skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Programmer screening techniques that non-techies could administer?
I'm at a large company where Catbert HR drives the recruiting process. They require some sort of screening criteria to use to prevent us poor developers from seeing too many resumes. While I agree with the intent, the practice turns out to be an utter failure because what gets through is crap (I suspect they administer the "test" via email and the users fill in the answers after asking Uncle Google).

Our needs are not particularly sexy (Java developers with Swing experience, JEE preferred, senior level) but finding qualified candidates seems to be a Herculean struggle.

Ideas we're considering:

- Brainbench testing (core Java)

- http://i.seemikecode.com/ with a developer watching

- CodeAnthem (http://codeanthem.com)

Anyone else have better/faster/smarter ideas? Don't want a flood of unqualified crap, but don't want to pass on the good ones either...
Also, every number system is base "10" in its own system :-)
Probably because that would defeat the point so disabling it from BIOS may not be an available option.
I'd double-check if this is legal for the project and/or country.

If I'd be paying something for it, I'd be thinking twice, though. Pseudonyms often have the air of either immaturity, legal protection or disavowing the product (Alan Smithee says hi).
No, I'm single. I'm genuinely curious on how you can pay so little.
Cringely’s second column on the firing of Leo Apotheker
Demystifying UEFI, the long-overdue BIOS replacement
Should Brazilian Startups Incorporate in the United States?
Apotheker to make $28 to $33 million if fired today
I love Lua, but what stack would allow you to use it in a web project?
Most of the "tips" in this article seem to suggest choosing a bad naming scheme or intentionally misnaming variables / functions. I can't imagine it would be that hard to put the code into an AST and work with that. That would make it easy to see where variables are used (despite losing their names). I realize that would take extra time, but I don't suspect it would be quite as bad.

I'm more afraid of the "Use threads With Abandon" tip.
Making a mobile connection
Uh... almost any reputable company out there requests a resume when applying to a job. So I fail to see how this article is relevant.
That's funny, my CS prof used to use addresses as an example of multi-dimensional array indices: "state" being a major index, down through city, street, to the number on the street being a minor index.
Best Refinance Rates
Scientists Successfully Induce Hibernation in Animals for the First Time
what a waste of time his entire tenure has been

The stock has gone down 47%, and he will walk away with approximately thirty million dollars. “Waste of time” doesn’t quite capture my thoughts about his tenure.

http://allthingsd.com/20110921/what-will-leo-apotheker-walk-...
That was extremely well written. I rarely read lengthy stories like this, but found myself compelled to continue. You're writing style and pacing kept me entertained.

So. What has happened to the Company since your departure?
This thread is about efficiency of the coding process, not the execution process. Nobody would argue that an arbitrary high-level language performs as well as the same code written C or hand-tuned assembly. The point of this discussion is that writing C or hand-tuned assembly takes more lines of code (and therefore thought) than writing the same code in a higher-level language.

So with this definition of efficiency, less lines of code does equal more efficient code.
A successful git branching model
It's good to see someone bluntly take apart common misconceptions.
Please come to Canada!
Ephemeral volumes are shared, just not nearly as variable.
I, in fact, did not say that, making this a non-sequitor.
I don't think so. It's about the price of money. If you can buy money for rate a, and sell that money elsewhere for rate b, where a < b, then it's arbitrage on the price of money.

(Where price of money is a synonym for interest rate.)
Right now there's no real answer for disposal of carbide (VHTR/PBR) or fluoride (MSR) fuels. Geological disposal and reprocessing are credible for today oxide fuels, but not for these. A fuel damage incident happened at the Oak Ridge MSR about 30 years after it was shut down -- radiolysis caused the production of F gas, which in turn caused the production of UF6, which migrated out of the drain tanks into carbon traps. There were no serious consequences, but enough U233 was involved that there could have been a criticality accident.

