skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am going to be honest here. I will immediately stop the conversation if a company would pull something like this on me. For me, time spent with a recruiter is time mostly wasted: corporate speak, big magnificent mission statements which tell me only what I can find from the site. For me, the whole idea of talking to a tech person is to figure out very quickly whether aforesaid person is interesting, does interesting work and is possibly a good co-worker. Your service doesn't help me at all: you don't work for the company, your knowledge of the company's backend is going to be superficial unless you have touched their code and I couldn't care less if you were a good person or not because I am never going to see you.

Ultimately such a service is disrespectful of candidate time. Also, if you are a small or medium sized startup, you would be blindingly stupid to do purely a google style Algo/DS interview. You don't have six months to train the candidate and you would be better off focusing more on talking about your own problems, how to solve them and such.
Mega Man designer crowdfunding a new, PC-based side-scrolling shooter
This is an absolutely great idea. More people need to think like this, just straight out offer a service. If everyone was taught this simple truth - Always Be Closing - there would be no unemployment lines.
Looking at the price on the wikipedia page, and accounting for inflation, it looks like the C5 was actually one-third the cost of a new Segway. $1707.44 in today's dollars.
I was excited to use this to enhance language learning dialogs, but their licensing is very strict and the software doesn't give you access to the final video files to redistribute them.

Apart from their specific use case, I it seems it would be hard to do anything else with this. They should think a bit harder about unshackling it a bit. It's a powerful idea.
On Corporate VC
And you don't immediately give a recent grad a large project with no oversight. You give them time to learn that stuff, and they'll pick it up with experience. But someone who demonstrably cant understand how computers work? That's who you need to avoid.
I'm a troll because I disagree?

Have you searched the US Court Databases?

As an attorney - I have. Check out lexisnexis for case law. There are hundreds of cases of US owners of patents suing and litigating against international infringers... literally hundreds.

Also, you are totally discrediting the monopolies that run the world and how they have prevented other companies from entering their markets via other aggressive methods or patent purchasing...
On the topic of incentives: Does anyone know if a system where a recruiter's compensation is tied to their proposed candidates success/failure ratio as opposed to just the raw number of placements made? Or is it always just more implicit where if too many bad candidates are referred the company switches to a new recruiter?
I believe the core of what you're saying: it's fairly rare to find someone who is algorithmically excellent, and who already knows all of the details of web dev. But I think that's largely a matter of interest and specialization, not capability.

But I stand by my larger point: I wouldn't hire a web dev who wasn't fluent enough in basic CS that they couldn't pass an algorithm interview. They don't need to be able to design machine learning algorithms, but things like basic algorithm analysis are essential.
As someone who is responsible for hiring engineers at a small fashion company (~10 people), I can say that I would not use this service. It would be difficult to justify the cost.

Also, there is one caveat you are missing: the very last question, "Do you have any questions for me?" Interviews ought to be a two-way street, and a qualified candidate, in this model, wouldn't have the chance to ask me questions about our company. How might you address that?

Recruiting is hard, as we all know, because it is difficult not just to find good candidates, but to find people period. At least, this is the case if you are a small business.

Job postings typically cost ~$350 - $500 to post on the well-known job boards. And I have yet to find a promising candidate via that venue.

So you are talking about a cost of 50% of what it cost me to post the job in the first place. And in all likelyhood, that candidate will be a no-go, and now we're out the money for this interview, on top of what is already an expensive proposition.

And if you've decided not to use job boards to hire (because they don't work), then you're already paying tens of thousands of dollars to companies who make money by placing candidates. By that point, I might as well interview the individual myself.

If you can find quality engineering candidates - and vet their interest, and their technical ability - then I would be interested. But as other commenters have said, maybe your services would be better marketed towards recruiting agencies themselves.

As an aside: recruiting is disproportionately, insanely, time-consuming and expensive. Many companies (Etsy, Hacker School) get huge press and accolaids for their progressive stance on recruiting. But if you are a small company trying to bootstrap, it is impossible to pay the fees (grant the scholarships, provide the space, etc) that make for good press and recruiting ability.

Help me solve that problem! Once I have more candidates than I can handle, then let's talk about more efficiently vetting them.
I am actually pretty decently ranked on Interviewstreet because I do have a personal interest in algorithmic stuff (I was top in Australia for a little while :)). I used to do your codesprints just for fun.

My feedback to you would be that Interviewstreet is heavily heavily geared towards academic algorithmic questions which the average developer would not have a chance in hell of solving. For example, in order to solve some of your old Hacker Rank questions within the time and memory constraints you pretty much have to know the studied and documented solution you would only ever be exposed to in doing a masters degree in CS. Heck, your problem descriptions were often thin veneers around the exact academic statement of the problem.

