skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have done about a dozen or so interviews. I can totally imagine some people not being able to do a simple fizz buzz from scratch. But when they have full internet access and no one is watching them. "Solving" fizz buzz is then as simple as performing a search and copying the results.

I'll probably get down voted because it seems people on HN are incredibly attached to the FizzBuzz story. Possibly I am totally wrong and I am too positive about the skills of people with a CS degree. But it seems the crazier the anecdote (full internet access, coding at home, etc.) the more eager people are to believe it.
I'm in a similar situation: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/7714

Can someone help me what would be the polite way to do? I really don't want to annoy anyone, but also wouldn't want my work to be only on my local branch ;)
I've interviewed at Google a few times. They don't ask the fizzbuzz test. Actually I was totally stymied.

I regard it as poor form to post the questions I've been asked online. However I could describe them reasonably by saying that I was asked to design algorithms that would efficiently perform some computational task, with a very large input set, given a distributed system with a specific number of computers, disk drives and ethernet cards.

By the time one is actually called in for an onsite at google, one has been through at least two, maybe three phone interviews.

During one such interview, I was asked by Google's engineer what actually happened after the user clicked a certain button in a popular GUI program. I went on for twenty solid minutes - "Well there's a system call, which is typically implemented by calling some manner of illegal instruction, so there's a trap into the exception handling mechanism. The registers are saved on the stack, the CPU sets a flag to indicate that it is in supervisor mode, then a table is consulted to find the address of the function that actually implements the system call..." and then I went on about what happens in the kernel.

Someone who didn't know how computers actually worked might say "When you click that button, the program saves your document."
Have you worked with a freelancer before who produced exceptional work? If so, ask them to do the work or recommend a friend with availability to do the work. Great freelancers are cheap, reliable, and available: pick any two.

If you're wondering why clients like you meeting developers like your previous contractor is virtually an inevitable outcome of freelancing sites, I recommend reading "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism." It was published in the 70s and basically won the authors a Nobel Prize. The example they use is about used cars, but it maps fairly directly to freelancing sites.
There is no contest: it is the environment where frequent, uncensored criticism is tolerated or even encouraged. That guy who is silently working on their own solution? Without listening to feedback from his peers (or, more likely, his betters) his work is probably junk that nobody wants or worse - something that will cause more problems than it solves.

Before I worked in software I noticed companies would have two cultures. A "shop" culture where workers can wear casual clothes, swear, kick stuff, and at the end of the day, get things working, and the "front office" that focused on sales. You never knew if a client was on the phone or in the office so workers dressed well and any negative speech was strictly forbidden.

Because programmers work at a desk, they are shoehorned into front office culture. This has probably done more harm to the productivity of software projects than any other factor. Just this year I watched a small software project (one that a small team of competent developers, QA, and a BA could have completed in several weeks) waste millions of dollars (some say hundreds of millions - the real figure (in the true spirit of front office culture) would be "rude" to tell) before being cancelled. I saw this train wreck coming a mile away and documented the issues and forwarded them to my supervisor but it made no difference. In defense of the company I work for, at least they didn't fire me. It is pure front office culture to blame the whistle blowers for failure.

And don't even start with "Oh, you just need to say it in the nicest, politest manner!" There is no way to tell somebody they are wrong and have to change in a "nice" way. Your organization either can focus on the quality of the end product and encourage criticism or focus on appearance and censor it. But if you choose the latter, unless your project is a con, it is doomed from the start.
I would love to see this integrated w/ Pushover.net. Would save $ on SMS fees, and has the ability to send alerts as high priority (ignoring vibrate/silence). Or even just adding an email address instead of an SMS phone # as the alert contact method would work.
You wrote: "I speculate that the reasons for the perceived - and ONLY perceived - shortage is that it's far more difficult for employers and potential employees to find each other.", and follow it up with an example of how most of Dalhousie's CS grads are able to find work in another country?

How is it meaningful to say that it's hard for the students and their potential US employers to find each other when apparently it's quite easy?
I use this one, nothing but good things to say about it: http://www.hackernewsletter.com/
As a person who has worked remotely for around 15 years (as a programmer):

Results may vary. It doesn't have to be this way at all.
The title of this article is unfortunate in my opinion; I clicked it expecting a diatribe against open source. But in fact, it isn't.

To me, the relevant part is this:

> "This behavior, eminently reasonably reasonable on the part of any individual, results in a systemic failure, a tax on new open source contributors. [...] It doesn’t take egregious individual behavior to create a hostile environment."

