skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like he's trying to connect a candidate's well-roundedness and interpersonal fit with job ability. The last sentence says it all:

> But if a candidate can’t even tell you why they liked their last job, or what they got out of their college experience, or any of the million other questions that speak to their basic humanness… Then no amount of experience will make them valuable.

That's his thesis I think, but he defends it very poorly.

> 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.

How do you know this? The other guy couldn't name his favorite book therefore he couldn't do the job? What past experiences do you have to back this up?

> A person who has no hobbies, and can’t even exaggerate one, almost certainly lacks the ambition to make your company valuable. They are probably a loser.

Again, why? I don't consider no hobbies == no ambition to be self-evident. One common aspects of CEOs is that their ambition for running a company pushes out everything else from their life (for better or for worse). Having no life could speak of too much ambition.

It just sounds like he's trying to justify cliquishness with vague correlations to being a good worker. "Loser" to him amounts to, "a person I do not like for my own personal reasons."
He asked to be invalidated. I was giving him the feedback he requested. I am someone who routinely either gets useless pats on the head or hatred from people. I can't fucking get anyone to engage me in meaty discussion of the issues. And that fact is helping to ensure that my thingamawhop will be stillborn or miscarried entirely.

Perhaps he doesn't appreciate being given what he asked for. Perhaps like everyone else on planet earth, he will not take my feedback seriously and will merely be defensive like it is a personal attack and not a well meaning, honest critique. And, gee, that's on him what he does with it. But he did ask for people to try to poke holes in his idea, presumably on the theory that it would help him uncover weaknesses and thereby improve the darn thing. But maybe it was just pc bs, like most of the blather on the face of the planet.
So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

Sure, but I doubt that advice would make a difference in the author's tale. In the opening anecdote, it seems that the candidate would easily pass such a test if one were present but that he was rejected because he wasn't good at conversation or showing any passion for his hobbies.

Regardless of how effective (or not) it is as a recruiting tactic, I can muster a little sympathy for the author's position as I would find it quite a dilemma whether to give the thumbs up to someone who couldn't engage in an interesting conversation during interview.
I guessed it would. I wanted to confirm.

That sentiment occurs every time I press ctrl+t, type face, and press enter.

Edit: typo.
It's not even that the candidate obviously didn't read stuff. The guy was suddenly grilled about irrelevant crap by some jerk. Having a mind go blank in such a situation isn't exactly unheard of. And then consider, that such a situation already smells hostile, and you might decide to not share. Or, just essentially, not actually be happy about your previous life choice, and not really eager to discuss that with a person you've met for the first time in your life.
God I miss turning on the radio to hear KCSM now that I live in Austin. I programmed years of my life away listening to that station in a crappy rented room in Sunnyvale after college, and loved every bit of it.

So grateful they're streaming online. I still donate.

If you live in the Bay Area and don't see a show at Yoshi's, you definitely owe it to yourself...
Maybe he didn't like English Literature - his passion was film, or programming, or architecture and he discovered it later (and he couldn't change his major then). Or his college had lousy Film teachers or didn't offer any programming/architecture classes so he decided to go with English even though he didn't like it. Or maybe he partied all college, and then graduated and found more about the "real" world and got his act together.

I agree (in general) with wanting employees that aren't single-minded and have no hobby/passion outside of their work, but in this particular case I absolutely disagree with author's decision (based on his article).
Maybe you're feeling sad because you're using social-media more than you should. See the following article : http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...
I log in once every 1-2 weeks. 2-3 minutes of scrolling through my most recent newsfeed, and it hits me what a giant waste of time fb is. session over!
It's the de facto place people put events together because practically everyone is on Facebook. That's pretty much all I use it for now, and it actually isn't too bad for that purpose.
After that you can take the AI course on Udacity.
Beautiful conversions from Word and Excel to PDF
That is what the author is espousing - judging people on a selected part of their bio, while disregarding any success they've had in the actual work they do.
There is a finite amount of time on this earth, devote it to the ones you actually care about, don't spread yourself too thinly. I feel that Facebook helps a little with the former but greatly encourages the latter. I know a lot of people whose FB friend list is basically artificial life support for relationships that should have been allowed to fade into the past. FB provides the appearance that the relationship exists and is animated, but really there's still nothing there, and yet you're still paying the price of it in terms of your attention span. Zombie friendships!
Yeah, sadly this lawsuit is just "cost of doing business" for Best Buy. They earned $140m in the first year, they only had a % chance of paying out for a lawsuit, and the lawsuit was worth less than 20% of the $140m earned. They just profited over $113m (plus the benefit of money now vs. money later) from destroying a startup

Business as usual in America nowadays :/
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/1403

Page to the actual debate that occured. There's a link on the right to the recording of it.

