skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author's position is sound for the hypothetical he discussed, where, if a company starts the conversation pursuing a candidate, it's reasonable for the candidate to expect that the company has done their homework (why else would the company try to hire you in the first place?).

So I'd suppose, if the company already knows you can solve problems with software, what they don't know is how well you'll fit in with the staff they envision you working alongside of. Skipping right to the coming-in-and-collaborating step makes sense here for both sides.

The tests definitely make sense for the other main case here, where the developer starts the conversation. Then no one should expect the company staff to go out on their own and search out Random Developer #45's blog posts.

I'm curious, how do you/coworkers supervise the coding tests you have candidates perform? You can tell some things about approach and tactics from a final draft of a solution, but I would imagine most of your listed desired goals would come from watching and interacting with the candidate while the test is being performed. And in that case, it'd still seem to be a big effort for the engineers and such who need to support?
If you're going to use Bootstrap, at least do it right and configure the viewport:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">
Lovely write-up, made me smile. I'll be reading your other posts on related subjects.

Great to read a walk through of a "directed trial and error" approach. Out of curiosity, how did you select NLTK and a graphing approach? Did you consider other techniques for ploughing through the data?
In the UK where you are from, the top marginal rate is 13.8% employer NI (make no mistake, that money comes out of your pocket), 2% employee NI, and 45% income tax. Grand total = 60.8%.

So you're not far off.
You may make donations. Most people don't.

If you're trying to get paid for creative work, donations simply don't work as a model.

There's a fundamental problem for both the arts and sciences, which is that in general terms, knowledge and creativity do not have a market value.

You can't place a market value on a Mozart opera or the Theory of Relativity. You can't even place a market value on last week's most downloaded SoundCloud track. Or on the Linux kernel.

Copyright is an attempt to butt-join creativity with a market economy. As such, it almost works, and it's the least bad solution for the context.

But it's still the wrong answer. I'm not sure what a better answer would be, but it could be something like giving a person with unusual verifiable talent extra resources and time to pursue their interests.

Academia used to work like that, but academia is always highly politicised, both internally and externally, which adds friction and error bars.

If there was a way to create a similar system with less politics, that might work better.

Or not. It's a hard problem to solve. But the current marketisation of everything - and FOSS is still marketised in its own way, IMO - is making things worse, not better.
I thought the point of the post was that it was "antidemocratic, immoral and plain evil" for developers to contribute to the success of an environment with such user-hostile terms. Am I reading too much into it?
If you were a voter in 2010, as far as I know. But I don't know if it contains foreign home addresses. Some people say that it was fetched from ysk.gov.tr . Normally MERNİS has more detailed database, so they say that it cannot be MERNİS. MERNİS stands for Central Citizenship Administration Center, it contains even pre-Turkish Republic "citizens", like from Ottoman Empire. YSK stands for Supreme Electoral Council. A friend of mine had access to MERNİS, he once said that the leaked data is not directly from MERNİS.
And from their privacy policy https://www.oculus.com/en-us/legal/privacy-policy/:

Information Automatically Collected About You When You Use Our Services: -Information about your physical movements and dimensions when you use a virtual reality headset.

So even if I play single player games in my home I have no expectation of privacy anymore.
Yeah... I'm suspicious of involved coding tests. Low-level stuff (e.g. FizzBuzz) to filter out completely inappropriate applicants is one thing. But judging people on their first pass at a problem could have many pitfalls. For example, it's common to make a first pass solution that does things "weirdly" or is "over-engineered" because you want to fully explore the problem the first time, rough it out, then make a robust final version later.

Being able to quickly solve mid-tier problems is nice, but how well does it correlate with being able to solve real problems in a suitable timeframe? I don't think anyone knows.
Are you saying, if something is popular enough it no longer needs moral justification?
Yeah, the company I work for uses a coding test. It's a simple CLI program that is relevant to our product, business analytics, that we ask them to spend no more than 2-3 hours on. The test has several tasks to complete, we make it very clear that someone who completes only 1 task but has excellent code structure, unit tests etc etc is more likely to get the job than someone who just blitzes through all the tasks.

The task avoids assuming any knowledge of algorithms / advanced maths / databases or web frameworks. We're only interested in their approach to solve a problem with code, not what libraries they've spent years learning, or what project euler problems they've committed to memory.

I came up with the test after I was going round a job fair (for the free stuff) and was handed a coding test to produce a simple CLI twitter clone. I had no interest in applying for the job but I did the coding test anyway. It's only 2 hours of my time and I find coding / solving problems fun.

