skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once failed a test because I wasn't good at abstract thinking. And they decided to be a good developer, you had to be a good abstract thinker. At that time, the test was already more than 10 years old.

I didn't get the job, although I had several references that I was one of the best and also most social and motivated developers they had ever worked with.

One of the references also stated that I was really good at thinking 'out of the box', finding a solution while everyone was blindly staring at the problem. That is abstract thinking, no?

I'm CEO now... And it might be me, but I've worked with some abstract thinkers and whatever they cook up hasn't resulted in anything concrete yet. (except for a huge consultancy bill on occasion)
Yea! A Model M as close encounter weapon of choice and some older nokia phone models as range weapons. Way to go to win any "fight" in the age of "planned obsolescence".

Btw, could it be the "feedback" those keyboards are providing is helping to balance the forces within hands/fingers an thus help to prevent various issues/strains heavy typing can cause?
Yeah, I have some background in psychometrics. I looked into getting work in these HR psychomestric firms at some point. I discounted it out of hand as I did not want to be involved in such a dodgy enterprise. Corporate psychologists give me th heebeejeebies (wearing one of my hats I'm now a corporate sociologist, which is a much more sensible gig).
My iPhone 5 (running iOS7 beta) doesn't detect me, but does everyone else. I'm forever muting myself.
"will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer"

Yeah, I think that describes approximately 1 of out every 1 persons.
This isn't just about developers and hiring practices. This is about systemisation and bullshit metrics being used to make opaque and life-changing decisions.

This is about the same kind of shitty thinking that results in surveillance states.

"We can't employ/feed you/let you travel/let you have a mortgage/let you open a bank account, you are Invalid."

"Invalid, what do you mean?"

"We are not allowed to tell invalids why they are invalid. Report for reprocessing."

Edit: Oh, and psych tests are bull. It's pretty obvious what the "right" answers are - so all you actually succeed in doing is filtering the psychopaths in.
Interesting. How strong are those results each time?

Each of my 4 scores have had a % strength with them - my I and N have been fairly high (30-60% over time), and the T/J were always < 10%, slipping in to F/P on occasion.
Ask: Stigma of the unemployed - a better job title for a lifestyle entrepreneur?
I run a small, unsexy internet business in Europe, with a two person office and about 20 people working from home.

Around here, 'entrepreneur' is assumed to mean 'unemployed' or at best 'freelancer'. I'm dating at the moment and find it difficult to succinctly describe my occupation in a way that does not kill the conversation dead, as it either comes across as bragging or an attempt to disguise unemployment. It's major taboo here to talk figures or numbers.

So any ideas for pithy ways to describe a happy lifestyle entrepreneur without coming across as defensive?
shoot, I just bought one last night, can I get $100 back? I'm checking if I can cancel that order now then reissue a new order.
patents maybe?
And someone reviews that hard copy and flips a switch in an admin interface like the one that supposedly got hacked?
This is why I installed a gym at work.
Second sentence of the first link:

"The results show the time people spend on their derrieres is associated with an increased risk of mortality, regardless of their physical activity level." No weasel words.

Yes you can find a study to say anything, that does not mean all studies are inherently untrustworthy. There are lots of studies showing that long-term sitting is unhealthy. This idea that it is a major risk factor regardless of other additional activities is not new.
I wanted to try something like this but didn't have one so I used a stool (4 legged IKEA with thin cushion). Not good, exhaustion feeling comes quickly, bad blood flow I suppose. I never bother searching for a real saddle chair but your post makes me wanna buy one.
I think you're misrepresenting the OP there. He's not complaining about MongoDB itself. He's complaining that proponents of MongoDB who attended this particular event failed to sell MongoDB because they promoted features that relational databases already solve, but claimed that they don't.
Sure - they're not the be-all answer to everything, but I've found them helpful in (re)assessing myself lately.

I found much more static-ness in my IQ over the last 30+ years. I was actually surprised at how consistent it was over decades and various tests (and, dare I say, slightly disappointed).
LLVM is far from platform independent, though, and encodes a lot of detail into its bitcode (struct alignment, architecture specific types, to name but two variations).
If you have nothing to loose and a death wish, you go on a rampage. If you have a reputation to uphold postmortem, going that route seems to be out of question. One route would be death due to work exhaustion, which the Japanese actually have a word for: "Karoshi". The other, more direct, is suicide.

