skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This story is a bit embarrassing to me, but I'll tell it anyway, I went for an interview a while ago, where I got asked a basic Javascript question ... problem is, I haven't actually written actual javascript in almost 3-4 years (not simple, but not really that hard either) ... I've been writing jQuery, which is supposed to be javascript, but I digress ...

I know how Javascript works, scoping, hoisting blah blah blah, but I haven't written a for loop, or used an actual getByTagName or whatever in a long long time ... I told the interviewer this, and they seemed cool with that, they asked me to write in pseudo code and I did that, then they asked me to convert it to javascript ... hunh?

Well, I started going through line by line and started doing just that, asking them to refresh my memory about the syntax of stuff, even how to write a for loop (yup, its amazing what spending years using jQuery.each or $.each will do to you :P). Anyway, we concluded and though I was annoyed at how out of practice I was, I thought I did okay.

Well the recruiter who set it up, called me back (very nicely I might add) and gave me the feedback on the interview. The interviewer, (who had been very nice to me too btw), had eviscerated me, writing that I displayed a lack of Javascript fundamentals ... saying I didn't even know how to write a for loop.

I don't blame them, because we clearly shouldn't have been talking in the first place, they were obviously looking for a hard core Javascript guy ... and not person who could just build complex front end UIs & interactions using backbone/ember/spine/jquery/whatever, which is what I was more interested in.

But it also got me thinking about how some engineers fixate on syntax, and use it in judging other programmers, and I realized that in some circumstances it is pretty appropriate.

For example, if you're looking for a specialized dev, then that kind of stuff probably does matter; in that, it can help you spot a star very quickly ... but I also think that over reliance on it could let you miss out on people who could easily specialize to the level you want, but might not have that immediate level of familiarity with the language. But when you have to go through 100's of candidates, is that something you're willing to take the time to look out for? Should you?

Sorry for the rambling, just been thinking about it for a long time now.
I use bootstrap mostly for prototyping and get it up and running. However, the way I see it, twitter bootstrap for instance is a very well done front-end framework, and puts a high bar for the front-end dev, which is always good.
My girlfriend still complains about having to go out and buy bras without underwires so she could fly without having her boobs groped.
I think there are some good nano questions that show A) that you have worked with some piece of technology (or at least read up on it well) and B) that you have some deeper conceptual understanding of it.

For example, you could ask how to switch two variable's values in C++ with the aim of finding out whether they know about the swap function (and you can then go on to ask about template specialization for extra credit).

This would be a better question than the ones in the OP because it's not just trivia and it's not something that your IDE will do for you.

Many people will claim to know a programming language on their CV because they spent a week trying it out 3 years ago, figuring that they can just pick it up quickly if they get the job (this might be somewhat true for the 5th or 6th language, but probably not for the 2nd). And these are the same people who will then program in that language for years without ever producing any quality code because they don't realize that there is room for improvement after you know all the keywords.
I think it is important for questions to be within the scope of the resume. If the applicant claims 20 years of Java only experience, throwing in a few of those questions is just a sanity check for that claim, especially if that claim is one of the reasons you are hiring them.

A sportswriter who claimed an expertise in basketball wouldn't feel it unfair to be asked a few trivia questions in an interview. If he didn't know how may winning seasons the Chicago Bulls had with Michael Jordan then maybe he isn't as expert in basketball as he claims.

Where these questions are unfair is when the applicant is more of a generalist. They have worked on very diverse projects in multiple paradigms and multiple languages. Their skill lies not in knowing how to use their tools, but in approaching new tools and quickly understanding how to use them. If you are a Java shop and someone comes into the interview with little Java experience then asking questions about Java specific type enforcement is going to leave them a little flustered.

Cater the interview to the applicant, not necessarily to the position. Then evaluate your understanding of the applicant with respect to the position and see how well they fit.
I see that now, thanks. I did a quick scan of the doc and didn't see it as it's a little buried.
Crazy Hedgy 2.0 - iPad 3 graphic teaser
I think you vastly overestimate our ability to understand genetics. The genome (any species' genome) evolved so haphazardly and with such deep and interconnected causal spiderwebs I think it's going to take centuries to understand it to the extent that we'll be able to intentionally influence it more than genetic drift and selection currently do.

NINJA EDIT: Regardless, the certainty with which you seem to regard your claims is hardly justified (unless you've got some concrete evidence you can share). If you're wrong, we'll have wished we were thinking about these things all along.
I think this post is ridiculous. You know how many great law firms have website themes from the 90s? How many great restaurants have that crappy flash intro?

Lots of them and I'm still going to use their service regardless.

