skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" ... but if you want to know if the interviewee understands Perl 5, these are effective questions."

Yep, the more I think about it the more impressed I am with that list.

It very neatly encapsulates a whole lot of Perl idiom and knowledge of common Perl errors (and "modern" ways to write Perl to reduce them), as well as more general "modern" programming techniques as used in Perl and the way other language's concepts are used/described in Perl.

Great list Chromatic, consider it added to my hiring resource arsenal.
> His main reasons behind this "DDD" policy is that it's the open source model. Developers work on things they care about, when they feel like working and then every hour they spend "working" is a valuable hour of work.

Does this actually apply to employer-sponsored OSS work?
No, I wouldn't. Flax uses <canvas> when it's available, and a fallback for when it's not, so it more or less works on a decent number of browsers, platform independent.
FCC Open Internet Apps Challenge
On of the quirks of pricing is that eBooks are VATable. That's 20% right there.
I'm of the school that measuring trivial knowledge is not a good way to identify good programmers

I'm right there with you, but this list isn't trivia. It's a broad set of basic questions. In fact, these three . . .

- What's the difference between accessing an array
element with $items[$index] and @items[$index]?
- What's the difference between == and eq?
- What do parentheses around the variable name in my
($value) = @_; mean, and what would happen if you
removed them?

. . . are so critical that if you can't answer them instantly, I would expect you to experience long, painful debugging sessions on a daily basis.
Not all techniques are appropriate for everything. (General rule.)
Excellent, I can't wait.
This was a fun company to profile. I really enjoy learning about companies that help publishers monetize their content—maybe because it took me a long time to figure out how to monetize mine.
"Malloy adds that Zipcar's proprietary security systems are installed throughout its fleet to prevent car theft."

http://directmag.com/mag/marketing_zipcar_goes_extra/
I think a lot of the commenters here are overestimating the probability of car theft.

"The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) reports that 2009 marked the nation's sixth consecutive year of declining vehicle thefts in the United States. U.S. motor vehicle thefts declined 17.1 percent from 2008 to 2009—the largest annual decline in decades."

http://www.rmiia.org/auto/auto_theft/statistics.asp

Also "premium" cars from zipcar have pretty discreet branding - just some on the rear bumper, nothing on the doors.
His statement about the observations intelligent life in the future is poignant. At some point in the future, it is likely, that an intelligent species would never have known and could never possibly know about all the hundreds of billions of galaxies that once were visible.
I'll be interested in seeing how this goes. I use Streetcar in the UK and it's been pretty good, but like a lot of posters I've seen a lot of damage done to these cars (particularly damage underneath the front of the cars from going too fast over speed bumps etc., which the casual observer might not find), though mostly they're pretty good.

The thing that makes Streetcar for me though is the customer service. I've gone to car drop places and it's not been there (parked on another street due to some idiot parking in the carshare spot), had problems in-car with the stereo (and in one case, working out how to put the damn thing in reverse!), and the CS reps have always been super helpful and proactive about helping me (and in the case with the moved car, gave me an extra half hour of rental time).

I guess you would have the actual owner on hand to help you with that sort of thing, but it's not quite the 24hr support and detailed knowledge about the cars I would get from the streetcar people.
Here's a big reason you don't see price cuts: the same party isn't bearing all the costs you mention.

With physical books, publishers pay for production, freight, and centralized storage for distribution to retailers.

Retailers pay for maintaining their own active inventories, including warehousing and shipping from their warehouse to individual stores, as well as paying for physical retail space.

(And if bookstores don't sell the books within three months, they can return them [hardcover] or strip them of their covers and trash them [paperback] and get a complete refund. Talk about uncertainty.)

Only one actor -- the publisher -- sets the suggested retail price, upon which the discounted price a retailer pays is based.
I'll argue that not everything about this is "sad". Knowing JavaScript opens new opportunities when it comes to the kinds of products you can develop and kinds of audiences you can reach. You don't have to look at it as a burden. JS might not have the best design, but it's not horrible, either. It's just a tool, and it's up to you how to use it.
And I'm sure the goal of the design was for you to have a great experience. (Remember: talks are primarily for the audience at the venue that the talk is given at. Posting online is an afterthought, because people always seem to ask, "can you post your slides".)
JavaScript Gesture Recognition for Touch Screens
Brian, your UniversityTutor site is impressive. Do you have any financial incentives for running the site, or what's your motivation? Why do you do it?

