a VM contains a running collection of OS services along with your app. Because of this, the ops team needs to be involved in keeping the VM up to date, the VM usually needs to be "managed" with orchestration much like a physical machine, and all-in-all it's big interdependent mess where the devs can't just forget about deploy-time concerns.

Idiomatic usage of containers forces one particular solution for this: a container contains one service; multiple services means multiple containers, and the orchestration of those containers is up to the ops people and their software.

VMs can also be done this way. EC2 ephemeral instances work great for doing a CoreOS-like "upgrade by starting up new AMIs instances and killing the old ones" strategy.

However, since ops people can't be guaranteed that random VMs they're handed do not, in fact, have arbitrarily-old services running in them with possible security vulnerabilities, they have to be conservative about deploying random VMs created by devs. Thus, VMs don't tend to get created by devs; thus, the devs still have to solve the deploy-time problem some other way to get the ops people something they can build into a VM. This isn't as much of a problem with containers.

Unikernel VMs, on the other hand, are effectively equivalent to containers: they both provide "just one service in a sandbox"-level granularity, that ops can then manage as it pleases. If Unikernels had come around 10 years ago—if Linux had been factored into a rump kernel, for example—I don't think we'd be nearly as interested in containers today.
Or you can just use a dildo in your anus. Also reliable and cheap stimulator of vagus.
It's just a fun little quiz. I kind of like it as a "reality check" to show the reader that while they may understand the concepts, the reality is much more difficult and fraught with subtle considerations. It also serves as a subtle reminder to readers (who may be the frustrated business-type from the opening of the article) that there's a reason software projects are so hard and cost so much money. Software development isn't something you can grok from reading an article, even a book-length one.
POJO stands for "Plain Old Java Object" and it is a somewhat common term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_Old_Java_Object

The term was coined by Martin Fowler, Rebecca Parsons and Josh MacKenzie in September 2000:[1]

"We wondered why people were so against using regular objects in their systems and concluded that it was because simple objects lacked a fancy name. So we gave them one, and it's caught on very nicely."[1]
tl;dr Results: "We could downsize our provisioned API server pool by about 90%." "the time it takes to run our full integration test suite dropped from 25 minutes to 2 minutes, and the time to do a full API server deploy with rolling restarts dropped from 30 minutes to 3 minutes. The go API server restarts gracefully so no load balancer juggling and prewarming is necessary."
“Uber [or Airbnb] for Private Tutors”–I’d sign up
Normal PicoLisp has a lot built-in: database, Prolog, web server, and lots more at less than 600K for the OpenWRT distribution. The MiniPicoLisp distribution, sans all the libraries, is only 73kB.
It is a very well-thought Lisp geared for decades for practical web and database applications.
Check the rosetta code entries for it to compare to other languages, simply amazing!
I think we do very well at hiring the sort of people who already work at Google. The false positive rate seems to be very low, and the people I work with mostly seem very happy (I know I certainly am).

The false negative rate worries me, though, and I keep wondering if there's a way I could structure my interviews (and feedback) differently to help change that problem.
One reason bringing your resume is a good idea is because scumbag recruiters sometimes modify your resume, inserting the right keywords to get you the interview in the first place.
> CPS deals with real horrifying and tragic situations every day.

That's what boggles my mind the most. Every time we hear about CPS they're overworked and have to deal with horrors I don't even want to imagine. But how do they have time to waste voluntarily ruining peoples' lives?
I guarantee to you it was an informed, calculated decision, not laziness or incompetence on anybody's part.

I'm working for a Fortune 25 company, and one of the main drivers behind our website redesign is that we're losing a significant amount of money providing assistance to people who aren't tech savvy.

Making passwords case insensitive, preventing special characters, and other such things are mostly there to cut down on people accidentally creating a password they can't remember and then calling in to get a password reset. Those costs aren't trivial when you're serving tens of millions of people per month, a large percentage of whom are elderly and have trouble using computers at all.

