How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide - <AUTHOR> https://www.byte-by-byte.com/google-interview/ <comment><USER2> Strange, I have yet to meet a single Google interviewer who was looking for perfect syntax during the interview. Last year I forgot the syntax for a data structure, told my interviewer "something like this," and he just said "that's fine." Got the internship later on. I even had one interviewer who was ok with me writing out matrix algebra mathematically instead of using np.matmul and all that.

<comment><USER3> As an interviewer, I can confirm that I don't care about syntax or whether the program compiles if I'm convinced their solution and approach would work. I'm also OK with candidates using placeholder helper functions or shorthand for trivial things (e.g. null/undefined check in JS) if they explain to me verbally what that part is supposed to do.

<comment><USER4> I also interview software engineering candidates at Google (n=150) and while I mostly agree, I do think there's some signal in whether a candidate can get the syntax right. It's not a dealbreaker if they don't, but all things considered someone who comfortably writes code all day is more likely to be able to write syntactically correct code than someone who doesn't.

The main things I want to see, though, are: can you communicate well about the parts of the problem that aren't clear to you? Can you analyze and compare solutions? Can you figure out something reasonably efficient? Do you understand your solution well enough to code it?

(Speaking for myself, not my employer.)

<comment><USER5> > I do think there's some signal in whether a candidate can get the syntax > right.

I know you're talking about software engineers, not data analysts, but:

select from <table> [oops... you're supposed to put an asterisk there]

select <column>, count(field) from <table> [holy shit... I forgot the group by]

select <column>, case when <condition> then <result> else <other> from <table> [oh man, case statements need to be terminated with an `END`]

select <columns>, from <table> [oh no... SQL doesn't like that comma before the from statement]

select <...> from <table1> join <table2> table1.column = table2.column [This is embarrassing, I forgot the `on` keyword]

select <stuff> from <table1> union <stuff> from <table2> [Jesus... I forgot to type `select` after the union]

select <column>, sum(column2) over (partition by column3 between unbounded preceding and current row) as cumulative_sum from <table> [dang, SQL doesn't know which rows if I don't actually mention `ROWS BETWEEN`]

select <column>, count(case when <condition> then 1 else null end) as count from <table> order by count desc having count > 1 [ahh that's silly, you can't put your HAVING clause after the ORDER BY]

with cte_1 as (select <...>), cte_2 as (select <...>) cte_3 as (select <...>) select <columns and aggregations> from cte_1 join cte_2 on <...> left join cte_3 on <...> where <condition> group by <many columns> [Oh my goodness, I forgot a comma after closing cte_2]

Now, perhaps this says more about myself more than anything, but I really do write code comfortably all day, I'm glad my current employer, or any number of the clients I've worked for, haven't had this philosophy (even when watching over my shoulder waiting for results they need at the moment). I'd be mortified if anyone ever dug up some of the atrocious things I've requested of the database in the server logs.

<comment><USER6> > > I do think there's some signal in whether a candidate can get the syntax > right.

> I know you're talking about software engineers, not data analysts, but:

(inserts self-pwn car crash here)

I've done SQL for ~20 years and I'd say I'm good at it. I don't make as many mistakes as you've described but I know exactly what you mean, and I'd never hold that against you because I don't give a toss about mistakes that the language will catch.

I've rarely interviewed others, but when I did I asked high-level stuff approaches. I wanted to see if they could grasp the solution, not the physical framework.

Actual example: you're given a large collection of words, which you're allowed to pre-process - you have plenty of time to do this. Later on you are given another word, how would you very quickly find all acronymns of that word?

(inerviewee programmer didn't get it, so I tried it on a non-programmer we had around - she very quickly worked out you ordered the letters and saved them - she didn't explain it clearly (to repeat, she wasn't a programmer) but in programmer terms it was a dictionary with keys as the sorted letters and the values as a set of the words).

In this case, would you employ the supposed programmer who didn't get it, or the non-programmer who did?

Actual example: Show me how you'd represent an arithmetic expression using objects, and how you'd evaluate it in an OO style (was after class hierarchy of (op, leftexpr, rightexpr and .eval method. With plenty of time and pushes in the right direction, he still didn't get it despite claiming good OO on his CV)

(True story: to same guy who didn't get the OO expression question, I started off with an SQL question. His CV said SQL was his strong point, so I gave him an easy one: "explain to me what a left outer join does". He shook his head in confusion "Never heard of it". Actually happened! I'm not even exaggerating!)

<comment><USER5> >Actual example: Show me how you'd represent an arithmetic expression using objects, and how you'd evaluate it in an OO style (was after class hierarchy of (op, leftexpr, rightexpr and .eval method. With plenty of time and pushes in the right direction, he still didn't get it despite claiming good OO on his CV)

As a SQL guy who knows Python, but specifically just pandas/seaborn/numpy (matrix/set operations rather than the underlying constructs which make numpy/pandas possible), as opposed to a SWE with OO skills, could you point me in the right direction to learn how this question should be answered?

>"explain to me what a left outer join does". He shook his head in confusion "Never heard of it". Actually happened! I'm not even exaggerating!

I... I don't even know what to say here. That's absurd to me he would claim SQL knowledge and respond with that answer.

My response would be "that is the same as a `left join`" (then I'd explain what a left join was) and follow up with "I exclusively write 'left join' and never 'left outer join' as my experiences with the DB/MS I'm most familiar with (Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, MSSQL and a couple others) accept the `left join` syntax without specifying `outer`".

<comment><USER6> First up let me apologise for the abrasive and somewhat unpleasant reply I gave to you. Not my best, sorry.

Ok, couldn't find a sample on the web so here's mine. It's not right for brevity and because this is the first python code I've done in ~3 years, so any criticisms welcome. Hopefully can get the formatting right

      # super.init omitted for brevity
      class Expession: # abstract base class
          def eval(): pass

      class Literal(Expession):
          def __init__(self, val): self.value = val
          def eval(self): return self.value

      lit1 = Literal(8)
      print(lit1.eval()) # prints 8

      class UnaryExpr(Expession): pass # base class for unary expressions

      class Negate(UnaryExpr):
          def __init__(self, expr): self.expression = expr
          def eval(self): return - self.expression.eval()

      lit2 = Literal(13)
      neg = Negate(lit2)
      print(neg.eval()) # prints -13

      class BinaryExpression: pass # base class for binary expressions

      # Note that subclasses Add and Multiply have the same
      # __init__ code so I should hoist that into the BinaryExpression
      # base class but for clarity I'm leaving it in the subclasses

      class Add(BinaryExpression):
          def __init__(self, leftExpr, rightExpr):
              self.leftExpression = leftExpr
              self.rightExpression = rightExpr
          def eval(self):
              return self.leftExpression.eval() + self.rightExpression.eval()

      add2literals = Add(lit1, lit2) # 8 + 13
      print(add2literals.eval()) # prints 21

      class Multiply(BinaryExpression):
          def __init__(self, leftExpr, rightExpr):
              self.leftExpression = leftExpr
              self.rightExpression = rightExpr
          def eval(self): return self.leftExpression.eval() * self.rightExpression.eval()

      mult2literals = Multiply(lit1, lit2) # 8 * 13
      print(mult2literals.eval()) # prints 104

      # now let's make a complex expression, say (7 + 2) * (-4)
      # Doing this by hand but a parser would build this from that
      # string
      expr = Multiply(
          Add(Literal(7), Literal(2))
          ,
          Negate(Literal(4)))
      print(expr.eval()) # prints -36

Basically it's a tree of objects that you call eval() on the root, and these recursively call eval down, then when they reach the bottom start returning their subtree-calculated values.

Make sense?

Re. the left join, I abbreviated it. Full event was that there was 2 interviewers, me + other guy. I said to our interviewee, "what's a left join?". Cue puzzled expression and headshake. My co-interviewer qualified that for him: "what's a left outer join?", getting the response "never heard of it". He claimed 4 years of sql on his CV. No job for you, matey.

This isn't rare either, worked at a recruitment office and overheard a conversation which recruitment agent used to check applicant wasn't clueless. Applicant was applying for C++ job. Q: "give me 4 STL containers". Applicant replied "cin and cout".

If you've done no C++ that's like asking a python guy "give me some python data structures" and getting back the reply "input() and print()"

Edit: to clarify about the expression eval stuff, I wasn't expecting code, just an obvious grasp of a tree of objects with relevant subtypes, and eval(). He knew roughly how to do it procedurally, but blatantly had no clue on the OO style (which, yes, he claimed to have on his CV).

Incidentally, I'm just starting my very first step into Pandas today. Looks SQL-ish!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I interviewed with Google NYC for Senior Dev position once, prepared well and thought it went well.

Received the green light and moved to the next phase, where I spoke with potential teams over the phone, then settled with Google Maps. Met with one of their Tech Leads, cool. I was really happy and though that all my effort to prepare for the "Google interview" had payed off.

Then no word back from the recruiter with a final offer. It turns out the VP of eng saw some red flags in my interview and decided to bail.

