skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is there any literature on portfolio-based hiring?

From the world of higher learning, the emphasis on portfolios is well-known. The interesting thing to emphasize is that the focus is on long-term development - e.g. have you become a better researcher or teacher over time.

Remember, we don't want someone with 7 years of experience if those 7 years were spent doing the same thing, not getting better/learning more skills.

I think this is something that checklist-based interviewing fails to uncover. Behavioral-based interviewing (e.g. STAR) does better but it forces the candidate to know that this evidence of programming maturity over time is what is being probed for (if it is). Whiteboard-based interviewing is probably the best but it requires dedicated interviewing by engineers and there are flaws to it (emphasis on reducing false positives v. false negatives)

> "In the section where I describe the various courses I have taught, I include several sentences that detail how both my successes and my failures in one course led to improvements in subsequent semesters. I refer to this development in my statement of teaching philosophy as well, but in the teaching portfolio I can point directly to the evidence of those improvements in sample syllabi." [1]

> "In some ways, it's like a two-year-long take-home exam," says A. Mitchell Fraas, a graduate student in Duke's history department. When the system was introduced, in 2005, he and his peers could opt to complete either a portfolio or the traditional exams. Mr. Fraas chose the portfolio, he says, because it offered a measure of control and a permanent record of his progress.

"I liked the sense of being able to see in a tangible format everything I was doing working up to exams," he says, "rather than blurting stuff out in a four-hour oral and never seeing it again, or scribbling something down on a 24-hour exam."

Felicity M. Turner, a fifth-year graduate student in the department, says the portfolio gave her an opportunity to revise her papers and think through an issue until she was happy with the result. In the portfolio model, she says, "the responsibility is on you to formulate your own argument, so the process of creation is yours." [2]

[1] http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/developing-an-effective-...

[2] http://chronicle.com/article/Portfolios-Are-Replacing/9141/
You propose the article is wrong in that abstinence should be the best treatment, further you propose that

'What we're missing now are programs that take an addict's natural tendencies and channel them in such a way that it benefits them.'

Which seems to be the million dollar question, since everybody has different personalities and beliefs, is there a common strategy to apply here?
More readable version here: http://www.jottit.com/5f82/
Not to sound harsh, but what's described here sounds totally believable. Someone who loved Sparrow on Mac wanted to bring it to Windows. He got the blessings of the developer to do it, was even lucky enough to have a few meetings with them.

But none of that implies any sort of formal relationship or gives any reason why the Sparrow team (or Google) should have any sort of responsibility toward him.

It sucks he got burned, but I honestly don't think he has anyone to blame but himself. If you're going to do so much work, either make sure you own the work (and can sell it yourself if the company no longer wants it) or have some legal agreement in place that you get paid for it. Don't leave yourself in a situation where the other person changes their mind and you've got no recourse to recoup your loses.
Such a scheme would solve the problem of getting unsolicited, unimportant email. But I suspect that these kinds of messages are not the problem. The problem is that busy people are just getting too much good quality email. People are just overloaded: they have too many demands on their time, their energy, and their money. Email overload is part of the larger problem of too little margin.

Attaching prices to emails could help a person that is too busy if the recipient had to pay. A person has a limited amount of time and energy during a day to do email. If prices were attached to emails, it might be easier to recognize the cost of an email. Prices might help the email user to ask questions like:

"If I read and respond to this email, this will consume 10% of email budget for the day. Is it worth it?"

"This daily email that I'm getting from X is consuming 5% of my total email budget for the month. Is this the best use of my resources?"

"Where is my email budget going?"
> They can be useful for certain constructions, but they don’t really enable anything amazing that you can’t do otherwise, just with a slightly different algorithm.

One really nice property of laziness is dealing with data larger than RAM. A couple of months ago I wrote some ML processing of the wikipedia XML in Clojure. In about 5 lines, I had a lazy sequence of every <Article> tag from the XML. Then I can (map my-fn all-articles-from-wikipedia), without blowing the heap (the wikipedia XML was like ~10GB, zipped).

Yes, it's possible to do non-lazy, but this was cleaner and simpler.

One algorithmic advantage of lazy seqs is that (map foo (map bar (map baz my-big-seq))) makes only one pass over the data, as opposed to 3 when non-lazy.
My understanding is that free part of freemium is a just a way to promote your product (i.e., marketing costs).
I learned that people who chose free will probably never pay - however they can do a lot of work for you for free.
If you’re referring to these by strings, wouldn’t you be just as well off spending a few lines of code somewhere above setting up some variables for hex colors? This seems like a pretty trivial kind of advantage.
I couldn't eyeroll enough if I got something back from an MX like this.

I don't care who you are. I'm not paying money to send you mail.

