skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Top Ways for a Company to Blow a Job Interview

1. Make me wait in the waiting room past our appointment time. My time is as valuable as yours.

2. Make me meet with Human Resources first. My time is as valuable as yours.

3. Make me fill out forms. This can be done in advance. There's this thing call "the internet".

4. Don't shake my hand. (I have no idea why this happens, but it does.)

5. Begin the conversation with anything other than, "Hello," or "Nice to meet you." Again, why would the first words of any interview be, "How would you handle mass emails?"

6. Don't give me your business card. As a job applicant, I'm just as important as any vendor or business associate. This is a good chance to demonstate it.

7. Criticize my job history. Here is the reason I've had 9 jobs in the past 5 years: Because there were poorly run businesses, assholes, and mismatches. The reason I'm here is to try to fix all that. Move along.

8. Expect me to have 10 years experience in every possible technology your entire enterprise uses. I can learn what I need. Promise.

9. Ask me how many gas stations are in the United States, how many ping pong balls fit in a bus, or why manhole covers are round. Frankly, I don't give a shit. There, now you have the results for both your I.Q. test and your personality test.

10. Don't follow up. I know that I'm probably not the only person your interviewing and this may take some time. Extend me the same courtesy you would the window washers. Don't make me email you every week.
RFID range is between 3-20 feet. Average human arm length is less than 3 feet. The limiting factor here is not RFID range.
I've read that as well.

Just trying to share a little FBO-lore. It's common to tell the whiskey compass story in the fashion I have. http://iflyasa.com/2009/10/11/whiskey-compass/

I was aiming for tone, not accuracy. There are all sorts of topics that pilots discuss with great vim and vigor. I was trying to convey that feeling. Looks like I missed the boat.
Over 50% of web users now support HTML5 Video
The runways are labelled rounded to the next 10deg so if a runway is 154.9 and the magnetic pole moves 0.2 deg you go from runway 15L to runway 16L

Alternately you could move the runway a bit
Interesting, but

> 4. Wait a week to send a thank you note. Or don't send one at all.

got me thinking. Is it an American thing? What are you thanking them for anyway?
I don't know, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say yes, based on the same general idea: if someone is smart enough to figure out that the (most) scenarios depicted in computer games are fantasy [1], I don't see any reason for her to not think the same about porn, science fiction, painting, poetry..

[1] Of course, art often draws its themes from life and experience - sometimes exaggerated, others downplayed. Whether any of those themes depict the norm, I'm not able to say.
The canary in the coal mine is only useful because there's only one plausible explanation for it keeling over. If they died all the time for no good reason they'd be useless. It might be really cool if we could extract signal against a noisy background but there's mathematical limits on our ability to do that even in theory, and we're generally better off looking at the less noisy signals.

Plus chasing noise turns out to be really dangerous. 5% of the time or so, random processes will correlate with something else you look at with 95% confidence. Your suggestion is not a good idea at all, it's a recipe for spurious connections and wildly disproportionate responses, no matter how good it feels to a human brain.
It really doesn't matter anymore; that ship has sailed. Various people (including me) had been predicting that this was "coming real soon now" since this time last year. In the meantime, Android has exploded in popularity and seriously improved its quality, and numerous other electronics manufacturers have come out with devices that bring tons of power and features in an iPhone form factor.

At this point, even if this is announced, I'd rather wait the additional month for one of the devices announced at CES yesterday. Probably the Motorola Bionic, it looks pretty neat.
I think the analogy of "submitting a form" is perfectly reasonable to average folks. It's akin to giving a form to the receptionist at the doctor's office through the window:

1. You get form, and go fill it out

2. You bring back the form and hand it to the receptionist

3. You get a range of responses ranging from nothing to a helpful answer.

Sounds exactly like an HTML form to me.

Is this the sort of parallel you want your users thinking of? Probably not, but it's also not some arcane terminology only programmers use either.

(edited for formatting)
3 lessons I learned from my bootstrapped startup
The google map linked in the article[1] contains many entries that don't quite fit the oddness of some of the die-offs people are talking about. For example, [2] refers to 150 tons of tilapia that died because of being farmed too densely. [3] refers to fish that died when a small city lake froze over with a bunch of decaying leaves trapped under the ice releasing methane. And others.

[1]: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=20...
[2]: http://business.asiaone.com/Business/News/Story/A1Story20101...
[3]: http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/201...
When it does, it gives this message: "YOUR BROWSER DOES NOT SUPPORT HTML5. GRACEFULLY DEGRADING TO FLASH. PLS DON'T TELL STEVE."

