skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked remotely from a home office for 2 years while commuting in monthly (about a 3 hour trip each way). I really enjoyed working from home and miss it now.

There were no communication issues or isolation things for me but that might come with more time. My wife would just leave me alone to work, if she needed something that could wait she'd just IM me and there were never any 'watch the kids for 30 minutes while I run to the store' kind of moments. It was great to be able to spend my breaks with my family.

The only issue I had with working from home is that it's more difficult to get to know new co-workers.
Right there is no substitute for a dating period. People should know this, if you think you have the right candidate but have some reservations tell them, give them 2 weeks to prove themselves and you may be surprised at how much talent you where missing. As well, use it with all candidates, remember that person that was a star in the interview but turned out to be a flop? yeah the 2 weeks works for them as well, you can send them packing in the two weeks once you realize your error.
Scientific American had a great article on this in my Pinboard: "The Secret of Raising Smart Kids: Don't Tell Them They Are" http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...

EDIT: It looks like it's behind a semi-paywall. Here's a Googled PDF: http://www.ccsf.edu/Campuses/Downtown/scientific_american.pd...
Can anyone fill us in on how they're collecting such accurate 3D detail for all these buildings? I mean are they flying airplanes with 360 degree cameras over the major cities at low altitude, for instance?
If I'm uncertain enough to want a trial period, I'd also want to keep my options open. If the position wasn't a good fit, then by the time I find out, I've been forced to turn down my alternatives.

No matter how you look at it, you're asking me to take on significantly more risk with this process.

For developers that are in demand, it's a tough sell.
If they do it, then the Android partners have no-one but themselves to blame.

Had they stepped up and made a device that people wanted then there wouldn't be any need, but just like with the Nexus range of phones, it seems that Google needs to drag their partners kicking and screaming into making devices that customers actually want. Mind boggling.
but i suspect that ita were exceptional. first, your puzzles were interesting - i imagine it's quite hard to think of interesting puzzles (how did you do it?). second, ita had a very good reputation so people were very motivated to work there. third, you may have been solving harder problems (and looking for more problem-oriented programmers) than many other companies.

i have done your puzzles for fun, but i would still be annoyed at having to do half-baked puzzles if i were suddenly out of a job and applying to a bunch of places.

(ps. and thanks for them :o)
When the Queen asked Michael Faraday of what use his funny experiments with magnets would amount to, he is reported to have said - "Of what use is a new born baby?"

From another angle, during some collider hearings in congress, the physicist RObert Wilson was asked: "Did the collider have anything to do with promoting “the security of the country”"? He replied "nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending".

In other words, fundamental research has definite technological implications, but also just satisfying our curiosity about nature is reason enough.
"The recent apps list is just that, a list of recent apps with thumbnails. There is no guarantee that the apps are actually running any code just because they are in the list."

This is the description of Android multitasking, but it's just as applicable as a description of iOS multitasking.

You can't really talk about the benefits of Android multitasking over iOS multitasking when you're describing the same thing.
I did ALS research in grad school and his case seems to be an outlier. Generally ALS is late onset (55+) and rapidly lethal (<3 years expected survival). That being said, early onset cases are often slower to progress and if I remember correctly his onset was in his late 20s, which is very early. There are really no medications or treatments that are effective for ALS, no matter how much money you have.
Startup idea: AirBnB for home schooling tutors.

You got experience, so you should do it :)
I don't think this guy's that unreasonable, there's a bit of attitude and maybe frustration but having interviewed a bunch of people lately I can relate.

I think the biggest issue with interviewing is that it can only be done well in a team. We usually have at least 5 or 6 people interviewing and some of them have to be from unrelated projects. We have the luxury of drawing from a large pool of engineers from different projects but for smaller companies it might be a good idea to pull in people from other companies as neutral observers, if that's possible.

I always find it interesting to discover my own biases during the debrief meeting.

+1 on the long resumes, though. Also, listing every programming language or CAD program in the skills list is very off-putting.
Berlin - Underground startup Heaven
"Too many talented people are on the sidelines waiting for the perfect idea. Jump in! You can make a very goood living with a good idea, and that positions you well to find a better idea."