There's many ways in which a deathwish can manifest, they're not limited to suicide.
Actually that's a good point I haven't considered. Would the keyboard really make that much of a difference though? It's pretty much the same muscle movements with your hand in the same place.
As with all departments in a company, HR does the tasks that they're assigned to do. It's a task, not a mission. There's scope creep and mission creep as with every task we're used to. If they do stuff that they're not supposed to do and make decisions that they're not supposed to make, it's the team and the person handling the team that's broken and time to reevaluate and adjust what value the team is supposed to bring to the company. That however is not unique to HR but applies to all roles and teams in a company. I worked with great HR people and less than stellar. But I also had to constantly battle system administration that made technical decisions for developers (no, we can't deploy this because ..., you must code your projects in ...) and stellar OPS teams that worked with the dev teams to provide an insane amount of knowledge, experience, insight and help.

It's easy to bash HR people just as "regular" employees often bash IT ("They won't provide that simple feature that I've been asking for ever since, just because they hate me."). But calling the role "broken" does not magically make it disappear. Someone needs to handle the employer/employee relationship and all attached nuisances - any organisation with employees that does not handle this role is more broken than any HR department I've ever seen.

I'd really hope that we'd be over this and appreciate that other people in our organisation provide value and experience that we maybe can't see at fist glance. Instead we close our eyes and call their role "broken".
Serendipity Is A Trillion Dollar Idea
He has a DBA mindsight in a FullStack world. There are many projects now that only require one or two FullStack engineers. Not one dba, one QA, two developers, one deployment/operations, one requirements analyst, etc. In this new FullStack world MongoDB is a great fit: changes are easy (no alter table add new_thing varchar(200); It's interface is JavaScript, the same language we use in other places; It's super easy to get started with (definitely not the case with Oracle); Oh and if we need to scale later, it might scale better too.
There was an article posted about someone that worked for a large corporation and they forgot about him but continued to pay him for years.

At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935
How is it related to living in a city? At least in the Bay Area you can walk/cycle pretty much everywhere if your work is close enough to your job. And cycling in suburbs is usually safer/healthier than e.g. in San Francisco.

This depends on location. In my area, the suburbs (designed as they were in the 1950s-1970s) tend to be very pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly places, particularly in those areas with business parks. If you want to get around without a car, then you really need to be in the city.

Your second point, however, is right on. I've always made it a point to find jobs within 10 miles of my home, so the bike commute is reasonable (having briefly done a 40 mile round trip commute, I can say that it took up too much of my time).
Interesting concept. There are a lot of cv builders on the market, building some high quality premium cv's could be a viable business but getting noticed is quite hard so pushing the LaTeX angle on the site might be a good way to find a niche.

(disclaimer I am the cofounder of sharelatex.com)
But if you work at the company for some time your employer has much better metrics to grade you than hiring process.
It was a hoax, but there are plenty of true stories in the same vein. What sets the parent's true story apart is that the protagonist did something productive with the time he had been given, whereas in the story you linked, the guy spends his days wasting away.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/contact/nexus_price
not sure if my purchase yesterday qualifies the price protection, i.e. google will refund me $100?
it sucks when you buy something one day ahead of a big price drop.
Hacker unterwegs Soziale Netzwerke und Kindercams Marketingblog
Are there good HR departments? I haven't had the honor of seeing any so by my book they're classified in the same section as unicorns and fairies.
The benefits of meditation is well documented. In fact, a Scientific American article published Oster's research papers on brainwave entrainment in aiding meditation way back in July 1973 - http://neuroactivator.com/blog/brainwave-entrainment/

There are dubious claims about the benefits of meditation floating around though. I've seen a business peddling a "meditation-based program" which claims to cure cancer. Made me sick to the stomach.
And a much higher cost of living...in London its insane.
Ask HN: Technical Adviser Needed
$90/hour, Remote

I've created something really different, a new type of datastore + new query language. I want a thorough evaluation of it and I don't want to go through the typical channels.

I'm looking for someone with a strong background in NoSQL datastores and database theory. If you're the right person this probably can't afford you but please contact me anyway.
My email is somewhatanon@yandex.com.
Thanks a lot for the feedback :) we have been thinking on how to push it. Its time saving, quality is amazing. We want to leverage LaTeX usage but people outside academia are not very aware of it. But we will rethink about it!
I think I'm going to trademark "software".
I've had a couple of trainers -- the kind with degrees in sports-medicine, not the kind that were selling cell-phones in the mall last week -- say that Arnie was the single worst thing to happen to modern fitness.

Their complaint was that his genetics are exceptionally rare. That very few people, like 1 out of 10,000, could ever hope to come anywhere close to achieving the same physique. That by becoming a sort of fitness idol he set up everybody else up for disappointment and often giving up because it is literally impossible for the rest of us to do what he did.

As an aside, if you ever watch his first movie, a documentary of sorts called Pumping Iron, he says that smoking pot was a part of his regimen. He even lights up on camera.
You seem to know an awful lot about growing marijuana. Past work experience?
It's not even really their fault. The HR person wouldn't know about databases and the deep knowledge and great insight a candidate might possess.