There is a grassroots thorium movement behind the MSR these days -- they're a bunch of smart, wonderful, and idealistic people but they're running against a headwind. The U.S. government is not interested in radical innovation in the nuclear space because it may open up new paths to proliferation. I think the most credible MSR concept is Moir and Teller's idea of having clusters of reactors built in huge underground bunkers. Small, modular reactors are exciting, but I find it hard to believe that online reprocessing would be practical for something small that isn't being watched over by a team of specialists.

Prehaps I'm a dinosaur but I till think FBRs on the plutonium cycle may have a market in the long term. It would take a long time for this to replace the LWR because of the slow rate Pu gets generated, but the amounts of Pu available in spent fuel would be sufficient to open up new markets for small modular reactors that are highly proliferation resistant. (A sodium fire probably kills you if you try to open it up, and then there's so much Pu240 you'll never make a bomb of it)
I just checked the traffic stats (I use statcounter)

- 1,600 daily visits (of them 1000 are returning visits)

- 4,400 daily page views
Sounds right up my alley. ObeaIraMFK1e@meltmail.com
Avg. Salary for Enterprise Architect Drops for Second Year in a Row
Is this US-only? (been dying for a good UK based gateway)

Also you should fix the layout of the upgrade screen: http://skitch.com/lfittl/f5rtf
For development work, contracts stating ALL work belongs to the company is very common. Actually, it's almost universal. A few states have laws that says that clause is void (cali being one of them), but most states don't.

If you decline every job that has a contract that says all work belongs to the company, you'll have a very hard time finding a job. (outside of states where the law specifically covers this case) The ones that don't have it will be ones where the management doesn't know any better, or (maybe) where you're a cofounder.

For reference I'll point you to Joel's writeup on answers.onstartups.com:
http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...
As someone who, despite being 24 years old, learned to type on a (mechanical!) typewriter, I don't like tab for indentation on the basis that, for me, tabs have a very specific meaning:

Carriage (or cursor, if you prefer), go to the next tab stop. [2]

For typewriters it means to go "literally" to where the next stop is. For text editors (at least for emacs)[1], it means to insert as many spaces as needed so the next column on the current line matches with the last non-space column on the previous line.

So, in the same way I use the table tag for tabular data in markup, I use the tab key for tabular text.

[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key#Origin
MicroSoft is famous for developing a siege mentality intentionally as it helps them get a huge amount of labor out of their employees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_mentality

What the Wikipedia article leaves out is that employes that are in this state will have a sort of 'fight or flight' response and will usually work their tails off.
In isolation it's useless but if you've put some work into crafting your online presence (i.e. a homepage with a blog, an up to date linkedin profile and a few choice code samples on github), then IME it makes a good impression pre-interview.
My pleasure. It's good you find it blunt: I tried to be concise so people would bother reading.
A member posted that meltmail wasn't working. Do check.
I'm not happy with PayPal, so I just got really excited when I heard about Samurai from a company with a familiar name.

The note about beta stage is acceptable, it means that it should not be used in heavy production yet, but the Lorem ipsum placeholder text on the Python API page just means it cannot be used under any circumstances yet.

After my initial shock, this package does seem amazing, and I can't wait to get my hands dirty with it; but please take the time to review and polish the pages.
I think it's a worrying trend, ever since Apple's iOS.

It's a pity that so many developers that are accustomed to use open-source tools will choose shinny over liberty to tinker, because after all -- it's the third-party developers that make or break a platform.

Basically Trusted Computing is sneaking in, because Apple-stuff is the developer-equivalent for the dancing kitty that begs clicking.

IMHO, people saying that trusted computing is a good thing are in fact idiots that haven't thought this through; since crackers will always crack, virus writers will always find back doors, and the only ones getting hurt will be legitimate customers (exactly as DRM).

And in case you think iOS is secure, you probably haven't seen JailbreakMe in action. At least with Windows XP you are aware that it isn't secure.
I mentioned CDs in my article. Did you stop reading at the first mention of gold? Further, CDs are not a "safe investment" because the real rate of inflation (not CPI, but actual monetary inflation) is greater than the return of the CD, by quite a lot. Another risk of CDs is that the bank might fail. Since the FDIC hasn't been collecting reasonable premiums against this risk, and banks are failing left and right, the deficit is made up via inflation, which means, you get paid back in lower value dollars than you lost.

