skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, it is not a hell of a lot. Certainly a drop in the bucket as compared to a developer's salary, even smaller compared to the employee's value to the company.

How many individuals would you interview before a successful hire? Let's say 20. That amounts to a $3,000 headhunting fee.

You can certainly make an argument for developers' time being worth more than $150/hr. Then again, the bottleneck isn't doing interviews, it's finding qualified people in the first place.

Then again, I know I'm not making $150/hr, even after you factor in benefits. (But what about opportunity cost? We can go down this rabbit hole too.)

Finally, at the end of the day, I'm not the one with the checkbook. I'd have to ask my boss. His first question will be "how do you know this will work? Have others had success before? What is your real cost of doing an interview?"

He gets people asking for money every day. So if I'm going to bug him about something - particularly if I'm going to try and chip away at our runway - then I have to have very strong guarantees that it will solve our business problem. And really, I'm not sure I'd be ready to throw my trust behind this concept.

So nothing you are suggesting is incorrect! I think it is an enterprising idea, modulo some of the comments in this thread. I'm offering, however, that for so many of the aforementioned reasons, for our particular company and the constraints I have, I would not pay money for this (since you "Ask HN'd") and there are other parts of the hiring process that are a bigger bottleneck than assessing fizzbuzz or someone's background.
I'd prefer one of these - http://www.comotrikes.co.uk/

edit - but maybe not for five grand
BS, web links can launch into apps, plenty already do it.
its pretty common knowledge that he is schizophrenic
> who hate the idea of talking to outside recruiters

Wonder why?
Could you list the reason. My guess is you would find my response in that.
To be blunt, I feel quite strongly that this is a bad idea. You might find business in this service, but only in companies which don't know any better. And if you can sell a service like this to that type of company, everyone (you, your client, their candidates) would be far better off if instead you sold them consulting services which made them more competent. Give a man; teach a man... right?

To explain:

Remember, companies are just formalized groups of people. What's the single most impactful component on a company's success? The people which make up said company.

The best candidates know this rule intuitively. They've completely internalized it. When these candidates imagine an excellent place to work, they imagine it first in these terms. These candidates will read the use of a service like the one you propose as a company shirking responsibility in an incredibly key area.

Yes, yes... it's only a first round interview. You're just separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

Maybe the company knows that you/your service is/are incredibly competent at this task. However as a candidate I sure don't, and my first impression is going to be that the company relies on a third party to determine whether or not it's even willing to talk to a candidate? I'm sorry, but I'm outta here. I don't have time to market myself to two separate entities just to work for the final one, especially when I'm already being recruited by two other companies which are competent enough to validate their own candidates.
What are the legalities in the US with respect to teaching people?

If I'm teaching something and a student says they intend to use what I'm teaching to commit a crime am I legally required to do anything at that point?

Is it different if the student says they're going to use the education to cheat a background test as opposed to some other bad activity?

Is it different if the skills are generally considered more harmful (martial arts, lock picking) versus less harmful (bike riding, painting, gymnastics)?
Shutting this guy up via prison also provides some value in maintaining the fiction of the efficacy of polygraphs, so it may not necessarily be an endorsement of his methods.

It is my opinion that much of modern LEO's abilities to solve crimes are based on maintaining a facade of authority built up by the common perception of their methods. Specifically I mean the methods of analysis like hand-writing analysis, polygraphs, and even more "scientific" methods like finger-prints or DNA evidence. These methods of investigation are often portrayed in popular media as 100% effective in providing proof, however their real rates of effectiveness are quite a bit lower.

Much of these techniques are not as effective as claimed or perceived, but are used as a tool to bring pressure to bear on criminals to cause them to implicate themselves indirectly or confess completely to their crimes.

Much crime is solved merely by rounding up the "likely suspects" and tricking them into thinking that the case is already solved and the criminal just has a chance to admit and gain some sort of ameliorative to their sentence.
AFAIK, React OS doesn't use any of Microsoft's trademarks, and they've come out of a pretty long, hard and deep audit to ensure that there wasn't any Windows code in the system.

The only recourse (other than a bullshit groundless lawsuit) that Microsoft has it to produce a better product. And considering that MS are ahead in terms of customers, API users, and paid developers... I'm pretty sure they'll remain on top for quite some times to come...
Is this anything like:

http://www.justinwilsonplc.com/index.asp
But TeX justifies (and hyphenates and microtypes...) by default? I'm curious why it would hurt legibility. It's the default text font for non-math stuff there too
In a way then, why aren't lawyers under the same kind of threat? Don't they advise people in order to avoid incriminating themselves?
A Theory of Human Motivation
Really cool idea, but it's hard to get a grasp of the trends at this level.

