skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had something like this happen to me, except it was a bait and switch -- they lured you in with some interesting job, but it turned out they were interviewing 75 people for 8 jobs.

At the end, they offered everyone (as in "ok, everyone, you're all a good fit for position EY535353-1") for some horrific job debugging JCL or something to everyone for like $18/hr (this was in 1999), and didn't hire anyone for the good gigs. By that time, the whole crowd was getting unruly, and we basically stormed out.
If I spend more than 50% of the time in an interview solving puzzles I'm not working for you. I may suck as a programmer, but if that's what you do in an interview, you suck at interviewing people.
There are powerful insights to be gained by learning a functional language if your day job is coding in imperative languages.
If you want to compare, then imagine that you're in the middle of the interview and the interviewer suddenly tells you “get lost, here's the elevator”.

This happens. The reverse isn't unreasonable either.
Instagram camera nearing completion
Without a doubt there was a string of novel ideas that eventually lead to Lipitor itself [1]. It is absurd in this context to say that those ideas were "worthless", and execution was everything. Indeed, if there were no novel ideas on the road to Lipitor, it couldn't have been patented.

I am only using patents to illustrate both that "ideas" are worth something, and also that it is actually very hard to have a truly good and original idea. (The WWW is another example of a great idea) Most people's "great ideas" are really not that great at all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statin#History
The JOBS Act: A Modest Proposal For Verification Of Accredited Investor Status
It looks like the GitHub repo is broken... https://github.com/begoon/usvisa-api/ Maybe it's just not published, yet?
Sadly, this is just a rumor.
My answer on this depends on whether we want to be an emotionally supportive group for people who make a badge of honor out of being socially and professionally inept, or whether we want to give advice which will actually move careers forward.

A company which is not a cultural good fit for you, and the employees thereof, can still be very valuable allies. I would not act to antagonize them absent substantial provocation. Not being like you is not a substantial provocation. Most people in the world will, after all, not be like you, and you'll end up not working for approximately all companies in the industry. That's OK.

You've already got the day blocked off in your calendar. Smile. Firm handshakes. Thank them for taking the time to interview you. Heck, they're giving you free live-fire practice for your next interview, make the most out of it. You should never say a word of criticism about the company to anyone but your primary point of contact and you should be darn circumspect with how you word it to him. (I like something along the general lines of "Thanks for your time and allowing me to get to know $FOO_CORP better. We're really in the same boat: I only want to work at employers where I'd do my best work, and you only want to hire people who'd do great things at $FOO_CORP. Having had the opportunity to hear you guys out a bit more, I don't think we're a great mutual fit. I will keep my ears open for you in case any of my friends would be a good fit for your position.")
No, we can't make a Joel Anti-Test. It's easy to say, from experience, what set of things nearly all good companies do. It's impossible to say from lack of experience what good companies don't do.

Have you used Google+ in a corporate setting? No? How can you know it's productivity negative? Have you used a VCS you've never heard of? Then how do you know it's a negative?

The very idea that you should enshrine your ignorance in a checklist of things companies must not do and software companies must not use is utterly preposterous, and you should be at least a little bit ashamed to have proposed it.
The Eight Queens Problem
Funny, that's how I usually work if I have the time. I hammer out code that works, then figure out how to optimize or simplify it.

I agree, the guy's comment is a bit of a paradox.
I don't know the history of the word conservatism but I do know there was a time when Republicans were more progressive than Democrats. Eventually they switched.

I agree that having a more popular moderate party would be nice, granted, I feel like many people who are forced to vote Republican or Democrat are just Libertarians (which seem to express the views of most moderates) and must decide between the lesser of two evils. Of course, that's due more due to the stranglehold of the two-party system on elections rather than people thinking outside of those parties.
This is a grey area. It IS rude to setup an interview then cancel at the last minute. It is NOT rude to send a thank you note the next day and say that you will be perusing other opportunities. Anywhere in-between these 2 conditions is going to offend someone.

It may feel good to explain why you have no interest in working in a place where egos are based on coding standards adherence, it is better to maintain professionalism.
Most malware does not seek to just nuke user files; it seeks to set up a permanent hidden presence in the machine. Windows 7 makes this much harder to accomplish with technologies like ASLR.

Security depends on layers. Chrome is more secure than IE, but you can run Chrome on Windows 7 too. If Chrome--or one of its plugins--are compromised (it is not perfect software after all), then the security features of Windows 7 will give you better protection than XP.

Maybe you don't believe me, because I'm just some guy on the Internet. That's fair. But I would challenge you to find a computer security professional who thinks XP is as secure as Windows 7.
After switching to a Model M keyboard a few years ago (one that I found in a shed covered in 10yrs of dirt and grease that still worked like new once it was cleaned up), I switched to writing conference call notes on a Mead notebook instead of typing them, because the keyboard was so loud.

