skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While we're debunking IQ tests of historical figures, I'll add some context for Feynman: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1251164 And I'll add something which probably isn't obvious from the summary: given the context of Feynman's test, 125 may have been the ceiling on it, since for educational purposes there would be little reason to detect anything higher.
I used to do that. Some people took it really well and thanked me, others got really defensive, upset, even angry. I'm happy to put in the time if people ask, but I found it's just not worth dealing with the emotional fallout of some percentage of the rejected candidates. (Unfortunately these folks ruin things for everyone else)
Because my experience says that when you do the above, a good percentage of the candidates will disagree and debate with you about your assessment of them. Then when you just ignore them, you just look like a douche, not to mention there are candidates who will never give up and go to any lengths to express their disagreement with you. If you were only hiring one position for the year, you could may be do this. But when you are constantly hiring, this does not scale and can easily bog down down recruitment.

I also feel that I am not in a position to give advice or feedback to someone I've barely known. Just because I didn't hire the guy does not mean that I was correct in not hiring him. At some level, we'll never know. So it's pretty hard to even have feedback that I can be 100% confident about.
Has anyone made a coverage map yet? That would be useful (going to be limited by radio coverage/standards/countries/etc)
Bugs Everywhere - track bugs within a repository (git, arch, hg...)
C to both of your questions.

The JVM compiler compiles for the JVM, which is written in C. So, how again can something written in C perform faster than...something written in C?

I'm not claiming that line by line transcription, C will always perform each particular operation faster than Java. But the fact that you could write the entire JVM in C means that you could recreate the exact platform and replicate the results. Is that sane? No, not really.

Comparing languages is typically silly, as it mostly boils down to implementation. If you -really- intend to compare speeds of languages, it would necessitate writing the best possible code in both languages, which may or may not even resemble each other. Under those circumstances, Java is not capable of beating C. Ever.

I don't understand why this is an argument anymore, it doesn't really even make much sense...unless my definition of 'language speed' is unusual.
Hell yes. It would cost TMO very little to provide this to me, as I travel very infrequently. But I consider it to be a very nice perk indeed.
oops, someone forgot an 'ORDER BY country ASC', or more likely to hit the Sort A->Z key in Excel.

::rageface::
Hah, well put. I clearly am not used to committing great evil with git--on purpose, at any rate.
The 2 good ones are: subsonicsoftware.com & superspeedyservers.com

The others are: recordsafeapp.com, recordsafeapp.tv & superior-sound-systems.com

All have about 9 years left on their registration & are registered with Gandi.
You can definitely create any number of locations and switch around between them in the Simulator, triggering the significant location change notification without driving around town. Although in their story it was the chatting-while-driving that actually led to finding the problem.
> IQ tests are notoriously hard to make. And they don't measure IQ, so much as what the tester considers IQ.

They are notoriously hard to make, yes, but psychometricians have put in a ton of effort to make culture-fair tests and investigate claimed biases, so they're pretty good these days. We're a very long way from the WWI Alpha test.
A (Leaked) Demo of Clinkle: The App That Raised $25m In Stealth
I just know this is going to be one of those famous archived Hacker News posts one day. This is the kind of thing that changes the game - amazing that you pursued separate deals with these four music services. Record industry - it was a good run, but your era is over.
But you won't get criticism without showing people the app. Heck, I won't sign up for services that only have little explainer videos instead of screenshots and text, there's no way I'm filling out a form to figure out whether or not I care about this.
Most 9V batteries are just six AAAA (nearly) cells wired in series. It should actually have less current capacity than a AA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9v_battery
Everyone seems to forget he was running a business that was illegal in every (?) country in the world. Germany could jail him, then deport him and the US might try him and jail him. Germany might also decide to extradite him directly.

I think it'd be hard to become a citizen of a country that has nice imprisonment terms, is where you want to live, and will ensure you're only tried once and never extradited.

Long-term, the best strategy probably would have been to launder the money[1], then become a large donor/philanthropist and get lots of political friends and great lawfirm on retainer. That way if they do catch up to him he's in a better position to deal with the DoJ.

1: Yes, I know, a non-trivial endeavor.
For anyone wondering, Cryptography in NaCl [1] goes in to some detail about the benefit of generating a per-message r vs a static r in section 9.

[1] http://cr.yp.to/highspeed/naclcrypto-20090310.pdf
Legal issues are the real problem. With so many holes you can push yourself into without knowing, a disaster is practically unavoidable in the long term.

I, however, reply with a more personal tone.
This is _awesome_!
Does anyone know if 30 dollar prepaid plan (100 minutes. Unlimited data and text) included in this deal?
Just in case anyone hasn't noticed this:

> While the data is free, it won't be particularly fast. Customers can expect network speeds at around the same level that they get in the US after they are throttled. Chief Marketing Officer Mike Sievert said the average speed customers would get would be around 128 kilobits a second.

