skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been on both sides of this situation. I don't think there is a clear answer.

The fundamental problem is that interviews are a horrible way to select people. There is little correlation between doing well in an interview and being capable at your job. So in theory the more you make the interview be like the job, the more accurate an assessment it is.

For instance I have never seen an interview method produce better results when looking for a front end HTML person than giving them a picture of the page you want, giving them cutouts of all of the pieces they need, and asking them to write a web page that looks like that, will scale reasonably as you resize the browser, and with reasonably clean HTML. Seriously, I've seen the results that this test produces, and invariably it gives you someone that can actually produce web pages. Occasionally it lets someone with poor work ethic slip through, but that seems to be better than the alternative. Particularly if the interviewer does not have the skillset you are looking to hire.

And then there is the time issue. I have seen interviewing for a new person suck up top talent for weeks on end. You need more resources, and you are losing proven, trained resources to do something they probably don't like! Yet unless you can have someone with the skills you're hiring in the room, the interview process can't weed out people who don't have the right skills. And as Joel's fizzbuzz test demonstrates, most candidates don't have the skills you need.

How bad is it? Well Joel claims a significant portion of candidates can't write a program to count numbers, but with every multiple of 3 replaced by "fizz", every multiple of 5 by "buzz", and every multiple of 15 replaced by "fizzbuzz". I believe it. I have found that over 2/3 of candidates when given a double-loop to compute the intersection of 2 arrays can't figure out how to make it more efficient. And good luck if you ask people to do something unusual like a depth-first traversal of a tree!

But there is a limit. It is easy to produce a simple application that looks reasonable, but which takes a lot longer to put together than you think it will. If you can't, knowing how it is supposed to go, personally do the exercise in an hour or two on a freshly set up machine, the exercise is too hard. Personally I far prefer having a test with some simpler questions rather than a full blown mini-application.

But the opposite extreme of depending on interviews to filter out bad people is worse. Much worse.
Thank you! IMO, the smartest thing to do in life is to pursue the options that maximize happiness. Money has a weak causal relationship with happiness[1]. Consequently, those getting a Ph.D. in English, for example, should do so if that's what makes them happy, but they should know there will be little returns from it.

It's the same reason why many of us on HN pursue independent employment: there's been plenty of articles here indicating entrepreneurialism means lower incomes than employment, and it most certainly has higher risk. But the real satisfaction comes from being independent!

[1] http://www.physorg.com/news70817137.html
I agree that sending out resumes as fast as you can email is a bad idea, and I agree with the attitude you proscribe, but I think you're disagreeing with something the author never said.

He did not say "don't require coding as a part of the interview process." He did say "don't require fully functional, complete applications as a part of the interview process." I've never heard of anyone asking for that, but the author claims he has.
I first saw the juggling analogy in Peopleware.
Go to #lojban on irc.freenode.net if you want to see Lojban conversation in action.
"It's the relationships, stupid"
whichoverflowshouldIposttooverflow.com
It's great a calorie counting approach works for this guy, but it has a horrible clinical track record. Dozens of studies conclusively show it does not work in the long run absent focus on the composition of the calories. Even in clinical studies where they control everything the subjects eat it doesn't work.

There is good empirical data on how to eat and exercise to get and stay thin. There's no reason to rely on outlier anecdotes like this. The prescription is: minimize starch and sugar (hard to do without eating fat), eat infrequently (don't snack), brief bouts of difficult exercise (sprinting, lifting) on an empty stomach.

p.s.
The headaches he describes are from very poor insulin sensitivity. He has a more serious health problem than body fat. The starchy/sugary diet he continues to eat leaves him at risk of disease. He says he still lives on junk fast food. What's the point of being thin but malnourished?

p.p.s. Caffeine is not an appetite suppressant.
there's a correlation between depression and food, but there are also correlations between food and socio economic status. So being low income might also be contributing to mental health (which isn't addressed in the article at all; though they do point out that if there are a lot of takeaway joints near by then the problem is exacerbated...might those areas also be lower income?).
You should send out letters with the goal of maximizing the opportunity you get a job offer. Thus it might be very valid to spam a lot of companies with a generic offer.

This doesn't apply if you want to work of a few select companies, such as Frogcreek or Google, but most companies have so similar that they aren't worth customizing for.
Excitement Fills New Chinese Exchange as Small Companies Sell Shares
My boss and I found a nice example of this in some sampler-placement work we did. The punchline is that our software occasionally doubled-up samplers in order to increase the probability of detecting a release.

The problem domain is a biological or chemical release in a building. Given a suite of possible release scenarios (variable release locations, amounts, and dispersion conditions), find the sampler network with the highest probability of detecting a release. Pretty much everything is probabilistically defined, including how likely each scenario, and how likely a sampler is to detect a given mass of the released substance. Critical to the discussion here, this probability was assumed independent of what other samplers did.