"How depressing is it to go through this gallery of sites built with Bootstrap?"

How depressing is it to go to some site that's been hyped up, see a great design, and then see no compelling product behind it?
Air travel is insanely safe. Ridiculously so. At some point we hit diminishing returns, and I think we're far past that point now.

I'd pay extra for less-safe and more-convenient air travel personally. Then again, I ride a motorcycle, so my risk profile may well be abnormal.
> The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made.

I remember reading somewhere (maybe one of Cliff Stoll's books?) that the author, a computer person, thought that a biological virus was the greatest threat to humanity. He mentioned this to a biologist friend of his, who assured him that the popular doomsday scenario is essentially impossible, and that his greatest fear was a computer virus!
I'm curious why my comment was downvoted? Just for future reference.
Great, another person bitching about seeing bootstrap sites...

I love the look of bootstrap sites. Having identical looking sites beats the shitty design most of these sites would have had before bootstrap.
My comment is in response to the discussion about this:

"Of course, my preferred solution to this problem is to allow the user to toggle the password field, so that they can view the unobscured text if they wish"

I am assuming that if the password field is being toggled, that it is not actually a password field but rather a regular text field with some javascript stuff messing around to hide the text. That would probably function just like a username field. I'm not really a web developer though, so it is possible my analysis isn't correct.
> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing.

NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same.

I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bootstrap. because there is nothing special,visually, to remember. No visual cue.

> Developers can focus on developing applications that are functional and usable, rather than tweaking CSS to make things "look right".

That's cool if you are building for just developers. But when it comes to non-devs, you don't want to confuse them, visually, with some other website. Remember, for many Facebook is a that "blue" site. With so many people taking bootstrap as it is, it's going to be... un-special.

I remember my friend discovering facebook themed Tumblr theme. People actually confused it with facebook and made comments like

"Why can't I update my status?"

"Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my fb?"

..

Also, the author is not saying Bootstrap is bad. In fact, it's good that you can focus on dev and have good defaults on CSS and design. But leaving it there is BAD. (read above, why). Take it forward.

Quick Fix: Don't use the Bootstrap top bar. Seriously, that's one major shift.

- Another Pissed at Bootstrap websites Designer
Now this makes me wonder. Can someone come up with an interview question that's strongly correlated with engineer ability, but sounds terribly unfair to everyone including the awesome engineer who gets hired because of it? How much additional effectiveness can we buy if we allow ourselves to be arbitrarily unfair, and how much unfairness will that imply?
I actually tried to resize the tab to see something similar but was rather surprised by a responsive design. What browser do you use?
Ask HN: Highest Ranking of HN Submission?
Is there any URL (within HN or third party) that allows one to determine the highest ranking a given submission hits?

Similarly, is there any way to get a listing of recent HN stories that hit #1?
Ask HN: Quitting a well paid job
I currently make around $300k/year in a software dev job that is unfortunately soul crushingly boring and bureaucratic.

I'd love to leave and have a go at a startup or possibly move into freelancing, but I keep putting it off almost solely because of the money.

How do you guys who have made the jump make the decision to leave a situation like this?

Within 1 or 2 years I could be very well set up for life, but at the same time, you're a long time dead and I don't want to wish away years waiting to get back to something I'm passionate about.

I'm asking here because I'm sure a lot of talented entrepreneurs etc have the high opportunity cost of leaving full time employment.
But in PHP, there's technically no difference between a list and a set

Sure there is. In a set, you can't have repeated values. PHP arrays can. Of course, you can implement a set using a PHP array.
"If we assume that everyone in US cities with >500,000 people makes two elevator round-trips per day, the US is losing out on 270 days of worker days per day or $13 million per year. Each elevator used wastes $160 per year. If your elevator was installed x years ago and your contractor charges you y per hour and takes z hours to invert the buttons, should you inver them? Return ((25-x)160-yz >= 0);"

Sorry but this is absolute garbage. I hate when people take a meaninglessly insignificant value, and then extrapolate it out to come up with a ridiculous dollar value, to try to prove a point.

270 worker days because of elevator buttons? Imagine how much the US loses because people sit on the toilet for 2 mins longer every day because they play Words with Friends. I assure you that lost productivity completely outweighs any time spent figuring out which buttons to press on an elevator.

Another error on your part is that you even said yourself that familiarity with the button layout will improve the time. So basically, if the same person is using the same elevator over and over again, it can't improve much further after a few attempts. It's only the first 10 times that the person actually might take more time, and after that it has reached the optimal level.