One of the handful I can pick up is that earlier films tend to have stronger brighter yellows in them that have faded almost completely out, but I have no idea why or what that means.

What I'd implore you to do is to give me some more low-level data to explore (maybe show me a full picture of the poster with the film title when I hover over a color palette), make it easier to spot trends (perhaps flatten everything into a single column to make it easier to compare them), and give me more high-level information (average out the colors of a decade as "the average color scheme of the 200Xs," show me the most popular color of the 1930s compared to the 1970s).

This is certainly cool, but I can't do anything with it.
When he mentioned Doom 3 coming out 10 years ago, I couldn't believe it.

But I looked, and holy crap: released 2004. I don't know why, but that makes me feel particularly old.
Interesting strategy, to prosecute, as the publicity will only raise awareness of lie detector beating techniques.

Better to research new mind reading style lie detection systems.
Portal (Game series) in education
http://www.wikihow.com/Cheat-a-Polygraph-Test-(Lie-Detector)

has several good tips on how to cheat polygraph tests. I actually strongly encourage everyone to read up on polygraph tests and how to cheat them, here's why: they've been wrong again and again, they've gotten innocent men in trouble. There's a very real probability that the polygraph can say you're lying even when you're not lying. To save yourself from getting caught by these pseduo-scientific tests if ever you're in the position, prepare yourself now, learn about the polygraph tests and how you can use them to your benefit.
JGC followed up with a downloadable nanosecond.

http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html

This is also my favorite Grace Hopper bit.
Would you believe such a test?
I want to point out that "fair use" or, even more generally, First Amendment rights, are not involved here.

The statement that the NSA issued, that no one is allowed to use the Seal without written consent, is strictly false.

Section 15.a states explicitly that you may not use the Seal "in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Agency."

This t-shirt does not give you the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Agency. Fair use, parody, satire, doesn't matter.

I linked the CNET article because the FBI did the same thing a few years back:

"While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us," Mike Godwin, general counsel for Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit company that runs Wikipedia, wrote the FBI in response.
If it walks like a duck... The NSA's Bluffdale UT facility is obviously built to handle more than a few thousand FISA requests. More like it could handle a quadrillion such "requests".
C99 6.3.1.2 requires that converting nonzero to _Bool yields a 1. An int doesn't work that way.
Indeed it was Instagram, I stand corrected.

I'm aware of Msgpack and I was under the impression that it doesn't handle UTF data very well, however that was some time ago and I may be mis-remembering. Msgpack libraries are also supposed to be quite a bit faster at encoding/decoding, right?
>...a facade of authority built up by the common perception of their methods...

And a hell of a lot of force, backed by weapons and corrupt officials willing to "make an example" out of anyone who stands against their false authority.
Perhaps, but then how do you explain the history of lawsuits?
> 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?

Well, it is worse than that, unfortunately. I think the answer is to strengthen first amendment protections rather than erode them. We have fewer problems I think than we tend to see in Europe in this regard, but with Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, I think we have a real problem.

That problem is that now first amendment rights depend in part on who you are talking to. If you tell the KKK, "we will need to kill black Muslims" that's different from telling Hamas, "You are right, we need to kill white Christians." The difference is that fully domestic terrorism is protected while foreign organizations are not. I think Holder v. HLP should have come out the other way because I do not think that is just.

> I believe placing limits on genocide advocacy is good for society (and the same for other comparably violent kinds of speech).

But surely "Someday the workers must rise up and forcibly take control of the government" qualifies if anything does, right? So distributing Marxist literature would certainly be outside of the protections of the 1st Amendment. That is exactly what was at issue in Yates and what the court said there was that there was a difference between saying that something would be desirable, and trying to make that same thing happen through tangible steps of preparation. It's one thing to say "the 2nd Amendment protects a right to rebel." It is something very different to add "and that is why I am training my private army." The rules which protect the Communists protect the NRA and I think more voices are generally good for discussion.
I find it abhorrent that you are offended by the words of someone who clearly has no control over themselves. Are you that insecure that you will take the rants of a schizophrenic and use them to play the race card?
Don't forget the most scary of all, well meaning.

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/C..S..Lewis.Quote.E...
I already hired engineers for several companies of very various sizes, and I can understand the value you're bringing. This said, if you're only going to be a technical filter, some companies will put your services against a combo of "recruiters + codility".

I personally went through codility myself for a company, and I found it decent, even though it has obvious disadvantages because of being online.

