skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about: "Let me tell you about a few of my accomplishments and then I'd love to hear which one you think is most significant for the kind of work I'd do in your organization"

Interviews go both ways.
Stirling Charger V 2.0 – Charge your phone with a candle
Why no one will read your thesis
Just seeing the face of the interviewee while you ask the question lets you understand if there is real passion for that kind of job;

Is this deceptively informative? I hate to cite Malcolm Gladwell but I do think Blink shows us that first impressions and fleeting impressions can be dangerous and wrong. What do we think "real passion" is? Does it really show on the face, or do we only think we know? Can being flustered or off-kilter skew the impressions we give?
Which browser and OS are you on? Depending on that, it should be somewhere near the top. Firefox has a tendency to close the accept dialogue if you change tabs, and you can retrieve it by clicking the camera icon in the address bar. Unfortunately there is no way for us to improve this UX from our end, but we are working on more informative "waiting" pages.
Bad Bayes: an example of why you need hold-out testing
This is a Kickstarter I'd back in a heartbeat.
This is sort of like when MMORPG's were all the rage and they said that they were destroying traditional RPG's, but fast forward a decade or so and guess what, we still have great traditional RPG's. We have great MMORPG's. There's a lot of enjoyable gaming to be had.

So there's in app purchase, okay. That's another way some games are going, but it's not the only way and it probably won't be. You can't make a AAA title like Halo or Call of Duty as a F2P with IAP. that's not going to happen anytime soon. However, some devs might try and nickel and dime players more because they can, but maybe just maybe this means that game developers will have a more sustainable business and won't be going bankrupt every few years as many seem to.
Yes, the Google Play store has heaps of garbage apps as well (and worse), but at least other apps aren't permitted to directly copy and use Facebook's app icon, making their app indistinguishable from the official one.
I disagree - these are the same types of questions you might see on a college application. As far as my experience goes, it's a question that has massive flaws, especially when you deal with people who has an impressive & flexible set of skills/strengths - it selects against some of the very best, since for them, it's difficult to say what is the most significant accomplishment since many accomplishments manifest as significant in different ways. To select one is to likely avoid talk on the others, and to make a snap judgment call on the implicit question of what is significant, which may end up with a flawed answer that the interviewee may not make normally.

That is why I fundamentally disagree with such a question being important for hiring. If you want to test how someone handles pressure, that can be manifested in other ways. If you want someone to discuss their accomplishments, a simple request for the person to describe some of his/her accomplishments would be less flawed (i.e. "Tell me a little about yourself and what you have done") - it would also be less confrontational.
Kind of neat.

What I like to do with rake tests and/or delayed jobs is write the actual business logic in some other file / module: a module in lib/, a DCI style class, whatever. Then the delayed job / rake task just calls that code.

So your rake / Delayed Job interface is one, maybe two lines. And the body of your code lives somewhere easily testable with standard unit tests without having to mock out Rake (and/or forcing your asnyc queue mechanism to be synchronous for testing).
Welcome to the mailpile Alpha Demo
Have you tried purchasing Windows 8 online? That's another experience altogether. I did that. It took 2 hours to make the purchase, with their horribly buggy store that doesn't even allow removing items from the shopping cart (had to clear cookies). It also requires Silverlight, which also crashes during the payment verification.

It cost me $199 and all I got was Windows_installer.exe, what a horrible joke. Well, let's try to get my hands on a Windows machine and proceed to generate installable boot image from the downloaded files. That went quite well, but I was furious at this point.

Ok, let's install and boot into my fresh Windows 8. That went fine. Next, let's try to activate it, and it says: 'This product key can only be used for Windows updates'.

Microsoft, are you kidding me? At that point I decided that I won't ever touch any Microsoft products even with a ten foot pole. I don't trust them, they are liars, and their products suck. Microsoft will not improve.

Look at that page: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Windows-...

Then tell me how that is not lying to your customers? The information that this product is just an update from existing Windows installation is at the bottom of the page, no one reads that!
Wait, this is just a train of thought... and it's got almost nothing in it.

I'll save you the read: "Good software is produced by teams who represent the people they’re building software for."

I feel like this has to be backed up by something. I don't feel it's necessarily true, or even correlated with good software. Some good software tends to come from teams which have domain knowledge, but good software also comes from teams where not everyone on the team necessarily does. Sometimes just the UX team has the domain knowledge, and the programming team knows how to program really well. Sometimes they're one and the same. The author hasn't landed on anything here except perhaps "UX process is a relatively important part of creating good software."

I'll offer a deeper answer.

Good software is created by good process executed by people who understand both the importance of that process, as well as how to create.

Knowing how to create is step one. You must master the craft of software first, and find people who also have, or want to.