Think of it more of an extension of the Kindle 3G business model rather than anything else. The maximum one could theoretically suck through that straw, at 24/7, is 40 GB a month.
802.11ac 'gigabit Wi-Fi' starts to show potential, limits
So where was the advice about hiring designers? As far as I can tell the post should be titled "Why not to hire designers based on dribbble". While it may be true, it really doesn't help those of us not in the field who are looking to bring in talent.
If RC Monster trucks can have replaceable battery packs, I imagine board vibration more than moisture has to be pretty severe to warrant permanent connections.
Doesn't seem like it:

> New and existing T-Mobile customers who are on a post-paid plan are eligible for the new international plan, which kicks off on October 31
This is not the proper solution. Instead of making your data accessible when the device is locked you should listen for UIApplicationProtectedDataWillBecomeUnavailable and UIApplicationProtectedDataDidBecomeAvailable. Once your keychain item becomes available again you can log the user back in. The keychain will always be available in the foreground.
It would be nice if it was that simple, but if you accidentally word something the wrong way you can open yourself up to a mess of problems. Employment lawsuits and accusations of discrimination can be very nasty and costly.

If this wasn't a concern, I would gladly take the time out of my day to write a nice note like this. Even if they're not hired, many technical people will tell their friends about their good experience with you and help improve your reputation in the tech community.
Noted it is 2G only, but it is a great step forward.
Power Quotes on the values and costs in social media
> It is a highly contested assertion that IQ tests accurately measure I.Q. It's completely possible that if you take a reasonably smart person and make them study for a specific type of I.Q. test, that he will score higher than he would have otherwise, even though his intellectual ability would remain unchanged over a broader spectrum of skills than the test involves. Therefore, it may not be a reliable measurement of I.Q.

It is not contested in the area in question; psychologists routinely use IQ tests without a qualm, and it is a consensus in the field that they are meaningful. See for example the consensus paper on IQ released in the wake of _The Bell Curve_ controversy or look at more recent review articles like Nisbett's "Intelligence: new findings and theoretical developments". Whatever the layman or politicians may think, the debate is over: if you make a good IQ test, it will estimate accurately general performance on all sorts of cognitive performance. If you destroy the accuracy of a given IQ test by training and then measure performance on the original variety of cognitive performance, this will immediately show up in the factorization and demonstrate how the IQ test's accuracy has been destroyed, and IQ tests developed with different kinds of questions will not show the spurious increase, just like if you took a different thermometer and put it in the person's armpit, it would show a different reading from the thermometer stuck in the mug of hot water.

> Your example makes no sense whatsoever, and you should have already known that before you typed it out.

My example is exactly analogous to the argument that was made.
I think being specific is great and letting them know what they did well is good. Phrasing it more in line with we found someone with a bit more experience in XYZ can help and even making it seem like if they take some months to brush up on... lets say python... they could be a stronger fit down the road.
Keep it honest, but avoid specifics.Too many people can nitpick rejection but if you imply there was someone just a better fit and give them some points on what makes someone (even if that someone isn't identified yet just an ideal profile) will help the candidate in the long run. Also, if you've gotten them deep in process like an on-site CALL THEM. 4 hour interviews and a technical challenge, you can spend some time giving them a ring. Especially Sr People don't make them feel like you wasted your time and sent a canned rejection.
I would iterate on this idea and start thinking about some new ones.

Catch up on this podcast StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com they have some good advice for what to do next.

Google and read/listen to Patio11, Brennan Dunn, Nathan Barry, and Amy Hoy. All have good advice for the direction you want to go.
It may be due to the advancing night here in Germany, and I don't mean to insult you personally, but this seems like an uninteresting discussion to have about things that can be readily looked up and/or reasoned about without me doing a lot of pointing.

Nevertheless: it's possible for a scientist to be completely wrong about most things, and yet produce valid scientific theories. Only when superstition and science collide directly, work usually suffers. Otherwise cognitive dissonance works pretty well. You also have to keep in mind that historical figures had a different cultural outlook than we do today, and I'm boring myself as I write this.

Uncharitable may well be a fair charge, I take it. Other things that don't rank high on my list of credibility indicators are: the number of people believing something, and the social authority of the people believing it. This is all incredibly obvious historical baggage we're carrying around from a time when the goat was the pinnacle of technical achievement. However arrogant this may seem to you, I think a bit of brutal honesty is in order.

However, having said that, I'm fully aware that no amount of argumentation can convince a believer (see my other comments on how religion closes that avenue after it infects a brain). I'm sorry if all that sounds pompous, arrogant, or just plain stupid to you.