It's really helped us distinguish developers who see work as a 9-5 job that they only do because they must and those developers who just love solving problems. Maybe the technical skills of those 2 developers are roughly equal, but one of them is going to be far more valuable long term than the other. So far we've only hired one candidate after introducing the test, and they've been the best hire we've made.

As a side note, we always do a phone interview first so that we don't waste time (ours and theirs) giving the test to complete no-hopers.
Optimal Register Allocation and Instruction Scheduling for LLVM [pdf]
> Oh my god, the horror of not having five-star restaurants!

It's not just the lack of 5-star restaurants, it's the lack of 2+ star restaurants and everything else that goes with it. If your job relocated to western Maine, how much of a wrench in your life would that be?

> If Google or Apple moved from the Bay to anywhere else, their workers would follow. Don't doubt that for a second.

Only if the pay incentive was great enough, I'm sure. Otherwise, it might be easier to just get a new job in the same area. Google and Apple might be exceptions, considering that they're pretty much both loaded, but any smaller company would have to think long and hard about the expenditures required to get the bulk of their employees moved. People get rooted in their communities, especially if the standard of living is higher than where they're expected to move.

> Or we could just embrace technology and stop insisting that all your workers have to breathe the same oxygen, and allow remote work.

And someday pigs might fly, but not this century.
Sometimes we do group or individual OTS style CRs (new term for me, "OTS"), but with a twist. The reviewer walks through and describes the code, not the one who wrote it.
Just be ready for copy+paste from Stockoverflow.
I'm sure you have heard of Jaguar/Land Rover (the luxury car brand). Do you know who owns it? It is an Indian company called the "Tata Group". Tata Group acquired it from Ford Motors when the luxury brand was on the verge of bankruptcy. This is a brand that is "Made in Britain". Even though Tata Group is an Indian company, it operates the Jaguar facility in England and employs locals rather than Indians for its facilities. The profit is also stored by the foreign country (UK in this case).

Do you also know that many hotels in the USA are acquired by the Tata Group? The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Boston is one good example. Again, the group employs only locals and has it's profits stored in the foreign country (US in this case).

There is no reason to believe that trade of goods or capital is lopsided to only harm the United States.
This. Interviewing is a two-way street. As a candidate, the only information that I get from a coding challenge is that the company does not respect my free time.
I think it's pretty clear he'd consider your job not worth the effort - that's his entire point, isn't it?
Yep. I think the more interesting stuff for developers is here: https://share.oculus.com/developer-distribution-agreement
Next blog post from the hiring company "why we continue to moan that we can't find devs despite having a shitty coding test".

I am with the blog poster here - fuck you and your coding test.

I lowered myself to do one recently, we walked through it in the next stage interview, where it became apparent the " tech leads" were incompetent muppets, who were intimidated when they saw a better solution then they had as their "approved" answer. Walking through slowly with them why their solution had poorer performance at both low and high volume, I was left with the distinct impression that the vast majority of the incompetent devs who would fail fizzbuzz are somehow doing the hiring.

Scary times!
If I had the resources zuckerberg has, and the access to information and data that he does, my posts would be optimized to show asynchronously by region, and to show first in the region most likely to respond positively to my post. That way it sets a tone of positivity for the rest of the commenters. At least in theory.
It takes two to ChaCha (Poly)
Soon after this got on HN, the source seems to have been taken down?

I 404 both on Github and npm.
Read it again. Author is concerned about how Oculus threats their users, therefore as a developer he/she decided to not contribute to that system.
"Sometimes nice" is not good enough to do this.
It may not help that the site for your cited example of a working app is returning an error:

http://www.coverr.me/

Though perhaps it's only meant for light load and HN is overwhelming it.
Pair programming or integrated code reviews in development workflow are preferred.
Oh come on. That's clearly reasonable data to collect to improve future products. They should probably ask you if you want to do that but still...

You probably wouldn't be happy to know that many many mobile apps track every click you make.
Mediumization of the design. Why would I want to ever see a 300px "hero unit" in a forum , of all places?

It's excellent that there's no visual noise of taglines, statuses, achievements and other crap like that, though.
What type of food can't be made at scale?

What do you do at Nucleics? My first job cooking in high school was doing micro preps for my dad, isolating DNA, PCR, agar gels, in David Baltimore's lab at Rockefeller University. My dad was in Walter Gilbert's lab at Harvard before that. Needless to say he was not amused I didn't go into the family business.
Alex, where's my money $4.5m? :) Nice to read an article with a smile.
I have no problem with that if it is an opt-in. Otherwise I expect privacy in my home.

