skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually I think that is part of a general problem, of infrequent large purchases.

Most people buy these things maybe once every ten years, so it is very unusual to have people who actually know what they are looking for when they are buying (a salesman's dream I guess).

I read an interesting article about washing machines, written by a repair man. Apparently there are not many manufacturers, but the cheap ones have loads of different brands. And loads of models, which don't actually differ very much, except for the software on them. So they can have a range of different price points, as it has x many different programs so must cost $100 more. Better to go for a basic one from one of the better quality brands than an expensive one with 100 different programs that you probably won't use anyway.
As is often the case, I don't think the difficulties in this case have much to do with age: If everything else was the same (within the possible, of course, meaning job history changes a bit), and the candidate was 26, I think most people would still reject the resume with little consideration.

There is ageism. There is sexism. There is racism. But there are also many cases for all of those where someone uses it as an easy explanation for any other difficulties they face, which is self-destructive because it avoids real self-reflection.
The BBC article[1] says they were caught by a mistake made outside of Tor:

But the porn ring was broken when an item was sent through the US Postal Service to a child, Ice Cyber Crime Centre Programme Manager James Kilpatrick told Reuters. That development led the authorities to Mr Johnson.

If they can track Tor sites directly, they're not saying. To me this sounds like Bitcoin: it's anonymous as long as you never ever link a transaction to a real-world identity. Once you do, everything that was once anonymous is now linked to you.

This isn't really new either; for a long time now you could create a fake identity and use it for whatever purposes, and your real identity would be protected and separate until you made a mistake which linked the two.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26639092
"[...]the Darknet’s Onion Router, also known as Tor"

Dear me. That would sound quite insidious, and possibly coherent, to someone with population average knowledge about TOR.
So the DHS is telling us this Tor is something dark and sinister and used by exploitative paedophiles.

I wonder what comes next..
Do some cool stuff, and you will be more likely to meet cool people.
We count number of records we transfer between two systems. For example in case of contact import one data records === one contact record that is imported into your application. In case of File Exporter one data record will be one single file, but in this case you might guess that 'bandwidth' limits are more critical than 'data records' :)
> Could you explain what you mean here a little more? Did a company, at the interview phase, tell you they wanted you to work on side projects for free?

What they told me is that it's a good thing that I am familiar with so many technologies, since that probably indicates that I spend a lot of my own time perfecting my skills. Which is actually true. But then they began to rant about how that's a good thing because this is a competitive field and it's really hard to keep up with all the new technologies popping up, so I might have to put up some of my own time to learn the technologies we'll use.

I actually raised an eyebrow and said that no, I'm not willing to do that. This opened up a discussion about dedication and loving one's job beyond the matters of workhours and payment, which are true signs of a professional programmer, at which point I really just told them I'm not interested in their offer anymore and left.

At that point, I'd have left even if they'd have sworn I wouldn't have to do that and that they were just checking. It's really impolite. I don't presumptuously boast about how I know what really makes the difference between a professional medic and one who just has a license to practice. It's also manipulative in a really poor way, implying that if you don't do all that stuff, you're "just" a programmer, rather than a "professional" programmer. Yeah, no shit I'm a "professional programmer" -- I don't have kids, I live close to work, my girlfriend works from home so her schedule is more flexible than mine, everyone in my family is in good health and back in college I fucked up my sleep schedule so hard that the occasional all-nighter doesn't do much damage anymore. But I'm exactly as professional as the dude who comes in at 9 and leaves at 5 because his kids want their father, not his toys.
The actual check is for if time_in_minutes == tz_offset_in_minutes. The problem is that times are always positive, so this check doesn't work if the offset is negative. The correct implementation would be time_in_minutes == (tz_offset_in_minutes + minutes_in_day) % minutes_in_day.
I've used Heroku off and on over the past couple years. I am not a fan, but it definitely has some good uses. Getting off the ground for free is nice.

Uptime was ok. I only remember one serious outage, but that was due to EC2.

The support is absolutely terrible. On the free tier you get a somewhat canned response (not a solution, just a response) the next day. The more you pay, the more support is prioritized in response time, it's still not good. When asked what it took to get great support I was told that's an additional $2000/month and would give access to a technical account manager. That was most of a year ago, so may have changed.

As far as page speeds and high traffic, that is very dependent on what you're doing. I was never satisfied with performance or latency building web apps on the platform. If your app is heavily client side, and server requests can be high latency it could work very well.