Sorry to be blunt, but you should abandon this project. It's not useful at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market
How To Make Money From Home
Council bans daughter contact over child images
The Nest of Car Stereos
I expect that what we'll see is a top layers of general purpose processing on top next to the heat sinks, then lower power layers further down, like maybe a layer of L3 cache then a stack of main memory. Probably also a lot of dark silicon which is only lit up for special tasks, like media encoding or encryption.
I am trying hard to see the point of this article. Is he suggesting that we stop using fonts as icons for buttons and menus? Or assuming that if we did use them, we wouldn't have the good sense to ensure they look essentially the same across the board? If your argument is "they don't look good at X size": don't use them at that size. And don't bother using sprites, either because the milage will vary greatly. If your argument is "they have a huge kb footprint": don't use web fonts that suck.

For every negative (so far, just one or two) point against @font-face, I can find 2 or 3 positive, more important points. Creating time-wasting sprites with multiple colors and then a giant section in my stylesheet aligning all of these "icons" is bullshit compared to the simplicity of @font-face.

If this anti-@font-face banter is by purists, you don't really understand what a purist is, or your definition is wildly obsolete.
Huh, I didn't know he went all the way to the Supreme Court.

I figured everyone should know George Carlin, but I added the NSFW, just in case people had their speakers up in the office (like I almost did - even though I'm a huge fan, it just slipped my mind). The "obviously" was a reference to him being the epitome of NSFW.
Negative Proximity
Except that you can build apps that are optimized for ICS and that degrade nicely for older versions / less capable devices.

That's how smart developers always operated. I remember when Id's Quake 1 first appeared ... I could play it on a 2 year old Pentium processor on MS-DOS 6.22, even though Windows 95 was capturing the headlights.

You can start taking advantage of ICS APIs today. It's more work because you have to test and workaround older versions too, but the thing that differentiates Android from other frameworks is that it was built with degradation in mind.
Colllor - Turn one color into many alternative ones
Everything is broken
I thought that I was seeing a lot of "... is broken" headlines lately and I was right.
Skype Certified Webcams And Headsets From Microsoft
Elevators should have touchscreen panels allowing an easy change of interface.
Text editors are not completely language agnostic if you want to use features like syntax highlighting as somebody had to add syntax for a particular language to your editor of choice.

Also IDEs like eclipse are faily language agnostic, of course the tool support is better for some languages rather than others.

I use eclipse for PHP but I only really use it as a text editor (along with some of the features that help me navigate the code easily), all the debugging etc is done server-side anyway.
We are using Graphite at Wavii. That Etsy trick is great. They just issued a new release so it's definitely not abandoned. It is cleanly coded python, we have had no trouble patching small bugs and figuring things out by reading the code.
Yeah, he seems to forget that it's just a game, and after a while people want to play new games. Games, by their very nature, appeal partly for the novelty (who wants to play a game if all the challenge is gone?) which means that when the novelty wears off, people will go elsewhere. Nothing wrong with that. It's like thinking a movie is leaving the theater because the popcorn is getting stale.
Let's use jute bags
Sounds like pretty much every salaryman in the "real world".
Amateur Astronomers Flash the Space Station
Bingo, give this man (or woman, or whatever) a cookie. Not everybody is like us, scouring the internet all day long for new startups and clicking every interesting link that shows up on HN. The average Joe off the street has probably seen 2 bootstrap based sites in his life, and has no idea what bootstrap is, and couldn't care less that a site he's using looks nearly identical to 3000 other sites that he'll most likely never visit.

This whole "bootstrap backlash" is just a storm in a teacup and a waste of bandwidth.
More here too: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/20-beautiful-resources-that...
Gorgeous - but I've never had nausea come on so fast while playing a game. Most games, 3 or 4+ hours will trigger a migraine and nausea. This one ... maybe 10 minutes.

Otherwise, awesome.
What makes you so sure things would get worse?
Its funny, that construction personnel have this awful stereotype of ignorance and clumsiness, who will break their ipads at first chance.

We construct your buildings, bridges, water treatment plants in sometimes harsh conditions, but still go home safe to our families everyday. We can also hold onto iPads just like everyone else.
but that doesn't mean that they couldn't muddle through
with an editor + command line tools if required.

Anecdotal evidence is not a proof, but my empirical observation suggests otherwise.

There is, unfortunately, an un-ignorable set of IDE users who cannot be bothered into reading documentation about the language (and I am not talking about support tools manuals). They feel entitled that the IDE should take care of those "details". For this crowd, IDE becomes a necessity and my claim is that its an accidental or an artificial necessity. Not having an IDE may slow you down but it should not stop you, and that is exactly what I have seen time and again.

