skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think "quiz" type of questions are pretty ineffective at filtering out candidates. You do filter out the bad candidates, but great ones could also be left behind. Who knows, the person could be an brilliant developer who got nervous during the interview and had a blank. Or the phone call is breaking up. Or the person is in a non-ideal location. Etc... I would not filter out a potential hire just because the person couldn't remember the SQL syntax on the spot...

For me, a senior developer is someone who is able to work in a TEAM, be dependable (i.e.: The guy who you can call at the 3am with an urgent matter), mentor others and be able to contribute and implement new processes and practices. The technical stuff is important but should not be the main filter IMO.

It also seems to me that you want to apply a certain logic or algorithm to the process. Personally I prefer to call up and just have a conversation with the person (trying to find out the aspects I listed above). Unless I am Google and I am getting a gazillion applications, that's different...
A New DB for 80% of Facebook, YouTube-scale Sites
App Engine does offer you cron jobs now, at least.
There's an open source implementation of Silverlight, called Moonlight:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

I've never used it before, so I don't know how well it works or anything.
Ask HN: Review my website www.intelligentcredentials.com
Please provide feedback on my web based cv/résumé builder at http://www.intelligentcredentials.com

Let me know of any improvements or issues with the site.
thanks
I've seen it. From the gate waiting for boarding I saw cargo loaded in the plane. Later they announced that not all luggage 'could' be accommodated aboard and was to follow on the next plane.
the pain with that is the dissonance between folders and labels.
OOXML is text based now. So Office 2007 should be text capable. Sharepoint is generally horrible with that I agree, but I think it uses the default MS word mechanism to do that which stores changes with the file at the end.... kind-of a bad idea.

Also fun fact: Sharepoint agreeably sucks more than any other MS product but it's not actually written by MS, but a large part of it is written/owned/supported by Akamai Technologies
Cool link, cool vid -- Im so glad this wasnt some javascript thing taking the metaphor too far :). Seems like a waste of metal tho -- anyone know why this would be done? (other than to show off 1337 cnc skillz?)
Control: You can move and turn a wheelchair with your hands (or someone's help), or with a very simple joystick. An exoskeleton would need an elaborate control system to coordinate its movements with your legs.
dropbox. still.
My point is that COBRA costs significantly more than your health insurance plan when you opt to use it. Why people disagree with that so vehemently is odd.
I had almost same experience in Copenhagen Airport. Had to leave after half an hour and the suitcase was not picked up by passing trucks yet.

Edit: Now I remember; one cart-driver did stop, picked up the suitcase, placed it outside of the driveway, and moved on.
Thanks. I did a little googling. It appears that Silverlight works (at least marginally) in several browsers on two OS's (Windows and OS X).

I'm still curious about why Silverlight works for, say, Firefox on OS X, but not Firefox on Linux. I understand that Microsoft probably wants to prevent Silverlight from working on Linux, but I'm curious whether it's something hard to do because Linux doesn't have X, Y, and Z that Silverlight requires, or is it relatively easy to do (if you had control of the codebase).
When someone points out in a comment that this could be seen as verbal nitpicking, he responds well:

...the issue arises because there are the people who
understand and use the terms interchangeably, relying on
other readers to be like themselves and understand in
context of the communication.

However it's the people who don't understand the
differences that the clarification is needed, and they
run into trouble, or start making 1/2 correct inferences
and mis-communicating to others.

It pays to be precise, and when in the habit of using the
correct terminology, comprehension becomes easier for all
parties.

This is very, very true. Particularly when dealing with artifacts as subtle as programming languages, where, e.g., 'type' and 'class' shouldn't be used interchangeably. The problem is bad enough when dealing with core calculi---as this post demonstrates, being precise is doubly important when dealing with feature-rich languages, like C#.
You're right, their definition of 'medical bankruptcy' does include that person if the $1,001 wasn't covered by insurance, in the cases where they were comparing the results to their 2001 study which used the same criteria.

Their new results, however, apply a stricter standard, upping the bottom line number to $5,000 or 10% of household income, and they report a change of less than 1% if they eliminate the hard $5,000 and just go with 10% of income.

You seem to be claiming that people who are going to go bankrupt even if you remove their medical expenses are somehow meaningless data points for the question being asked by the study. That makes no sense, though. The cases that make it into the study are 'Medical debt below threshold, bankrupt anyways', 'Medical debt above threshold, bankrupt regardless', 'Medical debt above threshold, bankrupt as a result'. You're saying that we shouldn't care that the first category is proportionately shrinking, because it may be the case that the second category is accounting for all of that shrinkage. Even if that were true, that's still a reliable indicator that medical costs are growing.

