skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just out of personal curiosity, you should try to find out if any of these failed candidates are actually skilled developers but there's something about the questions or interview that's messing them up?

For example I consider myself a reasonable programmer, I can certainly do any project put in front of me. But I failed a YouTube phone interview because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest common subsequence of a set of strings.

I learned the following issues completely stop me from being able to program:

1. Someone waiting on an immediate answer.

2. Someone watching/listening to my though process.

3. Not being able to experiment with the code on a computer.

That didn't cut it for them because apparently at YouTube a lot of your programming is done over the phone (sarcasm).

I guess my point is, try to think of the exact tasks this hire would be doing, and ask them to do that. Will they really be writing recursive functions often? Also if possible give them a take home project, so they can work in a more natural environment.
Webmynd (YC 07) now allows you to reskin Google
The code is on github. Send me a patch ;-)
Outsource Step 1 with an on line programming screen. There are many companies that do this. Sure you'll have to pay for each one, but they will weed out the bottom 90% pretty quickly.
High cohesion is bad in exactly which programming environment? Functional or procedural?

I've always understood high cohesion to be related to low coupling. Also, writing util classes before you need them (where low cohesion may be necessary) is a nothing more than a time sink. Do something when you need it, not before. You are not omniscient and will not be able to account for everything no matter how hard you try.
It's ironic that they questioned Lee's grasp of English while their own tagline says 'one place to all your online stuff'.
I've done some work in this area. We enable the caller to text but all of the data transmission done over the voice channel. This allows for locating the call, a live conversation and it could be made compatible with all 911 centers.

Our users are deaf but anyone could use this.

See http://nirmalpatel.com/research/deaf911.html
I wonder why it should be more expensive than a motorized wheelchair?
I had a similar experience with BCBS. I paid them for insurance while I was between jobs. Called them up when I ready to cancel to find out that I apparently had a one-month plan. Umm.. OK? Who signs up for a one-month insurance plan? (Obviously I didn't keep a close tab on my bills.)

Insurance has come up a couple of times on reddit and there are always comments about how bad BCBS is. Even several comments about how doctors will say they're booked just to avoid dealing with BCBS.
Crows commute into urban areas just like humans. This is just one example of the many urban areas with commuting crows. I've seen them do it in Vancouver, BC as well: http://www.prattmuseum.org/kachemak/survived/crows.html

They use tools a lot. They can be trained to operate vending machines to get food out by exchanging them for coins they find on the street:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iihdP3b6LXw

They use cars to crack nuts and traffic lights to know when it is safe to go get the meat out of the nut:
http://www.autoblog.com/2006/09/09/video-crow-uses-oncoming-...

I think that a good portion of the population in cities around the world wants to cull the crows is a sad metaphor for the state of humanity. For a species that wants to find intelligence somewhere in the world, that wants to relate to and communicate with others to avoid loneliness to want to erradicate one of the few examples of great intelligence outside our own species is a metaphor for the erradication of intelligence within our own species as well. In times of war, philosophers are the first to be killed. Science is losing in our American class rooms. Teachers are paid a pittance while athletes are paid millions.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1337698/Plan-to-cull-...

This thread is interesting because these people want to cull the crows because they interfere with song birds:
http://www.birding.bc.ca/community/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2...
Another metaphor for our society more interested in pursuing entertainment in the form of sports or music or hollywood at the expense of engineering, science and math.

And others want to kill them because they wake them up!
http://www.canada.com/northshorenews/news/story.html?id=7d72...

How poetic: ignorance is bliss.
i imagine the engineering backing it. wheelchair is wheels on a chair. we've got the wheels-powered-by-a-motor technology down. exoskeleton is full of more intricately complex systems (assuming we're talking about the same thing here)
There's a fine line in play here. Websites are opt-in, as are OSes, but I don't think many people think of Firefox as 'Ubuntu Firefox', and rightfully don't expect that their OS is going to tamper with the expected behavior of known, third party programs. For the normal user[1], this is a 'browser lock-in' that seems worse than what everyone got mad at Microsoft for.

[1] By normal user, I mean the non-Linux-guru type that wouldn't think to try all the nonobvious workarounds. This clearly is no problem to the 'You only get to use Linux if you submit patches' crowd, but should be a big problem for roughly every other open source free software crowd.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 "Microsoft has a majority market share"

If you really think that "Multisearch breaks user trust" is the problem then maybe you should file that bug.
There is a paid version of Google Maps, costs $10k/year. It is required if you develop a private application (ie. not open for everybody).
This isn't really new technology. My brother works for a company that makes computers that go in forklifts that register collisions / mileage / other stats and generate reports based on who was driving / etc. They're used for driver accountability and help reduce warehouse accidents, but Apple's usage just seems evil.
How to do REST transactions?

