skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the take-away point for me:

> Everyone says they're detail-oriented in an
> application; I just make my employees prove it.

CVs are great, certifications and qualifications are great, but if you claim you can do something, I want to see the evidence.

When I'm hiring I want to see that the candidate has

* ... thought about what I will want and/or need,

* ... makes direct claims that they can provide it/them,

and then

* ... provides evidence to support their claim(s).

All the talk about FizzBuzz, trial runs, grammar Nazis, choice of typography, and every other hiring cargo cult comes down to:

Show me you understand the job you're applying
for, then provide evidence that you can do it.

Evidence that you've even thought about these issues will get you through the door.
I've always had a problem with these sort of suggestions, the idea that somebody without self confidence could gain it simply by repeating a mantra and brainwashing themselves would have me questioning the self-awareness of that person.

I have tried similiar things, and ended up laughing at myself over the ridiculousness of the entire exercise. I've found that self confidence is a little deeper than tricking one's mind and that any confidence gained by techniques like this would be superficial at best.
Depends on what you consider reality.

Anybody who can run a business can send invoices. It's not hard. So if you have trouble doing it, the question is why? If, like in the article, you have to get drunk to do it, then there's something going on inside. Sure, you can hire somebody to do it for you. But that just hides the problem. Brain tumor? Try aspirin!

I've never tried the affirmation thing, but I wouldn't knock it. Many, many good people lack confidence because they've been told over and over that they're bad, wrong, dumb, etc. It's not crazy to say that telling themselves something good and truthful might help.

Your proposed solutions would work on a reasonable person, but if we were always reasonable, the world wouldn't need psychiatrists and therapists.
This sounds very sub-optimal from the VCs' perspective.
Accessing web application features with Alt + <key> is one of the things this Ubuntu feature is about.
Right thats for enterprise software, not startups.

I wrote a little bit about the differences here :)
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/03/enterprise-vs-consumer...
Building a Unit Test Framework in 26 lines of Lisp
> I do have 4 half-Chinese half-siblings, but they are irrelevant.

That's racist.
She'll probably use it when she has her baby in October.
List of Top 5 iPhone or iPad Reading and Editing Applications
The future of Recycled Art
World is full of art. Everything that we see is the piece of art. Nothing in this world created without the help of art. Everything needs art involved in it. The keyboard I am typing from, the screen you are looking at.
>Monads vs imperative languages is a bit different though, since Haskell-style monads are more than just a way of allowing an imperative style. For example many other features like list comprehensions and parsing is also based on monads in Haskell.

So maybe monads are useful for implementing language internals. But if we assume my language has list comprehensions and a parser (however they're implemented internally), what would I as a user of the language want monads for?

I keep hearing that monads are great, but every code example I've seen using them seems like something that I could do more easily in python, without a monad. So I'd really like to see any examples of code that you would want to write using monads, even in a language that has imperative constructs.
A flash sale is a discounted sale that is available for only a very short period of time. It's the model used by companies like Fab, Groupon, Living Social etc. Anyone or business can pretty much do a flash sale for anything they would like to sell.
I think there is this (from my limited experience rather naive) belief that if a bunch of smart computer people get together, they can solve problems that have flummoxed biologists for long. This is something pervasive which afflicts even the smartest ones (See Steve Yegge's talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8 on how The Data Mining needs to be used more to solve problems in biology).

Having spent some time in grad school foolishly believing that all biology needed was a sprinkle of math and a generous dollop of python skills, I think the problem is that in Computer Science we have problems that are sometimes insanely hard but due to the several layers of abstraction, are inherently rather deterministic and much less noisy than real-world systems. I think the best comprehensible example comes from the physical layer of most electronics where several of the modeling equations are naive approximations designed to work under specific conditions. The complexity becomes even more overwhelming when you look at biological systems: The nonlinearity especially in say genetic hacking becomes apparent when you realize that each tiny modification has so many unintended effects (making modeling in a computer environment especially difficult) which is why biologist go through the grind of running all those "boring" real world experiments in labs. I think there are quite a few research labs that are using data mining and machine learning techniques to try to solve problems but we are at most quality places well beyond needing "smart people with computer skills". After a while, fundamental research requires, like you said, money on a massive scale which VC's really can't afford.
I want to echo this last remark. We often need to sync with the server and our UI can get to be relatively complex. Backbone is an outstanding tool for us. However, we don't have single page apps (yet) and we've removed any routers from our apps since they were unnecessary.

I believe many of the references on the web regarding Backbone (blogs, tutorials, stackoverflow) actually confuse matters and made my team's learning curve steeper than it needed to be. Also, the Backbone documentation isn't particularly newbie friendly. I strongly advise anyone first looking into Backbone to ignore Routers completely until the relationship between Models and Views is understood, and you've deciphered the patterns that express that relationship.