So the causes aren't necessarily hostile behavior, and in fact there may be both permanent and temporary solutions to this problems. Therefore, a better title would be "How to encourage open source contributions" :)
Thanks for your post and for not picking on one project in particular, but the obfuscation of the projects name in your last screen shot doesn't really work. It's trivial to read the projects name there.
Don’t Push Through the Pain [ergonomics]
IPOD CLASSIC FETCHING UP TO $1,000 AND ABOVE ON EBAY
I would do more than just verify employment, but I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail, not in public anyway.

However I will say that I've been a manager, and even when I wasn't a manager I participated in hiring. I've also been working full-time as a coder since 1987. I wrote my first program in 1976.

I can smell bullshit when I find it on a coder's resume.
Bit too complicated for them, really.
A New Startup Helps Online Business Getting Automated
Nothing, but you can't hide that it is https://myfraudsite.com from the user since the browser always displays the URL (at least it does nowadays).
Within our solar system (which is itty-bitty), there is really no theoretical limit to what we can send or receive. Bandwith is pretty high on modern satellites and probes and our only really limiting factor is latency, which doesn't matter so much when the probes can store data locally and slowly send it to you over time. NASA is currently experimenting with the LCRD[1] project for laser-based communications which have a downlink of 622mbps.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Communications_Relay_Demo...
Indeed, it allows you to pay me money, you can easily obtain them from invoices... they do not provide any authentication.
As an Italian, I can't understand what foreigners see in the Comedy. Really. There are some vivid descriptions -- sure -- but likewise there are in other books. There are some interesting characters -- sure -- but they are just sketched.

Among Italian poets, I prefer Giacomo Leopardi.
This gem exposes the Phantom Open Emoji library unicode/image assets and APIs for working with them.

Second line of the the readme
I know someone working at Sony Pictures. She said that Sony Pictures is literally paralyzed. They can't pay their employees and have reverted to completely manual processes. They can't accept orders from customers or pay their vendors as well. The hackers have completely destroyed their infrastructure. There is no real disaster recovery and there are backups of various systems at various levels of conoleteness but presumably those backups are infected as well.

They need to completely rebuild their ERP system from scratch and that will take months.

It's a complete nightmare and if this doesn't change the perceptions of CEOs on cybersecurity, they need to be fired because it complete puts their entire company at risk of they don't put a significant expense to ensure that their company is secure.
All hail e-residency, the newest oxymoron of our times.
Couldn't you charge people to look at their pull requests? The contributor's fix may seem very important to them, but in actuality may or may not be of any value at all.

They are using free software but asking the maintainers of it to spend their time to review their pull request. Some entitlement there. The justification, my fix is important. Well, we don't know that, and to determine it costs time.

I would think a fee system where people pay to have their pull requests prioritized. I know it goes against this misguided idea that everything free is a virtue, but there is a good reason why some things have an associated cost involved.
YII Controller Methods – Render and RenderPartial – PHP CMS Framework
A port scan of the entire internet takes around 3 minutes if you have enough bandwidth [1]

[1] http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/09/masscan-entire-internet-in...
As a creator and maintainer of OS projects, I have to disagree for the following reasons;

1) It is clear from the issue raised, that the creator of the issue did not do his homework. This means actually looking at the README file, and, seeing that the project "exposes the Phantom Open Emoji library unicode/image assets and APIs for working with them", proceed to the link to the Phantom Open Emoji library that the author took the time and trouble to provide a clickable link to , and read on from there.

2) Additionally, the creator of the issue then posted a link to an alternative project.

Ergo, not only was the creator of the issue being lazy in the first place, he then tried to punish the author of the project for that laziness. If you really cannot see this, then I suggest looking again at the project's README, how it describes itself, clicking through to the Phantom Open Emoji library link provided, and reading the information there. Then re-think your opinion on this matter.
KJP was absolutely my inspiration for this thing.
Quite a serious problem I myself have - at least I'm willing to admit to it - is that when presented with any coding task at all, I start looking for ways to optimize it. That's lost me more than a few jobs.

It's not that I can't write fizzbuzz. It's that I won't write anything at all because I'm trying to figure out a faster way to implement it than the obvious way.

Here's a little exercise for you: give your candidates what you call the "fizzbuzz test", but instead of 2 and 3, use, say, 4 and 7.

I bet quite a few candidates will write out the code for 2 and 3, because that's what they memorized before the interview, without understanding what the code actually does. Source code for fizzbuzz is all over the series of tubes these days, you see.
Have you tried posting to the dev mailing list? You might also check out the IRC channel (#julia on Freenode).
They are mostly made with 3- and 4-grams. Any lower and it's not particularly coherent, any higher and there's not enough crossover.
My Post comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711960 downvoted on Hackernews

I wear it as a badge of honor. Unethical and unsustainable companies like Uber get USD 40 Bil valuation by being led by arrogant misogynistic CEOs when they condone looking up user data including journalists

http://pando.com/2014/11/17/the-moment-i-learned-just-how-fa...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/emil-michael-of-ube...