There's a pile of problems both technical and social so enormous that this idea is so blatantly bad it isn't even worth serious consideration.
Kentucky teen faces charge for naming attackers in tweets
The only solution is filtering. If your email client could read, organize, and prioritize your email according to rules you've set and behavior it's observed, the problem is solved.

Email is just a transport mechanism for messages. The content and presentation thereof is where the problem lies, not the exchange.
I'm going to call these "Libertarian Fairy Pennies" from this point forward.
Don Brady (ZEVO/Mac ZFS developer) hired by storage vendor
On Steam, you click add to cart (which takes you to a checkout page), and then you have to check an "I agree..." box before hitting the actual purchase button.

I don't think this qualifies as one-click.
Photoshop and the ethics of photo editing
I do wonder about one thing, and this is an honest question. Do the cultural content and language requirements get in the way of startups?

Its stories like this http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/04/06/target-canada... that make me wonder if this would be an issue. Would youtube, if started in Canada, have been impacted?
Make the patent term proportional to the value of the disclosure contained in the patent. That is, the value of the claims in the patent should dictate the length of the patent term. We could crowd source the value. the USPTO can list "here's the problem" and ask for estimated values. Or, the patentee could suggest the patent term, and then the USPTO discloses the problem solved by the patent (or the new thing you can do because of it), along with how much the inventor is asking (in months). We create a threshold that must be reached in order for the term to be granted. Example, you invent a new compression algorithm for video, and file a patent. The USPTO publishes the following (simple version):

"A patent to compress video by an average of 8x over current state of the art algorithms.

Inventor seeks 240 months of protection for disclosure of the algorithm.

[ ] Worth it [ ] Not worth it"

If we set the threshold at X thousand, or Y % of those in the sample, then the inventor can get the patent protection for 240 months. This could be done as the very first step. So if value-less inventions are applied for protection, they could be screened out without draining resources.

Alternatively, you could do something more like a market value approach, and ask folks how many months of protection the invention would be worth, and take an average of the most commonly suggested amounts (in terms of months).

The point is, there are much better alternatives than a fixed N years of protection for any invention of a particular category. Not all inventions are equally valuable, so it doesn't make sense to price them by category any more than it does to price them (in years of protection) the way they are now (everything's equal to 20 years of protection).

So, rather than wait for the market to validate the patent after it's been granted (which wastes USPTO resources), let's validate it's value ahead of time. If no one thinks it's worth much, the inventor may abandon the claim. Or the USPTO can reject it outright as not meeting the utility criterion since the estimated value (by society) is too low.
Reassembling Das Keyboard
Both iOS and Android have a bell curve in terms of quality of application, but Android's apps, like Windows, tend to be on average much lower quality.

Part of this is the laisez-faire attitude of developers towards design and completeness, and part of this is making applications that work properly on the myriad of Android devices is very hard.
For what it's worth, I paid for TextMate, and I'm quite happily still using it. I've been very unimpressed by Sublime Text 2, and I'm not even 100% convinced I'd switch to TextMate 2 if it ever does come out.
The problem is, there already is a simple to raise the transaction cost of initial communication. You write on your web site "please snail mail my agent/representative at xxx." If I really want to talk to the person I'll do that. What types of communication beneficial to the recipient would this leave out?
Apple's commodity systems ship overnight.

The high-demand products must be experiencing some kind of limit in manufacturing. It could be the factory producing the screens can only make so many. Acquiring the components is not a trivial thing with products that aren't cookie cutter.
Here is a much better version of this article (might be the original):

http://www.zdnet.com/apple-mac-in-app-purchases-hacked-every...
Recommendation duly noted. I'm a big Vinge fan, too.
This is kind of pretty, but actually rather annoying from a UI perspective. Here is some feedback, which is just like, my opinion, man.

For one, there's the mystery meat navigation. If it's a visual directory of all color names, why not start there? Or start by showing one color and then rapidly "zooming" out to show an overview. I'm guessing you're going for some kind of serendipity right now, where I would refresh repeatedly and be treated to delightful colors. Maybe you could find a middle ground where there's still some serendipity, but it's also easier to navigate.

The transitions on the titles are also too slow. I know how it can be when you're staring at these things for a while, it can be hard to judge. Consider that when I mouse over a color, it's because I want to see the color name (which is, after all, the only thing this does.) Therefore, you shouldn't make me wait half a second to see it. If you reduce to something more like an eighth of a second, there's still a nice effect, but I don't feel like I'm waiting.

