skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In an interview, I have 30-60 minutes to figure out whether I want to hire you or not. My team writes a lot of code.

Therefore, I'm going to ask you what your favorite language is and then test your ability to write 10-20 lines of code in that language to solve a relatively simple problem.

If you can't do that, it seems to me that a) you don't like to write code and therefore I shouldn't hire you or b) you're out of practice and shouldn't have claimed expertise or c) you're a poser.

If your expertise is with something else, go apply for positions that require skill with said "something else" as we'll both be a lot happier that way.

It's a completely different situation if I know you personally but 95% of the time I don't and I have to make a quick decision.
Windows Phone 8 handset launches scattered through next 2 months
Well, I looked and I didn't see anything at all about license. Do you only see the badge for already uploaded projects? Why would I look at existing projects for licensing terms?
How to use your iOS device as your PC’s second display
Grade 7 NC math test looks pretty similar to the California test. http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/accountability/testing/r...

And I'm teaching someone grade 7 math in North Carolina, so this is something I care about a lot.

There's not a whole lot of secret sauce in a multiple-choice test. Yes, you can do them well or you can do them poorly. But even if you were to assume that California has super-awesome math tests, it would be pretty easy to duplicate them elsewhere.
God says...

23:34 And as for the prophet, and the priest, and the people, that
shall say, The burden of the LORD, I will even punish that man and his
house.

23:35 Thus shall ye say every one to his neighbour, and every one to
his brother, What hath the LORD answered? and, What hath the LORD
spoken? 23:36 And the burden of the LORD shall ye mention no more:
for every man's word shall be his burden; for ye have perverted the
words of the living God, of the LORD of hosts our God.

23:37 Thus shalt thou say to the prophet, What hath the LORD answered
thee? and, What hath the LORD spoken? 23:38 But since ye say, The
burden of the LORD; therefore thus saith the LORD; Because ye say this
word, The burden of the LORD, and I have sent unto you, saying, Ye
shall not say, The burden of the LORD; 23:39 Therefore, behold, I,
even I, will utterly forget you, and I will forsake you, and the city
that I gave you and your fathers, and cast you out of my presence:
23:40 And I will bring an everlasting reproach upon you, and a
perpetual shame, which shall not be forgotten.
Revolutionary surgical tech ripe for hackers - focused ultrasound
Says who? I've benchmarked my friend's Verizon LTE phone and gotten consistent 20 megabits down and 20 megabits up in a variety of locations across the tri-state area (NY, NJ, CT). This is better than cable modem service in a lot of areas.
Calling your product something generic like XK39-B50 or any of Sony's impenetrably confusing product names for their electronics would be better than the names they come up with.
Low-cost outsourcing compared to Silicon Valley?
Con Kolivas' Brain Fuck Scheduler (bfs) Patch (Linux Kernel) Benchmark [pdf]
This article wasn't about him getting fired in Oregon, it was a lengthy rant about him quitting in North Carolina. The reason you chose instead to focus your lengthy comment on that one throwaway line is because it reinforces your preexisting view that unions are the main problem with education, even though this article is mainly about some of the other problems.
This is obvious evidence that something is ripe for disruption, though I'm not sure what. Is it VC decision-making? Credentialing? Streed cred in the startup scene? Startup mentoring?

A curated course on how to get into a program that explicitly mostly "just takes the best team" is a code smell.
This is essentially correct. 3.4 is fine, but 3.0-3.1 means you are dead and may not even know it. It's utterly immoral, because a lot of employees at 3.0-3.1 think they're doing fine. Their managers are just giving them low scores to keep them captive.

What's amazing to me is that employees don't know their rights. If your manager deliberately interferes with your work performance, that's illegal (harassment law). If a company allows transfer, then exploration of internal opportunities is part of the job. A manager who makes transfer impossible through negative reviews is interfering with work performance and therefore breaking the law. (That, by the way, is why "calibration" happens in secret.)

