skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Bath->Bristol cycle path is a fantastic thing. I may have seen you on it!

I'm unfamiliar with the name "Two Tunnels Circuit" but I may have seen it.
Magnified in large London corporates yes but there are only a tiny percentage of 'decent tech companies' that fit that criteria.

I was referring to the likes of Facebook UK, Google, Badoo, Songkick, etc.
>Is this a common practice?

No, a 3-5 month interview process is not common.
It's not the lack of invetors and VCs in Europe - it is the lack of ability to invest in RISKY companies - the very definition of "startup".

European investors are just bankers (with a few exceptions).
The problem, I think, is that trademarks, once registered, create a pressure to enforce. So if you register a trademark you must be willing to widely enforce it. If you don't enforce it you risk losing it, and so you enforce as widely as you can. If they want to trademark "Apple Startup" no objections but "Startup" is dangerous.

This being said, if I got a call from their attorneys on this, I would be sorely tempted to respond with something like:

"We are a business startup and will consider your request. At the moment though I am eating an apple, while writing something up in EMACS though not on an eMac. I will call you back in a few from my Linksys iPhone."
Ah interesting, makes sense I suppose to get cash away from tills.
I'm not so sure about the criticism of applications being exposed as web services.

If you have a system setup where different parts run on different services you don't want to have to co-ordinate and resync all the applications when their underlying data structures change.

Web services solve this by having a agreed contract of communicating between systems, service A knows of a better way of accessing its own data that service B knows of accessing system A's data.
It's normal, yes. Growing up in NZ we were taught that it's impolite and you should always say "X and I." I was surprised to learn that in the UK it's said the other way around.
Why do people say "doing fizzbuzz" rather than just programming? Fizzbuzz is just a trick question to see if new programmers know how to use the modulo operator or not.
> Is this a common practice?

Yes. Looks like 3 Interviews, 3-5 months of interview process is pretty normal in Europe. I have applied for a job in Norway as well once.

> I can understand if you have another job and end up interviewing somewhere else while working, but if I was without a job I probably wouldn't be able to wait 5 months for someone to decide I've passed their tests.

Well there is another common practice that if you are unemployed without a serious reason (freelancing, relocation, family matters etc.) you are turned down immediately by a logic "If he couldn't get a job, something must be wrong with him". That's even worse if you were unemployed for a prolonged period of time.
I hadn't read it.

I disliked the article -- over simplified, far too general, poor analogy -- but it was new to me.
The state of free graphics drivers for mobile is of course terrible, and Canonical are quite UX driven so there is a big difficulty. They could have made more of an effort with the non graphics parts, which would have helped.

I never got the impression they had actually decided what hardware to use - eg it might have been Intel not ARM, as 4G on ARM SoCs is hard to get.
There were two tests - I don't know the names but maybe someone here knows more than I do about them.

Firstly: You had to write a personal statement, something to describe yourself

Test 1: Involved ticking (agreeing) with a list of statements from two perspectives. The first perspective was how you see yourself. The second perspective was how (you think) others see you

Test 2: Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal.

The end-result was basically a bunch of weightings that gave personality traits. Followed by a really well written auto-generated description of that individuals traits.

Typically when people had the chance to read their results, they'd say "ooh, actually I agree". But of all the things it said - there was a hell-of-a-lot that it didn't say.
Looks like a job for Sugru - pop a couple of tiny nubs on the back and it'll stop sliding!
Mine has broken its screen after half a meter fall on a carpet.
How would setting the registrar lock have helped in this case? The registrar lock can be unlocked by the current registrar... which was the target in this case.

It's good advice, but seems kind of irrelevant.

> It's worth noting that while some of Twitter's utility domains were redirected, Twitter.com was not -- and Twitter.com has a registry lock in place.
startups are FUCKED
He seems to be a regular commenter on the Guardian website.
It's not really valid, but it's not uncommon either. It's something that would sound unremarkable in speech but looks quite bad when written down.
There are significant fixed costs, you can't just divide the required goal by 32 to produce 1/32 of the number of phones. I'd guess that $1M wouldn't be enough to even produce one of those phones.
It all comes down to cost barrier to entry, it's a shame IBM mainframes are still so damn expensive.

Perhaps if somebody could offer {DB2|Oracle|Informix|Sybase} As A Service, like what many providers do with PostgreSQL and MySQL, it would be a different story for startups.

My profression involves moving MSSQL and Sybase databases to MySQL and MariaDB, then I go and read some of the features from the article in Oracle and DB2 documentation and think to myself "I ain't helping fucking nobody", the higher-ups in enterprise and startups usually only see upfront costs, not long term benefits.

