skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been seeing the same basic topic come to the top of hacker news over and over. I thought the with the advent of GitHub, Stack Overflow and easily sharable web and app projects that this would make vetting software developers easier. Are these resources not being utilized at all in the hiring process? Am I to believe that a software developer with several years of professional experience, references, and some sort of work portfolio can't code at all? I don't get it.
That phrasing implies that it's targeted to those who enjoy Coors Light, so I wouldn't buy it. But there are still many ways to market the product more honestly.

For example, they could be entirely open about this product being something new and different but from the same manufacturer. An example of this is Nya Carnegiebryggeriet, "a collaborative joint venture between Carlsberg Sweden and Brooklyn Brewery"[1]. They don't try to hide the fact that it's owned by Carlsberg[2] (4th largest brewery group in the world), but they make it very clear that it's a different category from their regular lineup.

If that seems to risky, they could sell it under a different brand without deliberately attempting to deceive customers into thinking it's from a small-scale craft brewer. Just present the product honestly under a new name without the misleading bullshit.

[1] http://www.nyacarnegiebryggeriet.se/en/brewery/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsberg_Group#Carlsberg
I think trivial questions meant FizzBuzz and count the A's.

What's the legal equivalent of that?
yep, $30/hr is roughly the salary of a GS-12-01, which is what fresh-out PhDs are usually hired in at in federal service:

http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-...
The real problem is when you have someone who is just competent enough to deliver mostly-working bit terrible code. Which the rest of the team has to maintain.

If the person is fresh out of college, of course, this is understandable and a senior person will likely be mentoring them, and reviewing their code. But when you have two such people who gravitate to reviewing each other's code, you have a serious problem that may not be immediately apparent.
This is one of those instances where if you get caught they'll arrest you but you probably won't get charged. At least where I live, if it went to court your attorney could spend all kinds of time exploring where it came from, which is something the government would rather not talk about.
Creating Cloud Foundry BuildPacks Using Docker
That's not how the shim works.

The shim loader is an MIT-licensed piece of code that's signed by a Secure Boot CA, typically MS for off-the-shelf x86 hardware. The shim has another public key hard-coded into it, and verifies that the next bootloader (usually GRUB 2) is signed with that key. It works around a couple of issues:

- The turnaround time for getting something signed by MS is slow. Linux distros want to be able to push out a new version of GRUB on their own. So by having the CA sign a shim loader, new versions of the boot loader can be signed with the distro's key alone, which they can automate as much as they want.

- There's some ambiguity over the GPLv3's TiVoization clause, so to avoid any interpretation that MS would have to hand over its own private key, MS won't sign any GPLv3 software directly (like GRUB). The distros think this is a non-issue, and they're happy to sign their own GRUB binaries without imagining they'd have to give up their private keys.

It doesn't change the security model of Secure Boot at all. You're still verifying that someone whose key is in hardware has a trust path to your bootloader. It's just that the trust path is one more step away.

If you want to include your distro's key in the UEFI variable that lists your Secure Boot CA roots, you can do that, and skip the shim. (You probably can't remove MS's key because UEFI drivers are signed with it, but that's a different issue.)

Some distros (notably Ubuntu) have their bootloader willing to boot unsigned kernels, on the grounds that Secure Boot protects UEFI "boot services" (things that run while UEFI still controls the machine, including access to certain UEFI variables like Secure Boot config), but does not protect ring 0. Other distros (Fedora, SuSE, etc.) think that that's nonsense, and Secure Boot obviously protects ring 0. So their bootloader only boots signed kernels, and those kernels, in turn, only load signed kernel modules.

