skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree, any candidate worth having would enjoy such a test. Any programmer who is put off by being asked to program needs to find another profession, period. You should not ask someone to program during an interview, you should review the code they've submitted and make them explain it, all if it, their design choices, their idioms, naming conventions, etc. If they can't discuss code they just wrote prior to the interview, you don't want them, but many good people don't perform well under the pressure of an interview so you won't get an accurate feel for them if they program at the interview.

No one but a programmer is qualified to evaluate another programmer, HR and recruiters have no place here and they'll just waste time and effort pretending to be useful, they aren't.

By doing the test you've already filtered out the wanna be's so you don't need phone interviews, the submitted samples should go strait to a qualified programmer, it'll take him only a few minutes to toss out any bad submissions and he'll quickly know who's worth actually interviewing and who's not.

Code is the only resume a good programmer needs.
> How would you advise nonhackers to evaluate hackers?

That's a very good question. Competent people generally know if they are better or worse than one of their peers. However, if no-one in your extended social circle is better than a mis-guided power user then you'd be unlikely to get a trusted and reliable opinion on ability.

In which case, a good proxy would be a de-emphasis on whizzy pixels. Any kid can make CSS menus and non-interactive Flash. However, how many normalise a database or install a firewall?
what's more fair is to use javascript and flash and the like appropriately, but to provide at least some sort of fallback for the users who cannot access it for whatever reason, even if it's only to spit out an error saying "sorry this page requires x, y, z to be enabled".

I do a lot of work for and with visually disabled folks, and it's usually the lack of any sort of fallback that's a problem. Can't tell if something changed, can't read captchas..you get the idea.

The problem with that situation is, of course, that a lot of them are using javascript-enabled modern browsers like ie7 and firefox and safari and usually not a cli browser like links, so they come across these huge webapps like the new yahoo mail that they cannot navigate at ALL very often. It's quite frustrating.
Ask HN: Any way to get back in Google AdSense's good books?
I had a few websites using AdSense, one of which was important, the others weren't so much.

I made the mistake of explaining how AdSense and internet ads worked to a friend and they decided to go onto my website and click everything, thinking they were doing me a favour. Of course, this wasn't doing me any good!

When I noticed what had happened I emailed Google to explain but my AdSense account was removed and I'm banned.

Trying to resolve the situation is like talking to a brick wall that only replies in template emails.

I understand their policy for people who think they can make quick money fraudulently, this is not my intention. I'm trying to build a business and it's important I'm using AdSense.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get back in Google's good books? I've read around and it seems there isn't an easy way but surely there is something I can do?
Ask YC: E-mail Signatures
It occured to me that even something as mundane as -mail can be approached creatively.

I'd love to see some cool examples of how people have used HTML in e-mail signatures, especially from designer type people.
Some _can_ use IE/FF/Safari, but when they come across ajax-heavy webapps it's like "what the?!". Plus it is entirely possible to make a fairly accessible shiny web2.0 webapp (e.g. gmail even without the simpler html mode and google reader with aria support)...although they are generally in the minority.

A very, very small minority are going to have a browser with no javascript support. It's important to have some sort of fallback, but I guess it also depends on your audience. No point in spending that time if all you're doing is catering to teens to advertise something, for example.
The simple answer is it's all about optimizing. Does making the screen wider make your product more appealing to the 97% of people with >=1024px wide screens? It wouldn't take much to compensate for the 3% of people who have to sidescroll.

Same with Javascript. Who in your audience doesn't have that? If you're building an app people will want to use on mobile phones, clearly you should have an html only view. If you're making a project designed mainly for desktops, then 99% of people have js and cookies on. If it adds any good functionality at all, it has to be worth it.

The question, as posed, is to generalized to have a meaningful answer.
WikiAudio.org Launched
We just launched this - below is the press release
---------------------------------------------------

WikiAudio.Org Officially Launched!
Sound Arts & Audio Engineering Social Community.

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Emeryville, California (May 24, 2008)

Imagine if Wikipedia combined with MySpace to create a free online audio engineering and sound arts school in which "everyone is both student and teacher"! This is analogous to WikiAudio's community vision. Bridging the divide between audio art, science, and education; WikiAudio is making strides towards becoming the premier "one stop" website for novices and professionals to network, educate, learn, and connect. The website combines both social networking and "Wiki" landscapes to create a hybrid that incorporates articles, videos, audio files, tutorials, user profiles, forums, blogs, RSS feeds, job listings and more.
Conceived by Bill Turner, who teaches at the Ex’pression College For Digital Arts in Emeryville, California; and co-founded by Lathan Hodge, a filmmaker and former executive at BET; the founders envision "Wikiaudio growing to become the premier audio tech community on the net." When asked for the inspiration for the site, Bill Turner said, "I think education should basically be free, and being that I'm in the audio industry I figured this is an excellent place to start." "We already have a lot of students who are on board contributing, everyone is really excited."
The technical development for the site was done by Cooper Quintin and Justin Giovanni of Bitsamurai.net. When asked about the site, Cooper explains "WikiAudio uses Mindtouch's open source Deki Wiki application integrated with Drupal to create a Wiki-social network hybrid. We all agreed that Deki Wiki is one of the most popular up and coming wiki software platforms available and that Drupal is definitely one of the best social platforms, so it made sense to simply combine the two to create something greater than the sum of its parts."