After a few weeks of this, my handwriting got back to a decent quality and efficiency and now I find that I take notes on paper for all sorts of things. It's great for working through problems.

I tried a whiteboard for a while and it just didn't do it for me. I think there's something about the tactile experience of holding a notebook in my hand and scrawling on it with a pen; the movement, the sound, the texture of pen on paper, not to mention being able to keep and flip through previous work and go back and make notes in the margins that makes it far better than trying to work out problems on a computer or a whiteboard.
All I want is a "-1" button.
Memory allocation is one spot where C# and other languages that use generational garbage collection very well. Since the heap stays compacted there's no need to spend time hunting around for a sufficiently-sized chunk of free memory. You just throw the new object right on top of the heap.

The same characteristic also tends to automatically produce pretty good locality of reference without any special intervention on the part of the programmer.

On modern computers the impact of both of these can be significant. For example, in the series I linked above, the thing that motivated the optimization that let Chen finally produce something faster than the C# version was the observation that his program was spending 60% of its CPU time on the 'new' operator. And the cornerstone of the optimization was taking a cue from the way that C# handles memory allocation and implementing a sort of low-fi mimic of generational garbage collection.
What about Hangouts on Air private to your company? That would be really useful.
E-commerce Landscape in One Graphic
Not so much JIRA itself, but the ecosystem and culture that surround it. It tends to be corporate enterprise ware and a symptom of a top-down management driven structure. I'm not aware of any teams that chose JIRA on their own. It's also rather oriented to time tracking and micromanagement (or at least that's how my group is told to use it), leading to Bad Agile focusing on process not results.

It's not terrible to use, just mildly slow and clunky compared to other options like FogBugz or TFS.
If you've painted a painting, and you feel as though it no longer represents the work you set out to do, would you just keep painting over it?

Would your work suffer from the same cargo cultism that affected it last time with the same brushstrokes on the canvas adding perverse guidance?

If the changes came in so quick that the paint hadn't even a chance to dry, you can imagine as well as I can how the painting would look. A big shmear.

Sometimes it is just better to start from a blank canvas.
Having seen how vibrant the discussion is using these features at Google, I have to disagree. In my experience, G+ is really well-suited for this, and it's way easier than editing a wiki, for example.
While this is awesome when application is help to mankind. What happens when people start printing guns, grenades and bullets?

Edit: No this is not flame-bait. I really feel that this type of innovation will end up within the ambit of "Government licensing and regulation model". Which also means goal to persuade "...manufacturing ... to household garages or backyards and places where you want quick production of parts in a very short time" will take a hit.
I've been following GW2 on Facebook and the community is terrible. Never thought to check it on Google+. (I'm assuming GW2 is what you're referring to).
Textizer: android widget for geeks
If theoretically there is a -1 button, where exactly are you going to use it :)
Karma doesn't make someone respected (quite the opposite in some cases), sharing good information does

Sharing good information often leads to high karma. I'm not sure where you're opposite comment comes from, a quick look at [1] shows that out of the top 15, I would consider ten very highly respected in the community and people who share good information. The other five names I don't recognize myself, but that certainly doesn't mean that they're not also highly respected or people who share good information.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Perhaps time has fogged your memory :-) That was a horrible processor. :-)
Interesting that this made it to the front page of Hacker News.
> Do a quick search on mistaking articulation for action, it should be helpful. The first I heard it from was a diplomat, Swiss I believe. The top search result is from Sir Swan, the gent who reached both poles.
So that's where it came from.

I don't know how and why you got the idea I couldn't understand an English phrase consisting of 3 simple words which are most probably part of a 5th grader's vocabulary.

If you find "mistaking articulation for action" thought provoking and profound, good for you. To each his own; many people find "early to bed, early to rise" or "time is money" profound as well. The good thing is I don't have to pretend I don't find it inane and obvious. I did a google search just in case it has some interesting back story like "Keep calm, carry on" - I didn't find anything.

When I said "where did it come from", I meant why are you throwing this at me. Did I say by posting on HN I am changing India? It's like you randomly wanted to use some phrase you heard somewhere and posted it in the reply.

> Unfortunately with time comes change, and that theory which I thought was unassailable, I can now see nuances in.

We are well past discussion, but your personal perception change doesn't mean India has changed - it's still diverse and averse to generalizations. If it were uniform, that would have been fine with me. But it isn't, and any attempts to make it look so, or actually make it so(the horror) are just wrong.
I thought twitter didn't allow this kind of aggregation across services in native clients anymore?