MS has complained about Ubuntu's interpretation, but has so far not shown any signs of forcing Ubuntu to change their practices. (I suspect with no real information that MS is worried that, if they're holding the only CA for PC hardware and they revoke the most popular Linux distro, they're going to be reminded of what antitrust lawsuits feel like.) You can see MS's signing policy here, including a link to the (non-MS) shim:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_hardware_certification/archi...
It's an interesting point, since I don't know how much other engineering fields are beset with this problem. The article features a photo of a collapsed bridge, but obviously its topic is software. Do civil or aerospace engineering firms have the same problem of incompetent coworkers who manage to pass all their interviewing hurdles? It seems hard to imagine -- I don't know how I'd fake the math on static and dynamic loads without actually knowing what I was doing. Why is software so different, lacking basic shared and provable prerequisite skills?
This site is completely blank with noscript on.
I've gotten interviewed by people who thought they were great but didn't know what they were doing. And I mean for serious companies like Pebble. 22 year olds who can't even properly phrase interview questions.

Whose the terrible engineer? Me with a patent and 25 years of innovation in key major products like the playstation network? Or the guy who interviewed me who gave me a thumbs down for being "terrible"? Or maybe it was just cause I have grey hair in my beard?

I see a lot of attitude about how there are "bad engineers" that seems to come from younger people who are very ... proud ... of their skills, but are more bluster than brains in my opinion.

I don't think they're terrible- I think they have potential. But they have the wrong attitude.
Disclaimer: Not defending threatening her. Definitely defending SendGrid for firing her though.

> by people that were extremely angered by something that should have been easily dismissed as a mistake.

It was a pretty big mistake on her part, going on for days and as far as I am aware she never apologized.

> Her apparent pattern of reacting loudly to small offenses ... also isn't something to become angry and outraged over.

Also not when it costs two people their jobs?
Russian Soldiers – Lincoln McConaughey Ads Parody
I would be deeply suspicious if that person was in fact a terrible engineer. More likely than not they'd be in a wrong place, doing the wrong sort of job.
I probably overstate that point, but it is less likely you can see they are on the phone. My point still stands - it's not the responsibility of the driver to peer into the car next to them to see their behaviour. In fact, that's downright dangerous.
Here are some resources I found useful (on top of Tufte):

1. Work of Alberto Cairo: http://www.thefunctionalart.com.
2. Searching Pintrest for UI/UX, dashboard, information design related keywords.
3. Work of Ben Fry and Fathom: http://fathom.info.
4. Work of Georgia Lupi and Accurat: http://giorgialupi.net and http://www.accurat.it.
5. Infosthetics Blog: http://infosthetics.com.
6. Work of Gregor Aisch from New York Times: http://driven-by-data.net
7. Information Graphics book from Taschen: http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/design/all/04984/f...

The last one is a huge brick with many interesting and/or beautiful examples and it also exists as iBook for about $10!

The above resources contain another set of links to great many sources of inspiration...
What makes something a threat or not is not the conclusions the recipient of the message jumps to.
I like this idea. You could even auto-generate branded mobile/web ordering apps just for those restaurants as a way for them to uniquely market themselves, and could be used as a revenue stream besides the exchange.
Or perhaps they have learned the solution to FizzBuzz, and simply don't code well under stress.
TerrAvion (YC W14) is hiring back-end engineers to make our hybrid cloud fly
Don't know if this post (http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/data-visualization-mistake...) can help, but I enjoyed it a lot. I think I can be applied to Dashboards too.
Is this always nepotism, or does it have something to do with the reluctance some organizations have in firing someone?
I've never seen such an incompetent person hired anywhere I worked for.

I did see similarly qualified people turn up to interviews but they were all invariably rejected.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7769
In your introductory course you might be asked what precedent is, but after that it's cases, statutes and IRAC: Issues, Rules, Application and Conclusion.
Many, many dev candidates do not have a Github account with any code on it, nor do they have an SO account with any answers on it. And past work often belongs to the employer (and was written by a team anyway), so.