Two reputed (understatement) publications decrying them, while CEO is arrogant and still does not fire Emil

And then this happens http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2014/12/indian-wo...

While they claim they have extensive background tests for drivers. Investors reward with a 40 Billion valuation, which is more than Infosys valuation a 33 year old company employing 200,000 people, bringing a lot of poor people out of poverty and into middle/upper middle class (and many such companies like TCS, TechM etc)

SV VCs and in general VCs if you are focussed on companies which are cool and provide high growth and high rates of signups (the new eyeballs) refer to what happened to secret https://gigaom.com/2014/12/05/whats-happening-with-secret/ and pile on in news companies (dude you guys are like retail investors, Zynga, Groupon...unsustainable companies but a pile on)

I believe in building sustainable businesses which provide employees, founders, and eventual shareholders consistent returns over a period of time

I will never put a Zynga founder Marc Pincus in the same league as NRN. The difference they made to the world is levels (think exponential) apart

I would rather drill, toil, sweat it out than just hype out, I say with conviction as many companies in my space (mobile, cloud, Big data) did fail or sold out after creating a hype

@Uber with 40 Bill ur not going to make a mark in India.
The War on Terror provides the opportunity. The War on Drugs provides the rationale. Both these are levers controlled by the US and both cost it much in treasure and lives for little gain (I'm following standard US practice and ignoring the cost to the non-exceptional peoples of the world). Sadly most US politicians lack the bravery and/or integrity to even suggest touching those levers.
Unnecessarily. That's kind of the point.
IOW, programmers assume hardware is simpler than it really is whereas hardware designers assume software is simpler than it really is.
Racism isn't the statement of a facts, racism holds that people should be treated differently based on their ethnicity or culture. As see nothing in the parent comment that is stating people should be treated one way or another.
I think you don't get the point of danmaz74's comment. Job hired his childhood friend as first employee, making him quit his job to work in the garage, and when the company goes well and they start talking about IPO, he doesn't bother to give him stock options as a reward for being instrumental to Apple's success.

That's pretty much ungrateful, and doesn't have anything to do with modern startups.
I'm using the program written by the creator of the King James Programming tumblr. The source is at https://github.com/barrucadu/markov
I just spent 10 minutes navigating the Paypal website trying to activate 2-factor auth on my account. Apparently they don't even offer it, at least for Singapore accounts.
Train travel is for the most part impractical because it's so slow -- passenger traffic takes a back seat to freight.

I've had a notion that we should nationalize the rail lines and invest in having it handle more passenger (and freight) traffic safely. The lines could be opened to other passenger service (hello, Virgin) and some competition could be had in that space.
It is so beautiful, and has the basic functionality of which I use Pingdom for but at a much cheaper rate. Transferring my domains now...
> Given that every single error check there is just
> passing up the error, is it really that different from
> having exceptions that propagate along with RAII style
> resource cleanup?

Yes, it's fundamentally different. The whole point is to make those error blocks visible, so future maintainers are forced to deal with the reality that those invocations are fallible. Maybe there's a way to make the error handling less verbose, but hiding it altogether would subvert that explicit language design goal.
Ask HN: When can company decide to hire programmers from outside of US with H1B?
Not at all surprising. It is common knowledge that energy companies utilize the government to pass protectionary measures that hinder progress and keep us married to outdated technology. Oil is not that efficient and obviously bad for the environment but it is so heavily subsidized by the government through lobbyists and campaign funding that it is hard for any new, cleaner energy to gain traction.
I note that the profitable lines are on the East coast.

Your choices for intercity travel are:

1. Drive. I hope you like staring at roads and other cars.

2. Fly. I hope you like spending more time getting to, and going through, the airport than you will spend in the air.

3. Take a train. I hope you like having leg room, a view, the ability to do some reading, going from city centre to city centre without fighting traffic, leaving from a train station you arrived at 15 minutes before departure time.

From NYC, I can get to Philadelphia or DC substantially faster by train than by any other method[^]. I can get to Boston sufficiently quickly that flying isn't worth it.

To travel to Toronto by air takes about 5 hours, once you factor in all the stuff that isn't flying. By train, it's about 10 hours. I am tempted, a lot of the time, to take the damn train.

[^] With one whoopee cushion: US rail systems prioritise freight over passenger traffic. You can easily be stuck for 10-30 minutes while several thousand tons of clanking steel crawls past a high speed train. Mind you, they close the airports any time somebody brings in a water bottle or if it's slightly chilly. So.
So this is my little project. It's great to see it get some attention on HN.

