skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems to be an ill thought out technique. The exercise has been designed so that all the candidate has is a false task and an awkward channel for communication.

Coding at interview is essentially always a false task, as the context and realistic goals are stripped away and the problem scaled back to something that can fit into a short timeframe.
Typically, enough interviewers are bad enough at setting problems that there's a "market for lemons" effect -- the candidate does not know ahead of time whether you are a good or poor interviewer. As their goal is to get the job (not to only get the job if this particular interviewer happens to be a good interviewer -- see note) that means a significant portion of their energies goes into second-guessing who they are dealing with. And stage fright -- I've watched candidates make a complete hash of programming tasks at interview, be hired nonetheless (because we saw something else in them), and turn out actually to be competent programmers too.

Strip the communication back to just slowly typed text, with a thirty minute timeframe so every communication is exceptionally expensive, and now we have an almost entirely artificial puzzle.

Suppose one starts by reading and understanding the code; another starts by running the tests. One decides, given the thirty minute timeframe he's going to have to batch his testing at the end because the number of smells identified sounds like it's the test measure; another decides to run the tests at every tiny edit because it sounds as if the interviewer wants him to show his test-driven credentials; another decides that interviews like to "see how the candidate thinks" and spends most of his time asking text questions of the interviewer.

From this we could deduce, what? To be brutal, I wonder if frankly we might as well be deducing that the first one is a Sagittarius and this week's horoscope doesn't bode well for them. Because for all we know, the differences in behaviour are as likely to be about different guesses about the interview (it is a cut down task, so what has the interviewer decided to exclude and what have they decided to include, and does this interviewer even have any idea about that?) as about how the candidates actually go about programming on tasks in context.

But perhaps that's just my scientific curmudgeonliness about the "cult of hiring" -- the irrational belief that programmers interviewing candidates have, usually without evidence, that they are "able to ascertain how a candidate thinks" in a short space of time on an artificial task.

While it might be mice to hear how the candidates hired performed, at n=2, we still would not be able to make any reliable inferences.

note -- While you might think the candidate would only want the job if it is a good interviewer, that is not true. First, because poor interviewers can nonetheless be good colleagues. But more importantly because the candidate loses nothing in being offered a job he/she rejects, but does lose something in not being offered a job they might accept.
I would say, you always have to trust the service provider. While you can manually verify a direct end-to-end connection etc., web apps could always easily change, without user notice. Well, but that's also true for any proprietary app that isn't open source and code-reviewed.

It could be a browser feature in the future to sandbox those webcam data so that it's only transfered to a specific opponent. That has some problems to solve and is just a raw thought.
Very well written article. Operations people are driving a new wave of real world/tech hybrid companies and I think they need a lot more respect for their contributions.

One nit, you admonish (rightly) people for thinking just because you are a nontechy that you don't understand the product. But then you make a similar mistake by accusing the young nerdy male engineer who is devouring the beef jerky of not being street wise enough to be able to order lunch.

Simpler explanation: you've set up the expectation that he can eat on the company dime so he's going to take full advantage of that. He can order lunch just fine he just doesn't want to pay for it.

Give him the company credit card (or a company seamless account) and 'problem solved'. Except it's not really a problem since it's better for the company if you can have him working around the company catering times.
This is pretty awesome. Would be rad to have something similar for the world cup for us non us sports loving coders.
Show HN: March Madness Tempo-Free Stats
This is a side project of mine combining two passions; sports and technology. http://madness.io/bracketology Tempo-free stats offers a better way to compare two teams without using traditional averages (such as points per game). For those of you interested in the tech, the stack includes MySQL, Couchbase, Redis, and a front-end stack of Rails and Foundation framework.

There are some json endpoints as well in case any of you want to use the map-reduced stat data and hack away eg: http://madness.io/matchup/dae/vs/oad/1395332100.json and http://madness.io/players/1772.json
I can expose more too if interested, just comment and let me know.
Actually, you have to use heroin regularly for months to become physiologically addicted. The time is shorter than for alcohol but not instantaneous.

What catches people is a psychological addiction: heroin high just feels incredibly good (disclaimer: I did not try it so I translate other peoples' opinions). But the same can be said about alcohol, sugar, games like the infamous 2048, and great many other things.

Of course there are substances that would kill the user quickly and harm even from one use, like PCP or the infamous krokodil. But the same can be said about methanol, or sulphuric acid, or many other hazardous substances. These substances are appropriately packed, abundantly labeled with warnings — but their use is not banned.
No, no, no, no and no. Stop it. Pattern matching isn't science. Stop pretending it is.

https://medium.com/best-thing-i-found-online-today/8178b2794...

