skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are looking at things from an incorrect lens here as far as "the system" goes. To give some context, the music industry was a whole different animal when Bob Dylan started in the 1960s. The "establishment" back then could be represented by, say, musicians from the Grand Ole Opry type of tradition, and the long tail end of the crooner / sweet music / big band era. Maybe some of the doo-wop which got popular in the 1950s was kind of "establishment" by then.

Folk along with rock and roll were the rising youth movements of the time and I'm not sure the older generation at the time understood it very well. Today it does seem like much of top pop promoted music is half "written by committee" but I'm not sure that was the case back then (see Frank Zappa's take on this from the eighties, which I personally think is even more true today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4wsURn3rw)

Look at the top of the charts from 1962 when Bob Dylan released his first album. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...) There's some R&B and rock for sure but also a heck of a lot of big band / jazz type instrumental (your Kenny Balls, Acker Bilks, David Rose, etc.), some country as well (Johnny Tillotson, Claude King, etc.), and cutesy pop numbers (the "Mashed Potato Time" is #3 for 1962).

The "folk music revival" Dylan started in was also fairly massive in the early 1960s but I would say at the time the top was represented by Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio (both are on the Hot 100 chart in 1962). Bob Dylan won't appear on the Hot 100 until 1965, #41 for "Like a Rolling Stone". (Of course, Peter Paul and Mary brought Dylan to a national audience with "Blowin' in the Wind".) In 1962 this wasn't even a decade out from when Pete Seeger / the Weavers got tangled in that McCarthyism drama, so it's fair to say that the whiff of anti-establishment the folk revival movement had was a somewhat justified feeling.

Of course, Bob Dylan went well beyond the folk revival. I personally don't get the vibe that Dylan was quite as anti-establishment or political as many of the others in the folk revival, nor do I imagine that he thinks of himself as a "rebel". He's more of a poet plain and simple; what makes him unique is more his words / lyrics than anything else.
I agree. But, I'd also argue that if he hadn't had the ongoing wars, recession, and hostile congress to deal with then lots would have happened.
Superior? Depends on what you are doing.

Working with game engines is a joy since you write "client" code, so to speak, and the engine is compiled for each platform.

QT is also really good, but also really expensive, and you lose native UI which can be a good thing or not depending on your use case.

NativeScript is working on becoming a universal cross platform solution similar to ReactNative. It's already on mobile, and I've read there is a macOS version being worked on.
Stopped reading at the "Calm and orderly" bit - if you've ever spent any time in Bangkok or Chiang Mai, this is far from the case.
Pretty sure Google's interview questions are under NDA.. Brave!
Crypt: Store and retrieve encrypted configs from etcd or consul
I knew all these answers too, because I was a developer in the 1990s.

There is absolutely no purpose to knowing off the top of your head how long an ethernet address is, or even what system call will retrieve an inode (his bickering over stat() "filling in" rather than "returning" was bogus, for what it's worth). The top Google search result for each of these questions has the answer. Knowing these things isn't part of being a practicing programmer; knowing how to find out is.
Really? when I tried that, I had to reinstall every six months or it would stop working.
s/know/have access to/g
14 Facts About Obama's Presidency Most People Don’t Know
> They asked me the same questions back in 2012. I was applying for a Java developer position.

I've has similar issues with other companies. Network developer? Great! Let's ask some assembly / Java questions!

Uh... if you people are that stupid, I don't want to work for you. Thanks. <click>
The same Led Zeppelin that borrowed all those American blues and country riffs throughout their career?

If you educate yourself on American music from the 20s-50s you'll realize the true extent of the influence on the British music of the 60s and 70s. It's a lot more than Rocky Raccoon but if you're ignorant of country music you're not going to hear the guitar licks, drum patterns and vocal inflections that show up in many of the recordings by the Beatles.

There's no shortage of literature on these influences so how about we just leave any additional education on the matter to personal study, eh?
Yeah, I just happened to read that last chapter of Colorless Tsukuru at the right time in my personal life where I could relate directly to just about every sentence, and at the end I just felt empty in a satisfying way, if that makes any sense. Then again, I find that with age I'm becoming more susceptible to melancholic or sappy fiction, even if it's not particularly well done (as in the case of some TV shows).
I expect that this is one of the reasons they're adopting Cloud Foundry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo, along with the UK, USA, and Australian governments. I think there's a few others too now.
It doesn't work that bad with cross-border metro areas in the EU. Or at least the ones I know.

I live in one, it's perfectly good. Maybe I wish the metro could have a few stations on the Belgian side of the border, but the buses do cross it so it's still fine. Other than that I don't see a problem with the cross-border situation. (By the way, it not only spans across France and Belgium, but also across Flanders and Wallonia on the Belgian side).