Well said. Good ideas can very easily morph into great ones if you're focusing on the right metrics and getting user-feedback. But inaction is always inaction, and inaction can't grow.
There's evidence that "brain activity" can slow the progression of neurological disorders, particularly those that selectively affect motor neurones. I'd argue that Hawking's incredible utilization of his brain, staying active as a theoretical physicist, has helped to keep his disease from overwhelming him.
sitting next to someone while they code

Then that's not pair programming. Pairing is an act of give and take, Ying and Yang, Ping and Pong, and sometimes Tweedledee and Tweedledumb. Sitting next to someone looking over their shoulder solving a problem that you know the answer to is not pair programming. There is no act of mutual discovery at all.
It's a great sign as long as code you wrote 6 months ago is better than code you wrote 12 months ago--it means you're getting better and learning.

I think as long as you're applying for jobs you feel you're appropriately skilled for, you shouldn't get too self-conscience about your code. Like most personal things, it probably looks worse to you than it does to someone else. The fact that you are self-conscience about it, likely means you have enough awareness to prevent you from becoming overconfident in your skills.
US seems a little too trigger-happy about putting trade sanctions on countries these days. They are basically coercing everyone to do what they want or else. And they wonder why the world likes USA less and less.

I don't think this will end well if this keeps up. Free trade is a prerequisite for a wealthy society. Trade isolationism can only lead to less wealth and more wars. Trade is probably the biggest factor in reducing frequency of wars in the world throughout history. Without trade countries had to invade each other to get the resources they needed.
RIAA: Kodak/Apple/RIM patent tangle proves we need Web censorship fast
Hence the winky face.
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Antonio jose boluda
WATCH  Cincinnati Bengals vs Houston Texans
What we've learnt 4 months into our startup, and why we are making BIG changes
"...deciding to focus on consumer and commercial printers in the past half-decade under Chief Executive Antonio Perez." ...

"...the viability of the company's printer strategy has yet to be demonstrated, raising questions about the fate of the company's 19,000 employees." ...

"Kodak has lost money each year but one since Mr. Perez, who previously headed the printer business at Hewlett-Packard Co., took over in 2005. The company's problems came to a head in 2011, as Mr. Perez's strategy of using patent lawsuits and licensing deals to raise cash ran dry." ...

"Mr. Perez decided to base the company's future on consumer and commercial inkjet printing. But the saturated market has proved tough to penetrate, and Kodak is paying heavily to subsidize sales as it builds a base of users for its ink."

Much like the incompetent Borders CEO, I predict a bankruptcy filing will mean a couple million dollar retention bonus in this guy's future. Sure, Kodak was in trouble in 2005, but it still had plenty of options better than printers and patent trolling.

I love when management of cash strapped companies hire consultants to do their jobs for them: "Soon after, Kodak hired restructuring lawyers and advisers to help shore up its finances."

So in the losers column we have shareholders, employees, retirees, taxpayers (PBGC/Medicare), and the communities of upstate New York. In the winners column we have the fuckwits responsible.
Indeed. I'm sure the multiple dedicated full time assistants and general adoration of everyone around him helps keep him positive too though. It's probably easy to have a pretty terrible quality of life with ALS even if you do have money for medical treatment.
Whenever I see a firm use brainteasers during the interview process, I just wonder why they don't simply recruit the best Sudoku players. That seems about as valid a way to judge software development skills.
I made a post on HN a couple of weeks ago basically saying the same thing. It can be rather frustrating to be asked questions with seemingly no relevance to the actual position.

I understand what they're going for though - the companies that do it correctly are looking at the candidates thought process through a challenging situation.

While I think it's important to figure this out, I believe it's more important to know how well the candidate can do the actual job, that of sitting down and writing quality software. Brainteasers and writing modified sorting algorithms won't get this (unless the company is in the sort algorithm business I suppose) but having the candidate write code which could actually be used in the job would.
If I had to guess, it would related to Du.ae, the UAE's second telecoms company - they have a duopoly.
The Atari iPhone game copycat battle zone heats up
I agree that the puzzles definitely have to be well-designed. There were a few of us -- myself included, for a while at least -- who created most of the puzzles.

We also never put a puzzle out to the world until a bunch of us had solved it. There was a long gestation period, and there's a "puzzles-discuss" mailing list for working out the kinks (and, in many cases, rejecting certain puzzles entirely). So, yes, you have to make a real commitment to do it well.

On the other hand, developing the puzzles was a lot easier than most of the coding on our real system, so it's all relative. It was actually really fun to do this stuff, and a nice change of pace. One of ITA's best developers (Justin Boyan) would take it upon himself to create the "perl postcard" solution for each problem. Another (Jim Rees) would always make an incredibly fast C++ version; it usually ended up being not only the fastest of ours, but faster than all the submitted solutions as well. I learned things just by reading his puzzle solutions. :)

I found the process rewarding beyond the hiring benefits, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. (Well, I hope so, at least.)
From what I recall, students can be covered by their parents' health insurance until they're 26 as long as they're still in school. That's what most college students do.

