Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl

AmazonInterview3

This was my first Amazon full time interview. It was not with a
recruiter but with a head of a two pizza team (a 2PTL). They were
surprised I hadn’t spoken with a recruiter already..

  • Tell me about an exciting opportunity that you worked on
  • How did you use technology there
  • How did you account for scaling?
  • What would be your advice for rapid growth sites such as Friendster
  • Talk to me about working in teams
  • What was your least effective team situation
  • How do you tell someone that someone else is better at a particular position than them
  • Design a web based email system. Describes pieces, components,
    design, large scale, and use case (This lead to lots of questions about
    the components and other decisions)
  • Why Amazon?
  • Where do you see yourself in five years?
  • Find the missing element in an array with values from 1 to 1000.
  • What ideas do you have for Amazon?
  • What blogging software do you recommend?
  • What blogging software do you use?
  • Any questions?

After the interview they sent me a coding question which I have to
complete and email to them before my next phone interview. That next
phone interview will be spent discussing my solution and then on the
basis of that interview they’ll make the fly down decision or not. The
question is:

  • Code up a simple class in the language of your choice to represent
    a deck of cards with operations to shuffle the deck and to deal one
    card.
Posted on by lhl

Saddle Creek is one of my favorite labels. After my initial exposure to some Bright Eyes/Cursive tracks (via AudioGalaxy, RIP), I’ve since bought just about every album put out by the label (yes, including the Bright Eyes Christmas Album). Which led me to a slight predicament — the Saddle Creek Store is currently offering a free copy of the Saddle Creek 50 sampler with an order of $25 or more, which would be quite tempting to give as a gift, but would involve finding some stuff I didn’t already have. After looking around, I did find some worthwhile albums to pick up. The first, Rilo Kiley’s Barsuk Records debut album. The second, the Amos House Collection, Vol 2, which has tracks from Elliot Smith, Spoon, Bright Eyes, etc.

Also, picked up a Park Avenue album (the one sample track [RA] sounded great), and also the Fizzle Like a Flood album. The entire album is available to sample online.

Lastly, Hopeless Records is currently having a $1 sampler sale. I’m not much into punk/pop-punk nowadays, but the Weakerthans and Atom and His Package tracks definitely make it worthwhile, a no-brainer at $1/pop.

Posted on by lhl

The Link Prediction Problem for Social Networks

Given a snapshot of a social network, can we infer which new interactions among its members are likely to occur in the near future? We approach the problem through the “proximity” of nodes in a network.

Jon Kleinberg also has other interesting papers on his site (one on word bursts, others on web structure, small world-phenomena, data clusting. His course on The Structure of Information Networks looks immensely interesting; lots of links (toread).

q: Is it feasible to precalc or rt approximate relationship proximity via # of connections, other arbitrary reputation/network properties

related: LINKED: The New Science of Networks – How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Science, Business and Everyday Life

Posted on by lhl

Russell Beattie writes about UI Heirarchies, starting with high praise for the iPod UI:

There’s the picture of the iPod’s user interface again. I just think it’s so clear, consistent and easy to understand and use by just about everyone. My Mom could easily navigate that menuing system. Apple could have put buttons and drop downs and a whole load of crap on that UI, but they didn’t. They kept it insanely clean and easy to use. I think this is the nicest gadget interface there is.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my iPod, but personally, I get aggravated by its UI. Perhaps it’s just me, but it just seems like its missing some really obvious things

  • The touch-button holding down play to turn it off – doesn’t work for me half-the time; so annoying; having an option beep/flash or something when it turns off would also be nice (w/o a real off button, there’s no tactile feedback)
  • If you’re playing something and you go to browse and play something else, you can’t just select it w/ the action button to play, you have to hit the play button twice. Once which pauses what you’re playing and a second time to play what you’ve highlighted. Don’t ask
  • Why isn’t there a way to fast-forward to the next album in album shuffle mode? It seems so obvious to me that it’s mind-boggling that it’s not there; maybe I’m using the wrong keys or something, but neither poking around or flipping through the manual has shown a way
Posted on by lhl

Ouch, take a look at this new IE exploit. I wonder how long it’s been in use in the wild? Hook it up to some JS status mouseover, and you have yourself a pretty convincing fraud potential (just in time for xmas shopping!). via Simon

Not a problem if you’re using a better browser, of course.

[To elaborate, yes the user@domain attack affects all browsers; that’s just URI syntax for you, and yeah, there are people suckered all the time by this. But w/ this 0x01 flaw, I suspect it’ll catch a whole lot of people off-guard who would otherwise ‘know better’; if you click on a link from an untrusted site, this attack can pretty much be made completely transparent (on the surface).]

Posted on by lhl

Emerging from a full night’s sleep (that was fun). Caught Something for Rockets at the Echo last night. They were quite fun, will be getting a copy of their demo/EP from a friend of a friend, so I’ll throw something up here when I get it.

Quick linkdump:

Posted on by lhl
  • Teacher to 1st-graders: Santa is fake – Parents irate after class told that Santa Claus is ‘make-believe’

    Donzelli said the school’s principal “had a real stern conversation” with the teacher. But there will be no written reprimand because she did not violate any school district policy.

    “We have no Santa clause,” Donzelli said. “We would think that teachers would use better judgment.”

  • AT&T Wireless Fumbles Number Portability
  • It’s not going to get any better. – I work for AT&T Wireless… (quite interesting thread, as you might imagine)
  • Cell Hell

    “You are holding my number hostage,” I said. “That’s not a porting issue. It’s some strange act of sabotage. What you are doing is a violation of FCC regulations. May I speak to another supervisor?”

    “You can, but he’ll just tell you the same thing,” Lance said.

    “I’m reporting you to the FCC,” I said.

    “I understand, sir,” Lance said.

  • ‘Just Bring ’em In From Space’ – An Interview With the Creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force
  • Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns

    “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them,” Colonel Sassaman said.

  • The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012
  • Five Geek Social Fallacies

    Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive

    Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:

    “Wouldn’t it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!”

    …

    Arguably, Friendster was designed by a GSF4 carrier.

  • MobyDock – Apple Dock-clone for Windows; see Matt’s post