skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you saying that the context and type of the problem in the interview doesn't matter at all?

I think it doesn't matter if it is consistent for all the candidates. A company can't change to suit every employee. Working for a startup like Youtube is high pressure. You have to be very self-aware and able to work under extreme circumstances. When your app crashes and millions of people are angry, you have to fix it! You can't create a special case scenario for your employees because they need to work in a stress free environment.

Of course that is a simple case, but high stress engagements occur at some point in almost every environment and how the candidate reacts to the high stress is very important, perhaps the most important.

IMO, it is more important for the employee to adapt to the environment than for the environment to adapt to the employee. Every candidate is going to want questions asked a different way. Every candidate is going to want their cube to be a different color -- that's why they are all gray or beige.

My point is, if you want A players on your team, you will be well served to waste as little time as possible on candidates that want you to ask them interview questions the way the candidate wants them asked and focus your attention on candidates that correctly answer the questions how the interviewer wants to ask them.
CoLA figures for New York are B.S. They're all based on buying an identical basket of goods. New Yorkers don't buy the same goods. 54% of New Yorkers don't have cars, because we have good mass transit. New Yorkers live in smaller apartments and don't have gardens, because we usually opt for walkability and nearby culture and entertainment instead of square footage. If you want the square footage instead of the walkability, you move to the suburbs of New York... problem solved.
Most bags is "lost" (delayed is the proper term) when the incoming aircraft is delayed, for any reason, and the remaining time is too short to unload it, sort it, (screen it), deliver it to the connecting flight in time. The connecting aircraft normally won't wait, unless there's substansial amount of bagggage. Delays cost moneyt. Baggage handlers have to prioritize by the number of bags that will "make it". Ofcourse, staffing levels etc. plays a big part in this.

The delayed ('lost') baggage is then moved to an area where it will be retagged for a later connection - this could be a direct flight to the destination, or be routed via up to (normally) two other airports, depending on the availability of flights. Sometimes it'll have to wait for the next day.

Normally, the baggage tag is registered with a "now onboard" message in a worldwide system called Worldtracer, which essentially is a huge Oracle database in Atlanta, with a rudimentary terminal input. If it's not (lack of training? lack of time?), then, no, the airline does not know where the bag is.

And RFID won't fix it.
quality of life != standard of living
As an employer, I want employees who can solve problems whether they are under pressure or not. You really want an employee working for you, or even a team member in your group who can't work under pressure when your site is down and they are the only one who can fix it? If you can't work under pressure, you can't work. Or maybe you can work, but I'd rather work with someone who can work under pressure or who can't. That's my point. And I believe it has a lot to do with external motivation. I apologize for the contempt.

Appeal denied.
This pithy bullshit comment is a disservice to the OP. He backs up his analysis with some interesting projected numbers and market research in other areas that experienced similar growth.

The post is worth reading.
Free Softwares, Games, Movies, ebooks and lot more..
Yeah Heroku is awesome, I'm really enjoying their new deployment platform.
I agree completely. Etherpad is a lot better than Google Docs. The big reason for me is that it provides instant collaboration. When I type something in, the other people editing the doc can see my changes instantly.

For Goog Docs, it takes a few seconds to see someone's changes. It's great for solo editing, but very annoying for collaborative work.
One obvious use is for when you have an intruder in your apartment.
Put all your resources into either selling something to someone besides the government, or making something you can sell.

IRobot can sell their military robots to people like the police, and the roomba side of course.

The alternative is going whole hog and getting more money from congress outside the sbir process. Then you're a defense contractor.
The truth lies in between.

You can think long-term while also delivering software for a fly-by-night platform. You just have to understand the difference between an app or business model and various instantiations of that app or business model.

Just because Garmin's software for the Palm OS is obsolete doesn't mean Garmin is obsolete. The iPhone OS was originally developed for the NeXT cube, before many HN readers were born. Microsoft Word was originally written for Xenix systems, then ported to DOS, then the Mac, and finally ported to Windows. The obsolescence of the DEC PDP-7 didn't hurt the Unix platform. The fact that all of Electronic Arts' software is hopelessly obsolete within a handful of years hasn't stopped them from staying in business for decades.

There are apps being prototyped on Facebook and the iPhone today that will have decades of life on one platform or another.
Study finds women directors damage profits
You can't build software that will last indefinitely unless you control the whole stack.

Building on Facebook, you have dependency on their business to succeed. Building on Windows, you have dependency on Microsoft and Windows and backwards compatibility, etc. As long as the stack underneath you shifts, your software will break someday.

