skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it's just me, but when I look for great programmers, their ability to solve coding challenges is really the least of my problems.

In my experience, the ability to leverage those skills into delivering mature, stable, maintainable and generally high quality software is considerably rarer than the skill to solve puzzles. And don't even get me started on non-technical skills, like being able to organize and plan the work, communicate with non-technical people etcetera.

Basically, I don't see this kind of testing covering more than 5% of the screening effort.
A computer program automatically torturing applicants with endless puzzle tests is not a way to find talented qualified people with experience delivering working results that delight the user. It's a good way to find people that have a lot of free time to play games because they are unemployed.

In the years following my first job out of school (decades ago) I can't recall any work that I have gotten by going to these sites, or dealing with monkey tests. Work comes because of my reputation and experience which speaks for itself. At conferences people give me their card and tell me to call them if I am looking to 'move up', which generally means "pay more than the last guy". Any time one contract or job ends, I look through these cards. Most of the time I get several phone calls from people I have met of the sort: "Hey Bugsy, I heard rumors of ABC Corp having layoffs. You looking to get out? We have a position..."

It's bad enough when the interviewer wastes more than 10 minutes of time with puzzles. Having it be automated so it can waste hours and hours without any human feedback is extremely offensive. Whoever designed this system knows nothing about acquiring talent.

The note in the article that in the future the site is going to be augmented with "real world tests" that force the user to design entire sites or otherwise labor for free borders on criminal since they are forcing you to do real work and you're not getting paid for it, in violation of state and federal labor laws.

If you haven't already seen examples of someone's work before you contact them, maybe you shouldn't be hiring them. Or maybe you need recruiters who know what they are doing.

Again, I have no doubt that desperate people who are unemployed because of their incompetence or lack of skill will not have any problem devoting the hours needed to google answers, or to hire third parties to help them complete these tests. I am sure complementary businesses will now open up that sell test answers to desperate applicants for a fee.
I've been using NestaCMS for a year or two now, kinda feel it's the best of both worlds. Low-tech enough that I can just write a markdown file in vim if need be, but the flexibility to do something dynamic if the need arises.
I've seen this exact advice in the Tango icon theme guidelines several years ago:
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines#Fre...

But i think it only applies for low-contrast backgrounds, like in these examples, for high-contrast backgrounds it doesn't necessarily make scanning harder. It depends on whether multiple distinctive colors are used for the icon itself. Icons without distinctive shapes often only use one colors for the icon itself and another color (or even multiple colors) for the background. I think this complicates scanning much more.

Also, removing unnecessary complexity from icons is almost always benefiting. So, yes, if possible, you should remove meaningless background shapes.
Most of the programs he describes aren't CLI programs but programs with a Terminal-based GUI.

A real CLI warrior uses sh, ed, and mail. :-)
Disagree.

Oh, and, by the way, if you think that it's unprofessional to be funny, then I'm sorry, but you just don't have a sense of humor. (Don't deny it. People without senses of humors always deny it. You can't fool me.) And if you work in a company where people will respect you less because your specs are breezy, funny, and enjoyable to read, then go find another company to work for, because life is just too damn short to spend your daylight hours in such a stern and miserable place.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000033.html
I had great fun doing the codility tests. Their site is great, allowing you to do the tests in the language of your choice.
If the discrepancies between state policies were large enough, I imagine you'd basically see white flight on a national scale. Essentially, supporting any type of social safety net would be optional for the people with the resources to move out of state. As a result, middle-class and wealthy people would flock to low-tax states without expensive social programs, leaving behind a higher concentration of needy people in the states with the stronger safety nets. What social programs remain would presumably go bankrupt while the nation's wealthiest individuals basked in the glory of their virtually tax-free lifestyles.
That's too bad. I'm surprised none of the mobile browsers have some kind of reading help.
I wonder what they say about lead pipes. And bricks. And banans (someone could slip on the peel, we shouldn't be providing such powerful weapons!).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p5jnqEyUs4
مشاهدة مباراة السعودية ونيجيريا بث مباشر كاس العالم للشباب
مدونة يلا جول الرياضية تقوم ببث واذاعة مباراة السعودية ونيجيريا بث مباشر فى الجولة الاولى من كاس العالم للشباب تحت 21/20 سنة ( عام ) فى كولومبيا اليوم ( مساء السبت بتاريخ 6/8/2011 وموعدها الساعة 03:00 بتوقيت القاهرة ) فجر الاحد (الحد) 7/8/2011 وموعدها 03:00 صباحاً لو بدك او عايز تتفرج على الماتش ادخل و وشاهد المباراة على النت بدون تقطيع اون لاين
This is good stuff. As the article was written in 2000, does anyone know how these things panned out? Is Fogcreek still using this plan?
Nice. We should meet up :)

