skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The “Moneyball” quote is by far the most provocative. Never mind hanging around bashing TendyCo or trendy engineers. There is a market for programmers, and like in every market, some are overvalued and some are undervalued.

But unlike stocks, you don’t extract value from your programmers by selling them at what the market perceives it will pay. So you aren’t hunting for programmers that are valued by the market, you’re hunting for programmers that will be productive.

And because it costs you time and money to even talk to programmers, you want the programmers with the highest probability of accepting an offer and being productive. Which means that regardless of your budget productive programmers that are undervalued by the market are the very best ones to interview.

Think about that the next time you see an ad that “encourages women and people of colour to apply.” Maybe they’re raving SJWs who hate white men. Or maybe they’re playing Moneyball. (Where or is `||`, not `^^`, of course.)
You mean go out in this great country of ours, skipping the lamestream media and talking to great red, white, and blue, through and through, the real people of America, you know, people of faith and the Constitution, and tell those liberals and media elites they can go pound sand, I tell ya?
Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more familiar with proprietary than free software, and hence when confronted with the choice to either bring in what he knows or learn something new, under pressure, it's likely that he would try to bring in something from Microsoft or another proprietary vendor.

No thank you. Free software is better for developers, better for my team and better for our company. Yes, rarely it's missing a necessary capability, and sometimes it's missing a nice capability, but it's normally quite as effective and, y'know, free.

I share his surprise about the concern over someone with too varied experience. In my own experience, that's generally a plus, since such folks often have surprising depth along with their breadth.

I also share his surprise about the concern over someone who's been contracting. I've run into contractors who basically just fill in the same template at every job, granted, but I've also run into contractors who are sharp and have — again — an amazing breadth and depth of experience. You just have to spend some time interviewing them to find out who is who.

But, again, I'd have huge concerns about bringing in someone whose experience has been with Microsoft or Oracle or IBM. I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of proprietary software and not an actual developer.
The problem could also be that many teams simply don't have the time or possess the knowledge to do an assessment like you're suggesting (which I agree is a good way to assess candidates). It requires someone to actually design an assignment (which is a task that many coders might not be good at), and requires one or more people to evaluate it.

The ridiculous whiteboard coding of puzzles probably stems from laziness or inability to implement what you're suggesting. I know that personally, if someone asked me to developed a work sample evaluation for my job, it would take me many hours to come up with something, and frankly I even once complete we would have no way of knowing if it is actually a good predictor of whether or not someone is the right employee.
Pros and cons of adding var/val to Java (JEP 286)
It's kinda hard to prove because of the confidentiality Google uses in it's agreements with partners, but Samsung was making every indication that they would fork Android, prepping alternatives to all of Google's apps. Then, they reversed course in 2014, they signed a patent agreement with Google and started 'toning down TouchWiz'. These stories were two days apart.

Why would Samsung do this if Google wasn't leveraging it's patent portfolio?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/01/27/samgsung-googl...

http://androidandme.com/2014/01/news/samsung-may-be-toning-d...
There would still be a great shortage. The supply of donor organs is tiny.
$1000-2000k per month
I'm not sure you need every merchant - I think you only need a significant proportion of the merchants that a specific population use.

I probably make most of my purchases with a very small group of retailers - for example, in terms of number (not value) of transactions, the sandwich shop by my work and the corner shop by my house probably account for 80% of my offline transactions. (I go to the supermarket about once a week, and although I tend to buy more, that's all in a single transaction.)

If you could sign up those merchants, and give me a compelling reason (convenience, discounts, rewards) to use your payment app, it might not matter that I couldn't use your payment app on those rare occasions that I go shopping somewhere else.

Just a thought. (I'm not in the payment industry.)
The skewing of opinion can be done by biasing the results of a web search. As discussed on HN before, a search engine has a strong influence over the decision making of its users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11255633
Hours? It could take a week, and if you're going to hire more than one person this quarter, it will still be worth it just in the time savings from not having developers deliver bad interviews.
In short, the new found text is just 31 page, typed. And one whole chapter of that never finished book "was published in the 1966 book The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces."

That book has an entry in Wikipedia even if there's less than 4000 copies of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Brotherhood_and_Other...

The picture in the article, if real, features exactly the title page of the already published chapter.

"The Cancer of Superstition was previously known only in outline and through its first chapter. Houdini had asked Lovecraft in 1926 to ghostwrite the treatise exploring superstition, but the magician’s death later that year halted the project, as his wife did not wish to pursue it."