Visit WikiAudio and see for yourself
http://www.WikiAudio.org

Founder: William Turner: wturner76@gmail.com
Cofounder: Lathan Hodge: mrlathan@gmail.com
Programming: http://www.Bitsamurai.net
> FreeBSD excels at (due to a better tuned filesystem and VM), for things where raw I/O and compute are the bottleneck, Linux tends to win.

I've noticed that FreeBSD works more responsively in low memory environments. Perhaps that's the VM tuning.
Unless the source explicitly made those articles public domain (or they're older than Mickey Mouse), those articles are copyrighted. (No, the absence of a copyright notice doesn't mean that they're copyright-free.)
The thing about Cocoa accessibility is that Apple does that all in-house. All the universal access tools and Voiceover (the screenreader) are theirs, plus they're the ones working on Cocoa. Almost nobody else has anything like it..there are a couple of third party tools I can think of, but nothing like what comes built in. On the other hand, Windows has the support of all the big names (cough freedom scientific) but there's a lot more diversity in terms of development. But they have to work with Microsoft and other third party devs and it's not perfect - one example I can think of is Firefox support in Jaws, which came only when Firefox was at like version 1.5 or 2ish. It's still not as good as msie support today. I might add that Cocoa apps are pretty accessible, but Firefox in all its xul etc. glory on OS X is mostly inaccessible with voiceover.

And the main problem with web accessibility is that people just don't give a crap. There are plenty of ways to get a site to be fairly accessible using any of the main screenreaders and other accessibility tools out there. But it's apparently a complete waste of time and not worth the effort. Some of the biggest companies and websites are guilty of this - like Yahoo and their "newish" Mail webapp. Google is definitely a lot better in this aspect.

So no, you don't have to stop using javascript, you just have to give more of a consideration to the small percentage of potential users (depending on your audience) that may need additional tools to use your website. If it proves impossible, just create like a "text only" version of the site up at the top of the source but hidden, so screenreaders could read that but normal visitors won't see. But I doubt you'd have to go that far. See a site like http://www.jkrowling.com/ for an example. I don't know why they did it the way they did, but they have the regular flash site in different languages, then the accessibility-enabled flash version, and then the text-only. I guess that covers everyone ;)

Mouse movement is another matter - that's actually quite personal to me because I have tremors that sometimes makes it hard to accurately do things with a mouse. But there's plenty of software and hardware devices out there for people with movement disorders. It's not as big of a problem as it is for, say, the visually disabled. Ultimately I'd have to say it's not just the accessibility tools at fault here.
While it's true that JS is used for a lot else besides serving up ads, the most profitable way, on the margin, to use it (say, per line of code per site) is by serving ads. If you really disagree, let me know of a something that produces per profit per line of code!
Peter Norvig recommends these:
Hastie http://books.google.com/books?id=VRzITwgNV2UC
Bishop http://books.google.com/books?id=yHwhAAAACAAJ
Ripley http://books.google.com/books?id=2SzT2p8vP1oC
It seems that if you want to get covered by TechCrunch, you have to give them an exclusive?
Please don't. The internet will thank you.
Average IQs would be sufficient to make his point. In my part of the world, "room temperature" refers to somewhere in the neighborhood of 75.
BSD gets an edge over proprietary software because if you distribute changes then you don't have to contribute source. GPL gets an edge over proprietary software because if you distribute changes then you must contribute source. Both models have merit and motive. BSD code is distributed widely within proprietary devices and operating systems. GPL code is distributed in a more homogenous form. However, which licence has the largest sum of installed modules?
Wow, given the line it was on, I had a rather different impression:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics)

Sorry, the parenthesis break the URL detecting, so you'd need to copy/paste. (Bug?)
I wasn't particularly impressed by her screencasts, but I'm pretty sure you're looking for something like http://demogirl.com/. You could also do it yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screencasting_software. If you're looking for an actual video (like the one you linked to) as opposed to a screencast, you might want to look into some of your local advertising agencies.
Microsoft Source Analysis for C#
Defunctionalization: optimising code by replacing functions with data
Back in my day I didn't know CS was it's own major; I thought it was just a subset of EE and programming was just one thing you had to know, in addition to being actually able to build a computer from scratch.
Cool, I will likely also be taking 281A.
thats a pretty strange metric to discern a technologies use. profitability per line of code is a pretty vague metric, and using the same logic you can say emails foremost use is spam, therefore block all email.
Wii Homebrew Channel
I can highly recommend reading RFC1365 ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1365.html ) which defines IP extension blocks to provide huge address spaces within IPv4 while retaining full downward compatibility with legacy routers and hosts. Such extension blocks should also be compatible with NAT and jumbo frames.
Configuring Emacs for Erlang (Screencast)
I’m sorry, but PHP sucks
Someone likes machine learning...