Despite the fact that I'm someone who actually does excel at these types of problems, I think they are absolutely the wrong way to hire people and whenever I've seen companies actually use Interviewstreet it makes me cringe - and yes I know companies set their own questions, but you lead by example and so most questions are abysmal.
How do you manage to have a life?
I moved cities to work on an start-up and after more than a year I still can't say I have made friends here besides my colleagues (and that's mostly a during work hours thing). I love my job but I fear that I'm letting life pass by.

Has anyone here been through this? Do you have any advice?
"Again, words, not facts."
Seeing the 'classic' Google Maps is like an upgrade. It's like moving from something that's aimed at touch screen devices, to something that's aimed at fully featured computers.
From the PDF linked in the article, several people were told they could get off the list by becoming informants:

> An FBI agent...told him the only way to get off the No Fly List was to "talk to us."

It is very troubling to me that the government is not merely using the list as a shield to protect a plane by keeping out people who would pose a physical danger to it, but using the denial of air travel as a stick to beat people into informing on others.

To me, this scenario sounds plausible: The government finds people with Islamic names or innocent connections to the Middle East, puts them on the no-fly list and interrogates them whenever they come to the airport. Some of them give in to the government's pressure -- "find us some terrorists or you'll never be able to see your family overseas again" is not an easy offer to refuse.

Of course if the person doesn't know of any actual terrorists, the only to be allowed on the plane would be to make some up, or name innocent people they simply don't like or don't know well.

So basically lots of innocent people get harrassed by the government denying them international travel, while the government wastes investigators' time and taxpayer dollars pursuing entirely fictional leads from informants with no connection to actual terrorists, who just want the government off their backs and are willing to make up tips to accomplish that.
Improving architecture and adding features by containing technical debt
I guess it is unclear to me what the problem is. You haven't met anyone because you work 100 hours a week and don't do anything else, or you haven't met anyone because after a day of work you go home and watch TV and browse Hacker News?
The description of the scanner and approach are probably my favorite part of the technical aspect of the story.
I blame this on the manager as much as the developer.

A company I've worked for once had a developer quit very abruptly. He did so immaturely, but it happened because his manager was dissatisfied with his performance and instead of offering tips and advice early on when the problem was first observed the manager waited until about eight months had passed and unleashed incredibly harsh criticism on him, basically threatening to fire him without mercy if he didn't improve. The developer felt so bad and embarrassed that he couldn't stand to work there and he just quit without even giving two weeks' notice. I think he was completely caught off guard and went from feeling great in the job to feeling like complete shit.

He was allowed for eight months to believe he was doing well, then told that all that work was not appreciated and he'd be fired if he didn't more or less immediately do better.
Did they deliver private information without a legal order to do so? If they were legally obligated to do something which has a non-negligable cost, they are entitled to compensation. In the same way that you might have to pay for a FOIA request, because it costs money to provide the data.
The latter I guess. I do work long hours but not always.
It's hard to go out alone though.
> Love it or not - it is the rules of the game. Someone came up with the idea before you and they registered that idea before you. Vague or not - they had the foresight - and they are indeed entitled to being proprietary.

No, they aren't. Upthread you claimed to be an attorney -- you should know better than to suggest that patents cover ideas. They don't. They cover implementations. Having an idea and going "ME FIRST" does nothing to get you protection.

Software patents are patents on ideas. They are a perversion of the patent system and are a plague. Using them to try to get licensing deals is blatantly extortion, and patent trolls know this; setting their settlement costs just shy of what it would cost to mount a competent defense. There is nothing good about this and it isn't even consistent with the rules of 'the game' you love so much.
This should absolutely not be illegal.
If women are not "genetically suited" for programming, then there can still be women among the "elite programmers and pioneers".

Statistically, it becomes much less likely.

the fact that many women were pioneers in programming was not related to ability, it seems to be mostly an economical decision

Tell that to Ada.
Only Bitcoin Converter You'll Ever Need
"I have dealt with plenty of really smart people that cannot program."

Straw man. You obviously have to make candidates prove that they can code, in addition to knowing algorithms.

That said, you can have the people who know how to use a database, but can't at least explain a B+ tree. That's a combination of laziness and incompetence that shouldn't be tolerated. You can't possibly understand how to build performant database systems if you don't know how they work.
The idea is to pay during write, at about any cost, to avoid paying during read. Of course that does not fit all usage cases, so the advise has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Hi eshvk

Thanks a lot for responding. I agree with few points but my argument against the rest is that I am not hijacking the whole interview process. I am just doing that round one which a junior person from the company would have done and I am hoping that if you clear you would have tons of chances to ask your questions and know the company well.

