skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow! I've been following your blog for a while and I would never have expected someone like you to get fired. It's good that you're speaking out. I have to admit I'm really curious about the reason you got fired but I guess it's none of my business. Looking forward to see what you will do of your following months, be it getting hired or drinking whiskey all day long while next to a typewriter. Please blog about it :)
I have a lot of family in France, and based on what I've heard from them, the flip-side of those kinds of employment protections is that employers become much more reluctant to hire people (especially young people and people considered higher risk based on background, skills, etc.)

Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.
You're right, it is a very American way of doing business. But you haven't put forward any argument against it, other than basically saying that it makes you feel icky.

We have a very individualistic culture in America. It has its positives and negatives. But most of the people here (software developers in America) have greatly benefited from that culture - we have a tremendous amount of opportunity in a field we enjoy and do very well financially. So we have no reason to complain. Even when we are fired most of us will find another job quickly that is still several times the median Western wage.

I would say the results speak volumes as well. We are the center of the startup world and our big tech companies disproportionately dominate world markets.

But there's one thing that I imagine has to be universal, which makes me wonder how much industry experience you've had. I think almost all of us have had the experience of working with someone who is a drag on their team. A bad developer does not result in 0 productivity, but huge productivity losses for the team. Sometimes people do just not work out, although maybe in Europe instead of firing them you rubber room them.
Being able to deal with a stressful situation calmly is a mark of solid training and a work culture that emphasizes level headedness.

In addition to training though I wonder if those working in ATC all share similar personality types.
There is a huge difference between 90% (or even 99%) and a 100% eclipsed Sun. People in Norway should really travel to the Faroe Islands to experience totality :)
OneTab is awesome!
Coverage/participation is mandatory - they send collections after you if you stop paying in BC
Everyone has exactly the same process, with the exception of interns. Interns have an abbreviated interview (shorthand: we switch from assessing aptitude to assessing enthusiasm), and any time one came back looking for a full time job, they got fast-tracked. I'm not saying that was the best policy (it did keep us from collecting some extra data), but by the end of an internship you had a really good idea that you wanted to work with someone.

The lede I buried in this post is that we hired more-or-less resume-blind. I had final call on every hire and went through some effort not to look at resumes. On our first-calls, I'd ask some questions that would give me background hints about candidates, but that was primarily to tune my spiel (I didn't want to explain blind SQL injection to someone who'd spent 3 years as a pentester already, for instance).

If I had it to do over again at Matasano, I'd have done it formally resume-blind. Only Dina would have had access to resumes, and interviewers would be forbidden to ask resume questions. The process would have worked better if resumes were firewalled out completely.

There was no culture fit score; in fact, if you gave subjective feedback ("passion", "confidence", "work ethic") your feedback was likely to be discounted. We were proud of the culture diversity we managed to scrounge out of our candidate pool; to have team members with kids who needed to keep strict hours, and team members who'd roll in at 11 and still be there at 8 working on a pet problem. We had drinkers and non drinkers, college students and people with 15+ years of dev experience.

You could get booted from the process for being overtly an asshole (I, for instance, might not get hired), but that happened very rarely and with crystalline clarity.
I really like this idea, and I think its generally right. However, I think its worth recognizing that people can change roles - commandos can become infantry, which can become police.

But for sure, Its important to recognize that this is what the growth pattern looks like, and does highlight that needs and roles change; if you can't or won't, you gotta go - not because you're a horrible commando, but because they only need infantry now.
It's odd you keep saying "all open source lawyers" agree with you, because I can't figure out who you could possibly mean. Like, which specific human being do you believe agrees with you? I've studied copyleft almost daily for two decades, and I'm aware of the position of nearly anyone who has ever called themselves an "open source lawyer" in the world, so one would think I'd know who you are talking about since I "know them all" and I can't figure out who I could ask that would give me the same argument as you give.

The only lawyers I find who agree with your position (and, BTW, they agree with it for completely different reasons than you state, and I suspect they wouldn't agree with your reading of v2 Section 6) are a few lawyers in Germany.

I thus find myself in the odd situation of having to defend your trolling a bit, because Till Jaeger, Christoph's lawyer in the VMware case, has indeed stated publicly that he believes you can regain a license under GPLv2 by coming into compliance and redownloading in Germany. However, this is likely specific to Germany because no other legal expert I've ever met who has studied this issue has argued it works anywhere else in the world.