I'd love to see this turn into a huge class action lawsuit against every company (including Google) that does that shit. Serves the fuckers right.
Five avoidable pitfalls in business continuity and disaster recovery planning
Ok, I'm going to disagree with you here. Speed of light delays cause latency when you're talking about large structures like caches, but they're not even the biggest factor in L3 with current processes. If we were clocking things as fast as nanotubes allow then we probably would find speed of light delays dominating latencies, but increased latencies will only eat a proportion of the gains from higher clock speed, and that's what we have branch predictors, prefetchers, and deep OoO engines for.

Unless you were talking about clock skew between the exit points of your h-tree?
What is the purpose of this book? Is Ruby internal workings not widely known or understood, or is this more about how to reverse engineer a software stack? Did you discover anything that is not documented in Ruby docs?
A lot of great minds I have studied with simply shrug when asked what they want to do for a career. Hence Google has its pick.

Admittedly, many people know damn well what we like doing, but are just about equally sure there aren't any actual jobs doing it.

For example, I like academia. It's not perfect, and I could certainly make some improvements (like more money, less bureaucracy, less enforced hierarchy, and more personalization of... everything), but next to business life (at both a mid-sized corporate environment and a niche bespoke software business), I like it and I'm good at it. That doesn't mean there are anywhere near as many jobs available for aspiring academics as there are qualified aspiring academics.

Eventually, something has to give.
Is reading memory faster than writing on a PC?
THe best part about this post is that as I whizzed through my RSS feeds in google reader, I saw the title of it as "We're creating a culture of distinction" and said to myself "That looks boring." Yes, I am over-stimulated and distracted...
I would also like to see a version I can purchase through my Kindle as well.
Like I say at the end of the article any feedback is appreciated. Please leave it here in the comments of the hacker news post.
Permamake.sh: Continuous background builds
What about long-run outcomes under standardized testing vs. without standardized testing?

Longitudinal data would be difficult to find, but surely countries differ in their respective levels of standardized testing.
Has anyone used their new variables stuff? The whole custom variables thing was ludicrously complex. Google's competitors just let you supply a JSON object with each event so you could add whatever you wanted. Google also bafflingly would only show the average value of numeric variables which is beyond useless.

Hopefully they also fixed the major problem with their previous analytics library which was that it only supported one reporting id at a time. (Under the hood it would correctly work with multiples but the API ensured a singleton for the top level "tracker" which then forced only one id.) This causes problems if you have multiple libraries or components who want to do their own reporting.

The previous mobile libraries were very much the minimal work to pretend they worked like web sites, which really doesn't work well. I wrote about this at http://blog.appington.com/2012/08/13/technical-differences-m...
Sadly, that is indeed normal for people looking for jobs as teachers in Oregon, and has been normal for at least the last several years. The only districts that are really hiring are the very rural ones, and even then it is usually just one or two positions.
This is going in the middlebrow dismissal corpus.

(I don't plan to mention that every time I find a new one, but this is the most perfect example I've found since I thought of trying to detect them algorithmically.)

If a 3.25b valuation at Square's age is a huge miss, all but a handful of companies in history have missed worse.

Do you actually know anything about Square's "PR machine," or are you just assuming he has one because he's in the press a lot? I don't know myself whether for example they have an in-house group that does aggressive outbound PR, or whether they have an outside PR firm, or both, or neither. It's possible the answer is neither; I get mentioned in the press a lot, and YC has neither.
I bought a 32GB Nexus 7 in store on Saturday for $249 in Mountain View.
It doesn't make assumptions, YOU make assumptions.

You can calculate a "valid" response in function of the bus volume and the ball radious f(v,r) without assuming anything and without having any real data.

Off course you can also focus on the "supidity" of the test and that also gives the company an idea of your thinking process and problem solving capabilities.

