skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Runtime: O(infinity)?
I actually enjoy hearing about feature releases from other YC startups. I accept your feedback but respectfully disagree. If you don't like it, please don't upvote it.
Start with simple and fast screens, then progress to more fine-grained tests.

A simple programming question will filter out a huge chunk of the candidates (i.e., those not smart enough to code or to cheat), then email screen, phone screen, and then an in-person interview.

You should also figure out _exactly_ what qualities are most important in a candidate, and which ones you're willing to overlook.

Generally, I test for: (1) can they think? (2) can they code? and (3) can they learn?

You'd be amazed how much chaff you have to sift through to get even that much grain.
Generate two random numbers with your rand5 function, let them be the two digits of your base 5 number. Each number from 0-24 has a 1/25 chance of being picked.

If the number is greater than 6 throw it away and repeat, otherwise you have your random number.
Me: http://www.ingamenow.com
developers, designers, business folks and content producers

http://quantcast.com/ingamenow.com
If I was the Chinese et al I honestly wouldn't write the cheque. At what point does national debt drown an economy? Does crippling debt not normally precipitate war with the debtees? I'm a little worried.
Moving to Rails 2.2 Headaches - Vol 1
Justin.tv is hiring the best and the brightest to hack on our awesome live video site. In fact, we have almost as many graduate degrees as we do college drop outs!

If you're a sysadmin, network engineer, or programmer, you can find work here: http://www.justin.tv/jobs
I'm glad I've found at least one kindred spirit in this regard! I was beginning to think I was the only one.

People with a background in non-brace-and-semicolon languages are more likely to feel the same way. Others (e.g. recent graduates learning only Java) may be less comfortable with the lack of semicolons, and may regard it as "sloppy," perhaps from a lack of familiarity, or because they've never thought about it or haven't read the specs and are simply regurgitating what they've heard.

On a related note, in CSS the semicolon is a separator, not a terminator, so to pick on some CSS from an arbitrary Web page:

body { font-family:Verdana; font-size:10pt; color:#828282; } /* unnecessary semicolon */
body { font-family:Verdana; font-size:10pt; color:#828282 } /* equivalent but shorter */

Also on the topic of cargo-cult coding cruft, you'll often see pseudo-XHTML with self-closing tags that include a space, e.g. "<br />", invariably served as text/html, where it is equivalent to "<br>" with the addition of two extraneous characters and one syntax error. People still actively recommend this practice, despite the fact that even when served as HTML, the extra space has not been necessary since the days of Netscape Navigator 3 or 4.

Perhaps with very, very large and complex code if the JavaScript engine uses an old-style interpreter?

JavaScript is only parsed once, even in ancient browsers, and no matter how much code there is, the time required to download it, not to mention executing it, will typically be orders of magnitude greater than the time spent parsing it. I had never heard the performance reason before as a justification for this practice, but I consider it a total red herring until someone provides hard numbers that suggest otherwise.

Ultimately this is a question of style and personal preference, but if you happen to prefer the cleaner style as I do, I see no technical reasons why you should not use it.

Finally, never forget Wadler's Law:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadlers_Law
But you can't. If you are a large corporation, the only thing determining whether an opponent is a patent troll is whether you can dig up a patent of your own that the opponent is violating. If you can, you can use the mutual threat to enter a patent sharing agreement. If you have no way to threaten the opponent, they must be a troll.

To them, there is no effective difference between a company that only files patent lawsuits and a startup that has been forced out of the market by competitors that are violating its patents.
I have some clients who are hiring; if you like working on client sites and know event-processing systems, I can definitely help out. byrne@hunter-green.com
from all of the tech companies that we've talked to, hiring preference curves seem pretty consistent:

> immediate personal + professional networks
> existing customers/users
> extended network
> recruiters & job boards

From our perspective, that means we can create value by helping people leverage their networks (http://startuply.com/Apps/Overview.aspx), gain access to existing high-quality networks (http://jobsyndicate.com, coming soon), and by making job sites that are focused on the communities and companies themselves (e.g. http://www.startuply.com
I wouldn't worry about it that much. I mean think about it...most of Google employees are young idealistic guys who know how to program. You honestly think if Google was doing something sinister, one of those idealistic kids wouldn't throw up an anonymous webpage spreading the word that would make front page of reddit/digg/HN?