I am fine with them using any of their preferred tools but they should have some idea of whats going on underneath, hence my two use cases for an IDE. If you know what you are doing, by all means use an IDE.
I've been using this for an upcoming project of mine, for static heatmaps, really simple to use.

I do wish you could alter the shape of what's plotted - at the moment it's just circles of different intensity layered on top of one another - it would be really useful to be able to draw a shape of something else (like a line or area).
Golang last build soon to be tagged RC for Go 1
But Bush did tell us why we invaded Iraq: "He tried to kill my dad." Before he was even elected he indicated a desire to invade Iraq because he saw it as the hight of his father's presidency left unfinished. "If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it," he said on the campaign trail. He never once stuck to the WMD story; it was just what they made Powell say in public as a cover for all the other reasons he gave (see the Downing Street Memo for more details.)

If Osama had came out with a multitude of mutually-contradictory statements we'd have reason to doubt him, but he was amazingly consistent from when the CIA started funding him until the US military gunned him down.
I recommend learning to use a password manager to automate creation of secure passwords and controlled by a single passphrase.

1. A good password manager can run or be made to run on many platforms, including mobiles and flash devices.

2. If you happen to use a single password frequently, then you should not forget it anyway regardless of whether you or a computer made it.

3. With throw-away/automated passwords for every site/usage, you can be more confident in allowing passwords to be saved for convenience in application password databases, e.g. browsers.

4. A good password manager should allow generating passwords based on common patterns which can be customized per site. Therefore, you become almost completely indifferent to the bizarre rules that some sites may require (since you only have to flick a few checkboxes once).

5. Password managers can easily measure and show you the entropy for your password.

A good one to use is Keepass though there are other competitive ones.
Yes, I remember a grocery store manager telling me if someone steals a pack of cigarettes - that they have to sell about $200 in groceries to make up the difference.
which meant you could develop for XP and still
run on Vista and vice versa

That's not the case. A lot of apps and drivers broke on Vista.

You should really go and read The Old New Thing, as it's really enlightening: http://amzn.to/wW0Okn
For the same reason that, as a user, I benefit from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, I am fine using Bootstrap applications.
I knew I liked my sleep! All those people that make fun of me for going to bed at 10, well I win.
As we speak, I'm running a Windows virtual machine in fullscreen on my left monitor. The VM's sole job is running Adobe AIR for the HipChat client.
Love it! Very interesting, I will have to test out the theory.
That's correct. The data was also extracted using probes under a microsope in this case.

From Dr Decapitator's page:

"The data was extracted by laser-cutting the top two ROM bits from the actual CPU logic (so it would read all opcodes as OP(00) or LD(11) opcodes depending on whether lines were pulled high or low, and neither OP nor LD can branch address), then microprobing, 8 bits at a time, the ROM outputs from before the cut. The program counter was also monitored to ensure that the data read started at 0×000 and didn’t jump anywhere."

(http://decap.mameworld.info/2010/12/16/snes-dsp1b/)

You can read more about chip decapping here: http://guru.mameworld.info/decap/index.html And here: http://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-12/dc-12-presentations/G...
Spot on. However, I would add that much of the push for 'original' designs come from many other sources beside the designer. I can not tell you how many times I have had clients request all manner of non-standard layouts and other customization to make the website look cool/unique/fresh...
Will slowdown in U.S. labor productivity spur hiring binge?
It's already been said, but can't be said enough, thank you for fighting the good fight. Thank you for being the one who stands up instead of the one who lets others stand on his behalf.
I wholeheartedly agree. This is one of my major gripes with web apps replacing native ones. I never have to figure out what's a button or a tab on a native app. It seems these two concepts get reinvented ad nauseum with web design, such that I have a hard time figuring out what to interact with or how on many sites. This tends to end up in a cyclic argument of "well, if it were well-designed, it'd be obvious." But, if it looked the same, it'd be even more obvious.

The other half to this is I care more about content & usability than aesthetics. Bootstrap lets me produce and consume content more readily. So, I'm a fan.
I wonder if you could etch channels for liquid coolant directly into every 3rd layer or so...
I've enjoyed Bootstrap for building internal web apps. It's hard to justify a big design budget for something used by a handful of people internally (unless design is your business), so just stock Bootstrap is a huge step up. It's compatible in the browser you use, it's responsive, it's easy to put anything where it needs to go. That really saves time, especially for projects that have a lot of different screens and a ton of "just add this here" requests.
Depends who I am. If I didn't know anything about carpentry, I would choose method 1. I don't have the specialized knowledge to judge his work.

Insert obvious parallel about hiring managers who can and can't program.
I imagine he would say 'What are the weaknesses of bash scripting?'
To be the be-all, end-all company that builds products for other software businesses.