skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I stated in the thread kemayo referred to:

1. I got as far as a promise of a second interview that never materialized. I found it annoying to be told that they wanted to give me another interview, then that they 'moved forward with another candidate,' then to see that the position is seemingly unfilled months later. (I'll note that they were posting in the "We're Hiring" threads within a week or two)

2. Between stages in the interview process I would be told that I would be hearing back from them 'shortly' or 'soon.' This ended up being an average of 3 weeks between stages in the process. Which was rather frustrating.

[edit] I'll at some other notes:

1. The programming problem doesn't have to be perfect. Mine wasn't. They pointed out that my code was susceptible to SQL injection during the first interview. And I also missed a JavaScript gotcha (that was obviously placed there intentionally). [Obviously you want to do as well as you can on this, just sayin' that they aren't requiring 100% on the problem to get your foot in the door.]

2. I was able to get an interview with little PHP experience.
Yeah, I like this library but SVG is still an issue on Android 2.3. Besides that it's great. I see video game companies using this to create Dashboards with stats for online gamers.
> If everyone lived in cities as dense as portland, the current human population would only be living on about 2.7% of the world's land mass.

What is the human population's current footprint? Wikipedia says humans' average population density worldwide (excluding Antarctica and oceans) is about 50 people/km^2.
I would encourage anyone wanting to apply here to read this first: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061860
Blame the government, not Google. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) pretty much makes it impossible for Google to provide accounts to people under the age of 13 without opening themselves up to major liabilities. Your uncle lied and mistakingly made himself appear to be too young to provide an account to, Google had no choice but to originally take him at his word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childrens_Online_Privacy_Protec...
As a fellow human being with faults and weaknesses of my own, Thanks!
Exactly! That's exactly what I was thinking reading this... it's a bad thing, not a feature. Why on earth would anyone do this to their repo willingly? This is visual aesthetics run amok, in the hands of someone who doesn't understand what the point of that hash value was. Ouch.
A little update - I've now replaced the power supply's circuit board with one from a modern (and working) ATX PSU, the graphics card with a CGA card (which works with the TV with the BIOS timings) and booted into ROM BASIC using a little Windows program to turn keystrokes into scancodes sent over the serial port.

The hard drive doesn't appear to be bootable and I don't have any floppy disks for it yet so I need to write some more code to see if the hard disk is broken or just doesn't have a boot sector, and to determine which RAM chip is faulty (it's only detecting 192Kb of the 256Kb onboard RAM).
How to Hire a Great Marketer for Your Company
I don't think you're really responding to his point. I'm rather in favor of alcohol myself, but there are some things that are just plain bad regardless of quantity. Food is good in moderation because without food you starve to death, but Twinkies are bad regardless of quantity; not only are they nutrient poor junk food, but they taste pretty disgusting compared to any kind of proper cake. And it's hard to come up with any redeeming qualities of cigarettes, either.
I've spent 2 weeks coming up with a name as for me having a good name is important. It's not number one but I know that good names exist so I put the effort in and go through hundreds of names. Using every tool out there before I usually come to one or two that would work.

This is great, I see two or three on there that'd work for a prototype i'm working on and may decide to release as a proper app.

Saves precious time and is worth it. Some half decent logos as well.
It probably won't hurt you at all. Copying rarely works.

So the only thing you could help other people avoid is something that didn't even hurt you.

Probably not worth the effort and stress worrying about. Put that energy into kicking their ass in the marketplace.
I think it would be hot to see the big tech companies all team up with a designer brewery and each do a signature beer. Microsoft's beer would have to be called Windows Beer 8. FaceBeer would have a QR code on it, when you and another person scan it you're added as friends. Apple's would have 5 patents just on the bottle design. Samsung's bottle would look just like Apple's. AOL would just be Budweiser poured into an AOL bottle.
I'd recommend you to go with Ruby On Rails. It might take you some time to learn, but it would be beneficial in the long run.
Yes, much lower.

Property taxes in my suburb are around three quarters compared to the nearby city (Atlanta, GA - millage rate 44.435; Gwinnett, GA - millage rate 32.10). Couple that with the fact that houses are much much cheaper, and in practice I pay ~$2000/year property taxes on my house while my friend pays over $5000/year in property taxes for his condo in the city. Then my mortgage and insurance are also cheaper, and it works out to be much cheaper. But I have to drive more.

Part of the reason is more government - cities will tack on their own taxes to pay for the city government. I have no idea what benefit this extra level of government actually provides, though.
Even if I can google programming answers or use stackoverflow, it probably takes 5 minute for me to get my answer. In other words, just because knowledge exists on the internet, it will take me a non-trivial time to retrieve these information.