No mobile app is tracking me. The only information stored by the use of my phone is the cell tower location, the use of that information requires a court order in my country (although it is possible that even that isn't stored anymore, I would have to check).
Nah, I was just making an easy joke.
I really think this madness will only end if we all refuse to do coding tests, subject ourselves to multi-day interviews, etc. I do understand that this is easier to say when I have a job.
Stream torrent movies and tv shows from CLI
This looks like a way to break BitTorrent, as other posters have outlined.

Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Hard drives are not that expensive, and patience is a virtue. I'm very happy that youtube-dl exists, for example, because otherwise when Google disappears I'll lose a lot of useful material I have access to at the moment.

Regardless - I'm surprised to see this here. Sci-Hub is one thing - it's an educational resource.

Mainstream media... I just gave it up rather than pirating it. I'm not 18 any more - my friends don't really care about the latest Marvel flick. The movie companies have lost even my mindshare now. Books, online reading material, educational videos, all free, all a better use of my time, all less likely to leave me wanting a fast car like James Bond.
On the plus side, the really good companies who eschew shitty coding tests become even more attractive to good candidates.

If you are going to start a potential employment relationship by asking me to acquiesce so readily, it doesn't bode well.
Meta:

Interesting how what once was basic know-how (don't use your real name everywhere on the web) is now almost criminal as Facebook does their best to enforce, legally and otherwise, -real accounts, and way to many sites use Facebook as comments system / login etc or otherwise require you to sign with a full name.
This fork is still available:
https://github.com/orinocoz/pirateflix
"You get what you pay for," is probably what my grandfather would have said about this problem.
The author deleted the repo.
There is no incentive for any kind of product that acts as a filter or proxy. There is little demand, outside of a few Kickstarters.

You and I might move towards egress filtering but I suspect most people won't.
It would be interesting to see if someone could endow an independent publication with enough money to keep it going, then put quality ad-free journalism behind a paywall.

I'm thinking it would be something like "B Corporation". Not exactly a charity, but not necessarily trying to maximize profit either. Charge a high monthly price, maybe $50/month for immediate access to new articles, but after 1 month everything becomes freely available.

Information will undoubtedly be copied and posted elsewhere anyway, the only thing you can realistically control is who gets access to it first. People who value up-to-date news that's guaranteed to be impartial would pay for early access to it, I think. Everyone else would still get to benefit from it as well, just slightly delayed.
Robots.txt checker – without needing to make live changes, quickly test rules
You could make the same warning about writing open source software. Nobody calls that evil. As soon as you release anything under the GPL or MIT license, you're also giving Oculus a worldwide, ... perpetual, .. right to use, ... and distribute it.
Alright, I'll bite. In practice, how does this differ from most open source licenses? Yes, I appreciate that there is a corporate entity which is reserving these rights for itself (non-exclusively), but at some level this writer's response seems a bit overdone. But really, if I license something, say, via an MIT license: Am I not saying in effect that I grant anyone that comes along a "worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content[...]"?

Don't get me wrong, if I want to keep something proprietary and under my control, I best not publish to the Oculus services. But "antidemocratic, immoral and plain evil"? Nonsense.

(note: I didn't read the Oculus terms, more than I want at 5am on a Monday, but am responding directly to what the author's complaint is aimed at.)
personnummer? Sounds very Scandinavian to me and quick googling doesn't yield anything particularly Turkish about that word?
Make sure you ask for the O(1) solution, because if someone's production instincts are to write

(fn [l h]
(* (dec (- h l))
(/ (+ h l) 2)))

whenever they need to sum between two numbers, then I'd argue they're a worse programmer than someone who just writes `(reduce + (range (inc l) h))`. Programmer time is expensive, and linear time is, for 99% of ranges most devs will encounter, just fine.
> It's really helped us distinguish developers who see work as a 9-5 job that they only do because they must and those developers who just love solving problems.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Many (most, even) of the best developers I know will come to work at 9am, be super-productive for 8 hours, and then completely switch out of Developer Mode at 5pm. It's entirely feasible for somebody to be extremely passionate about programming and learning and problem solving and all the other things that we associate with "good" developers without them doing any sort of work in their own time.