You know, just in case biases hid something
I've been using R extensively for the past 12 months and have achieved a high level of comfort with the language. Now I find myself at a wall because of my lack of math and statistics background. I've taken R as far as I can, or put more properly, R has taken me as far as I can go without learning more math.

With that said, I have little reason to use R right now except for it's excellent plotting ability with ggplot2. Otherwise for data munging, wrangling, connecting to databases, doing unit testing, etc - R is a giant PITA. Better to stick to Python for that. And as I learn D3, I think I'll use R even less for visualization.

Therefore R will only be valuable to me once I can harness it's power for data mining and machine learning, which is it's killer feature, IMHO.
Here is a sure-fire way to weed-out potential winners: base your judgement on some dumb interview questions or metrics.

I have failed many interviews. But anyone who I have ever worked for has praised the hell out of my work. Interviews have never been a good way of finding ideal candidates. The best way, IMHO:

Give the interviewee one week's worth of work as an "internship". If they care about working for you, they will do it. It gives them a chance to prove themselves, and you a chance to really evaluate how well they can do the job.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, close window. Typically left feeling completely neutral. I've got kids and my friends are at the getting married / having kids age now as well, so my feed has gone from "I'm so fucking high!" pictures to "Look how cute my ugly baby is!". Occasionally I use it to contact people whose phone number / e-mail address I don't have, and it's great for that. It's like my White Pages.
Please see my other response. My comment was meant to be interpreted as most musicians who have "made it" these days aren't real musicians, it's all appearance and showmanship not musicianmanship. While there are some great musicians who are considered as having made it, there aren't many and in a world where people still think Slash is the worlds greatest guitarist it's obvious famous musicians who appreciate their art, the fans and what they have are a dying breed.

There will always be real musicians around, but I purely meant those who have made it not those who do the 9-5 hustle and bustle in the Subway's playing for change or smaller venues for $50 and a bar tab.
This whole trend of categorizing people as "winners" or "losers" seems distasteful. What is winning? Favorable circumstances in the present?
I had a facebook account. Someone who clearly dislikes me and carries a grudge from 500 years ago for godknowswhat "friended" me to promote their thingy that they were involved with. That turned me sour on the whole thing. Many months later, I left their thingy and was wondering if I should unfriend them or something when I realized I had not logged into fb in over a year. So I decided the clean, diplomatic thing to do would be nuke the whole account. So I did.

I will never figure out social media or self promotion. Ugh.
Okay that makes a lot of sense now. I was wondering why there was nothing about a high ongoing royalty rate mentioned in the article. If even trivial patents can get ~3.5% on revenues, such blatant theft of actual files and ideas should get substantially more.
If you think it is invalid that is a perfectly acceptable response. You made a point and I countered. No need to get hostile Mz. I'm just glad you took the time to respond. You're feedback is appreciated, even if the answer is "your idea isn't worth building".

I want to hear what your thingamawop is - please share. Maybe this is the start of doitfor500, and you get the first version for free. Or at least we put you on the right path if you do it yourself. I'm really curious now what it is.
honestly i don't know of anything that can compare to Mathematica, besides its $300 price tag
Salaries and standards for programmers are way higher here than anywhere else.

One way of framing it, is asking if you were already living in the Bay Area, would be willing to take a $40-$70k/year pay cut to move home to be closer to friends, family, and more affordable housing?
Single sign-on for your websites
How to Use Your Words: The Pros and Cons of Plain Text Email
Sometimes, I feel like quitting facebook. Some others, I enjoy watching friends flaming on politics and video games. But most of the time, I just use it to contact people I can't contact otherwise, mostly aquaintances I rarely see. I always think of Facebook like the modern version of the adress book we had next to the phone before such social networking sites appeared. I keep my old contacts in case I ever want to talk to them again for any reason, a couple years from now.
I believe the keywords on that graphic would be "perceived corruption." In consistency with the other comments, that implies that it is based on surveys of the public.
Hover.com and 10dollar.ca.
I've watched your hiring FAQ evolve through a number of threads here on HN, and I'd love to see it wikified. Even if you don't open it up for general editing, it'd be nice to be able to bookmark it, check it out from time to time, view the revision history, and so on. (Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean an actual wiki. Could be Google Docs, a GitHub gist, etc.)
Good. Screw them. Now the evil a-hole caption will hang over their logo in my mind forever. Probably others on HN.

Even if this damages their brand in only a small way, it's a real cost.
I have to admit, I'm surprised at how polarizing the words "winners" and "losers" are to people in this thread.

Replace the word winner with successful, and does it seem so bad?
wait, what do you regret?!
I use IntelliJ with multiple non-nested Maven projects all the time.