We also use Coffeescript, which increased the trouble of learning Backbone. But it was well worth the extra head scratching.
Is it just me, or is, blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html a bad choice for url on this subject?
One thing I've always loved about SQL Server is the Adventure Works OLTP and data warehouse DB samples, they are absolutely priceless when it comes to experimenting and learning. Is there something like that for Postgres? Is Postgres even intended to be used as a data warehouse and, if so, are there any decent business intelligence tools that can work with a Postgres warehouse? I'm not looking for an open source Analysis Services/Business Intelligence Studio equivalent, just something that I can build some cubes with and run MDX queries against.
I'm unfamiliar with that work, and I'm not much of an affirmations person. But the victims of victims thing makes a ton of sense to me now that I'm old enough to have watched kids grow up.

Kids are incredible sponges early in life. They soak up so much. In the store I see parents saying things to their kids and think, "Wow, that's an expensive therapy bill in the making."

Personally, I don't worry too much about remembering the particular interactions in my past. I treat it more as a reverse engineering problem. Given my behavior X, in what circumstances could that have been adaptive?
Thanks, I disabled the SSH key until more information is available.
The media is complicit. No one who watches any of the major news channels will ever hear of this.
"Show me you understand the job you're applying
for, then provide evidence that you can do it."

In return, I ask that an employer provide some substantive description of what I'll be doing, giving me the opportunity to think about it.

Actual job posting I saw recently:

----------------

Requirements:

* Object Oriented PHP

* Efficient in MySQL

* Experience with programming logic, great code writing style

* Understanding of HTML

* Strong database architecture and implementation skills

* Team Leader

* Ability to work independently

--------------

This tells me pretty much nothing.
Oops. Google translate link: http://translate.google.com/translate?client=opera&ie=UT...
As a spare-time grammar nazi, I find it quite fitting.
For us it was way cheeper. Still a shocking amount for a small studio. I'm not aware of any "pricing structure", or if there is any; I heard the number we were supposed to pay.
Programming is algebra in some instances, it's calculus in others. When you want to display something to the screen it's geometry and trigonometry and if you're you're doing 3d work its' linear algebra.
A style Guide Guide
How do you know it would be any better if you started with Scheme? Can you say you didn't get programming until you switched to scheme? Or did you get Scheme "very quickly" because you were already familiar with programming concepts?
YouTube Introduces New Feature Face Blurring for more security
I think that's perfectly reasonable. Although I'm not a native speaker I quickly get annoyed at people's inability to form proper sentences. But only in formal situations, such as the job application scenario in the original article.

I went to a Barclays bank in the UK the other day to try and open a business account. One of the main reasons I didn't go with them was that the guy who was going to be my 'personal banker' could not spell the words maintenance ('maintainance') and developer ('devloper'). This just makes you seem incredibly unprofessional and unworthy of future dealings.
I was 3 years old so don't remember it, but I do remember looking up at the moon and thinking that there were people walking on it right then. That would have been a few years later, but I can't have been more than 5 by then.

It was worth doing, but it's been done. I hope we go back in my lifetime, certainly in my children's lifetimes, but for better reasons than just 'because'.
Looks well-done. If possible, Id love to be able to extend it with a custom set of non-js-syntax commands for the current document. If also possible, Id love to embed it in the document-- independent of mozilla.

Id help with a fork if you think that could work.
Fortunately there is a default IP limitation in place, however it's still worrying.
Assuming OP can program, finding a job in one of the code mines isn't going to be hard. What is going to be hard is:

1. Finding a place to live (The SF market is god awful. Living in the southbay without a car will limit any "networking" opportunities.)

2. Living within your means. We are not in Kansas anymore, that 6 figure salary in the code mines will vanish quickly when you add up rent, living expenses and entertainment (Oh, also if you come from a state with no state-tax, we have those around here too, fun!)

3. Manage to find time to hack on this project that is going "to change the world". At first, you will definitely want to go to every meetup in town and every beering event that startups provide, you will end up not having time to actually build a product. So dedicate sometime to do that too. :-)
It's kind of b/s though to assume that just because a company does better it's all due to the CEO.
Selecting the Right Idea for your Product
Maternity leave is typically separate from other accrued PTO.
I do the same: unstructured e-mails, poor grammar and, in general, bad writing style make me reject applicants instantaneously.

However, I wonder if I'm letting good candidates go just because of my grammar nazism.

How do you (folks in HN with more experience at hiring) feel about this?
I haven't tried it. But if you've only tried it enough to laugh at it, how would you know whether or not it works?

