skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have done this before, with some success - however, I think you might be missing the point slightly of a white-board interview. Yes, one purpose is to assess your coding ability, which you're right to say a short project could achieve.

Another is to assess your ability to brainstorm and talk people through your ideas. If it was about coding ability alone you wouldn't need the whiteboard - you could just be sat in front of a computer. I can think of several people I've interviewed who have produced very good code, but have lacked the social skills required to integrate with a large team - even working remotely. So I don't think the solution is quite as easy as you think.
(I don't disagree with this, by the way. The perfect culture that supports the perfect balance of personal and remote interaction is a dream that one aspires to, not a goal one necessarily expects to attain in one's lifetime. ;)
You can write code remotely (probably even better than you would in an office) and you can deliver and debug and do maintenance remotely, but it's very hard to do politics remotely. When it comes to convincing people, the person or team on the scene has a built-in advantage over the disembodied person on the phone or the net. This is just human nature. Monkeys gotta monkey.

Yes, yes, it used to be that the person on the scene had a much bigger advantage, and now thanks to our awesome telepresence technology the advantage is smaller than it used to be. Whatever. The advantage is still there. Blame time zones, blame the limited field-of-view of cameras, blame subtle sounds that only locals can hear, blame the fact that it's easier to establish rapport by talking about the weather when everyone is experiencing the same weather, blame out-of-band signaling of every sort, from sharing the same pizza at lunch to sharing the same hallways and parking lots to sharing the same air.

You can fight this by deliberately leveling the playing field: Force everyone to be remote most of the time, from day one. 37signals built their company this way. (And they also attracted and hired excellent writers; that's not a coincidence.) But if you don't foster that culture from day one it is hard to bolt on after the fact. Particularly because the culture of written communication and the level of writing skill needed to make remote interaction work doesn't arise overnight and doesn't grow on trees. You need to practice being an effective distributed organization.

And the problems with being remote won't always be obvious - indeed, as I said up front, the code may well be better, because offices are such unproductive workspaces. But the problems will arise when politics arise, as they do in any group larger than a given size. It will be harder to move up or around in the organization. It will be harder to sell ideas to co-workers from other departments, the ones who don't work with you everyday, because the social grooming is so difficult.

It's not just because of tax law that most remote workers tend to be contractors, and that so many contractors dream of starting small product businesses. The culture of business-to-business contracting is better adapted to working in writing and over distances, because there's several hundred years of cultural experience to draw upon: We have contracts, we have lawyers, we put stuff in writing. Selling a product to someone through the mail is even more formalized: People expect to read brochures, to get the product in a circumscribed package, to sign a contract and pay by the hour before putting in a tech support ticket. Contrast all this with the employee-employee relationship, which tends to be egalitarian and communal and rely a lot on subtle mutual teambuilding and backscratching that are difficult to virtualize.
Citation needed

(NB Gruber is not a suitable arbiter of trustworthiness)
Too cryptic!
Ah yes, excellent point.
That's good to hear. I've really only had success with people willing to work some time in the office or who would have relocated, but we allowed to work remotely (this is over several companies). The folks that absolutely demand working remotely don't carry themselves well in public channels, which is likely the root of my stereotyping.
Interesting resolution. I wish Leah went into some of the negative affects living in the "cloud" had, rather than just promote all the services she uses.
Plenty of BigCos have teams who work remotely. Often the teams that work on the most interesting, new stuff (because they tend to be smaller and more agile than the folks manning the sausage factory).
Mi primer deseo político para 2012: Que el PP se haga antifranquista (I)
Although large sections of the Magna Carta have been repealed over the larger part of a millenia, it could be easily argued that the most important parts of the Magna Carta Act are the ones that are still in force. To be English and say that you don't care about the Magna Carta Act is almost tantamount to saying that you don't care about justice; maybe that is your point.

The Magna Carta was the point at which England ceased to be a despotism; an absolute monarchy. If the Magna Carta was to be fully repealed without legislation that was morally equivalent to replace it, the justice system in England, and probably the rest of the UK, would come to a halt.
UndoTree is a true godsend!
It basically shows a graphic over the undo tree and lets you navigate it.
Really handy. :)
>coders exist to increase complexity and guarantee their own necessity

Holds true in more cases than not, at least in my experience in the enterprise. "Writing your own X" when off-the-shelf solution is available is a dominant example of this.
Dude, this whole software business thing at 37signals got started with me in Denmark.

Also, we just hired someone from Russia.

