skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Over my lifetime I feel like computers have gone from nerdy thing that nerds do to trendy thing that popular kids hire nerds to do badly and treat like garbage. I guess it's not really surprising that people known for poor social skills get taken advantage of like that, but still it bugs me because I identify with them.
This has been an area of interest for me as well. I have spoken to a lot of engineers and hiring managers on this subject, and my takeaway is that no two engineers seem to agree on what's the best way to hire people.

Some think that code-while-on-the-phone interviews are bad (too much pressure for some candidates), while others think that take-home interviews bring all kinds of issues (e.g. candidates copy pasting code from Stackoverflow).

Some think that white-boarding is important (insights into the thinking process versus syntactic correctness), while others think that it's not a true evaluation of what the candidate will actually be doing at work.

Some think that asking pure algorithmic questions are bad (does anybody even implement their own hashmaps at work?) while others think that it's a reflection of how much a candidate explores the depth of a subject.

Some swear by HackerRank/Codility based automated tests to "filter" unqualified candidates, while others think that looking at Github for their code samples would be a better evaluation.

Some want generalists, while others want specialists.

Some people reject candidates on arbitrary "culture-fit" reasons.

Personally, here's my ideal interview process based on all these conversations and my own 100+ interviews in various places I have worked:

* Minimum reliance on resume - some people are just bad at writing about their achievements

* Have an initial 30-min call to learn about the projects that the candidate has worked on (especially if you are hiring a specialist). This should not be a filtering round unless you see something totally off target.

* Send the candidate a take-at-home coding assignment. This should ideally take only 2-3 hours and should be directly related to the kind of work she will be doing at work.

* Have another 30-60 min follow-up call to ask the candidate about the approach taken, alternate options, and possible extensions. This will help one ensure that the candidate had not merely copy pasted the code from the Internet.

* If everything looks good, bring the candidate onsite for face-to-face interviews.

* I prefer 2 rounds of face-to-face - the first round asking questions around the candidate's areas of strengths, and projects previously worked on by her. On the second round, I prefer asking questions that are from the domain I am working on. This will allow me to find out how the person attempts to understand a new domain, and whether the person listens/asks questions etc.

At the end of the day, interviews are subjective, and I have made peace with the fact that you're always going to miss out on people who might have just had a bad day.
So if someone takes something without permission, it's ok to take it from them because they already did the original "taking"?

Morality is tied to intention. If you can only access something with a screen reader and can't see ads, that's fine. If you're intentionally removing ads while full well knowing what they are for, that's immoral.

Then again morality is subjective to the individual so perhaps this is better described as basic ethics.
> Maybe in a few years we'll do something about it.

Nope, there will just be another round of new faces, new tech, and new fundings.
direct link to the first attack:
http://netdata.firehol.org/?force_before_ms=1460213988000&fo...

direct link to the second attack:
http://netdata.firehol.org/?force_before_ms=1460226227000&fo...
Those tracks are on google maps, you can see where they run. They run within easy walking distance of or thru downtown Renton, Bellevue, Kirkland, and Totem Lake. They run right by Google in Kirkland. They run by Boeing's Renton plant. It's hard to see how it would not be immensely effective as the backbone of a transit system.

With park&ride, it doesn't have to be the last mile in suburbia.

And lastly, with sensible zoning, high density development will naturally grow up around places that are easily accessible to the track stations - just where it would make the most sense to be. Totem Lake, even now, is a booming, gridlocked mess, with tracks running right through it and weeds growing through the ties. It's baffling.
Zizek has written a lot of really fun and interesting books. I'd definitely encourage you to check him out, but just a word of warning: if he's the only living philosopher you can name, then you probably don't know enough philosophy to really understand everything he's saying. He assumes a pretty thorough knowledge of a number of past thinkers, like Marx, Hegel, Lacan, etc.

Do check him out anyway though, and also check out some general introductions to philosophy if you find yourself intrigued and wanting to learn more.
I hope I don't sound arrogant, but a short way to put it is that it turns out social and professional obligations meet you!
Alas, I think you are correct.

One of the people I talked with when writing the book was a young woman who worked for a financial services firm. She loved her job, loved the culture, but told me that she was going to have to leave because the only way to get a promotion was to go to another firm, then return later.
Chris you're right Dan misconstrues your ideas and that's disappointing.

The real issue with his article is that he was lying to himself before he even joined Hubspot. I'm really surprised how shocked people are when they join startups and aren't happy. What did you expect?

Hubspot is not Salesforce. Uber is not Google. DoorDash is not Groupon. The maturity of companies at different stages varies significantly.