Thinking back, I remember a friend in high school who was brilliant, but had no confidence. At her slightest mistake she'd say things like, "That was really stupid." If you tried to encourage her, she'd brush it off or disagree. It all made sense when I saw her with her dad, who at her slightest mistake would say, "That was really stupid."

If it works to remove confidence, I don't see why it couldn't work to create it. And indeed, my 6-year-old nephew has a lot of self-confidence when trying things new. I doubt it's unrelated that he gets a lot of encouragement for every step forward he makes.
Gunman kills 12 in Colorado movie theater
Well that's got nothing to do with Mono though. Do you have any examples of what you are trying to do?
Show HN: HitchMe helps your texting game.
It's a bit bigger of an issue than that. There's nothing wrong with easter eggs, but the big issue here is that it is a sexist remark at a time when women are having a difficult time making it in many STEM fields, specifically software development, directly because of the actions like this that affect them in the workplace.
I think it's a fair, but just to simplify the argument:

Poor grammar often is an artifact of a person being inexperienced with reading, writing, or both. Either that or a sign of an unwillingness to learn. Both of these are red flags when hiring.

On the other hand, if your "zero tolerance" policy includes things like my usage of an oxford comma, chances are I don't want to work for you.
Code refactoring cat [gif]
So... Yoda and all the internet kitties are out of luck...

sad it is;

or . , ;; :

one of those
Just don't leave your SSH service open to the internet. Set yourself up a VPN and block SSH to your internal LAN.
I have the same trace in my logs and I disabled the key for the moment. For a quick translation because the page is in French:

If you have a server with OVH, they setup by default a secondary SSH key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 which is allowed to access your server only from a single IPv4 and a single IPv6. This is to allow debugging of your server.

It looks like the private key has been compromised and is now used to try to access the servers from another IP. Your server will not be compromised, but by security, better to disable this extra key by renaming the file "authorized_keys2.disabled".

You can check your logs with a grep like this:

# grep "correct" /var/log/auth.log
Jul 17 21:42:49 node1 sshd[18548]: Authentication tried for root with correct \
key but not from a permitted host (host=178.63.21.XXX, ip=178.63.21.XXX).
Remember how you could just talk to people any way you'd like (email, IRC, lists, usenet, forums, IM etc.)? Forget that, that's boring (or rather inconvenient for us to intercept). Talk to people though us so we can read your conversation without any effort, profile you and then sell you to our advertisers. It makes perfect sense.

What is wrong with the Internet? It was going so well.
Tetris-like video games may help prevent the development of traumatic memories
The future of cloud computing: 9 trends for 2012
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pubid=ra-4ec9f6550a9f273d
> His comments, and those on the Linux mailing list, have started a huge debate about whether use of the string was sexist and how male developers should conduct themselves.
Now I want to know the following:

1) Will he hire people who can't tell active voice from passive? (Check out the Language Log archives for how many grammar and style nazis can't tell the difference.)

2) Does he require that you can tell who and whom apart and use them in their correct cases?

If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors in Linguistics ;-)
Great article!!
Really interesting facts on bandwidth vs latency.
A starting businessman should NOT be apprehensive about sending out invoices. There is no shame in asking for someone to pay for what they have purchased.

REMEMBER: you're doing them a favor by not forcing them to pay up front. A 30-day same as cash policy is worth {cost of capital}/12

If you think reminding the customer about their bill is "begging", "only a business necessity", or whatever, you are wrong.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you bought something and thought the store was begging by asking for payment. Safeway is not greedy, begging or anything of the sort when they ask me to pay for a loaf of bread. And you are not being greedy by asking for payment for your work.
How to Create a Landing Page Design + Free PSD Download
It is not supposed to be so hard that you have to get drunk before doing it.

I agree that you should face your fears. But if you have fear to the point of paralysis, I think telling people just to man up is bad advice. It's like the dieting advice one gets from people who have never been fat: plausible on the surface, but ultimately it comes out of ignorance.

I also agree that one shouldn't blame one's parents or the world. But that's different than understanding how one's relationship with one's parents has shaped you.
Hi, Author of locache.js (http://locachejs.org/) here.

I think there is a good use case for something like this in certain situations, but using the browser cache for Ajax requests is generally a better idea.

I wrote locache as a more general client-side cache mechanism for all sorts of objects rather than just caching requests. I was caching lots of backbone models and user actions - it generally worked quite well. I also actually used it quite a bit for caching third party API's that I had no control over (more specifically I was working on a mashup using three different API's and often fetching the same content). When being lazy I tried once to cache my own API and regretted it after as its basically a poor mans browser cache.

