skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of those indicators were meant to be taken in isolation. Each of them, by itself, means nothing.

Taken altogether, they are helpful because they allow someone with little technical expertise to at least have a snowflake's chance in hell of recognising programing talent. If someone is enthusiastic, has a broad technical skill set, has been programming since before uni, loves to talk about the latest bit of technology he's picked up, is articulate, smart, learns technical stuff by himself, and has a tendency to work on side projects (rather than having all his experience on the CV), then they're far more likely to be a good programmer than not.

Remember, a business guy is effectively flying blind. I can sit with someone for 15 minutes and tell you whether they're a good hacker or not without having asked a single technical question, but someone with no technical skills cannot do that - nor can they figure out how to recognise someone like me to ask me to do it for them. They'll get fooled by certification-laden "software architects" who haven't written a line of code in years and will happily help them hire a football team's worth of mediocre programming talent.

I put together this list over a year ago to help non-technical people in this situation, and others must have found it useful, since over time it's accrued some 300'000 visitors and been linked to from pretty much everywhere.

If you feel you can come up with a better list of indicators, please do so, I'll be the first to vote you up.
Thanks. Your front-page critique was really helpful. I'm working on putting a few of your suggestions into practice.

The design thing that drives me mad is figuring out what the front page should look like. How do you combine a Digg/Reddit interface with original content without short-changing one or the other? If there are any pro or amateur UI designers out there with advice, I'm all ears. I've created about 40 front page mockups in the last year and finally just decided to stick the original stuff in the sidebar to focus on getting the social news up and running as best possible.
Worth pointing out that the article proposes the opposite: that business guys can learn how to hire hackers, thanks to that list of indicators I pulled together.
> This begs the question, What the hell is the point?!

It raises the question. Begging the question means something else. Look it up.
In Tech, you have sites like Techcrunch...
That's a fail right there. Techcrunch is the bete noir of tech journalism, as Last.FM showed, and as Alex Payne ranted about:
http://al3x.net/2009/03/03/towards-better-technology-journal...

The larger problem isn't really coverage however -- it's not about getting the stories out there, although that will ultimately become a problem as societies formerly brought together by newspapers fracture into interest groups. There's no shortage of coverage online.

The problem is in the reporting. Many of the things you link to are actually about commentary on reporting done by others ("commentary" is even in Naked Capitalism's site description). The actual reporting and investigation is, by and large, still done by journalists working for newspapers.

Print media and businesses supported by it, like the newswires, are the wellspring of the vast majority of our news, and we drink from the river of information they ultimately become. Formerly the problem was merely that the wellsprings were tainted by bias and poor stewardship, and we were trying to make online solutions to clean it up -- which proved to be a difficult task.

Now the wellsprings are drying up, and we've got an even tougher job to do.
Obviously, that's the ideal. But how would they recognise you in the first place, to know to ask you to do their technical hiring?
There are many, many examples

Which ones were you thinking of when you wrote this?
> "We've developed specific algorithms in our technology that address latency issues across the GSM networks," Piilani said.

Apparently they're doing time travel in software now.
I find it funny that people said it has awful sounds.

It outputs in MIDI! Use whatever synth you want!

I use my Oberheim Xpander, to paraphrase, "The greatest synth in the world" and the tunes Songsmith puts into it sound great.
So you take an "art versus fun" argument and turn it into... what? If TechCrunch was taking New Yorker articles and rewriting them with a completely different style, it would be something like what Songsmith does. As it is, you're comparing apples and uranium. There's no similarity.

(Also, I respect Arrington and TechCrunch. I don't read it, but I don't dislike it, either. Congrats, though: this is the first time I've seen that particular obnoxious argument technique used on Hacker News. You've brought us to a new snarky low.)
What's new about twitter is that you don't specify the recipients. That is a real difference, and the right thing for some kinds of messages currently sent by email.
This is at least the third effort to split California. Google "california jefferson pearl harbor" for background information.

No, the "Separate SF from LA" blather doesn't count - SF is LA North as far as "real" Northern California is concerned. The real lines in CA go north/south, not east/west.
"at least have a snowflake's chance in hell of recognising programing talent" is a good frame for the article. Unfortunately the article, as written, seems to promise much more.

"If you feel you can come up with a better list of indicators, please do so, I'll be the first to vote you up."

I think the counter point maybe that there may not be any valid "indicators" at all that a completely "programming blind" business guy can use. At least this is how I read PG's original essay. I agree with that viewpoint based on my experience.

Personally I found the essay (and the comments) amusing. It is just that I don't feel that this list of so called "indicators" have any practical utility, not because you didn't try your level best to come up with good indicators, but because the successful use of such indicators needs some programming experience (or trusted programmers for the business guy to delegate the decision to, who happen to be good at programming).