And it's probably not written by Lovecraft but CM Eddy, as stated near the end of the article, "according to Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi."
Cash is the only way Govt can implicitly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency)/explicitly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar) control 99% population;
Well, for one thing, there's more to life than earning money necessary to prevent starvation...
I think this is a symptom of a wider malaise in our societies today. Technology can be an enabler of wonderful new things, but it also affords new opportunities for power and profit to those who control it.

The average person is not a financial expert and so there are very lucrative opportunities for those who know the system well to make a lot of money at the expense of those who do not. Payday loan companies and high interest credit cards come to mind as extreme examples, but every time you put money in a savings account at your bank they are making a lot more on it than they are paying you in interest, and every time you use an on-line payment service or swipe your card in a store you're giving a significant cut to the payment services involved, not the person you thought you were paying. This is before we even get into the privacy implications and so on.

The average person is also not a technical expert and so there are analogous opportunities to take advantage of them, but we are becoming so dependent on technology that if anything the opportunities here are even more one-sided and certainly much greater in number. Day-to-day functionality and communications increasingly rely on isolated, closed ecosystems, run by commercial operators that have every incentive to lock people in and then exploit them, yet which are typically not subject to regulation as essential public services the way that traditional phone and mail systems typically have been. The "war on general purpose computing" is well underway, again with even basic things like the software you can run on your own devices locked up through a combination of proprietary repositories or app stores, cloud integrations, DRM and similar technologies, and legalised anticompetitive behaviour thanks to ever-increasing distortions of IP laws.

Much of this comes down to the same recurring themes with new technologies: as well as providing useful new capabilities, they can also become a threat to privacy, to ownership, and ultimately to the freedom of smaller businesses or private individuals to create and use technologies and data as they wish rather than as the controlling mega-businesses and governments dictate.

This does not seem healthy to me at all. However, since most of it is predicated on the average user of these technologies not understanding the full implications and often not having any meaningful choice apart from giving up on a technology altogether anyway, there is only so much the little guy can do.

We should fear a cashless world, but we should fear more the kind of world that cashless transactions exemplify.
The point is that the specific criteria defining what is criminal can include whether or not there is consent.

A contract can establish consent.

E.g. if I go into your house without permission and take stuff, then it is theft. If I have a contract saying that I have permission to go into your house and take stuff, then it is not.

I have not contracted my away from something illegal. The contract has established consent, which meant the criteria that otherwise would have made my actions criminal are not fulfilled.

> If impersonating someone is a criminal offense in a particular jurisdiction, then -- assuming that jurisdiction has a sane criminal code -- there is no way to make it legal through a contract.

That depends whether or not the criteria that needs to be met for it to be a crime requires lack of consent. If it requires lack of consent, then a contract can document that the consent has been given.

All jurisdictions I'm aware of (not a lawyer) have the concept of agents that may act on your behalf with consent. To what extent such agents can act using your name (with consent) vs. using their own name but on your behalf, varies greatly.

E.g. some places your agents (say a PA) will sign letters "[agents name] for and on behalf of [your name]" or similar, while other places they will use a signature stamp with your signature, or do "p.p. [their signature] [your printed name]" (the p.p. stands for "per procurationem"). Many other variations are in use, and how obvious signs there are that a document was not personally signed by the person the letter is from varies greatly.
I see, thank you for clarifying. I misread your comment, but if it is a general comment about the concern for version history of code that supports a scientific conclusion, then I absolutely withdraw my comments about it being insulting or personal.

Without the history to prove exactly what happened and when, there is no reproducibility.

I would even go further and say that each and every model fitting attempt should be recorded in some type of version history. This way, researchers can't engage in multiple comparison errors, whereby they test lots of things and fish for a specific threshold of significance that may be met solely by chance based on how many things they tried, or researcher degrees of freedom problems where seeing the output of intermediate model fits causes you to change the experimental design mid-stream (like collecting more data in the context of a model where that would change the required significance threshold).

These kinds of pitfalls are extremely common and go unreported most of the time. If someone found a significant relationship after testing hundreds of things and fine tuning the data collection, even if that result is statistically significant we should deeply discount it. But what if there is no record anywhere that all those previous attempts took place and that they motivated the experimenter to tweak the experimental design?
IBM used this kinda of contractor quite a lot in the 2000s and a bit later; I don't know if it does anymore.
> A core premise in the design of the Seattle Public Library was that a new library should put greater emphasis on open social spaces than space for the "stacks".