In other news, I really wish my employer would let me upgrade my browser...
I finally got Disqus commenting working on my blog :)
An iPad 2 model at CES 2011
It's sad that you're one of the few who can see this and yet the other replies to your comment seem to give bizarre rationalizations of why it's okay to be poor. I don't think there's an excuse at all. Go to Denmark or Canada or a number of other countries and they've all but wiped out poverty. It's a pathetic rationalization that poverty "is relative." The more I read HN the more tired I get reading these over-used libertarian fanatical positions. The poor are not just drug addicts, there are many people who've had much fewer opportunities and never had a chance to go to college or get an education. There are many many people who fall into "the working poor" look at any number of people stuck in dead end jobs but with little to no ability to get out of the situation.

Meritocracy is a complete myth. The poor work the hardest and most dangerous jobs and the most hours. If all it took was 'hard work' then these people would be filthy rich by now. But obviously not all work is valued the same.
Ask HN: Any experience with the Mercury PL? [repost]
[preface]: This is a repost from a submission I made last night, probably not the best time to submit a question to HN I suppose, so I'm reposting in the hopes of catching any Mercury programmers.

Pretty much in the title, I'm looking for some comments on people's use of the Mercury programming language and how they felt about it. The language looks great, I haven't toyed with it at all but I do find logic programming languages a bit of a romance.
I want to know if it is something worth learning for future attempts at putting into production.

For some comparison, I use Erlang and Python in production and I play with Scheme on a regular basis.
That said, though, $35 a day after Apple's cut is $12775 a year for said app, assuming these scorching sales hold as average for the duration of the calendar year.

String enough of these apps together (or dust them off the archives), and you've got yourself a cottage industry. It's the iOS app store all over again!
It is about the way technologies get hyped and over-sold and over-promised, and then made unusably complicated.

In the excellent book "Antipatterns," I recall that this is called a "Wolf Ticket:"

Wolf Ticket is a product that claims openness and conformance to standards that have no enforceable meaning. The products are delivered with proprietary interfaces that may vary significantly from the published standard.

http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/wolf-ticket

Wolf tickets are sold as safe choices because of their interoperability, but of course once you have anything non-trivial built upon them, you discover that the interoperability doesn't actually work and you are left locked into your vendor.
The whole site is open source. Here's a post where I explain how to grab the code and find karma thresholds:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853964

There could be easter eggs that aren't in the publicly distributed source code...
I love how it's considered this great awesome thing that you "can" spend lots of money on BUTTONS for the damn thing.
SOAP has always seemed bizarre to me. It's something like "We think CORBA was a good idea, but they messed some stuff up, so we'll toss the entirety of CORBA and make something with a completely new set of problems while completely ignoring most of the mistakes we learned with CORBA."

I'm still luke-warm at best on the whole ORB idea as-is, but even thinking from the point of view of someone who thinks object brokers are the best thing since sliced bread, I feel like the SOAP people got it very wrong.
$180K in lobbying seems beatable.
Are you referring to the sodium sulfur batteries that NGK makes?
Does someone collect a license fee every time they are presented?
This harkens back to Windows vs Mac conventions for alerts (see http://developer.apple.com/ue/switch/windows.html#designClea... )
I'm an American and have never and would never send a thank you note. They need me, I don't need them.
IPhone Accessory From XWave Channels Your Brain Waves to the iPhone
I cant seem to get to the article but I think I know which article this is. I'm a huge fan.

I especially like how the machine was initially designed so that it required 4 chips per board. But when they were about to start manufacturing the boards, they realized that present technology couldnt fit 4 chips per board.

Feynman it seems modeled the system via set of partial differential equations and then said that he had proved that 3 chips per board were enough and modeled how the system would work even in this configuration.

No one really understood what he had done but they trusted him, created the boards and it turned out he was right.

This story I believe was in an Scientific American a long time ago.
To me, sending a thank you email does two things: reiterates interest and keeps you in their short-term memory (consider that the company may have interviewed several candidates in a few days).
Some interesting data on how line-length affects readers exists here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/06/text-columns-how-lo...
The first item on the list currently which is not some sort of false positive appears to be wareseeker.com at #10 (and that's debatable).
... I signed up here to ask the exact same thing.
Which is why my the department I'm an alumnus of called it Earth Science_s_ - http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/ - which is fine: it's a coalition of mineralogy, mineral physics, petrology, paeleontology, geophysics and rheology...
I agree, but local TV and radio stations keep online services from streaming sports events to people in that area.

Also, sports is somewhat unique in that the value is all in seeing it live. Personally speaking, once I know the final score of a game, watching a replay of it is worthless. Highlights are one thing, but watching the entire game when you already know who wins, makes no sense to me.
Right, funny that how never manifests in his writing, no?

that's why i unsubscribed from his rss feed recently. i subscribed a long time ago because i enjoyed reading his commentary on apple-related things, but in the past few months it's been more about how much android sucks.
I think the "recent entry" effect is underemphasized in a lot of discussions. It is like the old not-quite-paradox where you can move a kid between class A and class B and increase the average score in both rooms: transfer a middle class Mexican family to the southern United States and twelve months later every actual human is better off, but both Mexico and the United States suffer statistically.
I honestly think selling the product for less money, however spending tons less marketing the software, could be a good exchange for many of these companies.

