skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole point is to use a task so trivial that even moderate amounts of stress won't prevent your fingers from taking over. That's why people who criticize "FizzBuzz" as not testing the true requirements for a job are simply wrong. All you want is some real code that produces a correct answer.

My programmers wrote FizzBuzz in under 60 seconds. If you can't write FizzBuzz in 15 minutes in an interview then you are either unable to program, or any level of stress will prevent you from doing your job. Either way, you couldn't work for me. I don't routinely stress my programmers, but stress is a matter of observable fact.
Check your link: you're missing an 'a'

http://bespin.mozillalabs.com/
Yes, the classic energy hoax of "marginal improvement over a well known and understood chemical process that obeys the laws of thermodynamics."

I have a feeling you missed the part where they put hydrocarbons in one end.
The page images are a little too small so it's not very useful in it's present form. However if they made the images expand with a mouseover it would be pretty cool.
What do you think Y2k would have looked like if there hadn't been a serious date-format conversion effort?
A lot of people would agree with you in 2001, or better said, before 2001, then the .COM bubble happened.
"we can use fossil fuels, or renewable from land fills..." "solar?" "we can use solar". Sounds pretty much like a hoax.
Peer To Peer Mesothelioma Lawsuit Advice
Information-filled mesothelioma lawsuit help & advice website that also offers a Peer to Peer format and links to other useful cancer websites.
Privacy, complexity seen as Google blind spots
The Net, the megaphone of minds
Yeah, I think it's a good test for that reason. I personally would probably do badly on a complicated programming test--- I tend to program best when not in a room with other people, not being put on the spot, allowed to think while walking around outside and then return to a burst of coding, etc. But I could write a few lines of obvious code in pretty much any situation; there's a pretty big difference between peak performance and absolute minimal competence.

It's hard to make analogies to other fields, but it feels sort of like a writing job not asking you to write an insightful philosophy essay on the spot (legitimately difficult), but just asking you to write a paragraph of grammatical English (anyone even remotely fit for the job should be able to do it).
As much as I like the idea, let's be realistic. How many secretaries are out there with coding chops?

(full disclosure: I didn't read it all the way through. I could very well have missed something)
Keep Your Startup Virtual
Next step: Ubuntu on microwave.
The graph looks fairly stagnant towards the right.

Also I'd like to stress what others have already said: Don't trust the fake metrics from compete.

Plain old common sense tells you how unlikely these figures are. Look around you and count the number of internet users not on facebook. Now look again and count those not using google...
I don't think it's just stress. Few programmers actually write correct code on a whiteboard / pen and paper so expecting them to accurately program outside of their preferred environment can be vary hard for some people. It's something like asking an author to spell out an essay, plenty of people can do it but it's a separate skill from being a good writer.

PS: Try composing your response by saying one letter out loud at a time without typing it before you type it.
Please do hang on to the experiment & keep your blog updated. I have changed my habits so that I now can get up at 5am to get an extra 3 hours of coding before heading off to work. Not every day, but when I need to, at least 3-4 days a week. I plan the days when I will wake up early in advance & go to bed early accordingly.
This is a valid point. In my experience, the best interviewers are the ones that don't make me feel like I'm in an interview. It feels like I'm just chatting with a fellow hacker. This makes me much less anxious and stressed.

They're the ones who get the most realistic view of me as a programmer (for better or worse).
See, honestly I think something like Codility misses the point of these coding exercises.

For me, a coding exercise is more than just a way for me to see if the person can produce something that works. It's also a kick-off point for other questions. Often there are things the person will do along the way to a solution that reveals some lack of knowledge, so I keep my eyes peeled as they talk through their solution for these potential gaps.

One of the biggest problems now is that you have people who can even pull of FizzBuzz but don't know much of anything beyond how to get something like that working. They don't understand data structures, algorithms, or how a computer really works.

A simple coding exercise like FizzBuzz can reveal these gaps too, even if they get the problem right. The trick is to use their implementation as a way to probe their thinking.

For example, if they are just using a "sort" function, like in Ruby, ask them how it contributes to the runtime of their algorithm. Or, if they are loading a file into RAM instead of just iterating over reads on a file handle, ask them about it. Or, if they are iterating over the keys of a hash (h.keys), ask them how they think that works. (This recently revealed to me the candidate did not understand that a hash function was irreversible.)

None of the major gaps in knowledge I've found that separate mediocre from good candidates were found by just looking at their code and giving them a thumbs up or thumbs down. That's good for separating the mediocre from the morons. To find out if they're good, you have to probe.