1. Put a uuid under /transactions/

2. /transactions/<uuid>/ is a COW copy of /

3. make changes

4. put "commit" to /transactions/<uuid>/status
Efficiency: It is hard to beat wheels on hard surfaces for efficiency. Battery life.

Stability: Wheelchairs are inherently stable. There are a 1000 ways to fall from a standing position.

Cost: Two small motors in a wheelchair. A dozen powerful actuators in a legs only exoskeleton. Simple tubing suffices for a wheelchair, an exoskeleton will be pushed to more exotic materials and forms because any additional weight will raise the cost of the actuators and reduce the already sad battery life.

Ask this question again when you see recreational exoskeletons for wealthy people.
Will I be able to select a chunk of text Or the entire document) and change the font size with some simple keyboard commands ( < and > , perhaps)?

The issues with the OOo UI are more in things being arcane or clunky, not the absence of pretty visual widgets.
I'm surprised more companies don't use version control such as git in their documents.
Well, at the very minimum, Carol Bartz has framed the conversation around how Yahoo's doing and being measured differently.

Earlier, it was Google's % share of searches vs Yahoo's: a rather stark and quantitative loss every quarter and every year. Now, I'm not quite sure what it is but at the very least it is not that.
Then make it the default for next version, just redesign it to be part of the layout with huge buttons instead of just a toolbar dragged to the side.
No problem - I actually searched for it on my own when I wanted to answer the question "What's the point of this OS? Why is it different?" I came to the comments to post the link to it, and thankfully you already given a summary.
(answering without research)

Power supplies, i.e. the battery problem. Wheeled vehicles are much more efficient than walking/running.

So for an exoskeleton you need more motors, you need big joints, AND you need a bigger energy source, whatever that may be. My guess is that batteries can't meet the cost and weight requirements, and there is no market for a 1000 lb. V8 powered wheelchair that would probably kill 3 people if it fell down the stairs, negating the benefit of the extra mobility.
First: "bingo"
Then, the full URL to his site.
Sorry, I meant in Pythons case. Obviously theres plenty of virtual machines/interpreters/compilers which do not have a GIL and work perfectly fine.

Here are some of the reasons Python uses a GIL: http://www.grouplens.org/node/244#comment-2493

Pasted for convenience:

"""
Python has a GIL as opposed to fine-grained locking for several reasons:

--- It is faster in the single-threaded case.

--- It is faster in the multi-threaded case for i/o bound programs.

--- It is faster in the multi-threaded case for cpu bound programs that do their compute-intensive work in C libraries.

--- It makes C extensions easier to write: there will be no switch of Python threads except where you allow it to happen (i.e. between the Py_BEGIN_ALLOW_THREADS and Py_END_ALLOW_THREADS macros).

--- It makes wrapping C libraries easier. You don't have to worry about thread-safety. If the library is not thread-safe, you simply keep the GIL locked while you call it.
"""
Actually, that's what I thought they were going to cite.

I think he misunderstands Dillinger, anyway. Dillinger understood his business, and his role within it, just fine. He was a flash in the pan, and it would end badly. Dwelling on it would probably only hasten it.

Now, if more companies understood _that_ lesson...
Based on a test I ran on a number of people there is a linear correlation between IQ and Programming skills!

IQ100->belowGood
IQ110->Good
IQ120->Better
>IQ120->Best

You raise some very good points though. I am not sure about the 'no bugs' though.
It is pretty complex, people are used to doing it manually: 1st draft, 2nd draft, 3rd draft, etc.

It might be a good product idea, an ms word clone that brings the benefits of version control.
When Twitter is Down
oh man, this is my downfall as well. hearing stories about the way google conducts interviews convinces me that i'll never get in there, or anywhere like it.

i'm perfectly willing to write code as part of a job interview. just not on a whiteboard or over the phone.
I think some employees either can't be bothered or don't understand it.
It seems like it would just be some motors on a frame.

My dad was paralyzed for the last six years of his life with a slip-and-fall injury to his second cervical vertebra. He underwent a great deal of expensive physical therapy (illustrating starkly what Medicare DOESN'T cover) and tried out several models of motorized wheelchairs. Sometimes he attempted standing in standing frames. An effective motorized exoskeleton would have to have a very sophisticated balance system, and it would have to have a very sensitive and delicate control system to respond to inputs from people who often don't have much other control of voluntary muscle movements. What would its default (at rest) position be? How much would it allow connecting gastric tubes (something my dad used) or intravenous tubes or emergency airway tubes or other medical devices?

Are there challenges that make this kind of technology infeasible?

