skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really understand this mentality. Is is really that hard to get rid of the charlatans that slip through after the fact? Just monitor them fairly closely (but secretly) for a couple of weeks. Have some sort of object measure of performance for that time period. If they don't pass muster, get rid of them. This seems like a better method than spending 6 months to fill a couple of positions.
I would love to hear more about the app that you started for games like Settlers of Catan. I love Settlers and I have thought about doing something similar for a while.

Do you have a link to source or a blog post about it or anything? Could you talk more about what you tried to build?
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>recession

>unproductive

>invalidate

>important consideration

>does that really indicate that there's no opportunity available?

Well ain't you a special snowflake?
Unless you're House, apparently. I've always wondered how accurate that show really is...
I want to agree. But my home country (Ireland) has PR, and where I live (in the bay area) local elections are run with PR, and I've lived in 2 other countries that use different forms of it (NL and Spain). I think it's a good thing, but it's no silver bullet. You can still have corruption and bad policy, unfortunately.
I feel exactly the same. Don't try to make stuff up you don't know, do ask me questions, do just TRY, rather than noodling about and not saying or doing anything.
Ironic coming from a site with way too much unreadable helvetica nueue
But possibly not error-free the first time at a whiteboard. Talk about unrealistic conditions.
"Deliberate practice" is, in fact, what Gladwell is saying the 10,000 hours should measure.
My brother is a medical researcher. Much of his work involves statistics, but he's never taken a statistics course nor read an intro book. So a lot of his results are just basic high school stats and pretty graphs, nothing deeper. It would be funny if it weren't medicine.
Incidentally, you'll also be able to use this technique to determine the area under a curve! Let's patent it together and get rich!
The problem only the best programmers can solve: trust
> it would make sense to hire that person because they are young enough to move up the management track and into the succession track.

So when you find someone good at code, you want to make sure to move them out of coding when possible and into something that skill and understanding of programming has no bearing on: management. [edit: removed pointlessly antagonistic remark]
Unless I was hiring a professional whiteboard coder, I would find another method.
I commented on something discussing Microsoft. I didn't know MSoft did Android phones (yet)...
Here's an idea. See:
http://i.imgur.com/vTOKr.jpg

What I did:

- Increased priority of "depart and return" calendar.

- Added "click or type below" to make instructions more clear.

- Added a small indicator beside mouse pointer (when hovering over a date) to indicate the current mode of the mouse pointer (two modes: you're either hovering and ready to click on a depart date OR you're hovering and ready to click on a return date).

- Subordinated the depart and return fields. Selecting from the date picker with a mouse should automatically fill these fields.

Why?

- I assume (maybe wrongly so, I am not sure) that the date picker is the most common / popular / usable way to enter in the dates.

- Compared to the current home page, I think this addresses my complaints (see earlier comment) in that it (1) significantly reduces the disparity between the date pickers and the fields, and (2) makes it more clear that the two calendars are in fact for the entry of both the depart and return dates (and not two separate calendars).
This would only be effective if you know that a leak is going to occur. Otherwise, this wouldn't mitigate any specific leak as it is unknown when the leak would occur.

However, a strategy that could worsen the effectiveness of Wikileaks would be to constantly spam them with large amounts of plausibly authentic fake documents. Maybe I'm missing something but this seems like such an easy way to tie up the resources of Wikileaks that you'd have to wonder why these governments and corporations aren't already doing this.
I agree. I can type a good chunk of code in a few seconds and have it nicely placed in my head to think about other things. On a whiteboard it may take me a minute just to write something out and by that time I've forgotten what I was doing.
Being Myself
Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP? 
Hi,

I am a novice programmer, currently self-learning, would really like to understand Object Oriented Programming well. Can anyone suggest some books that are good at explaning OOP for beginners?

Thanks for the help in advance.
I really can't see a meaning with that comment.

I don't think anyone claimed that Apple's e.g. censoring porn is the same kind as Microsoft murdering competition and slowing down development.

For porn -- relax, much online video works on the iPad. :-)

I would argue almost all areas is better with competition. If you prefer monopoly solutions, there is still North Korea (Cuba will go a bit capitalism, I've seen).
The charitable interpretation (for your OB friend) is that she was not speaking literally, and got bored when you started perseverating on her hyperbole. The more likely explanation is that your analysis is indeed correct.
Amazon investing $175 million in Groupon rival
Lease Options
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Let's trademark it and copyright it, too!

Now we just need to find a coder to implement our great idea.
I believe that /this/ is short sighted.

