skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the article is talking about a new-hire situation, not evaluation of one's own employees' efforts.

It'd be pretty hard to get metrics like yours in a hiring situation.
ha! $160/hr from IBM is a bargain!
I guess he's a nerd.
http://www.tvn24.pl/0,1534811,wiadomosc.html
turning off the wall of tv's, thats funny. killing some guy's display in the middle of a demo, thats not funny.

i just hope there are some ramifications.
I always ask two questions: What's the coolest hack or project you've ever worked on? and What's the worst hack you've ever committed?

I like these questions because if a programmer is good (in my opinion)...you'll see that person light up and get excited.
Born After '64?  You'll need Real ID.
Priorities Everywhere: First get a life, then learn to live.
Yes they do when you don't have an exact spec of what you're creating. That's been my experience anyway.

Tests are great when:

* You have the spec before writing any code (not necessarily for the whole system, or even large parts of it).

* You've settled on a design/implementation, and need to make sure you don't accidentally break it in future.
Annoying and redundant. I often find myself clicking on a page to either force focus to that window, or to select text to act as a highlight so I can find my place easily later on.

This means any accidental doubleclicks are launching new tabs or windows that I don't want.

If I want a definition of a word, I have more global, convenient ways of handling that.

Now, if instead double-clicking did something like spawn a topic search through NYT or news.google.com or something, without the hassle of underlining every word, I can imagine that would at least seem useful.
An interesting idea, stupidly mangled by the corporate process. If they manage to make it useful that would be nice. But I suspect it's just ploy to boost pageviews, and will be measured solely on that.

You can only do one word at a time. I can look up "republic" and "day", but not the phrase "republic day".

The click time-window is long, about 800msecs. Lots of accidental pvs there.
My email's in my profile. Feel free to contact if you still need help.
A browser based vocab tool is something I'd be interested in using especially for more literary sites.
I dislike it, very much, mostly because it is intrusive (pop up). Its behavior violates the principle of least surprise, since most websites and applications don't do that.

If it was an inline popup box in the margin, I would probably like it.
I obsessively click and highlight text while I read, so it quickly becomes annoying for me.

Anyhow, I have already have the answers.com plugin for Firefox, which brings up that overlay on command.
I think you can have the best of both worlds. I tend to do exploratory programming to make a "rough draft", and I've found TDD in this context to be rather stultifying. But, once you've scoped out the project, TDD is great for the process of rewriting/revision.

N.B. I'm currently experimenting with Behavior Driven Development using Rspec. It looks like it may be flexible enough to be used even for exploratory programming, especially since it adds tests for pending features to the usual pass/fail dichotomy.
On the subject of the Tata Nano car from the other day:

"It will go on sale in India for 100,000 rupees but it will not be available in the Europe due to more stringent safety and emissions standards."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2238563,00.html?gus...
I would seek other web developers at any number of public forums like OReilly Ignite, BarCamp, DevHouse, etc.

For informal UI testing, you can even go to any coffee shop, show people your work, and ask them what they think. Often you can benefit by seeing a virgin user who didn't understand that action X lead to result Y.

You could also quantitatively test your choices by pushing a different UI on some small percentage of users, and see how it affects performance or things like signing up active users.

Certainly rely on your peers, but the best mentor is need. Solving a problem teaches so much.
GTD with Painter Chuck Close: "Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work."
Their prices are pretty outrageous, but if you don't want to ever worry about ops and deployment, they are your ticket.
I thought I was the only person who obsessively clicked and highlighted text as I read.

We should start a club.
Command-control-d is much better in Mac OS X.
Not a typical topic, but fine writing is just as much hacking as programming... or painting. Fantastic.
Add the following line to Adblock Plus in Firefox:

http://*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js

That will fix the problem.
He seem to believe that valid XHTML will render the same in all browsers. If only it were so easy!