I read articles on HN every month about people who are bamboozled about startups after they start working there. These same people delude themselves about how awesome startups are. Startups are the birth of companies.In the beginning and up until you reach a certain point of market dominance, it's always hard. It's been this way for years and yet people continue to write articles about this nonsense every month...I'm really tired of it.
I would say that those born into poor cultures do poorly.

Those cultures that are no longer poor were more conducive to escaping poverty.

The evidence is compelling in places that dropped government control of everything and millions of people have moved out of poverty in just a generation or two.

China is a good example. Everybody started out poor but they still had an ethic or working hard, saving for the future and education.

Other people are born with the same opportunities but not the same values and don't take advantage of those opportunities.

Its not the poor neighborhood. Its the poor ideas in people's heads. Change that and the neighborhood changes too.
Ask HN: Best startup/tech movies?
I don't see why I am being down-voted. This person is admitting to an illegal act. Valve does not have a bug bounty program which means this person had no justification to do this legally.
Sadly, most managers don't talk with their employees about career development. There is an irrational fear that having these conversations gives an employee "permission" to leave, even though an employee certainly doesn't need his or her manager's permission to take another job!
> can we at least agree that all that bullshit about being a star and "graduating" is total bullshit? What a total slap in the face.

Completely agree. If the person is leaving on their own? Sure sounds great! But firing or laying someone off? Seems borderline psychopathic to me.
I find this one to be more impressive. The legs are using an uncommon approach that seems to fit well with the pendulum like center section.
Linus Torvalds: Why Linux Is Not Successful on Dektop
It's starting to head that way again.
I'm curious...are you still in touch with those managers? Did their efforts convince you to maintain a relationship even after you left?
This happens when there is no synchronization involved, the engine is printing line endings in a separate operation, so they come out weird like that. I'll add a mutex locking mechanism on console I/O at some point in the future.
It is, in fact, fairly normal to get a very low number of tests that actually move the needle. Most ideas you have suck and will not improve our conversion rate! This fact will not change if you stop measuring.

The article is right that some ideas aren't worth testing. For example if your checkout page is broken, just fix it.

One mistaken idea a lot of people have is that half your A/B tests will win and you'll get instant magic results. This myth comes from multiple places. Vendors and CRO agencies push case studies about wins, not about the process (which includes lots of losses). Until last year all A/B testing tools (including the one I work for) were nothing but false positive engines [1] due to support for multiple goals without applying Bonferroni, using non-sequential tests, and similar issues. Even if you just ran a bunch of A/A tests you'd get lots of wins!

[1] This is still true to some extent. The situation is now better - VWO, Optimizely and A/B Tasty all have fairly solid stats. There are a lot more than these 3 vendors, however.

(Disclaimer: I work for an A/B testing vendor.)
like Squid

I think the answer to that is that the days of local caches being useful are long gone. The top traffic count on many networks ends up being things like Youtube, and very few people are going to see the value in attempting to locally cache that sort of data.

Even if served over http, tonnes of traffic is uncachable anyway due the increased use of dynamic resourcing. Even this basic looking HN page will end up uncached by Squid because I'm logged in, regardless of https being in the picture.

As for performance, I've played around with benchmarks using Goad on a micro tier EC2 instance and never found an appreciable difference between http and https.
I think that society is excellent at finding new ways to find things that we can classify as work. All our needs and wants may be possible to meet, but people will still believe that everyone must work.

If you want that as a goal, social change may be more important than technological change. Who controls the automation? A small set of people.
When companies treat their employees with respect like this, good employees end up staying longer and accomplishing more, which is good for both parties.
Fortunately, autonomous trucking doesn't have to solve many of the tricky last mile problems before it becomes immediately economically advantageous. You could imagine local depots just outside of the city center where platoons pull into to switch from autonomous to human drivers.

Truckers would only have to work inside a local area rather than deal with the logistics of long haul routes and drive challenging surface streets rather than the soul numbing monotony of long interstates.
Opinions are not the same as representations of others' ideas.

If I say "I like capitalism," that is my opinion.

If I say "Karl Marx likes capitalism," that is a misrepresentation of someone else's ideas.

If I say "Karl Marx likes oppressive authoritarian regimes" because every country implementing communism has pretty much turned out that way, that's pretty much misrepresenting someone else's ideas too.
It reminds me of Newspeak, the language in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
This hits home for me, I traveled the US and abroad, working on my startup and contracting, for over two years. At the time all I wanted was to drop everything and travel with no plans, but after a while all I wanted was my own place and my furniture and actually having friends I hang out with. I met a lot of people for short periods of time, but I lost contact with a lot of real friends back home. When I'd talk to friends or family we'd talk about my travels and they'd say how I was living the dream and they were envious, and I'd always have to soften it like the author by telling them I really just want to get my own place again. I was exhausted. I got back to LA a year ago and settled down and resumed life with my old friends. Thankful for the travels but very happy to be living a calmer more normal life now.
Might be time to find an organization that believes in a mutual relationship, I'm afraid.
I, too, have gotten interested in this area.