Developers are people, too. They have families, friends, hobbies, and other things that are more important than your 2-3 hour coding test. You are alienating a large number of people by asserting that the ones who complete your coding test are "distinguished". You are also seriously reducing the size of your talent pool whenever you want to hire somebody.
>The concern is that climate change

An none concern since climate change is an new world order scam to get us to hand over our resource an civil liberties to the governments.
5) Rider Payments - Amsterdam, Netherlands - Mobile & backend engineers (all levels). This team lets everyone use their preferred payment method to pay for Uber rides. Email charles+rp_hn0331@uber.com
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people worldwide have had their lives destroyed by this.

For enjoying art.

The War on the fans is immoral, hateful and wasteful.

Those who enact it have stolen more from artists than anyone.
On the other hand it's trivial to change someone's official address. Just send a certain form by mail to the tax agency. (Not sure if they send a confirmation to the old address; but if they do, the perpetrator only has to pick someone who's on vacation; hello Twitter & Facebook.)
My previous company had what I think was a good hiring process: they required about 500 lines of Python code (it was a mainly django shop), and if your code was good, they'd ask you to go there one morning/afternoon and implement some minor feature in the development codebase.

For frontenders, the process was similar, but they'd ask you for some mix of JS/HTML/CSS.

The 500 was a somewhat arbitrary number, but it was basically "show us a good amount of what you have done". In my personal case, I sent them a link to one of my python libs in github, but some people without github sent some files like headers and implementation (like one or two guys for a ObjC role).

If you passed the initial code review, survived the day with the team, they would still ask for one or two contacts of previous co-workers, teachers, etc., just to have a chat. In the end, we had a very very good team there!
My Growing Disdain for the Young Turks
I think this is the same software the NOC is using at chaos events to build our local GSM infrastructure.
Works pretty flawlessly!
I kinda want to see it done using a couple of rad1os or HackRFs though... if that's at all possible...
libfuse: 2001
Dokan: 2007

We are in 2016...do you still still try to understand which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Not o (little oh), but rather O (big oh).

There is a difference between them. Little oh roughly means "grows strictly slower than, in the limit", where as big oh roughly means "grows no faster than, in the limit".

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1364444/difference-betwee...
Hardly so for Turkey. Important positions in Turkish bureaucracy are being filled by people who have close ties to the ruling party. I guess this is somewhat normal in many countries given that you have some appropriate filters, unfortunately such filters are diminishing every year. Just last week the prime minister announced they would hire 750k long term government employees bypassing the regular procedures and by creating adhoc exams for each position. Regularly Turkey has this nationwide exam called KPSS which you would have to pass to be a government employee, bypassing this exam will even further reduce the government quality. I don't see how people without the necessary qualifications can improve these systems.
It seems to me that there's a high-end piece of the market where none of this applies.

If you're really good, you can go your whole career without ever having to throw your resume over the wall and wade through this sort of filtering process. And if you have an experienced team who have worked with lots of good devs in the past, you can reach out directly to them and go straight to the hiring part of the interview.

It's only where those two ends have to interface with the rest of the hiring universe that you see friction like the author describes. If you're the guy who built Big Thing X and some random company tries to get you to spend 3 hours on their coding test, you're going to say no and they're never going to find anybody half as good as you. And if you're a team of Good Devs at a Genuinely Good Shop trying to hire with a job ad, you're going to get a thousand applicants who can't FizzBuzz and you'll develop scars in the form of coding tests.

I think the key as a developer is to rapidly get one's self into that category where you don't need to deal with this crap. The last time anybody dared hand me a coding test was a good fifteen years ago, and that was the last they ever heard from me.

I bet I'm nowhere near alone in that department.
Seperates those who remember their math from those who don't! Brilliant. I love the Gauss equation for this (had to look it up, I need to review math more).
I disagree that it is necessarily toxic. We have a similar issue where I work and I feel our collaborative culture is fantastic. What gets in our way is you can't expect someone to drop the code they are writing and context switch every time a CR is needed. So the CR happens at the next available context switch from whoever context switches first. Sometimes that means CRs are near instantly picked up. Sometimes they are picked up the next morning, usually because it is possible that the CR request got lost in the noise of our chat room. This will get caught in the morning stand up.
Magento, new york, experts, development, design
> If your job relocated to western Maine, how much of a wrench in your life would that be?

I'd be fucking stoked. Cheap land, low population density, mountains. But I'm originally a redneck from that area to begin with, so my expectations of amenities and services are very low.
And this is why almost all US cities are incredibly hostile to anyone walking. Also, while this is subjective, they're unattractive as well.

This is a helpful illustration of how parking minimums raise rents by several hundred dollars a month and make the streetscape less appealing.

http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062