skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, hiring managers, and almost all companies apart from extremely early-stage do-or-die start-ups, simply do not care about productivity. Sure, they'll use productivity as a political excuse to fire you, overlook you, or ding you on a bonus or something. But that's just a way of cover their political games with plausible deniability paperwork. At the end of the day, they don't really care about productivity, and most businesses are not punished by consumers when the business is not productive, beyond a low, low threshold of productivity that non-do-or-die stage businesses can mostly automate and extract from workers who only even need to be semi-conscious to do the work. I've experienced this laissez-faire autopilot attitude first hand, even in a multi-billion dollar asset management company where there was "real money on the line every day" and blah blah blah.

Just look at the office space provided to knowledge workers. Open-plan offices demonstrably destroy productivity. You're literally throwing away something like 10-15% of a worker's productivity (and thus also the corresponding compensation you pay them) just by placing them in a loud, no-privacy open-plan space.

But companies can't get enough open-plan. They want on-site cafes, rock-climbing walls, elaborate decorations, game rooms, liquor-focused cultural activities, etc. etc. all taking place right on top of the space where work is supposed to get done. Can there be more of an unequivocal admission that they don't actually value productivity?

The idea that most businesses have to be really sensitive to bottom-line productivity is a Big Lie. They hire you because they think you'll be a politically ally to their particular internal faction for their pet projects and power struggles. They may need to use your on-paper credentials to win arguments or to "certify" some things, but make no mistake, they absolutely don't care about what you can do.
Yes - I wonder about that every time I see an ad for Apple Pay or some other payment app. Contactless is rapidly becoming the default, so how do you compete with it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322644 1 day ago, 18 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319882 1 day ago, 2 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319785 1 day ago, no comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319536 1 day ago, 2 comments

Found by using the "past" link[0] on the "newest" page[1].

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Mic:%20what%20happens%20when%2...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
Funnily enough, I'm the exact opposite. Mentally, money in my account is "my money". Cash I've withdrawn feels like already-spent money. Since it's unaccountable, I tend to spend it more frivolously. Might be a generation-to-generation thing.
"Aunt Marge will be as happy using Linux without even knowing it's Linux"

Unless she wants to print something... [1]

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html
I interview tons of candidates. The resume tells me nearly nothing, just what you've worked on before. Not how much, out how well that went. So in terms of some "textbook" model fit, the question is a little silly.

Generally few people are really good. And their spread out unpredictably across the landscape, so you have to just interview lots of people to find them.
There is an older version still available under a less restrictive license, although it's not always easy to find.
Right but 2 things:

1) HR (presumably taking direction from in house counsel) takes the position that it will be difficult to distinguish between a work sample test and an IQ test

2) We are a large organization with very broad roles. The Performance Team hiring for a Senior Software Engineer will probably want a different work sample than the Analytics Team...
I usually hear the term "addiction" used more for the physical cases such as alcohol or narcotics, and "dependency" more in the psychological sense.
By storing your cash in a bank, you are exposed to both the bank's insolvency and the devaluation of the currency by a central bank. By keeping it under your mattress, you are only exposed to the latter. Of course, by not storing your money in a bank, you are 100% responsible for securing it, which is the primary drawback that most people face. You are also more directly exposed to fluctuations in currency valuation since fiat is generally inflationary and the money is doing no work for you at home - but quite a few people still find it worth all the drawbacks to keep a chunk of cash at hand.
This is exactly how I eventually approached the "passion" problem. For the most part it works but resentment can build up (on both parties).

Generally the person or entity has some idea of my abilities and so I say I'll give a maximum of 40 hours a month and it will cost this much an hour. I find the 40 hours a month thing good for both parties because they can compare it with what the currently get done in a month to what I might be able to get done in a week of man time. That is I'm shooting for roughly 4x. If I can't get 3x or greater to whatever they currently are doing it isn't worth both parties time. Consequently I charge more but they value my time more and I value their relationship more.
There is a pretty important distinction here -- We have seen in the US consulting market (at large corporations) an influx of 90s style contractor arrangements for staff augmentation. This is basically the counter to failed outsourcing efforts. These contractors almost entirely work for large groups like Robert Half, Tata, Infosys, Tek Systems and others.

We also still have a very very strong consultant labor force making 2-3x what W2 full-time employees can pull in. These consultants generally work through smaller consulting firms that take smaller cuts for the placement/handling billing and invoicing.
My credit card bill this month is £500, That seems easier than "i had n trips to the ATM plus I think I had £30 in my wallet from last month and I got £25 from donna for the booze we bought in France over the summer"?

Not only that, I can download a monthly spreadsheet of all my transactions, pivot them into a simple table and so on and so forth. Data out the wazoo. £105 a month on tube fares. £235 a month on lunch. £17 on fuel. Knowing where I spent it is as useful if not more so than how much I spent in total.