What the HR person would know is how the person appears socially and how he manages to present himself.

The company should make sure the HR person isn't the only one deciding if somebody gets hired or not, because the HR person simply does not possess the tools needed to get the best man for the job by himself.
I wonder what the reverse click-through rate was.

When you watched a video that was a response to another video, YouTube showed "This is a video response to ______"

I personally used that a few times, unlike video responses which I don't remember ever using.
The only reason people don't exercise is because they don't. I don't know of a genuine reason to not be able to spare 20 minutes a day. If you can do nothing else, run for 10 minutes and do 50 push ups, that's all it takes.
I'm astonished that this sort of thing still goes on. Who is not aware that this kind of psychological testing has been shown to be utterly subjective, unscientific and sometimes destructive?

And who isn't aware that psychologists have recently been forced to abandon the Asperger Syndrome diagnosis, after an epidemic of phony diagnoses of people who are often very successful in spite of the diagnosis, people like Bill Gates, Nicola Tesla and Albert Einstein?

The big picture is that society is in the midst of a re-assessment of the role and meaning of psychology, and the future doesn't look very bright for psychiatrists and psychologists. More here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
The Revisionists Have It Wrong – Ballmer Blew It
glue a tiny dot of rubber to the back of the phone.
Perimeter.js
Perimeter.js is a lightweight script that creates an invisible perimeter around a target element and monitors mouse breaches. Basically it can take conditional loading of scripts to the next level.
Looks good. My old CV originates at Linkedin labs, which had some nice templates a few years ago. Using LaTeX is a particularly nice touch, because now I can tell recruiters that I really don't have a Word version of my CV.
I have neither of those and this doesn't even include popular providers like gmx oder web.de. This a very bad move.

In that case, you should check against a blacklist instead: http://torvpn.com/temporaryemail.html
instead of saying you're an entrepreneur, say what you do. for instance:

blogger = author

information marketer = teacher

outsourced app = product designer

affiliate marketer = international sales manager

ecommerce store = ceo of import/export business

and so on
Now if only they actually start selling this thing in my country, I might consider buying it.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but wouldn't that always return true? (a/b)*b just cancels out the b right? Unless there is weird floating point stuff going on.
I have no issue with testing as part of a recruitment process but it should be a single input into the overall decision and certainly shouldn't be able to override other more significant factors.

In this instance a reasonable compromise would seem to be to have the HR manager state what the specific issues they felt might exist were and call the candidate back to talk through them and see if they could be substantiated. If someone was that bad a fit then I doubt very much it would be hard to surface supporting evidence in a face to face discussion.
> that a quiet young man of Asian descent

Perhaps that could be the problem, HR used test as an excuse.
I would hazard to say that a support contract is essential if you plan on using MongoDB at any sort of scale. I speak from vast experience.
FYI: Perimeter.js is a lightweight script that creates an invisible perimeter around a target element and monitors mouse breaches. Basically it can take conditional loading of scripts to the next level.
HR should never have the final say in a hire or no hire. I interviewed with a company recently which originally said they wanted me but later took the offer away. I was interviewed by 3 engineers and realized after talking to them that they were all very smart and that I would love working for the company. Apparently they all 3 liked me and I was told they wanted me after I talk to HR and filled out an application. Turns out I had about a 2.9 gpa and they wanted at least a 3.0 so my offer was never official. I still want to work for the company and I might in a few years when my gpa isn't even looked at because I'm sure the engineers will like me again...
So the company you work for is filled with engineers and the best hiring practice they could come up with is to give the final call on staff hiring to a humanities \ social "sciences" graduates...

Maybe you should consider Google's old screening logic test. While being completely ridiculous and ineffectual in finding intelligent engineers, they still do a decent job at deterring the anti=authoritarians quite effectively while saving you money and time on HR.

Personally, I like the old maniac hiring. You take a complete loon and put him in-charge of the process. Have him do tarot card readings, crystal energy vibes tests, skull measurements... But instruct him to pass any person who keeps his mouth shut during all of this.