I've put a lot of thought into creating a similar site but for mentorships, in particular for the growing population of autodidacts, unsatisfied school students, and in general people unhappy with their education.
Interesting, but annoying that it's not on GitHub or Google Projects where I can watch it. GitHub is slowly becoming the preferred way to track interesting projects. If it's just some site out there, I may forget about it.
For PagerDuty, what changed between their first and fourth try?
Yeah, the room was packed when I got there.. sat in the front on the floor for it. Definitely the most useful of everything I saw there.
Oh, thank you! I felt stupid for about the same amount of time until I read your comment.
It is cool to see people adding to the browserscope data. If you haven't heard of browsercope before check out the short video from Velocity last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QnuXuE52BI
Well, yes. And that's the effective situation we've got at the moment.

What I'm proposing is a full acknowledgement of that: if you want to live on the bleeding edge, then that should be supported as well as possible, but a very clear delineation should be drawn between the responsibilities of the distribution and those of the developer/sysadmin. RVM does that very cleanly, even if you only use it with the system ruby.
I meant the model that OSS software gets developed in. That people work on the feature or project they love/want to see succeed/etc rather than what a manager told them to focus on.
>All of that is to get a professionally typeset and edited book with cover art and yadda yadda.

Give me the text and I'll add a version of Readability (same typesetting for all fiction books would be fine for me, there might be particular text features that need specially treatment occasionally I imagine). Cover art is usually pretty formulaic I can't really see most authors paying [to a graphic artist/designer] more than a days wages for subsequent covers, perhaps a week for the first one.

Presumably with an e-book reader I can set set the kerning/leading/font-size/font-weight/etc. ?

With e-books you could set 2 prices, edited and unedited, call them different names if you like. Then authors can decide how much they want to spend on editors - in some cases I'm sure they add a huge amount, probably define the work, in others not so much.
You're the one missing the point. Don't write the ugly hack in the first place, and you'll find that that code can be written faster, debugged much faster, and won't be an albatross in the long term. I also find that the crappier the code, the buggier it is and the more support requests are generated (the Pareto principle definitely applies here) - which sucks developer time away from more important things and compounds your problems.

This is something that I've seen several times, and in every case the people involved severely underestimated the time suck of crappy code. "It's not that bad" often means that the developer is spending 50% or more of their time working around deficiencies.
My bank in Australia, Commonwealth Bank, recently refurbished my local branch as a "flagship" branch, lots of TV advertising about how awesome the new experience is, etc. I thought nothing of it until the other day when I had to go to the bank. When I went in, someone greeted me about 5 seconds after I walked through the door, asked what I wanted, took me to the right counter and explained what I wanted to the person behind the counter (there was no queue - but that might have been good luck). I was completely blown away by the service. At the moment I don't think any deal from any bank would tempt me to switch.

So yes, I think UX innovation could add a lot of value to the generic bank experience.
Ask HN: Google Phone Interview
I have a phone interview with Google about one month from now. They ask me to refresh my basic data structure and algorithm. Does anybody have any Google interview experience? Do you guys have any recommended reading sources for this? Thanks
Googling around suggests that this involves the zipcard - if you don't use it to enter you can't start the car. There's no real reason that other companies can't do something similar.

Also (and perhaps I shouldn't say this) I often see additional zipcards in the trunks of zipcars - by the spare tire - presumably for use by service personnel.
They used to provide this option but it actually made the API harder to work with. You could deny or approve one permission at a time and the developer had to handle it (and by handling that really meant always checking for permissions before actions and bugging the user for the permission whenever they tried something that required it). As a developer I prefer the new way, which is also how Android development works. Giving line-item veto to a user is a terrible idea. If they don't like the permissions, don't use the app. It's good for Facebook's api too because now people aren't constantly checking which permissions are available before they do something, probably reducing the stress on the API quite a bit.
Medium and large companies need the article's advice much less than smaller companies, where the difference between someone who knows enough to download example code and modify it until it does something and someone who has current and effective language domain knowledge is much, much more significant.
Random question: what would you guys like to hear/know about applying (or YC in general) that's not already out there? I've been considering writing a blog post about GazeHawk's YC experience, but there are so many good ones already, and I don't want to just add redundancy. Anything unanswered from a startup perspective you'd like to know?
No. You just look at their code. You can scan sample code in 5 minutes and determine how well someone knows the language.

I won't even consider having an in-person interview with someone until I've seen their code. It's just too often a waste of their time and mine.
This is approximately the question G.K. Chesterton's "The Man who was Thursday" addresses. I won't spoil it and probably couldn't do it justice if I tried, but it's a compelling story.
I was about 10 years give or take myself. I blogged the transition on my site. Glad I made the decision to give emacs a serious try. Didn't know what I was missing until I did.
Might I suggest "herogit"? You can keep doing "heroku <command>" like normal – it just treats different branches as different apps, which I quite like. They put it in the last newsletter.

For example, I have a "staging" branch for my staging app and use the "master" branch for production. When I checkout the staging branch, the heroku gem switches everything to the staging app. Checkout the master branch and it switches to my production app.