In other words I completely agree with your assessment that "Remember, a business guy is effectively flying blind. I can sit with someone for 15 minutes and tell you whether they're a good hacker or not without having asked a single technical question, but someone with no technical skills cannot do that - nor can they figure out how to recognise someone like me to ask me to do it for them. They'll get fooled by certification-laden "software architects" who haven't written a line of code in years and will happily help them hire a football team's worth of mediocre programming talent."

We disagree on what (if anything) can be done without a competent programmer in the loop somewhere, by a business guy with no programming experience using these(and possibly other) "indicators".

peace,
Your original headline was sensational and detracted from what the article was actually saying.

HN has aggressive moderators. (I think. I've never actually seen a moderator. But there've been rumors.)
what an interesting technology. I thought that maybe it would work on my macbookpro because the little girl in the demo appeared to be using one, but I guess it was either a pc or the ad agency screwed up.
In particular: the guy who talks about its being "shitty bluegrass." Yeah, Songsmith takes real live musicians and has them record custom music for your song! It's totally not synthetic.
You're using the @ symbol incorrectly.
There's a lot to be said for this theory if you look at the real world, where anonymous interactions play out well 90+% of the time (selon anecdotal experience.)
The actual reporting and investigation is, by and large, still done by journalists working for newspapers.

Most reporting I see is just summarization of press releases or a collection of quotes from contacts of the journalist. The analysis of sites like Naked Capitalism is much informative and hard hitting. Do have good examples of actual investigation done by newspapers? It seems very rare to me.

As for Techcrunch, it's by no means perfect, but it's better than anything in the newspapers.
Okay, the number was based on how many people I knew in hospital who got better.

I'll admit that my statistic is made up, but I think the rest of my comment is reasonable.
Firefox 新手上路
It's a custom hack that's rather pricey. I don't know if this is sellable. It's neat, though.
You are trying to measure how hot a fire is by how much smoke it's producing. While on average smoke and fire are related it's not a great indicator. A simple solution would be to get 10 programmers into the same room and talk about a technical problem and ask them to privatly evalutate eachother afterward. But, that's not "fast" and "cheep" so most people go for guessing games.
Unfortunately the article, as written, seems to promise much more

Well, I'll be sure to make the next version better. :-) This was posted 18 months ago (and it's the third time it makes the front page of HN).

We disagree on what (if anything) can be done without a competent programmer in the loop somewhere

I think these indicators can at least be used to whittle down the technical people that a business person knows down to a shortlist that is more likely to be good (rather than just have fancy titles). I'll grant you that the list can be improved, but I can't agree that the list is useless.
Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity
You're confusing why people watch with how he makes his money. And you're confused about why they actually watch.

The vast majority of folks who watch Cramer don't do more than one or two trades based on his statements.

Yes, I know about how Cramer's recommendations "move markets". The size of those moves proves my point. He's got enough of an audience that if a significant fraction of them did anything, the changes would be enormous. They're actually on the edge of statistical insignificance.

Julia Child is a great example. People watched to "learn" but nothing much changed. Yes, they bought some equipment and cookbooks, but she really just changed how people talked.
Capitalism Beyond the Crisis
That's true for Twitter, but not of Yammer, which is essentially a glorified mailing list. (Is there anything else that the Yammer model offers over email? If so, I'm not seeing it at cursory glance.)
"I can't agree that the list is useless."

Fair Enough :-). As I said earlier, I think your intent (of finding these or potentially better indicators) is a noble one. I am not convinced of the efficiacy of such indicators in practice, when weilded by a business guy with no programming experience. But hey, I could be wrong and you could be right ! I'll be glad to change my viewpoint if I see this approach work in a consistent fashion!
I think it's growing past that. :)
Assuming you're not joking...

Aside from that just being a very dishonest way to conduct business, you'd spend all your time organizing people who are working together who don't know they are working together. Even if you could manage that, you'd have no way of assembling the finished components into a working application, and there is just no way you could find someone capable of handling that task that was also foolish enough to think such a complex operation would be part of a job screening process conducted by a person incapable of knowing if it's done well or not. In fact, it's very unlikely you'd fool any experienced developers they'd quickly deduce that you don't know enough about the code to judge it's quality.

The end result would be a pile of code that wouldn't work and you'd have no way of fixing it without hiring an even more exceptional programmer, who would probably tell you to throw out 90% of the work and start over.
Boot Camp?
I worked on a pretty big site where we read from the slaves and wrote to the master, but we were still on 4.1 with MyISAM. Given the current size of the iodrives we would have to shard a lot more than we were, especially for a few large tables. But, it would drastically reduce deployment complexity.
> I call bullshit.