My list of areas to ask questions about above is not exhaustive. If the proposed treatment is more technically complicated (that is, more expensive) than some existing treatment, and few people can afford the existing treatments to begin with, there isn't a lot of market push to develop the new treatment.
A feature is just an indirection for getting something done.
There are often better / newer ways of getting that same thing done, sometimes part of a bigger flow context. So the "feature" is a tidbit that can be removed.
Also, most common rich text formats don't play well with the diff format, so it can be difficult to see changes in a meaningful way. I actually hope to work on a solution to this problem as a school project this fall, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Other than that, most version control interfaces leave something to be desired. They are natural for us, but not for most other people. I realize that there are some good tools available, but I haven't seen enough of them to say whether or not average users could get used to them.
Gamers gun down Half-Life
I agree. When I first meet someone over the phone or in person I'm in a social mood and prefer to talk rather than do a code dance for them.

Once I'm alone at my desk though it's easy to get down to business.

Think it would be cool if companies just said show up to work, and you work for free for the first week. After that both parties can decide if they want to continue.
Not being able to think of a good name for a variable, function, class or data structure is a show-stopper for me. If I can't come up with a short, descriptive name, then I assume I don't really understand what I want that thing to do or be. I'll sit and think until I'm satisfied I have both a meaningful name and a grasp on how this thing fits into the problem.
Which is beyond affordable since you just lost your job. CORBA is a horrible solution.
Where 'Ramen Profitable' Startups Host
Washington Versus Silicon Valley
The new MS Office format is XML with plain text. RTF is also plain text.

However it wouldn't be very hard to do, if you implement a small script that takes the git history and pushes it through a viewer showing different versions of the file. Obviously highlighting would be harder but the changes would be visible.
Highlighting requires a bit more babysitting with the file format to produce valid files obviously.
Weight Loss Diet Food That Makes a Balanced Healthy Diet
I do writing as well as coding for personal stuff, and I know I love putting my text into mercurial to track changes. I figured I couldn't be an outlier but maybe I am!
What is interesting is that C# has become the antithesis of Java. Java is now muddled in the JSR process and takes a long time to develop new features. C# is driven by MS and features have been evolving at a fast rate.

This is quite different from the beginnings of C# when it was basically a Java clone.
How a denial-of-service attack works
Hallelujah! Thank you.
Wow, I have seen people (myself included) fool themselves, first time a see an entire company.

This would be fine on the days before everybody figure out how to monetize search, but to not have copied the adwords model it has to be one of the biggest failures in business history.
About time.
Many people's lives have been saved by being able to send a text to a friend from somewhere in the backcountry / offshore where they couldn't make a call but there was enough signal for a txt.
As do I. I actually am building a two tiered system as my server parts come in. I pretty much have a .repo file that says to track which folders with what protocol either git or rsync, that way I won't fuss with stuff that;s annoying or stupid to version control like binaries, and music.

What's a pain is trying to get those protocols to work not over FTP because SSH slows down file transfer by a factor of 10. When I do transfers via SFTP or SCP I get about 1.1-1.8 MB/s when I do it via FTP I get about 10-11.8 MB/s.
Today 3% market share - tomorrow the WORLD !!!

Posted from Opera, been using it since version 3
Slicehost is backed by a fairly large hosting company now, they always seemed more professional then linode. I used them back in the day and it always seemed like it was just one dude and he didn't have his processed automated well enough.
That's the issue I was referring to. The diff tool works on lines, but changes to formatted text documents are word- and tag-based.
offlineimap + {mutt, dovecot}

- Two way sync

- All my other accounts (university etc..) are sync'd into gmail
BCBS isn't a single company; it's an association of independent health care plans of varying quality.
its very pretty: http://bit.ly/33z8g
It's part of their brand!
Our company, myself included, LOVES using Apple's Pages for documents. Unfortunately, .pages documents are actually directories full of files, so you can't check check in a file and then view it/download it using a web repository browser.
Another really unhappy camper: http://nospinpr.com/2009/06/09/spacelocker-the-social-media-... - I think what gets people even more is the level of arrogance in the customer support replies.

It's a downside of using your email and password to log into sites - and obviously spacelocker does this deliberately given the number of complaints you can find on the net and their unwillingness to make their sign up clearer (or separate). Being a bit lazy, if it's a trusted site, I'm almost afraid to admit I've done it myself since it's convenient - I use my email and password to log into HN.
"you should try to find out if any of these failed candidates are actually skilled developers but there's something about the questions or interview that's messing them up?

hard to think of a halfway competent developer failing to answer

"where I ask them to implement a simple function, implement a recursive function, write a simple SQL select (join across two tables), and create a simple object model (how would you represent a car as an object)."

in about a minute or so all told, even verbally, over the phone.

"YouTube phone interview because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest common subsequence of a set of strings."