In any case the test serves its purpose well.
We slept on floors.  We waded across rivers.
Yes. I hate my app having "pages" as the analytical tracking medium and using "page-views" to quantify it. I wanna' measure more.
Can someone please comment on how PDF and ebooks from Manning's programming books render on Nexus 7 vs. mini-IPAD ? That, for me, is the deciding factor.
Google’s lame duck explanation of why the Nexus 4 doesn’t have LTE
Thoughts on Google’s New Nexus Devices
not if you want a reasonably distributed gene pool, diversity of genes is always a good idea
Peter.michaux.ca - Early Mixins, Late Mixins
"hobbyist" is relative. I started as a hobbyist and eventually expanded it into a business. Also in an era when people are underemployed, I feel that these sort of activities will become a valuable way to obtain a degree of self-sufficiency.
Flashpoint Applications Are Open, Due Nov. 19
very cool. Throughly enjoyed.
The fact that the Buy Now buttons haven't changed in years is called stability, something you want from the company processing payments on tens of millions of websites. A couple of the things they've done for their quarter billion users since the eBay acquisition:

* Lowered transaction fees for volume merchants to 1.9%

* Partnered with many of the largest payment gateways to add PayPal to their services

* Introduced PayPal mobile and NFC phone-to-phone payments

* Introduced micropayments

* Introduced two-factor authentication

* Got their European Union banking license and expanded to 100+ new countries

* Began offering PayPal Buyer Credit (transactional lines of credit)

* Moved into retail stores, accepting PayPal at credit card terminals in-store of 6 national retail chains and growing

* Began offering a mobile card reader to accept payments into a PayPal account

* Introduced student accounts with parental controls

* Opened their API for development of peer-to-peer payment services

* Introduced virtual, one-time-use credit card numbers

* Began offering merchant gift certificates

* Introduced a "storefront widget" that could be embedded in websites

* Began offering SMS-based authentication

* Began offering a virtual terminal for manually keying in offline/phone orders

* Introduced PayPal Pro and the ability to store payment authorizations you can charge against in the future (i.e. a payment vault with permission controlled by the customer).

I'm sure there's lots I'm forgetting. They still operate in dozens of countries where there are zero alternatives for individuals/small businesses to accept credit and bank payments online. Operating in 190 countries, many of which regulate them as a full-fledged bank, takes a lot of offices and a lot of staff.

10 years ago you could add a Buy Now button to your website. Today PayPal covers just about any payment scenario online and off:

* Take payments on your website, redirecting to PayPal for zero PCIDSS compliance burden

* Take payments directly on your website with PayPal's multiple server-side APIs

* Handle micropayments, recurring bills and usage-based bills with a payment token you only have to authorize once

* Take payments at your cafe with a swipe reader on your smartphone or tablet

* Take payments by phone or mail order with the virtual terminal

* Mass pay others by uploading a spreadsheet/CSV or by API

* Pay friends or send gifts from your smartphone

* Pay with PayPal at major retail chains with your phone number and PIN code

* All with a lower effective transaction rate than at least 90% of most small businesses would pay anywhere else

So they're doing more than ever before, for more businesses than ever before (judging by their revenues), while reducing their fees instead of increasing them. Why does the sexiness of their developer documents or New Buy Now Button Wizard matter more to you?

https://www.x.com/products
You don't tell Steve what Steve doesn't want to know. And he doesn't want to know the general populace's opinion of Windows branded products.

As an executive at MSFT, your career can be largely made or destroyed on how well you protect the artificial reality sphere around the top brass.

BT,DT, got the t-shirt before they laid off the person who made them.
Peter.michaux.ca - Organizing Browser Application Files
It's definitely tricky.

Junior teachers are often more easily pushed around, while senior teachers can have the experience and connections needed to push back against bad administration.