But there is one common metropolis authority that the transit agencies have to answer to and that coordinates what happens in the metropolis, it's like the inverse of what you're describing in the US apparently.
If you are interested in continuing to leverage your python skills (I assume this because of your ref. to Django), then perhaps building a bridge between Matrix and Gnu Social would be something BOTH communities would benefit from: http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#servers
I can see both sides here. Google does want to make sure even higher up technical hires have good technical skills, which I think most developers would agree is a good idea.

But their way of measuring this (the standard way) is bad, because it ignores the nuance a more experienced person has (seen so clearly here).

On the gripping hand, I can't help but feel the candidate did demonstrate a big failure to communicate, which is an important skill in itself.

For example, listing SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK in hexadecimal is great for showing off, but is legitimately a bad answer to the question – as evidenced by the lack of understanding in the questioner. I also think some social graces might have got them further (e.g. "Oh yeah, sure. Quicksort is O(N log N on average, and is generally a reasonable sort to chose, but I wanted to mention some other factors that are worth considering").

At the end of the day:

- it's a hoop. Jump through it and get a fish, or don't.

- calibrate for your audience! This is a very important technical skill (and this test was unintentionally correct in its result IMHO).
Windows 8 was not a UX disaster. It just wasn't finished. How long did you use it for?

I personally used it the whole time it was available. Despite the fact that it was unfinished, it was still vastly superior in many ways to other desktop systems. So, I'm quite certain that I don't know what you mean at all when you say "UX disaster".
According to wiki the one I was thinking of was the Ka-50

> The single-seat configuration was considered undesirable by NATO. The first two Ka-50 prototypes had false windows painted on them.[19] The "windows" evidently worked, as the first western reports of the aircraft were wildly inaccurate, to the point of some analysts even concluding its primary mission was as an air superiority aircraft for hunting and killing NATO attack helicopters.[20]
That article [1] is intense.

"all true Christians must vote for Trump."

"Faith Trumps Politics for Faithful People"

"Put self aside and fight for Trump to help stop the forces of evil from prevailing"

"Trump’s past transgressions, of which he has expressed shame, remorse and apologies, pale in comparison to the revelations we now know about the plot against Christians and the strategy of creating a Catholic Spring, dividing Catholics and undermining the authority of the pope by Team Hillary and the global elite"

"Mother Teresa’s nuns are praying the rosary daily for voters to receive clarity of truth from The Holy Spirit and vote for the candidate who supports life and religious liberty (Trump) against the party engendering a culture of death and new atheism disguised as liberalism"

[1] http://archive.is/QI4Dq
People that have been around know such things. At one point, Richard Stevens (RIP) was god. Every programmer had a copy of TCP/IP illustrated, Advanced Unix Programming and Unix Network Programming. If you wanted to do anything network, you had to write your own servers, you had to understand the details. The breath of knowledge was wide and the depth was just as deep. Ask around on HN, and you will probably be shocked how many that know such things. :-)
This wasn't a technical interview. This was a phone screen. As dumb as it is, having non-technical recruiters do a "technical" phone screen like this is increasingly common. I don't think this practice is completely justifiable, but part of the root cause is the enormous volume of grossly underqualified people who apply for any particular position. It takes a hiring company a large amount of work to vet a candidate but it takes a candidate nearly 0 effort to apply for a job.
The fall of Pokemon GO
It's standard practice at the Googles and Facebooks of the world to have a recruiter lob a bunch of canned questions at you during a phone screen, including Director-level phone screens. My experience was a lot different that the writer's, however. The recruiter was friendly and I was friendly back. I think I missed one or two but still went on to the next round. This guy comes across sounding like a pompous asshole and I wouldn't want him as my Director of Engineering, either.
The sad part is that things were looking pretty hopeful in 2008-2010.

I particularly liked Cappuccino. It's basically a port of Cocoa to the web. You could design your interface in OSX's Interface Builder. The project is still around and is still being worked on. Sproutcore was pretty similar, and is also still around. Neither of them are being developed as heavily as React or Angular 2, but they have both been mature for a long time, and perhaps don't need a lot of work to be done on them.

Maybe it's just me, but I still find 280Atlas[1] and 280Slides[2] more impressive that many web apps that ship today, and they're nearly 10 years old and ran in browsers far slower and less capable than what we have now.

I actually think more developers would frameworks like these if they didn't feel they had to stay on the latest and greatst JS treadmill to remain employable. And I write that as someone who likes React and Angular. They're both sane ways to develop complex apps, but they don't feel that much better than what was possible 8 years ago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouzAPLaFO7I
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZwfh-_QEQ
Medical Recruiter: "What are mitochondria?"