To find out if they're great, well, that's another story entirely that is far afield from FizzBuzz :)
RedFlagDeals acquired by YPG
I've had employers ask me to bring my own laptop and have me write my code on it in front of them. That reduces the "whiteboard effect" tremendously.
Designed to Help Uplift the Poor
I hire such people. Now, usually they either think of themselves as a secretary or as a programmer, and sometimes feel put upon when asked to take the other role, but I think it's completely realistic (and a good idea) to populate your company entirely with people who can at least handle simple scripting languages.

It is more expensive, either in terms of time (you /can/ find that diamond in the rough college student who is super organised and a reasonable coder and willing to work for $15/hr, but you have to spend a lot of time looking, and usually kiss a few frogs, and the person will leave for better wages as soon as others notice they are good.) or in terms of salary (anyone who can program reasonably well really is worth quite a bit more than that.)
I really like Accelerando, too. But it sounds a bit too reasonable; business as usual, with neither Heaven nor Hell.

The human mind accepts better living conditions as self evident really fast and forgets all previous situations. We lack historical insight -- from the viewpoint of two-three centuries ago, we probably live in a good approximation of Heaven.

-- There is no widespread hunger. (Locally, one year in seven had a bad harvest and lots of people died with many children getting brain damage).

-- The child mortality is much less than 20-30%. Enough said.

-- We have antibiotics. We know about cleanliness for operations/childbirth -- and can stop pain during them.

-- We are rich and most everyone can have education, music/art access and only work 8 hours a day.

-- Social equality. Just 160-170 years ago in my country, it became illegal to beat your employees...

-- Modern dental care.

-- Etc.

Even in most of the world's under developed countries, they have it much better than we had just ten generations ago.

Edit: I'm not arguing against "weird". I am arguing that utopia and/or dystopia is more likely than we would guess naively.

Edit 2: To nitpick and give a reference to my last claim (that was irrelevant for my point):

I've seen data for up to 30% children dead before 5 years of age in Scandinavia for poor farmers (that is, most everyone), around 200-250 years ago.

From the reference: "In 2007, there were 37 countries in which at least 10% of children under five died, down from 41 in 2006. All were in Africa, except for Afghanistan."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality#Highest_rates_i...
But THERE WAS an effort and it WAS successful. That is my point: everything that comes our way, humanity WILL deal with it.

We did in the past and we will do again in the future. The probability for doom, while not zero, is extremely low, due to our flexibility.
Napping 'boosts' brain learning power
When Andy Grove Saw The Future Of Networked Computing
This is a link to a site which does nothing but selling a electronic book...

It does seem like spam to me. I don't see a conceptual difference with the Viagra emails i frequently receive.
Forced by the EU: Microsoft puts its browser selection site live.
Developers, developers, developers: Microsoft's Windows 7 Mobile Challenge
So you agree with me: crisis and solutions. Nobody said "brush everything off". On the contrary I said that solution will be searched & found.

As for "catastrophic damage": yes they are possible (even an asteroid hitting earth. But what are THE ODDS of us not figuring out a solution in time? Even lower than those of the event occurring in the first place, and thus practically negligible.
I can't remember the link, but I read about one job where they gave candidates an ssh login and asked them to write a simple, running, perl script. Something like 10% actually finished the assignment, and they hired one of them, but avoided screwing around with LOTS of screening phone calls, enthusiastic people who "were familiar" with Perl, Windows programmers who didn't really know what ssh was, etc.
it's not that different. good programmers sketch the algorithm or data model or architecture on paper first----or however they figure out what they're doing before sitting in front of a computer.

writing a program by hand is not cruel and unusual, it's quite realistic. it's like a musician site reading, not an author writing an essay by spelling letters. (site reading is a skill that comes with being a musician. i can site read music that i would have had to learn to play in the past. i always prefer to read challenging music, but i can play comparatively easy music with little problem.)
An simple explanation of cryptography and steganography
The Seven Deadly Sins Of JavaScript Implementation
please do!
Webmaster Forum - Web Hosting Forum, seo forum & Computer Help Forums
Instant Business Loans: a financial tool for business pristine
You have to take it with a choline source. I noticed next to nothing taking it alone, but when I took it with some choline bitartrate, that's when I noticed an effect and my dual n-back scores rose a little.
1. It's notorious for clashing with many people's intuitions and being very confusing. Many smart people who are experts in probability theory answer it incorrectly at first and then it takes them a while to convince themselves they were wrong.

2. On the other hand, if you read about it and understood it once, it's trivial, and you can give a correct answer confidently while still being very bad at probability in general. So you'd be selecting for knowing a piece of trivia rather than any real knowledge or experience.

3. Interviewers are not flawless mechanisms, they're people. They have biases that are different to control for even when they're aware of them. You want to steer clear of questions which a) make it easy for the interviewer to feel smugly superior to the candidate; b) the answer to which looks very easy and natural once you know it well, and it's difficult to remember how non-intuitive it had been before. This question fails badly on both counts.
Bloom estimates that a box filled with 64 ceramic disks can produce enough juice to power a Starbucks.