Rote memorization allows me to bypass the latency and allows me to get things done faster. The rest of my brain is focused on retrieving all my experiences on how to debug or knowledge or how the framework I am using interact. I use Google and stackoverflow as needed.

My suggestion is to use SRS software like anki or supermemo and build your own deck of things to memorize such as how to get the size of an array, how to capitalize a string, etc. A good rule of thumb is to memorize anything you have to google twice. This will save you many 5 minutes of development time in the future.
Product Development: 9 Steps for Creative Problem Solving
I think you've missed my point. How much "support" am I supposed to add?
> There's a whole "no, we're not kidding; are you sure you want to take the job even given this?" segment to the offer

So, your strategy is to deliberately make your job offer sound as unappealing as possible in order to find the people-who-call-themselves-programmers so unemployable and desperate for work they'll subject themselves to a trial period? Well, I would say that strategy, in terms of achieving its goal of attracting the desperate, is working out wonderfully for you all.

From my own experience watching as my manager tries to find good people and from everything I've read, it IS hard to hire good developers. But it seems like you guys are making it much harder on yourselves.
Professors are not obsolete. Professors who spend their students' tuition on research and professional equivalencies instead of teaching and putting a majority of their efforts into their classes are.
John Dvorak has said something similar

Ouch. Next time I say something stupid, just downvote me, or compare me to Hitler or something. No need to fight that dirty.
PC Fix 2011 Registry Cleaner Features
"I’d worked places with a trial period before, but it was always just a matter of not..."

Will you be on probation after that grammatical "bug"? By the way, you guys sound pretentious as hell. I'm surprised you don't lose more than 20% in the three month trial.

What's the point in the trial? If it's not working out, just fire them.
I think it might be because good developers filter you out before you filter them out. They might spend time working on the code because they happen to be interested in the problem, but a good developer would not waste their time on dull problems just to get a phone interview because they don't need to. Especially if they have never heard of your company. If you are selecting people who are desperate for jobs, your P is not surprising. Perhaps your should fix your own (hiring process) bugs first? Maybe P(great developers applying)=~ 0.00016? Just kidding :D
Ah good spot, I missed that. I just thought this seemed a lot like the usual "anti-hype" posts, and considered it interesting that occasionally the hype is right.
New pursuit of Schrödinger's cat
When I make a hiring decision, I am damned sure. The recommendation to hire is the point where I commit to doing my best to make things work out.

I have screwed up before. It sucks. It is painful and horrible to deal with someone who is not working out. But I haven't blown a "hire" vote in 18 years. Hundreds of interviewees, dozens of "hire" recommendations, zero bozos.

It sounds to me like you are insecure in your hiring practices, to the point where you tell people "Quit your job, move your family, turn your life inside out, whatever; but you're on probation here and you're gone if you blink funny."

Maybe it's just my past, where I was in this position (and it worked out really well, btw). But I wouldn't do that again, and I wouldn't do it /to/ anyone.

Good luck. I hope it works out. But I cannot imagine a worse way to enter a job.
Facts are the machine language of knowledge. Hopefully you didn't spend university, in whatever major, memorizing long binary strings. You were meant to be climbing the abstraction ladder (say, to higher level programming and language design) and pushing the boundaries of what can be expressed and known.

DRY is for every discipline, not just software.
I don't get why the fact that TDD drives good design is a bad thing. When you're not testing your code, it's easy to start taking shortcuts and coupling modules that should have been kept separated. TDD forces you to think about "modular design", which is just great. Of course, if you're trying lots of solutions to find "the right one", don't write tests. Just write hacky prototypes as fast as you can.

"(b)in conflating TDD with one or more of (1) testing, (2) automated testing (3) automated regression test suites (4) developers adding more tests to the automated regression test suite as they develop more features, refactor, debug etc.

You can have (1) to (4) without either (5)writing tests first (aka "don't write a line..."

I get here that you're being sarcastic; but there's a difference between using TDD effectively to get the job done and using it "because it's cool" or "because people say it's nice". You don't have to write tests for every trivial things, or write tests for your tests of your tests. Lots of time, writing high level tests testing for the interfaces is a good time/quality ratio.. there's nothing wrong with that.

About c). I do agree. However, have you ever jumped into a project without tests? With tests? Which one do you prefer? Tests don't prove that the library is working perfectly; they only prove that what's tested is working. Personally, jumping into a new project that have tests give the confidence to change things and know I won't break anything. Of course, that's not always the case but I think you know what I mean.

And about Hickeys.. I haven't heard the speech and don't know about the context. But changing stuff in your language is something; but again, starting to change stuff in someone else' is different.
Mahatma Gandhi Quiz
I suspect that the density problem in the US isn't as bad as in Australia.
Lastly, the three month trial thing is, for me, a huge problem.