You can maximize your longevity, though, if you build on a solid foundation and work at a high level. If you only use Python core, for instance, your software will probably work on machines for a long time -- as long as a compatible version of Python works on those systems. Contrast that with something OS-specific, which could break given future operating system versions. The same idea applies to the web and web frameworks.

Building software is like building a house: The stronger and more resilient you build it, the longer it will last. With regular care, the house will last a long time... but left unattended, it will eventually rot and crumble at the feet of nature.
Thanks jrockway for clearing that up.

So if people get used to using GV on iPhone, Blackberry and Palm, it would make switching to GV on Android trivial. There would almost no transition costs.

I get tired of my iPhone (or more likely pissed off at Apple for something) then I could just take my GV #, make some settings changes, then buy an Android phone and be off.

Easier switching is better for us, maybe not so much for Apple or AT&T.
Yeah, no GSM, no play.
How will the interviewee know that interviewer is smarter than him?
Metafilter does this the last I checked (it's been a while) and they seem to be one of those rare communities that have managed to maintain the quality of discussion over a long stretch of time.
So if I am going to spend my time developing something, I want it to never go away.

Get into building furniture or mainframe software, because as long as you're developing for an emerging platform controlled by someone else (in particular, someone interested in making money), the chances of longevity are slim.

If you zoom your lens out a bit though and look at developing your art (as opposed to developing a platform) then you can go on forever.

There is a saying in the film industry (to paraphrase) that you only make one movie, you just keep making it over and over again. I see the same thing in any creative venture such as software; continually refining the singular vision of perfect code, which transcends platform, language and even developer.
I'm still looking for a good way to express what was meant by that symptom description.

You know about tail recursion, but I'm trying to get at the uses of accumulators that have nothing to do with tail recursion.

That and I got fed up with listing all of the exceptions to every rule.
There is an upside to scumbags like this. The publicity will, hopefully, teach people to NEVER give their existing account information to another site.
because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest common subsequence of a set of strings.

That's rough, asking for a solution to an NP-hard problem over the phone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_subsequence_prob...

Or maybe they were just expecting you to say "for each combination of subsequences of each string, check if they are equal ..."
News like this spreads the lesson that you should never tell anyone your password, so I'm all for this being on top of every news aggregator out there.
The whole online stuff?
http://www.youtube.com/cernettes
If you ask me, having someone say a function over the phone just sounds stupid. If you're going to have them say it, why not have them SING it instead? Would be more entertaining, and since the way they're doing it doesn't matter, what the hell?

I don't say SQL queries out loud, and trying to do so would probably screw me up; I don't know about you, but I don't sit down to write stuff and get it perfect every time. I often start writing a query, go back and adjust something, start working on another part, tweak this or that, and then finish. You can't do that when you're forced to say something over the phone. And I don't solve problems I've never come across by just starting to code on my own and see where it gets me; especially when it sounds like the kind of problem that someone else out there, probably smarter than me, has already solved. AND I wouldn't want to hire anyone who took that approach. Sometimes, it's fun to reinvent the wheel, especially when you're trying to learn things, but I wouldn't want my developers sitting around all day reinventing everything.

If you really want these people to do these things, plop them down in front of a computer, give them a time limit of x minutes, leave the room and come back and see where they are. This relieves the pressure of you standing over them watching them, gives them time and space to work the problem out, and is much closer to how they'll eventually be working...unless you work at some freaky place where the boss stands over your shoulder and watches you type all day long, in which case I feel sorry for you.
You're correct, mine was in California. But they've tainted the reputation of the brand IMO and I won't use any of them from any state anymore.
If you're going to put someone in the coding hot seat like that, at least give them the decency of having 30 minutes alone with a computer.
"The 1-2% that succeed can expect an upside of around $10-20 million in annual revenues. This isn’t quite a lottery, but it’s depressingly close."

A lottery ticket costs $1 and isn't worth it. A 1% chance to "win" $10 million would arguably be worth $100,000. I wouldn't say it's close. (And that's not even counting that this is annual revenue.)
US reopens H-2B visa programme for foreign workers
OOXML is typically stored as a compressed ZIP archive. Even when its decompressed to its constituent XML files, modifications are performed without much regard to how a diff will look.

This applies to auto-generated XML in general -- ODT is not immune. LaTeX and reStructuredText are the only formats I know of which are suitable for professional publication and can be usefully diffed.
Why? As a stop gap against irrelevant posting?

Guess what, those people have money too. What would happen if this was implemented? It would make it harder for new members to join and establish long time members as incumbents, probably setting things up such that 'unwanted' members would be blocked from the site. That last step is a very short distance from putting in place ways to make it harder against unwanted users.