WTF. Is this some sort of playground?

> There are many, many examples of successful technical teams organized by people without deep relevant technical expertise.

And there are many many more that are complete disasters. As they say, a blind pig occasionally finds an acorn.

> All this PHB stereotyping around here is just arrogant vanity.

Actually, it's experience.

The interesting difference is that technical folk don't claim any particular skill in the domain of PHBs but the PHBs claim incredible skill in technical domains.

If both are correct, there's something interesting going on, but let's see some evidence.
Cool - I recently thought about the same thing, when I wondered what happened to "kudos". Hope it works out for you - the idea with the charities is great!
They certainly feel like Javascript. Partly that's a good thing (I can highlight text), partly it's a bad thing (lots of rough edges).

It's still a great example of how powerful JavaScript can be when used well.
I've always felt the same about HN. I've behaved a particular way on HN, though not much different than I behave elsewhere. My suspicion is that most people on HN also severely limit what and how much they say because they're worried about pg getting a negative image of them. This does help keep the community on topic and very civil, so maybe that's ok.
I recall that happening in the original game, too. I could be wrong.

EDIT: "You have died of dysentary." That made me smile.
> 1. The key shouldn't be kept in the closet outside the safe

How do you lock up the 'impossible to duplicate key' - by definition you would need a lower-level security key to secure it?
"This isn't rocket science, and programmers aren't special. "

I agree completely.

" Programming is a deep technical skill, just like many others, and the way you hire for those types of positions if you don't understand them is to rely on the judgment of others who do."

Exactly! This is the central point. This is how I (as a programmer) would find a good lawyer or doctor or helicopter pilot from large numbes of doctors or lawyers or pilots with similair sounding degrees and other "indicators", for example.

I am just not convinced of the whole idea of using "indicators" as a substitute for the above. It is not so much that any indicators are wrong in themselves , but that unless I have someone who knows how to use those indicators correctly.

Now I don't know anyone who can help me with the judging , I could go with a list of "common sense" indicators and take my chances. I have serious doubts on how much this will succeed in picking an exceptional doctor/lawyer/pilot etc.
Real life is all about trade-offs. "Slow" and "expensive" is not an option if you want ot be competitive, and others can do it fast and cheap. If all you have to go on is smoke, then learn to recognise different kinds of smoke is pretty handy.

In hindsight, more than a year after writing this article, I would say that this list might be most useful for the business guy to recognise someone who will help him hire good programmers, rather than as a direct hiring tool.
Most reporting I see is just summarization of press releases or a collection of quotes from contacts of the journalist.

I tried to address this -- this used to be the problem we faced: newspapers had grown complacent and corpulent and were content to rest on their laurels, and we were inventing online ways of giving them reasonable competition.

But now we have to try and replace them wholesale, which really isn't easy. News reporting requires a lot of people to do very boring things for a long amount of time. Online hasn't yet been able to come up with the pay that would reward them for doing it, and the opportunity cost for reporters of doing it for free is, in general, far too high.

Also, I think you're confusing analysis with reporting. Comment is free, the saying goes, because it doesn't take much to analyse something: you just need a brain and a comfy chair. The reporting is the hard bit: sending someone to dig through files, to attend the dull meetings, to nose around.

I can think of countless examples of newspaper investigation, but they're probably going to be meaningless to you as I'm in Scotland. But here, a head of government (Henry McLeish) and the leader of a major political party (Wendy Alexander) were both forced to resign for scandals uncovered by print journalists. It's local reporting like this that will ultimately suffer most.

(As for Techcrunch: it's covering tech. If the web can't do better than that on its home turf, it doesn't have a hope in hell of doing it for difficult stuff like local politics. That's why it's such an embarrassing example for all of us).
I don't think that that is quite accurate. I doubt that the majority of people here are here for the ycombinator seed money. I come here because it is the best aggregation of topics that are interesting to my tastes. Will I apply for ycombinator seed money? Probably not.
I think it's interesting that they're offering an international plan for only $10 more that offers free calling from 40 countries. That seems like the biggest win. The current situation with international roaming is ridiculous.
I am certainly not a good programmer, and using this logic, you might hire me. So your list isn't perfect; however, I suspect that it's pretty good. The basic problem is that it won't distinguish between people who are really enthusiastic about computers and genuine good programmers. The difference between these two groups is probably really obvious in a field like chess (lots of people who are enthusiastic about chess are still terrible,) but it might be harder to notice in a knowledge-based field like programming.
Wife makes website for her hubby, will make or break the deal?
Help Darcs developers travel to the upcoming Haskell Hackathon
What’s It Going to Take to Fix eBay?
Ask HN: Is GRE useful outside graduate school?
Having finished Bachelor’s degree in CS and subsequently worked as a professional programmer for 3 years, I am finally considering going to the graduate school. As part of the preparations I will be sitting for the GRE general test sometime in next few months. Upon reviewing and practicing the test material I realized that something is bugging me really bad.