Judging from everything I've read in this article, it doesn't do either of these things.
I hear you, but .NET is open source now, and comes with a large open source community. </nitpick>
Why would it raise a warning flag? I'd move to Australia for a one-week job, but I would hate moving to another town for six months. [I'm in Europe.] I just can't see any drawback to short-term contracts.
Spark SQL vs. Presto w/ 1 Billion Taxi Rides on Amazon EMR
Being in the IT job market off and on for the last 18 months and being interviewed at about 40 companies in one of the major tech hubs in the USA, gave me a similar experience as the OP. I came to several conclusions:

1) In my case trendiness is more valuable than the school you've graduated from (graduated from a school overseas that nobody in the USA heard of). I worked for one of the companies in the area, notorious for its difficult tech interviews and I got a bunch of calls from recruiters (including from Google) during my tenure there and immediately after I left. Two years and few short gigs at not-that-cool-companies later, I don't get that amount of calls.

2) Most of the "technical" recruiters have no clue how to evaluate technical candidates. For many of them the main (for some the only) way to judge about your skills is how much money you make/how much money you want. I'm talking about deep understanding what engineer do, I'm talking about basic stuff.

3) If you have 1-2 short gigs for the last couple of years you are under the suspicion that you can not be trusted enough to be hired as a FTE.

4) If you are unemployed at the moment of the interview - look 3)
I believe now that hiring in the IT industry is somehow a stochastic process. I was hired and got offers from reputable companies and organizations and rejected even at the first round of interviews by no-name/less-than-mediocre-companies. Go figure.
You can't even assume that a company competing for your dollars will treat your better (Verizon's tracking header junk on mobile, even with that market being far more competitive than landline).
Considering it is cash-positive small company, someone might be crushing them and we would have no way to know. It seems the flurry of positive press that they were getting seemingly ended in 2012 ~ 2013. Not that it reflects as an evidence towards their impending demise, but there is little evidence to contrary. Even with a company that has ideal/fair distribution of profit, the inherent smaller size translates into a higher risk.
The Google Closure type system is much saner on this front already. A variable of a declared type cannot be undefined. Nullable and non-nullable types are distinct: primitives are non-nullable by default, with an option to make them nullable (?string, ?number, etc.), and types deriving from Object are nullable by default, with an option to make them non-nullable (!Object, !MyType, etc.)

Of course JavaScript itself does not have a notion of nullable types, so touching any native API interfaces naturally leaves you with a bunch of nullable types where you may well know the value will never be null, so you are left trying to decide where to do nothing, where to add an assertion, and where to add a conditional branch. This ambiguity comes through the Closure API in many places that it would be nice to have a non-nullable type guarantee, but I suppose the library has evolved over time and further must be adaptable to a range of coding styles.
One thought I've had recently: What if being "unconscious" isn't unconscious at all - what if it's a different form of consciousness?

For instance, it deals with the internal world of our body, maintaining and dealing with issues as they happen. It's responsible for releasing chemicals to get a desirable action from our 'conscious' self. It gives us rashes in an attempt to change its environment.

I haven't thought about this too much, but in the very least, I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Has anyone actually tested that our 'unconscious' is indeed unconscious?
iText is very expensive when used in commercial products. It has a AGPL license, but costs for commercial use.
> to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark

How else would you describe 21st century RFID using 1st century vocabulary? Revelation was written 2,000 years ago, and is supposed to be about things in its future, after all.
"I smoked pot with Johnny Hopkins." "You don't know anyone named Johnny Hopkins." "It was Johnny Hopkins and Sloan Kettering. And they were blazing that shit up every day."
Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job?

Like me, for example, I currently have a job doing .Net, but in my past I have several years experience working in iOS, a year working with a Java stack, I used to do PHP way back in the day, I use Python all the time for personal scripts, and I'm currently learning React-Native to update my mobile experience and get a couple new apps out there.
Really? Everyone I know in the .Net world is busily building upon open source libraries via Nuget, which is an NPM equivalent. Most of that open source code is hosted on Github.

Now .Net is now also open source it would seem that the only proprietary part to the stack is Windows itself, and shortly .Net is going to be running on any platform.
> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done.

