skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh please. I can understand not hiring someone who communicates poorly. That makes sense. But grammar is just a set of arbitrary rules that some person or group of people decided were correct. It's like a secret handshake that lets people know you're part of some smart boys club (by and large it seems like men are the only ones who enjoy bitching about grammar). To me, it says, "I went to a good school system and was taught correctly!"

Sure, I get a little anxious when people misuse your/you're. But to think it's an early indicator of success is at best limiting yourself to missing out on talent, and at worse surrounding yourself with likeminded pedantic grammar nazis who care about unimportant things. In my time as a software developer, I've met a lot of people who got angsty about grammar who weren't very inspiring programmers. I've met more people who couldn't figure out their and there or you're and your to save their lives who were both fantastically good software engineers and effective communicators.

Lets keep a little perspective here: The goal of hiring isn't to find someone who's not going to annoy you by misusing grammar in emails. It's to find someone who's going to help you accomplish your goals. I get that details are important for your company. I just don't agree that knowing grammar rules indicates an attention to the proper details.
Oh wow, I never realized that until now. There was a time when you could look up at the moon and know that a few guys were there right at that moment.
Maybe he's not a figurehead, and maybe this whole internet thing isn't a movement, but he sure is taking all the heat for something. Much respect to him for fighting back in the way he knows how to best, eurotrash techno. Oh yeah!
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Looks interesting, maybe I'll get it.
Really? That's a rather phonetically spelt word, aside from the "s" sound at the end.
Seriously? From a single data point you deçide to cry wolf? I say this as an iPad user.
Check out Fat Head. A Documentary response to Super Size Me that discusses how what we "know" about fat and cholesterol was the result of a politician lining his pockets by pushing the agenda of one of his friends in the business world http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fat_Head/70115017?trkid=23...
FFS I was hoping VanL's comment was here. The article starts of with a "the world is fucking burning, motherfucker, build your nuklear shelter in the woods! NOW!"

Honestly, is this patent any different than shit we've seen over the last 5 years from many different companies?

Oh boy, more litigation, more fees, etc, etc. I just want google to get pissed enough to start suing for map-reduce.

Now having said all that "and the vertical bar does not act as a scroll bar" -- that is a obvious improvement, you cannot claim that it took years of research to figure this shit out. This will not hold up in court. It will, however, cost lots of $$$$.
Wow, just, wow.. really?
I freaked out at first. I couldn't believe that they were criticizing developers for poor grammar. As I read on, I realized that they make a living on the written word and it all made sense.
So so much text to say absolutely nothing. But let's see how long before she starts cleaning out the house that will be the big indicator
Like I said, if your money is supporting someone doing good and gives them the ability to continue doing good, then it's helpful.

Going back to the Red Cross example: If I'm a doctor in the US I'm making very good money, I get to see my family every day, and I have a very high standard of living.

It takes one of those doctors (not necessarily from the US, but I imagine most doctors live well) to give all of that up and fly over to a country in ruins to help. Without the people who are willing to really make those sacrifices, we've got a bunch of money and that's it. Money in and of itself is not what is usually needed to rectify situations.
It probably depends if he's one of so many ignorant "grammar nazis" that don't understand how language works. Once you wade through the thin veneer of rule vomit, most prescriptivists have little to no clue about the language they are enforcing -- only demonstrating an ability to remember lists of uninformed, anachronistic and often ignorant rule sets that are usually intended for application in a specific milieu. They're usually foolish enough to then go and demonstrate this nonsensical approach in public. Usually as a pedantic and insufferably pretentious, high-friction social interaction: correcting minor typos, misapplying and enforcing meaningless rules, "correcting" conversational and idiomatic prose into stilted formal styles (thereby losing nuance and ultimately meaning). They then claim that it's important they do this because language is used to communicate, but they then demonstrate an almost perfect ability to use language in a non-communicative fashion.

On the other hand, even descriptivists can get a little frustrated when "too" and "to" are mixed up; "their", "there" and "they're" are conflated; "its" and "it's" are misused, and so on. It does demonstrate somebody who is unfamiliar with handling the language in the written form, but indeed the correlation between intelligence and understanding the complex English grammar in its fullness are undeniably low. It may simply be that a programmer with poor grammar has spent more time handling code (which also happens to be a milieu with very clear right and wrong feedback mechanisms for incorrect syntax and structure) than in handling written language. Feynman for example, wrote very little prose of his own.

tl;dr This employment tests only filters for people who have spent a great deal of time handling language and provides almost no information on their time handling code.
What's so bad about a grammar test? Any competent person (excluding extenuating circumstances: dyslexia, etc.) should be able to pass a simple grammar test. It's not some hardship that you have to study for or anything.
But why change the spelling? Maintainance looks much more logically correct.
Change is needed on the .CA Board of Directors, Part II
the aurasma lite app is available in the iOS app store. not sure about android ...
I think linguistic skills of someone who saws pieces of wood for a living are less relevant than for someone who conjures up high abstract concepts and communicates them to man and machine alike.
This practically excludes everyone who doesn't speak English as their native language. Depending on what business he's into this can be a serious handicap for recruitment.
good writing doesn't automatically come with proper grammar.