I'll be dropping in here to read any more comments that show up, although it looks like I'm late to the party.
Apparently we give out blue ribbons and $$$$ to corporations who deliver incomplete software. So yeah, why the fuck not for open source? ;)
Could it be a good idea to create a service where people can help with FOSS projects by being the 'intercept' between messages and the maintainers? I feel to inexperienced to help out with actual coding, but helping out with support emails or tickets (and only forwarding those that seem useful) is something I could see myself doing, for example.

And I could imagine that after helping out in this way for a while, I'd feel more inclined or more self-confident to start helping out with code.

Or does this already exist?
From this data: almost half of Amtrak's ridership (north of 45%!) occurs on roughly 1000 miles of track, or just 3% of Amtrak's almost 28,000 total miles --- all in the Northeastern US, DC to Boston through NYC and Philly.

Another gigantic bite of Amtrak's ridership comes from short-hop California routes --- particularly LA to San Diego.

The sharp increase in Amtrak ridership that Brookings notice includes the zero riders to 3.3MM riders from the introduction of the Acela service, plus another 2+MM from other Northeast routes, presumably knock-on benefit from the Acela.

Most of Amtrak's route map seems, with this data, to be a pointless waste of money. The "renaissance" is the Acela, and not much more.
Were you under the impression that IBM was a non-profit? What exactly do you think corporations purchase IT resources to accomplish?
> I've yet to find any plugin (Free) that actually performs functions of a job board.

That is some intense entitlement right there.
Using it for about a year without false positive/negative. Usually much more sensitive than the competition for short issue detection.
Natalie Portman, hot grits, Netcraft confirms. I read Slashdot, too, but that didn't make the predictions any more real-sounding.
Amazon sends conveyor-belt roller instead of gift
Apple Campus 2 December update
this is very true because a pull request that solves a problem that the software's maintainer is also interested in solving is one that will be merged quickly. it's the frilly things that nobody else really needs, are difficult to review and merge, don't include tests, aren't particularly well written, and/or will only make the codebase worse just to appease someone's half-baked use case of dubious validity that typically sit in the queue for weeks or months.
Why passwords should not be stored on a mobile device
As I published two month ago an analysis about Samsung Knox (http://mobilesecurityares.blogspot.de/2014/10/why-samsung-kn...) I thought it is time to write a short article about passwords in general on mobile devices.
I would only really count Juniper in that list, building on and with FreeBSD. Apple take some bits but their product is not really FreeBSD (alas) and they dont seem to give back. AFAIK EMC and Yahoo are ex-users now, or largely.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five Watson Analytic efforts" --Thomas J. Watson
Thanks for the suggestion, that's on the long-term roadmap ^^, you can totally add several email address though (with the CC field)
Can someone help build a flow-chart of determining whether this program is of value to me or not?

I'm a cofounder of a tech/internet startup in country A. I am a citizen of country B. I have no valid work visa in country A so work as an off-shore consultant for my own company, hence no longer a resident there. I am now a digital nomad in South East Asia.

Most valuable things for me:

- Being allowed to apply for visas in other countries from their consulate in a country other than country B (embassies and consulates are slow and painful and I don't like working there while waiting for my passport). Usually I'm allowed to do this in any other "country of residence." Would e-residence count?

- Being able to easily establish a corporate entity and proof of employment paperwork (also expensive and slow and painful in country B) which helps streamline my visa application processes.

Edited to fix some extraneous statements.
Superconductivity without cooling?
GP is talking about adaptive streaming with HLS. What you're discussing works only if all your clients have the same bandwidth.
Showing FreeBSD/Erlang stuff that just works and cope with substantial amounts of traffic is not politically correct, because it will cause a severe pain of cognitive dissonance to the Docker/JVM/Node/Cloud crowds..

Lets chant together: JVM is the best VM in the world with millions of man-hours invested in optimizations. Servlet/JSP are mature, battle-tested, enterprise-grade, type-safe solutions. NodeJS is the only way to develop high-scalable internet services. Everything must be a containerized micro-service, orchestrated by Docker/CoreOS/systemd.
messages are probably much smaller, but more numerous and latency has to be 'realtime', but also client-server-client juggling. so, to me this means they need to respond faster, more often, and deal with more sharing than a website.
It's mostly because, as I noted, taking a train for short trips has become a better option due to the hoopla and bullshit surrounding flying these days.

For long trips though, you're looking at a day of travel vs days of travel. For most people that's not hard to choose between.
This is true in the Boston/NYC/Philly region, but not outside it. I prefer the Acela to a Jetblue NYC-IAD(DC), but the flight is the better call for that route.

It's also only true of the Acela routes. Intercity travel on normal Amtrak trains is awful.
This is not true. Facebook has never attempted to migrate them to Linux. If WhatsApp wants to convert to Linux, it is their decision. More than likely they will stay on FreeBSD as that is what they know how to run and a good way to kill a product is to force them to do things instead of focusing on building their product.