skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went through Amazon's two online tests in October 2016 while interviewing for a full-time position.

I took the first test just like the OP, the logical reasoning part seemed kind of irrelevant and a waste of time for me. That was nothing compared to the second online test.

The environment of the second test was like a scenario out of Black Mirror. Not only did they want to have the webcam and microphone on the entire time, I also had to install their custom software so the proctors could monitor my screen and control my computer. They opened up the macOS system preferences so they could disable all shortcuts to take screenshots, and they also manually closed all the background services I had running (even f.lux!).

Then they asked me to pick up my laptop and show them around my room with the webcam. They specifically asked to see the contents of my desk and the walls and ceiling of my room. I had some pencil and paper on my desk to use as scratch paper for the obvious reasons and they told me that wasn't allowed. Obviously that made me a little upset because I use it to sketch out examples and concepts. They also saw my phone on the desk and asked me to put it out of arm's reach.

After that they told me I couldn't leave the room until the 5 minute bathroom break allowed half-way through the test. I had forgotten to tell my roommate I was taking this test and he was making a bit of a ruckus playing L4D2 online (obviously a bit distracting). I asked the proctor if I could briefly leave the room to ask him to quiet down. They said I couldn't leave until the bathroom break so there was nothing I could do. Later on, I was busy thinking about a problem and had adjusted how I was sitting in my chair and moved my face slightly out of the camera's view. The proctor messaged me again telling me to move so they could see my entire face.

The whole experience was degrading. If you're wondering why I did it, well, I've been using various AWS services for five years and I admired the work that the AWS team had done. Furthermore, I need the income to support my parents and Amazon was the best chance I had at the time. I got invited to do an on-site interview but I declined once I had another offer, and I'm glad I did.

EDIT: Small detail I forgot to mention. When I was showing them my desk, I had the monitor for my desktop (I was using my laptop for the test) and they asked me to turn the monitor so it was facing backwards.
Yup. And Google+ was supposed to help mitigate that risk. Look how that worked out. What's REALLY stupid is Google had a (crude) "social network." It's called YouTube. All that genius and no one said "let's take advantage of the YouTube foundation and trick it out of bit..." And in the meantime FB streams more video than YT.

Come on now. That's fucking hilarious in the context of treating people like circus animals and call it an interview process.
It's only when you are at Exabyte scale. If you are migrating petabytes of data to AWS the snowball devices are just fine.
Nothing new and nobody should be surprised. Over 5 years ago I moderated a community that had extensive problems with a subset of very problematic users. This lead to real world problems and ultimately intervention from local law enforcement.
It was during this time that I learned the admin team dealt with these times of users by working, not dealing, with them.
It became evident that [a]dmins had been tipping off these users, keeping them one step ahead. As these admins were called out they would fall silent and the cycle would begin again.
It's more along the lines of fixing a bug in the system. It's not about flushing out an ideology like TD wants you to think. They're exploiting Reddits code to have more weight than similarly sized communities. Reddit is balancing that.

It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with these guys actively exploiting the voting system.
> the players should play the tie-breaks before the match

But then wouldn't the game before the 'tie break', essentially become the tie break in pressure/strategy etc?
Fascinating, thanks. I wonder what the startup ratio is for emacs without the dump vs emacs -q.

I build emacs from src from gnu savannah and I have no emacs-undumped btw.
Will they be tracking my middle finger?
Oh okay. I thought you meant it like one of those crazy "suicidal rook"-type stalemates, where stalemate isn't the "fair" outcome.
ahahahahahah says the guy who works at amazon.

Of course you're going to try and justify it.
Fitbit to Buy Pebble
> * Had me swing my laptop 360 degrees around the room I was taking the test in, to make sure there were no notes or people assisting me on the quiz

What happens if you have a computer without a webcam? Do they just not hire those people?
Unfortunately behind a pay-wall.

Full text:

Fitbit, the leader in the fitness band market, is near a deal to acquire smartwatch maker Pebble, according to three people briefed on the deal.

The price couldn’t be learned but it is thought to be for a small amount. Pebble had been looking to sell, one of the people said. There have been signs over the past year or so that Pebble was facing financial challenges. Earlier this year it reportedly laid off about a quarter of its workforce.

THE TAKEAWAY
The expected sale of Pebble to Fitbit signals a consolidation in the wearables market.

The Pebble brand will be phased out after the deal. What Fitbit will get is Pebble's intellectual property, such as its operating system, one of the people said.

The deal signals a consolidation in the wearables space, which has been crowded with several players including Apple and Jawbone. Pebble burst onto the scene several years ago with a flashy Kickstarter campaign that drew interest from consumers. But it struggled to gain traction.