> Send the candidate a take-at-home coding assignment. This should ideally take only 2-3 hours and should be directly related to the kind of work she will be doing at work.

I used to be a fan of this, but I'm not so sure anymore. The reason is that if you give me a test that "should" take 2-3 hours to complete, I know I'm going to be competing with people who are spending large multiples of that amount of time on it.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solution to offer for this problem.

Edit: compete -> complete. Freudian slip?
X-Hacker-News-Please-Stop
> Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic.

If you run in to that (I have many times, still do occasionally), it means that you're not solving the right problem, or you're trying to solve it in the wrong way. The way to solve the problem in that case is by listening and offering emotional support, but it's still not productive to react with negative emotions.
Nice analysis! I was thinking safety is a function equivalent to negation. But I agree if safety and gun ownership are separate variables.

p | safe (p) | ¬p | safe (p) ↔ ¬p
--+----------+----+--------------
T | F | F | Owning a gun is unsafely owning a gun.
F | T | T | Not owning a gun is safely owning a gun.

I think this is the original reason why it's confusing, because the sentence "not owning a gun is safely owning a gun" is highly unintuitive. There is a contradiction because safely owning it conflicts with not owning it.

edit: I think we can legitimately fix the confusing sentence to read "not owning a gun is safely not owning a gun".
This comes down to definitions. What I'm taking the article to mean is the sort of mini/micro A/B tests that many people do (taglines, button colours etc).

Using your example of "obviously good", lets say something seems "obviously good", so you launch it, and after a week, you see that it converts worse or better. That's an A/B test, where A is before the change and B is what is after. You don't need software for that, you don't need to do on-the-fly A/B testing, you can just launch.

Given a site has existed for a while, it has a pretty known A for most things you'd want to test. Doing A/B tests on small elements seems may indeed not be worth the extraneous costs of time etc.
But a substantial fraction of those involve implicit background checks. I recently received 3 long guns of personal significance in my teens in the '70s, from my father (who I live with after "eviction by tornado" and now to help take care of him), and having started my education in all gun things starting in 1963-4 he knows my character better than just about anyone else.

The first time I bought guns was from a professional couple, and they wouldn't have done it if I and my SO hadn't convinced them we were also such, and would treat them with all due respect.

Of course, no one denies there are problems at the other end, but we are talking about a Constitutionally enumerated right in an era where all Constitutional protections are under threat (yes, even the 3rd Amendment, pervasive surveillance is exactly what quartering troops was all about way back then).

I won't predict a violent counter-revolution if the nation went to mandatory background checks, like would be certain if registration became mandatory, but that would be playing with fire.
Standardization makes it so that nobody has to carry this load themselves.
They're designed to not look scary or confusing when the prospective buyer looks at the engine bay and knows nothing about cars. Extreme example: https://iedei.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/2010-lexus-ls460-s...

Plus it just looks more like an Apple product and less like their mom's shitty Camry they grew up being to school in.
Electric cars need batteries, which in turn need to be manufactured and charged with electrical energy by nuclear, gas, coal, solar or wind farms, which all have their effects on the environment too (but centralized plants would be easier to keep clean). Batteries are nasty chemical contraptions that are hard to produce and dispose of cleanly. Yes sometimes in Corporatism (State and Capitalism), there are underhanded deals, but in Capitalism, things cost money, because they take time and labor. Instead of disparaging somebody with a pejorative term, why not use your smarts and labor to come up with a way of accomplishing your wishes to see something realized? Money is, in the general sense, man's way of placing some value on goods or services, his time and labor. It is not evil in and of itself, it is a thing that allows trade to take place; men act, and do either good or evil. The world is a whole lot better due to technology, markets, and Capitalism. Sure, it's not perfect, but more people have been lifted out of poverty through it, or by it. It does have its warts. You should aim for utopia (aim high, miss low), but not fail any policy that isn't 100% utopia.
As an aside, sea-levels are not going to just rise like water in a glass analogy because of polar ice melting. They are going to fall in certain places and really increase in others due to many physical reasons - see [1].

[1] - http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-about...
You're doubleplus-unhired!
I think there already are examples of the right sorts of things to do. For example, in Switzerland, it is a law that all employees (barring rare special exceptions) are legally entitled to 4 weeks of vacation, at least 2 weeks of which are entitled to be consecutive, per year.