Good. Now you must understand process. As your software grows, it will cease to fit inside your head. You have to build systems surrounding your software that guarantee its quality, and bypass your feeble human limitations.

Good. Now, as your company grows, you must understand people. The relationships and complex interactions and psychology will cease to fit inside your head. You have to understand the motivations and limitations of people in general, and your specific people, and make sure your company aligns them all in the direction of quality. You must build a company that values quality, and values the quality process, above all else.

Build an organization which is aligned toward quality, and it will produce quality software.

I didn't go into enough depth, but this guy did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

But yes, for a team of one, it is probably closely aligned with how well you understand your users.
Woodward's idea is something different though. It's based on general relativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect
This is pretty unhelpful as this (your) submission wasn't discussed at all.
Do you give up in between?
I remember working at an Optical Networking startup in Ottawa, where my boss, in particular, was extremely passionate, and believed deeply in the company, and consequently worked weekends and 18 - 20 hour days regularly. The company never got a customer, and went bankrupt. My boss got laid off with everyone else.
I'll have a couple good accomplishments on the job every year but nothing jumps out at me as the biggest accomplishment of my life.

How should I answer? Just pick out a recent one I guess.

Does anyone else have this problem?
Have any of these petitions actually resulted in significant policy changes? Seems to me that the system is just a way to pacify would-be protesters by giving them an outlet for their discontent that has a low barrier to entry.
Heed the warnings in extreme weather –or risk losing Earth
How does anyone know they are hosting illegal software? Seems like Microsoft is doing something worse than a file host or torrent site. They are actually paying the criminal and themselves. Its perfectly sane to bring down entire website/ecosystem when it is found to host a movie or song. Is software IP less important than Justin Bieber new soundtrack? Were are the suits to knock on Microsoft's door when they turn a blind eye to what they are hosting and profiting on.
The "Deport Justin Bieber" petition blew past 100K signatures a couple of days ago; I don't see him being told to leave the country yet.

Could it be that these petitions are completely useless?
After all the shilling of gold and faux-economics that Bonner has written over the years, I have a hard time believing anything he says.
Because some people cap at "I managed to code the most lines of code in June, 2006 among my seven colleagues, even though I was just hired on the tenth of the month and didn't know the code yet. That was quite a month."

whereas others cap at, "well, I did manage to build the world's first and largest bitcoin currency exchange and reach volumes of about a million a day before we had to shut down."

when you find out they did it by themselves, that is a huge difference. like two orders of magnitude FTE's.

it's like, if some guy spearheaded and came up with the whole idea behind the new Mac Pro, in an era of stagnant desktops, the whole mechanics and central idea (with the heat core). This question lets you know this.

a million examples, this is really just one.
Really, nobody's gonna say it? Okay, fine. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. You, guy wearing the uniform, you the mindless meat puppet acting out nonsensical policy directives. Without you, there is no system, yet you choose to participate in it, you enable it, you make it real.

I understand some people have no choice, family to support, made bad choices in the past that limit their opportunities now.. but you, good sir? You get no pass whatsoever. Young, male, educated -- one would expect you'd try harder than to settle into a TSA job.
Yeah its very situation dependent. If I get an interview at the small motor sports place near milton keynes (its not Aston Martin -:) )

I would probably use some of the stuff I did on back at my first job working in the mathematical modeling section of a world ranked RnD organization.

If it was big data I would use my experience back in the 80's doing map reduce for British telecom - and that proves i can ship :-)
I find it bizarre that you think a left-right two-party system is good.

People should have the right to vote for whatever they value, and should have the right for that vote to count (via representation of those values). A two-party system suppresses those rights. It's 'efficient' if you happen to agree with one of the two parties - but, it is not fit for purpose if you think the point of democracy is to represent the people in political decision-making.

A political system which implies that there are only two valid points of view (or one valid axis) is the poorer for it.
Maybe I'm an old fogey but those 1990's graphics look awesome to me.
The readme has a typo: dervied should be derived
> Anything you do that you did not set out to achieve is achieved by accident

I disagree. Software that incorporates deep domain knowledge often results in emergent features, i.e. features that offer huge benefits, but that are essentially free to implement (negligible effort) due to the underlying design.
We say "calories" when we mean kCals– if Bitcoin does become completely mainstream, I see no reason why casual users wouldn't just say "bitcoins" instead of "milliBits".
Yes, there are often country-specific debit cards, but I'm not aware of many country-specific credit cards in Europe? Within the EU (and especially Eurozone), bank transfers are all easy to do and interoperable.
Apparently sugar in cement is a thing: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sugar+concrete

Sugar retards the setting process. Of course people who work with concrete would know this.

