skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> how willing someone is to burn several hours generating code to maybe pass a stage in an interview.

We are well into the area where it is my biases talking and not any sort of well researched finding, but I don't believe in developers who can turn on/off writing good code. Either a developer writes good code, or they don't. Further, I take getting my next job very seriously. I take hiring my next colleague equally seriously. I'd hope that this seriousness (in combination with me asking for a reasonable amount of work sample) would encourage everyone involved to put their best foot forward.

> How would you feel about, say, providing a candidate with a chunk of [source] code and 30 minutes to read through and grok it.

I have never tried this so don't have any experiential recommendations. My instinct is to think that this would be problematic, not because it is wrong to judge someones ability to learn foreign code, rather because the evaluation step would be very hard to filter for someone who learned foreign code quickly, from someone who is great at talking about stuff generally.

If I wanted to judge someones foreign code ability, I would as part of the code project, expect them to interact with a provided set of foreign code. I'd set explicit boundaries about how much they could or could not change it and then judge the candidate on how their new code interacted with the legacy code as well as what and how they changed the legacy system.

> I know reading code is in some ways easier than writing

I don't think that is in the least bit true. I think evaluating a candidates ability to interact with legacy code is a hugely valuable thing to filter on in most environments, it's just very hard to design a fair and repeatable work sample problem around it.
Building a Face, and a Case, on DNA
Nice video! Waiting for my invite.
Not crazy about this.
CSPAN Federal Communications Commission Meeting
The Perfect Time to Invest in the Perfect Investment
Ask HN: Best thing to do in summer break for student?
Hi guys I am first year student studying SE in UK I was wondering what is the best thing to do in the summer break. I "think" that I know Java and PHP pretty well(about 85% percent overall mark). The first thing that came to my mind was to find a job. After about one week of searching I found only one job for junior Java developer(maybe I am searching wrong). The next idea came to my mind was to get certificate, that way I will have better chance of getting a job right ? The oracle Java SE 8 Programmer I cost about 150 pounds, which I think are too much money for person that is not working. Next idea I have was to work for open source project just to meet people, but I think I don't have necessary skills for that. Also I try freelance projects, but almost everyone have more experience than me.

I will be really happy if you can give me some advice what is the best thing to do during this 3-4 mounts time period?
This is bull. It's about concealing from the people who are at the bottom of the range who don't deserve it. THAT'S an awkward conversation to have.
Logo Design According to Zeitgeist: Times Change, Logos Too – NOUPE
yea the landing page is pretty dope. how do we get invites?
>> it doesn't matter what you post in the job description - you still have to wade through applications.

One of the points in the post is that not posting salary information is also a filter. Some would argue that the absence of even a salary range filters out the top end of candidates, leaving you with a pipeline of mediocrity.
Will these promoted apps be as dangerous as websites promoted by browser search? I got this one just now [1]. Virustotal for "Firefox" from that site [2].

1. https://i.imgur.com/JDY7ptq.png

2. https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/4de57439b8fe09b90440b8e82...
The two times I've had that response, I've just taken my current estimate of high salary, added $20,000 and then asked them to confirm that that amount is in their definition of competitive.

First time, they said no and we stopped talking. Second time got me my current job. YMMV.
User Centered Design is orbital, not circular. (Poster)
My understanding of 'competitive' salaries are that the employer doesn't know what range they should be offering. The quickest method of resolving that is to phone them up and go, "You've specified a competitive salary range, I'm looking for a salary of £X for that position, if you feel that's sensible then I'll forward my CV", at which point my CV is then updated to reflect the amount I just specified.

If I'm applying for a job it's because what's there sounds interesting, if the salary backs it up then brilliant. If the salary is poor then maybe I didn't want to work there after all and that's very much their loss.
It could backfire - if I saw a salary stated on a job ad, I would consider it firm. So it it was too low I wouldn't even consider applying, when perhaps they would have been willing to work something out with me if I did.
Two efficient market theorists are walking down the street. They see a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk but keep walking. One turns to the other and says, "If that was real, somebody would have picked it up already."
I couldn't agree more. If we want more transparency from employers we (as engineers) should start with being transparent with each other. I had no idea that legislation existed in the US - that's really interesting!
You didn't have to be all wordy and cocky with your refusal.

Just be like "hey this seems fun but I just don't have the time for the challenge".

How many years of experience do you have?
Ugh, CTE's to construct a tree/graph in SQL Server brings back terrible memories. I'd estimate 25% of our time at one point was spent building aggressive caching in front of it due to the awful performance as more nodes were created.