Pebble burst onto the scene several years ago with a flashy kickstarter campaign that drew interest from consumers.
Fitbit, which went public last year, has had its own issues. Its stock price which has fallen from a peak of $49 in August of last year to roughly $8 today, giving it a market cap of $1.87 billion. The company recently reported net income fell 61% to $43.5 million in the nine months to Oct. 1, despite a 39% increase in revenue to $1.6 billion. Fitbit's main product is fitness bands but it sells what some have called a smartwatch, pitting it directly against Apple's watch.

Meanwhile, Jawbone, another maker of wearable devices, has also struggled in the past year or two and had looked for a buyer, without success.

Source: http://go.theinformation.com/dfNa4p4B_IY
Don't have a webcam or microphone hooked up to your computer, problem solved?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13075820
He's saying, "Ellen probably didn't know how to edit any comment on reddit, but she was smarter than me anyway and wouldn't have done it in the first place."
The subreddit in question manipulates the algorithm in bad faith and bans any sort of dissent or disagreement.

They're not attacking free expression but trying to reign in abuse of their platform.

Nobody really knows what "liberal" means because it's been used in several very opposite ways in different times and places.
Sounds like you're reading more into it than he said. I didn't hear him say "she's not smart enough to do it", I heard "she didn't write the code so she's not intimitely familiar with how to exploit it". Hell, he even closed with a compliment: if she does know, she's not as stupid as I am.
I don't need this personally, but philosophically I prefer it to Spacemacs
if (subreddit == "the_donald")
fixTheBug()
else
notABug()
Who was the contractor?
I cannot understand how the board hasn't dismissed him over the comment editing subterfuge. It's simply not how a CEO should behave. No matter what is being said about him.

Basically, by not firing him, the board is sending a message. It is saying that 1. The platform and it's comments cannot be trusted. and 2. That it's ok for employees to surreptitiously edit comments. If the CEO did it and didn't get fired, then how could they fire a lower level employee for doing it?

The CEO has set the standard through his own behaviour. And that is now the culture of reddit. By not dismissing the CEO, the board has sent the message that they accept this behaviour.
Not every cost is financial. It could be time. It could be personal privacy. But free - even free of charge - isn't free.
Single payer systems are neither Capitalist or Socialist. It's just a form of public spending.
You make a great point that advertising and ecommerce have no clear demarcation. Revenue for all online commerce is divided among layers of players performing specialized steps in the process, so any sizing of the online advertising market starts with an arbitrary distinction.
Are you suggesting that Amazon is using a product that they actually don't know anything about?
Assuming your approach to handling the 80% is very systematic and process-oriented than I suspect you are destined for success.

Having spent a couple years in enterprise support, I would guess that less than 20% of the workforce carried over 80% of the weight. This was my first experience working in a support organization, and at first I assumed it was due to unusually lacking management, but after meeting people in similar roles elsewhere I think it's par for the course.

Support seems to suffer from the Peter Principle[1] more than the other enterprise departments. The few competent people who were around me were almost always using the support role as a steppingstone to learn a new technology, with no long term plan to stick around, nor any desire for promotion within the organization.

Like many new hires, I starting identifying process issues that occupied a lot of time that should have been spent more efficiently. I even documented the issues and proposed changes to improve organizational efficiency to management, who said "good stuff, thanks" but then went on fighting fires instead of preventing them in the first place. These were very basic improvements easily understood by anyone with a technical mindset who spent a week or two observing our support process. A couple years later and I hear nearly identical ideas are finally being phased into the process. I take no credit, because the people with whom I shared the ideas have moved on.

This turned into a bit of a rant, but the gist of it is I see a huge opportunity for disruption of the customer support process for any company with regular case intake. For the sake of everyone who ever needs to obtain support, which is all of us, I hope your team succeeds!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
> Then again, if it saves me hours and hours of phone screens...

aka "I wasn't the one being violated, so I don't care."
Does anyone else not care?
> Emacs dumper has always been a dumpster fire.

This made me laugh. Thanks!
The counterargument is that loopholes in the mechanics allowed the community in question to artificially limit the impact of everyone else's favorite platform of free expression. The charitable view is to call what's being done a bandaid to fix a broken mechanic.

It's also not an understatement to say that the level of rule-breaking (doxxing, vote brigading, abuse, etc) from the community, sanctioned (or at least not nearly adequately curtailed) by its moderators, is probably justifiably grounds for banning the whole community (since it's failing to self-moderate) but that can't really happen because it would cause a much larger and more problematic fallout.