Also, the forced move to perperson licenses will help many backwards companies with their machine locked bias.
It's still vague and doesn't tell the user what is DONE when you submit. "Save Changes" for settings, "Sign Up Now" for users joining a website, "Log In" to log into a website, "Reply" for replying to a comment ;-) Etc.
Wow. Where can I find a woman who not only enjoys gaming but can solder.
Who is going to sign what?

If you mean the certificates that the certificate authority issues, then the certificate authority signs them itself.

If you mean who signs the certificate authority's authority certificate, then either another certificate authority signs it, or the certificate authority signs it itself and pays the browser makers to include it as a root certificate in their browsers.

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at?
For those interested, the linked Nature article has more details.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
yyyup......Thought HN was being taken over.
Yeah, here's a giant hole: I don't care what the temperature was in 4000 BC.

Right now, the ice caps are melting, and all available science points to CO2 as the reason. Maybe the reason in 4000BC was CO2, maybe it was something else. But right now, the ice caps melting are going to create a whole bunch of problems for us.

I also noticed that in this guy's "historical long view" graphs, he omitted the last 30 years so that we don't see a big spike at the end. And they seem to all be normalized differently. Very honest of him. I'm sure he's motivated by pure science and not politics.
I guess it's Google's way of saying legacy native non-webapp app is bad and hard to fix.
I've never sent a thank you note.
I've received maybe 1 from the ~200 interviews I've conducted in 15 years. ( The candidate that sent it was awful.)
Is anyone offended if they don't receive one ?
Yeah, I thought that one was interesting. I can't imagine hiring or not hiring a candidate based on whether they sent a thank you note, and I certainly don't expect a handwritten note! However, if a candidate follows up in email with some answers / examples / code / whatnot for questions that came up in the interview, that would be a good sign.
Well said. #8 really resonates with me. There has never been a time when I haven't been able to get up to speed on a new stack/toolset within a few days (weeks at most). Why, oh, why can't companies just focus on hiring smart/curious/motivated problem solvers? I happen to think it comes down to lazyness - it's too hard to find those people, so companies resort to keyword soup.
Books and Toys for Children by Arvind Gupta
Ask HN: How can I quit talking myself out of my own ideas?
I'm sure this is common amongst us developers with ideas. I come up with new ideas for websites all the time. Most of the time I will have 2-3 ideas a week. I will usually invest several hours into each idea. If I know enough to jump right into code, I will. Otherwise I start by researching for the idea.

Most of my ideas I am initially excited about. If I'm lucky then I may even be genuinely positive that the idea is "going to work". But, just like clockwork, I eventually begin to doubt the idea and usually end up dropping it. This usually occurs the day or so after the inception of the idea.

Usually, my reasoning for dropping an idea is that it seems so useless and minor in the grand scheme of things. I try to picture people using the product and it actually making their life better in some way. This is obviously not an easy thing to do.

I think that over the years I've trained myself to be my own worst critic. I'll let myself get engulfed in an idea right away, but then I always take a step back and criticize the unpolished idea to the point where I convince myself that it's useless.

What are some things that help you all remain optimistic and excited about an idea?
The first few things don't bother me. Running late? Who cares? Wearing a T-Shirt? Excellent, so am I. Your cell phone rings? Hit decline and move on. (Or hey, maybe your kid is dying. Take the call.)

The only thing that's ever bothered me is when someone doesn't know the answer to a technical question, and then aggressively bullshits me.

Example: we ask, "so, you've used Perl OO before, can you write us an example class on the board". He does, and instead of "my $self = shift" or "my ($self) = @_" in the methods, he writes "my $self = $_". Easy thing to miss on a whiteboard, no big deal. We ask, "are you sure it's my $self = $_?" he replies, "yes definitely". We mention that it would be $_[0] or @_ or shift, but he starts yelling about how $_ and $_[0] are the same thing.

They're not. No hire.

(And if he had said something like, "oh, it's so weird looking on the whiteboard, I'm not really sure", that would have been fine. Next question, plenty of time to redeem yourself. But if you are going to yell about a trivial mistake... well, I'm glad we caught this in the interview. Not only do you not know Perl, you aren't even nice.)
The trouble with putting the current task on the submit button is that the user is already doing that task and they might think that the button is a link to start the task over, particularly if they clicked on identical text to get to the form in the first place. I have personally made this mistake while using some sites.

