skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FizzBuzz is just a bozo filter. Sure, it screens out unqualified applicants. But why are you even getting unqualified applicants in the first place? It's because your hiring strategy is fundamentally flawed.

When I go out to look at job postings, that is all that I see. Single, standalone jobs. What I really need to see is an entire career track within the same company, from green rookie all the way up to the highest non-executive position on that track.

If I saw that, I could self-select for the position that is most appropriate to my current skill level. You wouldn't need to use FizzBuzz as my bozo filter. You would have to use a more difficult task, such as prioritizing a list of bugs and feature requests in a hypothetical program, based on perceived severity, resource requirements, and business needs.

But it seems like companies now only ever want developers with 5-10 years of experience in all the techs from the stack that they already use, and there are no promotions except into management. Where do they imagine those people come from? Where do they think those people go after they age out?

Is there some developer nursery out there that takes green rookies, trains them up into competent developers, and then just forces them to leave? Is there a developer nursing home that hires only grizzled, jaded old veterans and pays them all handsomely to do work that never involves any training?

The reason that you need an ever-increasing amount of bozo filters is because your job openings do not match the profile of job-seekers. Unqualified applicants are clogging your system because your posting is the closest thing they can find to their own skills.

Bozo filters treat the symptom. The only cure is to give all those bozos their own jobs to apply for. If your company is large enough to support that many positions, you really should establish complete career tracks, across all levels of experience, and advertise them as a whole to job seekers, so they can tell you what rung of the ladder they think they should be on.

In short, you advertise all the positions that already exist at your company, the number of vacancies, and how those positions are linked by promotion. Anyone applying for multiple positions spanning more than two mutually exclusive skill levels is automatically filtered out as a resume spammer.
There are three reasons to drive slowly in the right lane.

(1) It's safer (matching speeds reduces odds of and damage from collisions)

(2) It's more efficient (If you zoom ahead, there is a nonzero chance that drivers in the left lane will be annoyed and attempt to block you, reducing global efficiency. Note that there's no loss in going slow since the bottleneck is the constraint. As a result, going slow can only gain and never cost.)

(3) It's fairest (people who arrive at the same time will leave at the same time, regardless of their lane)

Another comment lays out my logic further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8084137

I know it feels silly to drive slowly in the right lane, but it's safer, more efficient, and fairest. Why wouldn't you do it?
I get what you're saying, but I think that's true of every interview question. There are no truly objective questions and people are unique; there is no way to make an apples-to-apples comparison of two different people.

I think work-sample questions are really good, but you're still optimizing for people who can solve problems in the extremely artificial context of a job interview.
Makes me feel slightly more confident in my ability as someone who recently finished my CS degree, but I still feel very far behind. I find it very weird that someone even after their freshman year in such a degree program could not understand or comprehend such a simple task. I don't think anyone in my schools department would fail at these tasks after taking the introduction to programming course.

Where are all these students coming from? Perhaps there is some problem with the source. It seems like they aren't being taught to understand, but are instead being taught to copy instructions in some manner.
Everyone starts out thinking that, especially when interviewing juniors. "I'll use FizzBuzz to weed out the 5% who are just outright lying about having programmed ever before in their lives, and after they bang it out in 30 seconds, we can move on to something interesting!"

Ten interviews later, you're just praying that SOMEONE will please just pass the FizzBuzz so you can hire them on the spot and go drink vodka to forget the entire experience. It's really sad.
I still completely disagree with you. You are misunderstanding the point of the question, and probably missing the importance of being able to formulate an opinionated argument about development and present it to a team. That is the point of the question.

You should not be apples-apples comparing candidates anyway. Everyone is different, and it is a collection of skills that you need to be a developer.

Candidate A may be a person who isn't as quick with coding, but they can quickly architect a solution in their mind and formulate an opinionated argument about why it is superior.

Candidate B may be an incredible coder, but unable to explain their methodology, or architect a solution that is generic and re-usable.

Both of these candidates can be an asset to the team in different ways. I find a lot of developers, the "JUST LET ME CODE" types, really don't understand the communication skills needed to develop an application with a large group of people. This question helps find people that will be better in that group situation, regardless of how strong their coding skills may be...because coding is only a portion of the job, in the real world.

Edit: I also pointed out in my reply, that an interviewer who takes a subjective bias when assessing the answer to this question is doing it wrong.
Also iy-goto-char
It's ironic to me that payroll taxes (which theoretically exist for the employee's benefit) have forced a promising and growing company to lay off staff. Have you tried hiring a tax attorney to negotiate with the IRS? Often they will waive some of the penalties and allow payment plans.
IBM no longer has deep pockets: it's spent more than it has earned on buying back its own shares, and now has a ton of debt.