If they're not in school, and they don't have their own job that provides health insurance, well...honestly, if they don't have a job that provides it, then they probably don't have a job that pays enough that they can afford to get it independently either. Most of my friends in that situation just gamble and try not to go to a doctor unless absolutely necessary. If they do have to...well, then they're going to be in some serious debt.

It's not a very good system, but it works for the people who have influence.
LISP is an expressive languadge and is very free form. JavaScript is very similar in their ability to manipulate even the core structures of the languadge and run time. As such they are very powerful. They give you freedom to do things that you just can't in other languages. They are free from the dogmatic constraints that other inventors choose for their systems such as OO or functional, etc. If ou want to write OO in LISP you build or download and OO framework, and you can do OO functional same thing. You can literally invent a sub platform within the run-time. This is also the reason that it becomes harder to learn, there is no OO standard or functional standard etc. and due to the nature of LISP developers there probably never will be one, as such it can make learning difficult. If it where not for Racket I would not recommend LISP as a first languadge.

Finally as a note to those that know LISP, I know that LISP has CLOS for Objects but for the subject of this discussion it is safe to say that LISP does not have a standard OO implementation CLOS is an object system but it is so different from say Java or SmallTalk that I don't think it is fair to call it OO to a person just learning as it is not the type OO that people think of when they talk about OO.
I'm sure you would like to , but it's not always practical.
Even organizations like the military who have fairly rigorous selection procedures do it in a way that can be fitted into a long weekend.
What happens when the US is no longer trading with anyone, AND continues passing SOPA-style laws that hinder the internet?

Sounds more and more like a novel I read, once (name forgotten) where everyone in America believes that China has perfected a firewall, where in reality it's America that's trapped behind the firewall and cut off from the rest of the world.
edit It's worth mentioning that the linked article is itself speculation/extrapolation on a Digitimes rumor. Questionable. /edit

Google has some difficult questions ahead if Amazon starts making phones. It's questionable if anyone else can justify selling devices like these below cost - and even if anyone else could, Amazon has the most prominent storefront and a more complete content ecosystem.
As another VT alum (two times over, and the second time being last year), I can tell you that what they're probably most interested in is the energy efficiency. Feng's group does research with both GPUs and power efficiency. Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron (also at VT) were the ones who started the Green500 list.
Having long ago been a copy editor, and now being a member of a book club, I'd just point out that not all who write write well, and that many who read do so with limited understanding.
According to their twitter account, they are were narrowing it down to an issue with NFS: https://twitter.com/#!/bitbucket

They also mention they will have a blog post detailing the outage.
I love Instapaper I've moved on from Instapaper.
I would hope "you just broke the user experience for 50 million people, there are 30 internal teams screaming your name" is higher pressure and stakes than an onsite interview loop. You can make or break your career in that situation too.

I had to deal with a crisis this week that boiled down to a poorly optimized SQL query or two. Of course, the manner in which they failed meant our DB started disk swapping and hurting our availability.

Contract to hire is something we do but it is rare. An initial try out period doesn't do us much good since the learning curve is long.

I don't trust take home assignments unless their solutions can't be googled. And it's a lot of work to create and evaluate problems of that nature. You want them just long enough, not a huge time sink for you or the candidate. You want them to demand a range of solutions so there are many ways to fail and succeed.

I agree we should not be doing riddles/puzzles. For me the most straightforward way to gauge a candidate's ability in an hour is to ask them to program on the spot and see how they act. Yes, it's a game and the candidate can learn to beat the system and oversell themselves. But the vast majority of people I don't want to hire do not go to these lengths.
NY Senators are paid well. 500k for both NY senators. Crazy.

And Al Franklet is a supporter? Something is wrong here....
Banach-Tarski: Fun with some very weird math
"But honestly: Most of the code being written around the globe is an unmaintainable, unreusable mess."

Yeah it is, and that's completely fine because most software is written to solve a particular problem and doesn't need to be reused. SOLID and GRASP have great applications but honestly for most software YAGNI is a much better principle to follow. If you're building libraries, or frameworks SOLID and GRASP are essential, if you're building applications your software is likely mostly glue. I don't worry too much about reusing glue.

This is what you get when you folow SOLID and GRASP all the time: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/cicsts/v2r3/index.j...