Letting administrators determine who the "best" teachers are can mean that administrators will pick the most obedient, not the most effective. A seniority system has obvious flaws, but I don't see increased bureaucratic power as much of an improvement.
this is a cool feature for those who have little kids and the only way to shut them up is to give them your phone
Nice to see this get opensourced!
The (literally) unbelievable UFO war in Antarctica
Obviously this is a complex issue, and I don't mean to single you out here, but I'm surprised how often I hear the argument that teachers aren't good enough from people who are concerned about the quality of education in the US. It seems to me that in most other industries, the workers in the field are given the benefit of the doubt.

In other words, do people really believe that Americans are great at being programmers or fire fighters or lawyers but that we just suck at being teachers?

Maybe I'm biased because there are a lot of teachers in my family, but my impression from hearing them discuss it is that the problem is much larger than whether teachers are good enough or not. Many teachers, like the one who wrote the linked article, are working under incredible pressure, essentially in conditions under which is is very easy to fail. Huge class sizes, inadequate funding, etc.

I think we should stop blaming teachers and assume like we do with so many other workers that most of them are smart and capable and will do well if we give them the support they need. And it would probably be wise to ask teachers how we can improve education and give them the authority and resources to implement their ideas.
I haven't done direct outreach for a few months. I'm moving to Honolulu next week and will be restarting direct outreach in November.

Back of the envelope / from memory? Leads (meetings) with ~1/10 contacts and projects from ~1/3 meetings.

I do Wordpress development, online advertising, search engine optimization, and social media work. It sounds like I might fall into both of your markets — marketers who need a solution for wordpress development / tweaks and wordpress developers looking for projects.

If you're interested in chatting, shoot me an email at kai@kaisdavis.com.
7 Tools For Running a Startup Social Enterprise
Apple's not in any significant danger yet. The margin built into their products is usually high, so should push come to shove, they can always cut that.

Normally demand is high enough that even at the premium price the product is sold out until it's replaced by a more sophisticated model and the "old" product can be manufactured more cheaply.

Other vendors should be thankful that Apple doesn't sell things at cost. This leaves significant opportunities for other vendors to fit in and compete.
>"Usually the term for it now days is college degree or equivalent experience..."

You're lucky to be in an industry where companies have, in recent history, been falling all over themselves to hire great engineers. This can change; that's the problem with dropping out. Say what you will about formal education, all things being equal that piece of paper may be what distinguishes you from your neighbour when the labour market loosens up.

Yes, I understand (and agree with) the fact that you don't need a formal college education to be successful, especially in the tech industry. But I think we glamourize the Harvard drop outs. Do so at your peril; the day may come when these things matter, and your Udacity certificate isn't going to match up well with the Stanford CS degree...
A view of the homeless in Chicago
I'd also like to see an underlying topographic map. It'd be interesting to see how the surface features affect the wind.
The last recruiter I talked to was hilarious. Like the author here, I pulled my Linkedin profile and I feel like I am fairly hard to find. However, I have a food blog and I guess I might have mentioned some tech stuff there. So this recruiter calls me and starts talking to me about food, I guess as a way to get me interested, but he totally and hilariously botches it because it's pretty clear he knows nothing about it. I told him "You live in one of the best food cities in the world, so even if you aren't looking to recruit you should to to these restaurants/food purveyors." I sent him a list of them and told him I wasn't interested in a job.
SpaceX Dragon Splashdown
PL man to PL man, what would you say the prospects are for taking a brain soaked in PL, compilers and software-engineering research expertise outside academia? You know, for when they boot me out of grad-school with a so-called "degree" in a bunch of years ;-).
Get Started With Social Media
NP-complete problems aren't impossible, they just get very computationally expensive the bigger they get.