Yup. Your hiring practice better be up to the task of bringing in the right people at the outset, because the top candidates aren't going to tolerate a trial period. Not in this market for their talents.

I also think the trial approach is potentially harmful to the company. There's a reasonable chance that the most ambitious and positively disruptive people are going to clash with the existing team at the outset since they're not part of the groupthink.

Sure, if a guy turns out to be a mistake you can and should fire them, but starting everyone on probation is no good.
This is completely ridiculous. I went to a 60% black city public school in the midst of a ghetto. So did most of my friends. None of us ever had any issue. I'm glad I was exposed to a diverse group of people early on in life, so that there isn't any risk of embarrassing myself by making a comment as ignorant as yours.

On top of that, my friends who went to the expensive private schools (whether in the city or suburbs) had easy access to cocaine, which was not a feature of the public schools.
I can see your point, and obviously DA isn't actually solving combinatorial optimization problems while ITA is. The problem is that this problem will likely only attract devs actively looking for work. DA is a well known site, and I have no doubt that there are many good and happily employed devs who have peaked at the job description, but as you can see in the comments here this test is off-putting. If you're not in serious need of work, this doesn't seem to be worth your time (and in my experience good devs are rarely in serious need of work).

I think the reason for the low P(we hire you) is that you may be accidentally skimming off the cream here. At the very least try getting people on the phone first so they can say "hey these DA guys are pretty cool and interested in me, it's worth jumping through a few hoops", or make the test seem interesting/fun/challenging
You don't mock the drivers.. you abstract the database layer to test for a particular data. For instance, you make getName() returns empty string, 1000 wide character string, strings with unicode, etc. It's not about MySQL; it's about what mysql returns.
Google has experimentally determined that interviews 5 through 7 provide negligible additional signal, and so they've been eliminated from the process.

Contrary to latch's comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3062001, Google does tweak the process from time to time.
This will give you r/1232:

https://github.com/stephenh/git-central/blob/master/server/p...

(It makes a tag-per-commit; I'm not saying that's necessarily a good idea, but if you really want revision numbers...)
He's generalizing, of course, but it's because in the US, the suburbs incorporate into their own cities, and keep the taxes for themselves. Meanwhile, they commute into a city on a freeway paid for by the urbanites and enjoy all the benefits of city infrastructure, without paying for it.

Not sure how cities incorporate in Canada but that's how it usually is here.
The Sapeurs Of Congo
Thanks for the head's up. That's sort of bizarre/interesting/frustrating.
I read it twice because I thought I missed something. Nope.
> The effect of the train weight on track wear is minimal as it's the unsprung mass of the train (essentially the wheels, axles, traction motors and brakes) that is proportional to wear, not the static train weight.

I find this hard to accept. Just because there's a spring doesn't mean the weight isn't there, bearing down on the wheels, deforming the wheel and the track. Stand next to a train as it goes by, you can feel the ground move. All that bending/unbending of the track and bed contributes to fatigue damage, and fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the load.
That's done via fixtures, not mocking your database, and is significantly more trivial than HTTP request mocking.
Well this was a scary read... I fully understand that it was written with the sole intention of being scary, but seriously...

"He argues that financial incentives ought not to matter in a mindful society and is confident that well-intentioned social engineers can suspend the laws of economics."

Yup... people should work to better themselves without regard for reward, but for the greater good of society. Marx would be proud, but unfortunately, human greed and other vices always seem to win. Case in point - USSR and the ensuing disaster of the 90s, replaced by autocratic oligarchical rule of the present day. (First hand knowledge - I grew up there...)

"Mr. Sachs is honest enough to acknowledge that the "rich" are not nearly rich enough to pay for his ever-expansive vision of government. We're told that "each of us with an above-average income" (i.e., $50,000 per household) must "understand that if we are prudent, we can make do with a little less take-home pay." "

Anyone tried supporting a family in California on $50k income? I'm hoping my family won't have to try this.

"Government must instead quantify "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" and set policies and goals accordingly. There was a science to satisfaction, Bentham claimed, and it was a puzzle that trained experts could solve."

I seriously hope this was yanked out of context in the book, because otherwise it's a call for complete lunacy. Soviets tried this in Russia and Mao tried this in China... results were cataclysmic for the respective societies. If I could transport the author of the book to Russia of the 90s, or better yet Stalin's era, he might be signing a different tune.
上海世纪皇冠假日酒店
Maintainability is not just about you changing your code later on; it's about someone else trying to understand what you were thinking when you write it.. and then change it. Tests make that process way easier. You can add your new feature without wasting time to understand everything else and still make sure it's working. If it's your own project, meh, you know your stuff. You even know all the hack you did to gain time. I see tests as a documentation that shows me what's working. Reading tests (high level ones) is usually the first thing I do when starting on a new project. Comments change over time.. documents aren't updated.. people leave.. but tests remain. If the test passes, it doesn't mean everything is perfect, but at least you know that these things work.
have you considered nginx, tornado, python?
This is creepy not because I think Google is malicious, but because they aren't smart enough to handle privacy well.

