skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if this guy was shy or a bit of an introvert? I know if I were in that situation I may not have all the "correct" answers, especially if I were in a room with someone like the author. If you make me feel wanted or interesting I can talk about anything, if you make me uncomfortable and sound like a jerk? Especially in a job interview, you can believe I'd be nervous and may not have all the best answers. As far as hobbies go, I like auto racing, but other than that all my time is devoted to startuping and freelance work, which I love dearly. Books? Last one I read was How to Win Friends and Influence People and other than that, I can't remember the last one I've read. All that to say, maybe this guy didn't click with the author, but doesn't give you the right to call him a loser. That's just bullshit.
Thanks for all of the feedback everyone... it has been very exciting to actually "launch" something and get some feedback. You guys did a swell job of uncovering some bugs and edge cases. I'm going to keep pushing and at least get it working as advertised.

I did some research ahead of time and did come across purl.org, but had no idea about WebCite and a couple of the others. Yes, my project is basically the same as those.

Does this work as a single point of failure company? Who knows, but it's been fun.
Maybe I'm just dense, but what am I supposed to be doing in the demo?
Author went to college.

Look at his questions from another angle. Would you hire a CS grad who couldn't answer the question "What's your favorite programming language?"

I think his example might be overly specific, but the answers the candidate gave would certainly be a red flag.
I actually read his Twitter feed before posting. It was massively vandalized by Prismatic, who was clearly impersonating him.

The claimed bug is that the were not clear in getting permissions. That is completely irrelevant to the core of the principle here. They are fraudulently impersonating him, using his own account. That is a fact and it is a verifiable fact.

Given that you feel motivated to justify it, I have added your company Clever to my list of dodgy companies I will have nothing to do with. Thank you for informing me of your questionable ethics.
I can't speak for Windows, but if I click "Clone in Mac", it launches Tower.app. So the label seems apt to me. It's more that the URL protocol that sounds wrong to me (github-mac://??).
This article came across as offensive. Honestly if a company is actively classifying people as losers, it's not really the type of company I'd like to work at. A better hiring policy might be 'hire amazing people' and then look for the amazing in people. This approach is so negative and off-putting.
"As it turned out, we eventually did find someone for that position, with a lot less relevant experience. But she learned the job in about six weeks, and her upside enabled her to take on a lot of the unforeseen — and valuable — tasks that the previous candidate would have stumbled around."

Could you tell me a bit about your hobby of predicting the future, Mr Goldberg?

Who would you say are your top 5 clairvoyants?
Twitterrific 5 is out on UK
As long as you don't value home ownership. Or, if it's roughly even, then it includes what is mostly a higher quality of life in the Bay Area.
Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it."

Indeed,

I find it remarkable that virtually everyone I've ever known either has a Facebook account or has had a Facebook account. Which is say that Facebook has been the gateway drug to the Internet. And as many could predict, the majority of US citizens really are now "citizens of the Internet" now, for good or ill. No one is "just visiting", everyone has "not passed go, not collected $200" and is "in the Internet".

But that has also meant that Facebook itself has become more like the Internet. On Facebook, I interact more now with my "Facebook friends" than with my "friend friends" than when I started. And that's OK. This discussions are deeper and narrower like the Internet. Some people will find other places ... on the Internet. Some people will find other places only in real life. Some people will spend their days texting. That's what one expects from a process of digital stratifying. Good, bad, I don't know but it has had an amazing impact on our personal relations.
But it's a pretty lame attack him based on a selected portion of his bio.

This comment is like 10,000 spoons, when all you need is one spoon.
MIG-in-the-middle
Analayze->Inspect Code...
Shows both errors and warnings
I find the cognitive dissonance of Americans commenting on such things while still claiming silly titles like "the greatest country in the world" fascinating.

This one has a "besides Canada" footnote disclaimer. Why, because Canada does have a decent health care system? Sort of like... almost every single other first world nation except the USA?
Sure, we could replace winners and losers with some term like "A players" and "B players." But even judging past success has its flaws; I feel that society as a whole tends to put success, or "winning", on a pedestal. How many great minds have we benefited from who had significant flaws in their time, or went unrecognized?

People are probably a lot more complicated than we think. We try to sort them out into categories as best we can, but we should remember that our understanding of another person's value is limited at best. Calling out people as "losers" because they don't fit your purpose is immature.
I love it, I don't care, I hate it?