Finally, the text on the light colors is about impossible to read. You've got the right idea with the text shadow, but it's too faint. Keep in mind that since monitor calibrations vary wildly, if you care about readability, you have to be conservative with your contrast. I will admit that I'm using a really crappy monitor that I've never calibrated right now (and I know for a fact that the color reproduction on it is way off.)
The time stays the same since as ambition grows, the difficulty in prototyping and producing a product increases. Any gains made in rapid prototyping are offset by higher goals.
There are some other common reasons, apparently so far not mentioned in this thread, for job ads with a list of detailed qualifications nearly impossible to satisfy:

First, the ad might be only to satisfy some legal or bureaucratic purpose and not to help fill a real job. Having the requirements be nearly impossible to satisfy helps reduce the number of responses as desired.

Second, the ad might have been designed to give the employer plenty of excuses to reject people for whatever unstated reasons they have in mind. So, maybe they don't want to hire anyone in set A they have in mind so ask for five years of HTML5 experience and use lack of that experience to reject anyone in set A.

Likely real hiring in organizations good to work for don't use such absurd ads.

Such ads bring up a fundamental problem: The worker that happens to have so much experience that they can respond to a nearly impossible to satisfy list of 'skills' likely has many more related skills and, really, is quite highly experienced. So, such a worker is likely more experienced than the people hiring. So if the less experienced people hiring have actually done well enough in business to be able to pay a new employee, then the more experienced worker should be able to do still better starting their own business!

Or maybe the worker should do anything to get an interview with the company, see what they are doing, and then start a company to compete with them!

There is a related point: Such a worker will have to have at home his own computing, laptop, desktop, servers, and good Internet connection. So, really, he must already have nearly everything but a good 'business idea' for bringing up his own Web site and, thus, starting his own business. And in doing this work, he gets to use the tools he already knows or ones he would like to learn instead of the tools someone else wants him to learn and use.

Likely good companies are not hiring via such ads but are hiring via Linkedin, job fairs, networking, open source code samples, etc.

The real solution here is due to Darwin: Companies that waste time in silly recruiting efforts are at a competitive disadvantage and on the way out of business.

So, here is the good news: If some companies can remain in business spending time, money, and effort in such silly, wasteful ways, then think of how much money there is to be made if cut out the waste!

One final point hackers should understand: The 'suits' should be afraid of the hackers and they are!
It kind of seems like the ‘new GMail’ that ought
to be native for all devices(the trend is clearly for
that), was galloped by it’s bigger competitor.
...
In fact [GMail] may get even worse since
it’s inception was a mighty web app for email.

No dude, GMail is first and foremost an email service.
What GMail provides is so much bigger than anything a "native" email client can ever accomplish.

I see this mentality coming from developers all the time, but you're really not seeing the forest from the trees.

I also watched the YouTube videos showing the interface in action. This client might actually be great, however I couldn't see anything there to blow me away, just some icons with no labels and I hate icons with no labels (the first thing I did in GMail's new interface was to search for the option that restores labeled buttons).
In my case it's not that there are 50 people lining up behind me, it's that there aren't really many other companies to go to. That said, the staff turnover is incredibly poor. I would leave too if there was somewhere decent to go to, nearby.

As for whether they could be convinced to use it, probably. However 3 months later they still wouldn't have signed up ;-).

Other companies though - definitely. It's a great idea but it won't fit in with the more 'traditional' companies. Still make it though!
A Compelling Feature
I've often wondered the same. You basically end up having to have all three in your init.el file, since there doesn't appear to be a good rhyme or reason are to which packages are contained in which repositories.
If you liked that documentary, here's more:
http://www.clickmovement.org/coderush

Comes with lots of extra footage:
http://clickmovement.org/code_rush_footage_nods
From what you said above it sounds like Microsoft should also still be releasing and providing you patches for Windows 95. You paid a one time fee for an application, if you wanted support and updates for it forever you should have expected to be paying a monthly / yearly fee. If at the time the updates stop coming, then the company should just stop charging you the ongoing support fee.

Expecting lifetime support for a one time flat payment of almost nothing is pretty silly.
Not allowed! Look at my karma number!
I like unit tests and CI even with excellent developers who I trust utterly. We just have the computer automatically check everything we might check manually. Or that we worry that we might forget about.
Most freemium games crudely abuse human psychology to get players addicted and waste their time and money. It's entertainment, sure. But most of the time the game's are like slot machines, designed primarily to hook users and exploit them. Not out of any genuine desire to provide entertainment.

I think the freemium model is probably not ideal for many products that people have a real need for, it just lets people be freeloaders if they don't need the premium features. There are several freemium services I use that I would happily pay for.
What do you think the tech sector is?

As an Ex-Ryppler (intern), they were (are) definitely a tech company. I'm not sure what your question asks?
>Nobody is arguing this is a legal problem, they're arguing that this is a moral problem.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. The comment above the one to which you are replying states:

"Maintenance" means that they will fix major issues that the paying customers are legally entitled to (such as bugs that make the app unusable).