I try to include some context in the submit button but still make it clear that it will submit the form. Short, generic verbs seem to work well, like "Save", "Delete", or "Send".

EDIT: thinking more about this, I think what's important is to use a verb that applies specifically to the form data as opposed to the whole task: You send a reply, you don't reply a reply.
It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law.

Moore's law holds that the number of transistors that will fit on a chip doubles every two years, later reduced to 18 months: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law . Unless I'm missing something -- which is always possible -- it doesn't have anything to do with monitors.
Hmm perhaps that they are looking at a single iceberg core from a single location?

I would prefer to trust the satellite observations over everything else. All the other global temperatures estimates are much less accurate.

Then again I'm not a climatologist. 97% of climatologists "who have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change" there is a human made global warming [1]

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
TechStars Boston falls short in investment dollars vs. Boulder, Seattle
I feel a bit sad for all those people who worked on SOAP. I assume most of them simply wanted to make the web better and now we all point and laugh at their efforts with the 20/20 vision that only hindsight can allow.

Thanks for trying SOAP people, it was a noble effort but it's game over I'm afraid.... oh wait, I just saw on Wikipedia that these were Microsoft people. In that case, screw em. SOAP is wank! YOU'VE WASTED YOUR LIVES!!
Did you guys try to move to haml/sass from the existing view templates/stylesheets? Would like to know if you guys had good success rate moving to haml on a big existing project...
It's a cost to the taxpayer for a tactile service to the economy. Paving our roads was an enormous cost to the tax payers, but that doesn't bother anyone. Whats the difference between having roads to drive on, and having physical money to trade with?
He is a geologist. I don't know his politics, but he seems to be a genuine scientist. http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/resume.htm

While I personally am a supporter of global warming theory, let's not dismiss him out of hand. Many scientists through the centuries had theories that were rejected until proven right. Remember, science is not about what you think or feel, it's about what is testably provable.
The P/E for Baidu is 83, Amazon is 75, Netflix is 68. PE of 100 for Facebook isn't outrageous. If they implement Groupon without pissing off their users, they'll easily earn tons of money.
There are some elements of truth in here but a lot that doesn't seem to make sense. For example, the statement that companies like YouTube, Facebook and WordPress have failed to make "profitable revenue" is strange. As is this comment:

"Perhaps there is no for-profit business model for social networking."

Did Bo miss the Goldman Sachs docs that show hundreds of millions in profit on great operating margins?
I buy TiVos when I can get a lifetime subscription. One price, no recurring monthly or yearly bills. This usually happens around Christmas and for older models (Series 3 TiVo and earlier nowadays). Also, the box is mine.

I'm sure if I got a DVR from a cable or satellite provider, the monthly service cost would be included in my bill for as long as I have the device (a never-ending cost). I am essentially renting a DVR from the cable company. No thanks.
Each number labels one direction/end, so they'd still have to be swapped round.
http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=200 will work pretty well.
One thing that gets people in the US is medical problems.

Just as an anecdote, I got a couple of sinus infections back to back on my recent trip to the US. Two doctor visits plus antibiotics cost me more than 250 dollars out of pocket.

And that's for a relatively trifling problem. Imagine getting hit with serious medical bills at the very same time your ability to work has been seriously diminished.
Android tablets ignore the enterprise to their peril
I did not know that git had a grep command -- super handy.
Facebook's income doesn't need to grow linearly with their number of users. They could, instead, look at ways to make more money per user.

Since they've been spending their time until now focussed on getting lots of users, I'd imagine it's safe to say that they could increase their revenue per user well beyond what it's currently at.
yeah duh, lolz. Sorry, morning HN scan!
Google demos Honeycomb at the Verizon keynote (video)
This is a bit troubling as an iPhone developer. It'd be nice to be able to keep a profile on your users not for the purposes of advertising, but for the purposes of developing meaningful use-case metrics.

I suppose the proper thing to do would be to provide a opt-int one-time popup prompt that notified users what you were planning to do... sort of like Visual Studio, Netbeans, or Eclipse in what they do.

Any thoughts on other ways for developing analytics for parts of your app?
At one time SOAP wasn't too bad, until it tried to solve a lot of complicated problems (via WS-*), and in the process made the simple problems complex. Contrast this with HTTP which is being used for ever-more complex problems yet is really no more complicated in the simple case than it was in 2000. This seems like an important principle in protocol design.
The Computer Name Game
have you seen the company's logo?
> Sign Up Now

ew, no. For me at least "sign up now" implies starting the sign up process. I would think "complete registration" or "create account" or "finish and create account" would be much better than "sign up now" especially if you've previously used "sign up" wording.
What your computer does while you wait
Minute With podcast series - bringing you the deepest views of technology
Thanks the correction! I've only used european maps where the deviation is usually small. Local bias...