That said, if you feel like targeting bigger companies, I believe you should introduce yourself (or whatever company you're building) as a recruiter, but a strongly technical one, and then adapt your business model this way. It will scare companies less (newness equals risk), and it will make what you're bringing on the table more clear. Your value is in your technical skills.

I understand that the difference in your offering is that you're not offering companies to find candidates for them, but this is where you would become more useful than a method consisting of sending all the candidates to a service like codility.

All in all, I would use your services, but only if you solve a problem that my current tooling (recruiters I deal with, and online filtering services) can not solve, which does not look to be the case if I look at your current proposition.
ReactOS will probably be one of the rare convenient ways to run legacy software for Windows in the future.
I discounted the telling on p156 because the population size (enough water for 8,000 people and 100,000 animals), the description of the tree (withered in the day and dropping at night), and being able to fill 20,000 tuns (about 1,000 L/tun) in a single day.

I also wonder how they were able to get the lead for those pipe. Other reports imply that there was little contact between the islands, so they likely didn't trade for all that material. Figure a 4 cm across, and 5 km of pipe gives 6 cubic meters of lead or 70 tons of lead, which is a full load on a Spanish caravel of the 1400s. And I think I'm underestimating that number.

I tried to find more historical information. The Spanish Wikipedia page points out that a well with brackish water was dug between 1702 and 1704, as part of a search to find drinkable water near the coast. It also commented that Columbus stopped there on his voyages to the Americas.

So I looked up a translation of the log of his first voyage. The entry for 9 Aug 1492 says:

> The Admiral says that many honourable Spaniards, inhabitants of the island of Hierro, swore that they were on Gomera with Dofia Inez Peraza, mother of Guillen Peraza, who was afterward the first Count of Gomera, and that each year they saw land to the west of the Canaries

"Many" is not helpful, but at least a few hundred people on the island?

I looked backwards in time. Jean IV de Béthencourt conquered the Canaries for Spain in the early 1400. "There was no resistance offered by the scattered guanche population who were largely sold as slaves" says Wikipedia. Nice guy.

Your best bet I think is to look for records in Spanish. Oh! I found "Conquista y antiguedades de las islas de Gran Canaria y su descripcion: con muchas advertencias de sus privilegios, conquistadores, pobladores, y otras particularidades en la muy poderosa isla de Tenerife", dated 1676,

My Spanish is rather poor, but I think page 59 of http://books.google.com/books?id=cKvrI2UF-LgC&pg=PA59&img=1&... says there were 1,800 inhabitants of El Hierro.

Here's what I could copy from that text (updating the syntax to more modern Spanish):

La isla del Hierro esta diez y ocho leguas de Tenerife, es pequeña, tiene su Villa con buena Parroquia, y dos Beneficiados, que acuden a toda la isla y algunos Capellanes; ay vn Conaento de San Francisco; cogese much trigo, y ganado; rendra la isla mil y ochocientos vecinos, y muchos principales.

Here's my+Google's translation:

El Hierro is eighteen leagues from Tenerife, is small, has its Villa with good parish, and two Beneficiaries, who flock to the island and some chaplains; (also a convent of??) St. Francis; grows(?) much wheat, and cattle; the island (has?) 1,800 residents, and many (bosses? people who can represent your business interest?).

So, a 1670 population of about 1,800 people, under the Spanish crown, and before the 1702 well. I think this find greatly weakens the hypothesis that fog collection was necessary in order for a group of up to 2,000 people, and that they could have survived on the limited springs and cistern storage of rain water.
"Aside from the main point of this article, could anybody recommend a good algorithms/data structures book?"

Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual" or Kleinberg and Tardos's "Algorithm Design" or Sedgewick's "Algorithms" for folks with little/no math. I mildly prefer the last.

Once you have some math under your belt (say worked through Knuth's Concrete Mathematics), Sedgewick's "Analysis of Algorithms" or even Cormen et al. The problem with the latter is that it is too big to work through comprehensively and knowing what to leave out is somewhat tricky.

Speaking of which, has someone ever worked through Cormen comprehensively? I sometimes think I should take two months off from work for a "desert island" holiday and put in the work to do this. (I started once and was making progress but got interrupted and never went back).
The Anderson Report[1] into scientology stated that the E-meter[2] is used:

"...to assume, intensify and retain control over the minds and wills of preclears. Fears of its abilities keep them in constant subjection. Its use can be so manipulated by cunningly phrased questions that almost any desired result can be obtained, and it is used unscrupulously to dominate students and staff alike. All the evil features of scientology are intensified where the E-meter is involved. When used in conjunction with hypnotic techniques, its evil impact is greatly increased. This simple electrical device is not, of course, the sole basis for the condemnation of scientology, but without the E-meter scientology would be partly disarmed."

