skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it does the profession a great disservice to present these things as mutually exclusive ie "If I don't do side projects, I am a bad developer". For me I like to think of things in a different light.

What I find with side project developers is a certain self-directedness that bodes well for the kind of employees that can thrive in a pure startup environment. The kind of thinking it takes to go ...

"I have this problem, Heck, I'm going to hack something together that does what I need"

or

"this open source tool I use is missing this one feature, I'll just code it and send in a pull request"

Then actually take time out of your life to code it up and put it out for use and, even better still, maintain it over a period of time.

That tells me that such a person will have no trouble figuring out what they need to do if they go to work for a startup that they're passionate about. It tells me that they'll usually be the kind of people to drive initiatives at bigger firms if they don't lose patience with the politicking, red tape and glacial pace of things.

Now, this DOES NOT mean that developers who don't do side projects won't possess these traits as well. Its just that the signal is clearer with the side project types. In the end you still have to go ahead and find out if they're actually good engineers before you hire them
Google sucks. I had a pretty similar experience interviewing there. Strange, late interviewers. One guy who barely spoke English and another who literally asked one question, then said nothing for the rest of the "interview." Then, a pointless "feedback" call in which they told me they "can't provide feedback on specific candidates." Overall, just a really poor experience. F- 'em, move on.
This is why I use Bitbucket, with its unlimited private repos, for that junk drawer. I can keep my throwaways and false starts private.
These are still pretty amusing. They remind me of my cousin last night posting graphics depicting outrage that they don't string up Obama for this.

When I replied that most of these programs started under Bush, or likely long before that, I was told that it was "over 5 years ago". Yup. Just like gay boy scouts and Chik-Fil-A, wiretapping has been known about for half a dozen years now and is only now getting the attention that some of us have been complaining about since it began coming to light.
Don't worry, this has nothing to do with the "10 Things I Hate About SF" lists :)
Quite addictive. Fun game.
And they can do all of that just because everybody still wants to work at Google. Let's say the have 100 applicants for a position, out of which 10 are qualified for it. Then they can still screw 9 of them and hire the one person that for one reason or the other had the luck of interviewing with the right people and talking to the right recruiters.
I would imagine that any shared mailboxes should be capped to force mailbox rotation at the exact same time. Once a mailbox hits a predetermined limit, all the peers refuse to accept additional messages. Basically the exodus of users from a mailbox should happen all at the same time. Those users then randomly choose any of the other new mailboxen out there being formed. You would never be with the same cohort from one mailbox to the next. A few hundred randomly allocated and rotated monthly should help. I need to go back through that presentation again. Anyone thinking about anonymity should read it. It's brilliant.

The other thing we need is a way to easily handle multiple keys so that if one key is comprimised then we only get up a small amount of data. Ideally we would want one key per contact, but this of course would be prohibitively expensive computationally because I'd have to compare every message in that 10GB against every key I have per person. However being able to have maybe a half dozen public keys randomly distributed among your contact list would help. A totalitarian government forcing key disclosure with the threat of jail time would have to have all your public keys to determine whether or not you have disclosed all the information you have received. This would do the same for shared mailboxes as Truecrypt did for deniability that additional partitions exist. You can even distribute your keys among the different bootable Truecrypt volumes you have.

At the end of the day, public key disclosure shouldn't be a lookup but a give a key, get a key system. Basically, I would submit a new public key to you via some secure web interface
which would deliver a one time message to you at the shared mailbox you're using. At some later date, you generate a new public key for communicating with me (or use one of your current keys in rotation) and send me a message that contains the address of the mailbox I'm currently using and that key which I should use until I revoke it or issue a new one.

Ultimately we need a system that disguises how many people we are communicating with, partitions those people with multiple keys, that affords me plausible deniability since an attacker wouldn't know how many keys or mailboxes I'm using and where the level of security I am afforded is only bounded by the disk space, bandwidth and CPU time I'm willing to throw at the problem. This scales with paranoia.

On top of that we need a system that provides us temporal security. If all my files and communications are partitioned cryptographically by date, I can aquiesce to a warrant that specifically details the dates in which they are interested instead of giving them everything I have. If they have a specific crime they are investigating (which they should have), then they should be able to state the specific date ranges that contain the evidence they are looking for. This prevents fishing for dirt.
Nice catch.