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api
Sure, but not thinking we're at that point isn't a failure of "balls", it's an economic calculation. The person I replied to wasn't thinking in terms of economics, he was thinking in terms of WANT WANT WANT.
"The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got" with Andrei Alexandrescu
I feel like there's not a lot of gaps between typing, even for the Monday morning coding. Either that, or I'm a really slow coder.
Ask HN: I want dead-simple Java web app hosting with built in email support
I usually run on AWS but I don't really want to have to set up postfix, etc. Suggestions?
The learn mode is very helpful (try it at http://shaunew.github.com/Pac-Man/ ). It graphically shows the strategy each ghost uses to catch Pac-Man. Outside of aficionados, not many people realize how intricate the behaviors and quirks are. Very neat.
I agree with the first point, "Programmers who don’t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do."

However, out of curiosity, how many people actually work on side-projects?

Because, after ten years, I have only worked with a couple of people who actively work on side-projects. And I know that some people treat programming as "only a job" and they're done at 5:00 PM, which is fine. But is it really uncommon that programmers work on side-projects?

[Shameless plug: I have a few small projects on GitHub (https://github.com/mattchoinski) and I also work on freelance projects for various clients.]
Unphased by Samsung loss, HTC won’t back down in Apple patent fight
Yes, so use your backup keys, or a secondary phone number, or a secondary email address... plenty of options.
For the most part, we use video hangouts for smaller meetings, but that's an interesting suggestion: I could see private Hangouts on Air being useful for company-wide meetings. I don't know exactly what the team has planned though.
Have you looked at elinks for terminal browsing?
Verizon Galaxy Nexus Jelly Bean upgrade coming up as JRO03O update
How to enable cookies in all the browser. Useful resource
> His questions are not about writing code, they are about writing algorithms.

What's the distinction between those? He isn't asking the candidates to invent algorithms, just to implement simple ones. The answer to the second question is "return Pi * radius * radius", isn't that just writing code?
Lynx? Links -g possibly as well. Though yeah most of the web would be broken, I would hope documentation sites would work in it.
World GDP is ~70 trillion. Cost of feeding everyone in the world a healthy diet for 1 year = ~2.5 trillion. Or 3.5% of world GDP to feed everyone on the planet, hmm that may or may not be worth it but food is hardly the backbone of the world economy.
This look very cool. I wonder if they'll have any legal issues with a name that sounds like "Skype". After all, Microsoft went after a guy whose business was Mike Rowe Software.
More hardcore : http://www.youtubemultiplier.com/503e2aac93368-realhackerkey...
Mixel iPad App Developers Try iPhone App
An open letter to Jake von Slatt and Datamancer
Does anyone feel like they work more productively when listening to people bash their keyboards or is this more of a novelty thing? Personally, I can understand the rain sounds, this - not so much.
The public markets also encourage the 'discovery' of gigantic assets. I know a number of companies in commodity-rich countries (Australia, Canada) that, after discovering a mine, immediately go public because of this unique asset on their balance sheet. From there, they get the $ to exploit it, create jobs, etc. It is certainly a booming market and the demand will never stop. I don't think it's the same game factory-building versus discovery. The question is more environmental, economical and personal ambitions from my point of view.
So, supposedly VCs like to ask entrepreneurs "what would you do if Google enters your space?" Have you ever wondered what you would actually do in that case?

Some entrepreneurs talk about those "vomit moments" when something happens that makes you want to vomit.

Well... I won't be losing any sleep over it, but Google just "entered our space" (in a manner of speaking). We've been working on "Enterprise 2.0" stuff, heavily involving social-networking (ala, G+ or Facebook) but for enterprise use.

So, what do you do when Google does that? Well, I always imagined my answer to a VC, to that hypothetical question, would be something like:

"We'd stay the course, continue to innovate and become even more hyperfocused. Google has never shown a tremendous affinity for enterprise plays, and it's not their strength. They're a formidable competitor because of their size and resources, but this isn't what they do. It is what we do."

So, how does Fogbeam Labs react to this? We stay the course and keep developing our products and solutions, and become even more hyper-focused, of course. If this means anything to me, it means we have to be even better at interacting with our customers, understanding their problems, and working with them as a partner, not just a vendor.

We expect we'll still have a lot of advantages over "G+ for the Enterprise" in a number of areas, for some time to come. Not the least of which is because of our focus on deep integration into business activities and workflows and integration with other apps.. as opposed to simply being a very superficial communication channel that is basically just a complement to / replacement for, email.

Aside: None of this was unexpected. Google does have some enterprise presence, and them doing G+ for the Enterprise is hardly a surprise. We've only been wondering "when," not "if." Them actually doing it doesn't really change anything from our perspective.
Who Owns Your Tweets?
Indeed. Writing a unit test makes you think about what kinds of input your code might get. It's one of the few situations where you are specifically prompted to think of possible edge cases.

