skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Likewise my experience hiring people.

I was lead and I screen people with masters. They all failed. I swear they went back to school for master because they couldn't get a job.

One of them was an Indian dude.

So what's your focus?

"Database"

Neat what's your favorite relational database?

"All of them."

.... Ok, what do you think about NoSQL?

"They're neat."

What's your favorite?

"All of them."

In my head, I'm like what the fuck. Did this guy tried ALL of the NoSQL and all of the relational database?

Anyway, the dude was pretty bad, no real skills just a piece of paper. Couldn't even solve simple program puzzles (they're just Project Euler problems).
Considering the average salary for a competent software dev in SV-area is what? 120k? + social costs, insurance etc. That adds up very quickly.

Not to mention once you earn a certain size you do need to employ support staff, accounting, marketing etc. Ads aren't cheap for competitive niches either.
The PC version had color. It was my first version as well, and to me is the definitive port. I didn't like the cartoony Macintosh version that became the standard for all the 16 bit ports. The new art muted the fluid animations IMO.
Was your return address, the same as the one posted on your site? If so, just googling that, the first result is your site, which shows your email.
A Cooling Consensus
Knocking someone unconscious isn't exactly easy or reliable, especially when you're both in the water. If you really want them to pass out, you might as well start pushing them under water (or wait until they loose consciousness from drowning) or choking them.
I think it's very accurate, and I think the idea of temp- to- perm hiring is seductive for exactly that reason.

In addition to the argument that the economics of temp- to- perm don't work out in this market for tech talent, there are also fundamental problems with the approach.

Most importantly: lots of people can perform well for short periods of time, especially if they don't have to deal with interpersonal conflicts (which take time to develop) or technical design disagreements (which only happen at inflection points in product/service design; ie, it might take 8 months to discover whether someone can "disagree and commit" to work on a team where they disapprove of some technical decision). Also, lots of people can work well on a project for a couple weeks before they get bored, and some of those people lack the ability to kickstart their engagement back up again once they feel "burned out" by a problem domain.

I think those are some of the most likely failure modes of new employees, and they also happen to be different from the failure modes that classic interviewing and work-sample testing are likely to suss out; ie, you can cover the non-psychological non-work-ethic concerns about new candidates with a relatively straightforward hiring process, so temp- to- perm might not even buy you much even if you don't assume that the approach is costing you the best candidates.
One of the GREAT things about stackoverflow has been that they HAVE monetized from day one, and monetized well, without being intrusive to the community or the content.
> First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's fundamental right to read the laws of the land...

Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand, and makes the same problem. I think it's more accessible to run something through a compiler...
The biggest sin is not explaining what the project does and the problem that it solves.

I've had people complain to me that no one is using their great open source project. I complain that you don't explain what it does or why its great.

They answer that all you have to do is read the code. I try to diplomatically tell them that there aren't enough hours in anyone's life to read all the code on Github.

The project is not ready to upload if you haven't finished the documentation.
Firefox will use the OSX keychain only if you install Keychain Services Integration: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keychain-serv... . I highly recommend it.
IANAL, but I don't think it is legal to ship a firearm across state lines to anyone other than an FFL Dealer (Federal Firearms License)
Yes, they are vocal about their false negatives, and they are happy with it. As long as the resumes keep flooding in, and they are hiring who they need, why do they care about rejecting qualified people, or wasting their time?

OTOH, I care about them wasting my time.

"The problem is, how does the employer know you're one of the people who can actually do this" - I addressed this, I guess unclearly. Ask me. Ask me to describe my algorithms. You'll know very quickly if I am misrepresenting myself or not. You'll also see if I get passionate about my work. If I have 37 ideas that I haven't had a chance to develop yet (I hypothesize that any good brain develops more good ideas than it has time to pursue). Did the code ship? That is not ironclad proof, as I spent 4 years at a company and at the end the project was cancelled because of a political shift in Washington (this was defense work), but it can be a useful measure. I know people that spend forever 'tweaking' algorithms, but never producing anything that generates value for the company. Those people are largely useless unless you have a research branch, but would (and do) pass a Google interview with flying colors.

I've been told that they do not care about your resume, and that you will not be questioned on it. OTOH, expect red-black tree questions, scaling questions, and so on. But, they selected me. I have not worked in that area of CS. Ask me what I have been doing for the last 25 years, give me some kind of test to make sure I did what I said I did, and you'll quickly know if I can help you out or not. If I can code probabilistic graphical models and make them work in real products (which is what I'm doing at the moment, more or less), I can re-learn graph theory if I need to. On the other hand, if I can learn book answers to Dijkstra's algorithm and code shared_ptr on a whiteboard with no errors, I've proved very little about my productivity and creativity (a question I was asked to do by a Chicago HF trading company, and 'failed' because I didn't do it the 'boost' way, but spent time talking about all the tradeoffs one could make in such a design and made different choices then boost).

