skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree; when I interview I tend to talk to them for a bit to get a feel for how they view the world and how they code. I ask about personal projects, how they learn new things, sources of information for keeping current, what they've worked with, personal interests. I ask what they've worked with and why and why they would choose a particular solution. You can get some really interesting answers (programmers tend to be polymath-y types). I think the best hires we've made were people who had personal side projects, naturally curious with learning hobbies (not just programming), and were open and honest about questions, willing to have a good discussion, and weren't just trying to give the expected answers. There are two sides to that coin, since the interviewer also has to value that, and maybe it just depends on who you are and what you are looking for, but it has worked well for us.

I love the idea about doing the paid project on the real project; I'd love to implement that too.
Exploiting Signed Bootloaders to Circumvent UEFI Secure Boot
Show HN: Remember the login services you use (Twitter, Facebook etc.)
Ask HN: How do I ask for a raise?
What do you think is the best approach?

-I'm a shy person regarding this question, I have a friend that his method is "I have another offer, can you matched? or I'll leave" and got a raise 3/4 times.
I think the article could go into more depth and analyze this much further. One aspect that is entirely missing is how dating changed over the last decade. The rise of dating apps for instance would be interesting to put into the mix when discussing this.
Am I the only one who thinks of this article after reading the whole thread?
> https://overreacted.io/name-it-and-they-will-come/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485609
When people offer this, it's illuminating to try to suggest numbers and ask if that's still "reasonable".

It quickly becomes clear that for all the talk about it being "unlimited", most employers will be very uncomfortable when you start offering up numbers even slightly above the caps most other places.

Most of the time these "unlimited" policies seem to either be extremely cynical (with full knowledge of studies into the subject) or reflective of workaholics with extremely naive views of how much vacation time someone might like to take if it felt truly unlimited.
Hi!

Before developing this extension I used to accidentally create extra accounts on websites where I didn't remember how I logged in in a certain website.

Does this happen to you to? How do you think I can improve my product?
That's not a reason to let them off the hook, because they control the rest of the experience. If they can't give feedback, then they shouldn't have a hiring process that asks for such effort from the candidate.
If Go To statements are bad then why ...
... are there countless abstractions and programming language mechanisms that bounce you around the text in ways that Go TO could have never dreamed of. I rarely spend time thinking about stuff like this but sometimes, just sometimes, the question just begs to be asked (again).
Zuckerberg's Calls for Regulation Are Seen Missing the Mark
Nitpick: angle is the default but you can run at least Firefox on Windows native OpenGL drivers. Maybe Chrome as well?
this is stealing content right?
In this hypothetical, I'd rather ride in a car driven by the human--I can see if my driver is drunk, texting, or otherwise distracted and yell at him or demand to get out of the car.

With the computer, I'm just completely in the dark and then maybe I die in some stupid way.
Some years ago, I accidentally ordered two new phones from different providers at the same time. AS I had a 14 day 'cool off' I phoned one company to cancel, as I didn't like that phone, and they offered me a much better deal. I then phoned the other to pretend to cancel and got a reduction in my bill there!
Discussion over Strategic Planning 101 for Startups
I think this article conflates Management by Metrics and intense focus on short terms results. Management by Metrics is just as compatible with a long term focus or goal.

Now on the issue of people gaming metrics, that is a real concern and I typically address it with "counter metrics" intended to protect against gaming. It is not perfect, but it works well enough when you take the time to choose your metrics (and counter metrics) carefully.

So instead of "improve A by 20%" we get "improve A by 20% without impacting B"
So, how do you save yourself before candle burns the rope?
It's Google Summer Of Code season again. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

Larger open-source communities publish project ideas. Those communities are usually somewhat organized because they need to prepare months ahead, assign mentors, got vetted by Google.

I'm biased so I point you to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/20... and https://www.hotosm.org/get-involved
#1 thing for me - don't ask me to be a salesperson. In relation to this post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19534772 I was recently at an interview and the interviewer was a technical guy who had recently been promoted and he had a checklist of 10-15 things he wanted to achieve in the next half year, all really good reasonable things and then he said 'Now I just want you to tell me why you are the best person to do this'.

I finally had to give up and say hey lots of people can do what you want, I can do it and I can give you a list of people who can do it, I don't understand this "best" thing you want from me?
AOL.

This would normally be infuriating within fifteen seconds, but knowing that it's only for a day makes it fun. I'd upvote it for that reversal if there were a button.
> The major driver of climate change is energy production and transport. We can reduce our impact by limiting those first, before we get to the food we eat.