Additional layers of security can be added through more creative means and are typically more effective with people who don't use computers all day (two factor authentication by sending a verification code through text message when an unknown IP is used, etc.).
FYI BlackBerry is releasing a 16x9 slider phone later this year, which has fed into the Android rumors. The only glimpse BlackBerry fans have seen of that device so far looked like a Galaxy S6 Edge with a slide-out keyboard.
A lot of people really hated BBM and are happy to see the back of it. It was hard to manage as an internal service, and a massive privacy concern as a cloud one. MDM is very competitive if they're going to be an Android vendor, why would someone pay Blackberry when there are tons of competitors already in that enterprise space and already offering top notch MDM?

The problem is that back when Blackberry were big they had few competitors. BBM was one of the few services which could be used internal-only, and MDM was non-existent on most other vendors or operating systems.

Sorry, but to my eyes, if Blackberry made this their business then they would go out of business. A lot of the people who used to have the displeasure of managing this stuff don't want it back, and they will fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening.

I've literally seen wine opened when BES was removed once and for all.

PS - We no longer do MDM since users BYOD, all we have the ability to do is remove the company's Exchange archive (like deleting a PST on a PC). Plus it is encrypted anyway, so if they cannot login then they cannot review it.
Some interesting stuff:

---

TS//SI//REL FVEY We have discovered a way that may be able to remotely
brick network cards. We need someone to perform research and develop a
deployable tool.

---

TS//SI//REL) Currently CASTLECRASHER is the only production quality
Windows execution technique that Payload Persistence techniques have.
Another mechanism to execute DNT payloads is needed. Most pre-boot
Persistence techniques only have the ability to influence an OS through
modifications to the target file system. Work needs to be done to investigate
other ways to get execution inside of Windows

---

(TS//SI//REL) BERSERKR is a persistent backdoor that is implanted into the
BIOS and runs from SMM. Although the core of the code is stable, there are
always new requirements against which to develop. This includes new
network interface card parasitic drivers as well as applications.

---

(TS//SI//REL) GOPHERRAGE is the Persistence Division's pilot program to
apply industry best practices and agile development processes to internal
projects. To this end, the project is managed via the Scrum process. Test
Driven Development (TDD) practices are used as well in an effort to reduce
code defects. The project also is looking to incorporate ideas from DNT such
as their SCube build environment

[Aha, so it is top secret that NSA is using TDD and Scrum. I find that kind of funny]

---

(TS//SI//REL) TORNSTEAK is a persistence solution for two firewall devices
from a particular vendor. We need to port TORNSTEAK from the existing two
firewalls to several more from the same vendor.

---
Aye. It is.

As I understand it, FAA regs require that there be two people in the cockpit at all times. So, the Germanwings tragedy would very likely not have happened in the US.
Phase 2 - Enable ASIS to infect thousands of Silicon Valley company computers with zero-day exploit.
In Australia you need to provide ID to buy a sim card / new phone.
Alice ML:

val (page1, page2, page3) = (spawn getURL "url1",
spawn getURL "url2",
spawn getURL "url3")

The requests are concurrent. Spawn returns a future and 'page1', etc are futures immediately. When the value of 'page1', etc is requested later the requesting process either blocks until the getURL for that value is complete, or transforms into the value implicitly if it's already done.

I think it's just as nice as the Haskell example. I do agree that Haskell is a great language though.
This type of interview questions worries me. My nervousness then permeates throughout the whole interview so I've never been asked these type of questions, which is unfortunate as perhaps it's not as bad as I make it.

Someone recommended Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual" and I picked it up. If you feel like more exposure to data structures can be useful, it has a section titled "A Catalog of Algorithmic Problems" which I find useful to read before an interview.
I hear tons of praise for QNX here, but how many people have had good experience with it? I've absolutely hated VxWorks personally, and have heard many complaints about QNX as well.

