skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whiteboard interview attempts to be used as a way to figure out a developers thought flow, however it is a flawed system....

Many programmers are introverted and not always the best at speaking in front of people they just met, most people aren't.

The skill the whiteboard is checking is not the skill that will be used on the job, it is overly focused on an extroverted personality and how well this developer can present to new people. An introverted developer might mess up in an interview but be making the best designs, products and presentations to the team later when the team is known.

The true test is in the trenches and no test in an interview by a select few people in the company can ever tell product delivery and developer skill, the interview steps are just some litmus tests. Companies want the best and brightest but many are getting cut off at the pass from a whiteboard. Is the interview really where we determine who is the best, not the work? What costs more, losing a good developer to an interview process or letting someone in you determine isn't a good fit 1-2 months in on a small project.
Jesus; quite a few of those monitors are bigger than my living room TV.
Turns out this was made by a fan using https://github.com/IonicaBizau/github-contributions
thanks to GitHub's ability to accept commits in the past.

Another similar tool is: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
I was asked to do whiteboard interview once. I simply laughed and thanked for wasting my time. This was a company that knew me from previous jobs and they still insisted on this pointless exercise (1). From that point on I start by asking first, I dont do whiteboards, I dont do quizzes, I dont do personality/aptitude evaluations or out of the box tests. There is no point in asking me what some silly obscure acronym means when google is 2 seconds away, or testing if Im a team player if Im being hired to sit in the basement and staple patch cords together.

Google can pull this BS because they pay good money and are at the top of their game. But 100 employees boring 9-5? lol no. Lets face it, I dont need you, you need me. You came to me first.

1/ I returned twice as a contractor to fix shit build by new employee screened with white board :). This wasnt even a big company with strict corporate ruleset, they were just clueless :/
Parcus Group to Deliver Training for Tonga Communications Corporation
Interesting, so I should pretend to be very in-demand to game your interview process. Good to know.
previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9485237 (13 hours ago, 139 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419035 (12 days ago, 126 comments)
Apple are fine with Cordova apps in the store. We have a few.

They're even fine with those apps being updated without resubmitting.
> I can say that security is not always a high priority in medical device designs.

Agreed. But it's because generally it's not (yet?) a problem.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but I'm not taking direct action based on any comments here. Yours is an understandable concern, though.
Advanced Startup Management Techniques
>Some newsletters are pretty great. I would reconsider them given much improved curation. Not sure where others are at, but for me at least, it's an opportunity for somebody.

I'm actually trying to solve the problem of curation and discovery at Letterlist.com. It's amazing that there isn't really a great way to find the best newsletters yet.

I'm curious - what is the biggest barrier stopping you from subscribing to newsletters? Is it solely the curation issue?

And as for podcasts, it's a great question - I started a new thread (Ask HN: What must-listen podcasts do you subscribe to?)

- OP
I've just started learning Haskell using the online "Real World Haskell" book, which seems very good so far. But I'd love to hear how that book compares to this site from any experienced Haskell programmers who have used both.
"Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when microcomputers like the Apple II were all the rage, computer time was expensive, pressure-packed and cumbersome."

Does no one fact check anything anymore? If you're going to base part of your argument around technology that was around before you were born maybe do a little more research? And also... get off my lawn? Am I really that old?
I strongly agree with you -- if you're learning on your own you often need to know that something exists (and usually need to know the term for it) to be able to lookup / research.
Ugh, just what we need, another "pro" fractal renderer. Just search around, you can find plenty of non-free 2D ones, and it's not so easy to find a decent free 2D fractal renderer that does anything interesting, at least not last time I looked. I think it's one of those markets where you consistently find a small handful of people that are willing to pay, and the result is a net loss for the world at large, because fractals are cool but largely useless, and it's enough work to build something like this that people are reticent to give it away for free. So no, I don't think there's any real commercial potential there.
So does this eventually lead to a great merger between the ideas of "web site" and "app"?
Quick question I can not get the web browser to load. After I click what server i wan it sits at a flashing screen and does not do anything else. Any solutions?
What is IC referring to?
Serious question. We have guns in the US. Lots of them. Leaving the politics of that aside. What do you expect police to use when they need to approach a barricaded person or extract someone in the line of fire?

A Bearcat/MRAP is the perfect tool. Its big (hides officers visually), armored, and relatively cheap to buy & maintain vs outfitting patrol cars with armor. It has zero offensive capability unless you count sitting someone on top of it with a rife.