Also this:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/30/us-internet-securi...
I've been doing interviews for a large corporation. I can tell you right away that your process is designed to weed out the best of the best.

You see, the best candidates stay on the market for maybe a week. You'd be lucky to interview them once. Nobody who is truly good will jump through your hoops.

You're just hiring the best of the ones willing to subject themselves to this ridiculous process, pretty much some desperate developers who are barely good enough to pass your tests.

And a 3 month probation - no way in the world, I would only do it if you paid $200K + bonus. The market is desperate for good developers, I'd have to be completely desperate to be treated like that.
One more thought... one place we could learn from, however, is Scandinavian view on education - merit-based access to any level of it. In a nutshell, if you are good enough, society should give you a chance to get all of the education you need to realize your full potential and benefit the society, as well as yourself.

But then again, a system like this has to be entirely merit-based. At the scale of US (300+ million people), policing a system like that and ensuring fairness will be a disaster and it will likely fail. Throw in special-interests and affirmative action, and you have a mess no better and maybe worse than what exists today.
Even though the article covers a lot of other things, I very much agree with the headline.

I am a newcomer to Hacker News, but after spending just short two weeks immersing myself into the community I only wish I have committed HN to my daily routine earlier.

There is definitely lots of benefits to posting your submissions and trying to hit front page to promote yourself and get business for your company... But merely following discussions on the multitude of technical and business problems can really help you find the solutions you have not thought about...

In just two weeks here, I've already made some contacts from the site and incorporated some learnings into our product.

Definitely want to thank the entire community.
Good Afrrtnoon America: In Flexible? | Authspot
Be warned...

The above account was created 3 hours ago and is most likely to be from a public relations org for the gas/oil industry.

On another note, if you turn on your TV you'll notice this industry is spending a considerable amount of money right now on commercials, trying to prove to the US public that fracking is the new green. And giving ad money to CNN, Fox, etc, virtually guarantees the buyer that no news that makes them look bad will ever be shown.
Additional Memory Power Management Options In Windows 8
Portland is a poor example. I love Portland, by the way, but we're essentially talking about economics here, and Portland is skewed. In Portland, you have people that want to live this lifestyle. They don't want the burden of the car, they are environmentally conscious, they work in the city, and they don't have kids. Sure, for them, it's doable (and you sound like one of them). This isn't usually the case. Industrial areas, where many people work, aren't dense enough to support frequent bus stops, and most families would have a hard time getting kids places without being able to drive them hither and thither.

I've lived in some of the densest cities in Europe, and families still had a hard time getting around without a car. At one point, I did get a car, and not having to deal with the scheduling hassles of public transportation made my life instantly easier.

You have to have an enormous population density for public transportation to be a break-even affair. Your Portland public transportation isn't self-sufficient, it's a net loss, and it's subsidized by taxes. Sure, it's more efficient than cars, but it still doesn't solve all the problems that cars do, as noted above (primarily for families). By the time you get the density required for public transportation to be self-sustaining, you're looking at a cost of living that is unacceptable for most families (eg, NYC).

Sure, public transportation is great for young single people. Try going to the grocery store with young kids on the bus. It's virtually impossible.
... which git failed to do properly. So the git-pull man page is clear that it won't clobber your uncommitted changes. Except in the (buggy) case when it will.
US Marines headed to WALLSTREET to protect protesters
If you add an `l` to the account name, you get j(petrol)sky :P

Though it begs the question: is HN significant enough in other circles that the oil/gas industry would care?
You're making the assumption people want to live there because of the density and not because there are certain types of jobs that pay more in big cities.

Glaeser's book and a lot of the other work on economic geography make it clear that the two are inherently related and evolve together; density promotes knowledge spillover effects, dense markets, and various other Good Things. See also some of Richard Florida's work (though it can be frothy at times).
It's easy. I love the city, but I currently live in suburban hell because:

- My kids can go to a better school. A much, much better school.

- I can't fit my family in the size apartment I could afford if we lived downtown.

- Letting my kids play in the backyard is infinitely easier than packing up and heading to the park (admit it, there's not a ton of parks downtown), especially when you have a baby.

And that's not even including the benefits of the cul-de-sac, which means they can ride their bikes safely without traffic, lack of noise (and our noise won't bother neighbors), etc.

I can't tell you how much we want to get out of the burbs, but I'll be damned if I'm going to shortchange my kids' future, or make us all miserable by going three to a room. My boys are already sharing a room as it is.