I felt really frustrated and while I spoke I spoke with the recruiter he apologized and even said the hiring manager was on my side and people overall liked me but there were two engs that were on the fence. Gosh, I think I met with 7-8 engs, all the seniors seemed to like me. I remember not having the best conversation with 2 engs who were new to the company and could not relax nor communicate well.

Bottom line, prepare but also be prepared for some degree of luck and arbitrary judgements.

Yes, there are great interviewers in google. Engs that are engs in their minds and hearts, who can see the process is not perfect but work to get it better. But unfortunately, there are insecure folks who should be better trained for before interviewing candidates.

That was 5 years ago, not sure I would subject myself to this sort of loop even again. And strange enough they contact me few months after to reinterview but this time I could skip the big loop and meet with just 3 engs... I said no since I was already in a new job.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like the typical FANG experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A friend said recently, "people want to be employed without becoming employable". These guides really exemplify this obsession. Sure, Google has a nice salary and good perks and whatever. But after you get the job, you have to do the job. I wonder if the people who read these guides and try to study just the right topics to get a job, whether they actually _like_ programming.

These guides act as optimizations, shortening the path you need to take to get the job, shortening the stuff you need to learn, etc. But in the end, the path is all you get. If you don't like programming and if you don't like learning, then are you really gonna like Google?

I suppose there's people who genuinely like programming who just need a manual to teach them how to play the game. Lord knows I've practiced my fair share of whiteboard problems when I'd rather be reading about compilers. But there's something wrong about having to play a game to get the job.

<comment><USER10> > If you don't like programming and if you don't like learning, then are you > really gonna like Google?

There are also many people who are great at programming, wh love it, who are terrible at interviewing. After all, these are two related, but ultimately different skills. You talked about it yourself in your last paragraph, ending with:

> But there's something wrong about having to play a game to get the job.

Sounds like the fault is on the employer that makes you play the game, not on "people want to be employed without becoming employable".

<comment><USER9> Agreed, the fault is with the employer, but the people who are willing to indulge this game by obsessively learning to play it don't help.

<comment><USER11> I mean, if you want to work at Google and the likes, you need to indulge in the game right? And working at Google isn't just about the pay and the salary - thats quite a shallow thing to say. Engineers there handle data of astronomcial proportions, scale their systems every second to handle the ever- growing traffic, innovate on solutions that are used by millions of people around the world. I'd say, if you truly love programming and computer science, thats a pretty sweet deal.

<comment><USER9> The people who spend their days obsessively networking and practicing interview questions are generally not the people who would find problems about scaling to handle astronomical proportions of data interesting. The people who find that interesting tend to spend their days reading about scalability and performance. I'm not talking about someone putting aside a few weeks to a month to study up on these questions, I'm talking about people who straight up neglect their CS education because they want to pass a technical interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The amount of time required to 'learn' the Google interview would be time that could be spent learning more universally applicable skills.

Is it true that an experienced developer would not be able to pass the interview without studying using a similar guide? If so, then the interview process is... fubar.

<comment><USER13> A perfect job interview could be defined as an interview for which the best study technique is to become a better choice for the role. Studying skills that would not directly contribute to job performance would not change the result of a perfect job interview in any way.

In that sense, it's probably a good indicator for Google that the interview advice includes "practice writing code", "make it a habit to validate input", and "learn about data structures", and it's probably a bad indicator for Google that the advice includes "practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard" and "practice solving problems with a 30 minute timer."

<comment><USER14> I'm in the interviewer pool @ Google.

> practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard

This probably differs from interviewer to interviewer as to how strictly it's adhered to, but it's not really a hard and fast rule. I'm sure there are some interviewers that will ding you on a forgotten semicolon, but I suspect that most would not.

Personally I look for code that isn't so far from syntactically correct that it's clear you are trying to BS me. I'll even accept pseudocode for the most part. But I've had candidates that try to make up language features, and that doesn't fly with me.

> practice solving problems with a 30 minute timer

I only give my candidates 30 minutes. The whole interview is 45, I spend 5 minutes introducing myself and setting up expectations, 30 on the question, and 10 on answering their questions (after all, they're also interviewing us).

You can tell pretty early whether they're on a solid trajectory, and I'll offer the occasional hint to keep someone on track, or ask tangential questions if they're doing well on time. Not finishing isn't a deal killer, provided you had a solid approach and weren't just running in circles. But a good candidate will finish in about 25 minutes and we can spend some time talking about alternate approaches. Sometimes I'll show them the optional approach and see how that conversation goes.

Nine times out of ten a candidate scores low because they overlooked an infinite loop or code would crash on boundary conditions and candidate wasn't able to realize that even with hints.

<comment><USER15> > But I've had candidates that try to make up language features, and that > doesn't fly with me.

This piqued my curiosity. Can you give an example?

<comment><USER16> I'm still floored by how many candidates I've talked to that assert with great confidence that the local variables they declare will still be there with the same values when they call the function recursively.

And most recently, when iterating over a string's characters the underlying string methods KNOW that the string is being iterated and will pick up at the current iteration point. For example, you've got the string "5432112345". And via iteration, you're currently pointing at the first "2" at index 3. The candidate asserted that if you call "indexOf('2')", it would return 6 because "indexOf" knows that it is iterating and should start 1 beyond where it is pointing at.

And my favorite - once had a candidate that misspelled a function name while coding in Ruby. I didn't ding them for it. But I pointed it out because it just bugged me. And the candidate then swore to me that Ruby will automatically call the correct method if there was only 1 candidate based on the misspelling. You know when you do things like "git inti" and it says "did you mean init?". The candidate swore that Ruby would just call "init" for you because it knew what you wanted.

<comment><USER17> [https://github.com/yuki24/did_you_mean#installation](https://github.com/yuki24/did_you_mean#installation) :

        Ruby 2.3 and later ships with this gem and it will automatically be required when a Ruby process starts up. No special setup is required.

It doesn't call the method for you, but it does do the did-you-mean automatically if you misspell and it's close enough.

<comment><USER16> Maybe this what they meant? I dunno. I can see this being helpful in irb/pry.

In the end, we did end up making an offer to this candidate. They did well on everything we asked them. This was the only "brain fart" they had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is getting ridiculous. These guides to interviewing at specific companies are starting to sound like the video game cheat code books of old.

If the process is so nuanced that there's an entire industry around these types of guides (and Google even highly recommends you buy them!), then the process is fundamentally flawed.

But we already knew that, and as long as others are still playing the game, we are forced to play or miss out.

<comment><USER19> I completely agree.

Even Google suggest to "practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard". This is clearly a useless skill as a software engineers except in getting a job at companies that do whiteboard interviews. Did you try to refactor code on a whiteboard?

How are they able to find people that are able to efficiently debug problems?

When I interview people I tell them, "Bring your own laptop set up to be able to code and debug". And I give them "Fix this site" or "build this thing" kind of problems.

It looks like that it works a lot better to find "hidden gems" and people that are good at "doing" instead of those that are jsut good at "telling".

<comment><USER20> Elite schools do that in undergrad; e.g. as an initial scored lab exercise, write this recursive fractal shape using Logo, parallel Delaunay triangulation with prefix sums , dynamic programming solving oligopoly problem or single- value Paxos pseudocode on a piece of paper in 10 minutes (I am being serious). If you can cope with it, it immediately shows up in the interview and you are considered a member of the club, a person worthy of having conversations with.

<comment><USER21> Which elite schools? I went to MIT and didn't have to do any of this.

<comment><USER22> [https://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/materials.php](https://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/materials.php)

<comment><USER23> Just to add context: MIT Interim Activities Period (IAP) is a "winter break" few weeks in which anyone can lead classes/sessions on any topic: [http://web.mit.edu/iap/about/index.html](http://web.mit.edu/iap/about/index.html)

MIT CSAIL is the research lab joining of the legendary MIT AI Lab and MIT Lab for Computer Science. People who work hard and win the lottery to do research at CSAIL (or other prestigious lab) shouldn't afterwards be looking for entry- level coding jobs for which a whiteboard code monkey dance interview/hazing would be appropriate, IMHO.

(For different reasons, people who are in programmer career tracks, with verifiable industry track records and/or open source involvement, also shouldn't be put through the entry-level hazing. Claims that the ritual gives certain companies metrics or somesuch would carry more credibility, had those companies not been caught brazenly colluding, at the CEO level, to systematically suppress wages and mobility of their own employees, with presumed spreading market effects throughout industry.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's also a good marketing milking cow to create paid courses and trainings for Google interviews — the dream of so many novice devs and other "Intensive Coding Bootcamp" participants.

Keyword research and trends... [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=G...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Google%20job%20interview)

<comment><USER25> I'm semi-convinced this is yet another reason for perpetuating this type of poor interview practice (not just at Google).

When you search modern interview topic and comments/opinions on the current process, you'll find a few SEs (typically working at places like Google at some point) on that on the side sell training bootcamps, etc. These people will swear every direction that it's a reasonable process in comments around the web referring to their side business. Creating problems they provide solutions to: gatekeeping 101.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hate these style of interviews. I give them to prospective engineers every week for one of these FAANGM companies.