OP would only be rich & famous if they had developed an algorithm that solved minesweeper in polynomial or better time. (i.e., a time complexity on the order of O(n^k), where k is some constant)

Many NP-Complete problems are trivially solvable, just not trivially solvable in an efficient manner. - like the Travelling Salesman Problem. You can just try every possible combination. It's not fast, but it works.
NFC sharing between Windows Phone 8 and Android
What you're alluding to is that milk producing animals are able to turn grass into milk, something we (humans) long ago lost the ability to do. We are unable to digest cellulose for ourselves so we rely on cows and goats and so on to do it for us. Due to the ready availability in per-industrialized Europe of grassland having a cow or goat always means, thanks to the lactose tolerance gene, that humans prosper.
Barely visible choice of white letters on yellow background (at least for me, it could be that live is better)
Windows 8: a tale of two OS | Webdesigner Depot
Thank you so much for releasing this. I can definitely see a use for it and will look into it in the near future.
>Dalvik blows.

The single thing that almost got Google into big trouble with Oracle is a weak point ;)
This seems roughly equivalent to the argument that we should measure software developer quality by lines of code written per day. Sure, we know it's not a perfect measurement, but it's the easy one to check, and it keeps people from doing nothing.

Of course, we software developers, understanding the complexity of our profession, know that would be idiocy. "But hey," says the MBA, "Some metric is better than no metric."
At-will employment is complicated. Very complicated.

The truth is that you should usually take the severance as offered, because a lawsuit usually isn't worth the time and reputation risk. That said, there are reasons companies write severance contracts. They're afraid of lawsuits, and secondarily about what you might say about them.

At-will protects the right to end employment for business reasons (layoffs) and to fire people for objective, published performance standards. The first of these, I think, is completely reasonable. The second would be reasonable if the standards were published before people accepted the offer.

Performance improvement plans (PIPs) attempt to make subjective firings look "performance" based, but if you know how to play that endgame, you can draw it out and make your manager's life hell without giving him anything objectively fireable. (You shouldn't make his life hell. In fact, if you can strike a deal with him where he improves your review so you can transfer, and you get the hell out of his way, that's better. You should get a new job and resort to endgame tactics only if you need more time at the old job.)

With a rescinded offer, there's no performance case, so it's only legally acceptable if the company can establish a business-related reason (such as a plant closing or a hiring freeze).

It's very unlikely that one will actually end up in a lawsuit over this. You use the words "promissory estoppel" to get a severance package, and you take it.
NYC Hurricane Evacuation Zones
Free Xcode Plugin That Adds In Vim Keybindings
The key things I love about an Drip vs. commercial options is that since it's a django app it hooks right into our database and I can dynamically schedule an email based on anything.

This is incredibly powerful for segmenting emails.
This is going to be true for any group of professionals. Doctors, lawyers, software developers. Junior ones will do what they are told. Senior ones will push back and say "this is stupid" when management tries stupid rules.

Yet the senior professionals in those fields are valued. I suspect because their employer cares if the organization does a good job. I've seen school administrators range from mildly concerned to completely unconcerned. As long as the bosses' jobs aren't in danger, they don't care, and their jobs tend to only be in danger when something goes really really wrong, like a school shooting. So, like any other bureaucracy, they work hard to clamp down on anything out of the ordinary.

I think school choice is important for getting administrators to care. Of course, if parents pull their kids out of school A and into school B, and some higher power (like a district) simply moves administrators over from A to B, nothing has been accomplished.
As I suggested in http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/09/ab-testing-vs-mab-algor... you can use a MAB algorithm with a forgetting factor for this. I've actually done it with a more sophisticated system, but the idea is similar - boost whatever you have evidence is performing better right now. (You should put in logic to avoid time-based fluctuations in performance throwing you off.)

The one that I built had minor teething pains, but it is now working quite well. And it is convenient to be able to every so often drop in new versions, and remove ones which have proven unable to perform up to snuff even with a newness effect, and just trust that it will Do The Right Thing.
Could this post mortem be considered a meta growth hack? :)
Serving 100k ads per second with the help of RabbitMQ
Skydiving from greatness to humbleness
Your GPU's “Fingerprint” Could Lead to New Security Methods