skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ran across this yesterday (posted in 2011) about how google is using clang to automatically refactor their codebase: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVbDzTM21BQ
No, have fixed the sentence now.
Too aggressive in tone for what the gripe is here. I wouldn't hire this guy. Several of you long-time participants on Hacker News have noticed various iterations of my FAQ post on company hiring procedures,[1] and if you haven't read that, I invite you to follow the link and read it. Genuine work-sample tests are a GOOD idea in hiring, as most of the comments already here have said. Perhaps a full-day work sample feels too long to most job applicants, compared to a one-hour work sample (but how much would paying each applicant help with that?). There are also intellectual property issues here (but doesn't freedom of contract in most countries allow a way to resolve that issue?). But he doth protest too much, methinks.

In any job application situation, the company's concern is "can this applicant really do the job and do it well?" The applicant's concern is "will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?" In general, a work-sample test is a very good idea for answering both kinds of questions, and anyway research shows that a work-sample test is a far more valid hiring procedure than most other hiring procedures that have been tried. Check my FAQ link for research citations on that topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923

P.S. Yes, I intend to touch up my FAQ draft some more and then post it to my personal website. I just bookmarked the blog post kindly submitted here as another resource to refer to as I update my FAQ.

AFTER EDIT: I'd be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is. That helps me learn to make the FAQ better for its next posting on my website.
In this case the prosecutor's witheld evidence did result in another murder by the real perpetraitor 2 years later so your point is especially valid.

The prosecutor should have that on his shoulders as well.
To Lead or Not To Lead That is the Question
They're using Apache Cordova (PhoneGap), so they will run under iOS webkit (Safari w/o JIT) on iOS.
The interesting part is they could just donate a generous amount to the community in exchange for the use of their translations in the "official" release.

It's a win-win from what i see it.

Community gets funding they don't have to pay for another translation and make a little more profit.
I'm not sure what you mean about video and sound. OpenGL is first class on Linux distros, sound is almost exclusively pulseaudio now...and X11 is on its way out, hopefully it'll be dead to most desktop users within a small number of years.
Isn't that what a portfolio is for?
Academics are suspicious of anything slightly outside the mainstream. Did he know that?

MIT trains hackers for a living, since before this guy was born.
Good work.

I only had two games installed, Terraria and Volgar the Viking.

Now none of them work.
It's a crime to be tough on easy.
These things scare me more than terrorism
It's a bit more complicated than "longer confirmation times" since normal nodes will not relay them. Realistically, production use of non-standard transactions is unwise, but we'll make anything standard that people have a usecaes for and tests for.

... though in this case, you'd really want to use a script like I described instead of inefficiently using multiple keys per player.
This is great! The only thing missing is a .pdf version.

Here's what Minsky himself says [0] about the book:

"My first book about artificial intelligence was a book called the Society of Mind and it had one page chapters.

And this book was very influential because it had the feature that if you didn't understand one of these chapters you could just skim it and it wouldn't matter very much. And the result was that great numbers of high school students understood most of the theories and knew more than their professors did when they got to college."

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PdxQbOvAlI#t=16m7s
Why is this video news? Its presentation feels exploitative and sensational.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-04-02/
I think it is more than just being underpaid. Doctors, dentists and lawyers do not have to go through such stupid recruiting processes. I've known people to get hired in 15-20 minutes. The assumption is that your education and previous work experience is worth something.

In tech, it feels that one's education and work experience is what gets you the interview. Then, it doesn't matter. I'm tired of hearing the old "developer with 10 years of work experience who can't do fizbuzz". Rather than a lack of competence, the issues are:

1) Most humans can only hold so much information in their head at a given time

2) Tech/dev tool updates move ridiculously fast. It seems they are moving faster as time goes on.

Here's an idea: hire smart people. Even if they don't know your particular stack. Here's another idea that will never happen: lets all agree to be tested for interviews in one tech platform (that'll happen when pigs fly). We dismiss these issues now because we are young and hip. Eventually, many of us will have kids who we want to spend with. That's when we'll be on the other side of the table and have our oh-shit moment. I guess I shouldn't complain about the inevitable.
This is one of those articles where I more or less agree with the author's content but absolutely detest the tone and style in which he makes his point.