This point is therefore salient insofar as this thread is discussing a copyright case in Germany. But, as I wrote in the copyleft.org footnote I referred to earlier, the issue is just an esoteric legal detail except in the case of proprietary relicensing business models. Community-oriented GPL Enforcement Organizations always restore rights anyway once the violator achieves compliance, so the final impact of both interpretations ends up the same in most enforcement actions, unless of course your goal is to abhorrently use strict termination to extort gobs of money, in which case, this detail matters a lot.
Here's a version of it: http://amzn.to/cthr46
No, they passed, but invited me to apply again in a year and a half. That was a couple years ago, and their recruiters have started emailing again, so I guess I didn't do too terrible.

When they told me they passed they also told me that "some people get passed the first time and then study for the next 18 months and do amazing the next time!" and I just don't have the time for that. I already worked myself half to death in my twenties for two startups, I'm not going to study for a test as a second job for a year just to get a job at Google, although I still think it'd be fun and clearly challenging.

I recommend studying your ass off for algorithms (specifically figuring out what algorithm would be best for different real world problems, especially in regards to various Google products, including those you've never really used before) and practicing writing code on a whiteboard before you go. I studied for a solid week and a half beforehand, and it wasn't enough. I was prepared, just not prepared for what they asked me.

That's a common issue I have with these interviews, is that computer science is such a vast field that it's impossible to have everything in your head ready to shoot off in any interview, but interviewers somehow think that if you missed a question or two you're somehow not qualified to work for them, despite having years of direct experience at companies beforehand and being able to Google and refresh literally any topic you might encounter at your job in less than a minute.

Google seemed better than most at that, though. I still found the experience to be valuable and interesting.
It's not realistic, though. You can't possibly research the povenance of every garment, food item, piece of electronics, drop of oil, shelter, and building material you buy. It's impossible.
We will see what happens. I'm hoping I won't see anyone here (or in the tech community) complaining when this new regulation leads to negative consequences down the line.
Yes, they can. They don't need to include their license with the work. When you buy a DVD, you don't get a copy of the licensing terms between the authors and the record company, either.

Just because the CC license was included, that doesn't mean Elsevier is distributing the work under it. And in fact, there's a simple explanation: it's a license for the reader.
Well customers can leave too. I'd say it's a completely different kind of freedom but you are still at the mercy of forces besides yourself.
Vim users are a niche within a niche. Not all developers use Vim or care.
Serving configuration data at scale with high availability
The whole article is about a minor journalist whose page is bigger than some of the world's most interesting people. That clearly shows that summarization is necessary.
Actually, I think the opposite is true; in appsec, the final work product is a list of vulns, so if you want to cheat, it only takes 4 minutes talking to anyone else who has ever succeeded in the process before.

For a dev interview, taking something your team has built and scooping out some of its functionality seems like a test that is significantly harder to cheat on.

For my part: we ran this process for over two years and never discovered any plagiarism. Meanwhile, we drastically increased the size of our team and had total retention; from the time I took over recruiting to the time I left the firm, we lost a total of zero of those hires. All of them worked out.
Do you have more of the story than appears in this article because otherwise it seems like you are jumping to a lot of conclusions.
Similar recording of the BA crash at Heathrow. I am always impressed how professional they do things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCK62U6Fob0

Another one of an engine failure at Manchester - the response of the ATC within 1 second of the mayday call is plain amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhZwsYtNDE
What is the 'classic' GitHub team? 2/3 founders are still there.
"It results that the investment of the federal government with the powers of external sovereignty did not depend upon the affirmative grants of the Constitution. The powers to declare and wage war, to conclude peace, to make treaties, to maintain diplomatic relations with other sovereignties, if they had never been mentioned in the Constitution, would have vested in the federal government as necessary concomitants of nationality. Neither the Constitution nor the laws passed in pursuance of it have any force in foreign territory unless in respect of our own citizens." United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304, 318 (1936).

The U.S. cannot engage in war because the Constitution says so. It can engage in war because it's a sovereign country, and waging war is a characteristic capacity of sovereign countries. Admittedly, the U.S. has entered into certain treaties limiting itself in the conduct of war.[1] But in that case, the U.S. is bound not because of "international law" but because those treaties translate international law into domestic law. And it is bound only to the extent it has agreed to be by those treaties.

[1] E.g., the Geneva Conventions: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/04/drone-strik....
"I wonder if a lot of the cultural complexity you refer to
seems interesting to people because they have lost so much
consciousness of [their] ancestors and the long view
afforded by a knowledge of history. If you don’t know
history, everything today can seem quite novel. But in the
larger context of the story of human history, much of what
fascinates, today, is quite redundant."