Are they doing the whole do no evil thing? Probably not. But they are hardly a sinister organization with plans for world domination using your google search history to black mail you into doing their bidding.
We'd love to talk to companies that use coding tests in the hiring process. Do they work? How well? Any insight into the design of good filters screens?
Thanks for the feedback.

I would say the ideal customer would be someone with at-least 3 programs. So for example, if you had points with United, Marriott and American Express, then I think you would find the site useful. However, the more programs you have, the more useful the site becomes.

The one feature I think anyone with at-least 1 frequent flyer or hotel program could use is the "points or pay" calculator (there's a "points or pay" link in the tab-like menubar).
i've tried it out experimentally in google docs and it looks really good for big numbers. No real proof tho and it might be that the errors counter each other by chance:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pq4tB7LQWN03gF7ImGhIP...
Followup question: How do I know I have "one of these people" such that I can not waste their time with phone interviews, etc? Letting in a lot of chaff in hopes of not turning away wheat is not scalable, and if I already knew who the good ones were without phone screening them, I could probably cut down on the interviewing as well.

I'll grant you that true networked hires may have earned a skip-the-phone stage, though I'd still rather answer THEIR questions on the phone than find a no-fit after 3 hours in-office.

Be able to move fast is always good advice though!
Atalasoft is hiring:

http://www.atalasoft.com/company/careers/#aspnetarchitect
your valid XHTML image doesn't seem to load

on the design note, those are some really good images...did you make them yourselves? Also very clean overall design

Also...kudos on the short sign up page
We are hiring developers, php, js, ui, etc...:
http://jobs.centraldesktop.com
Soylent Search is people!
The Chinese would never do something so rash... they know they have to keep loaning us money, because it's either that or have their debt become worthless. They would also never go to war with us, outside of a battle over Taiwan that has become increasingly unlikely. What's the point? No one wins with war.

And yeah, crippling debt is normally a bad thing, but you have to remember that we are making up economics we go along. As long as economists keep saying that crippling debt is ok, everything functions. As soon as the theory changes, then we're all screwed.
Google provides reliable, high-performance, high-quality software for free. They have a massive philanthropic edge and have raised the bar for employee benefits.

This article states they are acting within the law not outside of it.

The NDA's are there to hide information they don't want in the hands of their competitors. I would think even the tiniest bit of information can be used by a competitor to extrapolate what is going on behind the scenes in Google.
Looks like you just dodged a bullet given the layoff announcement
http://www.nextny.org/ and http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/ are pretty established, but I can't speak for their quality myself.

(um or http://startuply.com/#/in%20new%20york/1)
"YouTube for documents" was a pretty obvious permutation to try. Do you have evidence DocStoc saw-and-copied rather than independently-devised?
it seems like a lot of that music is pirated.
The media has long relegated it's role of being an educator. Hopefully, this mess is big enough to make editors and journalists wake up and realize that their 401k's are getting screwed too.
Tell HN: MySpace Platform sucks.
Failures of MySpace Developer Platform:

1) Multiple places for documentation
- Forums, Blogs, Twitter, "Documentation", Google OS docs

As noted in http://developer.myspace.com/Community/forums/t/4709.aspx,
MySpace platform developers are expected to keep up with all *five*
sources of documentation.

2) Contradictory documentation.
Frequently, documentation contradicts itself between forum threads, blog
posts and the official web documentation. The explanation given in the
forums by the community organizers is to keep up to date with all of the
different communication channels.