He could have easily made the same point with far more calm and eloquence - why the anger and the tone that at least to me comes across as extremely arrogant?
The difference here is the perception: while everyone knows petrol is an expensive good, many people don't view electricity as something stealable - it's not really tangible, and you're dealing in amounts that can be fractions of a cent.
I agree with you, but you have to remember that even science is political, and in the US, climate change is _absolutely_ political. So you'll get knee-jerk partisan responses.
Well linux have 10 main desktop managers that are under development right now. Each and every one of them does roughly 80% of what I want from a desktop. And I have uncomfortable experience on all.
People have gone to jail for 35 years (or life) for far less -- especially if they are targeted minorities.

So let's not use the "it was just to pressure him" defense.
I had a similar thing happen to me when I was interviewing at companies right before graduating. One of the companies sounded like an awesome opportunity. They were willing to fly me out to San Francisco to interview me. However, the interview consisted of me doing 3 days of pair programming on their application.

After the initial shock of excitement I realized the cost to fly me out there was much cheaper than they could hire a dev for. I actually thought it was a pretty ingenious way for for a startup to get cheap work while raising money.

As some people have already suggested I think there are some good ways to avoid having to do this while still getting an idea for the candidate. You can offer to pay for their time, you can have them reimplement a feature you already have, or as the article suggests work on an open source project that one of the parties are familiar with.
Ok, so in a default non-nullable type system, nullable types are equivalent to maybes.
I think GP's point is that the user base of OS X-capable hardware is a lot smaller than the user base of GNU/Linux-capable hardware.
You should implement an import feature for hardcore fantasy players to import their various teams - your paid subscriptions are gonna come from these guys, it should be easy as possible for them to use.
The comments on this one are worth a read; there are some well thought-out rejections of this.

(Like so many of the ranty genre, it's taking a single use-case and insisting it covers all cases. Yes, some APIs could be replaced by a negotiated machine-readable version of an HTML page, but other APIs serve specific machine access patterns that don't (and shouldn't) map neatly to the pages humans see.)
Baeldung Traffic and Experiments Report – November Learning
I don't understand your first paragraph. Could you provide a more specific or particularized answer to "what's backing the Somali shilling"?

As a side point, the shilling appreciating in relation to other currencies would have to be driven by those other currencies depreciating against the world, or by printing press productivity falling dramatically; there is no authority behind the shilling, and they are printed by anyone who wants to print their own, so their value in trade is generally the cost of printing them (quite low).
Thoughts on Mirror Neurons - Why we feel Empathy
Have you ever seen someone get hurt by falling, getting knocked down, or by cutting his finger when cooking something? You then probably felt the actual pain of that person or experienced a shiver in your spinal cord. What has actually happened within your body?
> LD (frustrated): "But I need these features out in the field today. Anyway, I don't see what the problem is, it's only a day's worth of work."

"This is meant to be to assess my competence. They're gambling your deadline on either being extremely sure that I am going to be good at this job, in which case they're trying to get a free day's work out of me. Or they're taking a worse gamble on someone they're not really sure of, in which case they have no respect for you and by extension their workers.

Either way, you shouldn't be using work that actually matters to test new entrants; in the former case it exploits me, in the latter case it abuses you. So, given it's clear I'm not a good cultural fit to this company, I'm going to have to decline."
Indeed, it's seriously lacking a competitor in that sense.

I would say that GIMP is in top 5 of worst software ever made, what made me think of that is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_considered_the_wo...

I quote:

Paradoxically, a piece of music needs to have been noticeable, popular or memorable to be deemed the "worst ever." A piece that was unpopular and quickly forgotten is unlikely to top all-time public polls a few years after it was released. A piece usually needs to have had a high profile at the time of its release, such as an unexpected hit that was highly disliked outside of its fanbase.

I think Gimp is enough of both, to call it that.

Also, OP, I've heard that the CS works quite well (the original, not the pirated) in wine, I haven't tried it myself but maybe it's worth the shot.

Note: I don't like to criticize FOSS, since I'm sure there are intentions are always good, but it's just that it's so bad :(
Great website. There is beauty in mathematics. "Everybody" is a large group of people. Many don't feel the need to understand basic algebra or statistics. Differential Equations and Graph Theory are much harder sells for the general population.
I'm not angry, I'm upset.

More to the point, the prosecutor is guilty, which is why he received 10 days in jail. I'm expressing that that should have been a larger punishment for the anguish he caused, and admitted to. On top of that, this time they have a stack of evidence, enough to exonerate someone, and the prosecutors actions got another person killed.