I can understand (and I agree) with not wanting them to use armored vehicles in certain situations (non-violent protests, non violent drug raids, etc) but do you really not want them to have the capability at all?
thank you very much. I found your post quite helpful. I definitely have experienced at points an existential crisis wrt programming. I do enjoy it, but it's been a while since I worked on something I truly cared about.

my therapist described me as having an "idealistic streak" and mentioned I might be happier if I were working on something that motivated me more than a paycheck. This is something I'll have to take into account as I look for a new position.
Pinterest opening public API
cost-effective

Everything is designed for cost-effectiveness in this age of economic rationalism. Military weapons, police weapons, this keyboard I'm typing on... being cost-effective is not a hallmark of being military.

TASERS ... aren't cops main weapons

In some parts of the US. Which is the problem being discussed here: that police in the US reach first for the lethal solution. Police in the UK don't often carry firearms at all. Police here in Australia carry firearms, but they're a weapon of last resort, not their 'main weapon'.
Fun typewriter written in ClojureScript/React
individual contributor (i.e. nonmanager)
Hopefully Case isn't vulnerable the same way:
http://johoe.mooo.com/trezor-power-analysis/
It's taken me a while to write back, because new HN accounts are severely rate limited.

The spirit of your post(s) is well taken. Also, I watched the shit out of the magic school bus (which is, at least, what "sometimes you have to get dirty. sometimes you have to make mistakes" reminded me of)
Peer pressure. If two people get sidetracked, after about 10-20 seconds, say, "Take it off-line. Next?" It's even better if multiple people are willing to do this, or at least to back you when you make the request.
There are a few options e.g. Microsoft FAST or you can roll your own. However Lucene based systems can leverage the wide variety of addons and is battle tested so it's hard to recommend against it.

Just remember the golden rule of architecture. Always assume every component will catastrophically fail at some point and design accordingly. In the case of ElasticSearch/Solr it means don't use it as a primary data store, backup regularly and have a mechanism to insert deltas.
Pendium: A time and finance tracking tool for collaborating freelancers
Extremes should not be remedied with extremes.
Also it should be mentioned that the author is a co-founder of HackerRank.com , which is trying to be the testing platform for new interview candidates.

From the article, I didn't get any information on why or what or if there is a "Looming Fall" of the whiteboard for testing engineering candidates.
thank you for sharing your experience. it sounds like you've struggled more than I have, and I admire your persistence in making it through.
I use boost::format when I want a type safe printf-like in C++.
> I didn't get any information on why or what or if there is a "Looming Fall" of the whiteboard for testing engineering candidates.

Because its a product placement article (selling HackerRank).
>We don't like conformity.

I forget if there is a name for this phenomena, probably, but people are strongly biased towards thinking that they are open minded, that they don't like conformity etc. Everyone likes to think that they are accepting of new ideas, that they are adventurous, that they are forging their own path and so on.

Conversely no one likes to them of themselves as being prone to conformity, sensitive to peer pressure, fearful of ideas that challenge their own assumptions or fearful of being exposed to criticism or ridicule.

As a result people are very fond of saying that they are open minded and that they don't like conformity even though its not necessarily borne out by their actions.

Its also worth keeping in mind that this kind of belief is closely tied to a person's identity (as they see it) so challenging it can result in them getting extremely defensive and angry. By challenging it you are pointing out the gap between how they actually are and how they imagine themselves to be.

/armchair psychology
Check out the Meteor Dev Shop talks:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

They usually have a guest speaker or two or three who has built something on Meteor.

Personally, I've enjoyed working with it over the last two years. It comes with a lot of powerful functionality built in (too much to list here).

But, it is still changing. They just got to 1.0 in September, I think. I know a big red flag for many is its immature testing framework, which is not up to par yet.
I was about to suggest that it might be possible to port most/all of it as-is with GNUStep, but then I realized that the whole codebase is written entirely in Swift.
> The wrong medicine will dull your focus (I had a very bad sedative reaction to Lexapro) but the right ones will make you feel more normal. My work is the same as it was before, except I am happier now.

I'm really glad to hear that. It's surprisingly reassuring.

Out of curiosity, how long did it take you to decide Lexapro wasn't right for you?
If you take that too far you end up with medical gear that is so locked down the owner can not make any changes themself, but must ask for permission to make any changes.
> How often the translog is fsynced to disk. Defaults to 5s. [...] In this test we kill random nodes and restart them. [...] In Elasticsearch, write acknowledgement takes place before the transaction is flushed to disk, which means you can lose up to five seconds of writes by default. In this particular run, ES lost about 10% of acknowledged writes.