3) Broken examples.
Working code examples are rare. Many of the code examples do not work if
you copy them and paste them into the sandbox that MySpace provides.
Further, the examples use unsupported 'features', and the forums warn
against following their example. For instance, using MySpace-hosted
jQuery is flaunted in one forum post by a MySpace developer, but is
warned against as being unsupported by another.

4) Lack of support for the specification.
None of this would be an issue if MySpace *actually* supported
OpenSocial. Unfortunately, their broken and incomplete implementation
requires that you custom code for their platform and rely on their
"documentation" to understand what the differences and workarounds are.

5) Lots of broken promises.
The basic requestCreateActivity is part of the standard. In september,
MySpace said that it would be available in early october. October 30th,
more promises that it was "so close you can taste it." A developer-only
version was released November 21st, with no announcement about supporting
iFrame applications. This is just one example among many. For instance,
app invite sending from iFrames has no officially supported technique.
Unfortunately my friend took down her blog with links to all the studies, so I don't have my original sources. But if you google phthalates estrogenic there are a bunch of studies confirming the premise.

Also, it's been proven to bioaccumulate in humans, which, given that it hasn't been proven safe, should be considered a harm in and of itself.
Probably an offline question, but how is Ning to work for?
Ask HN: Review my web application
At Disqus, we're looking for a front-end hero* . The candidate should be good at everything from visual and UI design to Javascript optimization. Email jobs@disqus.com.

*hero is the new rockstar
I like to use control plus the mouse wheel to zoom in/out in the web browser -- not sure if this is what you mean by zooming.

One feature I like about Ubuntu's 3D-accelerated window manager is that it can zoom windows -- which is different from maximizing them because it makes everything (including menus, etc.) proportionally larger. So the "Windows key plus R" zooms until the focused window fills the screen. Win+1 zooms to standard desktop size, Win+2 zooms to double size, and Win+3 zooms to quadruple size, which are great for watching Flash movies that don't have a fullscreen option.
SAAS works very well for a lot of companies, besides it's bound to get a lot bigger in the years ahead.

I wrote a bit about SAAS and the design decisions you should take into account here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2007/01/moving-applications-to-w...
I've been developing this site on and off for a few months. It's developed to the point that I'm able to use it daily without an issue. But I'd love any opinions/thoughts/concerns from the HN crowd!
I think this article has some good tactics. Three additional points I would add:

1. An incredibly valuable skill is being able to clear your mind and see what you're working on from the fresh perspective of a potential user. This is even easier if you are your own target audience, or if your product is such that your team can 'eat your own dogfood.'

2. Don't forget that usability testing typically only makes sense if the participant is in your target audience. If you are targeting some sort of specific niche audience or need (and most businesses probably are), it's worth taking time/$ to find the right kind of person versus someone online who has no context for the need you're trying to solve. If you already have customers, some of them will almost certainly be excited to help test new features.

3. If you're doing research interactively, consider having someone who didn't design the product asking the questions: it's really easy to bias the results based on your expectations.

Finally, it's certainly not cheap but if you ever have a chance to do usability research in a lab with genuine 1-way glass, it's a blast!
we're hiring a couple badass engineers at dropbox (python/c++; client/desktop app dev experience preferred).

we're backed by yc and sequoia... shoot me an email at drew AT getdropbox.com
I went through this comparission recently and didn't find much between them. I ended up going with Slicehost due to their excellent collection of articles (the last time I setup up a prod linux server from scratch was about 6 years ago, so I was a bit rusty and the articles proved invalulable).
I was thinking it was Pascal - I think ^ is the syntax for pointers in Pascal, but the last time I programmed in that language, I was 12.
This is the caricature of clearly-produced-by-an-academic. The idea that founders would use a spreadsheet with relative weights to divide up the pie is so counter to what actually happens it's comical.