All you really need to know about GRASP is that it advocates the factory anti-pattern. If you're using the factory pattern you've likely chosen a language that couldn't figure out the separation of concerns between allocation and initialization and has STUPID baked into the core of it.
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California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks
I saw those puzzle ads frequently in Kendall/MIT and Harvard (what, 6-7 years ago?). It was very clever recruiting on your and ITA's part, and a much better way of using brain teasers than as part of an in-person whiteboard session.

I don't think you give yourself enough credit in the success of the puzzles. They were really well-conceived problems - just difficult enough without requiring too much domain knowledge. Very 'catchy', if that makes sense.
You can use sun.misc.Unsafe [1] and get 64 bit (long) addressing. It is JVM dependent, of course, but typically in such use cases you have pretty tight control over the stack. Unsafe pretty much covers the gap between C/JNI and NIO.

[1]: http://www.javasourcecode.org/html/open-source/jdk/jdk-6u23/...

[edit: see 'public native byte getByte(long address)', for ex.]
I don't know--I think keeping a mouse in a bottle of orange juice for two years may very well turn it into jelly. It's acidic and does not prevent the decay of the body. It's at least not out of the realm of the plausible.
> They may not know why they don't like Obamacare, but they can memorize that catchy word and they know it spells trouble.

Not to get to OT with politics, but another important part of the "Republicans are better at messaging" thing is that in general conservative positions tend to be very simple, e.g.

"drill for more oil" vs. "if we create a market for greenhouse gas emissions we can incentivize a market-based transition to a cleaner...."

"get tough on crime" vs. "focusing on incarceration ratherthan rehabilitation for certain classes of crimes actually increases crime by decimating minority communities and perpetuating a cycle of...."

"the government is bloated" vs.

Etc.
As a native South Carolinian, I encourage everyone to read the comments on the original article, and compare them in tone, content, and relevance to those posted on HN.
Ornery is fine, the trouble is that half the stuff he wants is crap. You want everybody to have a good answer ready for what their career plan is extending out a full decade? Well, that eliminates a whole lot of people, many of them perfectly qualified, for no good reason.

There's some good stuff in here, but that's outweighed by the large serving of nonsense.
I suppose the type of development 37 signals will do is more concerned with product design and less to do with fast algorithms etc.

I haven't really used their products but in terms of technical sophistication they probably aren't much advanced beyond CRUD type web apps (I may be wrong here).

If you wanted to hire a games engine developer or someone to design algorithms for google then brainteaser problems might be more relevant.
I don't enjoy brainteasers. If an interview question begins, "Four people and a goat need to cross a river...", I cringe.

But when I'm interviewing, I do ask people for a pointer to their open source projects. And if they don't have open source projects, I give them a workstation and ask them to write code. I've seen too many self-proclaimed programmers who claim, "I spent the last 2 years writing Python," who can't sum a list of 10 numbers without using Google. (Hiring can break my heart.)

One way or another, you've got to see code. Real code is best, but it's better to ask people about toy data structures than it is to hire 3 team members who can't write FizzBuzz.
Wall Street is insane: Idle TV chatter leads to 11 percent Netflix stock surge
Thanks. We were very aware of the marketing aspect of the puzzles, and designed them accordingly. The ones that made it into the T were ones that had visual appeal as well. It wasn't just coders, either; marketing and graphic design worked played a big role as well.
I don't think I'm the troll here.

The client is the WebGL application running in the user's browser. It requests the appropriate data from the Nokia's server for the area that the user is looking at. This is what I mean by "being sent to the client".

By "merged in the graphics card" I mean that the final image is composed in the graphics card.

Have a look at vterrain.org to get an idea of how these things work.
I applied for a developer job at Google once and eventually had two phone interviews.

I was asked to come up with a sorting algorithm that would run on 4 computers with more data than could fit on any one computer. I was then asked to do a complexity analysis on my algorithm.

The only thing I think that really tested was how long it had been since I took an algorithms course in college.
I was rejected in a recent interview (2 months later I'm waiting to 'hear back' means rejection) where I wasn't competent at writing algorithms to do various tasks such as implement an insertion sort based on this image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Insertion_sort_animation.g...

My confusion was the job was looking for a generalist who had experience with lots of different technologies. Specifically, working with node.js and socket.io polling methods, API design, working with some python framework and backbone.js.

I'm honestly not sure what the lesson there was. Am I a bad developer? Do I navigate interviews poorly? Does my breath stink?
Sweden Recognizes File-Sharing as a Religion