I do interviews, I care less about the right answer than I do about the problem solving approach. I interview electrical engineers and I make them do simple transistor problems. If someone gave up and said that they couldn't do it without some sort of SPICE program, I'd cut the interview pretty short. But if the fundamentals are there, even if they don't remember something stupid, knowing how they approach a problem and if they know how to ask for help is more important.

Every time someone says "I didn't get the job b/c I couldn't do a linked list on the whiteboard." I'm fairly certain it was more than that.
I find it most efficient to simply ask questions in these situations. (e.g. "Why do we ...?", "Have we discussed...?", "Is it a concern that....?)
Penetration Testing | The Metasploit Project
This would mean more if it came from Dane. Saying "I said two words to Dane that changed him forever" isn't cutting it for me.
this'd be the guy who runs a site with a name I can't pronounce and need to use google to figure out how to spell it because it's so unmemorable (as in, it's not a real word so the spelling could be anything - is it malahoo, malaho marlywho mlahoo mlaho? buggered if I know [or care])
Wikileaks is down again, this time through DNS
Watch Australian Open Golf live streaming online
Mahalo is a real word, just not an English one.
I am not sure if this is a direct answer, but I think it can be indicative of possibilities. I worked with a contractor on Odesk, he was based in India. This is what used to happen - I used to pay him through Odesk, he had a paypal and XOOM account, and a bank account in an Indian bank in India.

He used to transfer money from his Odesk account to his Indian bank account using Paypal and/or XOOM.

Btw, fyi, I am based in the US.
Focus magazine
Well - I used to be a subscriber. Still a great magazine, so thought of inviting potential readers.
Unless I've needed a specific language, like SQL for example, anytime I've asked a candidate to code on the whiteboard pseudocode has always been fine.
Meaning of  Botox course
Botox course is one of the training which many medical professionals aspire to join and get the certification.
There are MANY of us who work for Amazon who do not support the removal of WikiLeaks (or the recent book-banning thing). Both cases set off long email threads on the issue, and left the bad taste of censorship and general mistrust in our mouths.

Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do. It's not like the company is commenting on it internally or taking input from its employees. Then again, which company does?

This is the grim reality of working for a corporation - you are working for them and participate in all sorts of decision-making that benefits them greatly, but when it comes to things like this they make the decision for you and give a different meaning to a brand you helped build up.

It's starting to feel like in a country controlled by a few politicians and the corporations funding those politicians, we have no say period :(

-Disgusted Amazon Employee
The two page rebuttal that was written by Jane Monaco is among Jane Monaco's selected publications. (You linked us to Jane Monaco's page, not Mary Tai's.)
Feel free to point out which rights to the content that Amazon believes Wikileaks does not have.
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I've had some astonishing questions asked in interviews lately. Very esoteric and obscure parts of C++ that if you followed good design you wouldn't even see or need to know about - and if you did, it's a short google query away. Testing esoteric knowledge rather than actual intelligence and programming ability is a complete fallacy imo. But then it goes even further at some places where you have to do a psychometric test to get in...!

At least Google's interview questions (from what I saw) made sense in their challenge. It's not stuff you would know from being an everyday programmer but it's stuff a truly great programmer should know.
He already did, it's just that nobody is allowed to talk about it.
I agree with you, I just want to point out the fact that he (the startup guy) DID go to brunch with his SO.

I'm sure that it would have been easier for him to just stay home and work, and go out "some other time" or something like that. I really like that it seems like they both compromised on brunch that day. He joined her for brunch, and she was alright with him doing work at brunch.

Seems like they have a really good relationship.
You get promoted based on how many cases you solve, not how many difficult cases you solve. If you are smarter than the average criminal, you probably stand a less-than-average chance of being caught.
Number 1 was an open secret even before the leak. The leak was more of a reminder that Khalid el-Masri was extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan (the matter has been the subject of a Wikipedia article for years), not anything new.

Number 2 is pretty much more of the same. Number 3 is pretty much de rigueur.
I use org-mode to keep notes while I'm working. It's really helpful to be able to create todo lists very easily and then clock in to specific tasks. If I get stuck on something, I start a heading to write about what I know/don't know and what I need to do next.