TDD doesn't work well in every problem domain. Sometimes you have to accept that parts of your code can't reasonably be unit tested, and isolate the bits that are testable. But where it is a good fit, it's magic. My favorite book on the subject:

http://xunitpatterns.com/
I'm not sure but, if this all sends requests from a single domain; it will be treated as a visitor-tracking-malfunction issue. I wouldn't like that if I'd have ads or related stuff like that in my site customized and viewed through here.
Detroit Venture Partners' Josh Linkner On Motor City “Getting Back Its Mojo”
My team picked JIRA after examining other options; we felt it was the best and most usable solution that wasn't a) Hosted or b) running on expensive alien software like Windows (we're a unix shop.)
Fair enough; again, it's probably not useful at every company, but in the companies that I've worked for in the past (big and small) that have used internal social networks (like Yammer for example), it's definitely been beneficial to me.

I think that wikis and shared network drives don't work as well for sharing content in the same way that they don't work for me sharing with friends. People like the format of a social network, curating content and sharing it with the right people in a way that it will pop up where they are looking and provide an easy way to have a discussion about it. And this sort of content shouldn't really "leave the net" (unless you're talking about the physical intranet); the idea behind this feature is that it stays within the company's control, in a place viewable only by employees.

To respond to your other points:

1) An interesting point, and this is where I think it depends on the company. I don't really view Google+ as a time-wasting site (though I do moreso with Facebook), because Google+ has a big focus on sharing interesting and relevant content to the user. In a company that embraces this sort of internal sharing of content, I think it could be very useful.

2) Perhaps lots of places already have deployed solutions for internal sharing; Google is just providing another way (a way that is being actively developed and potentially already is being paid for by the company because of other Google Apps).

3) I used Yammer at a small startup once, and it proved to be a nice way to aggregate work-related content. But at really large companies that are willing to have their data stored with Google, I think this is even more useful because it provides a good way to communicate with people you don't know at the company, and a way to follow what is being said by the internal superstar developers.
That is pretty smart. It allows people to refuse being paid in some crazy way like this.
Yes, GW2. - I added my G+ profile link to my Y! profile, add me and shoot me a msg and I can send you my GW2 circle.
For startup projects I love Mongo because we can get a product up and running very quickly. However I always feared in the back of my head we would have to move off of it if our service got too big. Maybe it is all the complaints from a small portion of heavy users. Regardless, big updates like this are going a long way to help make me feel content on continuing to use it as we grow.
But this would eventually converge to the 9-5 frame of things, wouldn't it? This is the only time of day that everyone is absolutely certain to have no other commitments other than working.

Also, the fact that you had the talk initially set for the dinner time basically means that your culture is already incompatible with the lifestyle of those who value family over work. I am not saying it's a bad thing, I used to actually sleep at work when I was younger, but it is an indication of problems you'll face once your team gets over a certain size. Diversity has a smaller common overlap.
If you send a plaintext email that is more than just a link to a dodgy domain you are guaranteed to get through (unless you're already on a blacklist). This is the only kind of spam I still get. Even spammers know to use plaintext (well, some)!
consider webapp2 if you are looking for something lightweight
"It was us who blackened the skies."
This has nothing to do with with leaving early, which is totally fine as long as you do so politely and decently as what you are actually doing is saving the interviewer from wasting time and effort.

No, this is to do with embarrassing and humiliating the interviewers in front of the other candidates. The example guy stood up and walked up in front of every other candidate and sent a clear message to them all. Having stuck his neck out he slightly undermines himself by showing he was not aware of how he got in to the room in the first place!!!!

Like I say, if done right you are doing the interviewers a favour by leaving as soon as you are clear you don't want the job. How you do that is every thing.
It is not a rumor, it is Satire.
I agree with #18 wholeheartedly but I disagree with the examples because those are more of math questions than programming questions. I have never needed to write a program that dealt with circles/radius/area/pi so I'd probably fail that test as I'd have to look up a few things that I have't thought about in over twenty years.

I prefer to have about 15-20 index cards with problems that have open ended solutions ("Build a RPG combat system using 4,6,8,10, 12 or 20 sided dice", "Create a system to store Books and allow people to search by author/title or genre")
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448409
I'd suggest you learn how to touch type if you care about getting stuff out of your head fast.

Just because it has a graphical interface doesn't mean the process of telling the computer what to do will be faster. The reason for this is simple - there are still just as much stuff you need to tell the computer for it to be able to do what it must.
Letting daylight in: review reviewers and maximize transparency in science
Why Apple Actually Lost to Samsung
No, it's satire: http://en.paperblog.com/samsung-pays-apple-1-billion-sending...
Mac Process Killer (mprock) - kill processes on mac os like a Human.
Broken Promises of Privacy