Also, another tidbit for folks here - Yuvi is following the startup lifestyle by taking a break from college and joining this startup. Which is a big, big deal in India. I'm very impressed
Link to the paper he mentions as one of the best papers ever at the start of his talk for your convenience: http://www.bottomup.co.nz/mirror/Barton-B5000.pdf

The paper describes a CPU architecture. It has a lot of similarity with Chuck Moore's Forth hardware in that it is stack based instead of register based.
Neither of these sites allows you to do the tests in the language of your choice =/
Weeding out the truly incompetent people may not be hard but it's time consuming nonetheless. A phone screening may take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes of the interviewer's time, regardless of the interviewee's competence. Multiply this with the number of candidate a company has to wade through for a single opening and it gets significant real soon.

They're probably not the new LinkedIn but I think they're into something.
I remember that! I was working at DEC at that time happily browsing internet news.

When others started to use Web Browsers, I dismissed that all as "pretty pictures, the fad will go away". Guess I was wrong :)
As a .net developer i have to say no its not wrong to use ASP... as long as you understand its caveats. as a startup/ your job is to make money. that should be your main goal. HOW you do that is different.
20 Years Ago Today: The First Website Is Published
You're right. I side with Google. At least on the patent issue and the fair use issue. I'm not sure about the anti-competitive shenanigans against SkyHook, as I don't know the facts.

My opinions are not because I "don't believe in IP", but because I believe that IP has been abused to the detriment of human advancement. I believe in fair use, I believe software patents are evil, and I believe making information available (within the bounds of fair use) is good for the world. I make my living off of IP. I'm a software developer, a published author, and a songwriter (I don't make any money on that, but I still like the protections copyright provides), but Google has a history of not being evil when it comes to wielding patents and IP against competitors, and your examples don't change my opinion on that. They're the company being sued in both cases.
Computer Vision Syndrome: Do Your Eyes Have It? Here’s Help
I don't think the title is misleading at all. "How and Why We Switched from Erlang to Python".

How - by writing a WSGI app that uses gevent and simplejson
Why - because the Erlang code was old, no one knew Erlang well enough to maintain, and Python is the language used everywhere else at Mixpanel

The title wasn't "OMG PYTHON RULEZ ERLANG SUCKZ!!". The only real ambiguity in the title was that Mixpanel (as a whole codebase) didn't switch from Erlang to Python, just a small module switched.

What did you expect with this title? More language criticism?
High School Science Fair Winner Might Revolutionize Internet Search
I wanted one too, so I PDF-printed all the pages, combined them into one file and also made a Kindle version:
http://bit.ly/o7gfMH

It's hosted on Rapidshare. I expect Zed will have a better version soon, but this works in a pinch.
your "easier" route will produce fake progress.
Well, circumstantially, there are companies like Google and Microsoft who spend a lot of time on these types of tests. It's not an original suggestion that they aren't effective, so I have to assume that Google et al have considered this...and yet they're still using them.
His Youtube demo is worth viewing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oeh9pdHZco