I was actually going to bring this up. I have a lot of friends who are interview pros. They say if an interviewer decides earlier on you're not going to get hired, they basically fold up their sheets and ask non-related general questions to pass the rest of the time.
With these writing platforms coming up its starting to feel like the glory days of LiveJournal.

I would like to see something that can step in as a social layer to connect a wide variety of blogs over a multitude of platforms. Maybe something that offers standardized categories - - like AllTop with self-discovery.
The links to research we are talking about (as opposed to journalists trying to summarize research for pop sci books) is stuff whose production is funded almost entirely by entities like governments and charities, and where the 'publisher' does not do much but enjoy exorbitant profit margins thanks to paywalls. If the publishers and their paywalls disappeared overnight, Open Access would pick up the slack pretty well. So no, monetizing is not really necessary here.
I imagine games are different because people who own games still tend to buy games. Someone who already has a note taking app that works for him is less likely to try another one.
People who say they have nothing to hide feel that way because they think they've done nothing wrong. They fail to realize how easy it is to take something you've done that was considered legal and suddenly make it illegal. Once the now illegal activity has become a social stigma then the information that you once participated in those activities can be used against you.

Example? Once upon a time sending an email to a person in a foreign country wasn't suspect. Now it is. Sending it to someone in a certain country can likely make you a target of the government. Whatever label is attached to the person you are corresponding to will then be attached to you. This was how it was done during the Communism scare in the US after World War II. You spoke with a known Communist? Then you must be a Communist.

Never mind easy blackmail material that people in positions of power tend to get themselves into.
Not only that, but also that she is, to some extent, responsible for also safeguarding the privacy (or at least anonymity) of people who contact her, and she doesn't feel that's possible.
> If I heard an editor judge an author's work based on what that author posts to twitter, I'd be horrified.

And yet, many potential hires are judged by their facebook posts[1,2], tweets, blog entries, and anything that can be found in a google search. All of this amounts to methods of elimination. You can treat it like a portfolio, but an active github account is just a cheap way to filter out possible negatives.

It is also good to mention that, unlike writers, a lot of programmers cannot show their previous work, because it is the private property of their current/previous employer.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/03/05/facebook-...

[2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/password-protected-...
"Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state."

I prefer approval, but hey, your state can have IRV and mine can have approval and thanks to the electoral college that doesn't break things!

Unless we're in the same state, in which case we'll have to agree on something I guess.
> I can certainly see that. Do you count "main body text" as 'content' in your designs?

I make an effort to never use placeholder text that doesn't at least closely resemble the real (or intended) content. This might just be me, but I'm pretty sure it's common amongst better designers: building something around fake data is much harder than building something 'real'.

> You think such a phenomenon happens with web designers?

Absolutely.

> brainwave analysis on rats (or users :-)

If Art and HCI are on opposing ends of a spectrum of interface design I've always been a bit closer to art—so my experience with testing ends at formal user interviews and guerrilla-coffee-shop tests. It's not a stretch to imagine the big tech companies doing brainwave analysis (and I'd be thrilled to participate at any level, it's seriously cool stuff).

> design community just cargoculted it?

Like any community, designers react to the trends of their peers, but a competent designer can defend pretty much any decision, which makes it hard to tell the difference between 'doing something familiar but wrong' and 'following trends that are right'.
The sad thing is that even among the people willing to admit that the majority of the developed world's problems are political, most of them are under the delusion that more/better/different politics is the solution.
> lithium-ion batteries (the latter were under active development), but they're now the primary power sources for portable devices, and lithium-ion batteries power the Tesla Model S.

What does that mean for the user. Do batteries today last twice what they lasted 30 years ago? Nope. Are rechargeable batteries any more viable today? Nope.

Even batteries in laptops only last a year or so before they are just dead and need replacing.

If you think battery technology has really massively improved in the last 30 years, please let me know what real world improvements there have been...
> I know he is getting a pay-raise. Do I deserve one too?

To find out, ask for a raise. But be careful -- if you're perpetually in the top 10-20% of salaries for your position, you're likely to be among the first laid off in a business reversal.
"did not knew any languages I knew"

I was the surprise interviewer in the exact same scenario (well, not at Amazon, but same general idea) and was later cross examined, mostly by HR, about how well I thought he'd be able to help me if I came to him. The HR cross examination about his ability was all touchy-feely questions not technical (did what he say sound nice, not, did what he say make logical sense when passed thru the well known engineer BS filter). Position had one of those estimates of 25% helping other people with problems and group work, and he would have been hanging out near me although somewhat different kind of work, so it seemed fair for me to ask him noob questions about his expertise, just to see how he would talk to someone on the team from a different background. He was an expert in C++ if I recall correctly.