It's not logical to say we need to tackle the biggest problems first before tackling the smaller problems. Tackling the easier problems first, or tackling as many problems as we can simultaneously makes more sense.

It's also wrong to imply that food is not a major contributor to climate change. It's hard to compare (because of methane emissions v CO2 emissions, food is transported on vehicles etc.) but it looks like food production is similar in impact to transport.

> Why would we first limit a fundamental need

Eating food is a fundamental need, but not eating meat.
> Walmart brought their self-checkout lines to a screeching halt

Yet self-service works fine in the UK despite a ban on free bags. Shoppers are incentivised to bring their own by peer-pressure of people waiting for the checkout to clear.
I don't know about that. I too have worked on .NET projects that were structured in very different ways.

IMO when you see a lot of variance that's a smell. There isn't an obvious or known good way to do something or there is no convention you get a lot of entropy creeping in. I find the folder/path based stuff at least has a convention or two that keep things in roughly the same shape from project to project. I prefer that this is the case than what I see with C# projects.

Anyway, it's just my pet peeve.
"Formal French" is planned, but the language goes on without it.

For example, the AF is oblivious to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan (unless a word there ends hitting common usage)

> Some verlan words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse[3] and a doubly "verlanised" version was deemed necessary, so the singly verlanised meuf became feumeu; similarly, the verlan word beur, derived from arabe, has become accepted into popular culture such that it has been re-verlanised to yield rebeu
Sadly I’m yet to meet an employer who thinks like this. Especially in Australia. I’m a C# developer not because I was born with C# DNA but because to use any other language in suddenly looking at junior wages. Even though I could do a great job in any programmming language. It’s insane.
Modern Monetary Theory Makes Sense, Up to a Point
From what I can gather, it's not a simple answer as they do more there than just build houses. There's infrastructure upgrades and mortgage assistance and even work on who owns what piece of property. Some stats for FY18 from https://habitathaiti.org/ :

665 infrastructure projects

683 homes repaired

2139 jobs created
> Since we're from different countries (I'm from the US), I realize that I am necessarily speaking from a position of privilege.

The implicit value judgment of the US as necessarily superior has the opposite effect of what you probably intended.
I second this. I freelance as a part time CTO and this has been my favorite appproach to hiring devs. A paid project goes a long way to establishing a good work relationship and gives both sides most of what they need to decide if it’s a good fit longer term. I also always offer my clients to start with a small contained project to see if we’re a fit. This ends up saving a lot of time: the risk is low for the employer, and the developer gets paid their market rate and has a chance to show that they are worth it. It’s then really easy to decide if we should continue working together or not.
So hard that only six houses were built ... ?
The Programmers
> There's a general misconception between being productive and being effective.

Indeed: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -- Peter Drucker
GitHub install upload filters to comply with new EU copyright directive
That sounds more like a tuple space than a KV store?
I think the crux of the problem is... Everyone knows what to expect in a SAT exam, and still if one complains that they didn't bother preparing for it 'cause they do not have enough time... That excuse is not getting them an admission to top institutions, which admittedly have no short supply of folks willing to prepare and go through the grind.

It is sad that interviews in tech have been reduced to a process that resembles SAT-esque entrance exams. And now, there's an entire industry around prepping candidates for the interviews.

That said, I like the approach tptacek wrote about: Give the candidate a book or two, and when they are ready, interview them on it instead of interviewing on algorithms and data structures regardless of the position/industry [0].

I'm not so sure about Stripe's process as well [1], because one might have been effective because of the team and setup they are comfortable with in a given setting that isn't replicatable in an interview setting. No amount of 'bring your own laptop' to the interviews is going to make it work for the interviewee. You need to test the interviewee on the basis of their strengths. Not arbitrary measure of strength. Gosh, this is a hard problem.

There was an article on techcrunch about interviewing in tech and how it breeds ageism [2]. The premise was that it is simply not possible that most folks with X yrs of experience at a software shop are all secretly terrible that they can't get past your interview process.

Either you are part of an exclusive network to get on a rocket ship of a startup [3], or slog it out like everyone else: I remember how tough it was to get a job at Facebook in 2009 or Google in 2005 with ACM ICPC finalists and TopCoders as your interviewers.

[0] https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

[1] https://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/What-is-the-engineering...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 (on secretly terrible engineers).

[3] https://a16z.com/about/
Um, I don't think it's a good idea to take it that personally.