I think we've just been given a glimpse into the lore and practices of a foreign profession.
Dungeon Keeper costs $6 because it's 15 years old... When it was new it cost $50.
Programming is unusual that some people may have incredible mathematical talent which will allow some to be a LOT better than other without much effort (in specific areas).

I am not in that category. Above average, keen to learn and a decent bit of background. Not earning anywhere near 200k+, but I am living inn Barcelona which is pretty cool. Don't do more than 40hours per week usually either.
> in communist party they discuss and study communism theory.

Yes, the CCP members believe in Marxism as much as the members of Church of England believe in God, according to my personal speculations.
Thank you for the great comment & suggestion, rpwilcox!

As you recommended, I'll be moving the majority of my actual rake task into a DelayedJob which will perform all the work. The rake task will then only be responsible for queueing up the batches of work and nothing else. And yes, at that point, I could just test the DelayedJob itself vs. the actual execution of the rake task, as I'd have a high degree of confidence that if the DelayedJob works on a model as expected, it will work via DelayedJob in batches.

I decided to write about this first to showcase the capability of explicitly testing rake tasks - I started learning Ruby / Rails about 6 months ago and wanted to share this knowledge. My follow-up post will be on turning this into a DelayedJob.
Which is still less than that £69.99 In App Purchase that lets you dig out 56 blocks.
Thanks for the pointer to the bug report!

I've just checked, and the (Linux Firefox) camera/mic permissions menu fails to appear on the other WebRTC conferencing sites linked in this thread, too. So it's definitely not just appear.in.

[Edited to add:] For others suffering from the same problem, the bug report linked in parent suggests it may be fixed in FF 27, which will apparently be released during the week of Feb 4th.
Sure it has been overused. But then I do see two categories of programmers, the "passionate" ones who keep up to date. And the "one year ten timea" ones that are stil suggesting the same crap solutions that were cutting edge 10 years ago, when way better alternatives exist (my team leader).
> If an idea is so obvious that nearly everyone faced with a similar problem stumbles on a similar solution...

And there in lie more issues with obviousness: it may be obvious if presented a similar problem. Many scientists, mathematicians and engineers will tell you that the biggest step to solving a problem is to state it the "right" way. But once you do that, the solution becomes obvious! In that case, the issue is, was the problem obvious in the first place?

Fortunately, patent systems have a provision for this. In the US it's called the Teaching/Suggestion/Motivation (TSM) test: roughly, if any reference identifies a problem that would motivate someone to solve it in a particular way, it counts towards obviousness. Note that TSM is not the only criteria these days.

As a well known example, think about the iPhone. In hindsight everything it does seems obvious. But the problem, as. But the problem, as Jobs restated it, was "current phone interfaces suck, touchscreens are better, how do we make it awesome?" I don't think anybody was looking at that smartphones in that light. Yes, there were tons of touchscreen phones but they all sucked. If you look at Apple's patents, each one looks trivial now, but taken together, there's no denying that the iPhone when it came out blew everyone's minds.

> It can only be economically destructive to award such monopolies.

There is insufficient empirical evidence for this thesis. Interestingly, the same goes for the opposite thesis, that our patent systems are economically beneficial.

Everyone agrees that the bar should be higher, though. Nobody knows how to set it higher, unfortunately
So this one interview question allows you to make the decision between hiring someone who has only worked in the profession for a month and hiring someone who wrote a whole bitcoin exchange. Faint praise.

The big issue is, what does this style of interviewing do for you with a real-world candidate selection challenge --- say, 3 developers, all similar on paper?

There is no reason the best candidate necessarily has the best story. The story of your "best accomplishment" has as much to do with random chance as it does with capability. This question demands that an interview somehow de-confound the luck element and the skill element.

And to what end? Even if you got a clean reading on this question, somehow equalized between the candidates, I ask again: do you really know a lot more about how the candidate will actually perform on the job? Because that is almost the only question that matters in candidate selection.
From none several days earlier to, it was happening every couple of minutes when I made the submission to HN.

edit: Oh and yes definitely I use several blocking sites in my Postfix configuration but I checked the reputation on those IPs at that time they were not in the registries yet. Plus these, I should have explained, were failed authentication attempts, not just plan spammers. You know using made up names like harry, sally but sometimes valid ones like info.

I'm not math wiz but I doubt they could be lucky enough to guess the password on account with tries at minute or more intervals, I also run fail2ban which usually stops them too.