Machine Learning (581)
Total Videos (1520)

581 / (1 520%) = 38.2236842%
You really are taking board comments seriously today.

Ha. That is true. And now you've made me laugh.

Since obviously nobody else is following this, here's a completely frivolous story that just popped into my mind. I was at a software conference and ended up talking to a pretty famous guy. A second (not quite as) famous guy walked by. After he was gone, the first guy told me that two evenings earlier, on the night before the conference, they had bumped into each other in a hotel corridor, and the second guy had said, "Good." - and kept on walking. "What do you mean, good?" the first guy called after him. Second guy's reply: "I'm not the biggest asshole here."

p.s. Total writing time: 2 min 30 sec. :)
At my school there was a blind guy, he used Lynx to surf.

Once I looked how he was surfing / coding. And he was incredibly slow ... "Normal" people scan the page. He could not, he had to more or less "read" the whole page. I did not see much more, but it gave me the impression that surfing was a frustrating experience for him.

One of his friend told me that one thing that screwed him each time a was surfing was the "Javascript links". On lots of pages (well ... too much) instead of a regular HTML link there was a piece of Javascript code witch supposedly was opening a new window or do "something smart". These links did not work for him.
The worse part of the story is that the fall-back mechanism is pretty easy to do:

<a href='page.html' onclick='return do_something_smart(this.href);'>

Maybe the situation has improved. But I guess that it did not improve that much. Writing a Web-browser is complex, therefor I believe that integrating accessibility features is difficult too.
And upgrading everybody's wheelchair is not easy in practice. So it is for screen-reader, and accessibility software. We still have IE 6 around! It is utopic to believe that every handicapped would upgrade in just a few years.

Of course we should not drop Javascript, but we should think about its impact. It is like adding a step in front of a building; it can be a real obstacle to some people.

The web would be a better place if we do so. Not only for our handicapped friends, but for us in the future. I don't want to give up surfing when I am old because I broke the web with fancy and non-essential features.

HTML is the web. Javascript enhance it. But Javascript is not the web.

Here is a good place to start:
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
(Does not really speaks about javascript but it gives a lots of useful advises)
So... it's compiling it, but acting as an interpreter. So even the macro-evaluation step is compiled?

I seemed to think you'd have to have a Lisp interpreter (so that the macros would have to be interpreted) and optionally a compiler. So you can have the 'interpreter' just be a compiler which is followed by a call to the generated code?
Twitter's posted a response at http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/twitter-enforces-tos-cares-a...
Who is Ayn Rand? An utterly dreadful writer and philosopher who believed that the axiom of reflexivity of identity had substantive ontological, social, moral and political consequences. It's no accident that Objectivists sought to justify their belief in the "virtue of selfishness" in the law of reflexivity; they have no use for altruism. Rand's philosophy glorifies the sociopath homo economicus, whose sole objective in life is to maximize his expected utility.

However, results in evolutionary game theory show that a society of self-seeking, self-regarding agents will generally face conditions that ultimately lead to its collapse.

Gary Cooper's goofy speech in The Fountainhead ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4 ) typifies Rand's attitudes. Among other preposterous propositions, Cooper is made to utter the nonsense that great inventions are uniformly the work of sole inventors, selfishly and reflexively seeking their own interests. This is ahistorical; see Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ( http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm ) for the history of inventions such as the steam engine, radio, telephone, and so on. In each case, ideas were in the air, and there were a number of people who came up with similar inventions more or less at the same time.

Cooper argues the basic notions of intellectual monopoly, which are that intellectual property is essentially indistinguishable from tangible property, and that all copies of ideas "belong" to their creator. These arguments come straight from the RIAA legal playbook. I'm surprised that any culture of hackers would want to subscribe to notions more commonly associated with corporate monopolists.
From the article:

And of course it’s easy for a billionaire to say “money and things aren’t important.”

The important thing that they always miss is why its easy. It goes beyond just being able to afford to hotel hop. In a very real sense everything belongs to him. At least everything that is mass producible. This guy doesn't need a car because wherever in the world he is, he can simply say "get me a car" and one will appear. Substitute boat, plane, ham sandwich, whatever and its still true. When you have that much money, "ownership" becomes entirely a matter of semantics.
I agree with the article. I like Gmail a lot better now that I no longer have to manually switch it back to "basic HTML" mode.
This is why I love math.
Craigslist seems like it's willing to do a lot of work to avoid the simple solution of just charging a little for postings.
I just got a blackberry and anything extra to read/scroll through in emails is just plain annoying and slows me down.