In fact I'd say good writing usually eschews many "rules" of proper grammar.
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False alert:

The information is wrong, and OVH was right. I hereby apology for the mistake. See this for more details. FS#7060 — Debian: log d'authentification SSH incorrect. http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=7060&edit=yep
I've also had issues with a slightly unresponsive touchscreen on my Nexus 7. Touches that (based on smartphone experience) SHOULD have registered, don't.

Separately, and more seriously, this morning I flipped the screen on (after using it for a while with no issues), and the screen was completely washed out to the point where you almost can't see what's on the screen [1]. I obviously tried adjusting brightness right away, powering off and on, etc. Nothing. This seems fairly widespread [2] (lots of reports on forums etc., then again a lot of people bought it and only people with issues complain). I will be trying to tighten up the screws inside, and making sure any connectors are seated properly, but sending it back for a replacement if it that doesn't work.

[1] like this: http://www.nexustablets.net/forum/nexus-tablet-site-news/650...

[2] more reports here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1749849
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that the existing system works particularly well or is value for money, I just wanted to point out that there's much more going on than hosting a crappy website. ;)

> only familiar with math publishing

Fair enough. I'm only really familiar with the life sciences.

> Automated typesetting is a solved problem

This isn't as simple outside of CS/EE/maths unfortunately. Most academic researchers couldn't tell you what LaTeX is.

> As for your cost of $99/article, the Arxiv costs $400k/year

arXiv is awesome but it's a preprint repository not a journal (whether or not a repo + engaged community is as 'good' as a peer reviewed journal is probably a whole other thread... physicists still usually publish in journals, even though they use arXiv constantly and put their manuscripts up there first)

I picked $99 because it's the number PeerJ (also awesome) is suggesting. In reality life science journals will charge you $1k+...

> are you really going to claim this darknet is more reliable than mirroring articles

I don't make that claim, academic librarians and publishers do.

(if you prefer you can swap out this cost and replace it with the cost of hiring somebody to do ops for you on an occasional, freelance basis to handle things going wrong, moving to new cloud providers etc. over a 25 year period...).

> Similarly, paying membership fees to the other big publishers to keep little guys out of the market

I don't think I explained this the right way. The fees are to help maintain common services that all publishers then use - for example, to ensure that given an identifier you can always find the full text of a paper (URLs being unstable over even relatively short timeframes), to mint and store metadata about those identifiers to make sure the right people get credit when cited etc. Those services are unquestionably valuable and get used by millions of scientists every day.

> If it weren't for reputation effects and agency costs (i.e., if the market were competitive), this process would cost well under $99/article

I disagree but believe that you should be right. People like PeerJ, eLife, arXiv and others need to keep exploring alternative ways of doing things until we hit on a sustainable model.
Larry Page's Voice Problem
I think you're making a big deal out of nothing. You're hiring this guy because of his proficiency in using his tools: saws, hammers, wood, nails, construction knowledge, etc. It seems silly then to dismiss him because of his lack of proficiency in tertiary tools: words, word processing software, etc.
Short version:

Some programming languages use the same symbols and notation to mean something different that algebra. Chances are you will get confused if you come from an algebraic background. I Reached to this conclusion based on a single data point: a friend of mine.

Problems like this was what Niklaus Wirth was trying to solve when creating Pascal. The assignment symbol in pascal is :=

Or maybe she would have been better begging with assembly (if I remember my 6502 correctly):

.macro a $300
.macro b $302

LDA a
STA b

The assignment clearly looks different than algebra.
HAE tried "don't know, don't care, you figure it out" as a business plan?
I'm developping a social startup, in the sense "help people improve themselves", and I honestly don't care if it makes money or not. I'm not altruistic, I want the success, recognition and to change the world. If I don't have the money, why don't I let the guys who have it, VCs, figure out how to make it? Has anybody tried the approach in the title? to what results?
It's not a sneak test - it's an actual grammar test. If you are asked to document something, and you can't observe basic english grammar, I see a problem too. Zero tolerance may be taking it a bit too far, but one would imagine he can tell the difference between a typo in a big test and actual fundamental lack of knowledge of the grammar you should have learned by the time you were 14.