Then of course there is the free money I get from spending on a card. It all seems like a no brainer. And I never need to go to an ATM. And most the time I just lean my wallet against a card reader and mosey onwards.

I'm not sold.
I was working for a small business once and they owners patronisingly asked "How much commitment do you think it'll take for this business to work? 110%. We work all hours but you only do your contracted 9-5:30". I just looked at them and replied "It's your business". They didn't give me any more bullshit after that...

Surprisingly being paid bugger all + a tiny amount of equity wasn't actually motivating me.
Because it can compile plain JS using the rules present under plain JS, such as nullable and undefined-able types by default, regardless of the rules it's using to compile TS.
I was just thinking "contactless payment", right after I did a Google search for the "innovative" CueCat.
I am curious about how much trial and error went into selecting this particular combination of technologies.
I tweeted. He deserves the recognition however we can give it.
I don't know about google, but you can do it with the wordpress.com site:

http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F?w=250
Great answer. When I see these ideas floated around, I always think that these companies will never hire people who value their time and have at least a decent job. When a company comes to me with these great "deals" the first thing I say is thank you very much and move their emails to my spam box.
Ask HN: Pros and Cons of First Job Out of College at Small Company
What are the pros and cons of getting your first job out of college at a small company? Does that have any kind of negative impact on your future job prospects? Thank you!
Visualizing Linux Server Resource Usage with Socket.io and D3.js
The best way would be to stop using Windows. Windows is the only platform where you see backward things like:

1. Antivirus software that gives a false sense of security being popular.

2. The vendor refusing to fix vulnerabilities that give attackers complete control because of backward compatibility concerns:

http://foxglovesecurity.com/2016/01/16/hot-potato/

3. UAC prompts that annoy users to the point where the user either turns them off or automatically clicks yes. This is in part because of the even weirder situation of legitimate software often being written to touch things that it has no business touching.

4. End users trained to execute software obtained from random internet sites.

5. File names used to identify files as executable.

There are probably other backward things with regard to security too, although I cannot think of them offhand.

Your best choices would be installing a Linux distribution or buying an Apple machine running Mac OS X. If you must use some sort of Windows, check out ReactOS:

https://www.reactos.org/

That likely does something by virtue of not having same bugs and not having yet implemented the legacy things that exploits often target. It is not as good for security as Linux or Mac OS X though.
> and lessen nation states' ability to combat inequality with policy

Ok, one person is a great programmer making good money and another person is not interested in any of that and makes less money. I do not see any inequality here that needs to be combated with policy. One possible result of such policy would be that both will turn out to be less interested.

You cannot turn the losers into winners, but you can certainly alienate the surviving winners and convince them to build their next factory in China instead, or do their next startup from a beach in the Philippines.

Instead of reducing inequality, the outcome will become very biased by profits made in China or the Philippines, and therefore lead to even more inequality. Lather, rinse, repeat.

At the basis, quite a bit of inequality is caused by the fact that some people happen to be smarter. Your policy will obviously not outsmart them. Therefore, if your policy has any effect, it will inevitably be exactly the opposite of what it was meant to be.
I bought a counterfeit Macbook charger a few years ago, and indeed, it did damage my computer (I think it damaged some internal power system in the Macbook. The effect was I could no longer run on battery power).
If you had asked at Matasano how we evaluated our work-sample tests, we'd have told you. In fact: the first contact any new candidate had at Matasano was a 45-minute-long phone call with a director+ (for a year and a half: me), during which we explained our process in excruciating detail and answered any questions that came up. If we got even a hint from a candidate that they might not know exactly what we were looking for, we'd get their mailing address and fedex them a stack of free books; we gave them cheat-sheets on what parts of those books to read, as well.

I have the strong impression that a typical SFBA tech hiring manager thinks it's crazy to give candidates cheat sheets for interviews, and that helping candidates with technical evaluations decreases rigor. THE EXACT OPPOSITE THING IS TRUE. Evaluating technical ability under unrealistic pressure and with unrealistic restrictions confounds the results of the evaluation.

Of course, you have to design tests that are valid predictors for candidates who have received tips and assistance and practice and resources. That sounds hard! But it isn't. The best predictor for a candidate's ability to do the kind of work you really do is, simply, the kind of work you really do. Not problems from a book, not trivia questions, not one algorithm poorly implemented on a shared coding site and a Skype call, not whatever bug is at the top of the bug tracker today, but a sample assignment given to a real member of your team, the same one, for every candidate, graded the same way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322070
In Missouri, you want the contractor.

I've worked for Fortune 500 companies around here. The senior full time employees have been working at the same place forever, so their skills are often outdated. They get paid a lot less, but they are often fine with that, because the place gives them the one thing they want: status. Changing jobs means you might not get that status. In comparison, the top contractors get far better pay, have worked in more than one or two places in their career, and are the guys you want to hire.