What if I, uh, like it just fine?
> all the negative news about social-networks and realize it does not affect me (directly anyways)

Some of it not. But deleting your name off drunk party photos is actually easier when you are part of Facebook, for example.
Can we get congress, or at least state congresses one by one, to pass a law that says, rather than filing their rates, they must provide a web API for accessing them. That would make the records much more accessible to everyone and solve this comparison accuracy problem. It is definitely in the interests of the consumers.
On your point 4, Perhaps I'm biased, but the entire IT industry is "insidious" by design. The technology infrastructure is what allows nearly endless traps like these to be set for those who try to cooperate with their clients wishes. It's a lose-lose for those trying to win big clients.
I actually find base R excellent for data munging and manipulation, even without using additional packages. Here is a reproducible example that very easily accomplishes what you were trying to do (first two lines just set up a sample data frame)

set.seed(123)
dfrm <- data.frame(height=runif(20),
name=paste(sample(LETTERS[1:5],20,replace=TRUE),letters[1:20]))
subset(dfrm, grepl('^D',name), sel=height)

Basic R functions like subset, transform, with(in), reshape, aggregate, (a,ma,ta,sa,va}pply, match, grep(l), by, split, table, etc. allow you to accomplish just about any data frame munging you might want. Add on the plyr, reshape2, data.table, xts/zoo packages and you're ready to tackle just about anything.

I'm not a big fan of sqldf because imo R is not supposed to act like SQL. Using sqldf in practice would require a lot of query string manipulation and takes away from the nice functional features of R.

Nevertheless, it is very easy to write incomprehensible R code. The best way to avoid this is to take one of the existing style guides (Google, Hadley Wickham's) and adopt it seriously.
A nytimes.com article on R outlining it's history and how it is moving from academia to main stream data analytics http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-comput...
How This Tech Billionaire Plans To Build A Mars Colony
City of New York Design Challenge - Reinvent Payphones
I think your response here and to the other poster above is quite sound. I also program regularly in Matlab, R, and Python, but when it comes to data analysis, I do find that R is just much more concise than the other two (the data manipulation and statistical analysis tools are more high-level). Learning R and going through its tutorials (the MASS book and actually the S-PLUS Statistics Guides) and learning about functions available to me made me learn a lot more about stats. I sometimes use Matlab for image processing and optimization, or some simple simulation but less and less these days (trying to replace it with SciPy since I use Python a lot in my workflow).

But I also agree that if you're already proficient with Matlab and happy, then maybe you don't need to learn R (though often you can be blissfully ignorant of your possibilities if you are unaware of the vast libraries that another language/environment offers).
Have you ever tried to import a project in IntelliJ just by opening the POM file? I find it imports the project structure from the Pom very well.

I agree that Idea makes it's project layout very hard to understand for beginners and struggled with it myself until I realized you could just import a Pom file and be done with it all.
I would have been less offended if your initial comment wasn't as presumptuous. You most certainly have a right to participate in the conversation, but there was no useful content in the post. It came across in exactly the same was as the email messages I get from colocation providers whenever the one I host with has a problem. It frankly smacked a little bit of "ambulance chasing", and that turns me off.

If you had bothered to provide more actual information about what your software could have done for us, I would have reacted very differently.
Could use some help from SF startups :)
Hi! I'm an out of state student (international student in the US really). I was here for the Lean Startup Conference.

I'm staying in SF for the rest of the week... to kinda get inspired by visiting startups (by osmosis ha!).

Can I please stop by your shop for maybe 5-10 minutes? Promise I won't be a bother :) might ask a few silly questions and take copious notes ha!

Thanks much !
Sourabh

t3-sourabh@unl.edu
This is nearly exactly what I would've said, but more thought out.

The newsfeed was overwhelming at first, but the day I realized I didn't need to feel bad about not responding to a friend request from some old acquaintance I never actually liked, or about blocking/defriending someone who just posted annoying stuff all the time, was the day it became super useful to me once again. Now my newsfeed is mostly people I care about sharing stuff I find interesting or amusing, and that's a wonderful utility for someone who's moved a few times and has friends all over the country.

I'm convinced that what you get out of Facebook is what you put into it. It doesn't have to be an unpleasant experience.
Ok, I read it, I knew it was link bait going in, and felt it tweak "Those Buttons" that such things do. I'd like that 5 minutes of my life back.

TL;DR summary I got from it was "I use these questions to decide if I'll enjoy working with someone, and I don't hire them if I don't like their answers." and interspersed with a bit of aspersions on people who aren't good at "small talk."

One of the interesting things that is oft overlooked in the angst of hiring is actually the angst of firing. Really. I mean the only reason you want to be super super careful about hiring someone is because if they don't work out then you've wasted that time. But if you can lower the cost of hiring enough, and make firing pretty straight forward, then the economics can change.