I have heard many people disparage GRE. Their grudge is that, among a few others, much of what your study for the GRE test is not really useful in the graduate school, nor is it helpful later in your career. Now that has really started to worry me because I think I am spending more time on it then what I probably ought to.

Take vocabulary. Memorizing hundreds of abstruse words was no fun when I started. I was merely cramming . However, things started getting interesting when I actually began writing down the words, looking the meaning up in a dictionary, analyzing the usage, and applying the words in my own sentences. Of course it’s taking inordinate length of time but the experience is really enthralling and edifying.

Practicing for ‘Reading Comprehension’ lead me to the world of critical reading and writing. I began to critically read newspaper op-ed , keep an eye on the techniques that author uses to constructs the passages, and find flaws or strength in every argument he or she makes. Again it is slowing me down but I am getting engrossed. So much so that I bought an entire text book on Logic; one that teaches how to make arguments, identify fallacies, and do deductive and inductive reasoning. My interest only seems to be growing by leaps and the bounds.

Now I am worried that the amount of effort I am putting into it is just not worth it. Everything on the test preparation books too is focused only on maximizing the score on the actual GRE test day (quick tricks and tactics without deeper learning).

Can some of the things I learn for GRE can be carried over to the graduate school and the career that follows it? Should I be putting as much effort into it as I am doing now?
Ask HN: How do you recognise good business guys if you're a programmer?
Inspired by the recent HN post of "How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy? -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515900", I wonder what light would the people here (presumably much more programmers than business guys) shed on how to find/recruit good business partner/key employees?
> > Every new release getting better, faster, more usable; growing market-share faster all the time...
> You could be describing Windows or Mac OS X with that.

Not really, no.

No Windows release in this timeframe was a match for the transition to Tiger, or the transition to Leopard.

Vista isn't faster then XP for most things, nor is it more usable. That's reserved for Windows 7.

And their market-share is actually shrinking faster all the time.

> > What goes up must, must come down, at some point.
> That rule doesn't really apply to software.

I sure hope so.

Though your evolutionary strategy view is very corporate-y, shareholders and quarterly profits is squeals. I'm more of an actual user of the said systems, so I don't care much 'bout that.

MS lost me in 2005, when I could run Ubuntu and do all the same things with none of the hassle. And they won't get me back, because they move too slow -- I've gotten used to good things fast. All of this is to say that Windows is irrelevant to my original comment. I didn't come to MacOS X from Windows.

My original comment was a bit on the off-topic side, if you will. I was interested to know if anyone else feels the big boot looming over their computing habits. That's all.

Nothing at all about Windows.
I come from a business background as well, and I wholeheartedly agree with your point. It's just as hard for hackers to find good businesspeople as it is for businesspeople to find good hackers.

Yes, many businesspeople hire bad hackers resulting in a bad product. But equally many hackers hire bad bussinesspeople and never get their product out the door. None of these scenarios are good.

The keypoint here is that to start a successful business you need many components, and if you fail at just one of them you're finished - A startup is never stronger than its weakest link.

The startups that achieve success acknowledge what their strengths are, are keenly aware of their weaknesses and try diligently to hire people that can fill these out. So the great hacker should not frown at businesspeople if he wants to do a succesful startup, he should acknowledge the fact that he has shortcomings, as everybody does, and try to hire people to fill out these shortcomings. The weakest point with many hackers (in my personal experience) is that they don't like political games, don't like cold-calling people, and don't think marketing should drive your sales. Exactly the things a good businessperson excels at.

So please, get along and you will make more succesful companies.
The news medium has a message: "Goodbye"
Facebook’s Dave Morin On The Search for a More Social Web; Connect Comes To The iPhone
Lance Armstrong: Natural Born Twitterer
This is probably true, though it's impossible to prove without data.

My point was that there's an extra incentive for good behavior here that you don't find at many other online communities. If you kick butt on HN, assemble a team that follows PG's rules and pitch him a great idea for a startup, he might give you $15k and open a lot of doors for you. That setup just doesn't exist on many other community sites, perhaps any, and I think it must be taken into account when we marvel at how great this place is.
Summary: PG has an Air and uses Firefox and Terminal. But he's PG, so that automatically becomes newsworthy.
"The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau." I know this is figurative language, but Shirky made a bad choice -- Wal-Mart doesn't advertise in newspapers much. They experimented with a large push three years ago, and decided it wasn't worthwhile. ( source: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display... )