The way to keep the community going is exactly with that: the community. A fostering of general ideas and a careful watch on discussions should be applied, not more barriers to entry!

Better spam algorithms and community spirit, not exclusive sites!
Job Losses Slow, Signaling a Shift in Economy
I've also seen a lot of "contract for hire" jobs at larger companies that are short (3-6 month) contracts, with an understanding that they are evaluating whether to hire you full-time at the end of the contract. If not, you still got some contract work and can move on.
"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join."

Scary! I wonder about your definition of "used", if you used an RDBMS in a non trivial app "for years" and never wrote a join! The database design must be very ... unusual :-).

And this was in the days before ORMs :-D.

" Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. "

I've never yet seen a non trivial RDBMS based app where the existence of an ORM absolved developers from having a good grasp of SQL when they needed to drop below the abstraction layer provided by the ORM.

"So not being able to do it without looking it up doesn't really tell you anything."

It does, really! ;-).

"PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test -- they don't use SQL, they use flat files."

The interesting thing about this statement is that it shows one way out of potentially being asked to code on a whiteboard/over the phone. If you have a PhD' from MIT and/or have a strong track record of writing Open Source software, creating and selling a startup, build robots (and electric unicylces ) for fun etc, in other words, if you can show , well before the interview, that you are as good or better than the job demands, you are very unlikely to face the "find the longest subsequence in a string" or "write a join" type questions. But then if you could do all that why would you look for a job?

In my case, after writing some open source software, (and posting an url as the first thing in my cv) I've found that these kind of elementary questiong simply drop away. When a few thousand people use your code everyday, people know you are good.

The OP's post is about when all you have is a cv that looks like the last 100 cvs you reviewed, and people who can't answer simple questions about how to write a join (hence his depression).
With some preparation, you can transform the problem from one that may not be part of your job (solving completely new problems in front of an audience) to one that certainly will - explaining your solution clearly to an audience.

If you try hard enough, you can be familiar with likely interview questions and then the problem is how best to present your solution, which is an important skill, and one worth practicing.
Meet CI Joe: GitHub's new Continuous Integration server
That's very interesting. Why is auto-generated XML hard to diff?
We may be mishearing their intended formulation, which could have been asking for the longest common substring (described here: difference is that subsequences don't have to be entirely contiguous, just in the same order.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_substring_proble...

That's an interesting problem with some simple solutions worth understanding. I don't think it would be unrealistic to expect a high-quality programmer to be previously familiar with it, or, if not previously familiar, to be able to make progress toward the DP solution with some thought.
Performance monitoring with Collectd
The Benefits of Enrolling with an Identity Theft Protection Company
These identity theft protection companies act as a anti-protective device, as they will provide you with the “red flag” before hand with fraud alerts whenever a risk is detected, so that it is worthy to take a step. Every action involving your personal information is observed.
Speaking of someone who's basically right out of school, I can tell you that I probably wouldn't hire most of my classmates. It _was_ depressing.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
I would certainly be willing to pay taking into consideration the current context. But it would scare away a lot of users. If most users leave hacker news and then it becomes less active I may not want to pay any more.
"We may be mishearing their intended formulation, which could have been asking for the longest common substring "

Good Point. And asking a clarifying question would be a very strong positive in a candidate.
I was regarded as some strange kind of mutant because I not only kept academic papers in version control, I also had a single global BibTeX database that all my papers referred to. It was really, really nice but so not the done thing in the department I was at.
Specific applications and platforms can have a short shelf life but really each application that is made can teach you things that can be used towards progressing towards the long terms goals for your company or humanity.

I'm developing a twitter application. Twitter might or might not be a fad. I can't see so far into the future and while my prognosticating skills are decent, I'm not 100% certain. Hell, I thought friendster was hot.

Anyway by developing this one application, I am learning about social tools (which I've never done before), neural networks, semantic analysis, markov models and a hell of a lot of stats techniques I previously did not have a lot of usefulness to me. In the grander sense, I was more comfortable with deterministic techniques rather than probabilistic techniques.

If Twitter goes down for good, I lose some time but I take that new knowledge and make the next app that gets me closer to my 20 year goal.
Correct, both our website and our matching infrastructure is hosted at Linode.
Microsoft “OneApp”, possible app store for Zune HD?
Well, if you're using ORMs to handle all your SQL needs (and they literally must be handling all your needs if you're never writing anything with a join) then I don't think that you actually have a working knowledge of SQL in any sense. There are certainly plenty of jobs which require that knowledge, and I'm not sure an employer would want someone who didn't have direct SQL language experience.