For me, org-mode is the way to go - plain text, integrated into my editor, easy outlining, time tracking, and to do lists. Check it out.
Analysing a Touch-to-Desktop UI port using Fitts’s Law: Reeder for Mac Beta
You have to love the sensationalism, "WikiLeaks,org domain killed." Terminating services that can be continued elsewhere is not "killing." I would think that they'd avoid sensationalism in order to stay reputable, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
The problem with his Wikileaks theory, in my opinion, is that he fails to account for the fact that only ~0.1% of the cables have been released at this stage. The philosophy behind a staggered release? As stated by Wikileaks and Assange, releasing them in waves will allow the public and the press to digest all of the material in a paced, stable manner. This implies that subsequent waves will have important, valuable information that needs to be digested and processed.

I have seen this "US Government is behind cable leak" theory a good deal in the past few days and I do not believe that it holds any water. I think that it's reaching, to be quite frank.
http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
LFSes also have the nice property that they have a smooth CPU usage profile. Traditional FSes improve perceived performances by batching writes and flushing them periodically, leading to occasional spikes.

An LFS can pretty much flush a write as it comes to hand.

It turns out that LFSes are awesome for ... logging :D
Yes! 100% of observed instances are, in fact, observed!
IANAL -

But AFAIK, hiring the older worker on the basis of age would never be illegal. Discriminating against an older candidate is illegal in certain circumstances, but not always.

http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/age.html

In practice, such discrimination appears to be commonplace and virtually unpunished given the burden on the candidate to prove that discrimination actually occurred.

Considering that there were 22,000 Federal age discrimination claims in 2009 [http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/charges.cfm] and that 61% of all claims were considered to have no reasonable cause and 17% were closed administratively [http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/all.cfm] one could napkin estimate that about 5000 people had some success in claiming age discrimination. I'd be willing to bet that most of those successes were against an employer and not related to the hiring process.

Not that any of that makes it right.
Now you will know: http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
I learn more about you by seeing your relationship with your text editor

Are you sure you are not just learning whether the candidate is superficially similar to you?
Agreed about mutual funds.

Hedge funds charge high fees, but a subset of them provide a product you can't get anywhere else: returns orthogonal to other investments. Sophisticated investors pay happily for it. What's being stolen?
Mr. Adams says he's a fan of conspiracy theories, but I don't think so, since he suggests conspiracy theories are typically "any wild story" engineered to sound feasible. This definition goes against the whole reason for including the word "theory" which is supposed to suggest underlying assumptions are at least in part based on observations. He unwisely paints such theories as black or white in terms of how feasible they are, without acknowledging that the truth of many popular conspiracy theories may (often likely) fall somewhere between completely false or true.

Take his first example of a small group of rich people secretly running the world. Have people in the past conspired to influence outcomes at a local town or city wide level? Certainly. How about a larger scale than this, such as at a state or country level? Again, in many places, most certainly. Could that scale be increased even larger? Are there super wealthy people with power and influence? Certainly. When viewing things this way this "unlikely" theory becomes a lot more feasible, and the truth is probably somewhere between zero intentional conspiring, and one evil mastermind with an underground hundred-monitor supercomputer.

What about aliens abducting people? I don't know about implanting chips in people's necks, which Mr. Adams seems to have thrown in to conveniently push this theory into the complete nonsense pile. I've always heard simply about alien abductions. Now, most credible sane scientists will tell you that it's more likely than not there is alien life in the universe. If we've now established alien life likely exists, we can also reason that it's possible that some alien life is further evolved and advanced than humans. In my opinion, the first place the abduction theory breaks down is the likelihood of any actual contact with aliens in existence (the universe is a really, really big place). I would say that's unlikely enough to effectively kill the abduction theory completely. However, if one lets the mind wander and play then maybe sufficiently advanced life forms could have discovered a way to leap through spacetime akin to the Starship Enterprise's warp speed ability. Sure, that's still a huge stretch, but it does give a bit more entertaining feasibility to this abduction theory Mr. Adams has so completely dismissed.

To me that's how a true fan of conspiracy theories entertains them. ;)
COBOL is forever
My theory is that many other technical fields have high barriers of entry where a newcomer has to really prove her chops, usually with a certification exam, before being allowed to practice the profession; but once she starts, fellow professionals treat her with respect and take it as understood some minimum capability.

In programming, almost anyone can start on the job - but we play out the hazing ritual throughout entire careers. Every time a programmer has to change jobs, she has to face a barrage of pointless trivia questions from megalomaniacs. Of course, many of them then grumble that they can't find competent programmers.

Also, I think that the interviewer anti-loop that Steve Yegge mentions (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...) is real.