They don't test for good engineers -- they test for people who practice these style interviews, and for good new graduates.

It makes sense to ask these questions to new grads, but afterwards there is so much more experience that I feel like is much more important than acing data structures questions.

I am amazing at whiteboard questions, but that doesn't make me a good engineer. It's because I found the trick to solving these, and have practiced them. A lot of it it is practice 'ooo this looks like a graph problem, let me use a graph', etc.

<comment><USER27> Have you worked with any great, experienced engineers who would have had no idea how to traverse a tree?

<comment><USER28> Yes, and those same great engineers went ahead and figured it out. You see, some are hiring parrots, and others are hiring problem solvers.

<comment><USER27> I'm all for hiring problem solvers, but how do you differentiate them if you don't ask them to solve problems?

Years of experience is definitely not a guarantee of competence.

<comment><USER28> Hypothetical interview question: Write a function that finds the distance between two words.

Candidate A: Can recite algos and remembers that Levenshtein distance is the answer.

Candidate B: Has no idea what Levenshtein distance is, writes a brute-force solution with the understanding that it's not an optimal solution. After the interview she spends more time learning what she doesn't know, learns about Levenshtein distance, and sends you an optimal solution via email.

The above is a real-life scenario, so my question to you is - how do you decide who to hire?

<comment><USER27> This is not a good interview question and neither candidate seems to have answered it well, but I would reject B first because I obviously don't know whether she did any research or whether she just asked Candidate A via StackOverflow

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> These guides are just people trying to make a quick buck. There's no shortcut to getting good and perhaps that's why these type of interviews are here to stay.

<comment><USER30> Amen

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've been trying to prepare and it makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

Prepping while working is draining.

</comment><comment><USER32> > For the phone interview, it will be on a Google document, and for the onsite > interview, it will be writing code on a whiteboard.

That part is not completely correct. At onsite can choose to write code in a Chromebook which will have a lightweight editor with syntax highlighting.

<comment><USER33> It wasn't really a choice when I interviewed there. All but one interviewer had me write code in the chromebook, which was my least favorite part of the interview process. The trackpad didn't respond to my slightly dry erase covered fingers, the keyboard was weird, and the quasi hangout software it was running crashed a few times, one of which required a full restart. That might not sound like a big deal but in a high pressure/time constrained environment it was a bit of a nightmare. I was told going in that the chromebooks would be available as an option, but writing a few lines of code only to be told to stop and switch over to the chromebook (which had either gone to sleep or frozen), have the interviewer log in and select the correct session, then select syntax highlighting, then finally being able to start writing code doesn't seem very conducive to maintaining a train of thought.

<comment><USER34> Tell your recruiter, interviewers are not supposed to force candidates to use chromebooks.

<comment><USER33> I thought about it, but the chromebook hang ups were not the deciding factor in my performance (I did extremely meh and am fine with that because I'm entirely self taught and to even get that far was really cool). There were other larger problems with the process that google should be fixing instead of dinking around with chromebooks (I'm assuming they were there so code could be reviewed afterwards, which makes sense).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Should be titled "How to Ace the Technical Interview in the Bay Area". Even absolute shithole bottom tier companies or unknown startups are asking these questions. Write perfect code on the whiteboard or get rejected. You have to put in A LOT of time into preparation even if you don't want to work at Google, which is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER36> Genuine Question: Apart from maybe the money or a nice resume entry, why would you/do you want to?

<comment><USER37> I don't work at Google (and I don't agree with some of the things the company's decided to do) but have many friends who enjoy working there. From what I hear, Google has an organizational structure that is very favorable for regular engineers. Once you're hired and you put in around a year of work in a team, it's almost trivial to find another team. Engineers also directly evaluate managers and I've heard stories of mid to high level managers crying in bathrooms because of poor reviews from their reports. These factors combine to create an environment where teams are actively working to make engineers happy and content. Compared to many companies where managers make a lot of decisions in a room with no feedback given to or received from engineers, it's heck of a lot better.

<comment><USER38> >I've heard stories of mid to high level managers crying in bathrooms because of poor reviews from their reports. These factors combine to create an environment where teams are actively working to make engineers happy and content.

Honestly this sounds like a thought experiment.

Do you have any ethical hangups about entering an environment where falling out of your favor can leave someone stress-crying in their place of work and/or about their livelihood.

If so, how much money would it take for you to join the system anyway?

How long would you stay in such a system if you found yourself already in one?

Back in the real world, in a business context, it sounds like an abusive workplace and an untenable system. Like, that obviously can't last forever.

<comment><USER37> Perhaps using the crying manager example was a bad idea on my part. What I can stand behind is having an org structure that encourages managers and execs to treat their employees well. It sounds like Google has done a better job than most. I'm sure there are managers and engineers crying in private in every big company out there. What I'm trying to say is even though a lot of people like to assume that people work for Google and stay there just for the money, Google probably does some things very well to keep all the talent despite the negative press it gets. And I think a major factor is how empowered a "regular" engineer feels in the company. It sounds like a step up from many other companies in that regard.

<comment><USER38> There are at least two problems with this:

\- "I'm sure there are managers and engineers crying in private in every big company out there": You're not excusing google here, just expanding the range of companies whose apparent behavior is mortifying a couple of people in this thread.

\- "Google probably does some things very well to keep all the talent despite the negative press it gets.": probably. They probably do a lot of a/b testing to dial in the compensation/retention ratio they're looking for, or maybe they just heap rewards onto engineers because they can afford it. Be that as it may, some people think that what google's doing is detrimental to society, or at least the problems are bigger than a salary or even a total compensation package should make up for.

<comment><USER37> I don't see any problem because I agree with what you said. Work shouldn't be so stressful that you cry in private. Google should do more "good" for the world.

I still think Google stands as an attractive workplace for reasons that are not just compensation and resume boost, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> They lost me when they got into showing how to make the 'dups' function faster. The author definitely either doesn't understand big-O notation or doesn't understand the complexity. Their O(1) implementation is anything but. Likely O(n×log(n)) at best. Also, their brute force implementation is unnecessarily verbose. Want dups?

      from collections import defaultdict
      def dups(seq):
        d = defaultdict(int)
        for x in seq:
          d[x] += 1
        return [k for k, v in d.items() if v > 1]

Assuming Python's defaultdict has O(1) lookup/insertion (which I think it does), this algorithm is a proper O(n) complexity.

<comment><USER40> Hmm. I don't think they claimed to have an O(1) time solution, just O(1) added space. Which, it is, but only because they're counting on the original array's underlying type having enough bits for their sign flipping. It would be as if you used a more compact type for the array elements, and then allocated another bitmap for the range of numbers.

Of course, once we start optimizing how the original array is stored, we may have exceeded the limits of this problem as a teaching exercise :)

As for time, it does seem to be O(n) to me; can you clarify why you think it's nlogn? It may not be particularly fast in practice when compared to other O(n) approaches like the bitmap, but I don't think the complexity is wrong.

Your solution is nice - it actually gives you more information (how many appearances, not just T/F >1 appearance), but it does require more additional space and isn't necessarily faster. I think the bitmap approach would be nicer if you're ok with using more space; the bitmap is essentially a very easy to find perfect hash function due to the unique input constraints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It would be nice if an article on how to ace a coding interview did not have incorrect code in it. AFAICT the set-based algorithm for finding duplicates is wrong; the resulting set will contain items in the list that are not duplicated.

<comment><USER42> It doesn't work. Not just a coding issue either, as the code matches their explanation for this "improved" method.

<comment><USER41> _> It doesn't work._

Yes, I confirmed that by pasting it into the REPL and verifying that it gives the wrong answer for a one-element list. Apparently the author failed to follow his own advice to always test code that you write.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wouldn't get an interview from Google even if I wanted to. I'm 29 and live in Africa. That said this guide was still helpful. A reminder of some of the skills I should hone for my next interview. I loved reading the comments here because they give so much perspective from all sorts of people. HN is extremely critical of everything and it can be sobering. I cannot obviously speak about the intentions or damage such guides have or can do but honestly, even if you know how to code, it doesn't hurt to prepare for an interview in a way a prospective company would want you to.

</comment><comment><USER44> Question for hiring managers and employers:

In Silicon Valley, tech interviewing has become an arms race between applicants cramming to pass tech screens and interviews, and employers coming up with new routines. Sites like Glassdoor and CareerCup are loaded with interview questions that have appeared in those routines, giving savvy interviewees the opportunity to see the questions on the exam and prepare accordingly.

How do you feel about the existence of these sites, and do they affect how interviews are conducted?

<comment><USER14> As an interviewer I don't really care. A good candidate doesn't need them, and a poor candidate isn't helped by them. The only thing that's irritating to me is that they actually burn interview questions. Once a question is seen on an external job board it gets banned as an interview question.