Side note: I just noticed yahoo's email let's you view image attachments in a lightbox and has a slideshow ready to go for multiple images. Beats having to download junk just to delete it seconds later.
Don't worry! The BWAAAAAAMBUALNCE is coming!
Slightly off-topic: I've noticed that almost everyone I know signs their emails these days. I don't think that was true 10 years ago. It's always struck me as redundant.
Here's a hint: no needless HTML email. No HTML signatures.
Anyone really serious about being humble would pay his laywers big money to make sure he never appears on the WSJ. I mean seriously this is what they call "substract to add". You give the impression that you dont care for material goods, although ou have spent a lifetime acquiring them. aS a result you become even more famous and richer.
It really depends on what type of site you're building. If it's a simple website where the JavaScript just makes things a little slicker or easier to use, then you should gracefully degrade for browsers with JavaScript disabled. Same with CSS and low res.

If it's a complex web application, don't worry about the people without JavaScript enabled.

As for cookies, I think it's pretty much expected that they be enabled for any sort of login mechanism. The alternative is to pass a session token around in every URL, but the moment they close the browser or open a different URL that gets lost.
#1 - Never call the cops on yourself.

#2 - File an appeal https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contac...

Good luck.
Sorry.I thought that many people fail at university, so you prove that you are somehow more capable of learning. Few was not well chosen.

However, I observed in recent years (at least here in Switzerland and also other people told me about it) that it seems to get easier and easier to pass university, as there is more and more pressure from the state (which finances university) to let more and more people pass, due to the lack of engineers.
By "homeless" they mean "living in 5 star hotels year round".
You are correct, but note that just because "self taught" is unpretentious, it is not necessarily the case that "autodidact" is pretentious.
> IP was conceived in such a way that TCP, UDP, and other protocols could be layered on top of it, but because NATs break the encapsulation, with NAT each new protocol requires every router's NAT to be reprogrammed to know how to handle it.

> If IP had been designed with NAT in mind, it might not be so broken now.

Perhaps UDP should have been defined with session numbers. Some NAT complexity is due a lack of standard session identifiers.

> The internet was meant to be a network where every computer is equal, and in that environment anyone could set up a server and start doing business or providing their own content. No more. Now, thanks to a completely avoidable numbering shortage and a NAT-hell, the internet is getting to be more like television - big company's servers provide the content, and you consume it, just as the media companies and cable companies like it.

There's no shortage of network addresses. However, there is a shortage of products that support practical protocol extensions, such as RFC1365. Router and operating system vendors have been keen to push IPv6 compatible products but there's less sales to be made by supporting downwardly compatible extensions.

You may be conflating your remaining problem - ISPs firewalling desirable packets for the purpose of creating more profitable grades of service. Admittedly, its no fun being squeezed between large corporate interests but be positive.
The Technology Superpower You've Never Heard Of
Reinforces the fact that it's all about the connections.
For a demonstration of this principle, compare the quality of a person with a degree in Computer Science. Has the average gotten better in the last 30 years, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?

My feeling is it has gotten much worse as people have sought degrees solely for the purpose of using them to get jobs in the field, precisely as you suggest would happen to blogs and reading cliff's notes.

However, may I point out that blogging is very different from reading the cliff's notes of a book? A hiring manager can read your blog. If they simply check that you have a blog, well, whoop-de-doo. I have a blog, so that clearly proves nothing.

However, if the hiring manager reads your blog, they can deduce a great deal about what you pretend to think and how you communicate it. So it is a small example of your work, much as posting source code is a small example of your work.
Glad this exists. Would appreciate a less 'busy' design though.
Something is wrong on the internet
"Knowing the path is different from walking the path" etc.

They may well not be happy with their work either, cf Ira Glass video.
I wouldn't call it a card game, but rather a board game. After all, that's what product it was being compared to. Still, it sounds pretty cool that the kid is being taken seriously.
Free Live Online TV Streams
Global Dreams for a Wireless Web
Scobleizer: This is why I love the tech industry…
I like Twitter because it can be accessed from so many different mediums: IM, SMS, Web, and probably more. FriendFeed doesn't have this yet, and because of the lack of a 140 char restriction, probably never will have the extension Twitter has.
I'll be there. I'd say we should have a meet up, but I already know everyones schedules are totally booked with beer and werewolf games.
Yeah, in Spanish it's not unusual or fancy.
I have Norvig's AI:AMA in PDF form; if you don't have it already and want it, send me an email.
Meh. I think that spreading the meme of reducing consumption, if you believe it, is worthy of the article. Maybe it isn't about impressing everyone by seeming humble--maybe it's about spreading a better way of thinking about wealth.