For example the Flash-trick that he talks about is just a script that writes the embed-tag through javascript. The only advantage is that the page now validates, since the validator doesn't execute javascript. The actual HTML rendered by the browser is still contain the embed, so obviously it will not render any differently.

Its just a pointless pursuit of validation for the sake of validation.
works fine on firefox - but not for Safari or it's webkit brethren

yeah javascript/css cross browser compatibility is a pain...
Me too. I thought I was insane for doing that. Glad to hear at least someone else is.
"Did Bill Gates Just Say Vista Sucks?" would be more appropriate.
Thanks for the reply. I'll check out those public forums as well. But the idea of testing the UI out informally is also pretty good.
I liked the story too.
Dislike it with a passion I normally reserve for "Are you sure you wish to close this window" popups and lightboxes.

Solutions are to block "altClickToSearch.js" with an adblocker or install a greasemonkey script such as:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721
Try open source projects or joinging an existing company.
"It'd be pretty hard to get metrics like yours in a hiring situation."

And who here signed up for easy?

In a new hire situation, require examples of work done (on-line or otherwise). Make them code. Give them a conditional mini-project. Get appraisals from former clients, employers, co-workers. etc. etc. etc.

I could think of a hundred better ways to evaluate unknown talent that the suggestions from this article.
Meet your reddit brethren: http://reddit.com/info/5yw4h/comments/
Scientists have grown a brain in a petri dish and taught it to pilot an F-22 jet simulator
Cringely: Apple to buy Adobe in bid to dominate digital content creation?
There was a thread on reddit a while back. I think us click and highlighters are in good company.

http://reddit.com/info/64ek1/comments/
I do it too, and the WSJ feature annoys the heck out of me. I like it on Answers though, and I have the answers firefox extension as well.

Apparently WSJ knows it's annoying, because you can turn it off if you are a subscriber (IIRC).
In other words, "Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's insane" ;-)
I went to a party once where all the chicks thought they were poems. The place reeked of patchouli.
I was looking for the same thing yesterday (if I understand what you mean about a vocab tool). I settled on the answers.com extension (http://www.answers.com/main/firefox_plugins.jsp). I didn't look around very hard so maybe there is something better out there.
9 Ways to Know When to Jump Ship at a Startup
I'm in the same boat. It would be great to have someone who would be available for the occasional question, to look at the business plan, etc. Is there are place where a startup could match up with a mentor?
What Ever Happened to Code Reviews?
In my experience, this is true whether I've been working on my own project or at a company. There may be people out there who can write code for more than 8 hours straight per day but it's impossible for me. Realistically, if I get 5 good hours coding out of an 8 hour day I think I've done well.
Try Yahoo groups too. Though I don't know if you want to protect your IP at all, through an NDA or something analogous and that might pose a problem.

I work mostly in embedded world but I do some web development on my own. If you want, I can look over what you're doing, give you my thoughts and point to some tools. My email is mishamanulis at gmail dot com.
Phew ... I am not alone
I saw an odd picture with two children wearing their shorts on their heads. I then clicked the "X" as quickly as possible.
>The over-50 exemption was created to give states more time to get everyone new licenses, and officials say the risk of someone in that age group being a terrorist, illegal immigrant or con artist is much less

I thought it was illegal to discriminate based on age. Of are they just worried baby boomers won't vote for them if they're subjected to this shit?

Either way, sounds like an easy court challenge.
If this is true, it is kind of ridiculous. That's pretty cool that they can do that.

edit: I read palish's comment. It would be cool if they could do that.
Ajax View: Remotely Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications
I bet he wished for a toy train for christmass, and when he didn't get it, exercised his revenge.
27 Tips to Conquer Your E-mail and Improve E-mail Productivity
Screw Winning The Lottery - Just Make a Facebook App and Get Your Millions Now
I do this too. I'm convinced it's a vestigial habit of the "old" web, where it was very common to have a crazy img based background and text that you couldn't read. I found myself highlighting text on the web all the time just so I could get better contrast.