(Yes, the double space after the period is a built in habit from typing class, and a debatable item in the computer age, but nobody seems to care one way or the other.)
Especially in a forum, where very frequently, there is a post about sexism in our industry and a call to attract more women to the field.
>You must be fun to work with. A CEO whose litmus test to hir a programmer isn't programming finesse or cultural fit or drive..., but how good is his grammar.

Love the typo in your last line. Love it even more if it was unintentionl.
http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/oth1/parody.htm
Grammar can often be so complex, that you can get experts who disagree with each other.
Tips on writing a terrible CV
The Art of Asking Someone to Meet For Coffee
Or have English as a second language.
In general job X, that may be true. But when you're being hired at a company where your job is going to explicitly be writing clear technical prose, I don't think it's unimportant at all.
Why I Quit Reading This Dr. Seuss Book to My Son
If turning the screen off and back on rectifies the problem, then hopefully this could be resolved with a patch.
Here is where I part from the OP. I do think of programming as a form of writing, and so I think it's OK to judge a programmer thusly, but I don't think it's got much to do with stocking shelves or plumbing or carpentry.

Moreover, based on your snippets that contractor has trouble with spelling errors, not grammar, which in my opinion is a different sort of skill altogether. Also I would not be surprised if he/she is dyslexic or similar.
First, "whom" today is more or less reserved for formulaic usage. You write "To whom it may concern," but you don't say "Whom did you meet yesterday?" If you start rigidly using whom as objective (a use that Sapir noted was dying in 1912), you sound stilted and put people off. It's the sort of grammar nazi thing that alienates customers.

Similarly passive voice, split infinitives, etc. all sound like great rules until you realize that there are plenty of cases where these so-called rules are actually good to break. For example, perhaps his productivity would more than double if he would stop worrying about whether his employees split their infinitives.
I wouldn't hire people who's eyes point to different directions.
Scientists Invent Wonder Material That May Kill Tumors and Cure Diseases
Same error here too. It's unfortunate that this made it to HN before it was fully tested.
I've never understood this putting punctuation that isn't part of a quote inside the quotation marks. It seems both wrong in terms of verity and in terms of logically constructing prose.

Can someone explain a rationale for this proclivity ?
agree... the reaction talks more towards emotional maturity than differences between algebra and programming
Because that's pronounced "maintain-ance". Stress on the "ain".
NYC office is almost entirely Vim.
I would also like this explained. I know very little about who ESR is.
Now lets go bash oracle/sun for using 0xcafebabe for the magic number in java class files.

No, please, get serious. Trying to find a hint of sexism in everything is almost as bad an offence as making sexist jokes where it's inappropriate.
How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses
How will Coursera make money on free online courses? The Chronicle of Higher Education did a FOIA request for the company's contract with colleges to find out.
Wellllll...

Pretty much the reason why a lot of progress in manned spaceflight came to a halt is due to the Shuttle program. It was sold on a laundry list of promises that somehow a lot of powerful folks utterly bought into. But in the end it ended up being far less capable and far more expensive than just about every alternative. Although admittedly it does look pretty cool.
Detecting And Working With Orientation Change Gestures In Appcelerator Titanium
It's more like I am applying for a programming job, and I don't see why I have to subject myself to your whims.

Consider that instead of grammar, I am advocating I will only hire people who can do 50 push-ups. After all, what can I expect from people who are sloppy towards something as important their own bodies. What's so bad about 50 push-ups? Any fit person(excluding extenuating circumstances) should be able to do 50 push-ups.

The thing is, I don't see the correlation between grammar and the job I am supposed to do, but more importantly, by doing that, you aren't warranting me the respect I believe I deserve. I have a particular job and screening procedure in mind. If you ask me to skip rope, irrespective of my ability do so, I will have to deny.
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Although I obviously understand how you formed your analogy, I just don't see how it's actually analogous. Software development is a male-dominated field, and the objectification of body parts is much more prevalent with women's breasts than with male genitalia. If we lived in a world where males felt uncomfortable working in software development environments due to repeated sexual harassment by their predominantly female co-workers and where billboards and music videos were filled with gratuitous imagery of male genitals, then this might be analogous. But that kind of hypothetical is way beyond my imagination.
Stop Linking to Our Website or We'll Call Our Lawyers
What's so bad about it is that unfounded assumptions are being drawn from the performance of said test.
Any competent person should be able to make a bed neatly and quickly. Would you apply for a (non-hospitalitly-related)job that required you to demonstrate your bed-making abilities?
Funny, I prefer misspelled to incorrectly corrected. Nothing worse than having a document littered with poor word substitutions -- at least with a spelling error I could know a bit more what the writer intended.