As per your first question; they are getting there.
PostgreSQL now has a built-in function for managing materialised views, in MySQL/MariaDB that is still hand-rolled.

MariaDB however does have Virtual Columns and Dynamic columns (to tackle nested tables, as per the article).

Look to MariaDB for the MySQL developments, as Oracle are bringing very little to the table in terms of matching MySQL features to Oracle (not surprising). But they are resolving important security, and infrastructure issues and improving InnoDB heavily.

Also PostgreSQL does have HSTORE, for storing JSON data types, very tasty.
If I got two of them I might though :)

These days I just use a password manager with a big phrase for the master. I couldn't tell you what any of my other passwords are.
Yes, SquareTrade.
I've taken several kinds of psychometric tests, but have never seen one that produces a single result, whose unit is %. What kind of psychometric test could that possibly be?
Nice article! It's a sad, sad world out there. My wife sent me this: "It's a baby girl!" http://wp.me/p1BPc5-dV A story on why India is the rape capital. [PS: And I will be a dad soon.]
Fizzbuzz is a test for programming-ability. It's easy to explain, easy to grade, easy to run. If you wanna check if someone can programme, then someone else has already come up with a good test (fizzbuzz) to give them.
Only once have I had a job where I was interviewed by a HR person. The whole interview made me feel uneasy, but I took the job anyway. I should have trusted my instincts and rejected the job, on the grounds that they put HR people to interview engineers with silly questions.

The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period.

On the other hand, I was put on a dead end project and the company, despite being a rather small one, was like a big corporation where you can hide without doing anything and still get paid.

I actually read a few thousand pages of Intel programming manuals and wrote not one but two toy operating system projects and got paid for it!
Interesting, but I'm still waiting for hoverboards.. 2 years to go :)
That is a downside yes.

The question still remains. Would more people have pledged knowing that the project would get funded?

Essentially this would be like preordering it.
Good point; we'll update that wording.
I like to read what I write aloud as a sense check before submitting it - nothing stood out immediately. My wife often tells me my (written) English is terrible.
fizzbuzz I find is also used as slang for "Groks simple programming". I would say any fizzbuzz equivalent would be fine too.
http://www.sustrans.org.uk/mymile/ncn/map?lat=51.36781434142...

Through the Two Tunnels out to Midford and back along the canal path to Bath. I work in Locksbrook, live in Bear flat so it's an awesome if slightly bumpy ride (canal path). Although I recently bought a cyclocross bike and that has made a world of difference compared to a road bike.

At the moment I'm heading out to Saltford, then back Up to Midford (and sometimes Wellow). It's a really good burn.

If I want to hurt myself I'll pop over to Radstock although that one is a little bit lumpy for my liking and some of those lanes don't give you a lot of room should you meet a car coming the other way.
That's big companies for you. Enterprise!
It's perfectly valid. "X and I" is only valid if the sentence makes sense if you only used "I".

This article makes one valid use of "me and X":

> in an effort to score extra points with me and Carl.

If you changed that to "Carl and I" then took out Carl it would be "to score extra points with I", which is disturbing and wrong.
HTC is reported Building a custom OS for its China users
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But the problem is that if it reached the goal of $1M but didn't get far past it, they'd be expected to then supply the phones those people had pledged for without actually having enough money to produce them.
Knowing how to fizzbuzz doesn't make you a good programmer.

But not being able to do it is a very strong signal that someone can't program in any professional setting, no matter what they pretend. It's a very simple and effective test to rule out people who think/pretend they can program, but really can't.
Yeah, I think that's generally reasonable, and I totally see where you're coming from. (Though I do believe that even though we're in the US, Stripe will do a better job of guarding the privacy of our customers than the vast majority companies.)

Having said that, in the particular domain of electronic payments, I think that meaningful privacy is (sadly) a mostly unattainable goal: it seems safe to assume that the card companies themselves collaborate with all kinds of surveillance. Given that everything ultimately becomes a transaction on those networks, what happens at the edges matters less.
Even when I saw my own results, towards the end of my employment there, there wasn't a single overall metric result.

Maybe she did some kind of averaging, or maybe she was told by management to invent a reason to reject him... since about 96% of the company was of British White origin - I shouldn't speculate though.
lol. London does quite a lot of risky financial shit.

Also you might have heard of a little company kicking the shit out of Intel... ARM. Based in Cambridge UK, that is also where most tech investments in Europe are happening (not London or Berlin).

Also, Germany and Switzerland are much more quiet and private about investments. You won't hear about many of them.

These days you can invest in a UK startup, and have the government pick up 100% of the tab if it fails. Not to mention insane tax breaks (100%+) for r&d and for exploiting patents. The UK already has crowd equity.