It's probably different in the bay, where big tech companies have little trouble paying 200K+ compensation packages, but around here, just contractors do.

Why do the contractors get paid more? Because they can get paid without talking to HR, or meeting any pay bands. Last year, I worked with other three contractors, whose names anyone in the Scala community would recognize. 200-300K a year range. The best full timer they had (which just quit, after being told how silly he had been by being full time), made 110K.

Being well known means that switching to work for TrendyCo isn't difficult though.
CueCat
That's an incredibly naive filter. I'd estimate the vast majority of developers don't care too much about whether their technology stack fits some arbitrary ideal. A good interviewer would focus on gleaming out a person's understanding of the fundamentals, and more important, actual instances of problem-solving, creativity, and learning.

> I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of proprietary software and not an actual developer.

You can remove the word proprietary and apply that claim to a significant number of developers, regardless of their chosen tech stack.

> Free software is better for developers

Citation needed.
Here in Italy the big issue is that many business will just not declare cash transactions. It's pretty common not to be given a receipt when buying a coffee and often when you visit a doctor they'll say: do you want the invoice or a discount?

A couple of friends got married recently and I found out they paid over half of what the owed in cash to get pretty decent discount.

So before we talk privacy and company let's remember that this kind of hidden economy has a huge cost for society and it's very widespread in southern Europe.
"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically"

Nonesense. Contractors are actually much stronger technically because they usually come in to complete a specific task and are not usually trained by the company.

At least that is my experience here on the east coast.
Your cynicism is noted.

But my cynicism says that managers often hire people who will be productive because a huge part of their political game is producing software that appears to be “strategic” or will generate the revenues that make their group more valued and garner more budget and power for said managers.

So yes, it’s cynicism all the way down, but no, that doesn’t mean that managers aren’t trying to hire productive programmers :-)
At our company, we offer a bonus based on company revenue. If you are part of the company as we grow, you get a direct bonus
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11324923
It is simply not true that the Perf team must deliver the same work-sample test as the Analytics team.

Let's not dignify that argument. I absolutely believe you that your company has allowed HR to sabotage your hiring process, and that sucks. But let's not pretend HR is right to do it.
Sounds like Russell's Paradox.
New JSON parser for Go: up to 9x faster than `encoding/json`
What+is+Google+Domains?+How+to+Register+Website+with+Google?
I would say Dark Souls. But it's a different kind of RPG (third person, action oriented, difficult and unforgiving. But fun!)
Showerthoughts: DDOSing an important social institution (and fixing it) – Part 1
Where are you going to put the food if you fill up your entire grocery store with 100 checkout machines? Also spending a minute or so waiting for the checkout machine to clear my transaction still sounds like huge pain in the ass.
3 fun apps in 3 days with source. Can I have a job? 20 years exp. dev
Hey all, I've tried looking for a role for 2 months and only got 5 phone calls. I think the problem is I've moved to Philippines to live from the states. I'm looking for a part-time or full time job that is remote only.

I can do frontend in any framework. I can write your backend in:

Node
Go
PHP
C#
C++
Perl

I made these 3 fun apps in 3 days for a code sample, on a friend's Windows laptop, in only 3-4 hours each, The source code is here also. Enjoy!

Portfolio in ReactJS: https://jsfiddle.net/2Lf6zzx7/embedded/result

Matrix TodoMVC in Coffeescript/Jquery: https://jsfiddle.net/gp6qz2dy/

All these frameworks now have TodoMVC examples, but I had nothing to compare it to. So I wrote afull TodoMVC spec implentation from scratch in CoffeeScript and jQuery. It's about 75 lines of code so I had space for special FX.

Template language in Node: https://github.com/falafflepotatoe/emmetp

Just a fun templating language for code golf or html templates.

jg_work(at)kify.net
Any feedback on how this compares to Reportlab in Python or Prawn in Ruby?
I saw it from the inside and thought much the same.

The PoS product was actually pretty good...
It varies. Some contract houses promise experience but deliver grads. I have more luck with direct contractor hires (not thru a house).
Show HN: Python requirements for Humans
Live webcams have been around for a lot longer than a few years. Interesting thing about this one is it's focused at a game, not the real world.
Meet Matter Studios
>I don't have enough on me right now

Yeah I remember that situation. I accidentally left my card at home. I didn't have lunch that day and I barely managed to drive home with an almost empty fuel tank.