<comment><USER25> In the current interview structure, I don't think that's inherently a bad policy. It forces interviewers to develop new unique questions and hopefully, while doing so, consider the cognative time and complexity the solution took them before deciding to hand it to an interviewee.

This also discourages overly complex or overly familiarized questions. If the question is too complex, chances are it will end up posted online soon after, penalizing the interviewer in time cost. If a new question is recycled frequently, it will also likely end up online at some point and penalize interviewers from using questions they're overly familiar/biased in assessment to based on their own rote learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> After a long and storied career I mostly just get a kind of vicarious doom- thrill from reading about interviews I couldn't possibly pass.

</comment><comment><USER46> Is it fair to assume "professional google interviewee" is a thing nowadays?

<comment><USER7> Yes, I have a few close friends hopping jobs every 1-2 years. Part of their secret is be involved with interviews to keep all this crap fresh in their minds and also be part of this sub-industry of tech interviews.

Good for them financially maybe. Professionally, I didn't see they go beyond the average senior dev. But that just me being sour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Seems like there are lot of sites like this in past few years. Great.

</comment><comment><USER48> There's an unconscious bias in this post. Google as a company is not only interviewing engineering roles. Even for engineering roles, there are too many sub categories and many doesn't follow the typical SWE interview process.

If you just want to know what the interview for your roles would be, the recruiter from Google will happy to give you an overview.

</comment><comment><USER49> Isn't the interview different depending on the job?

<comment><USER50> My immediate reaction to the title of the article was "... for SWEs and possibly SREs".

But to answer your question, yes, absolutely.

<comment><USER51> Any ideas what the process would look like for something like Solution Architect for Google Cloud? I can't imagine that there would be graphs and tree coding questions but you never know.

<comment><USER37> I think it largely depends on the person interviewing you. I know candidates interviewing for Machine Learning positions get asked with typical algorithm questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I've never seen an interview process that HN (and Reddit and Slashdot and ...) didn't trash as "deeply flawed", "biased", "unfair", "unreasonable", etc. At some point, though, a company has to have some sort of process, and by and large what they use works for them.

<comment><USER53> It's always so much easier to criticize (as nothing is perfect) than actually come up with a better solution in real life. So anything where there's no perfect solution, people will endlessly criticize online, even though they themselves have no better solution, and what they criticize is not terrible by any means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You can bypass the whole charade by knowing 2-3 people within Google that can provide "assurance" you are good enough. Whiteboard testing is for grunts/unknowns without network. Another way is to be a significant contributor to some popular open source project.

<comment><USER54> > You can bypass the whole charade by knowing 2-3 people within Google that > can provide "assurance" you are good enough.

This is not a thing. Everyone goes through the same level-adjusted loop.

> Another way is to be a significant contributor to some popular open source > project.

LOL no. Google is literally famous for rejecting major open source contributors for not knowing how to reverse a binary tree.

<comment><USER55> Is there something special about reversing a binary tree?

AFAIK, you could swap the child pointers and do that recursively for the child nodes. You could also do things O(1) by just changing the comparison function, perhaps by wrapping it to negate the comparison.

<comment><USER14> This is a specific, well-known case. Max Howell (the author of Brew) was rejected by Google. One of his interviewers asked him to invert a binary tree.

[https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en](https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In the Year 2000, Ships Will Float Above the Water - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/in-the-year-2000-ships-will-float-above-the-water/71707/ <comment><USER2> They did it before 2000: <http://www.vincelewis.net/ekranoplan.html></comment>


Oracle Open Sources Java EE TCK - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/jakartaee-tck <comment><USER2> Had to look it up.

TCK == Technology Compatibility Kit ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit))

Which leads me to believe CTS is compatibility test suite.

<comment><USER3> The TCK's have always been the center of much discussion / cause of friction in the Java community. Although most discussions were about the Java SE TCK, not the EE TCK. All this friction goes back to the Sun days. Apache Harmony was probably the pinnacle of TCK friction. This is the open letter the Apache foundation send to Sun: [https://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html](https://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html)

I realise that Oracle only open sources the TCK because they no longer want to carry the burden of EE (can't say I blame them) but its still ironic that Sun never wanted to release most TCK's and now Oracle releases the EE TCK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honest question since I'm not knowledgeable about this. Is this even something anyone cares about, considering how Oracle has treated Java and its other inheritances from Sun? If yes, how?

<comment><USER5> Certainly Java EE is far less interesting than Java SE. Even huge "enterprises" steer clear of the "enterprise edition".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is Oracle's motivation for doing this? Good will?

<comment><USER3> Oracle has been working on cutting EE loose for some time now. Its actually part of The Eclipse foundation now and its called Jakarta EE.

There are a lot of legacy Java EE deployments so it will stick around for quite some time. Though in most new settings people just use Java SE.</comment></comment>


How I Blew Out My Knee and Came Back to Win a National Championship - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/blew-out-knee-win-national-championship <comment><USER4> The thing with a torn ACL is that they can't repair the cartilage, so if you get the surgery and go back to playing sports then you have a significant chance of getting osteoarthritis within as little as ten years.[1]

Is it really worth suffering debilitating and incurable pain for the rest of your life just to be able to impress other people?

[http://www.npr.org/2011/01/19/133025140/for-young- athletes-k...](http://www.npr.org/2011/01/19/133025140/for-young-athletes- knee-surgery-opens-door-to-pain?ft=1&f=1060)

<comment><USER5> > Is it really worth suffering debilitating and incurable pain for the rest of > your life just to be able to impress other people?

If you think sports is about just impressing other people, then I'm guessing you've never played a sport at a high level.

Being able to unify your mind and body at a high level in competition... it's one of the most cerebral, peak experiences, and it shapes and develops your character henceforth forever afterwards.

Ask most competitive athletes who've been injured if they'd go back in time and not play to avoid it, and most wouldn't make that trade.

<comment><USER6> i agree with you, but i don't think you have to go that far to make your case.

sports are fun.

<comment><USER5> > i agree with you, but i don't think you have to go that far to make your > case.

I went back and forth on quoting my experience with training and injury above and didn't, but maybe it's worth saying - breaking a few bones in my right hand ended my fencing career, I was broke a tooth training in Krav Maga, and tore some cartilage doing squats with slightly bad form in the gym.

I'd have preferred not to have had those injuries, but I wouldn't give up the lessons I got from my training to not have them, even though all three are a minor annoyance on a semi-regular basis.

Tangential note - I'd recommend epee fencing to anyone here. It's a lot like playing Chess with your body, incredibly cerebral and conducive to excellent thought and flow.

I've never been as locked in as when I came back from down a few touches to tie it up at 4-4 or 14-14... you know that last touch is everything, and your opponent starts thinking "oh no, I could lose this when I was up so much" - <USER2> epee fencing, if you have a lead you almost always win, because a draw benefits the leading player and draws are easy to get if going for them - <USER3> you come back from a deficit, meaning you're scoring touches and avoiding them getting even a single draw, that final touch you get so locked in, and then winning after being down... nothing else compares. I shiver just thinking about about battling back to even, winner-takes-all... nothing else compares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to compete in gymnastics - it really is a grueling sport. My wrists are ruined from the pommel horse.

Congrats on the comeback, serious injuries are a huge mental and physical drain.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter This is part 1 of 2. 2, the "Comes Back to Win a National Championship" isn't going up until next week.

The only things I got out of it were that gymnastics is just as viciously brutal on ones body as ballet or sports like American Football, and the knowledge that mens' gymnastics is dying a lingering death in the USA.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have five daughters in competitive Gymnastics - they've all been in Gymnastics since around 2-3 years of age(oldest is now 15). I see their 'peers' in the neighborhood and there's no comparing physical fitness between them. It's been great for all of them - there have been injuries, but nothing that bad, so far.

Injuries happen - either get over it and go on, or curl up in a ball and put a cocoon around yourself. This guy had great intestinal fortitude coming back to the sport after those injuries - I commend him.

<comment><USER9> I dunno why but this reminds me of trainspotting. But choose life, right. One could avoid any risk of injury through non-participation but it's a deceptive opt out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Along the lines of blown out knees in gymnastics is the incredibly inspiring story of Shun Fujimoto, who injured himself during a gymnastics routine in the Olympics, and then kept competing.[1] Per the Wikipedia article on the guy, "One doctor stated: 'How he managed to do somersaults and twists and land without collapsing in screams is beyond my comprehension.'"[2]

Watching that video and reading his story quickly put an end to my complaints of "but I need a nice ergonomic keyboard to be able to work at all!"

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq-C5-vIim8> [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shun_Fujimoto>

<comment><USER11> The line at end of the Wikipedia article puts an interesting spin on this story:

      Later, when asked whether he would do what he did again,
      he replied frankly, "No, I would not."

This makes me see it as more a cautionary tale than inspiring. Although it is still amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was a spectator at that meet--it was truly frightening to see. Glad Jason is doing well and sharing his story.</comment>


Computing CSS matrix3d transforms - <AUTHOR> http://franklinta.com/2014/09/08/computing-css-matrix3d-transforms/

<comment><USER2> Since no aliasing is applied (at least on Firefox), these transforms endup looking terrible and illegible.