I do agree that dividing 100% by the number of founders is wrong. Figuring out the divide does not happen via spreadsheet, however.
I would be more appreciative if he weren't a journalist by occupation (and an aspiring novelist by extension) Emerging markets (or ex-commonwealth) literature is now trending upwards and the recent Man Booker prize was awarded for an Indian expat's debut novel (The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga http://www.amazon.com/White-Tiger-Novel-Aravind-Adiga/dp/141... )

So it isn't really a brain circulation as much as one individual's canny career movie for someone whose profession is writing. And it did work, he got published in the NY Times!

If I were more uncharitable, I'd call this "artistic slumming" for a new experience fix.
we're hiring interns! it helps if your name is darren
Your UI opening requires a CS degree? http://jobs.centraldesktop.com/details?o=ui_designer
EU bashes DRM, won't support "three strikes" rules
Google laying off 10,000? Maybe — lose the extra 0
As Demand For Display Ads Soften, AdBrite Introduces Cost-Per-Click Banners
If anyone is interested in chiming in further while we are here, I'd be really curious to know the top ways people are discovering new music right now.

For me it is: Sirius XM U (formerly Left of Center); Hype Machine; Pitchfork; Songkick (for finding shows in my area); URB Magazine; Fader Magazine; OHHLA Top 25
Blip.tv Brings Video Embeds to the iPhone
http://casttv.com was looking for a QA, you might contact them.
Thanks for your response. I'm doing an internship with Blue Brain this coming Summer-Fall, so I'm trying to get the lay of the land so to speak. It's a very interesting field, and I look forward to working in it.

Best of luck with your project.
As an entrepreneur, I strongly want to believe that something which many people find useful or even depend on can find a viable business model.

I think this helps explain the obsession over Twitter and Facebook monetization within tech circles.
I have a friend who works for pMDsoft in NYC. He says its got a great startup-like environment.

http://www.pmdsoft.com/ChargeCapture/about_us/developer.html

If you want to talk to him directly, email me at ben at devver.net and I'll put you two in touch.
What do people search for in a recession?
If you're talented it's still not a major issue to get a job in finance, lots of people are getting let go, but the good people are finding new jobs pretty quickly.

Plenty of banks are using this period to ramp up hiring to get the best talent for a bargin. C++ talent is always hard to hire regardless of the market.
I just finished a job-search for NYC.

Some hedge funds are hiring, and aggressively.

I get the idea that those hiring are suddenly flush with plenty of good applicants.

I went with Bloomberg, who's still hiring aggressively.

But, I got good leads on openings @ the Ars technica job board.
10 years ago and for a different company (in the computer game industry), we used a two question test (in C):
1. Write hex2int (without using any stdlib functions, such as strtoul(s,null, 16) for example. :) )
2. Delete a node from a singly-linked list.

Personally, I found a VERY strong correlation between what we wanted in a game developer and their answer to #1. #2 I didn't find all that valuable, other than to weed out people who'd never taken any algorithm/data structure coursework.

For that company, and those roles, it worked very well, because there's a correlation between bit twiddling, pointer operations, and knowing whether someone "gets" pointers and their job performance. That's not the case in most jobs, nor in most modern languages. (Who cares if you "get" pointers if your language doesn't have them?)

My current company asks on from a set of some fairly basic questions on the phone screen, and we pretty much grade the whole phone screen "pass/fail" (interview/thank you for your time). I can't say they work quite as well, but we're also looking significantly "up market" from what the game company needed.

My idealized criteria:
For professional hires: keep it short, but not so basic as to be insulting.
For college hires: keep it short, and probably basic.
For all in-person/whiteboard exercises: ignore error checking, exceptional conditions, etc. It's just too much effort to go through in that format.

Best coding test I ever took was for Accolade, who sent a zip file of source code for a very simple game (fly an airplane across a 2D map with mountains) and asked you to write "AI" (in the game sense, not the compsci sense) for the player. You had an evening and mailed them back a zip file with your code included. That was fun to do, and I suspect gave them fairly fine-grained insight into how good a coder you were, as there's "working", "optimal" and "elegant" dimensions into which various solutions bucket themselves.
Google's power is hardly absolute.
Not only preservation, but security and control over our personal data deserves more attention.