IBM has been the high-cost supplier for almost 100 years, so the idea that it will out-innovate and undercut Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the cloud is an interesting one. Especially as both Microsoft and Google have much deeper pockets and are approaching IBM in annual turnover. (IBM used to have 70% of the IT business. Fairly soon, it won't even be in the top 5.)
An audience of one. What about on a piece of paper? In front of a computer. How would do in code reviews? You can state your concerns to the interviewer to see if they can accommodate.
Interesting point of view. Admittedly, there are meaningful sociological questions about where tech is going to move society. It (tech) is moving faster and faster and has generally unknown consequences to all of us - those of us on the "inside" just as much as those on the "outside."
AWS
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-hosti...

Costs me about $0.50 a month to host a simple, static site.
SpringSled reaches 130k waiting list for private beta
Always be giving CTA
Oh? Something tells me I can't write a Bitcoin address on my direct deposit form.

Seriously, the interface provided by Citibank is pretty freaking great. I work, I swipe my credit card places. As long as I do the former more than the latter, I don't need to touch anything else. Also every few months I accumulate enough points to buy something on Amazon for $50-$100 for free.

Bitcoin could be even better if I got paid in Bitcoin and could pay people in Bitcoin, but I can't.
They do have a big problem making money.

When someone says "to make money" they do not mean to generate sales, they mean to generate profit. Amazon operates on a 1% operating income basis. They are unable to "make money" with their business as it's structured today.
Odometer – Transition numbers with ease
Who sold more phones last quarter, Apple or Microsoft? Wrong – it's Microsoft
Some people here uphold any law as something eternal and unchangeable, and above all criticisms. I think it has something to do with the Spaniards and their Catholicism, and the many Jesuit high schools.

At least that's what my Facebook stream of comments about some recent case involving Bogotá's mayor makes me perceive.

There's a huge divide between city people with all their laws and the contempt for provincial people, and the actual provincial people, the ones who suffer from guerrillas and paramilitaries just for trying to own some agricultural land.
I imagine the FAA is scared because drones require absolutely no training or licensing to buy and fly.

Just check out all these downed drones, many of which crashed due to mechanical issues - http://makezine.com/magazine/drowned-drones-when-a-multicopt...
For your type of industry or company perhaps. Not all jobs or companies are the same, and different styles of questions will be more useful depending on those.

A lot of development shops work by picking the best technology for the job. They choose the best plugin, or the best language, or the best component. In those types of shops, this question is exactly as you say - a task they will have to do routinely in the job.
The extension does HEAD requests by default, and occasionally you don't get accurate responses back from the server. You can change the request type to GET requests in the options screen (right click on extension icon -> options) to get more accurate (but slightly slower) results.
How You’ll Get Organized
The Persecuted Church
A love letter to Go's io.Reader
...in the myopic startup world.

I work for an enterprise doing WebSphere & I'm scared to see it go one day actually -- will be cool if it cheapens to the point where it is equivalent to an open source tech but I think its the proprietary nature that got it to where it is. Pretty big learning curve but it is rock-solid and would be quite an upgrade from a lot of the scripting lang stacks if it were to hit the world at large.

Coming from RoR it feels like moving from a toy plane to a Harrier jet.
Whoops, I probably wasn't clear enough in my reply -- the classes on transistors, logic gates, etc. are available to CS majors but are definitely not a requirement for programming. I completely agree that trying to teach about digital logic, etc. without the general context of programming is backwards.

Drive the car, build your interest, then start taking classes in chemistry, physics, etc. to see how it works.
My issue with that question would be that it favors students who spent a lot of time reading blogs, slashdot/HN/other journal like discussions over those that spend time coding. If you read enough of such opinions pieces, then you should pass this line of questioning reasonably and defend it even if you hardly used the tech in question.

I am saying that as someone who would confidently blable about agile development (it is the thing back then) and architectural designs/patterns without experiencing them on a real project at that age.

Those questions may show whether the candidate has general well roundness, but they are not likely to distinguish those who can do from those who can not do. Someone who focus on solving problems and coding will be able to answer them to some level, but it is very easy for him to answer less well and in less details.
"in the extremely artificial context of a job interview" is also true of every interview question. So giving it as a criticism of work-sample questions, when comparing those to other types of question, is meaningless.
No, Emacs/Tramp supports remote shells too.
> -- if it's unlikely I'm going to hire them.