On a different product now (using PG) and guess what has come up? We need tree nodes! My first thought: anything but CTEs. ltree, materialized paths, neo4j, anything but CTEs. They've just burned me so badly before I'm too afraid to try them in PG.
This is really interesting not just from the security angle.
I read http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitali... this book recently. It talks about how South Korea became an technological powerhouse so quickly compared to their neighbors.
China could be using the security fears, and protectionism to create their own version of silicon valley.
It wouldn't really surprise me, as some US cities like Boston are trying to create their own silicon valley styled area's http://www.technologyreview.com/view/516586/crowding-into-bi....
I usually follow all of these. The one thing that gets me is when a recruiter calls me up. I usually talk to them because I don't want to be a dick and you never know they my actually be valuable one day. I tell them my salary. "oh well this one pays about 70% of that and it's an 8 month contract. I'd like to put you in for this". I'm not leaving a full time position for a contract position with less pay. I might consider a contract position at about 150-200% of my current pay.
Django Facebook, contributors and help needed
Or closing US military bases.
The events that trigger Apache License 2.0 patent termination are much narrower: "If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."
That's reasonable, but I've found that I am no longer put off by open-ended contracts. I found many companies doing this because they know their hiring practices aren't good enough to weed out posers. If you are good at your job, you have little to worry about. Besides, I've lost more jobs that were "permanent" than contract. Employer commitment is a fairy tale from the days of yore.
They appear to be doing "take, modify, distribute as a compiled binary blob that no one else can modify and pass around". It's hard to reconcile that with the word "share".
As someone has spent a significant amount of time and resources coming up with something with similar intentions, this is very interesting to me.

What I don't understand is exactly what you are going for. How is this better than what we have?
I used to share the same sentiment about whiteboard interviews and the cs "fundamentals"(read: brainteasers) interviews. 2 years ago, I failed spectacularly in an interview for a Pinterest internship -- I couldn't answer a single technical question.

Fast forward to this year and and I've breezed through every interview with Google and other companies. I spent months preparing for the interviews, but the preparation was one of the most rewarding things I could have done as a developer at my stage. I feel far more competent as a developer with a solid grasp of algorithms and data structures. I enjoyed the preparation so much, that I started reading white papers on the more cutting-edge cs theory :)
I quite like algorithm design to be one of the judgement criteria for judging submitted work samples. Designing the work sample is very difficult, but the good ones have some box canyons that are easy to fall into without proper attention to algorithms.

I personally have found my computer science academic background invaluable in my career, and think that foundational computer science is useful in nearly any software development position. That said, some of the very best developers I've worked with do not have that foundation, so I do not think it should be used as a selection criteria.

I have historically used email for work samples and then fed them into whatever code review system the company is using. If I were setting up a big hiring pipeline right now I would probably due research about outsourcing the mechanics of collection/testing/code review collaboration to a 3rd party. That said, sending candidates through your real workflow can expose problems on your side, which is a nice side benefit.
>I haven't seen a scalable way to roll out total salary transparency with a net gain in company psychology

#1 Make sure everybody is paid as much as they deserve as far as you can tell.
#2 Roll out total salary transparency.

Not being "scalable" sounds like another way of saying "we don't want to do #1, it sounds expensive. Secrecy is cheaper.".
This one bugs me

"Recruiter: “Why don’t you tell me how much you think you’re worth?”"

Well... what I'm worth to a company depends a whole hell of a lot on how good they are operationally. Company A may be able to extract $500k of value per year from my skills. Company B may only be able to extract $80k of value from my skills. What am I "worth"? It's largely dependent on the environment I'm operating in, and how good they are at organizing everyone's skills to produce/extract value.
I'm personally hoping they target more generic keywords like genres of game or coupon or hotels or stuff like that. I'd be very annoyed if they let advertisers target specific app names like "Facebook", "Twitter", or my own app's very specific name (as long as it isn't generic)
What's amazing to me is all the recruiters who call you to ask if you want to do temp-to-perm work when you have a full-time job. Why would you agree to that?
A Field Guide to the Internet Infrastructure That Hides in Plain Sight
Positivity Self Test
Ask HN: Movies that changed your perspective for the better?
I was looking for that site too.
once it happened worse to me, I specified my minimum acceptable price at the first contact, went trough three interviews, then they offered 87% of what I asked.
Teenage stoners break in to a house and get themselves shot by the occupant legitimately defending himself. I feel bad for the homeowner having to be put through all this.
Traditionally, dual licensing works with GPL plus a "regular old commercial" license to integrate the library (it's usually a library) into the proprietary code.

It's a viable model for some things, like libraries; not so much for others.

Funding open source is a tricky problem. It is, in some ways, a 'public good' in the economics sense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
This one looks reasonably good to me. What in your opinion is full featured News.YC friendly bookmarklet?
Code under the Microsoft Reference Source License is also available, but would you not consider it an abuse if, say, Microsoft made a LLVM-based language under that license?