Very different circumstances, in my opinion. I do agree with your final sentence, however.
Any.do released a new calendar for Android
As I remember, it not that the particles physically spin (at least no one has experimentally observed them spinning, the particles are too small to see) but that they can carry angular momentum. Large objects that we are familiar with that carry angular momentum are spinning, so 'spin' was used as an term, but I've heard people say to think this way is misleading.

Almost everyone's first question in a Quantum Mechanics class is 'why do things behave this way?' As far as I have heard, no one (even those that developed the equations) has anything better than 'these equations produce results consistent with experiment'.
Lacking inspiration? Exercise found to boost creativity
Not true. Anyone can accept donations, in the US anyway. (Are there really other countries that prevent you from giving money to someone?).

The receiver will have to pay income taxes on the donations; and the giver will not be able to deduct the donation on their own income taxes. That's what requires special status.

This actually makes me realize I never thought about how people have to pay income tax on what they receive via kickstarter; I can't think of any reason they wouldn't. http://www.kickstarter.com/help/taxes
There are Macbooks (and Macs) with dedicated GPUs.
Sigh, why use "@" for HEAD? The currently checked-out commit should be called ".", just like the current directory. Doesn't this make more sense? A Unix person thinks "." means "this one" or "current".

I only complain because in hg, "." is the equivalent to git's HEAD, and it's already difficult enough for git users to understand any system other than git after they spend time learning its idiosyncratic and inconsistent UI.
http://www.commandlinefu.com/ is a good place to look for examples.
I wish I could have gone back in time to look at a codebase before saying yes to a job. I wouldn't have taken it had I seen it.
I agree with the principle that you should charge a day rate for a day's work. However, I don't agree with the author in this case.

For the author, this is an unusually genuine opportunity to see what the work is actually going to be like.

If the author feels that compensation for this time is necessary, they ought to confirm the salary would be at a level to cover the time-cost and risk of interviewing.

Asking for money up-front is (unfortunately) sending a signal that you need to be compensated early because you expect not to be employed as a result of your work.
Don't you need 4x the energy to make a car go 2x the velocity? The drag equation is force-drag = 1/2 p v^2 c a [1]. Or is there more at work here?

1: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation
I have very little experience with Haskell, I didn't really like it, it didn't seem to have strong focus on peoductivity, my view is that:

* Imperative programming is more straightforward in Ceylon.

* The same holds for functions with side-effects.

* Type safety is similar, Ceylon currently doesn't have type classes and generalized algebraic data types but will be probably added according to the FAQ.

* Ceylon is less type-inferred, which makes it more readable IMHO (1. regular syntax 2. type annotations are not just for the compiler, but for documentation too). Also - less confusing compiler errors.

* In general, Ceylon feels pragmatic, Haskell academic.
I've been playing Dota 2 / Hereoes of Newerth on my 13in mac air for years just fine. My only gripe is the mouse acceleration on OS X... the mouse feels horrible and you have to get third party software to make it only slightly better.
Just looking at his two blog posts, I think that the company's hiring practice worked perfectly and weeded out someone who may be technically competent, but is toxic to the work environment.

His tone is aggressive and completely self centred - imagine trying to have a meeting with him where he sticks stubbornly to his opinion, refusing to listen to other opinions and potentially throws tantrums whenever he doesn't get his own way.

Secondly, the fact he refuses to pair program with a developer on the existing code base ' to see how he works within a team / on code - suggests that he probably would equally be unlikely to do anything outside of what he is technically being paid for.

I'm not saying anyone should work for free, but sometimes you have to help out, whether it's working a bit later or helping during a crunch time. He comes across like he only would want to work on things that interest him, during the hours he's paid and then be out the door.

I think the company that was hiring did a good job of filtering him out.
Rebuke to the antivaccine movement: 100 million cases of disease prevented
You are offering an opinion that has no basis in fact. Innocent people going to jail isn't a modern problem. We must certainly try to solve the problem but complaining that "power hungry police and prosecutors are getting worse" adds no value or intelligence to the conversation, and you can't even prove that we are worse off today than 100 years ago, for example.

Also, why would you be surprised that the prosecutor was charged and convicted? Wouldn't it stand by your reasoning that the other "power hungry prosecutors who only caring about making arrests and getting convictions" would jump at the chance to convict him?
Thanks for the feedback and I agree 100%, the biggest new features will include integrating with existing fantasy services.
Really? I am required to have an account with Github, to prove something?

In the real world, some of us work on highly proprietary code bases, where putting any code up online could expose the risk of future lawsuits or prosecutions, certainly this has already happened to individuals in the industry.