What makes it harder is that for this to work, you need timezone overlap. I now live in Spain half the year, but it does require me to work from 1pm to 9pm. I enjoy it like that and it fits well with the Spanish lifestyle, but it doesn't work for everyone.
Convert your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, all into a physical journal
This is more like a side-project, but I'm proud of it. I've been building a newsletter email list that interviews startups that are hiring.

I launched it at the beginning of December and have grown from 0 subscribers to just over 100. I've sent out two interviews so far, and I have a few more waiting to be sent out.

The very beginning was a rough chicken/egg problem. People were hesitant to signup for a new list. Startups are busy and didn't want to devote time for an interview that would only reach a handful of applicants. Because of this, I cold-called a lot of startups for interviews in the beginning. I also tried hard to drum up subscriber numbers at the same time.

Luckily, I found some startups that thought it was a good idea...despite the low subscriber number. These guys were great and gave me interviews knowing they (probably) weren't going to find an applicant from the list. They also provided some great feedback on the type of questions I was asking.

Subscribers are trickling in between 1-3 a day, so things are going to get easier as I move forward.
What Doctorow criticizes is a general problem, not a problem in general-purpose computation; we see the exact same fallacious thinking in the TSA. Terrorists attack the United States with a hijacked aeroplane, so they ramp up security in airports - and mainly in the airports. The hijackers were passengers, so they focus their attention on the passengers, and the passengers only. The target was American buildings by means of hijacked aeroplanes, so they focus their attention on who and what goes on the plane - not what may happen in a crowded airport itself. A nutty attacker hides a bomb in his shoes, later his underwear, so we have to take off our shoes and get patted down or x-ray scanned respectively.

These are people trying to catch the specific perpetrators of yesterday, as if they had a time machine and could go back and stop that individual, not people who are trying to get to the root of the problem and deal with it. When governments impose taxes on optical media, because they "help" people pirate music, they might as well tax shoes and underwear while they are at it. When external hard drives came into vogue, NAS's in particular, Western Digital blacklisted media extensions like .mp3, because that would facilitate piracy; whether the government, lobby groups or they themselves came up with this I don't know. In this digital web age, people have moved their attention from physical media to digital media online, and now "the internet" is the complicit perpetrator.

The good and bad news is that this is a general error in people's line of thought, and it is a good thing that this is a problem that you don't have to be a geek to understand nor care about, because it will affect you whenever you travel, have a darker skin than most people, or use the internet. You can bury your head in the sand, but this will and does affect every person in the Western world you can imagine. Blame the media groups, blame the TSA, but most of all, recognize that we can't just focus our attention at the proverbial shoes and underwear, but have to grasp the scope of the root problem at the core of this, and how people soon enough will find something other to try to regulate and police to no effect and benefit for us all. Today it's the TSA and MPAA; tomorrow we will have to suffer a new organization of fools and another slew of politicians.
I think remote work can work well for a well defined problem. However, for small startups often the product is changing while it's being developed. Also the energy and team feeling are different when working remotely or in the same office. It is for a reason Y Combinator wants everybody to join them in the same office.
In the spirit of reflecting on the year in piracy, let's take a moment to recognize the Scene and it's resilience in light of law enforcement. They've been going strong for almost 30 years now with hardly any arrests of any real scale.

While governments are devoting all their time and effort to catch DDOS spammers and Lulzsec, the official release scene puts out games (with cracks!) and movies weeks before theyre released. TV shows are even more impressive; you can download most any primetime show before its even aired on the west coast. All of this for free, and released in true commercial quality, yet they get nothing but the satisfaction of beating their fellow release groups for their hours invested and risks taken.

Yes, they are pirates. No, they should not be idealized or rationalized. But they are resilient and a force that, seemingly cannot, be reconned with.
Is there something similar to Org-mode for vi?
I do not question that he would agree with you.
He's not smarter than me, though. :)
Or Jeff Pace: http://jpace.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/ergonomic-emacs-keybin...
Also, there's http://placekitten.com/ a kitten themed placeholder maker that was featured on hn once. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271795)
Two things. We've definitely found that this setup works better with people who already have strong social ties present. Close by family, friends helps, but spouse + optionally kids really does it.

Also, at 37signals the career path is not one that leads into management. If you're looking to climb the ladder at a bigco, then sure, I wouldn't recommend remote working.
Ship - Market - Ship - then Repeat

Simple and to the point. People can like your idea but they can only be a fan when there is something they can actually use. Unfinished maybe but getting better all the time.