To be direct: Pattern recognition is bullshit voodoo pseudo-science masquerading as objectivity and meritocracy. It’s sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and xenophobia dressed up as science. It sickens me.
I've had a moderately sizeable interaction with various forms of cabling throughout my private and business life, and no, Apple cables generally have terrible strain relief. The cables might be otherwise nice, but the strain relief is generally awful.
This is a common belief of geeks and maybe most people everywhere, that breaking down concepts into more easily understandable elements and working on outreach is something necessary for progress. They also seem to expect the oppressed group to do all the heavy lifting- figuring how to complain in the right tone as well as mustering the energy to complain in the first place.

I'm not sure history suggests that this is the way to go. There's no easy, smooth social change, and self-described "moderates" should give more room for people to be angry. Your post, instead of giving some "advice" on how to help tell the message, should just be doing that instead. Skip this condescending explanation! Stop making it about shy males!

More importantly though, many people think they want to be convinced by cause-effect arguments A, B, and C, and they advocate for that kind of context-less discussion forum, but really what they need is to be allowed to discover A, B, and C on their own terms after being presented with a persuasive experience D. But to make it really connect, you need to get the person involved. Calls of sexism help with that. As an intellectually confident person, people calling me out bluntly and confidently about my sexism got way further with me than people trying to sell me some sanitized variant designed for socially stunted males.

I don't mean to blow up on you or anything, but seriously it's every day on HN that someone who gives the impression that "he sees both sides" and has got it all figured out seems to be taking some awkward position as mediating sage instead of following their own advice and helping craft the message. The overall impression is, of course, one of endless condescension.
> That argument only works if taxation provides a net benefit to society.

How about this one then: At any given level of government spending and borrowing, tax evasion requires higher taxes to be imposed on those not engaged in tax evasion.
Survivor bias is the opposite of objectively rational and actionable data.

[edit]

The thrust of his argument is that YC is asking to be granted special privileges, in a circumstance in which they happen to directly benefit, in a way that only helps them unfairly cement their already privileged position.

It'd be hard for me to look at this privilege being granted as anything other than evidence of corporate/investor oligarchical corruption -- an outlook that isn't improved by your referencing their importance to success.
Not just guitar. Any instrument whose sounds can be expressed in sheet music, so basically any mainstream instrument. :-)
I can't upvote this enough! It's why I find jobs where what I do (engineering) is not the core product less rewarding on the whole.
Why execute them when you can suffocate them at 45,000 feet? This is conspiracy theory gold even though I think it crashed.

My guess is that this bears the traits of the worst disasters, an unforeseeable and unique cascade of system failures that led to the pilots having some control of a crippled plane.
given how many "product driven" companies fail for lack of marketing or customers, you'd think they'd catch on. but apparently that kind of pattern matching doesn't work for them.
The problem isn't the financial industry. Or, rather, the financial industry is only a special-case of the problem. The problem is middle-men. Specifically, it's the fact the Internet has made a certain class of people, whose job it was to take money from people and give it to people who need money (in exchange for a cut) obsolete.

The financial industry is the man-in-the-middle between lenders and borrowers. The recording industry is the man-in-the-middle between listeners and artists. Auto-dealerships are the man-in-the-middle between car companies and car buyers. Realtors are the man-in-the-middle between home buyers and home sellers. In every case, these used to be vital services in a pre-Internet, pre-cheap-communication world. But now, they all look like parasites, simply because we don't need their services any more. And, instead of refocusing their business around providing information and helping the market clear, all of these industries are trying to carve out regulatory havens that would allow them to continue business as usual whilst imposing higher costs on the rest of us. It is this rent-seeking behavior that makes them parasites.
They could at least do something about the sharp edge that cuts into your wrists in some positions.
what language is the dictionary?
I hate to break it to you, but you clearly did not have a top-notch immigration attorney if they advised you that a O1 visa was the best visa for your circumstances.

The O1 is intended for people who are the top of their fields; not just those that are good. It's for people like Yao Ming (sports) or Lupita_Nyong'o (arts) that we want to steal from other countries.

There were other visas that were more appropriate for your circumstances, (meaning easier to obtain) but generally simply being the first employee at a business doesn't amount to much, which is why you had to fight for it. (These other visa types are no longer available.) If you had been a founder or a C-suite officer, you might have been able to squeak in on a O1 [edit]without any hassle[/edit], but even that is doubtful--the EB series would have been a better path [edit] since EB review was more objective than the O1 review.[/edit]
> I was repeatedly asked if an engineer was around to explain the product before I had a chance to say more than hello.