Still it just sort of jarred me, the number increased so fast. I was worried there might be something else going on I could be missing.
Still cheaper than spending 70 pounds on gems.
Adding tab support to textareas
I'm in the UK and had an AmEx card for many years. Visa and Mastercard dominate the market, though.
That's because, while being low-res, they spent a lot of effort on the animations and the details. Most "modern" mobile games have about as much animation as final fantasy on the gameboy.
PyCon Offers Childcare for the First Time
Use both of them. The last warning is about messy code, but the first two will help you keep the code portable.
I was expecting a discussion of best practices, but it doesn't actually talk about how to write good software at all. The title should be "Corporate incentives sometimes interfere with software engineering best practices when the software itself is the product". Also, there are a lot of assumptions - I imagine most technology startups need to write software, but many of them aren't in the business of selling it.
Price of Amazon Prime may jump to $99 or $119 a year
Argentinian Peso:

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=ARS&to=USD&view=1Y
A near-perfect copy of Slashdot was supposedly served to infect "targets" with malware. Since Slashdot isn't the center of the IT world any more, the logical conclusion must be this: Who of us (reading this) is currently being served his HN by GCHQ?

We're here at the heart of what should (and does) bug many IT people over here in Europe: If you work in IT for a company that does something of interest to GCHQ and the NSA, then you and your access credentials are one of those 'targets' they keep speaking about.
SQL Sample data sets
Well, if there was ever any doubt that technology like Google Glass encourages creepy mass surveillance and that powerful new privacy laws are overdue, I guess there isn't any more.

As far as I can see, the path this kind of technology leads us down is only likely to end one of two ways:

1. We develop a more open and forgiving society that acknowledges everyone has faults and treats everyone fairly as the person they are today.

2. We create a society where every time you leave your home, or even in your own home, you constantly have to guard every little thing you say or do, including giving up all kinds of otherwise useful or enjoyable activities that might (justifiably or otherwise) reflect unfavourably on you in the future to someone whose opinion matters at the time.

Sadly, while there might be many people in the world who would both enjoy and respect the first option, it's not really an option at all right now, because there are also a lot of people in the world who will exploit personal information at the expense of the subject. Sometimes that is simply because they aren't very nice themselves. Sometimes it's for more indirect reasons like the way our societies have set up commercial incentives for businesses.

As long as everything from human nature to our economic systems are stacked against the transparency/fairness outcome, maybe it's best if we don't go too far down that path. This seems like a great example of the saying that just because we can do something, it doesn't mean we should.
De waarheid achter het Vitadis Slanker Leven Plan
Shouldn't the comparison of prices be for the original cost of the game, rather than how much it costs nowadays? Surely in 14 years time the iPad version would be indeed be cheaper if still existent?
It might not be good in the sense of maximizing the value of the franchise, but it might be better along other axes, such as creating long-term coherent policy objectives. It can take a long time to change things in the US, which is sometimes bad, but also sometimes good.
Are Fitbit, Nike, and Garmin Planning to Sell Your Personal Fitness Data?
All the information about this is very confusing, and in some press report it looks like a perpetual motion machine. I’ll try to explain what I had understood trying to find an explanations that don’t break the physics laws.

You must use some particles to carry the momentum. It’s not clear, but the main candidates are photons (aka light). The quantization of the electromagnetic field is the cause of the Casimir effect, and the name of the particles that arrays due to the quantization of the electromagnetic is photons. Some other explanations talk about a moving mirror, and an oscillating mirror produces photons.

The number of photons is not conserved, so they can be created or destroyed “out of thin air”. (Really you need another particle like and electron to carry the difference of energy and momentum. The electron then bounce against the ship to accelerate it forwards, and picks a little of energy to compensate the energy that used to create the photon. It’s plenty of electrons, and you can reuse them.)

So this is equivalent to pointing a laser backwards, so the spaceships accelerate forwards. The discussion should be about efficiency. Is this more efficient than a laser?

(Well, it’s not necessary to use a laser, a simple light bulb with a mirror that reflect the light that tries to go forward will work. If it’s not directional you will lost a lot of energy because the light that goes to the sides doesn’t accelerate the ship (I don’t want to do the integrals now, but I guest 1/3 of efficiency.) With a more directional setting, like the mirrors in a flashlight the efficiency will improve.)
I do hope you are right and that the extreme fractional math won't be an issue, but have my concerns still, because the valuation is so critical to the meaning of the names. It won't be like a dime that always means the same thing, because the average value of a dollar doesn't impact thinking through daily purchases.
I don't agree with this sentiment .. I think this is a very shallow approach to evaluating people on the basis of their past accomplishments, and also somewhat presumptuous to consider that they might 'outdo' their past accomplishments just by working for you. Therefore in my opinon the most important interview question to ask is this:

"Do you want to work here?"

.. followed up by:

"Why do you want to work here?"

If the answers to these two questions don't jive with what you need/want as an employer, then there are no further questions to ask.