I started today.
This mirror does not auto-delete (as posted on r-devel):

http://stat.ethz.ch/CRAN/web/packages/
Have any of these sites been brought to court for criminal negligence? If CC# are getting dumped, they probably broke a bunch of PCI rules too.
I specifically got the Kindle DX for manuals and other tech books, and it's been awesome. And approximately the same size/weight as an iPad...
People want instant gratification...
Seriously.
Use TextMate if you want a quick to learn, but limited, editor.
The official reason for the Iraq war was to prevent 60 year old technology becoming available to a government that our government decided would inevitably use it in a way that would be harmful to us. The war on drugs is a war on the possession and manufacture of even older bio-technology.

The control of and access to technology is one of the main fulcrums of human history. That's because control and access to technology inherently determines control and access to military, economic and political power and often those in power are always looking to consolidate and guard their privilege.
We generally never hire anyone we haven't seen before, unless there's overwhelming evidence that they'll kick ass. For example, we hired Pratik Naik from London and it took more than a year before he met anyone else in the office (couldn't get a visa).

For everyone else, we fly them into the office to determine if they'll be a good social fit. If so, they're hired and fly back home to get work done. Works great!
How a Culture of Failure Rescues Entrepreneurs
For me it's as much about not liking working at home as wanting face to face. I'm too easily distracted at home.
I would recommend Racket as a first language. It's tiny, can do a bunch of things, and has a reasonable intro to programming book here: http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/.

If he passes on that, Lua would be a good option. It has all of the goodies we'd expect with JS or Python (other than being the only language you can run in someone else's browser), but lacks a great deal of bloat, unintuitive scoping rules, and gotchas associated with weak typing/falsiness/that's-a-unicode-when-i-wanted-a-str.

Above all else, though, he should probably pick something other than Java.

My rationale here is that Racket or Lua will make it easy for him to learn programming because the language will be so simple as to require almost no time to learn. Then, ideally, he can use his established knowledge of programming with whatever other language he likes. Learning some larger language like Python or Ruby first would be more difficult, but is not a bad idea. Learning Java first will be even more difficult and may cause long-term damage depending on the amount of OOP koolaid he ingests.
I think the balance really is important. What we've found is that just meeting up 3-5 times a year does the trick for us. We don't need every week.
Norway Has Advice For Libya: how a nation can prosper with an oil-based economy
I haven't seen any one product that does all of that, but generally I want to separate heartbeating and status updates from the other queue functionality. ZooKeeper will do a lot of the heartbeating, presence, status changes, list clients, etc. I don't think it's designed to function as a queue though. I think with a combination of Redis and ZooKeeper you could get what you want.
SOPA as a Campaign Issue: Karen Kwiatkowski Goes After Bob Goodlatte
for Android there's also iTravelFree (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rezendi.itravel).

But you're right, waiting forward for the offline HTML5 Wikitravel app. Now with antimatter15's script it's only a matter of time and goodwill :)
That's a ridiculous position to take. He's not any of those things.
I went to college for CS, but quickly switched to biology. I worked in a neuroscience lab for three years as an undergrad and was a co-author on a Human Molecular Genetics paper.

Post-graduation, I worked at MIT in another neuroscience lab for 1.5 years. I'm co-author on another paper which is going out for review soon.

Despite my nearly six years in research, I've decided getting a PhD in biology is a fool's game - I'm quitting in two weeks to become a freelance developer. I've squirreled away $7k in savings (~20% of my yearly salary) which should give me about a 6-8 month runway to get this freelance thing off the ground.

Doesn't seem that risky to me, but everyone thinks I'm goddamned crazy for doing it.
I'm moving home (out of my parents, over to Yorkshire for a new job) in the next couple of weeks and I'm doing something similar for entertainment. Rather than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house, I'm using that money on a decent internet connection (S Yorkshire has subsidised FTTC broadband), buying a nicer monitor instead of a TV, and just watching recorded and on-demand stuff online.

Having said that, I'm not sure about the other stuff. I actually like going out into town and buying my groceries. It's social interaction, it supports local shops, it's a great way to get to know the place and the people. I could easily sit in front of a computer, pull up Tesco.com and order stuff in, but it's not the same. I'd actually question whether that's even "living in the cloud" - surely it's just internet shopping as it's been since about 1999?

The same goes for radio. Yes, you can switch on Spotify, Pandora, Rdio or any one of those services and hear your favourite songs, non-stop and commercial-free. But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room. (Disclaimer: I work in FM radio.)