> let's focus on the other assumption: that because a person has a non-technical role, she is fundamentally incapable of assessing whether she is able to answer your question.

> While we’re at it, I’d like to dispel the notion that people in non-technical roles don’t have technical skills. From the VBScript and complex spreadsheet wrangling required to perform analysis of key organizational metrics to mastery of numerous different specialized softwares and systems in order to perform basic functions of the job ranging from accounting to people operations, non-technical employees must have a bevy of technical skills at the ready every single day.

It's difficult to recognize what you don't know. As an engineer, I feel like I didn't understand jack a year ago. A year from now, I'll feel the same way about my current level of understanding & skill. Between now and then, I'll speak with confidence about topics I think I understand but probably don't fully grok.

Earlier in my career, I was "semi-technical" with more [technical] experience than the OP. Looking back, I really didn't understand the product to the extent I thought I did.

A little knowledge can be dangerous. YMMV.

edit : if you down voted, care to explain?
Off topic - did you ever play Wizardry?
> The _abuse_ of anything is bad. Alcohol is still a societal danger. If you really want to protect people you should make it illegal.

There is a huge difference between things that are fatal if abused, and things that are fatal if used as intended.

Surely you must see the difference?
National Endowment for Democracy
This is the core problem, who gets to allocate the visas?

If we assume only YC & some of the other incubators it starts to drive more traffic to them and raises the barrier to entry for a new incubator as they probably won't be on this program (allocating visas).
I'm the "non-technical" co-founder of my startup, and I used to program web server gateways in python. It just happens that our technical architecture that we're using isn't really my area of specalisation (it's my partner's) so I ended up doing most of the business dev, ops, sales/marketing instead of programming.

I think all this really depends on the where the startup is in timeframe. A larger company will have more specialised employees who do only one thing, but a smaller one would have a single employee doing multiple roles even if in both cases their titles were exactly the same.
It's supposed to be English (3 to 5-letter words from the EOWL word list).
> Many will fail, of course, but one could be the next Google, Facebook, Airbnb, or Dropbox.

What makes you think the United States cares about the next Airbnb or Dropbox? The policies of the Federal government are a (non-deterministic) function of a lot of powerful interests and opinions, and many of those interests are directly opposed to anything that threatens their outdated business models. As if today's founders need any more reason to avoid doing business in the United States.

I would much rather prefer startup accelerators like YC to expand into other regions of the world. One season per year in the EU and another season in Southeast Asia would be fantastic. Granted, many of these regions don't have the advantage of the Bay Area's technical and human infrastructure, but is that really such an insurmountable problem? We're startups, goddammit, it's our job to do create things where none used to exist.
Lol. 9007199254740992.

http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b01902112/9007199254740992/
It's the same in US.
Understanding your company's product, marketing, financials, hiring, and business strategy makes you an _incredibly_ valuable employee (though perhaps difficult to describe with a job title).

An employee like that shouldn't be spending much time ordering food and cleaning. Those things can be outsourced to people who can do them at scale for many companies at once, at a much lower rate.

At my startup we've used ZeroCater (Food for events),
HomeJoy (Cleaning),
TaskRabbit (Odd tasks),
Zirtual (Scheduling meetings, booking flights), and
Advsor (Accounting & Billing).

We also have a full time remote assistant that does things like coordinating team outings, ordering new tshirts, researching stuff, spreadsheet jocky-ing, etc, etc. They would also order food for us if we didn't have it provided at our co-working space.

I hope this comment was helpful and not condescending. I do some business ops work myself in addition to writing code and consulting. As the longtime only-female, I too had to deal with the assumptions about my role (outside the company, not inside).

All of these tasks are important and need to happen for a company to run successfully, but they don't all need to be done by an "Office Manager" just because that's how it works at some startups.
People seem to be trying to deliberately misunderstand my point.

1) I don't think this should just be for YC. I'm just volunteering to beta test it. I think we are very likely to show success, which would hopefully open it much more broadly. But I'd be very happy to do it together with other investors from the beginning. I feel that in general investors (YC included) are not doing enough to push this issue.

2) I do think that investors should get a say in who gets startup visas. This is no different than universities, big companies, or even the people who give out Oscars deciding who is qualified to get one.
Sources: Microsoft In Talks To Acquire Mobile App Development Startup Xamarin
From the parent, "not-quite-as-good-as-haskell-but-more-industrially-acceptable language". Not intending to be obscure.
Well, I think survivorship bias is separate (though, agreed, it is endemic in our industry) -- the logic wouldn't change in this argument even if YC had only funded Airbnb and Dropbox. It may be a case of misattribution by the founders concerned, but hey -- in the absence of RCTs, trusting them seems like the right default.