To me looking at the balance on my phone is far quicker than counting all the damn coins. 1 cent coins are such a huge annoyance that I'd rather throw them into the trash than actually pay with them.
What exactly happened on NYE?
Tax Payment Options for Americans Overseas
Awesome set of links. For those who are interested in starting your own online community (something like HN), check out HelloBox

http://www.hellobox.co
Show HN: Cubeit View, search and share from your favorite apps in one place
I was at GDC last year (did not go this year due to family emergency) and thought that, with a couple exceptions, everybody there was extremely professional. There was only one booth staffed with 'booth babes' (I don't remember who, but they were Russian).

(I'm not going to name the other unprofessional group because their biggest sin was 'being slovenly)
There seems to be an interesting tension between Hacker News readers who complain about ads and those who complain about paywalls -- realistically the money to pay for journalism has to come from somewhere, right?
Serves you right.

I'm sick of this fake humble passionate developer persona.

There are some of us who actually have families and better things to do with our free time than faking passion via putting hours on somebody else's product or those useless Github projects that we all know are nothing but publicity stunts to appeal to recruiters.

You are all damaging the industry.

Signed: 9to5 developer.
Two months ago, my dad died of a heart attack. One thing I've been wondering, and I'm hoping one of you can tell me, is why they couldn't have put him on some sort of machine until a replacement was found. This seems like as good a place as any to ask.

They said he was still alive when he got to the hospital, just barely, but the heart had too much damage to recover. My suspicions have been that either he died before he got there, and they didn't want to tell us that, or that they chose not to save him for some reason relating to insurance not being good enough. Neither is a rosey picture.
I'm the author.

Happy to answer any questions, hope you like it!
Using Git for Technical Writing
I understand that local affiliates produce their own content, especially local content that's not interesting to bigger outlets. I was calling the delivery system outmoded, the need for local broadcast affiliates to facilitate distribution. It's a cost that doesn't need to exist in the age of saturated 4G, and I think that in the medium-term, this issue will become larger, especially as more and more cars get cellular modems.

Unfortunately, just saying "We produce Car Talk/Fresh Air/whatever" is going to be enough to salvage the affiliate as presently composed; if they have a show of value, they'll have to make it available independently and will just be the Fresh Air company, not WHYY in Philadelphia.
Absolutely. I've had a contract where I could have done the job in two months; there were four people in the team and the contract was for six months. I spent most of my time reading articles on the internet :)

The reason for the over-budgeting? The team lead was a permanent employee trying to get promoted to manager; in order to do that, he needed a 1) successful and 2) significant project. Genuinely large projects risk being unsuccessful, but an overestimated one ticks both checkboxes.
Good. Awesome! Not that the hole exists, but that people are finding and reporting them to Apple. When the NSA finds an exploit they don't report it and we all end up surveyed.

Thanks JH researchers for finding it, thanks Apple for patching it.
Why was the apostrophe in the title moved? The title uses "writer's block", not "writers' block".

Edit: Removed a suspicious apostrophe =).
Home Sales Gain Momentum Heading into Spring
Actually, weev neither wrote the script nor ran it. Those were done by his codefendant.

Weev took the data provided to him by his codefendant and gave it to Gawker.
What is it supposed to do? Because I can't get any reaction on any controls (mouse, keyboard, buttons etc) in Firefox 45. Clean install with no addons whatsoever.

Update! Actually I get this JS error: SyntaxError: in strict mode code, functions may be declared only at top level or immediately within another function

Why did you use that stupid strict mode? It has no real benefits...
Ehhh, something like 6 of the top 20 CS schools are Ivies. Mark Zuckerburg founded Facebook while at an Ivy.
I think what I wrote was honest and factual, and it comes from my experience with all of the items mentioned. I did not resort to writing "barf JVM stack traces" like someone else in this thread, which is BTW a copy without quotes from a January 2014 blog article [1]. There must be people on HN just itching to downvote, or they somehow read wrongly into what I have written.

[1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42

EDIT - added link
I agree. "Programming in Lua" is a fantastic book! It showcases the whole language, as it's philosophy and how to use it's more advanced features.

I have the feeling that there is no "intermediate Lua". After you grasp the basics, the next step is really advanced stuff. The book helps you make that transition.
Nothing drives that point home as having people come visit the open space as if the techies are the local office zoo.
I'm definitely the same here. Taking cash out at an ATM feels the same as spending it. It's spent money to me.
Open-source bulk MTA for .Net
> At the basis, quite a bit of inequality is caused by the fact that some people happen to be smarter

Quite a bit is also caused by the undue influence rich people have over the policy-making process, helping them to ensure they remain rich by constructing 'glass ceilings'. Saying "well unless we give in to their demands otherwise they'll take our jobs to China" is simply not a good enough response.

As a middle-income web developer in the UK, I have more in common with a middle-income web developer in Bangalore or Shanghai than I do with a multi-millionaire in London or California.
What you are describing is a "rockputer" where all the actual computation is being done by something other than the rocks.