One summer I worked for McDonalds (the fast food chain) for all of four weeks, two in a 'training store' and then two in my assigned store. I was fired pretty quickly. During my training (hamburger flipping) the store manager explained that (at the time) McDonalds would hire anyone with a pulse and no criminal record. They would then train them briefly, and watch them closely, and decide early on if they wanted to keep them around.

My "problem" was that the store had an algorithm for queuing up burgers which, from my perspective at the grill, was broken. Our store had way more people who ordered Quarter Pounders (one 4 oz patty) than BigMacs (two 2 oz patties). The algorithm though said you had to 'start' twice as many 2 oz patties as 4 oz patties just before the lunch rush. We always were throwing out 2oz patties (you can't sell them after they've been on the warmer too long). So I started cutting back on the 2oz patties I started. Big mistake :-). Got "the talk" which was "We hire people to do things the way we want them done, you may not agree with how things are done but if you want to keep working here you have to do what we say." Silly me (it was only my second 'real' job) I kept trying to find ways to optimize the system and not get caught. At the two week point my manager recognized that I was a 'trouble maker' and couldn't follow instructions. End of my career right there.

Now the moral of the story isn't to make fun of McDonalds but to point out that they made acquiring good "fits" for the company straight forward by building a lighter weight hire/fire process than most places have. Folks I know who have worked at Microsoft suggested they had systems which did something similar, hiring at temps, then converting to full time. This made it easier to fire people who were temps in the first place. Google kinda of did that with their 'slotting' process.
Figuring out if a candidate is a person, rather than a meat robot, isn't "irrelevant crap." I have noticed a strong correlation between people who don't get jazzed over something--hobbies, academics, whatever--are not people I want to work with. The author's method isn't the only one, but it seems like a reasonable one to me.

It isn't "hire somebody who can talk about English." It's "don't hire someone who can't talk about something he (or she) cares about." If the guy's going to be in a sales role, he should at the least be able to pivot the conversation to something interesting that he can talk about.
I should have put this in my last post: “Why not OStatus”, from the Tent authors themselves: https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/4

The tl;dr is that Tent is much broader in scope than OStatus while being, at its core, simpler.
For me, those family status updates are distributed by an older social network: humans, particularly retired ones ;) Talking to my grandmothers is more than enough to know all about family members having babies, getting married, etc - whether I'm interested or not!
I use it like an RSS feed. Follow interesting pages that post interesting articles. Hide annoying friends from my feed.
Beijing Spirit Leads Enterprises to Continuous Progress
A country needs great national spirit and so does a city. That’s the reason that Beijing, the capital of China announced “Beijing Spirit” on 2nd, November, 2011. Beijing Spirit includes Patriotism, Innovation, Inclusiveness and Virtue. This is the summary of the spiritual wealth formed in the development and practice of Beijingers. It has become a guide to Beijing citizens’ practice since then. As an advanced local enterprise in Beijing, Raqsoft integrates Beijing Spirit into its long-term development strategy.
Your comment is making me feel like a loser :P

Can you explain what you mean?
Yes. But then, we use a gamified version of a work-sample test, so I would know that despite the fact that the candidate doesn't really care about the difference between Python and Ruby, he can exploit blind SQL injection and reverse engineer a network protocol. Which is good, because the latter ability is predictive of success, and the former is predictive of lots of stupid unproductive arguments.

This would be a nitpicking debate except that it gets to the heart of what makes the interview strategy in this article so dumb. There are lots of great programmers --- maybe some of the best --- who don't care all that much about language design or what language they'll be working in. There are, more importantly, a WHOLE MESS of programmers who can DEFINITELY talk your ears off about what the best language is... and then fail fizbuzz.
Definitely a nice job collecting all the data!
I have an account, but I don't use it. Recently Facebook has been sending me emails with people it thinks I might know, but I don't know any of them, which in turn means Facebook doesn't know me at all. Just the way I like it.
Many big companies won't sign 'your' NDA but they will have their own one that is probably reasonable (although check it, and get it checked by a lawyer if you are disclosing anything really stealable).

That can cause deadlock when bit companies need to talk to each other...
My thinking "I don't care" = "like it just fine". Perhaps a better choice of words was "I like it".
Sorry, I probably should have put in some instructions. When mousetip is turned on, you can hold down a modifier key (ctrl, cmd, windows key) and tooltips will dynamically appear based on the bounded shortcuts.
It's like rain, on your wedding day.