Your going to run into a bunch of issues with localStorage if you have not already - specifically to do with memory limits, the blocking API and some strange support on mobile browsers. You may find some useful things in my code, or you may want to drop me a line to discuss it further.
The Power Users Are Revolting
LOL... "I won't hire people who use POO"

Best URL truncation from a serious topic, EVER.
Thanks! It's built using the mapping library Leaflet, JS/CoffeeScript on the front end and Python/Django/Celery for the backend, which runs on Amazon EC2/S3. Took me probably a few man-months to build and refine it, still needs lots more work though.
I agree. I think Eric S. Raymond nails it:

"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers."

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
This was one of the most useful blog posts I read in the recent few days. I am an entrepreneur and I too have multiple beliefs that hold me back. In the end it is about recognizing conditioned habits that are holding you back and using positive affirmations or prayers (http://www.easwaran.org/saint-teresa-of-avila-let-nothing-up...) to come out of them.
In my experience these techniques work very well in overcoming negative habits like anger, fear and greed. I practice Passage Meditation (easwaran.org) and its main punch line is, you become what you meditate on.
I see resistance to follow these techniques from many people, yet many willingly fall prey to negative media. In essence you are eating/consuming through your senses all the time. By consciously choosing to fill your mind with positive messages you can overtime become a much more productive and happier person.
I just fired off an e-mail to OVH to see their response (and to probably make them more aware of this).

OVH pre-install a number of things by default on their Debian image including monitoring software (it integrates into their manager) and this key.

The only way to make sure things like this are a non-issue is to do a clean install yourself, e.g., via debootstrap in "rescue pro mode".

You can then install the key on their request if required giving you more control.
I find it funny that this is offensive to some people. I cringe that some of the silly names we have given internal code bits or projects might one day offend someone somewhere and need to have a formal apology. It's a good thing people can't get under the paint of their walls as it's common for construction workers to write notes and draw on unfinished sheetrock.
This kid would definitely make a great marketing person. There's absolutely nothing new in what he's done but he's presenting it really well, thumbs up to his parents who have probably done quite a bit of the work ;)

When I was 18 (10 years ago) I did loads of research into that stuff and knew just as much about information retrieval, vector space tf-ids models, latent semantic indexing, wordnet analysis, etc. At the time it was fairly cutting edge research. This stuff isn't anything new now, I was actually forced to decipher some research papers instead of reading popular books on the subject. It was fairly obvious to me back then that none of these techniques worked well for general web search. I did end up building a system that clustered google search results (in realtime) into DMOZ categories letting you refine your search results by clicking a category (which was actually useful and worked quite well in case you were searching for something ambiguous like "jaguar").

None of these techniques are new to anyone working in information retrieval. Just looking at co-occurrence of words in tweets and expanding the query with some related terms (weighted appropriately) would probably achieve what he has done (weekend project for an average dev).

I'd call this kid really smart if he'd actually figure out how to improve general web search, or could think of a useful application at least. Talking about existing research and making it look like your own isn't great form in my opinion. Coming up with your own definition for a "word" just makes you look stuck up. Much better off acknowledging work of other researchers and quoting them, although that would never generate as much press I guess.

Sorry if the rant is quite negative, I'm just getting a bit fed up with all the marketing surrounding "young geniuses" and teenage entrepreneurs these days. If I wanted to read that stuff I'd get the local paper.
"And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details."

A grouchy pedant might remark that this parses as "When good writing and good grammar come to programming, they are in the details; so also is the devil when it comes to programming."

I would not hire somebody who writes badly to be a technical writer, or to do any worth that requires a lot of writing. However, I have worked with a number of persons who did not write well but were very effective at complicated work.

[edit: for 'worth' read 'work']
It should be ok. I'll also add a pasted something
So someone set 0xB16B00B5 as the guest ID in the hyper-v code in the Linux kernel, and some other people got offended and asked Microsoft to change it.

I don't see the problem, I don't know how someone could be offended because of this. And as Paule Bolle says [1], it can be changed without breaking anything.

The only serious thing that comes to mind about this is the MS Trustworthy Computing initiative, but I don't think it has anything to say here.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/13/362
Toiture Quebec
Understanding the Whys
> We start it, early adopters. The mass picks up on it after a few years, only if it gets started in the first place.

Which, coincidentally, is a LOT of what you can see happening these days with "social networking" and "cloud computing" and all those other hypes and trends that basically existed very well in the 90s and before but now the public is "catching up" with technical developments.
i wont read an article about people who use poo

blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html
It's not about leaving a humorous note or reference (I know I've left plenty), but that it's a sexist one reflects poorly on developer culture.
I'm guessing he isn't a big Steve Jobs fan.
Thought 18#: A better SQL editor