And that squares with the conclusion of the article - talk to the person about what they did, how they did it, how they dealt with problems. Trouble is, I see no evidence of that in Google's actual interview process. You better be 20 and fresh out of grad school, or willing to grind through a lot of CS theory that you haven't had to do for a long time.
What was Garry's original title? It appears to have reverted to the article title now.
Programming JavaScript Applications - Free Early Release
I think this does a good job of illustrating what a good answer to this kind of problem is and why it is not a stupid question to ask at an interview: http://what-if.xkcd.com/4/

> First, let’s start with wild ballpark approximations. This is an example of what might go through my head before I even pick up a calculator, when I’m just trying to get a sense of the quantities - the kind of calculation where 10, 1, and 0.1 are all close enough that we can consider them equal:

> I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it.[Citation needed] Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram. The number 602,214,129,000,000,000,000,000 looks about twice as long as a trillion, which means it’s about a trillion trillion. I happen to remember that a trillion trillion kilograms is how much a planet weighs.
[illustration showing that a trillion is visually approximately one half of one mole]

> … if anyone asks, I did not tell you it was ok to do math like this.

> That’s enough to tell us that we’re talking about pile of moles on the scale of planets. It’s a pretty rough estimate, though, since it could be off by a factor of thousands in either direction.

Anything general I could say has already been said in this thread and others (it's to see how you think about the problem, not about the answer, etc.), but for me it was seeing some examples like this one that finally made me get it.
Why would you swap your battery in a 100 mile trip when the model s has much more range than 100 miles on a single charge.
How are you moderating the content? Are you doing it yourself? Are you putting together a flagging system? Do you need help? I am looking for another side project to work on.
There's a difference between action buzzwords and clear explanations of what you did. "Drove a process to innovate that led to massive KPI improvements" is very buzzwordy but not at all clear. :-)

If anything I think bias would lead to lower-than-expected scores, as more resumes would end up in the "to interview" pool. But it would be good to validate this against the rejected resumes.

I doubt most of the y combinator startups count as "big" companies, and he said he included all of them. He was trying to model "successfully held down a high-expectations technical job" and it seems like he chose a reasonably good heuristic.
God at least followed due process.
A couple I let through had things like missing city but valid ZIP code, which I assume would actually be enough to get the letter to them

Did you ever read their instructions for filing a FOIA request? "If you do not include a name and complete postal address, NSA will be unable to respond."[1]

While you are here I dont understand what you mean by:

"It seems that the NSA does not quite get that this is a protest, in addition to a request for information."

How did you expect them to act? And/or what behavior would constitute recognition that this is a "protest"? NSA is required by law to respond to FOIA requests. The civil servant that emailed you was doing what her employer told her to do so that she could continue to bring a paycheck home. Are all the "protest" FOIA requests supposed to get tossed in a burn bag at the end of the day?

[1] http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/foia/submit_foia_request/foia...
> Had they made the same statement a month ago, they would have been called tin-foil hat wearing nuts and now people say things like the above so casually and pretend like it was obvious all along.

It actually was obvious all along. There have been many programs of gathering as much data as they can. ECHELON is pretty old.

> People probably doubted they had the capability to sort through and and find useful information inside an internet backbone. It's a tremendous effort collecting and querying that much data.

Yes, it is a lot of data. GCHQ have a lot of computers (largest LAN in Europe, part of largest WAN in world, etc.) They also have a lot of expertise in this kind of thing. Who else would be buying all the data-mining books? (http://www.springer.com/?SGWID=0-102-24-0-0&searchType=EASY_...)
Sometimes books with diagrams, pictures, source code, look bad on an e-book.
You can fit two goulf balls in a bus and there are two plumbers in New York.
So now we're talking about constricting the flow of candidates down to those who are willing to accept a second job for weeks to mitigate the concerns of future employers.

The problem here is obvious: the best candidates don't ever have to put up with stuff like this. They're actively courted by prospective employers.

Sure, not every candidate can be "one of the best candidates". But why would a rational employer select a screening process that overtly rules those candidates out?
Tech pioneer Ed Iacobucci dead at 59; co-founded Citrix, helped IBM’s PC efforts
You are right that we live in an approximation of democracy, but that doesn't entail that "we aren't ruled by an evil cabal, we aren't ruled by some landed elite. We aren't governed by some educated class (you should see some town hall meetings)"

Democracy permits all of the above without destorying its own meaning.