The cloud is great, the cloud is an innovation, the cloud is very useful for many, many things (I use Dropbox, Google Docs, iPlayer, and so on heavily.) But to move your entire life online? I work all week sitting in front of a PC. I couldn't transform my free time into that too.
In a couple of important places Rakudo really stalled in the last half of 2011 due to the unfortunate absence of pmichaud++, its 'pumpking'. Jnthn++ and moritz++ have been able to recover some of the lost territory, but I'd say there's been almost a 50% drop-off in the rate of overall progress. I'm afraid the bus number is too low for expectations to be too high.
Zeitgeist 2011: Year In Review [video]
There is much wit in this brevity.
A few takeaways from what I've learned after 4 years of experimentation with outsourcing / hiring remotely in my own full-time online business:

- Turnover can be a problem. I went through 3 part-time workers in the course of 6 months because they moved on to bigger, better projects. The hourly rate was great, but the re-training and inconvenience was a nightmare. When my third iterations employee for the position ended up being a rock-star, I worked HARD to make her feel like part of the team, encourage her, and gave occasional bonuses even though she was an hourly, outsourced worked. She's been with me for 2.5 years.

- Hiring full-time, salaried employees in your time zone is EXPENSIVE, but eventually necessary in you want to free-up your time, grow the business and maintain quality. For a while, I really put off hiring a full-time operations manager, instead trying to work with professional, part-time remotes in a time zone 7 hours ahead. I saved a little money but dealt with tons of logistical problems. If your employees are solely building a product, this might not be an issue. But if they have any time of consistant employee communication, time zone shifts can get complicated.

I finally bit the bullet and hired a full-time, local operations manager despite the expense... ...and it has been worth it. I was able to interview face-to-face, which I think is important for critical positions, and ended up with a guy who I 100% trust with the operations of my company. I spent 7 months last year traveling internationally, and was often out-of-touch and 12+ hours ahead of my business and customers. Without a local, full-time employee to manage the business for me that I trusted, there's no way I could have done that. I possibly could have found someone remotely to do this, but I would have had to spend a LOT of face time with them for training, and to feel comfortable at a level where I'd leave for an extended period.

In summary, I've found a combination of remote and local employees really works best. Remote outsourcing offers a LOT of great talent and potential, but it's no panacea; there are plenty of logistical issues to be considered. But with the right planning and local/remote diversification, it can be a great tool for growing your business.
What I very much appreciate is that the article, rightly, gives credit to Nokia for proliferation of mobiles in developing world. I'm from India and I still remember my first phone was Nokia 3310 in 2002. I'm sure Nokia did it for the profit but that doesn't change the fact that I became loyal to nokia for making quality product and helping me better my life.

The same thing will happen to android, I hope. Nokia provided excellent hardware for me and Android will provide excellent software for the younger generation of India, Africa etc. And that is the point of the post.

Sure, Apple provided a huge boost to smartphones and industry will be indebted to Apple. But, as I'm indebted to Nokia not the company that boosted the mobile phones, future generations will be indebted to Android and not to Apple that boosted the smartphone market.
There are a couple of work-in-progress `org-mode` clones for Vim, VimOrganizer in particular. However, I do not feel comfortable recommending either VimOrganizer or its counterparts. Personally, I've realized that any `org-mode` implementation to Vim would be going against the editor's nature. I might recommend TaskWarrior if you're looking for command-line GTD application as an alternative to `org-mode`.
Canvas Fireworks to celebrate 2011 data
Only for Lion, unfortunately. (Maybe everyone else has already upgraded.)
I've mentioned this before, and its interesting to see it being pointed out by more than just me.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813915

Some options for the talent crunch are:
1. Grow your own talent from inexperience
2. Pay for relocation
3. Entertain telecommuting.
4. Build a satellite office in an area where there seems to be a mass of talent. Bay area companies take note, San Diego is absolutely crawling with unemployed talent.
> 37signals has people from such distinct tech hubs as Fenwick (Canada)...

I hate strong statements that have the out of being tongue-in-cheek. Fenwick is not any type of tech hub. It's a high rural area with the closest mid-sized city (St. Catharines) about 50 km away.
England has detention without charge, let alone trial.

It starts with 14 days, but extends to 28 days. People keep wanting to push it to longer; 48 days and 90 days are commonly heard desires.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jun/10/terrorism.uks...)

There's a whole bunch of stuff under counter-terrorism law that pretty much tramples over Magna Carta rights.
Wonderful. I am envisioning a live pair of images, palette and picture, so manipulations of the palette altered the picture.
Says the multi-billion cell evolved mathless organism.
Google and Yahoo are afraid of change