(A little gotcha: I have to use "git push <repo> staging:master" to deploy the staging branch)

I've never tried the Katana gem, though, so I have no idea if it's better or worse.

https://github.com/jbarnette/herogit
Already? Wow... it feels like just yesterday applications were open for Winter
Weird, I added swipe events to Showoff awhile ago. Maybe the running instance is just on an old version.
Been using Wing IDE for a couple of years now, just upgraded to the new one. It works well for me ...
I really am liking Redis, and they've expanded beyond just snapshots for persistent storage. You can now append data, and there a different options for both when you snapshot or append (a time, for each set, etc).
Surprise! Making every technical job available for outsourcing means that nobody enters technical job markets if they can help it! Getting an engineering degree is no longer a way out of the mines, the farm or the factories! Lots and lots of laws, especially "intellectual property" laws are a tax on innovation! Declaring all surprises as "terrorism" leads people away from doing surprising things! Surprise! All of this adds up to zero entreprenuerialship!
The #1 free App Store app? It's made by a 14 year old.
Showoff is designed to give presentations. Though it can output slides in a single page or as PDF for sharing with people.
Skype accounted for 25 per cent of international calling minutes last year.
What does LGPL even mean in the context of a client side tool... it's not like you have any sort of linking in the C-sense of the term.
>But if you believe that playing basketball will translate into you becoming a better soccer player, then you are deluding yourself.

Playing basketball will improve your soccer more than not playing a [round] ball passing sport (or indeed playing no sport).

At my small town, small-time school I represented the school in lots of sports. The sport I achieved most in I didn't play until after I started my working life.
One of the other main reasons ebooks costs so much is because they are sold in proprietary formats. Yes, some costs associated with producing, distributing, and selling physical books are diminished, but at the same time, publishers now have to pay to convert their text to each retailer's ebook format -- both a set fee and per-copy-sold fee. Publishers are forced to pay-to-play (essentially) in Amazon's store, or B&N's store, or whatnot, so that their books are available in their formats, a cost that is then folded into the production of the ebook. So yes, some costs go down, others go up.

On a side note, the agency pricing model actually is better for most authors/illustrators as well, not just their publisher. Physical book, the author gets a set royalty (anywhere between 5-15%) based on the retail price. Ebook, the author gets 25% of net receipts. The breakdown there is:

$10 physical book at 10% royalty: $1 per book to the author (out of ~$5 to the publisher)

$10 ebook at 25% net: $1.75 per book to the author (out of ~$7 to publisher)

It's a move toward more fair compensation for the content creators.
Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't heard of herogit before. I'd like to add more flexibility with branches in the future, but wanted to release it always using master in the meantime.
"Overvaluing the Idea: As we all know, execution is worth more than ideas. Ideas are cheap, especially in technology. Focus on execution and iteration over perfection. It is rare that your ideas will win the war."

Hail hail.
That's a better approach if you know the language well enough to analyze their code. I didn't write that list for people who already know how to hire good programmers.
56 Israeli startups at Mobile World Congress 2011
Israeli startups show up by the dozen to Mobile world congress 2011, and this time there are some interesting new entrants
"keep your devs
[...]
always working on something they want"

this seems to be the uber-rule for everyone who employs a developer. If you can guarantee that one (granted, it's huge) requirement, you should not get into trouble with your engineering workforce. All other things might not automatically fall into place, but once you got your people motivated through their work, a big part is in good care.
What position? It varies a lot based on which job you're applying to.
One of Nvidia's arguments is that there are few HPC applications that benefit from >4cores that don't benefit much more from a good GPU implementation. Therefore, an optimal configuration is to have a reasonable 4-core CPU with really good serial performance/watt directing GPUs with amazing parallel performance/watt. That design definitely echoes the Cell concept.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted either but I suspect it was for the same reason I was for asking similar questions.

As you point out from the faq, the onus seems to be on the owner and the only consequence for the dirtiness is the ability to rate the user. I think a more serious question relates to the adjudication process in the case of more serious violations such as scratches, damage or theft of items from the car. Do they automatically take the word of the owner - and what happens in the case of false claims against a renter by an owner - what appeal process does the renter have in that case?
Should I be worried about how many of these I actually own?

By the way, I think the one in the Royal McBee advert is the predecessor to the machine immortalized by the immortal programmer's programmer in the pseudo-poem "The Story of Mel".
The thing is with rental cars - it's not the major damage, but all the minor damage - the stuff that isn't worth claiming on for insurance. The scuffs were luggage is dragged in and out. The full ashtray, mysterious stains on seats. The service life of a car can be halved easily by an uncaring driver - redline shifts on a cold engine, vigorous attack of speed bumps, grinding wheels on kerbs - the list is endless.