Applicant Doctor: "They're double membrane-bound organelles found in all eukaryotic organisms, commonly between 0.75 and 3μm in diameter, that generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate"

Recruiter: "No. They are the powerhouse of the cell".
They cannot know if the dictator is on board, of course, but it could just be one of their lackeys flying to Geneva with a suitcase full of cash to deposit in a Swiss bank account.
The growers still managed to squeeze in a bunch of exemptions from the minimum wage law

https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs12.htm
9 Pricing Strategies to Explode Your Revenue (Backed by Psychology)
Mediocre people can't evaluate exceptional people. What mediocre people think is knowledgeable can't be exceptional knowledge, by definition. If you want to find exceptional directors of engineering, you need an exceptional person worthy of being director of engineering to evaluate them.

In seeking victory, not going beyond what everyone knows /
is not skilled.

Victory in battle that all-under-heaven calls skilled /
is not skilled.

Thus lifting an autumn hair does not mean /
great strength.

Seeing the sun and moon does not mean a /
clear eye.

Hearing thunder does not mean a keen ear.

So-called skill is to be victorious over the easily /
defeated.

Thus the battles of the skilled are without /
extraordinary victory, without reputation for /
wisdom and without merit for courage.

- Sun Tzu Ch. 4 (Denma translation)
> It's just so they can avoid setting up a real interview with someone who doesn't know the basics.

They're (allegedly) interviewing for a Director of Engineering. If google can't even google the guy and look at his track record, code, whatever, they don't deserve to have competent people working for them.
If someone told me that there would come a day when two of the first three HN posts will be about Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, I would have dismissed them as high or delusional. Turns out that I would be very wrong.
The Google person's response to the answer in question 5 would have pretty much ended the call with "can I talk to an actual engineer as you are doing poor keyword searches on my answers". I do admit to hearing the "I will stab you" voice in my head on that one[1]. This reflects really badly on Google.

Plus the answer on question 8 is the best worded answer to using big-O improperly I have seen.

1) http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%20will%20st...
Cooled Nikon D5500a Chills the Sensor for Clearer Star Photos
A brilliant professor of mine liked to say "The Answer of the Engineer: it depends".
Good news, that standard actually exists: http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.pdf
I wonder how close these differentiable neural computers are functionally to cortical columns in the brain that are "are often thought of as the basic repeating functional units of the neocortex." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocortex#Cortical_columns)
That undersells Xubuntu which is a full DE and very similar to GNOME 2, if you just want a classic stays out the way desktop then Xububtu is excellent.
Is China’s gaokao the world’s toughest school exam?
quicksort is O(n^2) which is definitely not the "best big-O" for sorting.
This seems like a pre-screen where the recruiter is trying to assess the viability of a candidate themselves. But I would assume that based on experience with recruiters elsewhere, no idea if Google has a higher bar for their recruiters.
Thanks for sharing, Matt.
CentOS is in a tricky position with regard to ALPN/http2 support--there's absolutely nothing on the horizon. A continuing shift to Ubuntu in the webserver space is almost certain in the mid-term.
I only have a sample size of one, but I blew threw a phone interview with Google about a year ago -- and the guy giving it was very technically skilled. We talked about the subtler aspects of the questions as we went.

They offered an in-person interview, of course, but I declined when I found out that they were only hiring for Google Payments in Boulder. I'm sure the job has interesting aspects, and maybe my imagination just isn't up to the task, but I have a hard time figuring out how I wouldn't go insane with boredom working on a system that just moves money around, not to mention frustration from working with the extra regulatory/process restrictions that must be in place to keep compliance up...
> Whether a fetus is a person is of course the point debated, but anyway, those are the numbers

More pedantically, they are surely not Americans either, since citizenship is conferred at birth?
Seems to kill my firefox.
Critical vulnerability Pork Explosion cripples security on some Android phones
I used to have the same opinion until I found an example of UI continuity which actually helped me learn a different UI quicker and didn't feel like it held me back once I had learned it.

But well, that wasn't continuity between phone and desktop. It was continuity between GUI and CLI (openSUSE's YaST).

Whether it really makes sense trying to find a compromise between [mouse&keyboard + big screen] and [touch + small screen] is then again an entirely different question. And in my opinion, this isn't happening until we have a good generic solution for projecting the vast number of different screens that you need on a phone UI to one big, densely-settled screen as is necessary for a good desktop UI.
"I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are?"

This isn't even my domain, but I remember some of this stuff. I had to dig in to this area years ago, and was knee-deep in that level for several months debugging and configuring stuff. Some of it stays with you, even if you're not there any more.

For someone applying for a director of engineering, I'm kind of split as to whether this should be required "off the cuff" knowledge. Would certainly help, but seems it would depend on the culture of the company - how hands-on they expect director-level folks to be - some companies seem to want that, some don't.
Many companies do a pre-interview screen performed by recruiters to filter obviously bad candidates. I have personally helped construct such screens -- though not at google.