Something bothers me about this: if the bug was merely a failure to call fsync() before acknowledging an operation, then killing processes shouldn't be enough to cause data loss. Once you write to a file and the syscall returns, the written data goes into the OS's buffers, and even if the process is killed it won't be lost. The only time fsync matters is if the entire machine dies (because of power loss or a kernel panic, for instance) before those buffers can be flushed.

So is the data actually not even making it to the OS before being acked to the client? Or is Jepsen doing something more sophisticated, like running each node in a VM with its own block device instead of sharing the host's filesystem?
In that video, the man with the knife is not threatening the police or rushing them. He wasn't even reacting to the policeman walking close by. Not to say that the UK don't have a different policing style, but that video isn't an example of police behaviour when being rushed.
I'm aware of portions of that literature, but haven't studied it explicitly. What do you think are the most interesting things happening in that space at the moment?

For me one of the most salient things in that space -- albeit a different point than the one raised in the essay -- is the debate about what sorts of metrics are most appropriate (if any) for informing decisions about hiring, tenure, and the like. In some ways it's quite like the be-careful-what-you-wish-for problems any business has in choosing which metrics to care about. For instance, the h-index might shape a researcher's choice of whether to publish something as one larger paper or two smaller ones.

As Sam Altman put it, "It really is true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure." I think a similar principle holds for research and scholarship.
It sounds like you want Frege, no?

https://github.com/Frege/frege
Microsoft also still does whiteboard interviews.

Also, one of the issues of providing an interview candidate with a computer is that some people are very particular with their environment.

For example, even if you let them use an IDE they are familiar with, maybe they really don't like using Macs. Or worse, they don't even use a qwerty keyboard.

In my company nobody uses an IDE, I use vim and the other developers use emacs or sublime. I think we all have our own little plugins/settings that we use as well.

Of course you could solve all of this by letting employees bring their own computer, although not everyone has a laptop either. To be completely honest, I really like the whiteboard but I definitely can see why others don't like it and get the impression I'm in the minority.
Just amazing and a far cry from my adventures with Fractint and a i386 Math-Co back in the day.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hubris on display here is: "it works for me, it must be right for everyone". What the author is missing is that the article-reference system is actually more flexible than a tree of dependencies. Consider the obvious example: citing Wikipedia. It's a pain, because Wikipedia changes, so you have to link to a certain revision and if you want to know the author you have to trawl the contributions, which nobody does. And this is true of Wikipedia because Wikipedia is a work in progress: it's not meant to be a presentation of knowledge but a repository of knowledge.

Science works like that too, but on the blackboards and notebooks and today blogs and comments of the investigators, which lack real start and end dates and are regularly crossed out or replaced. The work is refined for publication because publications are essentially learning materials, they're written and edited to be as comprehensible as possible for any active researcher in the field to read for education or leisure; likewise in order for citations to be useful the cited works must include some background information which goes a long way in keeping the sciences connected, because it's not rare for analogous problems to pop up in unrelated fields, and it is crucial that researchers from outside each others' fields can read each others' work in order for interdisciplinary collaboration of this form to be possible. But all of this background information is just background noise to the people actively working on a problem and that's why it isn't on the blackboard or in the blog post, and it's why terse notations like dummy indices became popular in scratch work. The divide between the didactic and generative arrangements of scientific work is better explained thus: papers are binaries, not source code. Binaries don't go in source control.
Stop trying to make autoplaying videos happen. They're not going to happen.

On another note: this looks fun. Where can I sign up?
Why the need to be snarky to someone who was just trying to give insight as to why this question was asked?
lucky you. Here (in one of the sunniest cities of the world) you can only earn parity - if you're lucky. The power company are disallowing new grid-feed connections in some suburbs because their aged infrastructure can't handle too much 'unconventional' input. (!!)
> Don't self-medicate with alcohol, "drugs" (the non-prescription kind), promiscuity, video games, or other things that numb you. As the psych meds take hold, you'll be able to get up, but you'll be dragged back down as well.

poignant. I either have at one point or actively self medicate with all of the above.

> Be very conscious of suicidal ideas as you heal. The real danger point for depression-driven suicide isn't when things are so black you can't even get out of bed. It gets dangerous when you start feeling energetic again. Then you have enough energy to hurt yourself. Have a support group or friends who understand, and check in all the time.

this is valuable, thanks. I tend to be very private about anything concerning my mental health, but this makes me consider sharing it with a friend I trust who I can check in with.

> Consider getting a new job now. It might help you to have a fresh thing to care about, and getting fired from your existing job will only hurt you.

this is something I've considered very strongly. I'm a bit hesitant because I worry I'll fail to produce in my new position (if i don't take the time to heal), but it's definitely worth considering.
Why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doesn't really worry about revenue
Is the whiteboard interview perfect? No, there is no perfect method.