The last sentence of your comment is ignorant and needlessly incendiary. I'm sure you'll find that the people you're talking about probably do know what it means. You can disagree with "people who identify as liberals but argue for different actions based on their best judgment than you do" (and there's plenty of fruitful discussions and arguments to be had around those judgments), without snidely saying that they're ignorant schmucks who've lost track of their purpose.
HN has made me leave several times for being so god damned ridiculous. We're not special. Wander into any Apple, Google, or Microsoft thread and watch the idiocy. Or anything to do with poliics (not even US politics, I've seen so many flame wars about countries I didn't even know existed).
GoPro, the Action Camera Maker, Plans 200 Layoffs
I would have assumed this is to test which applicants will stand up to authority and anyone who goes along with it would be disqualified.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think not: the first point of it is that it will never happen that the match is even, someone will always be leading. So it affects even the very first game, unlike in the current set up, where the first game (Trompowsky?!) is not a real game. At the beginning of the first game, someone would already have to play like they are behind. It also means that a you (I think) don't get situations where a draw is "good enough", a draw always solidifies someone's lead. That said there might be other consequences that I don't see.
I can't believe what I'm reading. A university installed effectively spyware on your device, to watch you as you were sitting an exam?

I sat about a dozen university exams in the last couple of years and in no instance did I have someone staring at my face, or peeking over my shoulder, during them. There were always supervisors in the theater, but they mostly walked along the aisles of desks and made sure to be unobtrusive and quiet as a mouse.

I really don't see any justification for what you describe.
hey that's incredibly clear! From your description I thought it'd be practically pointless - but actually you can see each sides strategy developing quite interestingly.

I actually saw people play out of sequence - some buskers or homeless or whatever people - just used to playing so many games against each other they'd get through the openings quickly by each person making several moves. It seemed too fast for me to see that they kept a correct pace, but maybe. I believe the games were very rapid. they stopped and started switching turns normally as soon as they were out of the opening. (so this refers to just a handful of moves at most.)

so with a bit of sportsmanship it's possible to actually play that way over the board with somebody who's cooperating with you to get through the opening quickly.
Would you mind elaborating on your philosophy against Spacemacs? I'm an avid user, but I'm totally open to arguments against it.
I have tried on many occasions to read posts on that sub but I found the hatred, the ALL CAPS, the doublethink and the crushing of any dissent nauseating. For example, members of that sub demonised a pizzeria owner with no evidence whatsoever, spreading lies and harassing him and anyone tangentially related to him. This incident is only the most recent one, by no means the worst.

What do you love about it that makes you go there everyday?
>> Oil companies don't emit a whole lot of CO2.

The Saudis certainly don't. That oil is easy to tap and, under some circumstances, be used with little refinement (shipping). But Canadian oil, shale oil, requires massive energy to extract.
Is that really the same del.icio.us that I had an account at once? Wow. Looks terrible. Like the web equivalent of an abandoned mall.
This isn't about left or right, it's about a CEO censoring opinions that he doesn't agree with. If it helps you understand, pretend he censored Hillary or Bernie supporters.
More than the language itself (I use some ugly ones quite regularly) I'd be worried about not gaining transferable skills. Moving on to the next job would be an uphill battle with recruiters and you might have to go back to entry level jobs.
Another user shared the text here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076836

The story is a bit light on details and it seems no sources went on record. Perhaps it'd be better if the title reflected that it's just a rumor at this point.
I can somewhat understand this kind of crazy monitoring if the stakes are high and the score on the test is the only or finally-deciding factor. But online tests for interviewing candidates are never that. So in this case I don't think this level of invasiveness is justifiable in the slightest. It's just a screen. Cheaters will get filtered out at the next stage in the hiring process.
We strongly considered Gluu, but it's not far enough along.
Calling a troll a troll is not dehumanization. Especially when spez called HIMSELF a troll and said he was trolling and was raised as a troll.
The reason for the very generic interview is that you won't be on the same team in two years. People move around a lot. If they hire you because you know Angular but fuck all otherwise, they're screwing over the team you're going to be on in two years who need someone that can learn C socket programming ASAP.

It's about finding someone who can see things more generally, but then implement solutions with the tools on hand. It's really hard to do, but it means I get to work with incredible people.

(Also, I did a webcam interview this week. It's not a great format.)
Just created a "Magento" instance and attached a static IP. It still unreachable with a browser after a few hours. What did I do wrong?
> US corporations have a multi-hundred year history of using thinly veiled proxies for race as part of their hiring practices. This continues to this day, including in the tech industry.

That's a pretty serious accusation, one that could spark a lot of successful lawsuits against those companies -- especially in the current political climate in the states they tend to be located in. Do you have any specific evidence to back it up?
Introducing the whole new DVDFab 10
Some of those topics are basic UNIX programming things (signals, threads, process state, controlling tty). Others are features of the operating system, so you would want something Linux-specific that tells you about kernel programming or kernel features you can use in your applications (security labels, scheduling classes, control groups, kernel threads, etc). Still others are features of the OS & cpu's execution of programs (instruction/stack pointers), you'll want to learn Assembly for that.