But how do you get to the "unlikely" determination? Do you want to get a ballpark reading on "unlikely" within the first 10 minutes of the interview or at the very end after investing an hour?

I'm not suggesting that FizzBuzz is the be-all-end-all but for the folks who already do find useful as a low-investment bs filter, it makes the most sense to use it at the beginning of the process and not at the end. Using it as a "last hurdle" makes no sense if you have a stack of resumes to plow through. If you have prior assumptions that 90% of those candidates are not competent at programming, what's the logic in using FizzBuzz as the last step? You want to identify the 10% as quickly as possible before investing too much extended interview time.
Yup.

Elon Musk’s Answer To Stephen Colbert’s Vision Of Wireless Charging: laughing at Colbert's jokes.

Did anyone who voted this article read it or watch the interview?
There is a lizard sex satellite floating in space
Programs that "do one thing well" are utterly useless unless you can compose them. Emacs is a tool that composes programs that do one thing well, like Bash or X.

Emacs, as has been said time and again, is not a text editor. It is, if anything, a development shell. It contains a text editing program (the default program), and that program does not manage child processes or SSH or Git.

You could also take the stance that Emacs _is_ a program that "does one thing well:" develop programs. That's the actual task of importance. Text editing is a secondary, ancillary task that owes its importance entirely to the archaic practice of representing complex interrelationships between data and operations on those data as a static linear stream of ASCII-encoded bytes.

Unfortunately, almost all programming languages are like this (hence, "languages"), but if you ever use Emacs to edit Lisp, you'll find that it's far less like text editing than it is like directly manipulating the abstract structure of the program. It does a reasonable job trying to replicate this experience in other languages, but when you have utterly inane constructions like seventeen-precedence-level infix notation, there's only so much you can do.
The Rise of Mobile Messaging in Business Communication
Haven't people spent (in terms of man hours) much more than that to secure it ?
> As in, the word "church" only refers to Christian places of worship.

That's not correct; e.g., the first definition from the full definitions at m-w.com is "a building for public and especially Christian worship".

In practice, there is more to it than that -- its not uncommon to be used generically and inclusively for place of worship, but you'd never (except through ignorance) use it for a specific place of worship except consistently with the usage of the group for whom it is a place of worship. (But the groups who use it specifically for their places of worhsip is also not the same as "Christian" -- it includes many, but not all, Christian groups as well as some, mostly newer, non-Christian groups.)

More relevant to the thread: the use of "church" doesn't seem to be about a place of worship, anyway, its about a body of believers, which is a use of the term which is somewhat less divisive, though still has the same generic for unspecified religions (though "congregation" would probably be better) and specific for some, mostly Christian, religions. So, its not an unreasonable single-word term to use in explaining the function of a generic product, though the complexities of the use and the emotional attachment that goes with naming issues around religion may make it problematic. Though, really, the name ("OneBody") of the product is far more of a specifically Christian reference than the word "church" in its description of purpose.

> Now, if you are saying that "church" means any Christian place of worship - as in, people don't differentiate between church and cathedral, which are different things

Well, this is far off the point of even this subthread, but the set of cathedrals is a proper subset of the set of churches in the way both terms are used by most groups that use the former term at all. That is a cathedral is a church that is also the seat of a bishop. So even outside of the generic sense, its proper to refer to a cathedral as a church.
Author here. Happy to answer your questions in this thread.

Except for bug reports or feature requests, file those at https://github.com/sdegutis/hydra/issues instead.
Haskell is an imperative language.
This is anecdotal and not the hard figures you're asking for, but I know in Austin both Grande and AT&T (two of the three ISPs in town) started offering gigabit packages. In almost all neighborhoods AT&T beat Google in getting fiber to people's doors. This went from being something they weren't even hinting at to being a reality within a year of Google announcing their intentions to provide fiber in Austin. And while Grande is still only offering fiber in high end neighborhoods, AT&T has pretty good coverage with it.
Yes, people who are relying on user agents are stupid.

That doesn't make it any less illegal to use the useragent to deceive someone about what equipment you're using purely to avoid paying a charge.
N170 – the part of the brain that does faces
From the home page it is impossible to tell what the program exactly does. The "documentation" link seems like designed to be impossible to find ;-) Reading the documentation ideas are not introduced in natural order considering that people don't know what you are taking about. Because I'm interested in what the program could do, I'm still trying to figure it out btw... This feedback is here only because I see you have a "buy license" thing and I want your business to succeed, and the current setup is limiting this IMHO.
You should look at https://github.com/stackgl/shader-school - it is very similar.
You believe that you shouldn't try to hire based on apples-to-apples comparisons of developers. I not only don't agree with you, but I run a (relative to startups) high-volume recruiting practice premised on that belief. We're not going to agree, and that's fine.

