skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A customer demanded I keep notebooks, dated an initialed on each page; I've never stopped. They wanted it because they are a patent mill (they have hundreds, file dozens annually). I do it because I can review what's done, whats left; keep todo lists up to date easily; keep lists on the right page, scribble notes on the left; find out when something started, when it finished.

Hard to draw diagrams in most todo-list apps; where do you jot phone #s, debugging constants, interview notes?
> You usually won't know a web page is actually using H5BP, especially without looking at the source.

One of the ways to know, before the new release which sadly kills it, was that many sites didn't customize the default hot pink text-selection background color.

Select text and get hot pink? You knew it was the boilerplate.
Some of those people at that company will be at different companies in the future. When in doubt, don't burn bridges. Don't be rude. Don't be a Prima Donna. Someday the tech economy will be very different, ask anyone who lived through 2000 - 2003, when a lot of people had to get out of the industry because there were NO JOBS.
This article is 7 years old and irrelevant. In fact a leap second was insert in June this year.
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.

Maybe my question is "socially and professionally inept", but why is realizing that you're not going to fit into a company automatically a criticism?

I'm not talking about the guy who walked out in the example or the way the poster described the situation. I'm asking a much more general question and I'm genuinely interested in an honest answer.

To me it seems quite legitimate that one could come to a realization that there are irreconcilable incompatibilities between oneself and one or more aspects of the job. I consider that a case of "it's not you, it's me".

Are you really objecting to the fact that it might be interpreted as "I've got better things to do with the rest of my day"?

I'm trying to understand the reason why you're so emphatic about this (e.g. couching it in terms of "antagonizing").
But adding these ad hoc "leap seconds" -- the last one was tacked on in 1998 -- can be a big hassle for computers operating with software programs that never allowed for a 61-second minute, leading to glitches when the extra second passes. "It's a huge deal," said John Yuzdepski, an executive at Symmetricom Inc., of San Jose, Calif., which makes ultraprecise clocks for telecommunications, space and military use...

Isn't this the tail wagging the Dog? Crappy programming leads the UN to redefine TIME for the whole plannet? There are few truly golobal, hitsorical markers of culture shared by human societies. Accross continents, races and millenia. Solar time is one of them.

How about: Don't fix what ain't broke. Fix that which is?

Sorry for the Rant

__________

Edit:

As pointed out elsewhere in the comments. This proposal was from 2005, and is apparently no longer on the table. Cooler heads appear to have prevailed.
> "He was criticized as being wrong for not following very dogmatic principles to the letter of the law."

What does this even mean?? He didn't respond correctly with their secret handshake? He didn't drink his cup of coffee with exactly 2 creams?

Is this a social thing, or a programmer thing? Did he use an unconventional coding style?

This line really sticks in my craw, confuses and somehow bothers me... I would love an extrapolation.
Hiding spot doesn't work, not fully accurate ;-)
Twilio Expands to 5 More Countries, Inc Israel
Simple, nice user experience and really powerful.
Which in turn took quite some influence from Cedar/Mesa at Xerox. But one might as well say that KDE 4.9 (2012) is based on MacOS (1984), that doesn't make it an "early GUI" in my eyes.
What are you referring to? The first time I interviewed there, I got zero feedback. The second time, I didn't make it past the phone screen (which has never happened to me before so I thought it was remarkable/funny.) and got the old "didn't think was a good fit" line.
I can't speak for the parent, but having been in that same boat, I'll answer for myself.

Why limit yourself to <language_x>?

It isn't about limiting myself to the language as it is being able to hit the ground running with it. I was mistakenly given an interview where they were looking for a Ruby developer, and had been referred to them. Only problem was that I didn't know Ruby as intimately as I do other languages. The position was fairly high paying, and one assumes an expectation of proficiency that I wouldn't be able to deliver on.

Could I have learned the language? Sure, almost certainly -- but the question is really whether or not I can learn the language faster than they can realize how inefficient I'm being and (rightly) fire me? Even if I'm upfront about it (which I was), I'm still not willing to gamble unemployment on whether or not I'll get up to speed within their expectations when I could easily justify my salary somewhere in a language I'm more familiar with.

Edit: I should also add that since that time, I have spent more time with Ruby and figured out that I don't really like it. Not going to get into a language debate or anything, it's a fine language, but it didn't fit the way I naturally think so, had I taken that job and learned quickly and all that, I'd have found myself programming in a language that I didn't really love, which could have lead to less job satisfaction as well.
What are you talking about? I did a phone interview and two on-site interviews, and the only feedback I got was a generic form letter that my background was not the right fit, which clearly isn't the whole story because there's no need to pay for a plane ride if my resume isn't what you're looking for. I'm guessing either they've changed policy here or you or someone you know happened to get a nice interviewer.
> And a second thing. Once you get through more things in life which a 20-something man hasn't confronted yet (divorce, leaving your parents behind etc.) you begin to value honest no-bullshit decisions like this one. There's no gain in playing actors.