Every rental car I've ever had has had at least some of these faults. None are what I would be prepared to live with in one of my own cars.

But I'm probably atypical. I would never own a holiday apartment for rental either.

However, if it was structured right, you could get to the point where people purchase a car specifically for the intent of hiring it out for profit, in the same way that people do with yachts, holiday apartments and other high-value durables. Although I think you'd be better off with a private 'fleet' of several cars to spread the risk across several units of any one car being off the road at a time. I could see myself purchasing a vehicle specifically for rental. Maybe an insurance write-off that can be repaired and works OK but has very low market value because of the title history. Maybe a car that has an out-of-fashion color or cosmetic damage like hail damage that won't matter to the renting person, but makes the car pretty much worthless in the marketplace. I can think of 10's of strategies of purchasing a vehicle at below-market value and then putting it into a rental pool. If I didn't purchase the vehicle as a personal possession, but merely as an investment item, I think my attitude towards it would be different.
The counter-argument is that testing on more platforms tends to expose bugs that it's worth fixing because they would have affected you anyway, you just didn't know it yet.
Node.js v0.3.5 Released
Becoming an educated legal consumer (a guide for founders)
It's funny how many of these ads are aimed at "normal people", while "normal people" today would be considered completely incapable of operating machines as (relatively) user-unfriendly as some of these.
Interesting.

Seems an awful lot like what happens in AA (not the mistakes part, but the way to handle or avoid those mistakes).
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Fourth_Air_Force

This stuff isn't new -- it's just new to most people.
Does anyone else find small light-grey text against a slightly darker grey
background extremely hard to read? I'm guessing there may be some
useful information in there somewhere, but I just can't see it (literally).
Just like an insurance company -- by maintaining a car fleet across which relatively few instances of damage/theft/etc will occur. They can afford to take a significant hit on a few cars, and they can afford to hire people to maintain/verify/qualify the cars at scale.
That's not the oldest one there, though. The LGP-30 was 1956.
I'm guessing they didn't have you sign a NDA?
If you want to learn the merit of a product, look at how the inventors are spinning it. Here you see they're playing up how it'll make the lives of impoverished African orphan children better, and how it was created by a team of women, rather than the evil terrible Patriarchy.

This is colloquially referred to as a "bad sign".

In all seriousness, though, this looks like a pretty crappy product. "Shake-light" generators like these are already pretty miserably inefficient, and you'll only be getting maximum power when a kick is perfectly aligned with the axis of the coil, with the magnet at the far end. If you kick it at a right angle to the coil, or with the magnet at the near end, then it won't generate any power at all, and, even better, will react differently to the kick.

You could use three generators, for all three axises, but that would triple the BOM, and the magnets will interfere with each other. And you still have the "magnet on the wrong end" problem, and the damn thing will still wobble.

Additionally, electronics designed for use in adverse environments can either be cheap, or they can be good. Soccket could make them cheap enough that the target demographic could actually buy them, and get tons of bad press when they break more or less instantly, or they can make them good, and have one NGO buy a hundred of them... and have them break slightly less frequently. Soccer balls are not terribly durable, (because they have to be light enough to kick) and when your reputation rides on miraculously making them much more so, you're in trouble.
No, but running a public repository for a given distribution is the way forward in that case, and that does involve knowing the lay of the land.
It's in their FAQ: http://support.getaround.com/kb/car-owners/choose-how-much-t...

Based on the screenshot in the tour, setting your price to $12/hour nets you $9.60/hour, so they charge a 20% commission. Not bad considering all the insurance and so on is taken care of.

To prevent rental abuse, it would be interesting if their car kit had an accelerometer, monitored RPM, etc. to detect when things are outside of the norm. There are some other potential issues I see with this. Their car kit appears to plug into the cigarette lighter -- what happens if someone breaks in and steals it? Also, those with integrated Bluetooth handsfree should not use their vehicle's address book functionality or they expose that to any renters. What if someone returns your vehicle but parks it in a spot that, the next morning, becomes a "no stopping during rush hour" zone?

It'd be interesting if this becomes a viable way to make money in high density areas. Lease a handful of half-decent cars for a few years and leave them full-time as rental vehicles. If it's realistic to make $350/month for only 15 hours a week, that could be profitable. Presumably you would only need to get parking/storage-level insurance as driving insurance is provided by GetAround.
My take on patents...

http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-busine...
My co-founder and I are looking to apply but it looks like I might have a baby due during the 3-months-in-SV stage and hence need to be close to base (Australia). Looks like I'll be hanging out for the following round. Good luck to everyone applying!
What a great list! It contains 8 books I've read, all of which have been fantastic. So I think I'll make my way through the rest (maybe skipping the OED).