Your "no control group" criticism makes absolutely no sense here. What are they controlling for? They aren't running an experiment, they're reporting on the proportion of bankruptcies that meet a particular definition, and how that proportion has changed over time.
Maybe it's just me, but I tend to immediately discount any advice or proposals that suggest I work for free.
companies that insist on showing me advertising to hear what they have to say aren't going to get my ear. why do so many websites do this?
I don't actually want to use a proprietary tool like Silverlight, or an open reimplementation, but I appreciate the effort to make the comment.

Thanks.
Python SOAP tutorial with ZSI
It was indeed an epiphany—really, a synthesis of a lot of ideas that were fairly new and floating around at the time (wikis, Extreme Programming, free content, and others).

The main idea of Wikipedia, even its combative/collaborative style and its peculiar solution to the epistemological problem of getting reliable knowledge, was cooked up in a flash of inspiration, and then talked out over a single dinner. The main policy ideas did not take a whole lot longer to work out, and they were mostly developed by one person—a philosophy Ph.D. who had a thing about reliability and bias.

The majority of the work for a long time was the relentless political/marketing effort to attract people to the Wikipedia community and keep them agreed to the main social values that had been envisioned very early.
I think the news here is that this company sent that support email to a user. It's pretty unbelievable. In fact, I'm not sure I do believe that it's real. Would someone really write that?
No, it started as a hand-built directory of websites, and outsourced its search function, using several different providers over the years. It bought Inktomi at one point -- which at the time was one of the top search engines (it powered Hotbot) -- and that's when it became more of a search company.
i can agree with this. i don't like quiz types of questions either. if i were to hire someone, i'd rather hire someone who i know i can rely upon to get a job done, regardless of their knowledge. someone who knows how to teach themselves, who is able to learn and learn quickly.

but, i still think that a longer-form, more essay-like quiz is better than grilling someone over the phone and expecting them to continuously talk to you while they're working through something.
Facebook & LinkedIn also ask for your email password, and they use it to spam. Whats interesting is that techcrunch never complains about it. Perhaps it is not wise to write harsh support letters to them ;-).
stupid user though.
I have kids, and whenever I do interviewing, I get worried about their future. I think the secret is to get them to feel passionate about something; as long as they have the motivation, they'll want to learn. But how to do that? And what if I fail? I shudder to think they'd have to stay in some of the crappy jobs I've been able to leave.
First, I don't buy the post's statistics. 65% of the subjects administered every shock in the experiment. But

when we believe that someone knows more than us about a
subject, they can get us to do what they want most of the
time (or 65% of the time if you can believe the experiment)

mis-parses the probabilities.

Second, I think the "(65% of) people obey to authority despite what should be their better judgment" overfits the results of the experiment. Perhaps people simply listen to scientists during experiments?
The single biggest problem facing engineering
Research on this is ongoing at my college and I've taken a grad class on it/looked into a lot of research on it so I feel like I can comment.

It is EXTREMELY difficult. I am in the last semester of undergrad degrees in computer science & mechanical engineering. I have worked on path finding, AI, computer vision and a bunch of mech engineering stuff. This was the hardest topic I've ever covered, by far.

At my college the professor in charge of research and his grad students have had success for lower body exoskeletons and are just now starting to work on upper body ones.

It is not just some motors on a frame. Realize the person inside the frame has limits on their joint motion and a certain gait, if the motors do not correctly follow the prescribed gait you could seriously injure the person wearing it. The human body has many more degrees of freedom than you would expect, it is not simple hinge joints.

Plus there is the density issue, batteries, motors, computers, frames must be made light but strong and durable etc.

And then there is the interface, how does the exoskeleton know when you want to move your arm/leg down. Is it pushing down on the exoskelton because you have no strength and gravity is pulling? Or do you want to put down the glass you are holding or take a step forward?

So people out there are trying, it is just really hard.

Note that the goal is to rehabilitate people, not replace wheel chairs. After enough time with a lower body exoskeleton and continually lowering the help the skeleton provides until there is basically none, the person slowly regains the ability to walk (in the case of a stroke victim).

For the upper body exoskeleton the goal is to provide help for those with muscular dystrophy or the like, i.e. where there is no solution today.
Apple and Facebook application development: A rush for fool's gold?
Forgive me if this violates the RTFM principle, but I've researched this in the past without finding a concise answer. If someone has the answer at hand, it might save a lot of time and effort.

My understanding from past preliminary research is that IMAP is (or was, as of a year+ ago) a better option in terms of performance and convenience (e.g. no crapout after X number of messages fetched). However, I'd like to be able to remove messages from my gmail hosted mailbox image without losing them in my locally hosted mailbox image. The IMAP instructions I found were not clear (to me, at least) on how to achieve this. (It seemed possible / a feature at least nominally supported, but I had trouble identifying clearly defined instructions and implementations.)