Sorry I don't have reading recommendations. I don't really read as much as just diving into man pages and looking up guides online. Hacker habits...
Scientists record biggest ever coral die-off on Australia's Great Barrier Reef
That's tempting to apply just to take the test without any pants on and automate a porn browsing script in the background.
As a liberal - its been my view to respect and fight for anyone's right to say whatever they want, regardless of my own views.

If there are bugs with the reddit platform that are being exploited, there would be no reason to "prevent stickied posts from showing on r/all"
> Depending on which definition of "spying" you want to apply, it is spying.

Without the secrecy aspect, I don't think you can say it's spying by the definition people typically use. If you went to an examination hall and took a real proctored exam [1], would you consider that the proctor was "spying" on you?

> Moreover, it is invasive and unsettling.

This, I can't argue with. It's hard to pin a definition on what makes things creepy or unsettling. Some people find clowns creepy. Why? I have no idea. But there's no sense in arguing about it.

Personally, I think it's a clever use of technology to streamline and scale a traditional process (exam proctoring) that avoids making you travel to an exam hall or interview.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exam_invigilator
Show HN: CandyMetrics – Easy to Use Amazon Seller Analytics Software
How do you know? Why is their site so heavily trafficked?
As an example of some requirements, any recursion is banned unless accompanied by a termination proof that keeps track of stack size. No calls to malloc() or free() are allowed, and so any library you might use that allocates memory is banned.

It's far easier to get the code working in something like Python, and then rewrite it in safety-critical C later. And the kinds of people who can write self-driving cars in Python are using very different skills than the kinds who can write safety-critical C, so it might not even be the same person.
As Greg Shahade pointed out[1], Kasparov had to beat Karpov to win the title, as did all the other world champions in the 20th century. He argues bringing back draw odds for the defending champ would lead to more interesting matches.

[1] https://gregshahade.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/how-to-make-the...
> As in research projects, which this project expressly states that it is?

This is from comma.ai, who famously tested on public roads with a reporter in the car and very little prior testing ("the first time it worked was this morning").[1]

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...
How to Root Samsung Galaxy S7 and Undelete Files from S7
Yes, and those select few supply Foxconn, Compal and Quanta. What you get on the open market is the rejects from those big contracts.
Google won't you apply to work there without giving your college GPA, despite the fact that all the academic research, and also their own internal research, shows that GPA doesn't correlate at all with job performance.

C.f. what Malcom Gladwell has to say about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLQC3EzDGr4
Yeah - the endgame stalemate was remarkable https://www.jotvid.com/video/3ecaDYWXoZc?ct=9450
Calling trolls 'trolls' is pretty reasonable, though, so what you're really saying is that you don't think they're trolls, whereas other people do? We could run a poll or something to find out, or listen to arguments from both sides, to get to the bottom of that.

I don't want to do that. I just want to highlight that it is very plausible that many people view them as trolls. Not because of their views, because of their behavior (there are thousands examples, right?). So then we have a problem --

If your default stance when someone disagrees with you (about whether the word 'troll' is fair here) is asserting that they're manipulating language for political reasons, when there's clearly a very reasonable argument for the use of that language (whether or not you accept it, you have to agree there's an argument), then you're committing the same crime they are - manipulating language to unfairly vilify them.
> To China and Iran - facebook is a "disruptive community." To use reddit's language.

There is a vast difference between the government banning you and reddit banning you (which they are not actually doing here, but for the sake of argument).

You have the right to free expression. You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet - if reddit does not like what you say, you can set up your own space on the Internet. If the government does not like what you say, then there is literally no legal alternative. That's the difference.

Oh, and stop confusing net neutrality with this issue. It's not the same.
I've loved and used Emacs for ~20 years, but if Emacs were to become slow, then if I were to have a replacement editor that could do the following (w/no X or window manager) without additional config in Linux, I'd use it instead:

arrow keys to move
add and delete text anywhere
paste from terminal buffer
ctrl-s -> search (and continue to find next match)
ctrl-v -> down
ctrl-esc -> up
ctrl-k -> kill line
ctrl-x ctrl-s -> save
ctrl-x ctrl-c -> quit
ctrl-a -> goto beginning of line
ctrl-e -> goto end of line

I don't even use selection anymore, because I can just use the terminal window copy/paste.
Why would anybody take your advice when they know it is very likely the government will forgive student debt again in the future? People do not take advice on face value, incentive matters!
> Honestly, that was always the best even before the ACA.

Preexisting conditions?
We are indeed working on creating a standalone Task Queues service that will work across all hosting platforms. You can sign up for the alpha here: https://goo.gl/Ya0AZd

(I work on the Python developer experience for Google Cloud Platform)