If you want to say "don't hire those people," you're being far more restrictive than those who want to do fizzbuzz-style weed outs.
I don't know goldman, and I bet you don't either - but there's a pretty big difference between this solution (which clearly cheats the aim of the challenge, and a solution that actually compresses. People hate to reward cheaters, even if it's a fun kind of cheat from the outside. But that doesn't mean he wouldn't have payed out for a real solution, which likely would have been quite interesting (and not quite as impossible as it's being made out to be, since we don't know whether his random source is truly random).
Clojure refactoring in Light Table
Show HN: iCantHear – An app for communicating with the deaf
It's totally twisted, because "business types" got involved and everyone started confusing "hacking" with "working". This story is a cool but simple hack, in the original meaning of the word. I find that a good definition of a hack is "a project or a trick that you can tell to your tech friends over a beer and have some good laugh from it".
Apple makes some of the best and worse choices, often even simultaneously.

Good: No firmware setup UI. Leave the user out of it.

Good: Firmware built-in GUI boot manager that discovers currently bootable OS's dynamically. Plug in an external, an icon appears with an animated reveal. Animation in the f'n firmware built-in boot manager.

Bad: That boot manager hard wires a label "Windows" for any legacy CSM-BIOS installed OS, even if it isn't Windows.

Mixed: Apple's firmware is mainly based on Intel 1.10, with some extensions such as UEFI GOP, and some Apple stuff. It's not a standard UEFI 2.x firmware at all, and it's not documented at all. 3rd party bootloader programs have to have physical access to Macs to poke them with a stick in order to figure out how they work due to Apple's closed nature. So if you care about running open source OS's on Apple hardware, this is probably more "bad" than "mixed".

Very bad: There's a long standing pernicious bug with Disk Utility, on Boot Camp'd drives (OS X + Windows) which permits the user to resize the OS X volume thereby creating a 5th partition: ESP, OS X, New Partition, Apple Boot, Windows. And Apple's tools remove the hybrid MBR, replace it with a protective MBR, and now Windows is unbootable. All without warning. This behavior violates their own proscription against manipulating drives with hybrid MBRs. Technote 2166: "If block 0 contains any other form of MBR, it should refuse to manipulate the disk." Their message boards have hundreds of such complaints. This isn't new, it's been a problem for years, it was bug reported years ago, and Apple basically blamed it on Windows rather than their own tool which actually causes the problem by wiping out the PMBR.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2166/_in...

So I'm not a fan of their hybrid MBR hack, even though earlier on it was probably unavoidable. Windows has supported UEFI booting since Vista, but Apple's kinda dragged their feet on supporting UEFI Windows boot until very recently, and I'm not even certain Boot Camp Assistant defaults to this behavior yet.
> "I strongly believe that a big chunk of the audience here would not steal, kill etc without reason even if they were sure not to get caught."

At one data entry job I had I got paid for piece work, instead of by the hour. One time they screwed up the math and overpaid me, by a lot (nearly a whole paycheck worth). It took a lot to convince the people in charge that they'd fucked up and needed to take the money back.
Isn't seccomp-bpf similar to OpenBSD's (failed) systrace? Both are basically filters for system calls if I'm not mistaken.
> the wallets of this world satisfy nobody

I don't know what it's like in the USA, but in germany wallets of this type are used by everybody and everybody's happy: http://i.imgur.com/v3mRk1H.jpg

Still, nice to read more details about the internal workings of a kickstarter campaign.
One solution to all of this is for the applicant to do a few things to avoid being confused for a terrible engineer. The last time I looked for a job, more and more companies were asking for an engineering design portfolio. Instead of waiting for the employer to ask you to talk intelligently about things you haven't learned yet, show up to the interview with a portfolio of things you can discuss on a detailed level for hours on end.

I've only been working professionally for a little under 4 years, but I've encountered a handful of terrible engineers - engineers who only know one solution and apply it to every problem that presents itself, very smart, technical people who know enough to hack something together and leave the difficult, last 20% for other people to solve, etc.