All went pretty well with me, although they didn't hire him (donno why)

The part of the story that was weird is I was an old-timer at that employer not a noob. Why they'd assign a noob to evaluate indicates either extreme trust or extreme desperation WRT the noob. Or he was playing you. If you really needed a question answered HR would take care of it.
I call bullshit.

It's almost impossible to argue that the public benefit of Groklaw is outweighed by the risk of the site receiving emails that will be exposed. Using the same position, every site on the internet should should shut down, people should stop sending all postal mail, using phones, and we should all go live in caves. This is really signaling surrender to the anti-freedom terrorists who occupy our national security department, and I think it's counterproductive.

If I'd had to guess, Pamela was ready to stop publishing Groklaw and wanted to go out making a big statement about a major threat to our future. I can thank her for that, though I think the message is somewhat muddied by the grandstanding defeatism.
World's Dumbest Idea:short-term shareholder value theory
Good luck getting out of those falcon wing doors when the car flips over...
Based off of Danielle Morrill's previous blog posts ranking startups and this Mattermark post, I get the sense that a lot of this ranking is putting certain companies "against" each other even though it's like comparing apples and oranges. For example, does it makes sense to compare a SaaS company with a $10K ACV that makes Google Adwords work against a company that gets 10 tweets a second because it's viral?
Except when not. When I was interviewing they didn't make me sign one. They rejected me for the original position, but later occasionally called me with some alternate options. These calls usually went like:

- We would be interested in having you at/as ... but before the specifics, you signed an NDA, right?

- No, I have not.

- Oh, then good luck, bye.
That's an easy solution in any language, frankly; have a shared queue of the requests, and the servers simply pull from the queue whenever they aren't processing a request. I'm sure that this is easier to implement in Go than a lot of other languages, but I think this actually defeats the purpose of the question. The hard part of the question is how to assign work to the servers rather than letting the servers pick the work themselves.
Like the competitive analysis part.
And if the contents of the safe are written in code, or some made up language that the courts don't understand, can they compel you to translate them?
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The efforts aren't illegal, in the Constitutional sense (U.S.), so long as the searches are deemed reasonable. Two branches of government (Executive and Judicial) have generally been in agreement that searches for the purposes of National Security (very broadly defined) are reasonable. And Congress has not passed laws to the contrary. In fact, Congress has been exceedingly pliant on these issues. They've been passing laws that not only make these searches legal, but exempting Telecoms from any lawsuits for their cooperation. A different Executive (say, Rand Paul) could effect many changes on his own. But history suggests that, when given War Powers, Executives of both parties have been very careful to relinquish that authority. And Rand Paul will have a hard enough time in his own party.
I'm sure it just lifts the whole car up.
>>> but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus.

The crazy thing is they don't give feedback, then call back in a few months and ask if you want to interview again for the same position like the OP said. Talk about completely confusing people. . .
Reproducing the iOS 7 Mail App’s Interface
CompJournoStick 1.2.1 Released
I wonder how much Google has spent developing Gmail.
I interviewed at the New York office for an SRE job a few months ago. It took about 10 months for the whole process to play out. In the end, after a full day interview, I was supposed to get the written up feedback from every interviewer regardless of whether I got the position or not.

Instead, my last communication with Google was a phone call where I was told that one of the interviewers still hadn't handed in their written review. It's now three months later, and that's the last I heard.

That left a sour taste in my mouth. I wasn't expecting to get the job, and really it was just a backup plan in case Algorithmic.ly didn't work out, but you'd think they'd have the common courtesy to get back to me. I'm sort of expecting that 6 months from now I'll hear from them out of the blue...that's how disorganized the process is.
> I would give them a few months before making such a judgement.

AFAIK, they have been up for quite some time now.
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In my experience, my Google recruiter simply did not respond to emails. The only way to get in touch with him was to email HR. Scheduling the first round of interviews? Email HR, wait for the recruiter to email me. Scheduling the second round? HR. Finding out results - you guessed it, emailing HR to get the recruiter to call me. This stretched my process to two whole months.
Empty?