I typically have a projects directory under which I have many subfolders containing Maven projects. In IntelliJ I create a single module rooted at my "projects" folder but for this module do not set up any sources. Then it is just a matter of right-clicking any POM and selecting "Add as Maven project..." I can enable/disable these projects at whim.

You can also simply add each module at a time.

I've always been impressed that it "just works". It'll even do in-IDE compilation against latest sources if it detects a snapshot dependency across (even non-nested!) modules/projects.
CipherCloud Lands $30 Million From Andreessen Horowitz
No, to both of you. No no no. Best Buy didn't "earn" 140MM; according to this story, they achieved 140MM of revenue. Revenue for Best Buy is the price tag on consumer electronics. Bust Buy doesn't pull those consumer electronics out of its butt; it pays vendors to acquire those goods, marks them up, and sells them to customers. Best Buy is a public company and is required to account for this difference, which is its gross margin. Best Buy's gross margin hovers around 25%.

If it all this suit cost Best Buy were the damages and penalties we already know about, then they are already close to wiped out on the deal (27MM vs. ~35MM, less legal). But that still doesn't capture it, because Best Buy spent money to clone this startup's offering and also to run the company and keep the lights on in the stores, which are expenses not captured in Best Buy's gross margin.

Incidentally, the 22MM figure also didn't get pulled out of some judge's butt. If you read the jury's finding, it's the amount of unjust enrichment Best Buy achieved by misusing Techforward's property.

In the very worst case scenario, virtually every penny of profit from this program was redirected from Best Buy to the winners of the lawsuit. But it's even more likely that Best Buy took a bath even beyond the imputed profits we're talking about.
The author might have a point. The world is filled with automatons, without passion or even mensurable interests. He might be right in not hiring the candidate, but we cannot know if he was, in fact, a 'loser' (by some definition of 'loser').

It might be the case that the candidate actually didn't find academy very enjoyable and spent all day drinking instead. Which most do, at some point. In that case, he could've been too shy to admit it, or did admit it and the author was too obtuse to change the subject.

See, we are dealing with his perception. If the candidate could write his angle, then we could try to infer something. It might even be the case that the candidate (with lots of experience) found the interview to be meaningless and boring and wanted to leave.

And generic answers are a nice way to end a conversation.
Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China.
Selection of bio? The commenter above just wrote a small novel about why he's wrong. Talk about selective reading.
lolwut?

Do you disagree that C# has similarities to other languages? C# is based on Java, which is somewhat based on C++. Basically anyone who does a CS course learns one of these. In comparison, I don't know any programs that use Haskell, oCaml, scala, or ML (I had a single class in which I had to use ML fora single project). What I mean to say is, functional programming is not widely taught. I don't think this is controversial.

Do you disagree that any person that is reasonably smart and that you'd want to hire could become productive in c# within a few days, given that they've used java or C++ before. This is a super-low risk gamble. I don't think this is controversial.

The only indicator that someone can become productive in F# is that they have experience in one of F#, Lisp, ML, Haskell, etc. I don't think this is controversial.

Hiring people is hard. Maybe you haven't been involved in the process, but you have to interview hundreds of people just to find that one person who is smart, is a culture fit in your company, and has enough self-discipline and a high-enough level of consciousness to go about their work in a pragmatic and intelligent manner.

Now imagine that you are CTO of a new company and you are deciding between c# and f#. If you startup becomes successful, you'll have to quickly ramp up in hiring engineers. If your startup doesn't become successful, you'll quickly have to ramp up in having someone else hire you.

Assuming we are a rational person, that is we are doing a startup in the hopes that it will be successful, then our plans will facilitate the hiring of many engineers.

Fast forward to when we need to hire many engineers. Also, remember you don't have loads of time to spend doing this, because you're the CTO of a startup and you have shit to do. Also, remember it's hard for startups to hire because 1) risk and 2) you aren't google.

Now imagine taking your pool of candidates and reducing it by 99%.
Yeah, go figure! I don't understand the algorithm for determining what appears on the front page of ask on hacker news.

7 points is not compelling enough for me to build this thing.
my ideal java ide:

http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-java-dark.pn...
YES. I had to relearn misconceptions about R four, five years down the line but the truth is not widely advertised (that everything in R is actually a vector).
Does the cost of living versus increased salaries come out in the green, when it's all said and done?
Dogs driving cars
Like Twittr.
Another minimal approach in RubyMine (another IntelliJ IDEA 12 based product):

http://i.imgur.com/C9zax.png

Just because the IDE has a lot of features doesn't mean you need to have them all enabled at once.
Hi,

I have sent you an email.
I deleted my account last year, and I have to say I feel pretty good about it.
Do you happen to know if the author went to college?