I really can't recommend them for anything outside of proof of concept, or small non-critical sites. I currently use Heroku for this.
Nope, there are standard arithmetic rules for subtracting negative numbers: `3 - (-3) == 0`

Your two versions of the contract mean the same thing, and I am confident it is implemented such. I agree with you that the actual wording is sloppy and confusing, and your version would have been more clear. But they mean the same thing.
pretty bad post, more evidence of relevant factors would be useful to add credibility. It seems this experience of lag is really not the norm, so why rant about it in such general terms. it's your machine/environment probably
Enjoy fastmail or whatever. Gmail remains usable and has grown to support its userbase....and still holds its own from the revolutionary place it launched at in 2004...
I've never bothered cheating. If a class bored me, I wouldn't bother. I took the hardest classes that I could, and was happy if I learned something even if the grade wasn't perfect.

That said, I do get why people do it. So much incentive is put on grades, rather than what you know. And it many cases, it is arbitrary. You get good grades for spitting back what the teacher wants, even if they are no smarter than you. (There are great teachers out there, but the mean teacher's standardized test scores are less than the mean student entering college)

While I get it, it really pissed me off when I saw it in action. Especially in grad school. I wanted to say, "Come on, grades don't matter in grad school. Do you really need to cheat?" Sometimes it was telling someone "I'm just auditing the class, can I have your notes and homework answers from last year?" Other times it was sitting for the same exam twice in different sections. When I saw it happen, I could never trust the person again.
If you get hundreds of resumes as a HR specialist for the programming jobs you offer, any claim that there is a shortage of programmers for your company is a big lie.
Back in the very early days of Palm OS, Palm had a "Quality Certification" you could apply for, and if your app passed, you'd get a bunch of marketing benefits. So we went for the highest-level certification on our products, which required surviving 1,000,000 gremlins.

At first I was very skeptical that it would find any meaningful bugs, but in fact it was very good at finding memory leaks and edge cases. In the end it took us several weeks to finally be able to survive the 1M gremlins without a crash. A single run of 1M gremlins would take about 24 hours.

In later years they added the capability to supply your own dictionary of values to apply to certain inputs so that gremlins could get past validation, and it would also save the entire state of the device every 10K events so that you could easily reproduce errors that Gremlins found.

I could definitely see this as a good way to stress-test certain parts of your app, though it takes a ton of time, and frankly without surrounding tooling (like resource monitoring, saving "state") it wouldn't be practical.
You then can't filter or delete spam, which far outweighs legitimate mail.
Use ODF.
I really like your idea for crowd-sourcing with email collection.
This is cool as hell. So many of our IoT applications are already stale -yes yes, big data and consumables reordering, yawn- that it's nice to see exploratory work in the field.

I'd be happy to buy one and see what happens. I think I've been in line for 6 months or so, actually, since Usman Haque told me about the thing.
The problem isn't presently the age or the resume.

With you, the resume would be a problem. But this might be a good thing.

As I've said elsewhere, I'd be pleased to obtain a junior tech position if it was a good match. But you're looking for specialists, aren't you?

I might be mistaken, but perhaps you're not familiar with how generalists operate. If this is the case, I'd prefer that you proceed to "circular file" my resume. It will save my time as well as yours.

Regarding the points that you've raised:

1) The website you've looked at isn't my professional site. The post went there, but the professional site is located at:

http://oldcoder.org/

Yes, I know that the professional site is sorely lacking in polish. I'll Twitter Bootstrap it sometime. :P

2) If somebody does not understand what it means to build a Linux distro from scratch, and feels that this is irrelevant to their firm, they are not looking for a generalist. Accordingly, I'm not a match for them and they're not a match for me.

As a side note, yes, over the past two decades, I've written literally hundreds of small servers and clients from scratch, plus a number of large ones.

Should all of the different servers and clients be listed on the resume? If so, would you look through the list, searching for some past project that matched some current need?

Do you understand what a generalist does?

3) I feel that this point is incorrect. You're thinking like a specialist here.

Nobody is going to hire me to work on DOS or AIX. Well, not AIX anyway; there is still some DOS work going on. But it's the range of things that I wish to convey here. Not the specialties.

If somebody such as yourself looks at my resume hoping to find a specialist, and dismisses the parts that illustrate a generalist background, it's best for all concerned, including me. that they toss the resume.

4) No idea what I'm talking about? :-) Heh. I maintain a fork of "sloccount".

First, it's about both code and documentation, not simply code. Or did I forget to note that? Regardless, I had a specific reason for mentioning the page count originally.

However, due to ongoing revisions, it may no longer make sense to include it. You may be correct about this point.

5) This point is confusing. You asked for more details but criticized the details for the Grumman job as "fluff".

The project included a Java GUI, Perl database code, network protocols implemented using multiple languages, a large OO Perl framework, the simulator that you mentioned, and numerous other components.

Which part is "fluff" ?

What I "did" was to design each component from scratch and implement it, except for the ones that I based on FOSS (which I then modified or extended).