It's possible myspace will create a whole new generation of obsessive highlighters.
How is it possible to have 20 years of java or ruby experience?
I might jump though that for a 150k job and or a fairly long 150+$/h project after the interview but IMO an extended interview process is a bad sign. If you can't tell if someone can code in a 2-3 hour interview you're in really bad shape and I probably want to avoid your team and your code.

Here are some real questions to separate the coder from the poser.

What's the worst hack you have ever done and why did you do it?
What's you least favorite language and why?
What's the hardest problem you have ever worked on? Why was it hard and how did you solve it?
What's the most elegant solution to a problem you have ever devised?

IMO: Trick questions and odd syntax issues are just as useless as asking about their IDE of choice or how to solve a trivial problem.

PS: If you want to validate my credentials after while we nail down my fee that's one thing, but I am not going to give out references early in the process.
Turmoil at Tesla Motors
No, they haven't. It's hard to explain what they did do since it was so overcomplicated, but bear with me.

They took a few thousand rat neurons and placed them on electrodes. At that point, each neuron's charge could be measured as it fired. A neuron doesn't fire instantly and stop - its charge rises sharply, then falls over time. The graph of a neuron firing resembles a bell curve.

Now that the charge of an individual neuron could be measured, they selected two (one to control the F-22's roll, and one to control the elevation) and began the simulation.

First, imagine a steady, level plane. We say that the plane's error is 0 degrees. Now roll the plane 5 degrees clockwise (or counterclockwise). The error is 5 degrees. So the plane's error is known, and maxes out at 180 degrees (inverted flight).

Second, imagine the graph of a neuron firing: http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/3873/graphet3.png ... We'll say that if we sample from the left side of the graph, we've sampled at X=0 degrees. If we sample from the right side of the graph, we've sampled at X=180 degrees.

Third, a technique exists to deaden a neuron's response. This technique is applied throughout the simulation, so the graph you're looking at is slowly being squished toward the bottom (the dashed line).

Let's say our plane has an error of 10 degrees. Go ahead and sample the graph at X=10. You know what X=10 was at the start of the simulation (the solid line), and you know what it is currently (the dashed line). They use the difference between those values to determine the airplane's corrective action.

Since the simulation starts with the solid line equal to the dashed line, our airplane takes no corrective action and continually plows into the ground. Eventually, the dashed line departs from the solid line enough to cause significant corrective action, and the plane flies straight and level. There is no learning involved, and no decoding of neural communication protocols. They're just decrementing a variable - only the variable is a firing neuron.

It's basically a hi-tech Rube Goldberg device.

You can read the paper here: http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/page13/assets/NeuroFlght2.pdf ... If you can't read a scientific paper, try. It's good to be able to know when a scientist is full of it.
Does anyone know if you can compile it on mac os X?

i get this error when i try to run make:

In file included from tclexpr.c:33:
tclunix.h:104: error: conflicting type qualifiers for 'sys_nerr'
/usr/include/stdio.h:273: error: previous declaration of 'sys_nerr' was here
make[1]: * [tclexpr.o] Error
The laptop wars - Will charity or profit end the digital divide?
A Quick Dose of Ruby History
Has Apple done any acquisitions of this scale before? FileMaker comes to mind.

Adobe and Apple both have very strong brands. I would be a huge destruction of value to kill Adobe's brands in favor of a unified Apple marque (Apple Photoshop, anyone?).

There is significant overlap on the creative side of things, but Adobe also has a significant enterprise software business, as well, with Acrobat Forms/Breeze/etc. There's also the Macromedia properties, and also Scene7, which is a completely different kettle of fish.