Who's to say what service providers can or will do with our data? Until we start seriously thinking about this and demanding basic rights, standards, and limitations in the storage and use of user data, we will continue to be unpleasantly surprised by what unscrupulous or incompetent companies do with it or allow to happen to it.
In the Wash. DC area, the local Board of Trade had a lot of small companies that wanted to network for each other's services & business. Web devs should do pretty well there, or in similar orgs wherever you are.

I did a bit of consulting years ago, for another software shop --- I think the general rule is network in the area that your customers are going to be.
That's an interesting question that I don't really know the answer to, short of falling back on the generic "trust your network" sort of answer.

Also, I'm not suggesting that you cut out the phone interview all-together, just keep it short and be ready to schedule an in-person interview them as soon as possible, preferably while you have them on the line.

When I'm looking at a company, I'm trying to determine if they're a good fit for me just as much as they're trying to determine if I'm a good fit for them. A big part of this is showing me that you have the ability as a company to recognize talent and execute accordingly.
OpenRain out in Mesa, AZ (Phoenix East Valley) is also hiring like crazy too.

Generally speaking, we're always on the look out for software engineers who write solid code with Ruby and JavaScript. If you're looking for a challenging position in software, I'd be happy to hear from you. We also have open PM and sales positions.

http://openrain.com/about/jobs
Is it a bad time to be looking for an internship?
Movements with temporal names can retain their meaning even after the passage of time. Futurism, Modernism, and Postmodernism all have specific meanings and refer to movements past their peak. You have a problem with that?
I'm not related to the parent poster, but I'm happy to see that. There's some good work done in HCI, and I'm glad to see appreciation for it.
My bad. http://www.webmetrics.com/
Try watching a skilled emacs or vi user who never moves their hands off the keyboard. Once you are skilled enough, the mouse-based IDEs just don't offer enough support for editing text.
or in Factor or Forth:

: pan egg break-in fry remove eat ;
For Kongregate, it's organic search (people searching for specific games) plus referrals (gaming blogs etc linking to games) plus in-game sponsorships (we pay game developers on a CPC basis to include our logo and link inside their games on other sites).

Every other game site does that too, our advantage is stickiness (people stay for achievements etc) and good SEO/pagerank.

Probably a lot of word of mouth, too. We could see this in our early days we would notice that a particular town would light up on analytics. In many cases most of the traffic was coming from a particular high school or something.
lenny.rachitsky at webmetrics.com

Also, our office is in San Diego. Details, details :)
About time to see the light and decide to start up his own company I'd think :) You always have to ask yourself whether a dream job is really about doing the work, or is it about being validated by the cool kids.
I put up a list of relevant job listing sites on my page a few months ago, mostly to point people to a starting page. They all still seem to be pretty active.

http://www.moondust.dds.nl/jobs.html

Disclaimer : I've posted it here before, there are no ads, it's not for-profit, only marginally relevant to this thread, yadayadayada, etc.
brilliant. Couldn't have been said better.
Good call on the W3C validator. The site does validate, but I think I'll take that button off anyway (it was giving me some problems too).

Regarding the images: We got most of the icons from istockphoto (the planes, calendars, mini charts, etc.).
Are there any peer-reviewed, properly controlled studies used to back up their assertions?

I could watch the video and track the references on my own. However, doing so for every new consumer scare would be a full-time job.

By the way, I'm still happily using a cell phone and brain tumor free. I'm hoping to live a long life if avian influenza doesn't get me. Long enough to see the end of my species by catastrophic global warming, which is unstoppable if we don't act drastically and soon, according to some folks with fancy degrees. I figure I am pretty lucky - I got vaccinated as a child but managed to avoid autism - so maybe I'll even get to be the last person left. I am so hardy, I have even been exposed to second-hand smoke and managed to survive. So yeah, I'll probably make it.

Anything you guys want me to do when I'm the last man on the planet?
Exactly why the future's so bright for merb...