Speaking of home purchases, if I were to do it again, I'd get two home inspections. My primary inspector for my current house completely missed very expensive (and relatively standard/easy to check) masonry and electrical deficiencies that were not up-to-code. His report was meticulous... perhaps because it wasn't prepared by him, but by an intermediary in the same office?

On this topic, I think that being able to communicate clearly is an essential skill. Poor grammar hurts, although not anywhere as bad as completely poor analysis. However, if you're going to rank someone on grammar, you should also rank them on their visual/spacial diagramming skills. A good diagram can communicate much more effectively than text. I'd rather have someone who is good at both language and diagrams than someone who is an excellent writer but unable to illustrate visually.
There are far too many typos and grammar errors in that post for its writer to be playing around. I think someone is bitter about their poor grasp of grammar constructs.
All the links to the story: Horror in Denver cinema as gunman opens fire ...
Facebook and Wal-Mart Join Forces
Grammar is a set of agreed rules, therefore it is not set in stone. Someone might disagree with the rules, and that leads to a slightly different grammar. And so on and so forth. Effectively, everyone has their 'own' grammar that they use. IMHO (especially not being a native English speaker) this article is rubbish (it's in URL BTW). One needs to know his grammar to write articles, but for a developer position? Don't think so.
But he stated it should be recommended for most companies too.
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> Here, manuscripts are subject to a ruthless process of open peer review, rather than the secret sort traditional publishers employ.

I don't know what this means. If the arXiv has some sort of open but centralized peer review, I haven't seen it. Maybe the economist just means that, once posted on the arXiv, a paper can be reviewed by anyone who wants and they can post on their blog. But this would be true of self-published papers, and no one would call that meaningful peer review.

> An arXived paper may end up in a traditional journal, but that is merely to provide an imprimatur for the research team who wrote it. Its actual publication, and its value to other scientists, dates from its original arrival online.

This isn't quite true. Depending on how lazy the journal referees are feeling, they can provide valuable feedback. Papers can change substantially during the review process (although this doesn't happen more often than it does). Typically, physicists update the arXiv version to reflect these changes.
Yup. It's odd that WW2 is closer to the moon landings than we are today.
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There have already been several links to specific web sites with this story, so I wondered if it might forestall more of them to have this link to the Google News source, which then links to them all.

Just wondering ...
>>There is no shame in asking for someone to pay for what they have purchased.

True, but what have they purchased ?

>>Safeway is not greedy, begging or anything of the sort when they ask me to pay for a loaf of bread.

No, but that's a loaf of bread, a physical thing with uniform properties and an established price. When you send out an invoice for your freelance work, there is the amount of hours and there's significant markup for it being freelance hours. It adds up, and before you know it you're sending out a bill for what is, at that moment in time, for you a huge amount of money.

It's not a bad thing to reflect on that. "Am I really worth this ?", "Did I actually earn this?", "Am I offending my customer by being out of the ballpark ?", and most importantly, "Can I justify this, not just to the customer, but to myself ?"

Over time you will appreciate how you fretted over that "huge bill", and maybe even adjusted it a little to feel comfortable about the value you feel you have provided.

It's not comparable to retail, where everything more or less has an agreed upfront price.
I'm not an iPad user and I really love my N7 but I notice this lag occur a few times yesterday. I suspected that it was due to high CPU load but didn't have the time to investigate it.

It actually occurred while I was showing off the N7 on the DC Metro to an interested rider. I feared that this out-of-love iOS user may have been deterred by the momentary lag even though the tablet is otherwise awesome.

I hope that this gets fixed in 4.1.2; Project Butter has made Android significantly smoother and I think this is just a rogue element in Google's aforementioned "War on laginess".
When I screen, interview and hire people, I look for reasons to hire someone as opposed to trying to find reasons to disqualify people. This kind of negative approach (especially when dealing with people) is just not a good way to go about things in my opinion and experience.
This is very much a cultural fit test. If people who use poor grammar are going to drive the author nuts, then as the the person running the company I think he's perfectly justified in treating the candidate as a poor cultural fit.

Additionally, as someone who employs writers as well as programmers, he might reasonably want to hire a programmer who is also a writer for the same reason that you'd want to hire a programmer who also has ops experience: it makes them a more appealing hire for the kinds of problems his startup is trying to solve.

In short, I don't see the problem.
Why Startups Should Hire The Minimally Viable Candidate
Is 0xcafebabe on the chopping block as well?
For some, it's his views on homaphobia[1], and his views on race[2]. For others, it's his lack of actually doing anything useful recently.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157324 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3826846

The link in [2] is dead, it previously linked to http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4270