This is (ever so slightly) different from OP's ultra simple questions above , but otoh , YouTube has a lot of tough algorithmic problems to solve. I am not sure what position you interviewed for, but the question itself sounds decent for a position that could involve algorithms and searching and so on. Now if the interview were for a job involving "code up a basic enterprise app" I can see how it could be inappropriate.

All that said, I am not a fan of extended phone interviews , but asking very basic questions (as the OP seems to have done) eliminates a surprisingly large number of looks-good-on-paper-but-can't-code-for-nuts type "programmers".

The key to not getting depressed is not to waste any time on people who can't answer ultra basic questions. If in 30 seconds you feel someone is too incompetent, shut the conversation down politely. Spending long periods of time with incompetents is depressing.

One solution is to send a (moderately complex) programming problem by email and ask them to send code back. This will weed out a lot of people without wasting your time.
There is no reason that individual coverage should be so high. I don't mind buying my own insurance. I just want the same price the big buyers get. And I want the cost to be deductible without having to establish a corp that pays a salary to me simply so it can buy the insurance on my behalf.
Most companies use Word for their documents, which doesn't lend itself too well to the standard version control scheme since it's a binary file.

Then there's the whole open source thing that certain companies are afraid of (not worth going into or arguing about, but it's there). Some places do use Sharepoint, which will do versioning on Office files, even though it sucks, but it does cost a lot more!

Ultimately though I prefer writing documents in a wiki, though I might look at something like Github for that now too.
I've been working for 3 years as a front-end developer and somehow have managed to pick up all of those skills minus the join (just started learning SQL last week). Maybe your pool of samples is tainted. Where do most of your applicants come from?
Does my perfectly healthy baby need a doctor with ten years' schooling to give him a vaccination? No.

For what it's worth, my perfectly healthy baby has never been given a vaccination by a doctor. Shots are given by one of the more cost effective and numerous nursing staff, and are scheduled so that they coincide with a regular well-baby checkup.

Not that I disagree at all with your point, just that this particular example doesn't really stand up.
That's basically how open source works.
Ask YC: Your favorite startups lately
What's some of your favorite innovative startups lately?

I like the approach that RethinkDB is taking with their SSD DB technology.

* = Doesn't have to be YC
Paul Tudor Jones - The Trader (video)
"The best way to "be", and to be recognized as, a good programmer is to write good code."

That is why he included "remedies" for each condition. If you implement all of these remedies, you are very likely to write good code, and thus be a good programmer.

The title leads to the structure of the article, which is really about pitfalls to avoid if you want to be a good programmer. And for some, the negative tone might really be necessary. Remember, incompetent people are often unaware of their own incompetence. But if someone has the humility to read an article titled "Signs that you're a bad programmer" and honestly look for things he can identify in himself, he is on the right track.

In my opinion, the remedies transform this from an attempt at vilifying outsiders, into a potentially valuable tool for becoming a better programmer.
I'd say that viewing the changes are more-so the problem because diff will be able to handle the backend of things on most files, changed words in lines are picked up easily, so are tags.
Great points. I bet you're right that the $106.5m number could be easily returned and more.

What I like about Google's approach, compared to Microsoft's or Apple's or Comcast's or [insert Fortune 500 company], is that their goal is to not make ALL the money nor control ALL the components between point A and point me.

Google has a different M.O. than the established technology players, and the others are finding Google difficult emulate/kill/marginalize/contain.

I reminds me of the "which would win in a fight, a Tiger or an Alligator" question, the answer to which depends on where they're fighting, land or water.

Google may not even be on the planet, never mind land or water, and may not even be aware of the rules of the fight.

They would scare me if it weren't for their consistent contributions to Open Source.
Did Yahoo not begin as a search portal?
I was once waiting for my flight and watching the activity out on the tarmac. A luggage cart dropped someone's suitcase, and it sat out there for at least an hour while the carts drove back and forth around it. Eventually, someone picked it up, but I'm sure the owner was long gone. Technically, I guess that doesn't count as "lost", but I wouldn't say that they set it aside until they had time to handle it.
Seems like Yahoo! is starting to regain some goodwill. Maybe developers will also start to realise how insanely awesome their APIs are.

http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html
"He pioneered the idea that user-driven content, and not the work of PhDs working with a cave full of parchment, can be relied upon to throw light on every conceivable subject in this world."

Hrrmph. I don't want to take anything away from Wales, since his contributions are indeed extraordinary: starting (and funding) Nupedia, funding Wikipedia, managing it with just the right light touch, and continuing to spread the word and get funding. But he did not pioneer this way of putting content together.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz#I.27m_not_one_of...
Shrub / Amazon S3 Proxy
Or do comment-driven development: write the comments for the method first, then convert the (hopefully!) plain English into code, ideally so that no comment is needed.
I third/fourth NameCheap, too. I still have some with 1and1, but all new ones are via NC. Keep an eye out for their discount codes too