Well, back when I was at Amazon, we did (and they undoubtedly still do) a LOT of soul-searching about this exact problem. We eventually concluded that every
single employee E at Amazon has at least one "Interview Anti-Loop": a set of other employees S who would not hire E.
My favorite part of the video is how it takes them twenty-five minutes to start racing.
Everydns explains on their website:

"EveryDNS.net provided domain name system (DNS) services to the wikileaks.org domain name until 10PM EST, December 2, 2010, when such services were terminated. As with other users of the EveryDNS.net network, this service was provided for free. The termination of services was effected pursuant to, and in accordance with, the EveryDNS.net Acceptable Use Policy.

More specifically, the services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that "Member shall not interfere with another Member's use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity's use and enjoyment of similar services." The interference at issues arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites.

Thus, last night, at approximately 10PM EST, December 1, 2010 a 24 hour termination notification email was sent to the email address associated with the wikileaks.org account. In addition to this email, notices were sent to Wikileaks via Twitter and the chat function available through the wikileaks.org website. Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."
I'd say the more likely case is that she wasn't speaking literally. Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means. Couple that with the fact that most doctors know just enough statistics to get by, and "the most common time for a baby to be born is 3am" gets translated to "the average baby is born at 3am".

The bored look was probably just her rolling her eyes.
I hear that. I once spent the better part of a day reinventing ActiveRecord's serialize class method (with tests!) only to be told by a friend that I had, uh, reinvented an existing method.

I can't imagine spending months on a peer-reviewed paper accomplishing the same amount of nothing. That would be disheartening to say the least.
also look at www.snip.ly -- it doesn't highlight per-se, but it brings the text you've selected in a lightbox over the original article. Like awesomehighlighter (which someone else mentioned, it won't work on NYTimes pages.

also, check out Diigo. It's the bookmarking service i use. They let you highlight text, add post-its, etc. as part of the bookmarking process.
The thing that sucks is when the interviewer doesn't care about that, but instead cares about specific answers to their particular list of questions.

It can be astonishingly random who gets through an interview. Bizarre that just a few words can tip the balance.
Training and getting someone up to speed for a few weeks, then getting rid of them (if it doesn't work out) wastes more time and money than spending several months to fill the position with the right person. Laying people off for performance is hard to quantify, not to mention I certainly wouldn't want to be working for a company who is secretly monitoring new hires' performance.
And somehow it works anyway. It's almost like nobody actually thinks HTML is SGML anymore...
Google's Shift From Search Results to Answers
Since you say you are a novice, I'd recommend Head First Design Patterns:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596007124

Do not jump in with the GoF Design Pattern book. :)
Creating a clickable tweet status view in Cocoa
Super-Duper Linux Computers
Oracle Asserts Non-Existent Open Source Trademark
The Pentagon Papers were never proved lawful! The only thing that was settled was the unconstitutionality of prior restraint --- government action to preempt a publication they felt was unlawful.
"Move" support in xdiff
I pointed out several downthread.
"It's all just business" <-- the unquestionable ruler of our times
> Amazon is making two claims of ToS violations

More accurately, they claimed several, and gave two examples. I don't think those two were meant to be an exhaustive list. For instance, content that is invasive of privacy is not allowed, and that would cover many of the items.
Calculus, per se, isn't a requirement, but physics is covered pretty heavily on the MCAT. And last I checked, you needed calculus for college level physics.
Yeah, that's where I'm headed too. I'm starting to see the value of a "get it done" mentality. I need to find my satisfaction from shipping stuff that solves problems, even if it isn't necessarily a picturesque masterpiece of patterns and design.
Microsoft - Goodbye To All That...
1. In 15 years you always have the option to hire the CTO from outside, but hopefully you have groomed internal candidates and created a culture where high caliber talent will stick.

2. Without opportunity for advancement, your best young talent will apply to YC.

3. Having managers which understand the technical aspects of the projects they manage, doesn't hurt.
Sanchez Gets A New Coach
DMCA : prohibits a natural act of human brain - the analysis/synthesis cycle

Software patents: prohibit another natural act - to take an idea and develop it further or develop a new one using existing as building blocks

Basically it is legal fences in the mental space.
My point is that a person's inability to code on a whiteboard has little to do with the value they can provide to the business. Some people just aren't good at it, and why should they be penalized for it? There are other ways to get programmers to write code in an interview, and a simple "Do you prefer to code on the whiteboard or on a computer?" can resolve this. It's not as though that's a huge burden on the business or the interviewer.
Zozzle: JavaScript Malware Detection [pdf]
EveryDNS.net Terminates Wikileaks DNS Services