I'm not quite sure he's the next Zuckerberg as suggested by the article, but looks like a smart kid.
This is how pg interpreted it. I wouldn't be surprised if the real reaction was more about _disgust_ rather than fear: I personally do like the functional programming and everything-is-a-symbol paradigms of Lisp, I just hate THOSE DAMN PARENTHESES and would probably try hard to avoid using Lisp at my workplace.
Some people have the same reaction when confronted with whitespace/indentation in Python, doesn't mean they're afraid to learn it.
Interesting. Not that I doubt Sagan's experiences, but I can't say the people I know who smoke cannabis seem any more empathetic than others.
DEF CON: The event that scares hackers
So complaining about extremist theocrats is crass if they call themselves Christian, but civilized if they're Muslim? It doesn't matter what religion it is, it's still a destabilizing influence on what's supposed to be a democracy.

And Fox News had such a clear role in making the Tea Party into a meaningful political force that commenting on the connection isn't necessarily even a political statement - it's a historical statement.
By looks you mean 'sounds like' a smart kid ;)
I am glad you brought Walmart as an example. We soon will have a country full of Walmarts where local stores have no place, which looks the same everywhere you go. Walmart after Walmart. It's all cheap there!

Similarly we just may soon have a country when Google is the only software company to work for. Because everyone believes all software should be free and ad-based, and because Google is dominating the ads business.
I do not think it is a matter of precedence. If you make cuts on larger expenditures, the end result will be a discussion of really tiny posts.

As an example, let's say you decide to cut 30% on defense. You cannot realistically do that by deciding to drop, say, the navy. There are lots of dependencies to consider (does it make sense to have marines, but no navy? Should we perhaps keep a small part of the navy for supporting the marines? What part? Can the air force maintain a global presence without carriers? If not, how many carriers do we really need? Can those carriers do without other ships for protection? Etc) People in charge will delegate filling in the details and suggesting a coherent set of cuts to subordinates.

After a few levels of such delegation, people will be talking about such 0.5% items. For that reason, I do not think you should ignore such smallish items.
> An environment shouldn't enforce thinking for the sake of learning.

I agree. However, I'm not sure the environment should bend over backwards to not make you learn. Probably depends on both the task at hand and the user. If only I could extract some generally useful heuristic…

Photoshop is an inherently graphical application, because (i) it works on images, and (ii) it is essentially an interactive program. If however I suddenly wanted to do automatic image processing, I would very much like to have access to some programmatic interface, most probably batch sub-programs that one could pipe together from the shell.

> Your subtitle editing case is specifically a command-line one

Yep. My point was, those cases exist, though I recognize the GUI is sometimes equally useful, if not outright superior. But the problem of GUI-only environments (and Windows specifically) is that if you don't even know what is a command line, you can't think of CLI tasks as CLI tasks. In my example, my first reflex was "sed", followed by "crap, Windows". On the other hand, a purely GUI user would have a "does a program does this?" reflex if he has any reflex at all.

GUIs make it very hard to combine programs. So in practice, they don't. They don't even tell the user about this concept. Instead, they tell the user that functionality is given from above. If no program does this, you're out of luck. I fear this contributes to the sense of helplessness of many users. CLI, on the other hand, quickly makes very clear that programs can be combined, that 5 lines scripts can be very useful. Sure, there will be a point beyond which one will need the help of a geek friend. But he would at least think of calling her.

Another point where GUIs easily fail hard is user customization. GUI programs tend to embed every functionality, leaving very little for external programs. For instance, Emacs or vi won't replace the built-in editing functionality of Thunderbird or Firefox (barring dedicated extensions). So I'm kinda stuck with the defaults.
"Again you are mistaken, my dear Paganel."