The software just brute-forces its way through all possible sampler networks. One striking result from our (very simple) study case was that it often put two samplers in the same location. This is a clear consequence of the principles laid out in the linked article.

For further info: Sohn and Lorenzetti, Risk Analysis, v.27 n.4 (2007), pp.877-886.
OTOH, they can always return an "unknown CPU" when the CPU identifiers are something they don't like.

Is there a trick an original Intel Core Duo will do that an Atom won't? Snow Leopard can't be 64-bit only because that would make it incompatible with the first x86 Macs.
How does zumbox work? do they scan mail... or do you only receive digital mail from businesses that have a partnership with them? How is this different from email?
Compress the folder with your favorite zip program and the compression ratio would be very good approximation of performance gain you will get out of zfs dedup.

Web archiving is another application that can benefit from this. You can crawl the same website 10 times a day and just store all of the files as it is.
The author uses unfortunate wording. His claim is that requiring full applications as a part of the interview process is unnecessary. He does not claim coding itself should not be a part of the process.

He makes clear he's talking about full, to spec applications in the introduction, but he calls these "coding tests." His conclusion makes it clear he does not consider "coding tests" to be the fizzbuzz sort of questions:

For those who administer coding tests, please reconsider what you’re doing. For junior developers, they’re fabulous tools. But for anyone who has a body of code samples all ready to go, ask for one. Ask a few technical questions that require code in an interview.
P.S. Can someone with sufficient Karma post a poll asking level of education completed. Or maybe level of education desired would be more interesting. I'm curious about HN's academic demographics.
Chiphacker
Software development. Multiple branches means multiple copies of a lot of files.
Also, LSD and other drugs. So it must be weird? awesome? for an ex-consumer to try to lose weight.
Does anyone use Apache OFBiz? From reading the description, it does seem much closer to what we'd be looking for, which is not just an online eCommerce site but a total solution for managing all of our inventory, stock, products, etc.
Anyone care to comment about what can be done with a hacked Wii?

I assume I can play downloaded games/imports. Could I write my own software, etc?
If I'm really excited about a position, I'll write my own code sample before I go to an interview. I'll typically write either a simple igoogle module or possibly a simple feature on my own website, proxying some of their calls through my own web server.

I find it does a tremendous amount of good on both ends. It lets me explore their website and look at their apis, I get a better understanding of their tech stack, and by looking at their code (at least their client javascript code), I brush up on areas that they've tackled.

On the company's end, we can dive into some tangible code that I've written and they can code review my work and ask technical questions based on that. It also shows them I'm serious and will hit the ground running.

I much prefer talking about relevant code that I've just written to a trip to the whiteboard to answer an esoteric question or hard brain teaser. It's more like a real work environment and the questions, at least I think, are more authentic to the task: why did you implement that algorithm this way instead of another? what are the code's limitations or where can it be improved? how would it scale?
And my point is that your point doesn't matter. Evolution doesn't care about your "goals". If any chunk of a population reproduces more than others, consistently, it will eventually form the majority, in a fairly short period of time.

You seem to be trying to prevent this from being true by sheer volume of analysis. Evolution doesn't care about your analysis, either. It doesn't matter why some people have more children than others in an affluent society. It doesn't even have to be an integer number of children like "3" vs. "2", it only has to be a trend.

If you want to have a separate debate about how children impact your quality of life, than say so and have at it. It is from my reading of your other messages that I get the sense that you are almost willfully denying what other people are saying. Perhaps that is not true. But step one is to agree that in the end, it simply doesn't matter what the reasons are, only the actions and their results.
I love how technology costs always come down over time. Server4You has $39 USD actual dedicated with .75 RAM - not bad. Although, I always shy away from AMD processors, maybe because of the horribly slow experience I had on a friend's Gateway computer back in the day. Is this just me?
For pointers I think it's much more readable to use boolean NOT.

if (ptr) {
ptr->foo();
} else {
die();
}

or

if (!ptr) {
OhNoes();
}

Also, you can extend the whole lhs-rvalue thing to for loops. Makes them look funny but you get used to it quickly, especially after it helps you avoid a few bugs.

for (i = v.begin(); v.end() != i; ++i) {
i->stuff();
}
Maybe if you remove all third party fonts it'll work again.
</sarcasm>

Jokes out of the way - they did just release a new line of incredible and ground breaking iMacs, Macbooks, etc. All along with the news of their most profitable quarterly earnings, and the general disdain for Windows 7.

I wouldn't be surprised if the mind-flow went like this for consumers:

"Wow I want one of those new macs!"
"Damn those are expensive..."
"But I don't want a windows machine..."
"I'll get a netbook, and then hackintosh it, I'll save money, get the experience I want, AND save 15% or more on my car insurance!"