Great insight on the contrast between how this Monk community lives with the modern world (paying taxes, working with USDA, financial planing), yet pays no attention to the hypermedia of internet and television that so many people are enveloped in.
I normally respect the things you say on here, but for once, I do have to cry "Citation". If you would be so kind, can you list some of the lots of new browsers that have been released?
> even the ability to render a page with monospace fonts if you want.

Is there any major browser that doesn't allow you to do this?
GPS tracking device found on an activist's car
Draw Biosensors on Your Skin
Work-sample questions is not free from its own evils. They are expensive to device. At big companies, significant portion of candidates dump out their interview questions on Internet so that's a big challenge.

Second, work-sample type of questions are also expensive to answer for candidates so you can probably just ask one question as part of whole interview and that's about it. So any conclusion is drawn from sample of 1 as opposed to sample of 5.

Third, work-sample type of questions requires knowledge of engineering skills that candidate may or may not have developed well at point in time. At many companies, emphasis is how can we solve problem X from algorithms perspective and engineering is just something you learn on the way if you haven't already. Key is ability to figure out computer science part rather than language and tooling part.

Overall, I think many companies blindly try to follow the model of Google, Facebook etc and fall on their face. If you expect your developer to write CRUD apps or do mostly plumbing work, there is no point in asking questions like find common ancestor in binary tree. At other companies, developers are expected to solve computational problems and engineering/plumbing/CRUD is small part of the solution pie. There it makes a LOT of sense to ask candidate to solve problems that requires deep computer science. Also asking as many of as possible so that your sample space is large and outcome has more confidence.
Here's how AAPL did during his absence:

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
In the pre-existing condition days, this could still be an issue, because not being covered at any point would reset the clock.
The point isn't that the taxpayers should cover his mortgage, but that the unemployment benefits should be more commensurate with how much one has paid in.

Anecdotal, but one of my older buddies was laid off. He's been earning north of $250k for over 30 years. He had savings, but assuming he didn't, his max withdrawal would be $698 a week, and only for 6 months, which is a max withdrawal of ~$18k, which is right around what he paid in to unemployment in a year. Ignoring that he'd been paying in ~$15k for years (or, I guess, half of that for awhile, as the pay-in percentage used to be lower), then he's not taking taxpayer dollars, he's taking his own money back. Or at least, a fraction of it, because the state made a lot more off of him than he made off of the state.

If he shouldn't be able to profit off of the state, then the state shouldn't be able to profit off of him.

Otherwise though, the compelling reason that unemployment should be enough to cover one's mortgage is because it is specifically designed to prevent homelessness, as the taxpayer cost of allowing him to go homeless because he had a few week lapse between employment and unemployment benefits is substantially higher than simply giving him more of his own money back.
Hi hackers. This is my first app. I made it to scratch an itch I had: Be able to make a calculation quickly and share the formula and the results (copy/pasting the link). In the next iteration I think I will add some share buttons.

As I said, this is my first app. Please please please give me feedback! Good or bad, everything helps!

Thank you
I'll admit that I'm bad at interviewing others. I'm not trying to humble-brag or anything. I'm just bad at it. Part of it is that I haven't had to go through an interview in over 10 years, so it's difficult to empathize with a candidate. I do my best, though. The other part is that I'm happy at what I do, but I'm not the best. I sometimes can't keep up with candidates when they're writing on a whiteboard and make a claim that such-and-such works. I squint and can make a judgement on that claim, but really I need to cover x, y, and z during our hour together and we're already 20 minutes into it and I don't want to get dragged into the weeds.

So, I'm not a fan of giving interviews. I wouldn't mind shadowing someone better than I, but my first inclination is that that would be a terrible idea since it would make candidates even more nervous.
Business depends on solving problems. Code is a medium for implementing solutions. I can count the number of times I've needed to put my CS degree to use on one hand, but knowing to whom, when, how to ask the right questions has been worth far more.
Progress is great.

IMHO, Angular isn't progress, and neither is painting yourself into a corner.
Having been fired... three times in my life... I can say that each time was more of a personality issue than a skill or competency issue. So I never took it hard. I've gotten some people fired too... and it sucks from both sides.

I'll say that it as satisfying as it is to know you won't have to work with some asshole again, it really sucks to sit them down and tell them that today is their last day on the project / with the company. Knowing the stress they will be under if they have kids or a spouse... it sucks.

When getting fired, when firing, always important to remember that there are probably plenty of people in the organization who still would like to work with you... so badmouthing and spreading drama is always your least beneficial solution.

Just take it with dignity / try and let them go gracefully.
Get a Drone's-Eye View of the Large Hadron Collider
Also cvim: https://github.com/1995eaton/chromium-vim
That's not a tradeoff I'm comfortable with, "even" in pre-release software.