Care to elaborate? (Preferably in English.)
And it's awesome. When it came out, I immediately wrote half-a-dozen little things to work with it, including "whatson" -- an app that lets me do things like "whatson thursday" and have it show me what's on the calendar.
It's a little more complex than that, but I'd say that's what it boils down to. There's all sorts of horrible stuff that gets mined along with the rare earths, much of it exceedingly hazardous.
what programs do you use to do things that emacs cant?
Not every developer has a brand. This service appears to target companies hiring developers that don't. Fortunately that is 99.99% of the market.
A piece of fun trivia. What is currently the PostgreSQL codebase used to be written in Lisp, and was subsequently ported to C.

You can still recognize Lispy idioms in many places, there's abundany usage of the List structure, functions called lcons and list_head/list_tail and a NIL constant for an empty list.

See the anecdote at line 77 in a README file:
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=blob;f=...
First off I wanted to say that you have a great site, and is very easy to use, nice work! It has always been though to get media attention overseas (atleast for me). But why not build your empire in Europe first and get satisfied customers there? As the growth graph starts flattening out you can move on to the US. If it becomes a success in the EU it is easier to expand to the US (already lots of EU press, happy customers etc.). Worked for Spotify.
You're not the only one. The more experience I get developing software with other people, the more I value stuff that isn't really captured by coding interviews:

* do you thoroughly document your code without nagging?
* do you value simplicity over cleverness?
* do you think communication is a chore?
* do you enjoy human interaction?
* do you have empathy?
* are you creative?
* do you have good taste?

Googrosoft-style interviews are great for selecting people with raw intelligence, a competitive streak and some level of arrogance. They're not quite as hot at selecting reasonably smart people who are personable, creative and tasteful. And that's a huge portion of the job when you're writing software in a group. Very little day-to-day software work requires raw brilliance, but nearly all of it requires communication, empathy, creativity and taste.
Sending SMS messages for free in Outlook
How I beat the paid texting system in Outlook by making an OMS service provider for Google Voice.
I agree. Can you imagine a bank robber stealing an unlocked car, then using it to go rob a bank and kill people? Then, can you imagine the car owner getting sued by everyone?

I can't.
Nobody said C10K is the end-all-be-all on scaling, nor should it be. It is also false that it doesn't present any arguments for why threads don't scale well. According to the change log the latest change was 2011 which added information on nginx, but the last change prior to that was 2006. That version of the document talks about memory limitations on using threads because of the stack size. While not extensive it also includes a quote from Drepper about context switches. It even points to documents that are pro-threading. My point is that it's been around for 12 years and is easily found and read by anyone. It also contains a plethora if links to more information on the subject. To claim that C10K is not a useful educational document is absurd. But C10K is one document, there are numerous ones out there, a google search away, our knowledge of scaling has anything but stagnated in the last 12 years. Your options aren't C10K or read the kernel source for your favorite OS.

If you're going to argue that those with knowledge need to distribute that knowledge better, that's fine. Knowledge can almost always be distributed better, perhaps someone could make a nice centralized website that has better information than highscalability.com. But at the same time you've just told me that a document that is a great introductory resource on scaling connection handling is not a "useful educational document". You may have better things to do with your time than read kernel source, but is your time so precious you can't do some google searches? Perhaps read an industrial white paper or academic paper on the subject of scalability? You can write all the software you want but if you're ignorant of how to overcome scalability problems are you accomplishing much? And if you're doing tests and learning about what scales but keeping it to yourself you are just as culpable of not educating people.
I think OPs complaint is that the service purports to find "great" programmers where they really mean "adequately competent to perform most tasks and able to learn". Another case of marketing speak annoying the nerds.
Relevant, my blog post from a couple of weeks ago.

http://blog.indextank.com/1030/interviewing-engineers-enough...

TLDR: Most companies put too much emphasis on testing IQ and don't know how to evaluate what makes people great at building stuff that the company needs.
Oracle and Google keep wrangling over potentially impactful Lindholm draft email
Button text is still broken for Windows Chrome 13.0.782.107
I had this idea last year but dismissed it, since I though search engines already used this. Makes me want to hit myself.
If Safeway makes 3% on everything this guy buys, that's 3% additional wealth that wouldn't otherwise be there, right?