Two questions: Is this indeed a possible/good/best approach? If so, does anyone have a pointer to a decent set of instructions?
That was actually entirely valueless. You're unemployed now because you didn't Twitter enough last year.
i'm perfectly willing to write code as part of a job interview. just not on a whiteboard or over the phone.

why not on a whiteboard?
I have no clue about law, but I think there should be a law that doesn't allow "PS" and "footers" or "*" in a different font size, whether it is a website or a printed form or billboard. Their font size should be at least as big as the least other font size used in the page.

The lawyers that frame these footers don't want us to read, and so do everything possible to "help" us "ignore" these.
Why do you use Opera? I just can't see the benefit.
For my current job (for an entry level position), I took a one hour test asking to do pretty basic coding prior to interviewing with anyone. It asked to find errors/poor practices in a code snippet, some quick logic/binary operations, and a larger question involving linked lists that required a few minutes of planning before I began writing code out.

This was a comfortable setting for me. Though in previous interviews, I would completely freeze when someone wanted a technical explanation, simply because I need a moment to collect my thoughts, and it's difficult to do so when someone in front of you is looking for an immediate answer.
Greasemonkey script that adds collapse/expand links to HN comments
Here's a little script I hacked together to collapse/expand HN comments. My javascript and GM skills aren't the greatest so forgive the shoddy code.

I haven't really tested this thoroughly so there are probably a few (read: many) bugs but it seems to do an OK job. The "reply" link isn't currently hidden but it shouldn't be too hard to add include it.

I tested this on an offline page saved from HN, and when I tried it online there were slight differences between the HTML so it didn't work properly. This could be caused by FF extensions like AdBlock or stuff like that so chances are you might encounter problems as well.

Anyway, here's the script:

http://pastebin.com/f1e888ab6

Feel free to mod/crit/enhance.
Senior Developer does not always mean coder. It means, in my view, senior-level experience and senior-level judgment.

What are the job requirements?

I was a manager for 10 years and didn't code except to fix bugs. When I coded, I used C/C++. As a senior manager, I oversaw the JavaEE application strategy at Sun.

At any rate, today, I am a Senior Developer at a start up that uses LAMP. I would have no problem answering your questions today but it took me a full month to get back up to speed.

It may be that you are focusing on the wrong questions, it may be that your job description is attracting the wrong candidates, or it may be that you are not promoting the job in the right channels.

Good luck.
Yes, it is depressing.

That said, I've had success with doing the pre-screen in a Campfire room and asking them to Pastie/Gist their code into the room. That way, you eliminate some of the weirdness associated with coding over the phone, but you maintain much of the immediacy.
cloudkick, I think those guys did a great job.

Delivered something of value, freemium business model that I believe will work extraordinarily well for them.

My hat is off to them! Just wish I would've thought of it first.
Im tired of these 1 page funny sites :(
dismissively makes the wanking gesture
You must be new here .....
Renraku really, really needs a summary Wikipedia page...
Steve Yegge's post on this is apt and may help those who haven't read it.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...
I agree with you, but I think that when it is possible to break it into atomic functions that are reusable then that is superior to doing it simply for size reasons.
Spotify. I tend to listen to it while working, and it's great I can listen to my music even when I don't have access to my library.
I would actually enjoy a one week type engagement to get a good fit for a company.

It works both ways. You are selling your time. They are selling their environment.

The problem is that the employer is accepting a lot more risk than the employee. Do you like paying for something you can't return and you can't get your money back for if it is crap? This is the situation a lot of companies are in. They hire someone, they pay them to write the code or build the project and it turns out it's all a lot of garbage and the company is out the money.

This problem is really tainting our industry. I think a lot of people who call themselves programmers are really just some kids off the street who grabbed an open source package and started hacking away. They can build a website with some graphics and stuff, but they have no vision, no experience with large systems that are actually going to be used for any significant period of time.

It is quite depressing actually.
Tori's Eye
I agree, Dropbox is a really nice startup; really polished.
I guess it's about execution every time, and yeah, they execute well.
Thanks. That's a great explanation.
Recursive subroutines that concatenate/sum to a global
variable or a carry-along output variable

Wow...I didn't see this in the article. That is downright boneheaded. Is accumulator-passing style forbidden for a reason? It's a cheap way to make functions tail-recursive---much cheaper than CPS!
Non-PHP Tools for PHP Developers
One of the guys in our department called it "the most exact photon measuring device ever manufactured by humankind"...
If your code has no bugs, the problem you're attacking is too easy for you.