I think that that's the main reason that it matters that all these guys were in their 20's. I wonder if any have had kids, a family, anything that's more important to them than their work. If I were slated to interview at a company for an entire day, and I knew for certain that I wouldn't be joining them after only a couple of hours, I would without a doubt make the decision to go home to be with my kids.

One thing I would do that this gentleman did not do, however, would be to speak to the principal about my concerns alone before walking out. Seriously, he forced the guy to follow him to the elevator to get an explanation. That's terribly insulting, regardless of the situation. Give the guy a chance to prove your impressions wrong.
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From here http://www.elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards...

http://elitekeyboards.com/support.php#2
Your Money/Time principal has long been defined. It’s called Opportunity Cost. You have experienced this principal your entire life. In many cases, especially as we earn more, this principal tends to involve money. However, it’s really about value and the decisions we have to make in life.

As far as how you express it, your conclusions are a bit off. The method by which you earn money (hourly, salary(taxable or not)) has no bearing on the value traded. Additionally, both time and money are finite, therefore a tradeoff must occur. This is true no matter your ability to work more or you’re a billionaire. In your approach to this idea, you’re assuming some kind of concrete, always balanced, equation. While this is more true(and easier to see as balanced) when opportunity cost is applied in business (outsourced factory can make widget X in bulk cheaper), this is almost always false in life situations like you describe. There are just too many variables. Skill, willingness, enjoyment, or necessity as just a few of the intangibles that factor into the decision.
That is very interesting, I definitely think you're right about it in the context of the article's scenario. By abruptly leaving the party early the guest of honor is essentially telling the host "I don't respect you".

It may be more a simple social etiquette thing than a hierarchy thing, but the fact that the host has leadership representing their group here probably infuses it with some level of asserting dominance in response to public disrespect.

Basically walking out on an interview is a great way to disrespect the interviewer, and you probably shouldn't do it if you don't want a fight ;)
Well said. I personally get a great deal of satisfaction tinkering with my car (or brewing my own beer) even though if I could put those hours to productive use I could earn more money than it would cost to pay for the repairs (or beer).

Everybody needs a hobby.
Ha ha, my husband is a programmer I have a feeling that he's going to like this
This is the last traffic camera on the coast still online for Mississippi.
So... once upon a time, falling back on others giving you stuff was something to be done as a last resort, when you had no other options. Presumably your parents felt like they had other options.

Somewhere along the way the social consciousness changed to more of a "get everything I can get from those 'other people'" as opposed to a "do what I can for myself first". It's not obvious to me that the result is better as a social contract, though it can obviously be better for a particular family.

Now there are definitely social problems when the self-reliance ends up trading off against other public goods (e.g. having your kids well-nourished and educated, not stealing, etc). But if people just want to be self-reliant in reasonable ways instead of falling back on public assistance as soon as they're eligible, I really don't see a problem with that.
I was wondering that when I saw it said the last leap second was in 1998. Made me check the date of the article, and yup, 2005.
Interesting discussions can still be interesting even if the proposal was ultimately rejected. The fact that this was discussed, and that the reasoning behind it was to benefit "lazy programmers" makes it relevant to me.

We should always be wary of fundamental shifts in the name of "safety", "security", or worse, sloth.
I find the most challenging part to putting this into action is the same things that one finds challenging when designing a test for a class: getting the challenge level correct.

For a while this summer I'd write out simple math problems for my daughter to do when she got up. I stopped when I realized that I was doing harm by consistently getting the difficulty of my questions wrong. These kinds of articles make it seem easy, but I find it quite difficult.

For obvious reasons, I'm continuing to try to help my children with math (and other things!), but like most things, it seems to require patience, careful thought, and practice.
I would just write the code to compute it to arbitrary precision and then tell the interviewer that I would test how many iterations are required and hard-code it.

If they insist that it must be solved at runtime, I would check the size of the computed term (1/(1+2x)) and repeat 'til it's less than 10E-6.
If we take the interviewee's story as truthful, then it sounds like a lot of the interviewers in the room could bear to learn the same lesson here - don't belittle candidates because you never know when or where you'll see them again.
The movie was silly: it painted corporations as evil while completely ignoring the problems that the corporation as a legal form was invented to solve. A grad seminar actually assigned it, and when I pointed out some of its flaws—like saying all corporations just have to make money, when many kinds of corporations need to do what their shareholders want them to—everyone was stumped. Had anyone read Coase? No. Sigh.