100% team player guaranteed!
I stopped clicking on video responses when I realised that almost all of them were spam videos trying to get some views after the original video went viral.
Why do manufacturers insist on making their devices so slippery? My old phone (in dire need of replacement) is all rubberized steel. It doesn't slide off anything, and it's practically indestructible. Why doesn't anyone make a phone like that?
How to Get the Best out of Your Digital Marketing Consultant
There’s a reason digital market consultancy is the new “it” topic in the field of business and marketing.
The SEO tips every web developer should know
startup founder is well understood in Europe...or MD of one
The author is part of the team that runs https://www.sharefest.me/
Yes. We understand. We are actively thinking of solving the problem. Sorry & Thanks for your time.
I'm thinking of giving a try to mini-keyboards, but I also use the arrow keys/pgdown/pgup frequently. So I have 3 tenkeyless for now.
They figured out a race condition that they will always win. So yes, the exploit currently can block all incoming calls.
What, specifically is that task?
Are there laws that prevent legal entities from trademarking commonly-used words? I mean, if you invent some word for your product, you have the right to copy it. But "startup"? What would stop people from trademarking "the" and "computer"? I may be missing the point or interpreting the law incorrectly though - please correct me.
The parody shirt the NSA doesn't want you to wear
Yes :) Its a step towards changing the way CVs / Resumes are made!
Marc Andreessen, Pat Gelsinger in verbal VMworld brawl
I wrote my post University CV in LaTeX using TeXnicCenter/MikTeK because I have used LaTeX for my thesis and I liked the output compared to Word. Then recently I had to rewrite it completely in English and since I had no LaTeX system installed on my computer I tried to used the Europass CV http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/it/documents/curriculum-vi...
It is a nice system because you can edit it online, it saves information in your browser so you can continue editing it and you can even reupload the PDF and repopulate the fields (it seems to have additional XML data inside).
Unfortunately I resisted just a month using it (I didn't like the spacing/format) and then decided to completely rewrite the CV (this time using Libre Office).

This is interesting, and maybe I'll give it a try, but
how are you planning to monetize it?
I could see a possible role for HR. I don't think it remotely resembles what they are usually there to do.

True story: I got an ad for a consulting position for "Postgre"

The description had as a listed skill:

"PostgreSQL USE GOOGLE TO VERIFY SPELLING"

That's a bad sign there.
It is absolutely untrue that you risk losing a mark if you do not enforce it widely. There is an obligation to enforce against third party uses which would undermine the distinctiveness of the mark/confuse the public, however not every third party use falls in this category.

Many uses will be completely acceptable and if you do not enforce against them you will not lose your right to enforce against unacceptable uses.
Video responses are often used by content creators that want people to submit content for mashups. Wonder how they'll do it now.
Why not simply say 'run a small company'. Nothing says 'success' like success, I'm assuming that your company actually works and makes money. That's as good as any employment or better depending on how well you're doing. Any date that just wants you if you have a steady job is not worth having imo, then it's no longer about you but about a search for financial stability.
If you're good at abstract thinking everything is the same. Even being the same is the same as not being the same ;). Really a good skill for software design, as you can build a lot of functionality that looks different on the same base and save a lot of time. Your software will also become easier to maintain and to extend.

Thinking "out of the box" is creativity. This isn't the same as abstract thinking, though you can "fake" being creative by seeing things are the same and proposing a solution that worked for the other problem.

It is my experience that purely abstract things are not usable in the real world by real people. They simply won't get it or making it do things is way too hard (inner platform effect). A good piece of software has a abstract core and a very concrete interface.
The one thing Splunk has going for it over ES is the amount of resources it requires to work at scale.

I needed 12 ES boxes for every one Splunk box to handle the 100MB/day log load of my system, and even then they ran at a high load and searches often failed, and in some cases it took hours for the indexer to catch up.
Most dangerous code I've ever seen on Reddit
You can trade mark any word if it is sufficiently distinctive and can uniquely identify you as the provider of that product and/or services. For example 'Computer' for canned goods would be fine, but obviously registering 'Computer' for computers themselves would not be distinctive.

You can also only enforce your mark against someone using a mark in the course of business (at least in the UK) which would obviously exclude a whole range of potential third party uses.
With that kind of logic, most discussions would be meaningless. Basically we are all dying from a disease called "life". The point is how you want to die: either miserably from chronic illnesses brought by long years of bad habits or gracefully from old age. However, there are no guarantees, but if you don't buy a ticket, you have zero chances of winning. Anyway, eating "healthy" does not beat exercise.
No, the problem is that you obviously thought to hard when wilfully introducing the problem and threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Slight issue with clothes budget. I keep shrinking 44 down to 38 :)

Still I only fill the car up with fuel once every 6 weeks now.
The HR guy once called me into his office to ask why I was leaving. To which I said "excuse me?", and then he turned around his monitor which showed my LinkedIn profile.

Turns out I had stuffed up a few of the dates for a former job and it looked like I working for another company!

I was curious as to what he thought I was doing all day in the office. Even more curious - why the hell was he tracking me on LinkedIn? I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised.
Nexus 4 Price Drop
Great talk on quality and systems, from 1994
It's integer maths. For example:
a = 10, b = 3
10/3 = 3
3 * 3 = 9
9 != 10