If you get all your news from YC then you're probably stuck in the silly valley echo chamber.
From the article:

The project didn't actually raise* any money; a total of $12.2m was pledged, but none would be charged against anyone's credit card (not even the usual few percent from a failed project) under a special arrangement with IndieGoGo.*

Not true, as far as I understand it. Certainly my bank statement showed a transaction, and a subsequent refund.

I believe the article is correct in that Canonical never saw that money - I understand Indiegogo held onto it until the refund - but it was certainly charged.
Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal.

This sounds like a test to see if you're capable of doing boring, repetitive and uninspiring work. I can see how that might be useful to many large businesses!
No offence to the maker, but this seems like a huge gimmick. There's nothing that separates this mechanical keyboard from others in the same price range, and there certainly isn't anything about it that makes it more developer-friendly than other boards. They've just slapped the letters CODE on the back and called it a keyboard for devs...
There was an interesting article in the Discover magazine about epigenetic changes:
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences...
I have been to student recruitment events at universities hiring software engineers for quite advanced level jobs. We give out a programming quiz (with a nice prize) at these events and we include the fizzbuzz puzzle. We allow solutions in any language and give out style points for nice solutions.

Our experience is that the answers to fizzbuzz are a good classification criteria in vetting who has got programming abilities and who has not. Most people who actually try can solve it, but the ones who are talented give out either a perfect and simple solution or do something elegant and go for the style points. The ones who don't give out a fumbling solution that is too long or shows signs of not being comfortable with the task at hand, even if they manage to write a computer program that produces the correct results.

As silly as it may sound, the fizzbuzz test is a good classifier for programmers. I didn't believe it until I saw the evidence from the quality of candidates we got.
"The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallable."

20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where sometimes they were 'F' and/or 'P'. I took a similar test again a few weeks ago and 'I' and 'N' were strong, the others were still weak.

I had a couple people tell me though that "it never changes". Which is ridiculous because it's obviously not true, and depends totally on how you interpret the questions, and that's based on how you're feeling when you take it. I don't think people administering tests or interpreting the results always understand what they're actually looking at (which probably makes me a stronger J).
In general, HR and middle management exist for a reason. Someone has to handle all the associated (legal) burden of having employees. There's a lot of paperwork to do, a lot of communication that needs to be handled. Same for management, they exist for a reason. Not hiring HR or management is a waste of productive time: The tasks don't just magically disappear but other people, the ones that you call "productive" will have to take care of them and all of a sudden, we developers do have less time to do productive things, such as having important discussions on HN blaming HR and management for our misery.

There's an argument to be made that HR and Middle Management should be supportive functions in tech companies and thus shouldn't have the last call, but I'd be really really careful with calling them "unproductive". I for myself am glad that the paper-shuffling tasks get managed by a dedicated employee rather than myself. I'd go bonkers in a week if they'd pile up on my desk.
It is hard to get tone over the internet, but I hope you understand why your example is incredibly far removed from a device that meaningfully interprets EEG data and uses that data to stimulate the motor cortex with a TMS machine.

What do you consider breaking new ground? It was their goal to demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. If it had not been done before, it seems to count as 'new'. What about the headline did you find misleading?
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Fizzbuzz isn't just modulo, as evidenced by the amusing number of incorrect solutions under the original article.
Is this the greatest science teacher ever?
https://www.sharefest.me/ works pretty well for this.
In India, it's very common to have fresh graduates take psych tests.

I don't know if the results matter.
I would say it is due to the fact that computers are full of wondrous things that distract us. How many software people have fought game addictions to gloriously complex and involved game? There are more distractions being created than there is time in the day to enjoy and when you feel tired it's so easy to just access that push button entertainment.
You can use a custom memory allocator in python? I wonder if this is somehow pluggable, or if they had to modify the interpreter.
Today, August 28:
SIGNATURES NEEDED BY SEPTEMBER 21, 2013 TO REACH GOAL OF 100,000: 5,392
Aha, you appear to be correct. This might be a case of linguistic prejudice then - the mistake of saying "me" when "I" is appropriate is considered to be a sign of miseducation, whereas few people ever make the mistake of saying "I" when they mean "me", so it has not acquired any negative connotations. This prejudice applies even when the usage of "me" is correct!
I think it would have been more reasonable. I was baffled for a moment.
3 x 1h exercises a week during 50 years is approx. a year lifetime. It is likely that if you do this you add more than one healthy year to your lifetime. Therefore exercises are saving life time.
I participated in a similar test not a long time ago. Along with personality test it self, It was basically asking same questions again and again and testing if I am being honest/consistent.

