skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But this is a different kind of stress. Interviews are usually performed under "social" stress - people normally get nervous when meeting someone new, probably for evolutionary reasons. This "short term" stress is very different from the stress you get because of a deadline or a critical bug.
Not exactly sure why this story is on HN, but it was interesting read nonetheless. A very courageous man he was to have done such a thing- twice.
Fallacy of bringing absolutely nothing to the debate and asserting to the point of ad homonim that scientists would have skipped basic statistics on their data. Please see the post immediately above yours and go demonstrate that the method is flaw before continuing this debate.

The standard of evidence to show fault is yours. Assuming that papers published in freaking NATURE have sound statistics is a reasonable thing for a layman to do.
I'd say that it qualifies under the "it teaches you somethinng about the world" clause.
It's not in the settings, it's the "draft" tick box at the bottom of the textbox.
If you're really this interested in it and really suspect an entire scientific field has engaged in completely terrible statistics, it's basic statistics and I suggest you publish a paper yourself.

That or you go look for the papers or the reason the papers have not been written.

This game is old. The standard of proof to demonstrate the method is flawed based on poor correlations is on your side. The method to do the correlation is public knowledge. The data to correlate is public knowledge. R is open source. Go forth and correlate.
A Virtual Gramophone
I'd imagine that googling for bug reports that one has been involved in on either side would be a good heuristic for problem solving skills and sociability. At the very least, you'll avoid hiring anyone who can be identified by googling for "bugzilla asshole".
Since the code is included, it might be possible to compile and run it through Cygwin?
"While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information"

Ja, ja... sure...
I think you mean global warming.
(a) source for that: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.h...
Sorry, that is just very poor advocacy. Accusations, spinning the facts, etc.
In-line comments are good because they never get out-of-date.

Out-of-line comments are best for big-picture information.
You speak like a true believer. The mails have shown, precisely, that IPCC process is manipulated. That is the problem.
Does warming exists? Most likely.
Is it human-made? Who knows.

P.S. Yes, I am paid by Royal Dutch/Shell to post deceptive comments on HackerNew.
Steven Berlin Johnson - The Ghost Map: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594482691
If you have enough time, you might want to read Steve Wozniak's interview from Founders At Work. It's very long and detailed!

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
It does word-wrap for me. I'm using Chrome on Windows XP.
From what I've read, many people vote if they think the current score needs adjusting, and don't otherwise. If that's widespread, then most of those who have read the comment and seen it at -2 feel that it's right.

These things are always statistical, have large margins of error, and cannot be taken as certain, but they are indications.

Anyway, this has been done to death, so I shall leave it alone now. Thanks for your feedback.
> This site just doesn't work, period, without JavaScript

Direct quote from the http://www.coloredlists.com/ front page. I shudder to think of people out there emulating worst practices like that. Please, please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement.
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I've never really felt it was that different, but for the sake of discussion, how would you simulate the non-social variety of stress in a hiring situation?
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The Copenhagen Diagnosis (2009)
Actually I'd like to see the per-line editing time combined with the VCS logs. Which lines contributed to the most bugs? What lines do people have to refer to the most when they're making patches? Are there parts of the code that people work more slowly in?
There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy. It just happens to be one launched by the fossil fuel industry to obscure the truth about climate change and delay any action. And this release of emails right before the Copenhagen conference is just another salvo—and a highly effective one—in that public relations battle, redolent with the scent of the same flaks and hacks who brought you "smoking isn't dangerous."

Citations please!
Indeed. As a parent and software producer I can feel the same part of my brain activate when (irrationally) defending my "offspring". I don't think I will change that though ;)
Perhaps off-topic, I was a bit put off at his definition of a friend. I wouldn't want to befriend someone who keeps me around to solve his problems for free while I'm at work.

Being that I've only interviewed at big-ish companies and in Japan (where companies ape the large companies uncritically), I haven't had a chance to see some of these techniques :/
They have been doing this for a least three decades. This is just the first time you have noticed them doing it to something you have first hand knowledge of (thanks to the Internet piping primary data into your home).

In the early 1980s, Scientific American did exactly the same sorts of things to "prove" that the Soviet technology program was unstoppable, and therefore that we could either retreat or commit planetary suicide. They had a consensus or prominent scientists and engineers showing, with hard numbers and slick charts, that it was provably impossible to do anything about ballistic missiles. Learned professors lectured us on the untenable accuracy limits of missile interceptors; rocket scientists lectured on the ease with which missiles could be spun to keep lasers from burning through. They had a social science consensus that saying "no" provokes aggression.