> The thrust of his argument is that YC is asking to be granted special privileges, in a circumstance in which they happen to directly benefit, in a way that only helps them unfairly cement their already privileged position.

I don't think Sam's argument is quite as self-serving, though I see how it could be interpreted this way. I think he'd agree that YC should not be a gatekeeper. (As in PG's original proposal.) But if the argument against the original proposal is that we somehow need more data before rolling it out everywhere, running a smaller experiment with YC would seem to be better than nothing at all.

I completely agree with you that a steady-state world of privileged visa-granters is not what we should be trying to bring about.
You're "remembering" facts to justify your bias. Here's the original blog post from ransackgate:

http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...

She never said anything about being an owner. As far as I can tell, she was a renter. Certainly, nobody knew if she rented or bought at the time the post hit HN.

Basically, what you're saying is that you don't like the guy's tone, so you think he doesn't deserve sympathy. Glad you don't work for AirBnB customer support.
Calling people sexist when they try to bring a valid point pretty much amounts to intellectual laziness too, don't you think ?

Like it or not, our brains are wired to be able to ignore unusual cases and save complete analysis of each and every situation. This course of evolution may be why you and I are able to post on this website, after all. Sexism, racism an any other form of discrimination are made of this. That's very sad, yes.

I want to make another point. Sexism is refusing to aknowledge the possibility for a woman to be technical, for exemple. Assuming she probably isn't is not sexism, it is an often-correct assumption. This doesn't make the man (or the woman) who makes this assumption a monster.

So I understand women's frustrations very well as I can be the one discriminated in various other situations, but don't blame it too quickly on people. Blame it first on evolution, the same evolution that allows you to not think to much about it when you have to breathe.
Ah. I was just confused at some of the words I formed. Here are a few: dak, els, vin, sean, ana, wos, ois, dah.
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It apparently uses geolocation: I can't even look at the app if I'm not in SF.

I tried it when I landed at SFO on my last trip to SF. It gave me the same message there, even after I quit and restarted the app. (Google Maps was reporting my correct location, so it wasn't my GPS being funny.)
The conflict between the desire not to have a Navy and the problems being caused by pirates presented interesting arguments for both sides. The conflict generated the conditions to build the 6 frigates.

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Frigates-Epic-History-Founding/dp/...
I completely respect that, and I'm certainly not about to argue with a YC alum about the value of YC on the YC community forum. But there is a world of difference between trading equity for mentorship vs trading equity for a visa [+ mentorship]. It will obviously never happen, but if it did the program would be unrecognizable.
I confused.

Are you advocating the New Testament over the Old, or making no distinction?
Social Media and Citizen Journalism (inspired by Ukraine)
I'm not sure if I agree with you. I'm not an immigration lawyer nor an immigration expert, so this is all anecdotal: I know a handful of startup founders, who were most certainly not at the top of their fields get O1 visas with the help of their top-top-tier investors / other things I'm not aware of (maybe speaking at second-rate conferences?). These were early stage startups that did not have much traction yet. While these founders would certainly be impressive to the HN crowd (open source contributions, cool things they've built), they were certainly not names you would have heard of even in technology circles.
Well, I sure hope Miguel gets a nice payday. He's built some really amazing tools over the years.

If Microsoft does proceed, it is a sign that they want their tooling to extend to their competitors' mobile platforms, something that has got to be a difficult business decision in light of pushing their own mobile platform.
Ask HN: what are some dynamic programming environments other than emacs?
By dynamic I mean it can be altered and introspected at runtime without having to relaunch the app.

By environment I mean something with a UI and some kind of access to the local system.

I'm looking for an alternative dynamic environment to live in during work.
Suggestion: Don't use Keynote. It is a royal POS.
"In that," he says. Not "in Bitcoin". Not even "in cryptocurrency." As Dorian claims in his letter, he thought Leah was asking about his classified work for the federal government, and he was merely saying that his years of doing classified work were behind him.

Are we somehow to believe that someone who can't even get the name of the currency right (he called it "Bitcom" repeatedly), is the inventor? Nothing in Leah McGrath's articles or the follow up interviews with the AP or in this letter suggests to me that Dorian Nakamoto is anything more than who he says he is: just an old engineer looking for work.

The Newsweek article, in my view, is a disgusting piece of yellow journalism produced by a hack journalist who was doing whatever it took to get a flashy cover story for Newsweek's inaugural issue. In that, it succeeded. But in establishing Newsweek's journalistic bona-fides or establishing Leah McGrath as a decent human being, it failed utterly.