This is also what makes gold a relevant possibility for this type of arbitrage. Since gold's supply is relatively fixed, as the dollar declines due to inflation, the gold price will appreciate. So, even if there were no increasing interest in gold from investors (e.g.: no appreciation due to increased demand) you'd be arbitraging the delta between the exchange rates of the two currencies. Borrowing in dollars and buying gold.

This could be, as I mentioned, done between any two currencies. Or, in the case of CDs, which I mentioned in my original comment, within the same currency.

But I guess that since I mentioned gold it is Very Important for you lot to say that gold is risky, and that I'm obviously falling to "mention" those things that I, uh, er, mentioned.
I went as a loner as it was fine. The people are friendly and there are other loners around who will talk to you if you stand around when the talks aren't on.
Sourcefire is the second larges at about 120M last I checked. I don't remember Mozilla being that big. I know Ubuntu is significantly smaller.
Agreed, that was refreshing (and affirming).

As the great teacher, Richard Feynman puts it: "if you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood it"
New Chrome Plugin Gives Instant Sentiment Analysis for Twitter Search Terms
Job boards are broken, and it should be obvious why
Maybe I didn't write it clearly enough, but you missed my point.

Sharing/social buttons are nowadays used for submitting stories. And if resubmitting old stories by visitors is not happening often (+), then it's pretty stupid. Why? If I'm already submitting my posts myself to social sites, these buttons should point to already created there entries. Even by only assuming that votes are the main concern in such sites, it's easy to tell that having "splitted" entries instead of the main single one is purely wrong. But crucial benefit here is social consolidation, so your visitors can easily check reddit or HN comments, if there are any.

And I believe my idea is really good, yet I don't understand why people go with mostly useless submitting buttons requiring additional work of the precious visitors. I also don't believe I could be the first one with such simple yet efficient solution.

(+) It's kind of the question here, I don't know whether there are any statistics about it.
StackMob now supports secondary indexes
There's lots of HNers in #startups on freenode
Predators and Robots at War
It looks like they are already! I'm looking at their site and they have a choice for US or Canada!
is the Autonomy acquisition finalized yet? it seems like maybe this is a signal that HP will attempt to refocus on its consumer products?
This is, of course, bizarrely arbitrary, since its assuming there's any underlying meaning to the ordering of the English alphabet (since, ya know, there isn't).
tl;dr
Programming is not as hard as people make it out to be.
Works with Shopify?
A Discussion on Win8's Metro UI, Netflix and lots of other useless banter
Completely deceptive linkbait title and a worthless blog post about racking up credit card debt. THIS is what gets upvoted on HN now? Pathetic...
Prestamos comerciales para negocio
I immediately thought that same thing. Someone else posted this link (http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20566/prove-there-ar...) which answers the question: if Pi is a "normal number" -- a number whose expansion in base b asymptotically contains each digit 0, 1, ..., b-1 with equal frequency, for any give b -- then within that numbers expansion (in any base) you'll find every finite string composed of those digits infinitely many times. So normal numbers will not only contain any person's name, but every book ever written, every law of nature, etc.

Wikipedia says that Pi is widely believed to be normal, but that it's not been proved. It's interesting that almost every real number has this normality property (in the sense that the set of real numbers that are not normal has Lebesgue measure zero), as it sounds like a very restrictive criteria.
This strikes me as a hire very much in the same vein as Bartz at Yahoo. Successful with on particular type of tech company doesn't mean success with another. (Apotheker being a similar example).

Whitman could be very competent and turn things around, she sends likely a good message to wall street. But if I were the king of HP I'd be looking for someone who's got way more domain experience.
Leveraging Money Is Essential
Xbox 360 Is To Call of Duty As PS3 Is To Battlefield 3
Personally, I'm partial to "catch ( Throwable e)" in Java, so that any exception or error gets noticed, and then log what was broken by such problem.