<comment><USER3> A simple workaround is to render at double the size and then scale down in the same transform. Makes it edible in most non-ridiculous transforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was a bit disappointed that a library was used to solve the system of equations instead of going one step further using Cramer's Rule.

Otherwise, this was a fun read!

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice!</comment>


The EU Can Still Be Saved from Its Internet-Wrecking Copyright Plan - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kenb8/the-eu-can-still-be-saved-from-its-internet-wrecking-copyright-plan <comment><USER2> Do not pay link fees, do not sign link agreements, do not use their links - soon they will beg...</comment>


Twitter's problems are the result of architecture, XMPP may be the answer - <AUTHOR> http://slashstar.com/blogs/tim/archive/2008/05/05/twitter-s-problems-are-the-result-of-architecture-xmpp-may-be-the-answer.aspx

<comment><USER2> Twitter has been offering jabber/pub-sub to larger API consumers for a while (most aggregators like tweetscan use it as their interface with twitter)

I agree with the premise that they should be using pub-sub for (most) api clients, but twitter agrees as wel - and have been working towards it (hence large consumers already using it)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not familiar with Tweetscan's specific implementation, but I would assume they're just grabbing the public XML feed, no?

<comment><USER2> nope - the aggregators/searchers/... run get updates via jabber</comment></comment>


Ubiquiti AirFiber Sets New World Record for Long Range Wireless Broadband - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/ubiquiti-airfiber-sets-new-world-record-for-long-range-wireless-broadband-20160629-00972 <comment><AUTHOR> "304 km (189 mi) high-speed data link from Sardinia to Tuscany, achieving data rates of up to 356.33 Mbps"

the ubnt community post has some more technical insights and pictures: [http://community.ubnt.com/t5/airFiber-Stories/ICTP-and- CISAR...](http://community.ubnt.com/t5/airFiber-Stories/ICTP-and-CISAR-take- the-challenge-and-upgrade-with-AF5X-304km/cns-p/1608780)</comment>


Ask HN: What are your painpoints with markdown? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently working on an article about distraction free writing. I would be intrested if you have any difficulties using Markdown? <comment><USER2> Nowadays I want most of my imgs inside figure blocks with figcaption, alt text and a title.

Markdown isn't that sophisticated, and neither is Pandoc's extension of Markdown. Even the part of it that Pandoc can do gets obscure.

Markdown is best for very simple markup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. Captions are not supported. Where do you publish your content to?

<comment><USER3> Netlify via Hugo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For me its quite combersome to use tables.</comment>


Show HN: Startup Idea Generation Guide - <AUTHOR> https://startupadvice.xyz <comment><AUTHOR> Curated advice from founders and investors on how to come up with startup ideas. This is just a small initial version, but the idea is to be able to search for any question and find answers from reputable people.</comment>


Weekly Robotics #70 - <AUTHOR> https://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-robotics-70 <comment> creative-coder Thanks for sharing. What is the background of the author ? Not very clear from the /About page

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, will try to make the about page clearer in the future.

My background is Robotics (studied Mechatronics on university). Currently mostly focusing on software part of robotics through Robot Operating System. I work as a robotics consultant/contractor/freelancer.

Hope that clears it a bit :)</comment></comment>


Amazon wants to depose Trump, says he's "biased" on $10Billion Pentagon contract - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/amazon-wants-to-depose-president-trump-over-jedi-cloud-contract-loss.html <comment><USER2> depose: 1. to remove from office or position, especially high office 2. to testify or affirm under oath, especially in a written statement

I think the article talks about (2) but chose 'depose' to make it ambiguous.

<comment><AUTHOR> title was changed on CNBC...I cut and pasted and modified the last part of the sentence to fit within the limit. The words "depose" and "biased" were there.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/depose](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/depose) _Depose

To make a deposition; to give evidence in the shape of a deposition; to make statements that are written down and sworn to; to give testimony that is reduced to writing by a duly qualified officer and sworn to by the deponent.

To deprive an individual of a public employment or office against his or her will. The term is usually applied to the deprivation of all authority of a sovereign.

In ancient usage, to testify as a witness; to give evidence under oath._

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Elections have consequences.</comment>


Ask HN: What are problems that enterprising college students could solve? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I'm looking for your help to brainstorm problems that need solutions. I'm in a program where we create teams and find challenges that the world or community around us is facing; however, many of us struggle to find realistic or 'not too broad' problems due to a lack of real-world experience. Based on your personal or anecdotal experience, what types of problems would you like to see a solution developed to? Are there places or websites to source ideas from? Thank you. <comment><USER2> Scoping out the right problems is a highly non-trivial skill in itself. For example, a significant component of a PhD is learning to do this with regards to research projects (that is part of what it means to be an independent researcher). Typically, the only way to learn this is by calibrating one's experience with one's ability, and the scope of problems will evolve with the increase in both. It really helps to have a mentor to provide guidance along that path, and to help set/refine goals and to calibrate expectations and provide feedback. The reason I'm explaining all this is that it is very difficult to generically suggest "problems" without knowing your background/interests/orientation. (eg: Coming up with good student projects is an art unto itself; something that professors are expected to learn along the way)

So maybe provide some more information about yourself?

Appreciate the initiative; good luck! Maybe we should develop more of a culture of sharing "problems" openly (formulated constructively) so that others with a suitable background might take a crack at them! :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Turn to the nearest problem that you see, that you have a strong drive to solve.

This world needs refining.

Everything in order at home? On your street? In your neighborhood? Your City? Your State? Your Country?

Here in Africa we have plenty of issues needing attention.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals)

Personally I was introduced to the poor standard of early childhood development in my city by a friend, and since then we have built 3 schools. Just in my immediate area, there are around 40 that need attention, and across the country of South Africa there must be thousands. The cost of a simple building to handle part of the problem is around $25k. Another problem we face is high unemployment, so we pay people from the community to help build the schools.

Lack of access to quality education, skills and funding are the challenges we face.

A lot of research still needs to be done on extent of the problem. I have been dreaming of an app that maps all of these ECD centers and rates them on various metrics, like quality of education, building, and nutrition. An app that would allow professionals who would like to give their time a list of options of places that need their help. Like crowd funding, but for skills. An app to allow the greater community to see, engage and solve the most pressing problems around us, all over the world.

Also and app like Uber or Airbnb, but for artisans and skilled contractors, with similar rating systems.

There are many crowd funding sites, but it's time to go deeper and actively seek out and solve issues.

[https://www.designindaba.com/tags/joe-slovo-west- community-p...](https://www.designindaba.com/tags/joe-slovo-west-community- project)

</comment><comment><USER4> I like Bucky Fuller's advice on figuring out what to do:

"The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual." — Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

</comment><comment><USER5> Are you in an area with homeless people? In my neighborhood, there's a homeless guy named Mike. His wheelchair has been stolen 4 times in the last two months, and he can't walk without it. I was thinking it'd be cool if there was a municipal registration system for wheelchairs, like there are for bikes, that would work for homeless people. Just an idea. No clue how practical it'd be!

<comment><USER6> Related: Malcolm Gladwell's Homelessness is Solvable

>[https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/solvable/solvable- podc...](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/solvable/solvable-podcast- series/homelessness-is-solvable/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Social media is in need of a major upgrade. A team of designers (as in user experience and information design) and programmers could work on new patterns for social media. You could use Hacker News as the test subject. Challenges you may consider:

        1. excessive influence of amateur opinions ( I'm not a doctor, but let me tell you what I think about treatment for acute renal failure -- this gets upvoted to the top )
        2. astroturfing (are praises within the comments section really just insiders shaping the narrative?)
        3. considerate, alternative points of view are buried at the bottom of the comments section
        4. moderator biases

you get the idea!

</comment><comment><USER8> Find ways to get college-age students involved in government (local, national, etc), especially voting.

Young people are a large, yet chronically underrepresented demographic. Just because it's true now doesn't mean it'll always be.

<comment><USER9> Only vote if you're actually willing to understand what the policies are and what is currently being done. Otherwise you end up having people vote based on superfluous surface level details -- e.g., I'd have a beer with them.

<comment><USER10> This. I'd say young people should focus on educating themselves about the various issues in an academic sense, particularly if they're in college.

Don't just read blogs, read studies and learn the statistics/background so you actually understand what they mean. Look up primary sources to get perspectives from people who have lived through whatever issue you're grappling with. Learn to write and how to think about the issue before jumping to forming an opinion, and know that the process may take years of work before you have an opinion worth hearing.

You have your whole life to fix problems if you want, take the time to get prepared first so you don't just make things worse.

From my own experience it's cringey to remember how easy it was to talk about "how willing I'd be to pay more in taxes for X" back when I was single and not paying any taxes. And I considered myself educated on the subject! Climate change is real after all, how can people not be willing to sacrifice for the greater good when the coastline is literally shrinking?!! :)

I blame most public school systems. They tend to reward very shallow reasoning for the first 12 or so years of a person's education, particularly in this age of standardized testing. So most students arrive in college thinking all problems are just as shallow.