The code being available is only useful if you can use it, and my point is that projects under most FOSS licenses can't use GPL-licensed code, which only takes without giving back in a usable form.
You are probably missing a lot of candidates. Maybe that's ok because employers seem to be ok with a ton of false negatives to avoid one false positive. I can't count how many positions that don't list salary that I came to find out pay about half what I expected. It's almost of waste of time for job seekers, actually for both of us.
Just search for the pdf version on Google.
Nothing will come of this. Who will bother to sue?
I assume the answer to his baseball question (why do baserunner go counter-clockwise?) is that most players bat right-handed. When the idea of running around the bases developed it made sense for batters to run to a base in front of them, which for a right-handed better meant a counter-clockwise trip around the bases.
I just said the same thing. Unless I absolutely couldn't stand another day in my full time gig I would never leave for temp work.
The lesson here is don't commit crimes, especially not those that involve risk of death. Which, given the abundance of legal firearms, is quite likely. Thus circling back to don't commit the crimes.
You are forgetting that private entities are also members of the public. Just because one private entity may benefit does not mean others cannot. When the commercial vehicle uses the public road, it does not exclude anyone else from using it, except to the extent that it causes traffic congestion. When the public buys a bus, it has the bus. The company it buys from could have sold that bus to anyone else who wanted one.

In this case, the private patent-holders take the benefit and exclude the rest of the public from it.

If you need it to be more clear, public funds should not be used in a manner that exclusively benefits only a few enumerable private parties. It doesn't quite roll off the tongue as easily, but there it is.
I think the lack of highlighting and indentation support in some of those tools is a pain and adds unnecessary mental overhead.

Whether a candidate can reason about the correctness of their code without using a debugger is a useful data point though. Both in a more abstract way and by manually tracing at least part of the program instead of stepping through it with a debugger. If you struggle to manually trace code in your favorite language, that raises some questions in my mind.
Actually recompiling Plan 9 takes about 60 seconds on my current Thinkpad.
This is not correct...the DOE labs are government-owned, contractor operated (GOCOs). Except the one in Pittsburgh, which is owned and operated by the government.
Sundial. Northern hemisphere. Done.
I don't particularly know how things work in the UK for students, but here in the US the best idea would be an internship or a summer coding program (Google and similar companies do a few of them for students).
You have to understand there are a lot of jobs, but there are a small amount of jobs you actually want.

Quality programming jobs with great co-workers, management, environment, stacks, etc, etc, are rare.

People talk and nobody wants to work with the smarmy arrogant guys that seem to be everywhere these days.
I worked at a place that had recursive ACLs. We used CTEs and it was pretty darn quick. We only had on the order of a million records, though, so ymmv.
terrible article, but i honestly had never thought about other satelites/moons
I understand that, but while the FSF might criticize liberal licenses, both GNU and many other GPL projects use code under those licenses, while their code is closed to the original projects. That's what bothers me.
Ask HN: Help, paralyzed by choices.
http://pastebin.com/A97JDeNX
These are some very nice tips! One of the things I like so much about ActiveRecord is that it plays nice with pretty much every example here, e.g. `Product.where("title ~* 'title'")` or `Product.where("title ~* ?", title)`. A few other remarks:

- I'm so glad to see someone talking about `generate_series` for time-series reports. I often see queries that are `GROUP BY date`, which is usually okay, but will skip an output row if you have no data for a certain day. If you want to force one-row-per-day, use `generate_series`.

- His `GROUP BY` query can be rewritten with less repetition like this:

SELECT sku,
SUM(price),
date_part('month', created_at) m
FROM invoice_items
GROUP BY m
HAVING m = 9

In other words, `GROUP BY` and `HAVING` can reference expressions that are aliased in your `SELECT`.

- Also on this query: In Postgres if `sku` is a primary key, then you can `SELECT` other columns from `invoice_items` without including them in `GROUP BY`, e.g. `SELECT sku, name, supplier_id, etc`. I think even joined stuff is okay: `SELECT sku, suppliers.name`.

- One more nit on this query: I think this is backwards from what he meant?: "having to be sure that whatever you GROUP BY is in your SELECT clause."

- Usually I don't use window functions where a `GROUP BY` will do, but to me the biggest value in window functions is they don't force any particular structure on the overall query, so they don't constrain you the way `GROUP BY` does. He kind of alludes to this when he shows per-sku monthly sales combined with total monthly sales. Good example!

- I'm not sure his CTE example shows much added value from the CTE, but maybe I'm missing something. The three places I really like CTEs are (1) recursion, (2) with INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE and RETURNING, (3) very big queries. But a lot there depends on taste.