At a very fundamental level, religious and secular people might never be able to have a meaningful discussion about the nature of the world. It's probably for the best that we usually maneuver around these black holes on HN.
[This is a copy of a comment I posted to a previous discussion on this topic.]

The problem is that the standard itself isn’t enough to actually support any of the content it claims to support.

It’s the equivalent of standardizing the object or embed tags: it’s a standard way of getting at non-standard functionality, and sites then depend on specific implementations of that non-standard functionality, the same way they depend on the Flash plugin today in ways that knowing how to implement the object tag doesn’t help with.

Standardizing a single fully-specified mechanism for DRM might actually be useful (debatably), but that would break the current model in which DRM is completely unsound and relies on security-through-obscurity. “Standardizing” a means of getting at the myriad non-standard DRM implementations and their non-standard APIs is worse than worthless: it’s actively harmful, and it prolongs the death of those technologies.

Right now, content providers have to choose whether to support the open web or DRM. They should continue to have to make that choice, with supporters of the open web reaching a larger audience, until eventually all the holdouts either switch or lose. This is a major step backward for that goal, and the W3C has no business claiming EME has anything to do with the open web.
Recruiter here that has worked with quite a few startups as well as large companies (agency recruiter, not internal). Some clients are great about giving candidates actionable advice after interviews ("your database skills were not up to speed"), but generally the personalized feedback is only given when it is pretty clear that the feedback will be agreed to by the failed candidate. If he/she missed all the database questions, this feedback will not be a surprise.

You start to hear the generic code words like "not a fit" when there is something more to it, like we just didn't like you, or something perhaps bordering on illegal.

I have clients that deliver me very personalized rejections for some candidates and very generic rejections for others, at which point it becomes fairly obvious that personality and other things that a candidate would be sensitive to are often the issue. It's much easier to hear "your DB skills weren't up to snuff, bone up on those and you'll get somewhere" than "we didn't like you, change".

Fear of offending candidates, or being sued, are the root of the problem - and 'not a fit' is such a bland response that it generally just creates more questions from candidates.
It is perfectly possible to write JIT optimizations in C/C++. In fact, HotSpot does just that.
Short answer: it doesn't impact my analysis at all.

Long answer: Even if it's true that countries are funding PhD programs for national status, that doesn't imply that the programs, themselves, are compromised. The programs should still produce educated individuals.
If they're not competent enough to blame this mishap on 'test data', I wonder if they'll prove competent enough to change the data for the final reported results.
I agree that a one-day interview deserves some feedback.

I disagree that said feedback is provided during a rejection letter.

I suggest to you as a candidate, to ask for feedback when they ask you if you have any questions for them... At that point, they can say you did well in this area, not so hot in another, etc. But its up to you to ask.
This feels a little like entitlement. Like the candidate is saying "You owe me an explanation". They already gave you a big chunk of their time. You gave them a chunk of yours. Nobody owes anyone anything.
Washio Raises $1.3M Equity Round, Haroon Mokhtarzada Joins Board
Hmm, did you actually encounter those bad behaviors, or are these hypothetical? I gave feedback to nearly everyone we interviewed onsite, and only dealt with one person who became defensive. I thought it'd be a problem but most people are actually very decent.

For all of your examples, I think you can communicate the feedback in a specific, helpful, and gracious way. For example, for the candidate that you're worried would futz around with technology for technology's sake, why not say something like:

"Hi X,

Thanks for interviewing with us yesterday! Everybody on the team enjoyed meeting you.

Unfortunately, I don't have great news for you: after a lot of discussion, we decided we can't make an offer.

We thought you seemed really smart, and you did great on all of our algorithms and system design questions. What worried us is that, during the pair programming exercise, you spent a lot of time configuring your custom-built editor and trying to use a combination of the D and Brainfuck programming languages running within an Amiga emulator, when C compiled to x86 would have been a more practical choice. Since we're an early-stage startup with only six engineers and limited funding, everything we do has to directly relate to making our customers happy, and so we're especially sensitive about pragmatism at this stage. We know it's entirely possible we're making a mistake, but given our company's small size, we just have to be very cautious, even paranoid, with every single hire.

Thanks again for taking the time to talk with us. We really appreciate it. And sorry again that things didn't work out this time. Best of luck with your other interviews, and please let me know if there's anything I can ever do to help!"

(I'm making up details, but you get the point. I've sent lots of feedback of this type and rarely had a problem.)
Great designers are found on Dribbble. It seems you're making a leap from "Dribbble has bad designers" to "All designers on Dribbble are bad".

Just because some designers on Dribbble choose to focus on visuals doesn't mean that they haven't mastered the other components of design as well.