Making this a law is argued as inefficient by some, and that there could be a part of the job market in which employees seek to negotiate different options, and the mandate for fixed vacation time hinders competition.

My interpretation of reality is that this is false. It just leads to the burnout and anti-human need sublimation I wrote about above -- which should not be viewed as though it is a positive reflection of market clearing conditions or some nonsense, especially not when the participants are often young people with no developed perspective yet on the trade-offs needed for their health and huge information asymmetry disadvantages.

Your suggestion of viewing this as an entrepreneurial problem concerns me, because I think that way of viewing the problem is largely what has led to it being as anti-human and severe as it is.
Indeed. Makes sense to front load that risk when you're young.
GraphQL-enabled event sourcing engine
My current company does a pretty traditional "algorithms on a whiteboard" type interview segment or two, an "object/app modelling" segment, and a "chat with the CTO" segment.

It seems to be effective in the sense that I don't recall anyone getting hired and then quickly fired, and my coworkers are all very smart, capable people.

OTOH, it's ineffective in the sense that we probably need to hire at twice the rate we actually are.

I'm not sure what I'd do to improve the process, honestly. Every approach I've ever seen or thought about has significant disadvantages.
TL DR April Fools
Yes, though the paid certs aren't much better than the unpaid.

Source: hiring manager for Data Scientist/Engineers.

I find lots of PhDs who can't code and lots of software devs who can't build a regression model. If you are a software developer who has done the Coursera ML course and/or a Kaggle then your resume gets read.
This is crab-bucket thinking, though. "You don't have it that bad!" Maybe labor, period, kind of has it bad, and that the tug-of-war between labor and capital is in a bad spot right now?

Being a little bit less screwed doesn't make you not screwed, it makes you less screwed.
I can only read two sentences of this "article".
Join the Process Identifier Preservation Society Today (2014)
The most fascinating golfer at the Masters is a 22-year-old majoring in physics
I used to have a normal computer chair for 10 years and have torn beyond your imagination, I decide to switch to racing chair for comfortable feel like sofa and for programmers who sitting long hours and perfectly support my back unlike every office chairs I tried in Singapore I found the back support are either hard curve or unbalance. Get it from a local store is safer and cheaper than getting from Amazon.
If it's a PR move then they think the public they're relating to is dumb as hell because they're giving $500 to their employees instead of paying out the legitimate claims they're supposed to, causing doctors to drop them en masse while the customers left stuck with them have no place to get proper medical service.
You might want to read the response, there were no changes worth backporting.
I recently came across this situation when attempting to hack on Keepass2Android [0], a Keepass client for Android. It was written with Xamarin, which was a closed-source framework at the time. Having to download and use software with a 30-day trial to hack on an open-source project seemed wrong.

Now that the Xamarin SDK is open-source[1] it looks like it's moving towards being freed, which I think is a good thing. That said, I'm not sure the IDE is available on Linux yet, so I guess it's still relying on non-free software.

[0] https://keepass2android.codeplex.com/

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/xamari...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Millennial+Employees+Confoun...

Click the news story on the top of the page.
Ubuntu is everywhere
Practically speaking, someone looking for a job change does not have 10 hours to spend on every company's coding challenge. So, you will have only a few people who would go out-of-the-way to do something like that.

And, that's not very different from someone spending more than the expected 40 hours at work. One can't do much about that if that person genuinely loves coding all day and does not mind working 60 hours a week.

Finally, in the follow-up call, I do ask the candidate how long the assignment took and how she spent her time across multiple tasks. Obviously if someone spent 10x the expected time, then that's another data-point to the final decision.
Spatial Query Processing Utilizing Voronoi Diagrams [video] (2006)
I just went back to Britain and was shocked by how quiet everywhere was. The only real exception being central London. Most of the places I visited have fairly similar density to the non-downtown part of SF where I now live.

I wonder what the reasons might be? Some ideas:

* Wood frame construction instead of brick - more noise let in

* More cars on the road as public transport is less viable

* Larger, louder cars and trucks

* Grid layout means more cars on residential streets
Something more universal (albeit less useful). i.e. something that automatically checks your rendered DOM for every possible Redux state transition, creates a callback URL for it, and sticks a link for that at the bottom of the page. Essentially, distributed redux: if redux is (state, action) -> state, then that over HTTP.
I'm aware of differing utility functions and this is not what I'm talking about. I get better results by assuming most people don't maximize any utility function but merely respond to stimuli in a probabilistic manner (with emotional state as a hidden variable).
Clearly it was a collaboration between the CIA and Putin.