In the 12 years of my career prior to discovering objective, work-sample, standardized, data-driven hiring, I hired exactly the way you're advocating. I sought out questions like the one you're advocating for. My favorite question from that time: "if you had to put together a libyou.a that you take from project to project, what would be in that library?" I found it to be a great way to start a conversation with a candidate to get inside of their head, and also liked the fact that it quickly gave me a signal as to whether the candidate had actually done the kind of work we did in our shop.

As it turns out, the ability to project a signal as to whether a candidate has actually done the kind of work we do in our firm is not actually useful. What's useful is: "if the candidate is put in a reasonable position to try, can they actually perform the tasks the role requires". Surprisingly --- in fact, shockingly --- I've found zero correlation between the capacity to signal ability and the capacity to demonstrate ability. ZERO. Our best performers six months in, as often as not, interview terribly on "signalling" terms, and were hired because work-sample testing overrode those concerns.
Modern U.S. Law is an exceedingly poor source for definitions. It is purposefully vague, broad, and often misrepresented for political, propaganda and public relations reasons. i.e. the law that limits our rights being called "The FREEDOM Act".

A weapon should not be labeled a WMD unless it does at least as much damage as Little Boy and Fat Man did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
They've already made shareholders a lot of money. Future returns have been pulled forward substantially. The stock should have been sold by now, the returns to be had on the stock are in the past.

Even being generous and giving Amazon a future 20 pe ratio, at the recent highs, would require roughly $9 billion in profit. Once again being generous and assuming they can ever reach a 5% net income margin, they need $180+ billion in sales. Let's recalculate for a 15 pe ratio and 3.5% net income margin: $342 billion in sales (that's the Walmart scenario).

The stock has nowhere to go for a decade from the recent $400x levels. The party is over.
This is great work. I agree, the state of church software is absolutely appalling.
Your ultimate value in the market will be your personal brand, represented in your work experience, skill-set, and to a minor extent-- academic credentials.

If you have funding to complete the MS, get it done now. As for managing myopic professors, remember you're the economic buyer in this relationship. Your calculus is based on launching your career soon as possible.
My type of industry is "consulting software development in every mainstream programming language and on every stack". We could have a very long thread arguing the point, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I hire for an unusually representative segment of the software development industry.
I'd argue that having that breadth of knowledge is nearly as valuable as the ability to actually write code, so I don't know that this is such a bad thing. The ability to understand the complexities and tradeoffs across a large range of potential solutions/toolsets/etc is extremely important, otherwise people fall into the "everything's a nail ..." problem.
> i would like laziness in this situation to be described by a keyword please, so that i don't have a whole language feature being slower by premature optimisation I don't get a say in... :)

Rust uses the exact same external iterator pattern[0] yet is competitive with[1] a C-style for loop[2]

[0] http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/

[1] up to and including inlining and full unrolling

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2957fg/can_i_request_a...
On hiring Node.js talent
We request solutions to slightly harder problems in response to an initial application. Even though this is done at home, it still filters out a large percentage of applicants.

We then do something at the same level at the start of the interview. This filters out about half of the people who have got as far as an interview.

We then do an SQL test, building slowly from "select * from user" to a multi-table with sorting query. This filters out the other half.

We don't hire often.

Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of agreeing with Joel. I meet good programmers all the time - just rarely in interviews.

Alternatively, offering the going rate is too low an offer...
The article says that because of expansionary monetary policy, "[Businesses] tended to borrow money and invest in their own shares." To me, this statement seems nonsensical. Here's why:

Fed policy affects things by changing the aggregates. But stock ownership can never change in the aggregate. If you have extra money and you buy some stock, for every dollar you spent buying stocks, someone else now a has a dollar from selling you the stocks. A common myth is that money can go "into" an asset class. It cannot. It's impossible for extra money to end up invested in stocks in aggregate, because for every buyer there must be a seller. Individually, you may have less money, but that's balanced by someone else having even more money now. Stock sales will never change the aggregate money supply nor aggregate investment nor total stock ownership. So what is cringely saying here?

I'd appreciate if anyone could explain the logic. I don't want to pre-judge, but my suspicion is that monetary policy is a subtle issue and that blaming the Fed is fun, both of which lead to mistakes such as this one.

(In fairness, perhaps the author means to say that specifically IBM used low interest rates to buy stock and not that businesses generally did this. That is a charitable interpretation that makes more sense and deviates only a little from what was actually written.)