As a talented professional, you are constantly in the market.

What sets the market price? Market.

Your compensation is not about how much revenue you make to your employer, but what is the market price for the resource (you) and is the employer ready to pay the market price.

When you get an offer that is way above your current rate, your explicit market price suddenly increases. Before you get the concrete offer your market price is likely lower.

Big companies have salary policies that are not necessarily about what your boss would like to pay you. When you get an offer to leave your boss gets more leverage as well to offer you more comp.

"I know what our salary policy is, but this individual contributor would be really hard to replace and his cost just doubled. It's really expensive to replace him. Can I make a counteroffer that makes him/her stay?"
It does underline how for some people it's not about the absolute amount the earn, but about where it places them in the pecking order. Raise up the janitor and they're relatively speaking closer to the floor.
It's a matter of definition. I guess some people define productivity as effectiveness.
As anti-fur sentiment grows, California’s oldest trappers are calling it quits
Hah, worked exactly like that in my case (I left anyway exactly 9 months after a counteroffer raise).
Not OP, but being a researcher in CS is a job that gives me that feeling (not always of course, but often enough)
Zef plugin – a alpha glimpse – Tony O'Dell
Getting cold, sure. I know this first hand as I lost weight and went from 35 BMI to 25 BMI not long ago. These days I get much more easily cold, and it's been strange having to plan to bring sweaters etc.

But my point was that my gf can't stand being cold. I don't enjoy it, but I don't mind being cold. It's not pleasant when you start to lose sensation in your limbs, but I can deal with it fine. My gf can't stand 3 seconds outside in -5C without at least five layers of insulation from top to toe.
Please do! I'd be very interested in reading that. Will you announce that book in one of your links in your profile?
>... are there countless abstractions and programming language mechanisms that bounce you around the text in ways that Go TO could have never dreamed of.

Like? What are those abstractions and mechanisms?

Well written programs can (and do) make use of no such mechanisms, in any case. Where have you seen those? Any particular example that moves the flow the way Goto does?

Exceptions come to mind, and people always point out that its bad to abuse exceptions for control flow (e.g. using them like a kind of goto).

The problem with goto (which is not considered a problem when used in local scope, e.g. for cleanup code within a function) is that it moves the flow of execution away and makes it difficult to track.

A function (or e.g. a continuation in Node) doesn't have that problem: you return back to where you started.
Most of japanese puns literally lean on the fact some words sound the same or really similar.
What i've noticed recently with interviewing candidates is some lack the ability to work outside the way they work normally, especially in practical tests.

Things like, "I usually work from home, so its too difficult to concentrate in this meeting room", "I use Windows, so writing code on a Mac is really hard" and the most common for some reason for why the technical exercise isn't working "Intellij usually saves the file for me"

Practical interviews are difficult to get right on both sides, but from the side of the candidate, I feel there has to be some ability to handle those situations, under pressure, with confidence.
Can you explain more how this works? So you get paid upfront for a e.g. two week sprint where you say what you think you'll get done in that sprint and the client picks if they want to renew for the next sprint based on a progress review at the end?

How does this work out if you finish all the tasks in the sprint really quickly or barely finish any in terms of client happiness? What are the benefits over charging per day or week?
Man, you are singing on my frequency. I’ve worked with too many John Musks. And I’ve seen too many full table scans and null reference exceptions :-(
For nothing. I have made 3 serious attempts but never found any use case for IFTTT.

The best was archiving songs from NYT Jazz Events to playlist in Spotify. But IFTTT changed API. Also archiving Discovery Weekly.

All the other recipes seemed like fun for a day or two but later had become a nuisance.
>freelance as parttime CTO

job title inflation bingo !!! ;)
I did have to input the characters one by one the first time. Not afterwards. IMEs are usually good at this game.
There's an internal form for accelerating account recovery. There's no 'access to internal customer support'. And it would be bad karma to create (internally public) bug reports with PII (like someone's email address).
I've worked at 4 software companies in Australia so far and none have been concerned about which programming languages I know (admittedly not for super high wages, but still...)
"Compensation is usually only part of why someone decided to leave."

Bullshit. When you have a family to feed and loans to pay compensation absolutely is a critical part of why someone might decide to leave.

Any employer who tries to shame employees into accepting lower compensation than what the market offers by appealing into loyalty or misplaced honor are absolutely just trying to screw the employee over.