The declared exceptions (and exceptions vs errors) in Java are a nuisance, IMHO. For example, use any kind of "dependency injection" ("strategy" pattern, driver plugin(s) for other, older languages) via reflection, and suddenly all of your exceptions have transmogrified into errors :-(
"Learn how to code so you don't need to hire programmers."

That's the hidden gem. Only do this if you enjoy programming, though, because it's hard work, especially in the beginning. Expect a year or two to get fluent, not a month or two.

But once you know how to program, you don't have to spend time finding scarce developer talent, you don't have to spend time communicating requirements et cetera, and most of all you don't have to pay them $X.
Same question from another EU-country.
Robotic male crabs compete for female crab's attentions
No. Pointers and recursion are easy. Programming is hard, like writing and design, because it is both.
I'm on board with his basic pedagogical point: don't tell people you expect them to struggle.

I'm concerned that he's going a little too far in the other direction, though. It's great to come up with a simple or even tautological explanation for concepts. However, those explanations don't address the nuances of why those concepts challenge people in practice. And telling someone it's easy when s/he actually is struggling is just as dangerous.

When I was learning C, I absolutely understood that a pointer pointed to something, and I wasn't bogged down by people telling me it was hard. That didn't stop me from dereferencing null pointers, returning addresses to variables on the stack, getting confused when someone added to a pointer, etc. The aptitude that Joel wrote about and Jon derides isn't the aptitude of applying a metaphor to code. It's the aptitude of coalscing a set of program behaviors into a mental abstraction that is more than "a pointer points."
I agree that it's easy to figure out. It's just not automatic.
GitHub is basically the Facebook of software developers and I think it is eating LinkedIn's launch.
I've been using JUL in libraries and Logback in new applications (Still using log4j in some legacy ones). It's worked out pretty well, keeping any logging dependencies/configuration out of my reusable code while not putting much/any extra baggage on the apps themselves.

I guess I should do a followup to this: http://efsavage.com/blog/posts/logging-like-its-2002/
Amazing how he was able to make such a specific prediction, not only about the firing of Leo, but also the hiring of Meg Whitman, if it was actually just a prediction. But he most likely had some strong inside information.

It seems that the HP board is set on destroying HP with all these political games and hiring friends as CEO's.
I'm sure it will work in Shopify once somebody adds it to active_merchant. Probably will take a few weeks to months.
Roger Ebert: Today's photo of a flawed design
My favorite quote in this conversation so far: "[Ms. Whitman] is bit of a lightning rod in Silicon Valley, where founders are allowed to have outsize personalities but mere managers are not." https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/technology/idea-of-whitma...
The economics of writing (and surviving on) a new programming language
Terms and conditions:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua...

Ah, I see.
I'm not in one of those states, and I've never had a problem with it. In fact, every contract I've seen has been written like California's laws require.

So no, apparently I -won't- have a problem finding a job.
Now you can share photos on Twitter via text messages.
Exactly. I'm guessing people have trouble seeing money as a commodity that can be arbitraged.
Sprint CEO suggests AT&T can’t buy T-Mobile, only Sprint can buy T-Mobile
Leo is making $35mm+...
I'll play devil's advocate here.

Maybe the reason is because everyone has super-fast 4G Android phones and they don't need to connect to wi-fi like all those slow 3G iPhones.

Also, the article references all iOS devices whereas the title references iPhone only. Obviously all iPod Touches and non-3G iPads would have to use wi-fi, and can't be discounted in the statistics.
I love/hate Spotify. I love the product and use it all the time. I signed up for premium after using the free version for one day, so they definitely won me over. What I absolutely hate is they have a huge number of show stopper bugs in the application. Songs don't play, songs go missing, can't get online, etc. Some have been reported over a year ago and still haven't been fixed.