So, how many Starbucks to a Library of Congress? How about not estimating and giving us some useful metrics, preferable based on this newfangled "watt" unit?
This "Win7 memory usage" story keeps getting weirder...

Here's an excellent investigative piece by ZD.net which exposes the shenanigans: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31024

And here's Randall C Kennedy ("Craig Barth") claiming that Microsoft is out to get him. http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/when-microsoft-attacks-...
"it's like a musician site reading,"

I presume you meant sight reading. Threw me for a couple of seconds.
It's a paid content that is useful to some here (hence the upvotes).

Do you mean paid content or services shouldn't be posted here ?
Somewhere under 20%. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7173/full/4501157...

Self-selected sample, though.
FERC Allow Google To Buy And Sell Electricity
Thanks!
(And for viewing.. u exported them to pdf?)
>Open-source has created more clones than any single company, and it keeps on cloning.

Well, it takes more than simply dumping a free product on the market. It has to be comparably usable.

>do you see it competing against Facebook?

Facebook is also free.

>They also have a Wikipedia competitor ... knol.google.com ... do you see it overtaking Wikipedia?

Again. Two free products competing with each other.

>But I do remember what my online-life was like before Google Search / GMail / Google Maps

People and companies are not static. Yes, google did a lot of good things for us (as did MS and various other places before them). No, they wont continue to do so forever.

><snip a bunch of stuff about using google for most everything>

This seems to back up my point. You're using all these free things instead of buying something from an aspiring new start up.

>I don't really think it's debatable whether Google provides value or not ... they clearly do.

Perhaps, but it's not a zero sum game. Them providing valuable services for free means that I will have a much harder time making a start up to provide those things for even a small cost.

>But if you're fear-mongering about freebies, it means you're not providing enough value to justify your sales.

With google the threat is two fold: a huge company with vastly more resources than any start up will have who gives away most of their stuff for free.
>> "PDF browser plugins kind of suck"

Apparently this is true on windows. Works fantastically on Mac though, even iPhone.
Microsoft should change their "available memory" widget ASAP to make it clear what is just used for caching and what is really "used up". If not, they should fire some people from marketing.
I watched the rest of the video, and noticed the big gas pipeline. So whatever is going on here it's not clean energy - it's basically a generator burning fossil fuel or gas from waste decomposition as usual. It seems unlikely that individual homes or companies could produce enough decomposable waste products to generate the gas needed.
Yes. But it doesn't have to be 100% correct. It just has to be plausible.

You don't ask an author to to write a perfect essay off the cuff. But certainly any author worth having could generate a brief outline for a story (or whatever type of writing you want them to do)
Tips to write sociology term paper
A sociology term paper is the major concern of most students who are pursuing a career in sociology. The main thing that worries most students when asked to do essay writing is the choice of topic. They are unable to decide on the topic that they should frame their term paper on.
Thanks to all of you for your replies !

Real neat !
I think stop working in the middle of a task really should mean leave some task unfinished. Thy way, you'll know clearly where to start when you begin again. I think this was posted on HN as a hack by Hemmingway.
Regardless of whether it's working or not, it's not a particularly anarchist sentiment.
I was watching the interview on 60 minutes and it seems like they edited out something that was said about "solar". As if he probably qualified that answer but the producers decided that it wasn't really relevant.
That casts the old "I'll just pick up the language as I go... I'm a fast learner" in an interesting light. And I'd take it as a good counter argument to "smart and gets things done". (edit: maybe not "counter arguement since SAGTD is also important. Maybe "corollary" would be a better word choice?)

I've seen a few "will pick up [perl | c++ | java | whatever] as a I go" type guys. (Come to think of it... I've been that guy on occasion)
Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?
Sacha Chua has some very nice instructions (from her upcoming book on Emacs) : http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-or...
I can recommend Evernote, it's great for notetaking. I'd also like to correct some inaccuracies in the article, for people who don't know the software:

- if there isn't a network connection, that isn't a fail. You can use native client in offline mode, and the data will be synced next time you will be online.

- the notes does automatically open in editing mode. (at least in version 3.1 I use).
yep, and viagra is usefull to some people with emails... your argument is not convincing. This is cheap dialectic.

oh and additionnaly viagra is usefull to some people reading HN... do you mean it is ok to advertuze viagra in HN ? (i can do cheap dialectic too :)

more seriously, this 'news' is clearly a spam and lets please avoid spam on HN.
If you are choosing the django stack, I would advise staying within the built-in template system.

Jinja2 is a great project and I wish it was easy to integrate with django.