I have a computer for that! Seriously, that's one of the things a computer excels at. This is what is so nice about a language with strong dynamic typing: it makes writing the sort of code which writes glue code reasonably easy.
There are so many privacy benefits to using cash

I like to use cash a lot too. And the privacy benefits are true sometimes, but more and more places want your information when you purchase anything. I bought a weed wacker the other day and they wanted my address and phone and email. I never say no, but instead reply with, "555 Fake Street" which is obnoxious, but its like you don't need my damn address to sell me lawn equipment. Amazingly, most people dont understand why anyone would give false information to a random business.
Deploying OSSEC at scale
So what happened as a result? Anything?
Exactly. On a global scale, the very poor are getting richer, but so are the very rich, while the middle-classes are getting (relatively) poorer. If you are middle-income (somewhere between $10K and $1M), then the probability that your children will be relatively better off than you is falling.

See https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi... - p35 is particularly relevant in this conversation.
I think what happened was that he (Doug) was trying to push SL into helping out more and to get some issues fixed, Doug felt like he was getting somewhere, but then SL was sold to IBM all conversations had to be started again. There is a github issue titled 'Is Express dying?' [1] that contains all of the events, issues and comments from Doug, TJ, SL and IBM.

[1] - https://github.com/expressjs/express/issues/2844
It saved us enormous amounts of time at Matasano. When we designed our work-sample rubric, our #1 concern was filtering out people who interviewed well and/or had great resumes but weren't worth a billable hour on a real project, but our #2 concern was interviewing faster and getting results back to candidates quickly. (We didn't discover the best reason to do work-samples --- discovering hidden talent --- until after we'd started doing them).

With standardized interviews and challenges, our whole hiring pipeline became entirely mechanical. We could send our a challenge and its instructions in 2 minutes, and evaluate the response the next day (or week, or whatever) later in less than 5 minutes. 7 minutes, to produce a technical evaluation that crushed a competing battery of tech interviews by several senior staff members that took 4-5 hours to do.
This is very true and so important to your professional growth. There's a famous saying, "if you're the best one in the room, you're in the wrong room".

At my last job I was the only developer at a small web agency, along with a designer and a project manager. Basically every problem and solution I had to figure out myself, and while I did that, due to time constraints I often had to go with just what worked, rather than figuring out the best of all possible options.

At my current job, there are developers who know a lot more than me, and in the time I've spent working with them I've found I learn so much more so much more quickly than I did when I was working on my own.
If Alice and Bob enter into a contract that says Alice will kill Carol for $1m, can Bob sue her for breach of contract if she does not? Or does the legality of the contract supercede the body of the contract such that the contract is void?
Likewise. I think (just from experience; can't back it up at all) that interesting but 'non-core' posts - as in not directly CS-related or startup-y - tend to fall off quicker. But then, because they are interesting, garner a good number of upvotes again on subsequent reposts even just days later.
They also don't sign the tax form as you. They sign it as a "preparered by" and you sign it as the taxpayer.

Most tax preparers are liable for their own mistakes, but not for omitting anything you didn't tell them.
> Every league game follows the same structure: with very high probability, one player will be top, one middle, and two bottom, with one jungler.

The prevalence of lane swaps (2 go top, 1 goes bottom) in competitive is one major counterexample. In fact, these often turn into having 3 or 4 people in one lane at the start of the game, forcing a fast push strategy.

> Teams will farm with occasional gank attempts until the midgame, where there is a slow transition from farming to objective taking and teamfighting.

Stereotypical Chinese LoL matches are nearly all teamfights, for better or for worse. Regardless, laning and midgame is where I think you should consider my point of champion diversity as well. Here, mistakes can be more readily mechanically exploited (late game, mistakes are punished strategically), e.g. if a laner is far from baron without TP, exploiting a 5v4 fight is a strategic decision, whereas missing certain skills early on in certain matchups means a severely negative outcome if the opposite laner has the mechanics, e.g. no flash and Q on CD as Lux means any Morgana can flash ult for guaranteed kill. These have a bigger impact than racial considerations and probably make up for map considerations (idk)

The script user example is one of mechanics: top players still win against those with pixel perfect scripted mechanics. This is despite having some scripters having 'game strategy competency' (that might be a real thing, but I interpret it as a player having real game knowledge).

IMO the biggest challenge to a human player playing against a team of 5 AI-controlled players is that of communication; perfect understanding of each others' intent is a far cry from the communication of even practiced teams.