See http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/20400301508/cs183class1 and Coase's essay "The Nature of the Firm" for more on why they exist.
The Musicians are the customers. They pay to upload to the charts and subsidise the listeners use of the site.
American law is patent nonsense
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If you use vim you SHOULD remap Caps Lock to Control.
I can't even fathom why somebody would needlessly burn bridges like this.

I don't think any of us can actually say if any bridges were burned or not, unless we were there. Ending an interview early is not - by default - an instance of "burning a bridge". It the situation is handled courteously and gracefully, no harm is done unless the person on the other side is a huge asshole. And if they are a huge asshole anyway, there's no point worrying about the bridge.
Well put and great advice!

I would ask the OP, Would you like it if someone did this to you? Has anyone ever walked out on you?
There are times when clean code that almost works is better than messy code that actually works. Generally when the requirements are still fuzzy. But also when your still deciding were to handle edge cases and such.
If you did want to try exhausting the PID space, I wrote a bash script to do just that (it runs a program with a desired PID):

https://github.com/lunixbochs/meta/blob/master/utils/pidrun/...

You can use it like this:

./pidrun 23000 cat

It might take a few minutes if it needs to wrap around the PID space. When it's done, you'll have a cat process occupying PID 23000, which upstart might be willing to sacrifice.
I suspect it's automatically a criticism if the words coming out of your mouth are "I only want to work with smart people" or on interesting problems, or whatever. I further suspect people will say more or less precisely that without realizing it. "oh, I didn't mean to call you stupid, you're just not as smart as me, that's all."
Building a "real" website for Dave Grohl using Isotope
I love the idea of keeping a programming notebook, but I'm still waiting for the searchable pen and paper notebook. Until then, I'll stick with Notational Velocity.
I'd really like to hear more of this story as the incredibly vague description of an SRE I was recently contacted about sounds like something I could potentially be very interested in.
Within a domain, yes.
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you are wrong in your rationale because crappy programming cannot be fixed and together with the current time definition it causes big problems to many, on the other hand changing the time definition causes problems to whom? astronomy purists?
Great point. Didn't even think of that.
There are companies who do the same: schedule a whole-day interview, and then escort you from the building part-way through, with no explanation.

Is it rude? Yes.
Did the same exact thing. Went ahead and read the article anyway though, it was still pretty interesting. Not sure how it ended up on HN.
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> tailf # tail -f, but better & shorter

That's better about tailf, and why would I use it instead of the (far superior to tail) less +F?
A lot of commentary on idea vs execution misses an important point - while some ideas have inherent value, people won't believe it until you prove it anyway!

There are so many "fools gold" mines being proposed and pitched, until you setup some equipment and bring out real, sparkling gold... statistically no one will try and compete and certainly no one rational will invest.
Debuggers have features like watchpoints, which cannot be emulated in any form using print statements. Also, many codebases are not set up to provide a decent stack trace without using a debugger. Features like watchpoints allow you to think about the debugging process in a very different way and can turn many otherwise difficult bugs into 30-second fixes.
Thanks for the reply Dirk! Point noted on the background. It's been a bone of contention with us. I like it, my co-Founder less so but we will test it on the masses and get their feedback.

Regarding your other questions:

We have special access with A&R from Sony, Atlantic, Columbia, Warner Bros and more. We guarantee that if your music gets into the top 5 it will be heard by the most appropriate A&R person for that genre and feedback from them will be provided.

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Yes, I'm assuming his story is accurate. Otherwise we are just debating hypotheticals.

I think that if you conclude that the company is not for you, and you feel that the interviewers have been less-than-nice, you are saving everyone otherwise-wasted-time by leaving early. I don't see how you are under any obligation to go through the motions in a process where you do not want a successful outcome. It's not rude to realize the company is not a good fit for you and save time.

In fact, why should any interviewer be offended with a candidate who has made this decision and leaves early? They've already decided they will not accept any offer from you. The only reason to be offended is if you cannot fathom than anyone would not want to work for you.
One important thing to keep in mind is that in day-long interviews, you interview with a LOT of people. Make a good impression, and those people could provide networking opportunities later, even if you don't take the job.

I've interviewed people who, though they stayed the whole interview, ultimately declined the position. I still have much respect for them because I could see that they are capable and motivated, and were I to encounter them again (which is likely in this industry), I'd be more than willing to put in a good word for them if it would help. Now if someone had up and left halfway through? Well, human nature and emotions are tricky things. Are they within their rights? Of course. Will it strike at my ego or make me feel rejection? Absolutely. Will it form a low level resentment, no matter how minute? Unfortunately, yes. Anyone saying otherwise is simply deceiving themselves. Am I in the wrong for this? Yes, but it happens anyway.