I'm pretty sure you don't use Google+.
Ding! Google hires more people every week than were employed in total at the Series D startup I worked at before them.
Being a first-time bootstrapper, I am striving very hard to minimize financial exposure. However, this means that I had to convince my cofounders and team to work for free; or rather, they agreed to join because they believe in the vision and for the learning experience and journey rather than for immediate monetary compensation.

Although they admittedly joined on happily and believe in our potential, I do struggle with doubt and accountability to them. The article seems to emphasize the mental strain caused by blows to self confidence or finances, which can certainly be crippling and terrifying.

However, by minimizing financial exposure and trying to keep a perspective that protects self-confidence, those are less of a concern to me compared to facing the possibility of failing my friends who contributed their time freely and signed on to what was originally my vision.

The pressure and anxiety over prospect of disappointing the friends who became teammates based on their belief in you and your vision seems hard to avoid. To be blessed by forgiving loved ones, friends, and teammates is priceless and the articles recommendation to "Most important, make time for your loved ones...Don't let your business squeeze out your connections with human beings...When it comes to fighting off depression, relationships with friends and family can be powerful weapons." resonates the most.
There is, in Birmingham UK, a chap who regularly ties up to the mooring on the Selly Oak canal, near the Vale University residence, who makes and sells wooden owl sculptures and stools for your garden.

He has an iPhone, and I think I saw him on facebook last time I walked past.

Perhaps what we are seeing is the 'normalisation' of the Internet/Web? It is no longer 'special' or a 'new world' but just a part of everyday. That means the balance of privacy/disclosure will have to be negotiated again. In the street, I can be stopped by a police constable and asked my name, date of birth and address. My bag can be searched, and I can be asked to turn out my pockets. The police would need a search warrant signed by a magistrate to enter my house. Magistrates are trained, they will only sign warrants under certain circumstances.

Is Facebook the street or your house?

I'm still thinking all this through... but yes, I think you will see a shift away from splurging everything over the Web. Of course, the people GCHQ are supposed to be trying to catch will already have adopted other communications methods...
The game board layout can get a bit messed up on smaller screens. Try maximizing the window and refreshing. I'm working on making the website as responsive as the actual Windows 8 app.
I imagine that you can then solve those other problems one at a time by implementing alternatives in your webmail client. The interface to the user can stay the same, but you can add additional more secure transports underneath that the client can opt to use when there is indication that the person they are communicating with uses a mail system that supports that upgraded security solution. In the interface, you just need an indicator of what information is being leaked on a recipient by recipient basis.

At the end of the day this is how filesharing evolved... from FTP to Napster to Kazaa to Torrents to Magnet links. They slowly solved each of the attacks out there.
I had a very similar experience. I work at an investment bank and was recruited by a large company that does proprietary trading including high frequency trading. I went for the interview which was scheduled to be an all-day thing.

In addition to having been in IT for a very long time I am also very knowledgeable on capital markets having successfully taken CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) tests. The CFO of the company that interviewed me was shocked that someone in IT passed those tests. The IT people, it was all algorithms and programming minutia. After the interview, they strung me along for weeks and then I just stopped calling them to check up on status and they stopped calling me. Then they would call me every few months asking me to interview again. I finally asked them to stop calling me.

The reason I bring this up is because I think sometimes candidates are excellent candidates for a $100,000 to $150,000 salary position. The only problem is the candidate is already making $250,000 and the prospective employer knows it after you fill out the application. I may be just thinking this to make myself feel better but I just thought the issue with the company was that I made too much. I probably would've had to literally walk on water and bring their dead relatives back to life to justify what they would've had to pay me to steal me from my current company.

Maybe that's the problem Google had with you?
That's sort of an interesting idea. Of course without the key it's always absurdly difficult to decrypt...but if we're worried about them intercepting keys, this could make life harder for them.
Yes. What if the talent starts making their own bands on the performance solely based on how much the company pays. How would they feel about that? Most of their tactics can be reversed.
Precisely.

The Post and the New York Times were free to publish this material. It has consequences of course, but none of them were levied against the Washington Post or New York Times.

The US Government does not punish the press for receiving, discussing or talking about that sort of information. Instead, it goes after the leakers. Discussion, and freedom of speech is much respected.

If anything, your link is but one more example that supports my point.