I tried it through coffin http://github.com/dcramer/coffin
and got hit by a few views from the contrib.auth models that had to be rewritten.

If you want to plug django-apps, you will have to patch and maintain them to work with Jinja2.

Coffin uses a nice trick to reload the view functions code with a Jinja2 version of render_to_response and RequestContext:

http://github.com/dcramer/coffin/blob/master/coffin/contrib/...

Note that django 1.2 will include 'Smart' if tags and Template caching if that is what you are looking for in Jinja2:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2-alpha-1/#s...
I was under the impression that there has been a variety of opinions concerning fractional-reserve banking in the Austrian School. While Rothbard was fervently opposed to it and Mises was hostile to it, I know that Hayek, at least, believed a fractional-reserve banking system to be necessary for an efficient economy.
Her blog (found from HN comments) was half my motivation to start using Org. But I haven't seen that page of hers. Thanks! [Edit: But sigh, not discussing logs. :-)]
Passing the Turing Test Using a Humongous Response Table
This is mostly bunk. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but I'll take the third video as an example:

First, the graph the author has drawn obviously isn't exponential. The graph is too flat and rises too quickly, but it certainly is scary. Second, global population growth is declining, and going towards zero. In some East European countries it's already negative. Third, this has already been discussed by Thomas Malthus back in the 70's and dismissed.

This looks like someone who doesn't quite grasp the complicated machinery of economy, people and energy and tries to explain it using pocket philosophy.
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Your comment about generating my response by saying one letter at a time before typing it made me stop and think - thank you for the insight. However, I still don't think it's a sufficient response.

I agree completely that writing code on a whiteboard is utterly alien to some people, and is so completely divorced from their usual way of working that it's unlikely to give a true picture of how they will code in the real job.

But we're not asking for an insight into how they will code in the real job. We're asking if they can write something like, say, FizzBuzz. More, we're not even asking them to be syntactically flawless and optimally efficient. We're asking if there's any chance that they'll produce working code at all.

I agree that there is to some extent just a disagreement about where to draw the line, and how detailed/accurate the solution has to be, but my experience is broadly in line with the worst claims - 95% of people who approach me for a job in programming can't write code at all.

For the remainder I'll ask how they usually write code, and then collorate with them on something more complex to see how they work.
If you stop and think about it for a minute, Rails is fairly topical for this site, whereas e.d. is not.

I think there is nothing wrong with trying to sell something that you've worked hard on; isn't that what most of us are doing here?

That said, I didn't vote this up and don't think I would buy this book.
I love interview questions that make Python look awesome.
Now I am sure this keynote was just trying to be provocative and make people think but: Really? Seriously?

You think that other skills - sales, marketing , financial , even secretarial type things require the same kind of thinking , the same kind of people as programming.

And you also think that someone that can program will either a) be happy doing a completely different job than their skill set or b) be worth using as a developer if their main skill is sales , marketing etc.

Now I am sure you can find the odd person who is a brilliant sales person (for example) and a great developer - but why? I don't want my sales people cutting code I want them selling stuff.

There is a phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" - sounds like the kind of people you will end up with
http://www.ookla.com/speedtest.php

Says $500/yr and also seems to say it is simply up/down throughput.
Was posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138142

Awesome talk. He points out a number of psychological hooks that games are now using to interweave real life. And takes that to its logical conclusion (I won't spoil what this is) which actually seems mostly plausible and maybe even welcome to me -- given that one is able to anonymously opt-out of all the games/location-data publishing.
Is it just me or is the html for this page really ugly?

Code like this gives me horrible flashbacks to the frontpage days:

td id="_description_1"

Not to mention a meta tag outside of the html block and class and ID names that make Hungarian notation look pleasant.
Don't real rockers wake up with a couple of groupies and do a few lines with a fifth of Jack?
It's hard to leave a mischaracterization of your ideas unanswered on a forum where people know you participate.

Yes it is. And here's something I learned by accident...

Many times I have been challenged by something I said. Often a great point, but just as often something totally illogical. I always felt compelled to engage immediately or else I'd look like I was acquiescing to the other.

Then a strange thing happened. I got so busy that I could only visit a few times per day. So when I returned to a thread I had commented in, I was challenged, and others had responded instead of me. And their responses were often much better than mine would have been.

So now that's my default. I let others respond for me simply because I'm not here. And I've been very pleasantly surprised. For every jerk, there are 10 people ready to downvote or comment.

There's a natural tendency to stick up for yourself, so it's tough to let it go and give others a chance to do it for you. But give it a try anyway. Have faith in this community. When you're too busy to respond, we've got your back.
The hosted version is 0.4.4? I think they're up to 0.6.something now.
What is a real alter ego?