Dribbble and similar sites like Behance are great to evaluate visual design. For other components, you have other media (writing, videos, case studies, etc.) Why can't we just leave it at that instead of acting like this is somehow Dribbble's own fault?
> He completely misses here what he wrote himself earlier for example about there not existing a simple mutation from the current state to the "desired" one.

We don't need a simple mutation. Learned associations and mental activity is quite enough for generating or suppressing pain. People can be terrified and panicked at the presence of particular people, pain can be controlled by hypnosis, or caused by phantom limbs. Is there a mutation, simple or complex, for phantom limbs? If I beat my dog brutally every day, does he need mutations to experience pain and stress at my approach?
mhm, so in that diagram what happens when both "Platform" and "Browser" are user-modifiable?
The Weird Post-apocalyptic British Comedy that Time Forgot
Better than the $2/MB we pay for international data in Australia.
Just because they are trainable doesn't mean they aren't measuring anything or aren't useful. Besides his arguments aren't for increasing IQ tests, but increasing intelligence in general. IQ being a rough measure of it.
I like the intention -- making software more secure is really worthwhile.

The reward scheme is dubious though: I love working on open source because it's intrinsically rewarding. But if you try to pay me a few bucks, chances are I'll lose interest because my day job pays better.

Extrinsic motivation killing intrinsic motivation is a known phenomenon in psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory
It means that splashing money around to get people to do stuff can have the opposite effect.
Also see the book Drive by Daniel Pink: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates...
I think you didn't read too closely - that's what they chose.

>Cells

After realizing the inherent risks in some lithium chemistries and finding it difficult to source low volumes of high-power cells, we decided to use a different lithium-ion chemistry known as lithium iron phosphate (LFP or LiFePO4).
That still sounds pretty reasonable, considering that at normal roaming-data prices, that 40 GB would cost you about $10,000. Between a speed cap and insane prices, I'll take the speed cap!
I would be willing to pay for this service here in the US for a reasonable price. There are plenty of things I would love a low-end data plan for, but can't justify the cost of $45/mo for prepaid data at 1.5GB/mo like Net10 offers. Think of electronics projects that could benefit from an anywhere, always on connection even if it's super slow. But is that project worth $45/mo, and is it worth it if you run out of data before the end of the month?
Yes, I know about the PDF issues, and I also realize that there are so many great resources on the web that having a dedicated general purpose programming magazine doesn't make business sense anymore.

It is quite possible that what I miss is really my childhood and the excitement of waiting for the magazine and learning about things (most of which I didn't fully understand) with wide-eyed wonder. But of all the computer magazines I have ever encountered I think it was Dr. Dobbs' that struck the best balance between CS academia and the hands-on world of programming. It straddled that world between abstraction and application perfectly in my opinion.

It would be a wonderful role to resurrect in the age of big data and increasing statistical and algorithmic sophistication. Won't happen, though. So I'll just wallow in my moment of nostalgia :-)
I'd much rather receive the shorter response without criticism. If I really want the job and am disappointed in the decision, I'd probably send a follow up e-mail and explicitly ask for feedback and what I could improve to work with the company. If I've got several opportunities and one of them doesn't think it'll be a fit, I don't need or want a paragraph explaining why I'm deficient.

Having been on the other side of the hiring coin the majority of my career, when a fit is bad it's usually just that -- the candidate isn't incompetent or a bad person it's just not quite what our particular company is looking for. There's no useful or relevant "advice" to give to the candidate other than explaining in great deal the idiosyncrasies of our team culture and hiring process... this isn't useful. It's not like we have the secret recipe to what makes for awesome programmers and have license to dispense that upon all who fail our review.
Maybe just shoot him in the kneecap and warn him that next time it'll be in the head? Steve should have some obligation to dissuade dan from his course of action prior to killing him, no?
If you would read the entire thing, most of it is about addressing that (that is explaining the reasons why evolution doesn't always produce the optimal result.) There are also a lot of links in the text to related material.

I'm not sure why you think this disputes anything he actually said.
I think your definition of "news" is basically this kind of story...

As a thought experiment, imagine if American readers of the "world news" section routinely were led to think things like "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if our policymakers tried that idea" or "wow, maybe the people in country x are just like me and deserve my profound respect, even though my country is launching missiles into their neighborhoods".

Illegal immigrants are dehumanized in the American press too, as are sex workers. The point of creating psychological/empathic distance between the reader and the subject is to permit the reader to suppress the basic reflex of valuing human life. Imagine the news story about an illegal immigrant sex worker who was found murdered.
The Gini overweights changes in inequality that happen in the middle of the income distribution, which is exactly not what we should be looking at, given how stable the middle is.

Except when it isn't.
Programming in Idris: a tutorial