Another issue, especially in larger companies, is you have to allow a bad engineer to fail in order to justify firing them. In a fast paced environment, sometimes you can't allow a project to fail simply to provide cause to fire an engineer. And even after the failure, HR will require you to implement a performance improvement plan, etc.
Can we change the perception of the wrist turn? #applewatch
I don't accept the premise that she cost Hank his job.

Conveniently, my argument is that the incident itself didn't deserve all the negative attention it got (it should have mostly been ignored), and in the absence of all that negative attention, Hank probably would not have lost his job.

Also, my point was to respond to the comparison you made:

And here folks I guess we have a real case of harassment.

I think there is a line to be drawn somewhere between here and pycon (two men talking privately about something that could be understood as offensive).

There's very little denouncement of the dongle joke. There's wide agreement that it wasn't outrageous. It wasn't the remarkable thing about the incident, merely the first thing that happened. Yet you've characterized 'pycon' as being on the other side of some line that defines real harassment.
Quite a few times, after getting a technical screen, the interviewer's attitude was "You loser! Why are you wasting my time interviewing here?" But I know that I'm really productive and really know my stuff.

When my employer was interviewing, the two best candidates (by my analysis) failed their technical screening.

I don't see any easy solution.

It also seems weird that employers complain of a talent shortage, but they always are looking for every little excuse to reject someone.
I'd say you're good. Some quick maths:-

Even if you only use a relatively small dictionary (of 32,000 words). Just picking two words at random is a billion combinations. Throw in some different punctuation symbols, plus a 3 digit number and that's over a trillion password combinations.

Any password throttling only helps, but you cannot rely on every website using it.
This kind of stuff (thermogenics, metabolic accelerators, fat burners, etc) has been used for ages in the gyms in one form or another. Many of the so called "supplements" always regulate the thyroid... So I wouldn't consider this a big "breakthrough" for weight loss.

The short path to weight loss has hidden dangers. Experts don't recommend losing more than 2 lbs/week. Surely you can lose more than that, but not as safely. The winning formula will always be: "Eat better, exercise more".
/r/KotakuInAction. Gaming, journalism, and sea lions. (self.subredditoftheday)
Perhaps, but that's not even close to the balance of probabilities.
I recently read an online conversation about how to spoof GPS coordinates to get in on and even skewing discourse in target areas. Sounds like a lot of fun, unless of course you factor in that most users probably aren't mature enough to critically judge what appears on their screens.
(OP here). You're right: for simple tasks like listing files or changing directories, you probably don't need bish. I should come up with some better examples where bish wins in readability.
I heard him on Dan Patrick a day or two later. He said that he used nothing more than Google to find these people (correlating Twitter handle to real name).
I’ve worked with secretly terrible engineers. I’ve seen lots of code samples submitted by secretly terrible engineers. I’ve been told that putting asserts in the code is bad practice because it means that the code is making assumptions, and I’ve seen my co-workers exult because they were successfully able to change the simple implementation of an interface without having to change the client code. I’ve heard software project managers claim they’d never seen a project fail for technical reasons, and I’ve seen them openly promoting waterfall development. And if you look at the kind of abysmal nonsense that fills sites like w3schools and developerWorks, not to mention the questions on StackExchange, it’s obvious that there’s such a huge volume of Openly Terrible Engineers out there that they frequently don’t know any reasonably good engineers at all.

I’ve also had the privilege of working with a lot of really super awesome people. They didn’t work at the same companies as the total incompetents, for the most part. And they weren’t all geniuses. A lot of them were just regular schmoes who worked every day to get a little bit better.

In almost 20 years in the field, I’ve also actually been the “secretly terrible engineer” — although I’ve been pretty successful in most of my jobs, I’ve also had a couple where I just stunk.

Different people do well in different environments, and software development is a wide enough field that it has a wide variety of environments in it.
There's too many egos, creative flakes and the alike for this to be ever called a stable work environment/career. Especially in the agency world!