Apple could have seen something like this happening on a larger scale and simply "tweaked" the OS with the latest update to prevent mass pirating.
I think you are right that this is the real story. The article itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If the reason you are getting a Ph.D. is because you want to teach college kids or get a 'BGN' job, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. The only reason to get a Ph.D. is because you want to publish academic research. And if you show up without already knowing what you want to be researching, you're probably not ready to get a Ph.D. yet.

That's not to say that academia isn't horribly broken, it is, but in some places it really seems like the author is going off in the wrong direction.
I see you guys running all over the place. Give me some feedback. Is drawing intuitive? Do you wish you could customize your character?
Actually, I make a point of asking to see a sample of production code anywhere I interview, and have done for a while. Nowhere has ever refused, although most places have asked to wait until the following interview if not warned in advance (which is best if possible).

This has been a very enlightening practice. To date, almost 100% of the places that showed me code put me off enough that I wouldn't have accepted any offer from them. The way they wrote their code told me more about the deep-rooted problems they had than anything anyone could ever say or not say in an interview.

It was fairly obvious to all concerned that those places and I weren't a good fit, though, and most didn't make me an offer in the end anyway. But if feedback was at all honest, asking to see their code has nothing to do with that, and in fact it was more often taken as a positive sign that I was genuinely interested, which at that stage I was.

My other favourite thing to do is turn questions around. If the people interviewing me at a smaller company are supposedly the senior technical people and they're assessing my abilities during a discussion about a code snippet (mine or theirs) in the interview, then I'm going to assess theirs as well: I will use a certain level of terminology, or mention related concepts, or allude to alternative design possibilities, and watch for their reactions and where the discussion goes. In other words, I would be assessing technical interviewers just the same way that I assess a candidate from the other side of the table, and for much the same reasons.

By the way, you should never feel insulted just because someone asks you to write code at interview, no matter what your level. I used to get some mild irritation from that, but having interviewed supposedly very experienced candidates, I have found that even those with great-looking CVs can be clueless no-hires in practice. The point of the basic coding test isn't to make the really good people stand out, it's to make the really bad people stand out. Of course, if you rapidly produce a decent answer to the simple coding problem, continuing with more simple coding problems starts to say more about the interviewer/company policy than anything else, and you might reasonably question whether they are wasting your time at that point.
Is The VC Model Broken? Mark Suster and Jason Calacanis Discuss.
Exactly. Even as an owner of an Atom-based Hackintosh netbook, I can't fault Apple for not maintaining support for hardware they never supported in the first place.

EDIT: Also: it seems to me that if Apple really intended to put a dent in the Hackintosh movement, they'd do something far more drastic than make things slightly inconvenient for netbook owners with a point release.
Maybe a good tip for beginners who confuse = and ==, but I don't recall ever making this error, and I've written a ton of code.
Can you supply some links to this "academic research [that is] so clear and unambiguous"? I came to a similar conclusion years ago and would be interested in retracing your steps.

As for the not-understanding-it part, how is it hard to understand? It's effective marketing. The industry doesn't make money by people getting better, it makes money by getting (their) drugs into them. Humans are a vehicle for the delivery of their product. (So now are pets. The opening of the pet market for antidepressants is so classic a move that it will surely be studied in business schools.)

The vegetable oil industry did the same thing, ingeniously, against dairy fat. Remember those decades of propaganda about how butter and cream mean cholestorol which means heart attacks which mean death? It was an industry contrivance. The original studies it was based on were shamelessly cherry-picked. The campaign leveraged the widespread public fear that derived from the heart-attack epidemic of the 1950s and 60s. (Edit: I learned this from a CBC Ideas episode a few years ago.)
But those companies was properly not those he was replying to.

Sure if you want to get into Frogcreek or Google then you need to spend months preparing (which is why I wont, since it is in the end just another job), but honestly many companies would be happy hiring somebody who cared enough to write a blogpost.
there's a 9/10 chance they'll find the Higgs

Are there any such wagers available in London? If so, what odds do they quote?

Does Lloyd's of London sell insurance against a black hole event? :-)
There's nothing built in to celery for this, but some people have already made different solutions (one which may be added as standard in the future). There's a ChainableTask where you can chain tasks together, the next running when the previous is finished, and they can optionally take the result of the previous task as a parameter.
Compte NCsoft
Not everyone likes arbitrage when it is used "against" them.
So you're replacing vendor lock-in with incompetence. I'm not quite sure which is more likely as there is extensive evidence on both sides of the coin.
When would a consumer ever think of getting a Hackintosh?
Which is why i spent $100 on my PC and run XP using the PID that came stuck to it :)

More money to spend on my family.
15 Best Schools To Get an Online Degree
I use hetzner.de and they have been awesome.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
If there was incompetence. They don't sell OSX to install on netbooks - in no way is that advised. If it was advised I'd bet they'd ship a lot more OSX discs than they do. But no, they ship those discs to upgrade your Apple hardware to the latest operating system that they made work with your Apple hardware.
This seemed very unusual (I live in Japan), so I looked for more info...