Meanwhile if you give it to a more profitable business, they'll make much more out of it. We're not pissing around stimulus dollars to feed poor people or make them richer. We want to increase the total amount of value in the economy.

Your now-he-can-buy-luxuries argument is bullshit. Great, let the government subsidize iPads, that'll get the economy going.
My idea involves having some capital to work with, but I'd still like to hear some feedback. When hiring people, you tell them up from "we're willing to pay you up to $AMOUNT in cash and/or stock as annual compensation. What percentage of that would do you want as salary with the remainder as stock?"
Isn't the main problem that technology moves so fast that the only way to have an organisation (that must) be secure is to staff it with teenagers.

You can have incompetent but responsible adults or
competent but irresponsible teenagers. Choose one?
Or at least, it would be extremely rare for someone to be able to project that much love and empathy for others without the use of psychedelics or empathogens, at least in western society.

It's rare with or without drugs, let's be honest. I've known lots of stoners and they didn't seem particularly empathetic.

I don't think Mr. Rogers ever smoked weed, and he's the best example other than Sagan of a TV personality that projected a lot of love and empathy for the audience.
Nearly everyone who? I've only seen it used to mean things that are now possible directly because of HTML5 features. Faster JavaScript engines do not fall under that.
There are hundreds of people in my phone which are not listed from the link in the post, I only see people on my friends list who have their Facebook phone numbers shared there currently, or did at one time when it was imported into my phone book. Sounds more likely at one time your wife had her phone number pushed to / listed on Facebook and it was synced to your phone before she removed it.
Socialize Android SDK integration guide
“Programmers should not be puzzle-minded… We would be much better served by clean, systematic minds, with a sense of elegance.” - Edsger W. Dijkstra

(http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1787249&type=htm)
Mobile Apps That Reward Impoverished Students With Food, Medicine
Sunk Cost Bias - Don't let it ruin your life!
Sure, but the study tries to find the most cost-effective way of providing stimulus. If you don't care how efficiently that money is used then we might as well just employ a fuck-ton of people building bridges to Hawaii.
High-tech micro-managing paternalism? Feeding kids at school would achieve much the same goal, minus the need for a cell-phone.
Move over, Wikileaks, there's an even bigger group of cunts with even lower ethical standards in town!

This will not end well.
Clang now builds Postgres without additional warnings
A surprisingly well-written tech article for a source like CNN: clear to non-technical people, and yet not chock full of gross inaccuracies. Mainstream journalists have gotten me used to much lower quality.
I agree with this. It would be interesting to see how Erlang was used - I find engineers that have "issues" with their erlang programs aren't actually using OTP to its fullest (using behaviors and supervisors, packaging as an application, etc...).
The one thing I have noticed over the year in reading and talking to very successful people is that the one factor they almost alway leave out is luck. The truth is, if they are really really honest, is that random chance played a huge role. They do not like to admit that to themselves because it is much more ego enriching to imagine that it was all due to how great they are, but really, if Bill Gates Mommy had not been on the board of directors of IBM... come on. Almost every example is like that.
Sorry to burst anyones bubble but life is largely a game of craps...
FOX isn't Fox News, so don't worry too much. I'm not, at least.

What people don't realize is that Fox News serves a commercial rather than an ideological agenda. The rest of the news media (especially when Fox News started) has a slightly liberal bias, which means the big business opportunity for Fox was right-wing news. It's not that they have a political agenda, they're just giving people what they want--news coverage that aligns to their political bias. As the TV viewing population has skewed older, Fox News has pushed even further to the right to match their target market. Likewise, the business opportunity for the Fox network was young adults. (And for The Sun in 1970, the target market was presumably working class British males who wanted to see topless girls in their tabloids.)