Regarding the closing point, "Fix up your resume, and cleanup or hide your web presence, and you'll have a better chance":

It doesn't seem as though you've read much of the original post. You've commented on the resume and on the website where the post appears. You are not fond of either. It is your right to feel this way.

However, these two things are not presently the key issues. Nor were they the subject of the original post.
We think alike.

At least they aren't busy trying to build Proteus IV.
Would the NSA be involved in something like this?
Mission creep.
"Marijuana Job Fair in Denver... back to you, Mitch-bitch."
What did she say? Freudian-slip or contact high?

Newscaster reporting on marijuana job fair in Denver, lets her true feelings out.
Political violence certainly counts as duress, so, like I wrote in the very first sentence, they'd be a refugee.

And, unlike the informal immigrant/expat distinction, that is even recognized by legal systems in modern countries. We treat people seeking asylum differently than those who are just moving because of climate or job opportunities.
We used to play music on Friday afternoons in my old office.

But we realized quickly that this was disruptive to many people. You need to give knowledge workers a “clean slate” environment so they can change it into one that lets them perform their best, but without affecting others.
That said, if we could invent an "uncrop" feature for photo editing that'd be pretty nice.
Wow - I don't think I'll sleep tonight. I want to reprogram all of this myself. Thanks for sharing!
Reminds me a lot of Caleb Larson's 2009 work "A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter"[1]. Sadly it looks like the project might have stopped completely by now, since the website for it is down[2].

[1]: http://caleblarsen.com/a-tool-to-deceive-and-slaughter/

[2]: http://www.atooltodeceiveandslaughter.com/
A classroom where no on cheats (2013)
The more I read about MongoDB, the more of a waste of time it seems (when choosing it over a relational database). I thought the one thing it was supposed to do well was sharding. Now it seems even that is problematic.
Electrical Fire on Board Malaysia Airlines 370?
I've always thought that cheating for online tests would be a big deal. I guess you get caught eventually in the interview, but you never know.
Ok. So suppose you have feeds of data that lead into your database. These come from various sources and some of the feeds go through different pathways in processing before being entered. Let's say that for some hypothetical legitimate reason some feeds are truncated to the date. These all get stored as timestamps in your database.

Now many db's (maybe even most) will happily cast dates to timestamps, but they do this by filling in 00:00:00 for the time. If you have to special case these in your front end, being able to treat truncated datetimes as having no date could be quite helpful.

Now this would not be an ideal design, I think we'd all agree. It would be very remotely possible a date could be 00:00:00.000000 in time and so you'd have some false positives. Ideally we'd put a flag on the record to say the date had been truncated, but you know, there are always cases where legacy code gets in the way of sane fixes.

In an ideal world this might never be a useful feature. In the real world I could imagine a number of uses in working around systems which one cannot reasonably safely or easily modify.

Yes, you could special case check for midnight. But there are cases where "midnight is false" happens to correspond to actual behavior elsewhere.
The time traveler's challenge.
Brighter inks, without pigment
Actually, it wasn't only sarcasm but kind of a TLDR.

The long version is:
"This would make for a suitable precursor to a renewed attempt on cracking down on some of the liberties in the internet.
I personally don't believe in gov't institutions being nice and I find it most sad that this being a farce is the first thing that comes to my mind.

Unfortunately, where I come from, child porn is the #1 official reason for any attempt of internet censorship."
Thanks! (I wrote Haraka)
Yes, regarding reasons for leaving. I'm going to drop those.

DOS and AIX are included to illustrate breadth as opposed to depth. Not because I expect anybody to be impressed by 20-year-old work in these two OSes.

Metrics are an interesting point; I'll need to look further at this.

Regarding teamwork, the resume mentions that I was considered a "mentor". Does this count?
I think we're on the same page. It may or may not be, but shouldn't people be free to choose to enter a lottery? (Assuming there isn't fraud on the chances)
GMail is pretty good. But the new maps is atrocious on any browser except Chrome (surprise surprise). The old version is much faster on all browsers. Same for the Android app, which also destroys my phone battery now too.
It's tough; when I was doing tons of tech screens a few years ago working for a consulting firm, I got pretty decent at picking out good resumes more than half the time. Mind you this was not my full time job. But you really need to do quite a bit of resume reading and phone screens before you get a good feel for it.

so, experience will get you so far.
I don't know where you learned arithmetic, but where I learned it, 3 - (-3) == 6....