Sometimes you'll get the message "Offline access for this computer/device has been withdrawn", which essentially deletes all your locally saved songs. Spotify limits the number of devices you can have offline access enabled on, but their algorithm is so awful it ends up nuking all your devices. So beware if you're planning on taking a long plane ride and suddenly your entire library disappears.
Hey guys, to answer the most popular question: Samurai is not yet functional for merchants outside of the US (but it does take international cards). The original FeeFighters product (comparison shopping for merchant accounts) is in Canada though, so you can still get a great deal on a merchant account (http://feefighters.ca)

Samurai will eventually get there at some point. Likely first in Canada in the next month or 2 and then we'll explore Europe. There is SO MUCH DEMAND for international that it's overwhelming. We really wish we could help out... the truth is that each country we enter is really complicated and we have to tread carefully because we need to ensure that our partners are great, that we can provide round the clock support, etc. We just aren't there yet.

Fill this out and we'll let you know when we launch in Canada:
https://docs.google.com/a/transfs.com/spreadsheet/embeddedfo...

And this one for Europe:
https://docs.google.com/a/transfs.com/spreadsheet/embeddedfo...

Also - for an overview on credit card processing (if you are wondering what the hell a gateway or processor is, etc) - check out our ebook (note this was written pre-samurai):
http://feefighters.com/ebooks/what-is-credit-card-processing...
I'm not so sure ... I know I skimmed over two sections that I recognized as ads but now, only 90 seconds later, can't tell you what even one of the ads was for. All I know is that they weren't content.
I can't think of another industry in the world where veterans offer so much support to people trying to enter it. Very cool.
(Very limited experience but...)

Processing has a loop that runs every frame, in which you redraw the whole scene each time. So for a Tetris game, on each frame you'd draw all the blocks in their correct position. You maintain the game state however you like, you just tell processing what to draw each frame.

In Raphael, its more like a traditional game engine. You might for instance make a new Circle (or Monster, or Hero..), and give it properties and events. The redrawing would be handled for you.

Hope that helps/makes some amount of sense. My experience here is very limited, so its possible I'm misrepresenting one or both of the libraries.
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We’re looking for developers who are ready to roll with experience in Ruby, willingness to experiment with MongoDB, and love Facebook. If you stopped being knee deep in IOS code to read this or moonlight as the neighborhood “Photoshop guy”, even better.

If you're interested in joining our team, let's get started learning more about you at http://bit.ly/n8Zw2d

What we value: Making software that solves actual needs. Enjoying the team you’re working with. The option to work when and how you want. Contributing social goodness through OSS and/or philanthropy.

What we’re offering: Solid Money. Meaningful Equity. Freedom to Innovate. Relocation Costs. Awesome Customers.

What you’ll be working on: The big kahuna product. Mobile stuff. API development for integrations. Implementing customer feedback. Quickly expanding databases. Scaling. Data gathering algorithms.

We’re focused on growing PageLever into the next generation of software that shapes how we understand social engagements on the web. We’re a fresh YCombinator company with the best advisors a team could ever want. Constant ~10% week over week growth, even a month after launch. This isn’t our first company, either - both of the founders have experience in solving customers’ needs and know what it takes to succeed.

We're based in San Francisco.

Here’s some press links for good measure:

TheNextWeb - PageLever: The Facebook analytics app by which all others will be measured http://tnw.co/nwKCfq

Mashable - New Facebook Analytics Tool Digs Deeper Than Insights http://on.mash.to/nHcgSp

TechCrunch - YC-Funded PageLever Offers Deeper Insight Into Facebook Analytics http://tcrn.ch/obr83t
Why Millennials Don't Know How to Use Google
I have one VPS there because their bandwidth pricing and that's it. They are a few years behing linode in other aspects.

For instance, you have to create a fixed sized partition and you can't change that number on the setup. You have to login on SSH, google and do the resizing manually. That goes against what I would expect for a "no bullshit" hosting.
Evoz: baby monitoring startup starts shipping