<comment><USER11> I'd say older people should focus on educating themselves about the various issues in an academic sense, particularly if they haven't been exposed to the many new issues facing younger people that are often ignored by the many politicians catering to older groups.

Don't just listen to cable news and partisan radio shows, read studies and learn the statistics/background so you actually understand what they mean. Look up primary sources to get perspectives from younger people who may face very different circumstances than you did at their age.

You have a whole life of experience that can help _and_ hinder; take the time to understand the changing world instead of clinging to the past so you don't just make things worse.

From my own experience it's disappointing to see older people ignore or stall on a variety of social issues that no longer affect them because they're set. Even worse, some ignore or pooh-pooh serious long-term problems just because they'll be dead when the ill-effects kick in.

I'm not sure what to blame for this selfishness and myopia, but it's important to remember that "uninformed" is not just an adjective that applies to the young.

<comment><USER10> And? As someone in their early 30s I'd agree.

The discussion was what should college-age people be doing with their time. I'm simply pointing out that young people entering college typically have little academic knowledge and little real-world experience. So outliers aside, how are they fit to solve problems again? Most of them are white belts when it comes to adult life. That's not bad, just a statement of status.

Given that college provides years of uninterrupted access to scientific journals, never mind classes and a myriad of other education resources, I'd recommend that they maximize the opportunities in front of them and maybe work their way to to at least purple belt before setting out to save the world.

Also, I find it sad how eager you were to pigeon-hole me as some cable-TV- watching boomer who's refusing to change just because I pointed out there are economic nuances to the climate change argument. You sound like one of the victims of our shallow public education system I mentioned in my previous post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The best help young, inexperienced, energetic folks can be is to follow someone who is aged, experienced, and lacking bandwidth. Romantic notions aside, young people are not particularly equipped to lead, and would do better to watch a leader work for a while instead of trying to dive in themselves.

Go find a group that actually has a mission and help them, rather than searching for a problem to solve. Plenty of animal shelters, churches, and soup kitchens would love a group of hands to help.

If your program specifically requires you to lead something, create a program to coordinate causeless volunteers with organizations that need them.

</comment><comment><USER13> The best advice I can give us to build something for pain you feel. Maybe it's edtech integrations or a part of your workflow or life that needs optimization.

If you build something for other people, you'll need user discovery and project management skills up the wazoo if you don't have a team with that expertise. And you're at risk of building Facebook for Cat Owners or something like that. Start with your own pain until you have more experience transforming user pain into something they'll pay for.

<comment><USER14> I just want to second this. The most satisfying work I've ever done, and the work I'm most proud of (that I speak of with interviewers etc) is work that scratched a real itch that I had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This sounds like a problem in your community: a large group of people every year trying, probably often failing, to find concrete ways to actually help out.

Go out and interview folks running non-profits, research labs, churches, health clinics, legal clinics, schools, anyone else who fits into your colleges definition of "community around us".

From those interviews, build a large list of project-sized problem/solution statments for future groups of students. Include skills needed, points of contact, possible adoption challenges, etc. Validate those project descriptions with the people you interview.

Identifying and describing problems that need to be solved and what it means to solve them is something lots of people build careers around

</comment><comment><USER16> Facebook, which has eaten the world, started in college dorm rooms. I'd love to see a not-for-profit social media option that emphasized connecting people to join up in the real world, to solve real problems, rather than encouraging addictive behavior. You could start with a social network for your college only or your city only and work from there.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that most people only care about themselves, and are not interested in solving real problems. That's why Facebook/Instagram/any other platform prioritizing self promotion are massive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are problems everywhere that need solving, from a few lines of code (bug fix), all the way to completely new solutions unlike anything known in existence. The real questions back to you are:

1\. What are your resources? (Time, money, people, space, hardware, software, etc.)

2\. Does the problem need to be profitable or is this philanthropy?

3\. What motivates you to work? (World issues, local issues, tough mathematical problems, etc.)

Trying to find something that falls within the cross-section of all these problems, I would suggest working on problems that curve energy usage. Anything that reduces energy usage is almost guaranteed to be profitable, reduce carbon emissions and generally make the world a better place. Some ideas around this theme:

* Passive/intelligent cooling of small/medium sized spaces that can be retroactively applied to human inhabited spaces. Air conditioning boxes are ludicrously inefficient, there should be some very simple methods to greatly increase their effectiveness.

* Software to reduce desktop computer power usage - especially in offices where they effectively get left on all of the time over night. I think a ridiculously large number of office workers could also be working on passively cooled ARM based computers. (Windows did/does support a Raspberry Pi for example, so they've already done the legwork.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Heya, great to know that you're interested.

A couple of things:

* Contact your local city or state and see. Colorado has a hackathon: [https://gocode.colorado.gov/](https://gocode.colorado.gov/) See if your local state has something.

* Code for America is another organization with a finger on the pulse of what needs to be done: [https://www.codeforamerica.org/](https://www.codeforamerica.org/)

* If you are focusing on a particular technology, reach out to your local meetups around that technology and post a message like you did here.

* Finally, don't get wrapped up in infrastructure or setup. Use something like Heroku: [https://www.heroku.com/](https://www.heroku.com/), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, or Transposit: [https://www.transposit.com/](https://www.transposit.com/) (full disclosure, I work for them) to make sure you can focus on the business problem, not the intricacies of EC2 or ALB configuration. Seen too many good ideas crater on that bikeshedding.

</comment><comment><USER20> Graduate college without debt. Find ways to disrupt the college culture to accomplish this.

<comment><USER21> Do you feel ISAs (income share agreements) are a good way to do that? Or do you think there should be other better ways?

<comment><USER14> I'm not in the US, but my feeling is no. Either get a scholarship to a prestigious university, or go to an in-state college and work to minimise the debt, even if it's flipping burgers. Doing that is the difference between graduating with 10k in debt and 200k in debt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Politics. Seriously. We don't need another high tech company or hedge fund. We need to fix our country. We need organized, voting young people.

<comment><USER23> ... to vote for whom? There are already lots of young people organizing and wanting to vote, although their preferences might not necessarily align with the generation above them. Populist movements (both the far-left and far- right) are taking over Western countries at the moment (as a reaction to the dire economic circumstances of the current generation), but the traditional political parties (mid-left/mid-right, but especially the mid-left) and the old media conglomerates are actively trying to suppress that.

<comment><USER24> I think he/she means to vote for "the right candidate", possibly someone that will start a genocide in Yemen, drop more bombs than any other US president and go away with a Nobel peace prize, pictures with kids playing around in the White House and a bunch of emotional speeches?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you're in Berkeley, I can help you directly.. I'm not sure why, but this sounds familiar. Otherwise, here is a problem:

\- Maintaining good nutrition is a problem for many [People].

\+ Maintaining good nutrition is a problem for many [People]. [your solution name] solves this problem by [providing a superior solution].

* solution: develop a service predicated on ensuring people meet macro/micro nutrient requirements; I wouldn't do this directly, I would partner with the fast-food/restaurant industry to develop "paths" towards "nutrition." Say you get a number 1 or whatever, well instead of "only having x more calories to spare" (restriction) you know what you need to eat next.

Now, this wouldn't be initially ideal as it'll probably drive unhealthy habits (to be exploited I'm sure), but it could help drive better habits over time: \- menus aren't well-balanced diets \- customers could seek more balance then there'd be \- incentive to balance menus \- could shift perceptions of food

Also, it's hard to solve problems you don't have. But, since you aren't married to any problem, you can be problem-promiscuous. This means you should start trying to solve problems—more problems will fall out of this process.

Loosen up your pitch process too, have categories (i.e. serious, comical, satirical, fiction, etc). Rapidly pitch for a few days (don't evaluate any of them).

</comment><comment><USER26> One idea would be to start by looking at technological trends in your country. If they persist, what problems would lend themselves to easier solutions? Examples:

1\. Smartphone penetration is increasing. This can help with improving access to education when there's a dearth of content in your local language on YouTube, Coursera, edX etc. You can build a platform for teachers to easily create videos / content in your local language and upload them on YouTube.

2\. Mobile adoption is on the rise. This can help with infrastructure planning by collaborating with telecom providers and analyzing anonymized data. You can create a tool for planners / ministries to visualize and analyze these datasets.

3\. A significant proportion of people use feature phones. You can create a news delivery service or something similar to bring to them what's easily available on the web and would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER27> Every category of product is filled with multiple companies offering their own version of the product. There would be clear market leaders and there would be the upstarts. the product features though vary, according to the company's business model.

So the opportunity here is to bridge the feature (or marketplace) gap between the products, eg- say build a bot for hangouts that is similar to some bot seen on slack, because slack bot company is not yet thinking about supporting hangouts. Now you don't need to come up with your own product ideas or think about the product distribution and you solve the problem for a lot of customers who are stuck with hangouts (because of whatever reason). If you build a lot of such micro-features, that ultimately adds up to a good amount of money.