Has anyone here used it and liked it more than, e.g. Linux?
Unfortunately I think it's the language, not the community. It definitely happenes with my own code as well, no hints from external developers are required :-) I miss Python in this regard.
What if Blackberry were to use Sailfish, instead of Android?
Until one shoots out the top. Then he/she can be a "poet" again.
I don't know Alice ML but one advantage of using abstractions like Applicative is that you can write code which is polymorphic in the particular applicative you choose. So, you can mock your concurrent requests using the Identity or ZipList applicative, and use the type class laws to prove things which are true about both. I'm guessing, but it looks like the spawn syntax is built-in here. Not that it's not as elegant as the Concurrent version, but likely not as powerful from an abstraction point of view.
I hate to be that person but this isn't the actions of a country that prides itself as being free. Sadly, it's not an isolated case either. I've read numerous similar accounts of such things occurring. Along with the "lemonade stand permit", it's bewildering.

I realise that in the grand scheme, these are fairly unique but you simply don't hear about such things happening in Europe, in Australia or in the middle and far East. Perhaps it's a case of similar cases happening in other nations but just not reported on so much.

Why do we keep reading stories like this and the deluge of police brutality and other wacky stories coming out of the USA?
If they use a heavily-modified, security-focused sort of android marketed toward corporations/government I wouldn't mind it too much. I just hope they don't end up having the same sort of android that every other phones seems to have nowadays.
You're misremembering the figures. The headline was "Apple, Samsung claim 95% of all cellphone profits worldwide." And it is 70% Apple and 25% Samsung.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/31/business/la-fi-tn-ap...
+1 for Sailfish.
If they manage to sell an up-to-date Android device with a keyboard, there's a substantial market of people who want one.
I see this phrase repeated over and over: nobody got fired for chosing Oracle, ibm, or Microsoft.
I wonder: did anyone got fired for chosing Postgres, Linux, or even new and risky stuff like Mongodb or nodejs? And being told at their exit interview "you should've decided to use Oracle"?
I guess tech people are fired for lack of talent in hustling company politics much often than they are for chosing a technology.
The change they made was from a monad to an applicative, which is less "hands on", thus preferred. Kind of preferring map over hand-written loops. (Although the golfing is definitively there and in the community, see pointfree/pointless style https://wiki.haskell.org/Pointfree)
Why landlording could be the next great small business opportunity
It is a mid-size, not a full-size. And the best looking cars are, imo: (1) Ford Taurus/Fusion, (2) Audi A8/A6, and (3) Chrysler 300/200.
I've run into some small issues, but I my Passport is the best phone I've owned; I'm a convert from Android. I think the hardware and the OS are both fantastic; better UX and more stable than my Google Nexus.

Sorry to hear that you have had so many issues, though. I mostly use Hub (primarily text), the fantastic Browser, PDF reader, calls, mobile Hotspot/tethering, and several apps (mostly native).
I have used it, and for what it is I like it rather well. If I was in the business of building real-time systems, I would choose it over Linux in a heartbeat.
At least in our resume-tracking software, there's a bunch of pre-canned messages you can use if you choose to, I imagine it's much the same there.
WA Gov. Sides with Microsoft: Philanthropy-Funded K-12 CS Education Now the Law
Oracle also has custom SKUs. It's just different fuses and since Intel already makes a dozen SKUs from each die it's easy for them to make one more. Personally, I'm thinking of ordering an 11-core SKU.
Congrats! Keep working hard and polishing your skills. It's good to hear that there's a little disruption happening in the interview world.
"Just pick up the phone, we know it's you and why you're calling."
There's a reason it's on the news, this is not a common thing.
Here's a similar case where a writer left her son in her car for a few minutes in a parking lot at a store:

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/03/the_day_i_left_my_son_in_the...
What do you mean? Investors in the Valley usually give answers within 48 hours?
Elementary OS Freya Review
There's like one per suburb/town in Australia. In rural areas, often there's just a payphone in the middle of nowhere. The only artificial light in miles.
I don't disagree with the general thrust of your point here -- being an Android OEM is a thankless task, especially if you look past Samsung (who is probably wishing they had used Tizen at this point) and see everybody else.