Also the statement that "We've chosen a democratic process" is a lie. It simply has been repeated endlessly that people believe it to be true. Tell me when was the time you decided to have democracy. People never had a choice. It was simply imposed and enforced.

Lastly, democracy is not the only means of having a civilization. Whether people like to admit it or not, as much as democracy can be good, it can also be bad.
"I reviewed resumes at McKinsey, your resume only has 10 seconds to impress"
This is what I thought all along.

A) Access is MUCH broader than just tapping Google, FB, MSFT, etc. Access is at the far broader level of telecommunication cables. Encryption can be broken later, with specialty FPGA chips.

B) More importantly, the US taking "everything foreign" and with GCHQ (also) taking "everything foreign" ... the Venn set of these two closely associated govt spying operations means they get "everything, period", including US domestic communications.

If true, the Snowden revelations are (small) child's play to what may actually be being surveilled, which may indeed be everything.
You may be thinking of Pidgin:
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords
Well, if we're getting our etymology on, 'engine' originally referred to any trick, device, or machine. An engineer was someone who created engines. It only took on the association with steam locomotives in the 1800s.

I would also like point out that early computers were also known as analytic engines.
If instead of brushing it off you could explain what those reasons are, it could be more helpful. Thus my question. If you don't know them and assume they exist - I'm not convinced. There are bad laws which are pushed in by various lobbies (like DMCA). The fact that they can exist long is not a proof of the sanity of such laws.
whitepages? My cell phone is not in the whitepages and I haven't had a landline for years.
For the record: I believe it's more likely than not that the NSA already has a CA key (or several) in its possession.
Status update: The NY State Senate appears to be unconvinced.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/348157673944014848
> This man is an idiot, please don't fill up HN with this drivel.

This personal insult is uncalled for. It's easy to sit around and complain about what the government is doing, but this man has actually gone out and done something - setting up infrastructure to make it easier for the average person to submit these requests, he is spreading the word, etc. He has also done great work protesting the TSA.
Scientists capture first images of molecules before and after reaction
That's what (software) patents are for (and video codecs are a heavily patent-encumbered field) - slowing down progress because of patent minefields you have to pay attention to when implementing a codec. It can easily happen that you missed a patent or can't circumvent it - then you have to pay protection money...

A perfect ground for innovation...
Middlemen don't necessarily need laws to protect their position on the market. If they offer some value with their services - people will use them. If they need laws, it can be that their services aren't necessary at all for the consumer.
How do you know that you've never met a person who didn't share their ideas with you?
I see, so this makes more sense for a smaller vehicle, but for human sized transportation its much better to have a fixed wing. Thanks!
I'm not sure this is really responsive to my point: I gave a specific example of a bombshell story the NYT ran that was arguably more harmful to "national security" than any revelation about spying on Barack Obama.
I wouldn't worry too much about being rich if you're capable of working from anywhere, especially not if your favourite places are in South East Asia...
A Clean & Simple Pastebin
Joel said this well a while back: Smart and gets things done.
The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage
When I encrypt, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Period. Stop trying to violate that privacy, unless you are accusing me a specific crime and you have probable cause.
> Encryption can be broken later, with specialty FPGA chips.

(http://www.gchq.gov.uk/AboutUs/Pages/Engineering-and-Technol...)

> Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language (VHDL) is used in system development stages. Circuits are implemented in discrete components, Integrated Circuits (ICs), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

> Most systems are PC based or rack mounted, although some have more demanding requirements. GCHQ is moving towards CE safety accreditation for all new systems, although all field systems are already fully Tempest tested.

EDIT: About your second point. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)

> ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement[1] (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, [...] etc.

UK passes names to the US; US passes names to the UK; this is a neat way to avoid the "don't spy on your own citizens" laws.
From your comments in this thread I strongly get the feeling that you have never had sex. So for the people who have not had sex I'll try to describe how it goes. If you are fingering somebody and then make a move to insert your penis, there is plenty of opportunity for that person to say no or pull away, if she/he does not want it. It's not like you make a lightning fast move and before your partner has a chance to understand what's happening they have your penis in them. If you're doing it right, you reach for a condom, you open the package, put the condom on, adjust your partners' position, and tease before entering, and finally you enter. In this whole process there are a great number of opportunities for your partner to (verbally or non-verbally) indicate that she/he does not want it.