According to me, taking interview is an art.
In fact, many times I have seen the person getting rejected by a company because someone inexperienced from the team took the first round and rejected him. I agree that companies should not do this. They should give another chance, but in real world when you have tons of resumes pouring in, companies end up doing this.

How about think along these lines, that if I really find you good. I will definitely make sure that your strengths are played in front of the employer really well and you are given due chance.
It depends on the join.

If you can denormalize your schema so there's no joining, that's great. If you can change the product so there's no joining, great. If the schema and database are designed to do the join you're going to do, that's probably fine.

If not, it's cheaper and easier to add capacity to the pool of shared nothing web machines than to add capacity to the pool of databases machines, so grab the data and run the join on the webserver. (or at least benchmark it; you may be surprised)
The complexity of software patents has grown beyond the capacity of the patent system to properly evaluate them. As such, it this subsection of the patent system is susceptible to rampant abuse, and can no longer effectively serve the purpose for which it is originally intended.

If this were an engineering problem, the solution would be obvious. Unfortunately, it is political, and therefore a well-dressed circus.
Someone came up with the idea before you

Hardly; most newsworthy cases are of patents that have sufficient prior art in academia and industry that they should have been rejected in the first place, and/or are so blindingly obvious that every failed Y2K-era dot com considered and rejected them as a pivot while they were shredding their stock for use as packing material.
for me one of my deciding questions I ask people is "Any questions for me?" If they ask a lot, I know they are interested and I'll bring them in for an in person.
As opposed to dealing with malicious unidentifiable people who are actually trying to take information from you and all your users consistently? I wonder where y'all work where you're not on toes all the time.
I once worked with an individual with a PhD in Mathematics who wrote some of the most god-awful code you could possibly imagine. In an algorithmic test, he would have bested anybody I can think of.

Intelligence and usefulness at tasks are incredibly complex topics for discussion. If you think you can reliably go from A to B, you're dead wrong. The only reliable metric is, if you want skills A, test for A. If you want skills B, test for B.
I see you haven't had to

* deal with product owners
* deal with customer service
* deal with marketing
* deal with legacy code
* deal with emergency production issues
* deal with whatever the latest buzzword is in project management
Calculate "total revenues"/"added value to society". The bigger this number, the more likely that the industry is heavily involved with the government.

Except for negative numbers, of course.
The argument about whether to ask algorithmic questions reminds of the "can an airplane on a treadmill take off?" question. There are two sides who arr sure that they're right and the others are wrong, but they're just answering subtly different questions.

In this case, the people against always seem to come back to questioning why you would ask something that's just memorization, while the pro-algorithms side is pushing for questions that candidates wont know the answer to, so they can see how they think.

I am in the second camp, if you cant tell.
Yes, noted, and perfectly reasonable. All this will eventually be resolved by neuroscience, as it takes over from psychiatry and psychology, a process that has already begun.

Neuroscience has a long way to go before it can offer what medicine offers for conventional diseases. But in the long term, it will make psychiatry and psychology look like astrology.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...
From company perspective:
Again, what is more important, money (which I am not charging a hell lot, if incase I am, correct me) or developers time. I am just reducing your cost on those interviews which would have failed already.

From candidate perspective:
Do you talk to recruiters from hiring agencies? If yes, then you can see me as another recruiter who is much more technical. On answering the candidate's questions, I can obviously do part of the work. I am only taking one round so you have tons of more rounds to ask your questions.
> Engineers are paid way too much

Engineering skills take years to acquire. Sure it's not rocket science or a brain surgeon which takes another level of dedication to profession. The job of a waiter or a 711 guy or a janitor and similar does not take much skill and hence the term 'unskilled'. The salaries merely reflect this fact.
I visit it from time to time but it seems to be limited to entrepreneurial meetups around here (Chile).
This is actually very inspiring.

A simple idea (hard to execute/manufacture), and people went crazy for it.

That's what startups are all about!
"a recent graduate who can absolutely nail algorithmic questions would be the most likely to screw up on the big ticket items that matter"

Why do people keep implying that only new grads understand algorithms as if it's some kind of fact? In my experience, new grads don't tend to know algorithms any better than they know anything else.

Good engineers keep learning about algorithms because the knowledge is timeless.
I wouldn't call it ultimate compression, plain-text is an easily compressible format.