They told me in my next interview I was one of the most consistent people that took test. I got a 95%, whatever that means. In reality I just noticed the pattern and gave my answers with that information
Personally I think the problem was that there where no free beer rewards.
remember that MBTIs have no evidence base - they can be helpful in allowing someone to "see" jobs they might be happier in, as they did for me, but they don't necessarily measure anything statistically significant about a personality.
My current company do this, we've around 600 employees across Europe and every candidate for an IT position in the UK takes the same test at a 1st/2nd level interview.

Unlike the OP it's at the hirer's discretion how much weight they put in the score and it's made clear to us there's a definite pattern that more nervous candidates & those without English as a natural language score less well. We ask them to come into the office, only in rare occasions does someone do it remotely.

Most of my candidates in software positions score 40-70% and have done well in the company, I've had a number in the 0-20% bracket of whom I took 1 based on his good performance in other aspects of the interview - he's not turned out to be a great hire relative to the others. A handful in the company get the 95%+ scores and they've all done well - I think many are among the best performers in our department suggesting some kind of particular capability.

The output of the test is a % score with breakdown in a few catagories plus a 2-3 page personality profile. I showed mine to a few ex colleagues, it said probably 8 things like "will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer" which everyone pointed out as eerily true about me (and the negative aspects I can therefore work on!) but it read a little like a horoscope in that you can probably find truth in it and it's up to you to what extent you forgive the paragraphs that are very untrue, although presented in a scientific way.

Honestly, I think it's pretty helpful as accompanying information and would use it again at another job
Well, developers can hire other developers, but we can't easily hire the accountants, lawyers and others (including HR, ironically). The big question is: how do we hire people from a field we're not competent in?

But yes, at my last job interview, I succeeded at the technical interview but failed at the 'personality' one. It's a loss for them, not for me.
I respectfully disagree. Get some decent HR people and don't give them the last call on hiring decisions. Make it clear that HR is supporting the process, but not leading the process and that the last call is with the department/team that is looking for a hire. Let HR take all the tedious tasks of hiring from the developers, such as all the legalese, handling employee benefits, sick reports and all associated paperwork, but do not let them define the flow of a hiring process. Developer time is far to valuable to be wasted on mainly administrative side-tasks.
I've taken the Meyers-Briggs several times and tried to answer in a way to get different outcomes. I've answered realistically, speculatively, and hopefully. Each time I got the same result.
HR must do something to got paid, let's do a stupid test to each candidate!
Five Tips to Supercharge Your App Launch
> Is this a common practice?

I've gone through two interview processes in Norway – none of them took longer than ten days and I can't say I have heard about anyone else that has been through months-long processes either. (I'm a software engineer.)
The main problem is companies are too afraid of firing people - a "good fit" from an HR perspective is someone they won't have to fire later.

They are "risk averse" insofar as they would rather hire a safe and comfortable person who meets their personality metrics rather than take a chance on someone outside of that who is technically sharper.
I think he means that by "making this argument" (that is, 'hey, join us, we're based in a place with a low cost of living'), they’re never going to get top entrepreneurial talent. Not that they're never going to get top entrepreneurial talent at all because of where they are.
I recall hearing - I think it was an article posted to HN a few months back - that handwriting assessments are common in France.
Do you have links to the studies they're quoting?

As others have mentioned here, science reporting tends to be sensationalist and inaccurate - sometimes less than other times - and I find it's generally more useful to at least skim the abstract of the paper referenced.

(And if possible, look for big obvious holes in the methodology too.)
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too many in authority want the glory of title, they do not want to be responsible, hence they tend not to do. Hence, when they run across people who can think, can do, get it done, they create systems where adherence is more important that work.

Those on the other end fail these wonderful HR tests because they all too often have to around the title hounds to keep the business they work in up and running.
Don't developers in London get paid crap though? I've heard horror stories about ridiculously low London salaries here on Hackernews. Are the low salaries just because their is a surplus developer talent in the UK?
Lesson: Sell your product ASAP, IF there are sales, THEN continue and build a brand and site around it.

This and the accompanying graphic are 100% spot on. It's amazing how many times we continue read this same exact advice and continue to empirically ignore it in practice...especially for us techies. Sell first, build next.
Please tell me more about "have the government pick up 100% of the tab if it fails". I'm aware of some incubators here and there (which are mostly a way to create artificial markets for well-connected "advisors" and Euro-funded "trainers"), and I know about the new R&D legislation (which is mainly benefiting BigCo, like anything else patent-related), but I don't see how you could drop the whole bill of your private enterprise on the Chancellor.