- When you use `string_agg` and friends, you can give an ordering for just that function: `string_agg(downloads.title, ',' ORDER BY products.sku)`. That syntax works for every aggregate function (I believe), although it's especially useful for the *_agg family.

Thanks for sharing these tips! I wish more people knew the cool things you can do beyond SELECT x FROM y.
patio11 has a good suggestion in this article (see the last section "A Brief Meditation on OSS") - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementatio...
Its a good thing you're taking college seriously and working hard to complete your assignments.

I'm sure you'll do well in the future with based on the initiative you've put in so far.
I absolutely think that your work sample project should have reasonable time requirements. I shoot for "a candidate that we would want to hire should be able to do this in 2-5 hours over the course of a week or 2".

If a candidate is unwilling to invest that much time in our process, that is perfectly within their rights and I respect that. But I'm not going to sacrifice my time for them either. If I need to cut time commitments from my hiring pipeline I will do it at the interview component. I would gladly trade 4 hours of work sample time for a half day of onsite interviews for instance.

As far as eliminating obvious misfits, I'd argue that a mechanical suite of tests (I like to provide say 70% of them to the candidate) gets much lower false negatives and much higher true positives than any "simpler" test you can devise.

The Guerrilla guide is a very good starting point btw, but I think it misses the central problem, which is, interviewing is not a reliable way to filter candidates for software development jobs, no matter how you do it.
Patents are granted on who files for the patent first. The invention protected must be non-obvious to the notional skilled practitioner in the relevant arts and should never have been disclosed in public before (novelty).
Announcing Docker Compose
Announcing Docker Machine
That's the method that Disqus used as well.[1] Later on they used a materialized path solution [2], but I remained impressed that the recursive query worked so well at their scale, enough so that I used the same method in a personal project that had a hierarchical comment system. Happily, it wasn't much of a hack to do this in Django... the raw query support is quite good; you don't have to sacrifice the ORM to do something like this.

[1] http://cramer.io/2010/05/30/scaling-threaded-comments-on-dja...

[2] http://cramer.io/2012/04/08/using-arrays-as-materialized-pat...
Scaling Docker with Swarm
Hyperloop Construction Starts Next Year with the First Full-Scale Track
Microsoft should Not have a four-front war
[edit: I previously said I didn't understand Alex's point.] I now understand the point you were trying to make. A better way to put it - if a random number generator were used in a decision process, I'd favor making the algorithm and random seed explicit.

Any procedure you use will have assumptions. You can't escape this. The only question is whether we show or hide them. Can you give an argument in favor of hidden assumptions and non-explicit procedures?
I think ideally, I would want something like an abstraction built upon something like Susy where I would not have to know as many css details http://susy.oddbird.net/
How do you determine if your tree is pathological? I.e., what types of tree structures would you find the closure table model to be pathological enough to warrant other modeling options?
Asynchronous programming in an easy way
Unlikely to garner much favour declaring 'Free Ebook from O’Reilly and NGINX' and giving away only 3 chapters...
Do Dying Whales Have Graveyards Where They Prefer to Die?
I've been keeping a list of several hundred Swift urls on my site that I update every few days: http://bit.ly/1l97xui

I also keep the list as a tsv on github: https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources

I've also been toying around with the idea of crawling each url and creating a small search engine. Not sure if it's worth the effort.
Star Wars! Spent tons of time happily playing with Star Wars toys as a kid. Definitely made my life better.
This is a huge change. I personally am very excited about it. At the moment if you want to drive installs to a mobile app, the primary channel is Facebook. It's hard to reach customers any other way. I have worked on apps with a relatively high customer LTV, and we could afford to pay for something like this, but there was no way to do it.

Generally speaking I think it will be good for consumers in the long run as well. This will surface the apps that are making money (which is in some way a proxy for providing value, usually) faster than the apps that are simply most popular.
How, exactly? This may be keeping track of someone else's team, but not my team, nor can I see any method of "using" it.
Busybox have filed multiple lawsuits over GPL violations, and won: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits
There's a difference between not posting salary and not telling a potential candidate when asked. Given that in America at least incredibly few companies post salary ranges to the public it is a stretch (and insulting) to claim applicants for positions with no posted salary are desperate.
I would respect a company significantly more if this is how the negotiations started. It addresses their need to determine if their range is on par with the market rate, and it allows both parties to minimize wasted time if they aren't.

Sadly I rarely see this happen in practice. It would be nice to see studies about how this affects the average cost to recruit a new employee.
The Year the Dam of Denial Breaks – Ready for the Flood?
"In fact, in the past year, we paid more than $7 billion to developers distributing apps and games on Google Play."

Do they mean when I buy someone's app and send them my money that they are taking the credit for "paying" the developer? If so then that's wrong. My bank doesn't pay my bills. I pay my bills using my bank's system.
So inbound.