</comment><comment><USER28> A scheduling application for the gig economy. People who are independent hairdressers, dog walkers, etc... and need an easy booking/billing/CRM tool.

My wife is using a tool for booking meetings at the moment and it's not the right tool for the job. It doesn't seem like the right tool exists for this type of person.

</comment><comment><USER29> Take your "too broad" problems and break them down suck that at least a part might be doable within the allotted time frame.

People, especially young women, spend tons of time doing laundry around the world. Doing laundry in a time consuming and manual way keeps them from attending school, which makes them unable to rise out of poverty. This is a big issue.

Will you solve the issue of how time consuming it is for people to wash clothes by hand? No. But could you design, in a computer, a pedal-driven washing machine possible to make out of plastic? Yes. Build a prototype? Perhaps. Make instructions available? Maybe. Roughly estimate costs? Sure.

If done well, this could help fix a problem the world is facing. Or at least help create good ideas for others to work more on.

Don't limit yourselves.

<comment> oh-moses Sounds weird, but someone actually did exactly that

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x594yMPSFqk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x594yMPSFqk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Papanek's _' Design for the Real World'_ might be good inspiration for you.

Here is the pdf - [http://playpen.icomtek.csir.co.za/~acdc/education/Dr_Anvind_...](http://playpen.icomtek.csir.co.za/~acdc/education/Dr_Anvind_Gupa/Learners_Library_7_March_2007/Resources/books/designvictor.pdf) \- however I'd strongly recommend getting yourself a dead-tree copy of it.

As for problems, can you come up with some sort of device to pop zits that flare up right in the middle of the back? I just nearly dislocated my shoulder trying to deal with one.

</comment><comment><USER31> You should do brainstorming sessions with your team where you _diverge_ and then _converge_.

What I mean is:

1) get a white board/wall, post-its, and markers.

2) have everyone, independent of each other, write ideas on post-its and put on the wall. Don't judge ideas, just put them. Lots of them. Don't put your names on the ideas.

3) when you literally run out of steam, which could be a couple of hours later or even more, as a team start discarding ideas that don't make sense or work for your team.

4) you may have to do this a few times so that you get a feel for the process.

In the end you should have some really good ideas that you as a team have agreed upon.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well you're facing a problem right now.

How do people with technical skills find the right place to apply them?

Or maybe where can someone go to find a problem that can help them learn, pre- vetted perhaps?

Where can people with small problems go to find help?

</comment><comment><USER33> One of the problems worth trying to solve is Food Wastage. In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply. This estimate, based on estimates from USDA's Economic Research Service of 31 percent food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010.

</comment><comment><USER6> BIG PROBLEM: The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world >[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/29/the- air-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/29/the-air- conditioning-trap-how-cold-air-is-heating-the-world)

</comment><comment><USER34> I recommend interviewing people in your community. If you're ok with working on a non-profit idea: the world is filled with local institutions that could use better digital technology.

</comment><comment><USER35> More abstractly speaking I'd say nearly every problem relating to humans is the general inability to understand exponents. Any constant growth rate is an exponential one and if the doubling rate is on a short enough time span to significantly increase resource pressures then you have a problem. That pattern is the world over. The solution would be a clever way of mass teaching people the consequences of exponents.

</comment><comment><USER36> Desalination is not too big but not too small of a problem to solve. Water shortages are on course to become critical in the coming decades and the social implications are staggering. A group of bright college students surely could devise some sort of method for it even if it's inefficient at first, and then work steadily toward improving it.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you're away at college in a college town, you could try getting to know the local government, businesses, and community. That would help solve the problem that has persisted to the point of stereotype: college students and administrators ignoring or looking down on the towns surrounding them.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ask your friends about their problems and solve those. Do stuff that you know best, for example, is registering for classes at your school hard and is there space for a better interface? Or maybe your school is socially dead and students want a way to connect with students .

</comment><comment><USER39> May not be possible, but a mobile app to scan UPC codes on cleaner products that then gets the products individual chemicals and their percentage through it's safety data sheet.

It's probably more of a problem of not being able to automate collection of the data sheets.

</comment><comment><USER40> Build some things which already exist. Inevitably you will run into difficulty trying to do something that ought to be easy. Those are the best problems to solve.

</comment><comment><USER41> I haven't actually tried it but I've seen [https://socialcoder.org](https://socialcoder.org) mentioned before.

<comment><USER42> There's also the humanitarian toolbox ([http://htbox.org](http://htbox.org)).

But I'm not sure if it's still actively developed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The great Pacific garbage patch is still out there. I like this passive solution ([https://theoceancleanup.com/technology/](https://theoceancleanup.com/technology/)). Maybe plastic taken from the ocean could be processed and incorporated into the plastic-removal mechanism to make it more effective. I think everyone would feel grateful if you even tried to solve that problem.

<comment><USER44> 80% of the plastic comes from just 10 rivers (there is a link on here somewhere) maybe focus on stopping it before it gets to the ocean

<comment><USER44> May not be entirely accurate [https://factcheck.afp.com/widely-cited-study- did-not-show-95...](https://factcheck.afp.com/widely-cited-study-did-not- show-95-plastic-oceans-comes-just-10-rivers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How about something to facilitate access to mental health services in your college/university community?

</comment><comment><USER46> Pepperdine Graziadio Entrepreneurship 661?

</comment><comment><USER47> Join a non profit working on something you believe in

</comment><comment><USER48> Dating app with deep NN face generation to get the topology of what someone is attracted to. Get enough samples to generate a model for them so you can auto- rate photos.

</comment><comment><USER49> Campus discourse.</comment>


Best and Worst Cities for Nursing Homes in the US - <AUTHOR> https://priceonomics.com/the-25-best-and-worst-cities-for-nursing-homes/ <comment><USER2> Two terms not mentioned in the article are elder and guardianship abuse. The prevalence of these factors can and should be _huge_ in determining both where to retire and, if it comes to it, a nursing home for one's own parents.

Specifically abuses of elder guardianship, in which scummy lawyers work closely with nursing homes and local magistrates to usurp guardianship of elders from next-of-kin and then collectively drain the bank accounts of their elderly wards for 'services' rendered. Which sounds like a dystopian, Kafkaesque nightmare, but happens in a number of states.[1][2][3]

[1]: [https://kbzk.com/cnn-regional/2018/11/05/four-plead- guilty-i...](https://kbzk.com/cnn-regional/2018/11/05/four-plead-guilty-in- guardianship-abuse-case/)

[2]: [https://www.ozarksfirst.com/news/ozarks-lawyer-testifies- in-...](https://www.ozarksfirst.com/news/ozarks-lawyer-testifies-in- washington-committee-hearing-on-elder-abuse/614553680)

[3]: [http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20180831/elder- abuse-i...](http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20180831/elder-abuse-in-ri- gaming-system-is-easy-for-fiscal-guardians)

</comment><comment><USER3> I knew some nurses who worked in nursing homes. If you want a good nursing home, try to get the insider info on how many nurses work per shit, how many patients are there, and how many of these patients need nurses hourly for taking readings, giving pills, etc.

Nurses are overworked in these places, and the owners of nursing homes make money only by hiring not enough nurses. I know of a nurse, who used to not take readings, but filled them out based on yesterday readings. This, because she had so much work to do on her own.

<comment><USER4> Staffing levels are used to calculate the star rating of a nursing home. States have required staffing ratios, for both nurses and CNA.

What I recommend is to look up the facility star rating and the last couple yearly AHCA survey results for the nursing home. You can also check to see if they have had any complaint surveys recently and what the outcomes of those were.

>Nurses are overworked in these places, and the owners of nursing homes make money only by hiring not enough nurses.

As above, there are staffing level requirements.

>I know of a nurse, who used to not take readings, but filled them out based on yesterday readings. This, because she had so much work to do on her own.

She could lose her license for this, and blaming someone else won't save it. Nurses are in incredibly high demand and she should go work somewhere else. Let me know if she needs a job and what state she's located in (and what license? RN, LPN?). We hire hundreds of nurses per year.

<comment><USER3> She is a RN in California , she learned it from another RN who worked with her. This was from 4 years ago. Since she could not find a job at hospitals, she took this job. Nurses don't like working at nursing homes: pay sucks; work is hard.

She told me to not tell anyone about this, as she will lose her license--names and exact locations withheld. Anyway, she found a better job at a prison, with better pay, benefits, etc.

<comment><USER5> The fact that another RN taught her how to commit a terrible crime against the people entrusted to her care doesn't change the fact that that's what it is.

Hopefully she takes better care of the prisoners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not great data science. I appreciate their ranked lists and bar graphs but you see the limitations of their very basic approach when you see ND, SD, and WY are high up on the best state rankings. It's easy to infer this is because those are very small states, they have a much smaller sample size than NY or CA. And yet they present data in ranked lists or bar graphs, neither of which convey the sample size of these vastly different states and cities to the audience.

</comment><comment><USER7> I will never go to a nursing home. I'd rather die. I have seen the inside of those places and I can assure everyone, regardless of how nice they look and whatever amenities it has, it is a horrible place to spend the last years of your life. My Dad died at home and that's the way you do it.