I could see them buying some core properties and auctioning off the rest.
It's a terrible idea. I bet someone had to come up with a feature to justify their IT job and created this monster. This, along with the PR "business" articles in the fashion section, made me lose the most respect for nytimes.
Summary: What ever happened to Code Reviews?
For determining the quality of your UI, you need to first determine who you want your primary user base is going to be. Once you have determined that, seek people out who fit into that demographic and then show them your design, because ultimately they're the ones who have to like it.
Is it worthwhile to attend web 2.0?
+1. This author has good ideas, but has difficulty being succinct. Thanks for summarizing the post.
Self-financed. Bootstrapped with savings.
Top 4 Things To Never Do To Your Users
W00t! Amazon invests 4 million into Woot.com
Where the Gaming Nerds work and play
"Here are some real questions to separate the coder from the poser."

This is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what I posted and everything I believe.

To repeat - there are NO questions or character traits to accurately assess quality from B.S.

The only differentiator is DEMONSTRATED PERFORMANCE. You need to find a way to determine this. I never suggested long interviews or trick questions (and have never employed them). Whatever it takes to determine DEMONSTRATED PERFORMANCE is necessary and sufficient.

And whoever downmodded my previous posts (and will probably take a hack at this one too) either doesn't get it or hasn't been burned yet.

(Why is it that when I willingly share my hard earned skills and knowledge, I get downmodded, and when I post a smarta$$ remark, I earn 20 unexpected points?)
lol... so true. Maybe one of those big "natural disasters" like a earthquake will hit it, and it will be rebuild to something more decent.
Coming Up: Solar Storm - Expect GPS and Cellphones To Act Up
Is there anything developers won't do for a pizza?
this is awesome... congtrats EZ!

Looking forward to using Rubinius in production.
Redeye VC: Old Half.com Commercials
I'm thinking no.
Why xml configuration files suck
I just started a new project, in Java because I was in a hurry, so I copied the web.xml from another project and just replaced the references to the old project with the name of the new project. (web.xml configures some things, like the servlets in the project, servlet filters, resources - many of them are needed for all projects).

Or wait - that was really repetitive. What do I do if something like that happens in normal code? I write an abstraction for it, something like configureServlet("newProjectName") would do, for example. Except with xml files I can't, or it would be rather complicated.

I conclude that it's probably a good idea to keep configurations in the same programming language as the rest of the project.
"Anyone at Google can process terabytes of data. And they can get their results back in about 10 minutes, so they can iterate on it and try something else if they didn't get what they wanted the first time."

I remember when people used to say that there were no serious barriers to entry in the search business. I don't think anyone's says that anymore.
Google and Facebook to Join the Data Portability Debate
Oh, sorry ;-) I was a bit tired, so the rest of the article was too abstract for me, over my head...

I really wonder about the Code Reviews, though. I remember in many projects (consulting gigs) agreeing to do code reviews, but I don't remember ever doing any, or only very rarely. That is such a shame - maybe only the best teams can pull off code reviews, because in other teams there would be too many issues with brushed egos?
Questions Answered: How to Raise Capital?
Under pressure from EMI, RIAA could disappear
How to Make Money Leading Creative Workshops
Most recently a specialized hosting company.
The Rise of Mideast Sovereign Wealth Funds
>in Java because I was in a hurry

lol :-)
How would that work in Java (or any other compiled language)? You recompile every time you want to change the settings?
Has anyone actually looked at this code yet? Documentation?

Wish they'd put up a SVN browser so I don't have to download it to see what it looks like.
Just because I already know it.
For example, instead of saying "the configuration goes into web.xml", the servlet specification could have said "the configuration goes into ServletConfiguration.java" or something like that.

Actually I think it Spring it can be done, have to look into it.
Profit.

Edit: Why do I read this article on screen? I mean - I have it on paper.. Damn procrastination.
I never understood complaints about the digital divide. I'm all for using cellphone minutes as a micro currency, and rigging a windmill to generate power in the middle of nowhere.

I'm just so much more concerned with the corruption-is-everywhere--i-cant-own-my-own-land--western-trade-barriers-killed-my-crop-yield--my-government-steals-aid divide.

Who cares about laptops when you have problems like that?
This "journalist" should be ashamed of him/herself. What a load of crap.