One business cycle later the Soviet technology program went bankrupt and took the political system with it.

Edit: And let us not forget the "nuclear winter" scenarios. Doesn't AGW simply reduce to a previously solved problem? ;-)
Not sure what you mean by that... V8 for example is a virtual machine that runs JavaScript.
jacquesm's guide to freelancing has enough meat to feed an army:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/be-consultant

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848370
I was employed as a monitor helping people with the computers in the lab and keeping the line printer running smoothly. On the side, I sold 5 inch floppy disks for $4 each which was a dollar less than the college store. On summer break, I made money coding Apple II software on contract.
Nice video, the Founders at Work story goes into much more detail, IMO, it's one of the best "chapters" in that book!
You could request the candidate to retrieve an assignment from a password-protected website and require a solution within X hours after retrieval.

This does put on some pressure - there is a deadline, after all - but people who are shy but confident in their coding abilities may be less anxious. This would also solve the common "but I wouldn't code without an IDE/Google/Wikipedia" complaint.
JavaScript would likely be the largest base of programmers and is certainly used by many amateurs and professionals. This would be included in the "any JVM language" option with Rhino.
Hear hear. Finally someone who sounds rational. The degree to which everyone in the sci/tech community has rallied around these sloppy, untrustworthy miscreants is really boggling me.

Defending bad science because you agree with its conclusions is not a good idea. I'm sure there's good climate science out there, and I suspect it can show a connection between human endeavors and the actual climate. But if it turns out the evidence just isn't there yet, at least with this bunch at the wheel, well then let's suck it up and accept that, rather than circle the wagons and defend "science" when it's clear the scientists in question have not acted in accord with their professed principles.
Well, for one, the man himself gave Gmail as example.
Well, he lists the gmail-specific ones in the post. I guess users of services provided by startups later bought by Google could provide more data on this. Any Grandcentral or Jaiku users (off the top of my head, there are plenty more of course) care to tell us if anything was dropped before the Google release?
As a client- and server-side developer I'm extremely excited about HTML5. For the first time in a decade, browsers are getting new capabilities! HTML 5 is much more than just new tags - we're talking offline support, concurrency with web workers, canvas, geolocation, native audio and video, WebSockets, a supported method of making cross-domain API calls...

HTML 5 is clearly aiming to bring the open web platform up to par with desktop APIs. I expect many desktop applications to be developed using HTML5+CSS+JavaScript within just a few years.

And even if that doesn't spike your interest, there's the critically important role the HTML 5 spec pays in standardising what we already have. It's ridiculous that XMLHttpRequest, one of the most useful modern browser APIs, has no spec - every browser implements it by reverse engineering the others, who in turn reverse engineered IE (which is closed source, so who knows if they got it right?). HTML5 fixes that. It also specifies things like innerHTML, ContentEditable, the execution order for script files, all that DOM level 0 stuff that never made it in to an official spec.

Finally, HTML5 specifies a formal error model for HTML for the first time. This means it will actually be possible to implement a new browser from scratch without having to spend years reverse engineering the behaviour of IE and friends when faced with invalid markup.

I'm amazed to see so many web developers unexcited by HTML 5. This is the first time our core platform has seen any serious evolution since HTML4.01 was published in 1999!

As for browser support, it's happening right now. If you develop for the iPhone / mobile WebKit stuff most of the above features are sitting there waiting for you to use them. Try this page in your iPhone for example:

http://simonwillison.net/static/2009/navigator.geolocation.h...

Even IE is catching up - IE8 supported a bunch of HTML5 concepts (key/value based storage, cross document messaging, hashchange event and more) and IE9 is set to support even more.

HTML 5 is the most exciting thing to happen to web development in a very long time.
There's no need to sensationalize this. It's not the end of MVC and I'm not sure what's "banished" here. This sort of headline is a depressing trend.

But it is an interesting pattern for software architecture/engineering, and I'm glad to learn about it. I'll admit that after reading this summary I'm not entirely clear on how this marks any sort of revolutionary change in program design. Instead, it strikes me as a mental shift enabled by a few years' reflection on what MVC aspires to be. Indeed, the author says as much: "This may not seem like a really big change and indeed, technically, it is not. However the mental shift is huge!"

I'm not a Java developer, but in Ruby this sounds something like implementing a significant amount of program logic in modules rather than directly in a Merb/Rails/Datamapper/what-have-you model in order to achieve a looser coupling of the data/business logic layer.