Just speaking from my experiences, where I was given trials and then told I rock, then many months later being let go because we no longer clicked and or my side projects hurt their egos.

For me this field and my side projects has been soul crushing!

* Loved if developers/designers could be apart of a union, one that provided a shield from all the bullcrap noted above. Thus, providing better job security and life/work balance.
I actually wasn't aware of that! Thanks for the link.
Interestingly enough, my experience using Yik Yak at a small liberal arts college is quite different. As the article notes, posts get removed if their score reaches -5. My observations are that basically any post with any negative connotations whatsoever is almost immediately downvoted to deletion. It's the opposite of what this article describes: overmoderation rather than undermoderation.
That's what I was going for. Not a replacement for bash the shell, but a language that provides a bit more comfort for programmers while retaining the ability to run on any system your scripts did previously.
There is a large pool of incompetent developers going from one job interview to another. Finding the decent developers amongst this herd is painful.

It's not that there are loads of awful developers lurking in companies (although there are a few). It's that awful developers pollute the waters when hiring.
Reddit is not a reliable source of information. Full stop.
Most of the time the job that a Data Scientist does is a job that a 20$/hour graduate worker does. The Big Picture, I think is how to orient a 30$/hour grad. to cooperate with a highly skilled Data Scientist.
Yeah, in Rust you'd have to go out of your way to use Rc to reference count the large strings.
I used to think that working with harder languages, e.g. C++,Scala,...[0], would avoid such people in the team, but no, some managers always manage to cherry pick them into the projects.

[0] Just one possible example, take your pick.
Ah, but what about Official Scrum Master Certification panels?
My guess - because he could, and likely had some good laugh when discussing it with friends.
There are already dozens of social networks with "effective moderation". Maybe those people who use Yik Yak are using it just because there is no censoring? I bet if they add moderation, the users will migrate to the next thing with no moderation. Please, stop "solving" social problems by limiting free speech.
I'm curious if you have any insight into how coworker Z was hired in the first place.
So I imagine you already have a large database of candidates in there so employers can receive them once they sign up, right?

Otherwise it's a basically a landing page and e-mail sign up for a stack overflow-type careers site and you'll only receive active (with few exceptions, lower caliber) candidates. Hopefully that's not the case, as there would be practically zero chance of success.
The lack of a trailing Z to denote UTC time (because that's all you should be using anyways, but that's neither here nor there). Also, the use of a space instead of a 'T', while compliant, means that any sort of parser that splits on whitespace or does something clever will break things.
Not really.

I'd amend your statement to be "There used to be a very limited thing called BIOS, a collection of historical hacks, which only did one thing decently, but not really well. To make matters worse, in all cases but this one, it completely fell apart. There was no consistent tooling, and when it worked, it was non-inspectable black magic even to the most sophisticated power-user. The limitations of BIOS booting caused different OSes to constantly step on each others feet."

UEFI is different, but actually has a design, supports tooling, any OS can work with it seamlessly without fear of collision, and as result it handles all scenarios simple or complex equally well.

As a bonus it can also do a million things BIOS couldn't, like loading a Linux-kernel directly, from acoss the network, without any intermedia-bootloading proxy or iPXE shim.

Now you can actually put your bootloader setup in source-control. I'm not sure why you would do that, but please go ahead and try that with BIOS.

So yeah. UEFI really isn't that complex. It's just different. It just seems more complex because now even regular guys like us can see all the moving parts, where in the past only OS-designers could peek in.
Grabbed a Nexus 5 myself, because hey, it's pretty hard to beat for $300 and also because of it's tight integration with Google service, with which I myself am tightly integrated.

But, for my mother? She couldn't give a damn less, which is where I think a lot of these smaller manufacturer's will succeed. I actually quite like the idea of a simplified/dumbed-down Android experience that Xiaomi is offering and would seriously consider it for my mother and less tech inclined friends/relatives.