This is no more amazing than putting a rock on a string and telling a computer to correct the plane's roll when the rock moves away from 0 degrees.

Also, the article has the greatest use of hyperbole-by-parentheses ever: "... what scientists are calling a 'live computation device' (a brain)."
How is the OLPC project "charity" when the governments buy the laptops from OLPC just as they would from Intel? The Economist is ridiculous, drawing false distinctions.
The project is being run as a non-profit. The money is to attempt to recoup costs and make the project self-sustaining.
If linkbaiting is a sport, then science journalism is the major leagues.
Ask YC:  Do you know of any good free advertising exchange services?
I'm looking for something like this Facebook app but for a non-Facebook web site:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2391617960
But I agree - your result was probably more meaningful.
and social network sites
I opt for the space monster (sim city 2000).
"I'm a nervous wreck. I'm a slob. I have no patience. And I'm rather lazy."
I use ctrl-A.
Whenever I read these kind of lists complete with data, I immediately invert every assertion and think of an example of an inversion (or, think of a counterexample for every assertion ...)
Hasbro (maker of Scrabble) sues to shut down FB App Scrabulous
You should use Pete Stevens' technique (http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html) to rickroll them.
My girlfriend is a doctor, and I can confirm that doctors will do just about anything for free food. Mainly this means sitting through a 2-hour spiel about new drug X.

Although sometimes the food is better, oftentimes I'd much rather have decent pizza than the mass-produced crap they serve.

(And she's a No Free Luncher, so we don't do these anymore, and she doesn't eat the free food in the hospital that everyone else does. Somehow, everyone is the one that isn't affected by the advertising.

Maybe Microsoft should start sending reps around to software shops with free lunch? I bet it'd be an effective strategy.)
"Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities."

"It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings."
I've done a lot of work on avionics software. Reviews for avionics are commonplace. In fact, sometimes it feels like half of the work is the paper trail and making sure that everything meets FAA requirements.

But, as annoying as it feels at times, this is a good thing.

If a social web application crashed every day, it wouldn't really be a big deal. If an airplane filled with passengers crashed every day it would be a huge deal.
From the comments: "I didn't even realised [career programmers] existed! I assumed that all computer science/software engineering etc graduates were previously teenage hackers."
Too bad irony tags are invisible.
I started restricting myself to smartass remarks for that reason.

By the way - a conditional mini-project seems like a good idea. Let them do something small but useful - for full pay - and evaluate performance.

I guess I could live with that on the receiving end.
News.YC drifting to smartass comments?
"Why is it that when I willingly share my hard earned skills and knowledge, I get downmodded, and when I post a smarta$$ remark, I earn 20 unexpected points?" (edw519 in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97316)
What It Takes to Break Through
> Make them log in by account number.

Really, who does this? Might as well remind us to register domain names instead of using IP addresses.
"Or any informal networks that help developers out etc?"

news.YC might be a good place to look at.

Something more serious: Have you thought about what you can offer a potential mentor in return for guiding you? This does not have to be a tangible thing like equity - perhaps just giving them a good conscience might be enough. But in my humble opinion you can only profit from finding an answer to that question.
I don't think you need to defend your choice of Java. It is hardly a poor choice to write software in. I worked with Java on a huge financial server, and it was really fantastic.

That being said, .xml config files are something I strongly dislike as well.
Sorry, I was going to down-vone this in a knee-jerk reaction. But I found that I was not hubristic enough to dismiss joining an existing company outright. Any way you'd better select your new host carefully.
Strange. Do Americans in general list their religion in the personals?
In this order?
"Most recently [...]": I like your attitude.
Laptops provide people the means to educate themselves and communicate with each other in new ways.

Education and communication are among the best tools available to address problems such as fighting government corruption and clarifying land-ownership rights.
The $27,000 Apple computer
"Rails Is as Rails Does" - Dreamhost Clarifies Their Comments on Rails
No sane German would ever dream about living on credit cards. But perhaps that's just because nobody uses credit cards here anyway.