<comment><USER5> As with most things, the topic is nuanced and making blanket statements without hard data as support is useless. There are no hard and fast rules and no "way you do it" when it comes to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This dataset from CMS is probably better: [https://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare](https://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare)

I would be skeptical of family reviews as a reliable indicator. Nursing homes are almost always miserable places.

<comment><USER9> [https://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare/search.html](https://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare/search.html) or [https://data.medicare.gov/data/nursing-home- compare](https://data.medicare.gov/data/nursing-home-compare)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think affluence of the local population and job competition also affect the rankings. The places with the worst-rated homes generally have larger populations of less affluent (i.e. on Medicaid or will be soon) patients, and there are also a lot of other job options for people aside from working in that sort of a facility (not the most pleasant job to be sure). The ones with the best rankings seem to be in areas where there is a more affluent population (nursing care ain't cheap) and/or jobs in a nursing care facility are more attractive compared to other local options (resulting in a higher quality workforce). A rough correlation, YMMV.

But that last bit about lack of other attractive job options contributing to a higher quality workforce was something that I was told by someone looking for nursing/assisted living care options, and in my experience (aging parents and aging parents of friends) it is actually true. I can also confirm from personal experience that New Mexico has absolutely horrible nursing/elder care.

Lastly, re: I think I'd rather kill myself than ever go live in a nursing home? You and me both. I've seen enough that I'd rather take myself out at a time/place of my choosing rather than go into nursing care. I don't think most people give it a thought though, much less have seen it firsthand.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes patients don't have an option but to go to such a facility, at least on a short term basis. Hospitals try to discharge patients as quickly as possible, which often results in patients leaving when they may be medically stable, but are functionally compromised or are in need of services, such as iv antibiotics or wound care, that may be difficult to provide at home. If they live alone, it's even more challenging. So the nursing facility becomes the only option. Facilities traditionally have had an easy access to a constant supply of patients, along with high reimbursement. They've have had little incentive to improve.

Fortunately care bundles (BPCI) are starting to change this, giving hospitals a vested interest in where their patients go and what the outcome is. Facilities are going to have to improve the level of care and service they provide - or risk shutting down.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think I'd rather kill myself than ever go live in a nursing home. I suppose the only way I'd accept is if I had late stage dementia and didn't realize where I was.

<comment><USER6> Would you feel differently if you fell and broke your hip, unable to walk or do a dozen other activities of daily living, thus needed nurses to monitor you 24/7? The thinking and math on this changes a lot when complex medical situations come into play.

<comment><USER12> If I needed 24/7 monitoring that's when I'd kill myself.</comment></comment></comment>


The Next Mass Consumer Social Wave: Political Expression - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/20/consumer-social-wave-political-expression/ <comment><USER2> The biggest obstacle would be to avoid being co-opted by the usual crowd of spin doctors and propagandists.

Once those folks take over, the majority of people tune out the channel, whatever channel that is. And rightly so.

</comment><comment><USER3> That egypt banner looks kind of photoshopped, but it's still pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know if this will work as well in the United States. I think the majority of people are more pre-occupied by more important issues like who should win American Idol, the cast of Jersey shore, what shoes Kim Kardashian recommends. Americans have no time for political expression...</comment>


The crow-sourced color of music. - <AUTHOR> http://stanford.edu/~borui/offshore/flowmusic/analysis.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting color palettes..but what does the color mean?</comment>


PillPack Raises $4M in Bid to Become Top Mail-Order Pharmacy - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/02/04/pillpack-raises-4m-in-bid-to-become-top-mail-order-pharmacy/ <comment><USER2> My wife is a Pharmacist dual licensed in Mass and NH and in love with this idea. She's going to get in touch but if someone from PillPack is on here let me know. You'll get a career startup software developer as an addon ;).

Really cool stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Founder here - would love to hear from you / her! Shoot me an email tj at pillpack dot com.

<comment><USER3> Threejay, we met via Skype at one of the advisory sessions you had during TechStars (I was with one of the VC firms). Great job executing! Let me know if you need referrals to pharmacists or doctors for any reason (or pharm/med schools).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice. This will help many people. My mom has done home healthcare (as an RN) and always says the most common problem is the ability for folks to get the correct meds at the correct doses at the correct time without help.

Combining with some drones (Amazon or otherwise) and sensors could make some interesting scenarios for more time sensitive and ephemeral med needs...

<comment><USER5> PillPack developer here: I'm imagining our office in complete chaos as we test delivery drones. Excuse me as I head over to YouTube to watch quadrotor videos :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been getting Xyrem from a central pharmacy for a while now and it's awesome that I can call one day and have my medicine arrive the next day via FedEx. Being able to get all medications with the same convenience as Amazon Prime is awesome. If this doesn't get hit with any regulatory issues, I can totally see Amazon knocking on their door one day and making an acquisition offer.

We'll still need pharmacies for immediate medical needs that can't wait a day, but for everything else this is great.

I now just wish ordering wines and spirits online wasn't fraud with regulatory hurdles paying local retail at BevMo is a lot less attractive than being able to get your favorite bottle of small batch bourbon delivered to your front- door.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's nice. Here in Sweden, this is a standard way of delivering medications to those who need it pre-sorted for easier delivery. It also has environmental benefits, since the waste can be reduced.

It's called "ApoDos" (which is just a portmonteau of the "apotek" which means pharmacy, and "dos" which means "dose"), here's a web page from Sweden's largest pharmacy: [http://www.apoteketfarmaci.se/Tjanster/Service.aspx?UniqueId...](http://www.apoteketfarmaci.se/Tjanster/Service.aspx?UniqueId=fd2797c6-ad02-4c43-b2c0-34718a7ced3b). It's in Swedish but there's a picture of the delivery bags used, tney come on a roll in a plastic case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup - the packaging component has proliferated in a handful of countries, the US (obviously) not being one of them. In fact we imported a piece of quality control machinery from the Netherlands where this packaging is much more commonplace.

<comment><USER8> Many senior care and mail order pharmacies use such machines.

[http://www.thriftywhite.com/Healthy_Pack_Rx.cfm](http://www.thriftywhite.com/Healthy_Pack_Rx.cfm)

[https://medexpack.com/what-is-a-medex-pack/pre-sorted- indivi...](https://medexpack.com/what-is-a-medex-pack/pre-sorted-individual- pill-packets/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So Express Scripts ($100B in annual sales) is going to get taken out by unit dose packaging? WalMart's pharmacy is also testing blister packs + multi- dose...I don't see how this displaces ESI...

<comment><USER10> My question is what's to stop the existing mail order pharmacies from doing the same thing?

My guess is that they'll get bought out if it takes off. Other pharmacies will copy the process.

<comment><USER6> I would imagine that the ideal scenario is someone designing completely automated equipment for dispensing pills, verifying the pill visually via OpenCV or other computer vision software and packing the pills in a box ready for delivery. This would do the same for mail-order medication as Kiva did for Amazon warehouse automation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like it but, if there was an FAQ, I'd sure like it better. Too many unanswered questions to bother though. Which meds? What states? What's the cost of the meds? etc

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry that's not more apparent to navigate to - there is a list of common FAQ's here: [https://pillpack.com/support](https://pillpack.com/support).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My hypothetical for solving this problem was some huge contraption that would electronically spit out the right pills when required. Pill Pack is so much more elegant. Can't wait to see them succeed!

</comment><comment><USER13> Pillpack is the 10-15 year plan.

The 20 year is actual delivery within your body: take a pill once and it gradually releases the correct amount at the correct time with an option to flush it out of your system as well.

<comment><USER14> Like the contraceptive implant? Without know a thing about drug delivery, it seems like it'd be pretty feasible already. There's probably a reason it's not done for more drugs, but I can't think of a good one. Perhaps the fear of someone pulling out 6 months worth of drug X from their arm, and selling/abusing it?

<comment><USER15> [http://gigaom.com/2013/05/01/company-behind-digital-pill- wit...](http://gigaom.com/2013/05/01/company-behind-digital-pill-with- embedded-chip-raises-62-5m/)

[http://www.proteus.com/technology/digital-health-feedback- sy...](http://www.proteus.com/technology/digital-health-feedback-system/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Mail order" seems like the tip of the iceberg of what these guys could do. I shouldn't have to use a pharmacy for my prescriptions or the supplements/vitamins I take.

Love the design as well.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. At first, it seems simple, but a lot of complexity behind the curtain and huge potential. Pharma and pharma distribution is a massive industry and provided they're able to scale and prove the model, they could go on to do a lot of other really interesting things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How are you guys handling lot numbers of medication dispensed, in case of recall & whatnot?

Love the concept (spouse is a pharmacist, comes with the territory I guess).

</comment><comment><USER19> love the comparison to apple & the notion that a design-forward brand (in this case, software enabling easy purchase of important consumer goods) can help tackle a traditionally archaic and bureaucratic space. super excited to see how things progress.</comment>