So, I dunno. It's a really cool idea, and welcome to HN...but please change the headline to something less sensational/linkbait and more informative like - "Data/Context/Interaction - Thinking Beyond MVC Structure."
Did you ever actually try running a site using proper XHTML? I ran my blog like that (serving the correct content type to non-IE browsers) for a few years and found it to be a ton of hassle for absolutely no benefit.
even if you dont have enough time, his book 'Iwoz' is a must read ! :-)
That's one hell of a hack.
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Truly brave man. Another one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki - "Polish James Bond" - he voluntered to go to Auschwitz in 1940, made reports about what happened there, organized resistance in camp, stolen some German documents and escaped when nobody wanted to try and attack the camp (he was trying to persuade Aliants and Polish Home Army to do that, but they thought it wouldn't work).
Erlang for Skeptics
Update - here's a much better article than the one linked, written by DCI's creator (who also helped popularize MVC): http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html
I've up-voted sounddust for you.

I come from a background where the ideas of neutral and impartial are independent of those of intellectual gratification. In mathematics one has strong opinions and can state them clearly, and in reply, people can tell you you're wrong without it being mistaken for a personal attack. I guess I just let that leak over into here - now being in business I usually keep it under wraps.

That's what I meant elsewhere when I said I would be less open. In future I won't be so blunt in my opinions, as am in math, and wrap them more, as I do in business.

We've done this to death I think - I really appreciate the feedback. Thanks.
We've been seeing tons of it at the ER where I moonlight. Last week at triage I cared for 10-15 that I suspected had swine flu. The vast majority of those people have cold symptoms: cough, runny nose, fever, chills, etc... But, every now and then, it strikes like lightning and a young person has an overwhelming immune response to the disease and their lungs fill up and they crap out.

I saw a person die of swine flu last week. Right after that, I discharged 3 people with swine flu symptoms. It's a strange little disease. Get the vaccine if you can, and at very least get the regular flu vaccine. It may give you a partial immunity. The more people in the herd we can get immunized, the better off everyone is going to be. I don't get to worried about it, though.

There's always a worry about a recurrence of the "pandemic flu of 1918", and the H1N1 outbreak meets the definitions of pandemic. But, when the media talks about the pandemic of 1918, they forget the medicine has changed just a little bit in the last 90 years. For instance:

-Oxygen wasn't really in regular use until the 1920's-30's.
-Germ theory had only gotten widespread acceptance for 20-30 years.
-Antibiotics weren't mass produced until Sulfa in 1936. Before then, a lot of people died that could have been cured with a shot of penicillin or sulfa.
-IV medications were given with glass syringes and recycled needles until the 70's.

I'm sure a large percentage of the 50 million people that died in the 1918 pandemic would have lived with basic modern medical care.
I don't think that's map correct. I didn't hear anything about a MASSIVE spike in deaths on the 25th.
+1 for the link
Yours is definitely better. I was just trying to do something quickly on the run to make point. Its really amazing how much population India has and Indian politicians cry foul about getting all the successful Indian people from developed nation hoping to make a change.

The change has to come within.
Most of the discussion appears to be about word-wrapping, but I think the actual content is pretty important. This is an excellent evaluation strategy for people doing you favors. "How much trouble is it?" is my first question when thinking about something that might save me money. Annoyance has a cost.
I was excited about standards on the audio and video formats. Since that has been cancelled HTML5 has no advantages over my current love XHTML. Both programmer and designer but both are just hobbies and my sites are mostly static (and I hate Javascript).
And hacking the real world. The mindset required is not that different.
I've got my doubts about the search for intelligent life out there - mainly due to the fact that we have plenty of intelligent life on earth, yet haven't really found a way to have meaningful intelligent communication with them - life forms that share the exact same conditions as us as opposed to who-knows-what out there.

For all the studies done on dolphins / primates / birds that have shown them to be very intelligent by many measures, studies that have shown they have very intricate communications systems, we still seem to be no closer to having anything resembling intelligent conversation similar to what happens in most people's daily lives.
The "blog" of Colin Percival (cperciva), the author of Tarsnap, is also very much worth a read. Fortuitously, he's just posted a convenient overview of the most important articles: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-10-15-100-blog-posts.ht....
Y Combinator, but with 20x the red tape
Sorry, which new features do you imagine available in XHTML 1.1 that aren't there in HTML 4.01?

Let me help you count: Zero.

HTML5 is very little about e.g. the HEADER element, and much more about the underlying support for other features, such as geolocation, native sound and video, crossdomain XMLHTTPRequest, offline support and (yes,) much more.
goodluck with that, nsf
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I'm sorry, but if such decisions are made without even double checking the results, then maybe it is not even the scientists to blame.