I do think that Windows Phone is in a better position than BB, partly because they have about an order of magnitude higher market share right now, partly because Microsoft has a lot of other lines of business making money that they can throw at Windows Phone for roughly forever, and partly because they own the phone maker and the platform. In some ways, Microsoft is even better off than a lot of Android OEMs at this point. Android OEMs get to make their meager profits when the device is sold, and Google makes all the other money off the device owner for the rest of the device's lifetime -- they get the Google Play revenues for apps, they get the search ad revenues, they get to offer you other Google services on the device. Microsoft could conceivably be in the same boat -- they have the Windows app store, Bing and Office and such, so they can monetize Windows phones throughout the whole lifetime of the device. So even if their profits on devices sold are miniscule, they could still be better off in the long run than most Android OEMs.
And Ruby too (PORO naturally). Leave it to Martin Foweler et al. coin a useful [category of] term[s].
Coursera has a couple courses coming up:

Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1: https://www.coursera.org/course/algo

Algorithms, Part I: https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI
Correct, spawn is built in in Alice ML. Haskell wins on all the ways it can be used beyond built in functionality compared to it.
Why not Firefox OS or Ubuntu?
I understand the competitive pressures that drive us down to only a very small number of choices in the market (e.g. iphone or android, windows or mac).

What I don't understand is why so many consumers seem to want that outcome.
Don't get me wrong; I agree with your "good change" observation, and I wasn't saying the Twitter interface should have been frozen in time at 2006 (and I definitely wasn't saying there is no room for improvement, even now). I'm simply of the opinion that Twitter is rapidly losing sight of what their purpose is.
Read Dick Costolo’s Goodbye to Twitter and Jack Dorsey’s Hello
Using a niche operating system is their problem.
Why not BB OS?
Someone should note that Larry Ellison owns about half of Netsuite. Quite the bias towards Oracle with the last source.
"It's a basic competence test."

They feel the same way about you having your own resume in an interview.
Other than Apple, no, not really. It's a commodity business and those are tough.
Run of Bad Luck in Trading?
>Why spend millions on an OS to be at the whim of someone else?

Because they can't beat iOS and Android. And they can't out-market and out-spend Microsoft for #3. So what's left?
I switched from Android to Blackberry because I consider the OS superior. To each their own, I suppose.
Blackberry will be out of business soon regardless of what they do.
Are you kidding? Tcl runs circles around JS.
They don't want the outcome. It's the result of the network effect.

App developers simply can't afford or are capable of maintaining a separate code base for each OS. Especially when each OS requires very difficult skill sets.
Maybe it's just me but I'm having a hard time taking this story seriously. The list of affronts visited on the family (strip searches, cops pissing on property, foster worse than the parents, humiliation of the parents by the state) makes it a story sound almost too good to be true if you are looking to rile up your readership.

No identifying information is another big red flag, the parents of the free range kids hassled for letting their kids walk a mile to the park were all over media but this even more horrible (if true) story of kids being taken away for playing in the back yard is totally anonymous? Come on.

The bar to get me to hate on bureaucratic drones is pretty low, over shoot it too much and you take the fun away.
This is for realtime apps, and Stream is for scalable activity feeds. They're not really similar at all.
Sounds like a blast.
Pretty much. Throwing what little money they have at trying to sell commodity phones just hastens that outcome.
It's a business now. You can't go back and reinvent it now, which is clear from my comment above. But that wasn't always so. In 2006 it wasn't so. I remember those early days when only nerds were using Twitter. Now, you can't sustain a business that way, I know that. But Twitter was always supposed to be minimalist and web-enabled SMS. It's a shame, IMO, that because of "monetization" they have to make all these moves to make it more complicated and harder to surface useful information and conversations. Promoted tweets that are intrusive. Cards. Etc. I think there was a time when Twitter could have been "rolled in" to the public Internet in a way that would be more open and free of this grasping for a profit strategy. That time has passed, and it's sad.
Exactly. The industry can't sustain multiple operating systems unless there is some way of abstracting the development platforms. Solutions do exist for this but they are generally very poor quality and force a lowest common denominator approach.

This is a smart and very overdue decision by Blackberry.