The use of psychological manipulation[3] tools works well for scientology. Polygraphy works better because it is backed by a larger community of supporters that are just as deceived as the subjects. Polygraphy has also benefited from decades of use in movies--ensuring much of the world's population now believes in the deception.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Report

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-meter

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_manipulation
Apple patent to remotely disable iPhone's camera, ringer, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
Well, there's also "I've been here 2 years and it's obvious to everyone that I'm still struggling" and "I think I've become so demoralised and feel so marginalised that I've lost a lot of the fire..."

So this dev knows he's been struggling and he knows everyone around him knows it. There's no indication at all that this was a surprise to him or that the problems hadn't been mentioned earlier. It sounds to me that the manager gave him much more time than was really deserved to catch on, and he simply never did. We're both guessing a bit based on incomplete info, but it looks like the message didn't go from "you're doing great" to "you're doing horribly", but rather went from "you're struggling but we're willing to give you time" to "you know, time is almost up".

If after two years it's obvious to everyone that you're the weak link, then while training might help a little, you're probably just in the wrong place.
>Words cannot express how much of an impact this OS would have had if the amount of time and resources dedicated to Linux, which is yet another UNIX clone in an age where 4-year CS majors do UNIX clones as assignments[1], were dedicated to ReactOS.

The difference is that UNIX was designed by AT&T Bell Labs and largely standardized with POSIX. Whereas Windows was designed by the people who brought you kernel mode printer drivers and the Blue Screen of Death and a working implementation requires such gems as having to intentionally reproduce undocumented historical bugs because legacy applications rely on them.

WINE makes sense because it's transitional. It allows you to switch to a better operating system without having to abandon all vestiges of legacy software at once. It's software you like to exist but you still hope to never have to use.

Which is why a full Windows clone is silly. It's not transitional. Windows was designed by a committee in a hurry. There are plenty of good reasons not to want it completely regardless of the license it's distributed under.
Yes, if a factory is legally ordered to make a weapon to be used against innocents, of course they should both make it and get paid for that. The law is the law, and it costs money to make the weapon.
I agree. If I rename myself as recruiter, I fit in well in the system. In fact candidates will be happy to talk to me because I am much more technical than non-tech recruiters. I think my positioning is biting me :).
The next time someone asks you why privacy matters, you can remind them that the government is now prosecuting speech as thoughtcrime.
No, the polygraph examination is a psychologically manipulative torture technique meant to intimidate the subject into submission. The main goal of the polygraph examination is to get the examinee to incriminate themselves through a verbal confession.

Nobody should be subject to it, and its use should be banned. It should be no surprise that the widespread use of this technique has attracted sadists and other predatory individuals.
I think Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms, where people vote with their wallets, would be a better way to validate an idea.
The Black Panthers also admittedly murdered cops. All the kudos go out the window at that point.

The militarism makes an easy excuse for a crackdown. If you think scaring the shit out of people, threatening their very existence with violence, is a good way to affect change, I think you are very uninformed. Find me one example where that worked.
Audio feedback? Speakers instead of headphones?
I don't know about you, but my programs never compile the first time I write them. I wouldn't recommend anyone using these techniques on the internet unless you can test them out on a real polygraph.
Relevant The Wire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ5aIvjNgao
What's Bad about Bluespec System Verilog
It serves far more than to simply raise awareness of the techniques for beating it, namely to deter other would-be teachers.

The government's hounding of him -- like their current hounding of Edward Snowden and their previous hounding of Aaron Schwartz -- is a naked assertion of dominance.
@OP - points 2 and 5 are opposing each other - you can't be paid too much and demand to be treated as a King in the Bay.

Kings are known for their high incomes.
I like your idea from a company's perspective. I've seen many teams struggling to get good developers - Part of the problem is the existing team (it sucks technically) - they can't ask the right questions and end up hiring the wrong kinda folks.

You should probably explain a bit more in detail (on a blogpost maybe) on the matrix that you will use for evaluation related to techs.

I agree with few of the comments below too.

1) I'll not be interested in talking to you if it seems to me that you are a recruiter. But then - its me and people like me who are humbly confident about their skills - that's mostly not the case with everybody. May be you could partner with an employee -mostly silent- during interviews.

2) You could be doing a great deal of misdeed towards developers. I judge my prospective employer/team based on the questions they asked, how they asked, etc, etc. I've been trapped into a situation where I thought that the team is "very good" based on the interviewer - which turned out to be a disaster - bcoz the interviewer was brought in from some other team (read: excellent team) - but that's not what I was hired for.