Best employers are nice and human, but also totally understand how the market works and are ready to play in it using fair negotiation tactics that involve only financial figures and no confidence tricks.
I was on a Senior Frontend Interview, it came up that I had a startup at one point where bootstrapped just about everything, the interviewer started going into that and how I maintained database versioning, and the batch processes I had running on Linode and why I chose Linode, and why I had ElasticSearch running on Searchly and not on AWS, and how did I do performance optimization and build times and why didn't I do this type of QA process and when I took stuff from ElasticSearch and put it into Redis for quicker response times etc. etc. and devops and whatnot, which most of the responses were well that was because I was the only one who could and some of these things you wanted me to have done are just too expensive for a startup in that position.

So anyway the interviewer told the recruiter who'd contacted me that I was not a good cultural fit for their Senior Frontend Developer position.
Sure, but what do they do in grade 4 and 5, after basic arithmetic and fractions? I'd be surprised if the answer didn't involve quite a bit of proto-algebraic "word problems" of the sort described in my comment, and in the attached reference.
Augustus lived into his late seventies partly due to his poor health, which forced him to stay away from many of his battles.
Many interview processes avoids trivia for pure problem practice. Either some real life problem setup designed to fit into 45 minutes, or...Leetcode problems. Only the latter are immune to the specialization problem, but have little bearing on the job actually to be done.
One of the core benefits I think of fixed price is you have a large incentive to be efficient, which you don't have so much with hourly, daily or weekly billing. Do you know any other payment structures that encourage efficiency in the same way? There's milestone based billing which is similar to fixed price but requires more planning.
Except when you tick that box you have to live with all the leftover packages you don't remember installing, but they're still there taking up space.
That's... somewhat true. My main objection is to "the author is the only one holding every rights on the code and every use that is not explicitly allowed is a copyright infringement (unless it's fair use)".

The ToS doesn't say there's an implicit reproduction license, though; it says there's an explicit reproduction license.

The other licenses can still be argued to be implicit. For instance, you have a decent argument that local clones are an implicit license – GitHub provides a "Clone or download" button directly on the repo page, and it's one of the main use cases of GitHub. (Other arguments exist.)
New York State to ban plastic bags–here's why
I always use those as a way to test a new language/paradigm/something. I'm naturally lazy and this is a wonderful way to get new knowledge.

>Sorry I want to write an extension to emacs so I'm solving your problem in elisp.
I believe that's done through conventional commits.

https://conventionalcommits.org
What do you mean? There's a difference between for profit and for profit only. If we set aside all moral and ethical arguments in favor of money then where do we stop with this? Why give corporations only free pass. Can we not just pass thugs, dubious professionals as just plain old capitalism. This argument and line of thinking is absurd and very animalistic.
This is something I have thought about before.

If the raise is "good" (well above inflation, at least as good as market rate), then it doesn't matter. Other motivations (pursuit of mastery, desire to do a good job etc.) have a more powerful effect than competition.

The problem comes when the raise is "bad" (at or below inflation, below market rate). At that point, the feeling of being undervalued kicks in and can have a more powerful effect than other motivators.

It is the difference between feeling like you are being treated like the best employee vs. feeling like you are being treated like the worst employee.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536973
There are still some in the countryside, and small alleyways in the cities. I think there’s only one in my city.
Dig deeper.
Ask HN: How to foil terrorist attacks if everything is encrypted?
This feels like a joke. As a San Francisco parent, this almost certainly drives us towards private school, a luxury that not everyone has.

I took algebra in sixth grade, and I'd learned the material in fourth from mother. Holding until 9th grade is baffling.
Unless the IDE you use everyday is the whiteboard, these are all fine and valid criticisms of your hiring tests. If you want to see real-world results, give candidates real-world conditions (including their preferred OS/IDE/workspace environment).

> under pressure

is this a common occurrence in your company? people expected to code well under direct supervision and a strict short time limit?
Two Ways you can use Sublime Text for Data Science
Some systems are even still on the previous era (shōwa). Some may even hit a Y2K-like problem in 2025 (shōwa 100).
Karl Marx said the same thing about collecting firewood in the forest.
Wow I can't believe they used an unsigned 8 bit integer for temps
Because, as with groceries, you're depriving someone else of content by consuming it. You wouldn't download a car.

It's the most disingenuous argument against free media (or piracy etc) that's being thrown around.
Here I tried to provide some use cases to make your life easier with Sublime Text
be more open-ended?

> Can you give us an example of a time you used a database index

Hey this query is slow, what could we try doing to speed it up?
But the interest the state is paying is not driven very much by the credit risk from individual tax payers.