It's almost like you completely ignored this to make some point about Ayn Rand.

>Now, you can argue that they should have known that the service might disappear without warning

What service? We are talking about a downloadable application that is locally stored on the user's device until they delete it. It will not stop working. I've been using an old version of Thunderbird for a while now simply because I haven't felt like upgrading and setting up all my GPG stuff again.

These things may seem like nitpicks, but I think the nuance here is important and is being skipped over in favor of complaining about something. The reaction is way overblown in my opinion.
Is it? I've only been doing it since 2000, so maybe I've got it wrong. But I thought it was about working more efficiently and adaptably by tuning our processes to embrace change rather than trying to fend it off.
Not just your opinion man, I came to post about the poor mystery meat UI and the latency to see after hovering, but you saved me the time.

Really don't care for this trend of these sorts of inefficient interfaces that mostly broadcast the person is learning HTML5.
Semantic Web Definitions To Get Your Brain Ticking
I say ban software patents outright. In most cases, the tricky part is the implementation of the idea and not the idea itself. IMO, the advantages of banning them far outweigh the disadvantages.
You should be able to explain your startup in one sentence
I certainly agree that a lot of "agile" projects are clusterfucks, especially large ones. Of course, that's true of all software projects. And a lot of what people sell as "agile" is bullshit. So I'm not sure how much that proves.

I also agree that well-run agile approaches throw big up-front design out. But I think they can happily achieve solid architecture and loose coupling.

There's nothing you can achieve with up-front planning that you can't achieve by refactoring your design after a release. The main differences are that you need some supporting practices to make refactoring economical, and that you have much more information available to you after release than you do before-hand.
It's hard to claim he's attacking a strawman when every point he makes has tweets demonstrating what he's talking about.
> An issue with this puzzle is that the objective is not clearly stated upfront. The author should make it clear ...

It's an interview question. You're supposed to ask for clarification. In fact, demonstrating your ability to elicit requirements is an important part of a technical interview.
Here you go: http://i.imgur.com/R7cZ5.png
These considerations certainly exist in every day code as well. If you change the daily reporting process to have a worst case run time of 25 hours then you lose, even if the mean run time is cut in half.
Well, there are puzzles that assume you're using an Xbox 360 controller.
I agree with you, and for the record, I was only approaching this as one developer (out of several) doing an interview. It's just that, after several iterations of, 1. "Hey Mike, can you interview this guy tomorrow" 2. Looks at resume, sees dozens of acronyms, languages, platforms 3. "Ok, can you write a function to reverse a string?" and getting something like 4:

for (int i = s.length() - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
String newString = new String();
char x = s.charAt(i);
newString = newString + x;
}

Well.... you get pretty jaded.
Justin.tv does not appear to use .Net [1,2]. You are right about Plenty of Fish, though.

ZocDoc was the company I was thinking of that uses .Net.

[1]: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-technology-behind-JustinTV
[2]: http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/16/justintvs-live-vid...
New type of chemical bond may form in extreme magnetic fields of stars
This is primarily a blog post about the FSet library for Common Lisp, available at http://common-lisp.net/project/fset/
Apparently, according to the verge, a windows client was not weeks away. http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/21/3174803/sparrow-for-window...
For all the kind of derision in the article, I don't feel anymore knowledgeable about startups, other than some vague thing about only worthwhile business being biotech or semiconductors.

I would say don't let this article be any real part of your decision making process, unless you're doing biotech, in which case I guess you can let it boost your confidence. :)
I only just saw your reply. I hope it is not too late to reach you.

Yeah, I was going to say that the most common algebra in programming seems to be monoids. Being aware of them would probably make some patterns people apply ritualistically more clear and obvious but I think that most experienced people have the notion implicitly.

Category theory formulations are not as common in OCaml and I am hard pressed to find any practical use for them. No that is not quite true. Knowing concepts like fusion, natural polymorphisms, initial and final algebras, ana/cata/hylo morphisms make many fuzzy patterns concrete. And motivate many algorithms. But I have never found a use where a theorem was useful in deriving some part of a program.
This whole thing is overblown.
For instance, another common technique with in-app purchases is to store a "item-y-has-been-purchased" key in either the NSUserDefaults or the keychain. Both of these are editable on jailbroken phones.

In app purchase is inherently insecure, but who the hell cares? If you are willing to go this far to get around paying, you're probably not going to pay. It's called software piracy, and it's going to happen, no matter what you do.
These kind of apps tend to be free though. There might be paid version available but for most a cheaper and usable version is either already there or would soon replace the paid version for most users.