What this means effectively is that 1am GMT+1 would evaluate to false, but 11pm GMT-1 would evaluate to true because 23:00 + 1.00 == 24:00, and 24 != 0.
Designing forms that convert, 7 proven techniques 
Web forms are the stars of any respectable landing page though they’re often taken for granted. They receive all the personal information of your leads or buyers, so that you can start to move them down the sales funnel. Depending on how you design your web forms, you can expect greater or fewer conversions.
Very well said. We have been thinking how to completely avoid human involvement in evaluation. We haven't figured out how but we are developing a feature to help interviewer in determining what to ask by using questions library. This won't solve the issue you pointed out completely but it will surely help interviewer to some extent.
I completely agree with your analysis that the distinction between immigrant or economic migrant and ex-pat is class-based.
You might be interested in Nifty: http://nifty-gui.lessvoid.com/

It's hardly any "best practice" or "standard", but it looks like people are managing to ship projects with it. Performance is reasonable; on the inside, it's openGL via lwjgl.

Another option is libGDX: http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/

Their presentations appear to be oriented largely around games, but the parts could be used for a desktop application just as well. There's a number of mobile games in both the app stores using it.
Malaysia: Files Deleted from Missing Pilot’s Flight Simulator
Excellent point. And, conversely, how do I demonstrate, on my resume, that I'm proficient as a generalist without listing the things that specialist-oriented readers here suggest that I omit?
I'm not going to lie, at the heart of this story is good news. Tor has consistently been a save heaven for child exploitation. This news is fantastic considering that these were genuine criminals that have been stopped and victims contacted. For once, I'm happy with DHS.
Frakkin' toasters.
The work is being done by my labmates, so I can answer questions.

The killer application here is color e-ink displays, since these structures are purely reflective, they should let you make an apparently brighter display by sending back all of the light of a relevant color.

Also on Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-the-key-to-making-pai...
I cannot think of much that is more thoroughly soul-draining than fighting a legal action that is brought to you.

And, the better your case, the more soul-draining it is. I would imagine that it is easy to comply when one knows he is in the wrong. But, when one feels strongly about the cause and is advised that he has an excellent case, then capitulation feels like being bullied and extorted into compromising one's principles. This, even when it is frequently the most prudent thing to do.

So, one is left with the sad choice of either compromising his principles or fighting indefinitely at significant cost in time, money, and emotional energy.
This is one of my fave posts ever on HN. Nicely done, Tim
Asynchronous testing in ClojureScript
I like the negotiation comments. It is always ok to say, "If you love me, and I love the firm, I'm sure we'll find a way to make a deal."

The best way to have leverage to have another opportunity in hand. Then you can say, "I will be fully transparent, and won't play any games with you, but I do want you know I'm talking to someone else too." That lets them know that you are valued. You just have to be polite, and not turn it into a multi-stage bidding war. But it does give you the ability to say, "I love your firm. I don't want to start a 2 week cycle of bidding, but if you could at least close 2/3 of the gap in offers, I won't have to worry about paying rent."
They've averaged ~13% growth year over year since 2008, doing 16 billion last year. Not sure what your metric is but I hardly think that qualifies as, "worst run brands ever."
The level of support and communication provided by Fastmail is one of the reasons I use their services as well. I even got a very human and nice response when asking a Symbian-related question.
Not to entirely judge your sentiment on your analogy, but I think it's fairly apt.

I agree that if homeowners are the judge, they might do something like speed of splicing a wire, or maybe wiring an electrical outlet, because that is all they know. However, we're talking about electricians being judged by other electricians in this situation. It's up to the sr. electrician to know what a quality electrician is and judge that effectively. If the sr. or hiring electrician cannot do so, you don't want to work for him/her anyway.

This tool is relatively meaningless without qualified people observing. If you threw them some code tests that were merely timed, I would agree with you.
>> Lose any technologies older than a decade from your resume. Lose any references to "35 years of experience with...". Take off your hobbies. Take off your reasons for leaving your past employment. There are too many other fixes needed to go into.

And in that process lose any traits that might command a premium? Do senior developers not deserve to be compensated according to their experience?
Libertarians aren't a major party. There are a lot of people in the Republican party who call themselves libertarians, but the actual Libertarian party is extremely minor.
Efficient uniform shuffling
I do not, but my wife does. She is a professor of English and she relates stories to me of her classes daily. One thing that helps her classes is that she always explains why they need to learn something, and she never introduces a lesson that doesn't further her own learning outcomes that she has set up (for intro classes she structures such that students are ready for her upper level courses, and for those courses she structures such that students will be able to succeed not only in English but also in other areas as well).

Yep, and I guarantee you that unless she is teaching only electives she has students who would rather not have to take her class.

I was a professor of Physics for a decade.

I worked hard at it, was considered excellent and lively and all the good stuff. I also did what your wife does. Yet, there are students who didn't want to be there, pure and simple.

Sometimes it takes a little wisdom imparted by time to know what you should like, and many students don't have that maturity yet.
Could be a shortage of qualified candidates. Just cause hundreds of people apply doesn't mean that even 10s of good candidates apply.