If every man followed the methods that you describe here and elsewhere in the thread, the human race would die out in one generation.
Perhaps in a Judge Dredd "I am the law!" sort of way. ;)
The issue is that in some states (I'm specifically aware of Texas, thanks to http://www.teslamotors.com/advocacy_texas) there are laws that essentially prohibit the manufacturer from owning a dealership.
Evidence is mounting that agencies within the US gov't are up to no good. Given that the main one is the NSA, an agency with a fair amount of expertise at keeping secrets; it shouldn't be a surprise that great smoking guns of evidence aren't bursting from within the place.
Vimfox brings live css, javascript and html editing to vim
I agree that ads can be garish. I just see this as a separate problem from design itself.

Recently XKCD made me think about how minimalism fits into design. For example, entirely text-driven:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_pace_of_modern_life.png

... and more visually oriented:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/balloon_internet.png

Obviously there are many ways to communicate ideas, and each in various contexts can be quite effective.
export function ? Given the fate of the original geocities, it would seem to be very helpful...
Monopoly Rents and Returns: A Sketch of a Model
Passwords are a terrible way to authenticate people anyway. The sooner we start using certificates and smartcards, the better.
There is no side-bar to the right. The site expands to 1400px. After that there isn't anything meaningful to place on the right side (other than for the sake of doing so - but thats just clutter)
We should be able to interrogate news stories without requiring everyone on the thread to declare their biases; in fact, overtly avoiding those declarations seems like good "thread discipline" to me. Are we talking about the facts and issues that follow from the facts, or are we echoing our biases off each other?

I want to know what's actually happening, not what HN thinks must be happening.
That's the main reason I used airbnb instead. I like meeting the locals, but I don't like the uncomfortable feeling of being in their debt or feeling compelled to hang out with them.
So the NSA's secret spy tool is Google search?
If you're going to swim in open water (not a pool) and there is a lifeguard, tell them you're going to go swimming and ask if there is anything you should be aware of.

They often have insights into certain areas, underwater terrain, currents and the influence of tidal changes. Also by talking with them, they will be more aware of your location.
hopefully it's the last security-related one

Not to nit-pick, but it's never the last security-related bug :)
You are not entitled to an "official" statement of my ideological beliefs.
I had dinner with 4 googlers, one of whom was very proud to ask the Prisoner's Dilemma to lots of interviewees.

Sorry but this article is false.
The issue here is that Google's business, or a large part of it, is all about amassing data in a useful and usable way.

I see it as a social contract between Google and their customers - customers give up a certain amount of anonymity and allow some activities to be tracked so that they are provided with services, sometimes paid (e.g. google apps), sometimes free (e.g. search or gmail). If the relationship becomes one where Google takes whatever they want and provides that data to third parties, why should we as customers put up with it? It's particularly galling if you're paying them for the privilege.

Plenty of alternatives are ready to replace them if they don't pay more than lip-service to their users' privacy.
As I said, relevant to an SDE position at Google. Those are not.
Correlation vs. causation.
You would think the NSA would sign outgoing communication.

Guess not.
Every recruiting firm that does consulting has some language in their agreement (with both the consultant and the client) about a cost (fee) for hiring the consultant directly. Try before you buy has been around forever. If they are moving these consultants around to different companies to find a match, that is somewhat unique. Just placing someone into a contract-to-hire role until the not hire/hire decision is made is not new.

I like contract-to-hire overall, but one problem is that you get lifetime contractors who have no intention of ever converting to perm roles, and they just stay as long as they can. Companies are more inclined to invest in and train a contract-to-hire employee over a pure contract employee. The brain drain can be a problem.

Another issue is contract-to-hire employees usually are paid a premium, and get accustomed to the money, making them less apt to convert. This is particularly troublesome for those that get their benefits through their spouse/partner, where the extra money seems substantial because they aren't paying for benefits or COBRA out of it.

Probationary periods are rather useless in any at will employment state (in the US, not sure about international law). Why put "We can fire you in 90 days if you don't perform" in an employment contract when you can simply fire someone on day 2 if you really wanted to? It seems like a decent motivational tool perhaps, but in markets like software it is just another reason for candidates to potentially turn down work, where the alternative (no probationary period and no expectation of even 90 days of work) is better for both parties.
“You’ve come a long way, Baby”: remembering the first stored program computer
I'm perfectly okay with thinking that he's a terrible writer who produces absolute dreck while still respecting him for being a creative and hard-working person. He makes the art he wants to make, gets paid very well for it, is prolific, and is hard-working in his field. That deserves respect.

But his stuff is absolute crap.