Disclaimer, I give lots of white board interviews. What am I looking for?

Syntax? Nope, I let the candidate use any language they want, they can even make it up as they go, as long as its consistent and doesn't contain magic. Most of my questions are simple and operate on arrays.

A good talker? Not really, although someone who freezes up and can't talk might be an issue discussing their ideas in a group, but its not disqualification. The number of people who have been actively anxious to the point they can't code anything on the whiteboard? Never encountered it, I've given maybe 500 white board questions.

My question revolves around iterating through an array, keeping track of a couple of pointers, and doing some simple swaps, its a sorting problem. I'm looking for people who can think 'step by step', people who can look at a very simple program, and keep track of how its executing.

You might say, you have an IDE to do that! IMHO, Any decent programmer can look at 8 lines of code and step through that . Most of the time, when I'm debugging something in prod, I only have a stack trace and the source code. I have to figure out how the trace could have been thrown, and I have to step through a bunch of code to figure that out.

Finally, Whiteboard coding is a skill, just like how to debug or how to import a project into an IDE; its a necessary skill to get a job. Plus, when I look around my room, I can spot 3-4 whiteboards, all of them have code and diagrams written on them. None of those came from an interview, those are all the result of one engineer communicating to others about their ideas.

edit: Last thing, the alternatives, side by side keyboard coding, a take home project. All of these have cons, keyboard anxiety is just a prevalent as whiteboard, just a different medium. Take home projects are nice, if you expect a candidate to spend a weekend coding for your interview. Just as people have walked out because of a whiteboard interview (something I've never encountered), I've actually dropped pursuing a company when they gave me a fairly complex take home project when I was at the offer stage at a different one. Fuck spending a day working on some throw away work and not get the job.
Security necessarily comes in layers. Some will fail; hopefully not all of them. Adding protections at the hardware part of the stack is a fantastic idea, but insufficient for something lives are literally, directly depending on.

Medical devices do need to be accessed. Diagnostics need to be performed to make sure they're functioning. Sometimes batteries even need to be changed. Insulin pumps and the like need to be given more medicine, and the dosage may need to be adjusted. Et cetera.
Logged-out users could have sessions too, potentially. (Although logged out users don't need CSRF protection on many websites)
Well, we we don't own legal bought digital content, we only lease the content.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/sep/03/do-you-own-your...

I can understand that with streaming you dont have a copy of the resource (which prevents you from copy), but even so.. how is that accessing an easily available resource over the net is better than accessing the resource locally?
When I hire someone this is my script:

#1 I introduce myself and what the project(s) entail and how things get done.

#2 I ask them some questions about their experiences, and ask them to tell me a story about some past memorable experience.

#3 I ask them to do a simple coding exercise (5 - 10 mins tops). If they bomb it, I don't care, what I want to see is how they _react_ to feedback. Some people will get belligerent during the interview, and that is definitely a red flag that I will not enjoy working with them.

#4 I let them ask me any questions they have and then wrap things up.

I think hiring engineers with a specific skill is great for a contracting position. But if you want to hire someone in a full time position, some learning on the engineer's part is to be expected.
Just like many programmers fail at FizzBuzz, many interviewers have no business conducting interviews. Also remember that these practices will continue until someone educates them. So, the next time you're given 45 minutes to code up a radix sort in a whiteboard, instead start a discussion about interview techniques. The socratic method goes a long way to making people realize just how much they are cargo culting.
Wow. Blast from the past. I remember being so thrilled when gcc finally added support for precompiled headers. The compile times for the program went from hours to minutes on the same hardware.
Some sandboxing could be done, but if an attacker roots a pacemaker or an insulin pump it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to prevent them from convincing the device to perform its intended function at an unintended time.
> I've written a blog post about a bunch of types of CSRF schemes and their pros and cons, but never published it. Is this interesting enough for me to publish?

Definitely. Having looked myself, I can tell you there aren't many resources online that get this right.
There's even a term for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
The Khila James Show: Police Brutality
thank you. that's kind of you to say, and very reassuring. I honestly felt really apprehensive and guilty / self centered / narcissistic for posting here.

> This is something with which many of us struggle on a regular basis.

it certainly feels that way at times :(
God, programmers are the biggest whiners in the world when it comes to interviewing. Do you know the shit doctors and lawyers have to go through to get hired? If you did, you'd thank Jesus that all you have to do is solve problems on a whiteboard. If you can't do it, then here's a simple and effective solution for you: practice!