Shigeo Ozeki, the CEO at Internet marketing services firm axiv.com, opens a closet in his office. Inside are some untidily folded keys to business success at his firm -- sleeping bags. Ozeki's 19 full-time employees work long hours, many from 10 a.m. to 2 or 3 a.m. seven days a week. "But it depends on where they live and if they have to go home or not," says Ozeki. Often there just isn't time to go home.

http://www.japaninc.com/article.php?articleID=91
1. Again, nothing about doing a dispute / chargeback precludes you from making a public stand against the company, so you need to stop conflating the two; they're orthogonal.

2. You have already tried to resolve the matter, and according to your own post, you have reached the point where you qualify for the dispute resolution protection offered by Mastercard. So why are you bringing this up?
Let me guess: SPARC CPUs are very fast in creating SHA256 hashes, right?

And, BTW, I am in no means implying this is bad. Quite the contrary - I would love to have an inexpensive SPARC-based desktop. If it existed.
This is not vendor lock-in (if anything it's vendor lock-out, if anyone were to coin such a silly term).

It is difficult to switch to Apple hardware, but switching away is as easy as installing Windows on a Mac.
Nested tables? Zeldman's going to be furious.
I think it hurts readability. But sometimes it is nice to skip a null check. i.e. instead of:

if (a != null && a.equals(b))

You can often do:

if (b.equals(a))
From my experience, I've seen a huge difference in the quality of developers between companies that conducted strenuous coding tests and those that didn't, although I'm not sure if the relationship is causal. It certainly does help weed out candidates like the author, who is clearly not passionate about the companies he's applying to.

I once took a class in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The professor moonlighted as a consultant for corporations. His advice was for companies to give real-life problems in interviews, as it's the most effective indicator of future job performance. The equivalent in our industry would be coding tests.
First, for dealing with obfuscation and evasion, you're reading, not writing.

Second, for every 100 people that talk about e.g. self-modifying viruses or shellcode, there is perhaps 1 person who can actually write something soup-to-nuts, and maybe 5-10 more who can modify that code to make it do something new.

Reading assembly is important for security research. Writing, not as much.
Or just take your own advice and bring a code portfolio.
Freaknonomics: Not so random after all
Another question is when was depression first classified to the scope at which it is today. We can't know if its rising or falling over an extended period of time without such info.
The mis-use of the term "vendor lock-in" aside, how is it incompetent to not support something you don't support?
There are no 9" or 10" Macs. It's not so great to carry around a 13" laptop when you want a 9" one.

(Fortunately, Linux doesn't have this problem. It supports Atom out of the box.)
Too bad, I had considered emulating OSX to see if it was worth something but I guess I will just continue using a real computer.
Poll: What's your level of educational attainment
chasingsparks asked for a poll of educational attainment. Sounds interesting. Here goes.
Some College
Some High School
I am not sure how can anyone in his right mind claim this is unexpected. Apple has always been one of the more closed companies in this market. It's is the only remaining computer maker from the 70s/80s that makes its own exclusive platform. The fact it uses a somewhat open Unix is a historical accident: Steve Jobs wanted to enter the Unix workstation market with NeXT and it had to be Unix-based.
After reading a Wired article on how well it works?
I wonder if they controlled for socioeconomic biases. High fast food intake is correlated to a bunch of other things.
Optimizing for the Intel Atom CPU
What's an example of one your extremely difficult questions?
At http://xp-dev.com there's no SSL on the free accounts - those users who want tougher security of their code transmitting over the wire do have to upgrade. (disclaimer: I own and run xp-dev.com)
How Does Your Startup Stackup? - nPost Metrics
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917219
My startups's new service for parents - A Story Before Bed
Javascript in a Single Picture
Enumerating a context-free language
corollary: if you don't want to spend money, there's always Linux and BSD.
Or, you accept that their main focus, is making the software work with the hardware they say it works with :/

Do you also bemoan linksys for releasing firmware updates that only work with linksys products and not others?
Well, I would be very surprised if the mind-flow went like that. I think relatively few Apple customers even know what "hackintosh" means.
Modern kernels have very little assembly, outside of things like locore. They've heavily abstracted away the things you'd normally write in assembly, like modifying MSRs; also, so much of what you do now is simply memory mapped.

In all of xnu, not counting AES, there are ~17kloc in x86 assembly, most of it in osfmk/i386 --- where no normal developer is ever going to go. There are over 730kloc in C.
A tiny niche in collectible coins grows into a $5 million mini-empire
I've seen good performance from AMD. I'd blame performance on gateway before i'd blame it on AMD.