mistrQ

I have just relocated to SF from London and have onsite interviews at all of the big tech companies.

I haven’t interviewed in a long time so thinking about the best way to prepare for these, normally I would ask a CS friend to practice some questions with me on a whiteboard.

Since I don’t know anyone here I was wondering if anyone else is in the same boat and wants to pair on some whiteboard questions or if there is a meetup for this kind of thing?

I’m located in soma.

For my final year project of my CS degree, I'm building a Faceted Search interface for Twitter. Essentially it will allow facets to be used to filter the results that are returned from a search on Twitter.

My initial prototype can be seen at: http://tweetsvu.com

The graphs are interactive and the temporal graph in particular allows filtering of the results by time range.

I'm using Python and the Flask framework, with Twitter Boostrap for the styling, and Google Chart Tools for the graphs. It is hosted at Epio. The implementation is currently fairly slow because of requests to other APIs (Twitter Sentiment), however it's a starting point.

At this stage I would appreciate any feedback (good or bad). Though please do appreciate that this is a very early prototype to gain some traction.

Hey HN

So this week I need to choose a project for the final year of my Computer Science degree at the University of Edinburgh.

We have been given a list of ~150 pre-approved projects with supervisors and asked to select 4 top choices. The list has some very technical options such as: "Parallel hashing memory vs content addressable memory", "Static and profile-based parallelisation in the LLVM compiler" etc

These are very theory based and while that is computer science, I'd like to do something more practical. Infact if possible I'd like to kill two birds with one stone and come up with a startup idea that I can use for my project. There are some relatively good pre-proposed projects such as combining travel routes for taxis, spelling correction for twitter etc. However I don't want to rely on trying to get one of these projects.

It's quite difficult to propose your own project as you need to find a supervisor to back your idea. However I think i'll put far more hours in if it's a project I genuinely am interested in and that I can possibly turn into a business.

Any suggestions?

I'm a CS student and my Java skills aren't nearly as solid as they should be. Even at a top University it was a class that wasn't very well taught.

Learning web languages (Ruby in particular) is very easy to get into due to the fun tutorials available. I'm tempted to learn Ruby and hope it also enhances my Java/general programming knowledge.

Before I learn yet another language, is there a fun way to learn Java better (OOP concepts in particular)? I saw the Play! framework and thought that might be quite fun to try out, but doubt it will enhance my actual Java knowledge.

I'm a CS student at the University of Edinburgh.

I have to use a lot of Java, C, Python and sometimes even Haskell. I have to use PHP at work.

I would love to spend more time learning ruby and rails. I just find my time would be better spent increasing my skills with tools I actually need to use daily as i'd only use RoR for my side project web apps.

Do you think the play! framework for java is a good alternative to rails or will it never become as popular?

http://www.playframework.org

As part of my CS degree, one of my courses involves developing an Android application that helps new students choose their courses and generally familiarize themselves with the university. This is sponsored by Google.

It's recommended we use Java with the Eclipse IDE. I'm not a big Java fan, I know it's solid but I find development time slow.

However can I realistically use ruby or html5/css/javascript or anything a bit more interesting (which may also make me stand out)?

I have seen phonegap, appcelerator and ruboto but I don't know if they are stable enough or there is enough tutorials/documentation to risk my course on.