Also, this is pure speculation. From ESR's article I gather that it is not even known how and when the data was used. They could not yet point to an actual published article.

And, who are these people, are they like the most famous climate researchers ever, the Einsteins of climate research? Are they the only climate researchers on the planet? I can't imagine that they have that much influence.
I love tarsnap (I'm using it in production now). But, I wish it were a little easier to use ...

For example, each of my servers creates a backup named something of the form 'machineName-epochTime' every night. I wish there was some built in way to delete all but the last N backups. I ended up writing a small Python script to take care of it, but it relies on text-munging, etc and seems brittle.

Something that would automate a 'grandfather, father, son' style rotation scheme would be appreciated too.

In principle, it isn't too hard for me to script any of this functionality - but maybe I'll make a mistake in the portion of my code that handles my Tarsnap key, or the portion that deletes backups. I'd rather pay someone smarter than me (e.g., cpercival) to specialize on making my backups work. That is, after all, the basic premise behind the Tarsnap business model.
Hey, what is this for? I'm about to start on a project at the border of research and industry, and I could use some money.
I think this is a terrible way to interview. I've encountered, again and again, candidates who appear to be very intelligent, you can have a great discussion with them, terrific rapport, they understand everything, they give interesting suggestions, and when you ask them to write a simple piece of code they absolutely cannot do it. Not because they're stressed etc., you can actually see they can't write code. Sometimes the incongruity between their confident appearance and convincing talk versus their inability to write code is mind-boggling.

Now I consider any interview process incomplete and utterly unreliable if it doesn't include writing actual code, however simple and straightforward.
No, they care alright. Enough to suspend my iTunes affiliate account for using the word iPhone without the copyright on my site. </bitter>
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What sort of programming problems are you giving them? Did these candidates have experience with other projects and were they able to fluidly explain their involvement with them?

It must be pretty rare to find a person who can describe a complex project in detail but is unable to write any code during an interview.
I'm excited... but it's not enough. What we should really have is a standardized low-level byte code interpreter, allowing a variety of languages and great performance. Basically what Java promised but didn't really deliver.
FWIW I don't see how that's a jackass thing to do. There's a chance that a woman may take maternity leave, then never return. That's an extra cost to the employer. It's a higher risk. I'm of the opinion that real freedom means the freedom to discriminate if you want to.

Insurers are freely able to discriminate, it seems like employers should be able to as well (I know in this age of political correctness it's impossible to).

Should terminally ill people be able to go on apprenticeships? I'd say on balance no - if they die before they're trained in the job, then the employer who is footing the bill of training them, has lost out.
This is a legitimate reaction. I'm having trouble finding references on my iPhone, but I've heard that the standard seasonal flu has a similar or higher fatality rate than H1N1.

If that's true, this new variant, while intellectually interesting, is not really of real concern.
What does that even mean? This is all so much speculation.
He was pretty clear that he looks at their code. Go back and read the third paragraph.

The place I'm currently at interviews in a very similar matter and we're currently batting 3 for 3 on new hires over the last year or so. I've never been a fan of the "run puzzles at them until they fall over" method. Google's hiring methods gave me a big fat headache and made me run as fast as I could from there.

I recently interviewed at another company that does a variation on this by sending you a coding challenge and you send the results back within 2 hours (you text them at a certain time and then they send the challenge). I liked this approach as well.

Both have their pros and cons but each of them will show you how someone codes. The hardest part for us has been figuring out if their style/approach to problem solving meshes with the team. That's still hard to determine in an interview because it's something of a personality thing We've worked our way through those issues, though.
Most insightful and original bit is at the end: I don't know what Google has planned for Wave or Gmail, but if I were them I would continue improving Wave, and then once it's ready for the whole world to use, integrate it into Gmail. Moving Wave into Gmail would give it a huge userbase, and partially address the "email is universal" problem. They could use MIME multi-part to send both a non-Wave, HTML version of the message, and the Wave version. Wave-enabled mail readers would display the live Wave, while older mailers would show the static version along with a link to the live Wave.
The new divide: Walled v. open
He mentions in the article that the interviewees DO write code in his process
It didn't sound like Gmail was made public with the features. Sounded like they were removed before it went public.
No, he said that he would ask for a code sample or demo. There doesn't seem to be any programming involved during the interview.
I don't think there's any chance of that. I've been the same about wave - it doesn't look that interesting enough to bother trying it out. Email, IM, twitter, etc is quite enough, and solves the main use cases very well.

Wave is a specific niche of communication, and that's why it'll never eclipse the above methods.
I wonder if some other person like PG will do a Y Combinator for another industry.