A free ride, when you've already paid.

Some good advice that you just didn't take.
The Database Billion
lack of toolboxes
It certainly looks nice.
I was in that position 5 years ago. I really tried - spent time learning keystrokes etc. What got me was the lack of integration and lack of basics. For example, Find Usages and Search were incredibly crap - which is a major problem when you've been brought onto a new project and you need to read and understand the code base. Perhaps things have improved since then. Ended up installing IntelliJ on the sly (advantage of a personal license!)
I don't "not care" about Facebook. I wouldn't be devastated if it vanished. I like it fine. It's useful.
No$psx - one more option for PS emulation
Obviously, the candidate didn't want to talk about his English major, but the author kept hammering away from every angle anyway.

Setting aside that the questions are obviously just designed to smoke out whether you're a human being or a meat robot: it's a sales position (account management is still sales). If you can't effectively shift a determined person off of something you don't want to talk about--for whatever reason--you are probably not somebody who a company wants in a sales/customer-facing role.
Photos and likes make Facebook worth it for me.
Thanks, good catch (my code probably would have been better if I had an actual use-case instead of a contrived example).
7 million bitcoins are "lost" because they haven't circulated in the last 3 months?

Maybe you have found evidence of an elaborate ponzi scheme that we are all played by, but I don't buy your conclusion, and it's not the conclusion of the linked article.

If only 90,000 bitcoins held by/moved through a small group is driving most of a total of 423,000,000 bitcoins transacted, then I'd say the rest of the owners of the 9mil bitcoins in existence owe those guys a debt for stress-testing the grid.

You can use a cloud bitcoin wallet, like BitcoinSpinner, which is implemented on top of the BCCAPI. While I have not read the actual API, and I'm not sure this program is open source, I can tell you that it promises your bitcoins cannot be stolen from the cloud!

If that's not good enough for you, and you don't trust your own safe box in your own house, then I'd suggest you run back to your FDIC insured bank, or better, start reading. It's shameful to hear Hacker News readers saying they don't trust their own data to stay safe.
Well, to put it into perspective, they joined during very different political and economic times: the Danes in the late 60s and the Swedes and Finns right after the Wall came down.

Edit: Looks like Denmark applied in 1969 and was admitted in the early 1970s.
Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL
Now, there's an argument for greenbacks. McDonalds takes greenbacks. Brb guys... fry cravings.
In your R version, you don't need the call to `which()`, so you could do this instead:

dfrm$height[substr(dfrm$name,1,1) == "D"]

And here's a much clearer way to do it:

subset(dfrm, grepl("^D", name), select = height)
Why no "It's OK"? Something more moderate and common.
I don't care. I just use it to keep track of what my overseas relatives are up to and contact them if necessary.
This is of course just my opinion, just as that graph is someone else's opinion (i.e. there are no universal 'truths' here).

Lobbying (as in paid lobbyists) should be viewed as corruption.

Going to war with countries for no (valid) reason (in the age of the UN) should be corruption.

Breaking any international agreement and pretending you still follow them should be corruption.

Imprisoning people because they expose your corruption, should be corruption.

I think even with that small list I'm pretty sure most of "The West" would be red.
This really isn't true. A better characterization is "only panic in exceptional or unrecoverable circumstances." A perfect example of this is programmer error (i.e., violating a function's contract). It's perfectly reasonable to panic over package boundaries in this case.
House passes unanimous resolution to ban UN regulation of the internet
Gaga buys MJ costumes
What risk does a dissolved company have? The article seems to state that the only real 'risk' was that the VC company spent their own money to fight this, not knowing whether they would win.
> "It's fine to disagree, but it's a pretty lame attack him based on a selected portion of his bio."

As opposed to attacking an entire blanket group of people based on their ability to answer personal questions in an interview?

tokenadult didn't start by calling people "losers".

It's lame when know-it-alls write blog posts about how their unscientific, unverified approach to some task ought to be adopted by everyone. It's even more lame when successful people ascribe their successes to such unscientific hoo-hah (even though we all have them), proceed to spoon feed them to everyone within eye-shot, and point at people and call them losers on arbitrary criteria.

The world is full of successful jerks - the jury is still out on whether your boss ever really had an effective hiring system.
They mostly use mules, they get the mules from phishing too. So the money is transferred from one victim to one mule, the mule agrees to send 90% of the money via a non traceable method. The mule is eventually on the hook for 100%.
The long run doesn't matter for them. I give BB 2 years before they follow Circuit City into liquidation.

3 if they're lucky.
Sounds like a subreddit, not a website. </irony>
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