The best programmers are working on problems that no one knows how to solve yet.
I agree. The questions the OP asked are all very easy. It'd be easy to describe a function to find the longest common subsequence of a set of strings as well. The reason such a question is asked is because it isn't something that we do everyday and how we solve problems that we don't immediately know how to solve is what sets good programmers apart from bad programmers.

I find anyone who immediately blames the environment for their lack of ability to answer the questions correctly to be suspect. These types of complainers are externally motivated and will never accept fault for their lack of capabilities. "You should have asked me in a different way." or "I need to be taught differently" or "There's too much pressure"... look, you can come up with whatever excuses you want, but the fact is, you can't solve the problem and what we are looking for is someone who can solve problems.

Case closed.
That's a really good idea. If wish we had that too.
Not too stupid for polyglot programming
America's Fastest-Dying Cities
280 North for re-inventing how web apps can be developed.
You seem to have a broken image (actually it's an empty img tag) on your landing page. It also looks a bit oddly formatted at least on my Mac w/FF 3.5.

You might want to consider adding your site to my new startup, launchly, for additional feedback. It's free - http://www.launchly.com
Even scrolling down the whole page (which is ultra slow thanks for cpu hogging with opera&linux (probably tiny css background images repeated over a big part)) I am not sure what this actually is?

I guess it inserts infos about what you are looking at from other sources?
I appreciate your meaning; certainly, there are enough weak essays about bad programmers, but this one has more substance than some I've read.

The idea behind any essay about bad programming has merit. I read the points in essay like this through two filters: is it a valid point and am I guilty of it. Most of the points in this essay are valid. The one about pointers isn't so relevant unless you live in C but the others, sure. The bit about knowing your platform well - that made me think about some things I've been working on.

The essay made me think and maybe checksum myself just a bit. For that, I like it.
Heroku...

After that I'm a bit partial to launchly but that's probably because it's mine. :-)
For all sorts of reasons, multipliers like the CoL adjustment in this article don't work for New York. (And really, they don't work in general.) To be "equally well off," there are a lot more factors than living in an equally-sized apartment with an identical car ... after all, living in a place that doesn't suck counts for something. As does not needing that car. Or having an immense amount of stuff to do (much of which is free or close) that keeps you out of that apartment.

On a personal level as a NYC resident, I live in a nice apartment in a nice (though not ritzy) neighborhood for $600/month, my transportation costs are $100/month and everything else is just about the same as it would be elsewhere. Every time I think about moving somewhere else, I have a hard time figuring out how I could come close to my current level of expenses without sacrificing quality of life.
I'm really finding Evernote a great tool for syncing my daily to-do lists.
Like I mentioned, I just get flustered when people are watching me, or want me to speak my though process aloud.

Those skills, (being able to code complex problems when people are watching) have never been a requirement of any job I've seen so I've come out of many interviews feeling that they got an inaccurate picture of my skills.
"How long did it take?"

I noticed a change in mental state probably right away, but over time it shifted from hyper-rational to better-focused.

The point I was trying to make was that whatever you experience the first few days is likely not going to be what you experience, on average, over the long haul, so "pharm tourism" is not a good way to judge a drug.
A lot of companies use wikis, which track modifications.
thanks i'll look into that
Actually amazon try to make my life easier when I want to by something. Godaddy instead is trying to sell me tons of stuff I don't want.
Then just flag them and move on.
Sounds like a great idea. There is a broken image on your front page. I see links to several social networking sites, but they are of different sizes even though they are right next to each other. Awkward. There should also be the ability to get the resume in word and pdf format... these are the most common formats that a recruiter and managers look at. Especially Word.

Do you give custom urls/sub-domains to people?

http://barackobama.intelligentcredentials.com

The name seems kind of stuck up. I think I would roll my eyes at someone who gave me their resume on a site called "intelligentcredentials". Possibly, build a network of domain names and allow people to choose the one they like. Shorter and simpler the better.

http://barackobama.ires.com/ for example.

Can I just copy and paste from a word document into that form and preserve all of my formatting?

Instead of having the form broken out seperate from the resume, have the fields be inside the final format of the resume. That way I can edit it in place.

Lastly, hire a designer. They will clean it up and make it looks really snazzy. nice work, I can tell it took a lot to make it this far and good luck with the rest!
I just read "The Corner", about life on the drug dealing corners in West Baltimore. (It was the basis for the show "The Wire".) When they quote a cost of living for "Baltimore", do they average over all parts, even the ones where no one wants to live unless you really are using all your cash for drugs and can't afford the hundred bucks a month it would cost you extra to live one block away from the drug dealers?? Because that average would seem to indicate an unfairly low cost of living then...