Also, it would be a very lossy compression. There are a lot of decisions made by the actors/directors/designers that influence the final movie.
You kind of hinted at your problem here well technically not a problem more of a barrier. Have you tried dating sites? Okcupid.com is a popular one surf that thing. Plenty of busy people look online to meet people if the bar or club doesn't work out for you.
Hundreds of cases vs. how many domestic? If domestic cases run even into the thousands you just proved the idea that it is less likely to be sued as a foreign company.
Coding noob here. Can someone explain the problem with the

`for foo in queryset`

implementation? Is it that for loops are inherently inefficient? What would be a better alternative?
You could go with an LLC instead of incorporating. There's less paperwork involved.
So in the US, how do you propose to deal with the fact that a Muslim will get punished under terrorism laws for advocating we kill Christians, but a Christian will not get punished for advocating we kill Muslims?

I mean, the 1st amendment is what it is; anything decided in accordance with it is constitutional. I'm just saying I don't really care for free speech when it comes to hate speech (e.g. genocide advocacy). I'm fine with people talking about alternative political ideologies like communism; discriminating against those is distinct from hate speech. Proposing that we burn all communists on principle? Sure, that's hate speech.

But, if you're saying the US government simply can't be trusted to enforce hate speech laws fairly with respect to different ethnicities, well, they can't really be trusted to enforce any laws fairly at this juncture.

I'm more just speaking in general: I believe placing limits on genocide advocacy is good for society (and the same for other comparably violent kinds of speech).
Do you want to have more female co-workers or not? Working with nude images when you don't really need to is a great way to discourage people from working with you.
Can I suggest that you pitch this service not to tech companies, but to recruiters? I think that's where the biggest disconnect lies - between tech recruiters and tech candidates.

You've got an excellent value proposition for recruiters, too. Anything that would improve their hit rate would presumably be extremely valuable.
There really could be an encyclopedia of challenges for working from home. It is hard to do right. It took me over half a decade to feel like I really had it figured out. Combined with running my own company was quite a challenge.

Social isolation, stress, illness, lack of exercise, are things that people who work from home face. Without deliberate action you can develop life threatening conditions after just a few years of neglect.

Offices, working together in person, can add a great deal of value and productivity to a task. I'm not convinced it is so valuable as to do daily.

Be mindful and pay close attention to your own personal health and relationships, and working from home can give you the opportunity to live a drastically higher quality of life.
Even more impressive in the 3d satellite view: http://i.imgur.com/J1apYPf.jpg
The man committed a horrible deed - he helped likely criminals escape the reach of justice. But the terrible truth here is that interpreting the squiggles of a lie-detector test is not science. Perhaps we as a society rely to much on this "so called" technology.
Naming logical fallacies does not constitue a cogent counter argument
The emperor does NOT like being told he is naked.
"Whether the measures are effective is a matter of debate."

Less so after this prosecution. It would be pretty stupid for the government to send undercover agents after him if his techniques didn't work. He'd be helping the government if he taught ineffective techniques to people to who wanted to lie to it. So either the government is very stupid (a real possibility, I admit) or his techniques work.
> My lack of a proper CS degree only haunts me during bullshit interviews as many interviewers who do have a CS degree tend to focus on CS academic topics rather than things a web developer would actually do during his tenure at the company

You don't know what you don't know. I could hurt you in other ways you just don't know it. For example it shows when you write blogs that claim SQL joins why there are deadlocks in your web application code. You don't have to go do a 4 year college but not knowing the basics of O(n) notation, how relational databases work inside, how concurrency works, different programming paradigms, is going to hurt you.

> 2) Engineers are paid way too much

Bullshit. If you feel like you are fraud and you are paid too much, well you might just well be. Doesn't mean everyone is.

Software engineering is qualitatively different from being a waiter. The equivalent would be compare a software engineer with a robot maker that builds waiter robots.

It is not about fairness. Tell someone born in a war torn country about fairness. He'd love to swap places with any waiter in US probably.

> One of the bigger websites I worked on relied heavily on SQL joins at runtime.

Now I am laughing. That is a pretty broad assertion. It is like saying "don't use C" or only use 3 space indents. Basically ignore this and use joins, use indices, and benchmark and even better -- (gasp) hire people who have got a CS degree and know about O notation, about concurrency, relational databases.
A Simple Livecoding Environment For Overtone With Light Table
Not really: "lookup" is not part of the API (as taught in a typical data-structures class) for stacks, queues, and priority queues, and technically arrays/vectors let you lookup by integer but the O(N) lookup by object is only an extension that most languages provide as a convenience.

If we really want to be pedantic, we'd have to define what the binary tree is used for, because there's no convention for what "lookup" means in this case. A heap, for example, can be implemented as a balanced binary tree, but the only methods it provides are push, pop, and top.
I guess that could work but okcupid has no presence here.
Where are you, again?
Linus: bool is dangerous in C if you don't understand it