To be honest, I don't understand how you manage not writing joins even if your ORM is perfect and flawless. I use the SQL prompt like an interactive debugger, writing queries to look at the internal state of my database.

(I assume that the original post refers to applicants that listed "SQL" somewhere on their resume, or else he wouldn't be asking SQL syntax questions -- I hold that if you have "SQL" on your resume, you had better know how to write a join.)
Tell HN: A request for saner text-editors
I have an problem with tradional unix text-editors--vim and emacs for example--and I'd like not to have that problem with future text editors you or others may create.

The crux of this problem comes down to navigation and newlines. Traditional unix text editors understand a new line as ending when the newline character appears. This means a line can span many 'rows' on the screen. This makes sense because this is how lines are represented internally. But unless you think this way--and you wouldn't unless you habitually think in low level computer representation and don't often use saner text editors--navigation in such text-editors is quite un-natural.

For example, let's say you're reading back some text you've written and find you want to change something. Your initial reaction is to navigate to that error from where you are at the moment. So, you find where the cursor is located and say something like, "five lines up and a bit to the left." But you can't directly do this with the arrow keys or key shortcuts, because you're thinking about lines in a fundamentally different way to such a text-editor.

In everyday life we navigate objects visually. We should be able to navigate the cursor in text-editors in the same way. And so I implore the developers of future text-editors to make the default navigation behaviour to understand lines as how they are visually represented, not how they are internally represented. Please.
I would pay up eventually, but I'd put it off until I really had to make a comment.

In the same way, I read HN for months before I finally registered.
Berkeley DB?
I really think this article is missing the point of many iPhone and FB apps - expanding the interface into existing applications (hoping to increase customer usage/stickiness/retention) and customer acquisition through free and nearly free experiences.

The real question is, "Are there times when a platform specific application is the best move for your business?"
This reminds me of Adobe Connect in terms of the UI, but way slicker and doesn't have Connect's outrageous enterprisy pricing. Nice.
All I get is a blank page... Is there something I'm missing or is the site down?
I think the best solution is to ask the questions in as many possible ways you can think of.

Some people are great at coding, but suck at whiteboard, others aren't comfortable talking about their thought process.

So why not give them numerous ways to show their stuff? Have them find bugs, have them code on whiteboard, have them write code in a compiler, etc etc.

Your goal is to find a good programmer, not a programmer who is good at white board.
No it's not fool's gold, startups are generating millions in revenue from both. They are simply a reflection of a globalized market place, you're competing with developers in under developed countries. What's fool's gold to you, is riches to them.

Don't mistaken AppStore or Fb for anything more than a distribution platform. Hopefully Apple and Facebook will address the growing problem of app-overload so quality can bubble to the top, but it's not their fault you're facing more competition. And for all the faults — they've both solved a lot of really big problems and continue to drive innovation.

Yes it's hard and frustrating at times. But, building a value-driven business takes years of dedication. 37signals, amazon, apple, ms, gary v, digg, flickr, fb, are not over-night successes. Put down Fast Company and pickup Forbes once in a while.
Yes. I used to do the chatty bit first before subjecting interviewees to the "technical evaluation"; it seemed polite to engage people first.

That was depressing. At least I found out the technical evaluation was worth giving. An astonishing proportion of people that came off well in less technical conversation would utterly flunk the test.

I'm not talking minor errors caused by interview pressure. I mean people with "5 years of C++ experience" writing void reverse_string(char* in) { char b[] = new char; b = in; ... }
Let's look at some of his "projected numbers" and "market research"

Assume 1,000 application developers are competing in this market, 1.5 billion applications are downloaded annually, consumers pay a price of 99 cents per application

Only 1000 developers worldwide? How in the world do you arrive at that number?

1.5B apps/year? All of them are paid? The vast majority of downloads today are free apps. Without even giving a nod to the free vs. paid split, I am left to wonder if the author has ever used the app store himself.

$0.99/app? Is that just because most apps today are $0.99?

Also, what about in-app purchases and other ways to monetize apps (advertising, perhaps?)

Sorry, the projected numbers are pulled out of thin air, and I see no "research" to speak of.

The only interesting part imo, was the attempt to compare the app market to the automobile industry, but then he says: "The barriers to entry for developing an iPhone or Facebook application are much lower than producing an automobile, both in terms of capital investment and technological uncertainty. It takes just a few hours or days to develop a new iPhone or Facebook application...", which basically renders the analogy hopeless (and shows an incredible lack of respect for the complexity of many apps.)

I'm left with the distinct impression the OP doesn't have a clue about this market.