Thankfully in the real world there are some sensible and mature interviewers who are able to look beyond the heinous crime of not having a Github presence.
Responsive design is better than mobile sites
I'm sure that those who lynched some black dude whenever a white woman was murdered in the 1900s South also often sincerely believed there was no shortage of evidence.

The problem is that people let outrage over the seriousness of the crime guide both their evaluation of evidence and demand for punishment. Their want their offended sense of justice to be assuaged, but this leads to greater and greater injustice, as people are wrongly convicted and sentences climb ever higher.
robbingwanker.com would have been a better name.
A closer analogy would be taking water from an outside tap, which again putting the value aside (even though it's much closer), people would be highly surprised to see someone arrested for theft of water and would actually think that outside taps in a public place might be intended to be used by the public who have access to the facilities.
This is not at all stupid: in fact, it can make a ton of sense for sites where the content changes quickly because you can have the browser cache the framework code for a long period of time so the page loads quickly and then your server only needs to deliver small amounts of current data rather than a large collection of HTML which mostly hasn't changed. This is particularly nice for news sites when the headlines are the same even if there's one part of the page which is customized for your account.

The catch is that search engines won't see any of that content unless you provide an alternative. Some places use the same API but either run the JavaScript on the browser or in a separate server process to avoid this.
Even if they would know what to do, it would still be something you wouldn't have to do on Windows, so anyone who is agnostic to what OS he is using and chooses based on practical criteria and not ideology or philosophy, will most often choose Windows over Linux. Linux experience just isn't there (would like to add "yet", but I don't see it even moving in that direction). I said this before and I'm gonna say again - Linux forces user to learn about OS and computer in general, which is not needed for most of people.
That's not the only tricky part with this approach. Pages take ages to load because all rendering has to be done in the browser and can't be cached. The site completely breaks when JS isn't enabled, which discounts search engines and users who disable JS (whether you like it or not, some users do this). It's a brittle solution to a rare problem.

Isomorphic Javascript should be able to give the best of both worlds. I've been playing with Meteor and Derby recently. Of the two, Derby seems like the closest to what I'd want from a modern web framework.
Frankly, if you've got the highest per capita incarceration rate in the entire world, and is nearly 7X that of countries that are other first-world democracies (Canada, Australia, etc)... something tells me there is an issue, somewhere.
Bitcoin Heist: Millions Vanish from Online Black Market
During my recent search for a programming job, two companies gave me tests to assess my technical skills.

The first company's test was similar to that which the OP describes. A manager gave me a list of company contacts and asked me to build an interface for sifting through it. It was a boring, tedious task that benefited the company, but wasn't particularly representative of my skills or knowledge.

Contrast that with the second firm, which gave me a coding challenge. They gave me a list of prompts, including interesting ones such as "Build your own A.I. algorithm that can interpret poker hands."

Not only was the second test more interesting and indicative of my skills, it made me respect the company a lot more. I ended up accepting a job with the second company because their creative interviewing approach made me more excited about their offer.
The changes look good!

Can't help but notice OP's blog platform replaces "--" (dash-dash) with "–" (U+2013, en dash), even in <span>s meant for code highlight. This prevents straightforward copy-paste of arguments like "--prune" to console ;-)
Well, I'm used to developing multi-MLOC projects in large teams; they don't switch a language so easily...

As for Clojure, I mean this: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich... (basically: immutability, controlled state transitions via agents/atomic/STM)
Imagine you apply for Google or Facebook, you know, a dream job undergraduates want to be in and they said "dude you can hack on this little ticket with me today and I will show you the codebase." I am sure in this case majority would say "fuck yeah let me see how good your codebase is."

Like many have said. One way to find out whether you like to work or not is whether the code looks interesting, how your co-workers work with you and what type of problems they are solving.
Not too too many. There aren't very many executions in the US, is is losing popularity in public opinion and not practiced in all states. However, it is legal for federal crimes and military courts.

For example, New York had a death penalty in 1995 that was never used and declared unconstitutional in 2004. Since the death row has been disbanded by executive order and it is unlikely executions will ever take place in NY again.

43 immates were executed in 2012.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Uni...
I use languages with REPL support since 1995.

A REPL helps interactive development a lot, but it is by no means a substitute for testing enterprise class applications.

You cannot cover all use cases of your code. Specially when other departments using your libraries make assumptions about your code behavior.
Mommy, the Drone’s Here