He seems to have this cute idea that you pay $120k to a institution of higher learning, then you dedicate all of your time to academics, then you emerge with a well-refined body of knowledge in your particular field. I thought this is how it worked too, before I attended a college.

Maybe his point is that you shouldn't be taken seriously if you pay $120k and spend 4 years doing something where you're not deeply intellectually invested, but it's hard to have the confidence at 17 to be the contrarian that doesn't attend college.
Discussion on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/14bvtz/the_end_of_a...
MLS data is oriented toward "retail sales." A lot of people have access. In many cases that access will be better than yours as an outside party. What seems likely to have value is data that is different from MLS.

I've worked for real-estate developers. Market data which gives them an edge. Aggregating that sort of data has the potential for a huge upside. Doing so efficiently has the possibility of scaling.
Thanks, amfeng. Does the chargeback liability hit end merchants, or is that absorbed by Stripe? With Balanced, Gittip is responsible for it, and can choose whether to pass that along.
I thought this article was informative. It's good info for anyone not wanting to work for a tool.
Ignoring that he has built a successful company (while needing to hire a ton of people to accomplish it) seems very selective to me.

Also saying that "Maybe he'll be a winner in the future, and I wish him well" makes me think he completely missed that, or perhaps has never heard of Bleacher Report. The intersection of tech people and sports people does not seem very large.
Love that this is posted here. Spend many hours listening to Dave Brubeck. A legend.
If you really want to screw Best Buy the way the rest of the market is screwing them (that is: to death), then, next time you want to buy a big-ticket electronic product, go to Best Buy to try it out.

Then buy it on Amazon like everyone else does.
I hate it* and don't use it with any sort of regularity, but I have an account. Sometimes people tag me in photos and I check them out. Maybe once per month. Also, some people sometimes invite me to events through it. I wish people would use better photo hosting services and event management services. They exist, so I don't see Facebook as a necessary evil, but rather an unnecessary and mediocre service.

*That's actually a very strong word. I dislike it, but I don't lose sleep over it at night or anything.
Rugby World Cup domination.
That 0.5 is not a rounding error.
Let me get this straight. The author asserts the following:

Lesser managers will try to stump candidates with horrible brain teasers along the lines of “Describe a time you got into a bad situation and resolved it effectively?” — or crap like that.

What hard-hitting, incisive questions does the author ask instead?

Which of your previous jobs did you enjoy the most?

What do you think of our web site?

Tell me about your hobbies...

You've got to be kidding me. These are all soft-ball questions. What amazes me is that the author's company already has a hiring process in place. But he feels justified in abandoning this process at the end when an interviewee doesn't provide correct responses to an arbitrary list of soft-ball questions.
It's interesting, but gestures in general have a major discoverability problem. I do not know that it is an unsolvable problem, but until it can be solved in a more general way, it's going to be hard to push them much harder than they already are.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. I gave you the feedback you requested. That doesn't mean "it isn't worth building". That means I respect you enough to help you try to find the weaknesses before you build the damn thing, in hopes that it will hurt less should you actually launch. And if you can't come to terms with that, life will get really painful when you do go public with it.

My thingamawhop: I nearly died just about twelve years ago. Then I was diagnosed with "atypical cystic fibrosis". I have spent the last twelvish years getting well when the entire world thinks that is impossible. I would like to write a simulation -- aka "game" -- to more effectively share my mental model. But it might never happen. I get accused of having Munchhausen Syndrome rather than cf. Most people with cf have made it abundantly clear that they would rather die a slow torturous death than speak to me at all. And I have been lovingly called a "troll" by the good people of hn for trying to get feedback to resolve my problems.

Sorry if I am a tad raw over the whole thing. This kind of bullshit has gone on for years. It likely won't end. Ever.

Best of luck with your idea.
Could you share your color schema info?

Thanks
Give AppCode a try - although it's mainly for Objective-C, it has good support for C and C++ http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/whatsnew/index.html
I had a problem with Github user pages for the past few months: It stopped building.

At first I was more than happy that for every commits, I can see the changes immediately, but after few days, it just keep showing the old build. I even started a fresh new accounts and setup a new user page, same thing happened. I tried many things to make it work, adding/removing CNAME, changing the page content, even waiting for few days, no luck. Tried to contact the Github team (via Twitter and the Contact Us page), no respond.

Now I am using my shared VPS to host a static site, waiting for some good news about build reliability, until then I wouldn't recommend using Github user pages.

Oh and by the way, if you set a CNAME, you wouldn't be able to access your project pages without adding it as a submodule into your user page.
Getting Real: Copywriting is Interface Design
The problem with a sink is that you remove 'currency' form circulation. Without a way of circulating the karma back or a way of generating new karma then you can get a lack of liquidity, and hence make it difficult for people to 'buy' connectivity because they aren't able to obtain any karma.