You're dealing with humans, not machines. Maximize your advantages by being polite and civil and bending a bit even when you don't have to. It's a small world in tech.
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Irrelevant?

The June leap second wasn't exactly problem-free...
Focus On: Trendy Startups Published in Mobile App Stores
Facebook Fails to Remove Spam from Help Center
Right, once I got on a schedule I felt pretty bad when I didn't get in my daily lift.
I fail to see how this is an attack on science or on Europe. That's just hyperbole. Making time consistent to prevent having to add time or remove time just makes sense. Time is a unit of measurement. We don't redefine the foot just because the new king has 10" feet instead of 12" feet. Time being connected to the sun is a relic of the days before accurate time-keeping methods. One day should always be one day.

To rebut my own argument, I suppose one could say that noon should always be noon, regardless of how long the day is. The prevalence of daylight-saving time in the US might disagree with that though.
It may be seven years old, but it's not irrelevant. People are still discussing this proposal. The article is the best explanation I've seen of this issue to date.

Here's a more recent article posted here a few months ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/science/to-keep-or-kill-lo...

Personally, I wish people would just leave UTC alone. If you don't want to deal with leap seconds, use TAI, which was intended for such uses.
Free from doing work you'd rather not do.

Free to take time off for travel or family when you want, rather than wait for set vacation days.

And so on. Most people have some things they'd rather be free from, if they had more money.

If you already have total monetary freedom, count yourself lucky.
Here in Latvia best of the breed coders usually receive about 2000$ per month (after tax deduction, for a full-time job) + various benefits. With all the taxes and benefits it's about 4000-5000 USD per month.

Mind, that 2000$ here is a very, very good salary. Normally people earn here about 500-800$ per month.

That said, if you want to get in touch with local PHP, HTML/CSS and JS freelancers, feel free to drop me a line at spiritus.emortus@gmail.com.

Sorry for the spammy note. :)
Foreigners want to buy cheap bikes because they don't stay long, they are not sure to resell bike when they leave and they usually take the bike back with them. Stolen bikes are cheap.
Tech industry must grow up.

Seriously! No more running around the office in sandals. Damn kids!
But it is completely irrelevant how things are manufactured. The end product is what needs regulation/laws. For example if you build a gun at home, then you own a gun and are bound to whatever laws exist for that in your jurisdiction. The means of creation are irrevelant.
I wrote about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4449194 , but again, imagine what they did in a date context: things are going well, you like the girl, you reach down. . . and find that "she" is a pre-op transexual. Now: there's nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with not making this clear in advance.

Or, from an alternate gender perspective, you're a woman and you've been dating a guy. The first night you stay over at his house, he gives you $1000 the next morning. You're probably going to be miffed because of the expectation violation.
Actually, I found the sound to be comforting. I miss working in an office with a team on site. Of course, I still can't go hang over their cubicle and ask them a technical question, but I only expect so much of that site. ;)
How do you get an organ (besides skin) on a chip? Do they mean tissue?
Companies with all-day interview affairs have no qualms about cutting the process short at lunch time. Why should an interviewee not be able to do the same? It must be handled delicately and gracefully, but that hopefully goes without saying.
I agree. In my experience, the only thing a debugger is most useful for (way faster than manual debugging) is performance.
I was hoping for a responsive design from WP. Sadly, no such luck.
This is what I'm getting from the responses as well. People seem to have forgotten that interviewing is a two way street, you are interviewing the company while they are interviewing you. There is not really a lording of power situation, presumably you both have something the other wants. Interviewing is not you showing up begging for a position. You are not really required to give any more consideration then you can expect from them.

Most companies won't hesitate to cut an interview short when they've decided they don't want you, why should you feel that you can't do the same?
The candidate didn't do the equivalent of "get lost."

I have been flushed from an interview process halfway through. (Apparently I failed the personality test for Capital One. Fair enough.) They had a car take me back to the airport. I didn't mind. The guy I was riding with (who was also flushed) was really pissed about it, though.

A company really should solicit feedback from the candidate during the process. The candidate can say "I don't think this company is going to be a good fit," and then the company can decide if there's anything more worth talking about. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't.
Mentioned in the next line: "whole social media thing".
Thank you!
But damn, that's expensive. Better find some used one...
Interesting idea but the branding is terrible and completely out of touch with the times.
If you use a decent text editor (aka Emacs or Vim), XML will be no trouble to you, I'm sure :)