Ensuring the recruiter understands the difference between an answer over their head and a wrong answer is crucial. What we did was to make sure the recruiters understood that answers they didn't understand needed to be surfaced to someone in engineering for a sanity check.

Often our strongest candidates would give an answer which recruiting wasn't capable of vetting. The key is making everyone aware that the answers may not fit the script, and that this is OK. Recruiters shouldn't be judging the technical details of an answer; they should be looking for "gosh I don't know I've never seen that."

Pre-screening is sadly necessary when doing high volume recruiting. There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.
This would make a lot of sense. I would /never/ make a build using maven again, but having maven central around is a huge plus for the jvm ecosystem and I'm happy it survives. (plus lots of people continue to make new builds with maven and legacy maven builds will be around basically forever)
And you are right. All countries may be authoritarian on certain things while not being on others. Therefore, no country gets a perfect 10/10 score on the index.
Must've been a slow year for books
The most recommended sales books of all time from Reddit and Quora
I got curious as to what were the most recommended sales books on Reddit /r/sales. I thought it would be a quick automated data job and make a nice quick blog post. Famous last words. Weeks later and manually going through the entire history of /r/sales and then also deciding to include data from Quora.com to get a bigger sample I have put together the 47 most recommended sales books of all time. A little about my methodology. First I found every mention of a sales book and created a master list. Then I found how many times that book was mentioned and how many upvotes that mention got. Final scores were counted up and the books were ranked. There were hundreds of other books that got a single mention but they needed more than 1 to get on the list. So apologies if your favourite book is not here and please start recommending it to others. The one weak area of the list I think is categorising each book. Because I have not read them all I had to guess from the recommendation what area of sales the book fits in. Please feel free to comment below to correct me. Total reading time for all these books is 170 hours. Or 7 days if you do not sleep and connect a coffee drip to your arm :) Lastly I teamed up with a few sales partners and we are giving away the full 47 books. I would love to be there when that crate arrives.

The full list of 47 books and scoring is here: https://www.onepagecrm.com/topsalesbooks

Have you any suggestions for improving this list?
Digest.AI: Your daily digest of your team's chat conversations
So apart from giving the right answers, you now have to intelligently predict when to give wrong or suboptimal answers to account for the inadequacy of the interviewer? Not that I'm blaming the recruiter here because he/she was just trying to do his/her job, but come on. If I were in his shoes, I would be pissed off not because of failing to land the job but because of being told that I gave the "wrong answers" when they were clearly right.
> Activists would do quite a lot more good by demanding better from their own government. I mean better management and governance.

I think this is something most people agree on, but disagree on how to get there.

One thing not often discussed is the role that illegal immigration to the U.S. plays in all this. In some ways, the sheer amount of illegal immigration provides a release valve for the political "pressure cooker" that is Mexico - and by keeping that valve open, there's not enough of a force for change. Those who migrate to the U.S. often send as much money as they can back to their relatives in Mexico - which isn't a lot, but again serves to placate and distract from the real problems.

I'm not suggesting "building a wall" is the right solution - but I do think it's fairly obvious that illegal immigration has real costs for the U.S., and plays a key role in keeping a corrupt/ineffective Mexican government in power.
Likewise, identical situation, identical thoughts/response.

I want to follow up on this and see what the deal is. It just strikes me as fundamentally wrong.

I'm honestly hoping this is not actually a Google recruiter doing this; if it is, that's just broken.
>...but I'm sure even a relatively junior coder would be able to tell if someone was just doing technical word salad.

In interviews, I've had people give answers I'm not familiar with. The easy thing to do is to ask them to explain how their answer works. You get to vet whether it seems legit, and as a bonus see how good they are at communication in a genuine teaching moment.
I remember cracking up then forwarding it to all kinds of people and forums. Along the lines of "remember this" if you try to justify trusting the OpenSSL codebase for anything.
I really hope this isnt real.
only some hash functions are fingerprints. Other hash functions are the exact opposite of a fingerprint.
Interesting how this is an example of "societies crumble when their elites want to go in different directions".

I agree that lack of focus is a big problem and wonder what those competing 2-3 visions are.

I think Jack came back because he/the investors thought he was the only person with the political clout, or moral authority, to whip people into line behind him, and get the company moving in one direction
Yes I remember too and it worked very well. I used it the whole time it was available.

It worked well on my Windows tablets (Surface Pro, Surface Pro 3, Dell Venue 8 Pro).

It worked well on my gaming PC, my dev workstation and my hyper-v server.
Leaderless Rounds and the Problem of Weasel.vc
"Recruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. "

Because when Google is down, it's typically upper management that fixes network issues. CEO level to directors of engineering are on pager duty most nights there.