I'm not accusing you of this, but in other cases I've seen proponents of something say "This isn't a big deal, it's just starting out".
Then, when people continue to complain a year from now, the defenders say "This isn't a big deal, it's always done this."

Vivaldi looks interesting, but I'd wager that there's a decent overlap between the Power Users they're after, and the group that values their privacy the most.
Microtransactions didn't work because it either imposed mental overhead or relied on tipping culture.

So either you're guessing whether the article is reeeeaaaally worth 1 cent, or you're wondering if these $0.001 increments are going to add up to a whopper, or you feel annoyed having to press the "tip" button all the time.

This model -- independently invented several times -- removes that entirely.

> Why should it be limited at all?

Small amounts drastically reduce the attractiveness of using this to launder stolen credit card money.
Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/2y5q5g/help_us_ide...
This simply isn't true. People who are terminated at Microsoft or Amazon or Google or others for poor performance (either during annual performance review or other times) are not laid off - they are terminated for poor performance.
Well you already got pocketsphinx set up so that is a start (I recently did this here: https://github.com/kastnerkyle/ez-phones but it was a little annoying to script). There are a few ways to train/extend pocketsphinx, but ultimately good ASR in arbitrary environments is a research problem!

I second the opinion that Kaldi is more advanced, but it is also way, way more complicated to do anything with a custom dataset. There are a few examples of decoding with existing models though, so maybe that is a start. These lectures may help: http://www.danielpovey.com/kaldi-lectures.html

There is also an interesting toolbox here that you can train, though getting access to TIMIT, WSJ, etc. is pretty annoying. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ymiao/kaldipdnn.html

You may also get mileage out of some kind of post-transcription NLP/cleaning if you haven't done that yet.
As a techie who is not involved in machine learning, I see these AI articles coming up and I wonder if it's me or AI is indeed on the rise after such a long stagnation?

Is this newfound excitement and interest in AI fuelled by actual, objective advances?

EDIT: Keep up the good work, I sincerely hope that the work you do will make the world a better place. I wish I could help somehow.
You're right that it's definitely pretty easy to cheat if you have insider knowledge of some sort, but the odds of a candidate leaking the answers are probably pretty low unless you're a huge company and don't change up your tests.
We had three work-sample exercises at Matasano. All told, they took candidates mid-single-digit hours to finish (many geeked out, or golfed on them; we did our best to keep this from happening --- you can read about this on our hiring page:

http://www.matasano.com/careers

This sounds onerous, but it is less onerous than the normal dev hiring process, which involves an onsite interview that eats the whole day. We did on-site interviews, but they took just 2.5 hours to complete; candidates would be out at lunch. Essentially, we were shifting some of the time candidates would spend sweating in a conference room to their couch instead.

There are bad work-sample tests. "Bad" comes in a variety of flavors. I think bad work sample tests will out-predict the median interview. But there's a lot of room to optimize and improve this process, sure.
Great, if you want to hire people who "can code", but have no social skills. I am personally done working in environments where people think they "can code" but have not enough of a social skill to at least empathise with your point of view on naming conventions.

Don't get me wrong, I can code, I'll write you anything you want, AND IT WILL WORK! and I'll still know there may be a better way but this is the way that works and I still think I don't have enough years to live to argue with social incompetents who think that fighting over tabs or spaces is a good idea and a pocket protector makes you sexy.
We are not selecting for "no social skills". We're avoiding selecting for slickness.
"You're not trying to make a .INI file a little friendlier for a human programmer -- you're trying to make a collaborative Google doc a little friendlier for a parser."

That's exactly what we were aiming for. TOML, which I think is brilliant for config files, was actually a bit of an inspiration for this.

But for our use case, which typically involves longer copy blocks, TOML still felt closer to something a developer might grok than to something a reporter would intuitively understand.

It's also worth noting we make abundant use of other formats in our interactive graphics — from JSON to CSV to YAML — when the data is much more structured and unlikely to be touched by a wider group of people in the newsroom.

This is pretty clearly not a solution to all structured data; but rather, just the subset that we want to be easy to write and edit.
How do you avoid wasting time on candidates that are a poor fit? When we advertise for an open position we get a ton of unqualified candidates.

In your post you say, "At my last firm, we had the “first-call” system. Every serious applicant got, on average, 30-45 minutes of director-level time on the phone before any screening began." You seem to continue on from that point. What happens before first-call?
I actually work for people who I consider to be good friends. It's just something I tell people of how this industry works and why it's an awesome job.