skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite hiring process I've been a part of was with a AI startup. The initial phase was a list of maybe a dozen questions in an email. Fairly open-ended questions about how I perceived aspects of intelligence, ontology, and general philosophical concepts. Then a day at the company talking with the founder and the team, walking through their concept, long two way discussions about it, and a discussion about the direction of AI in general. Didn't get into a lot of coding details, it was assumed if I could participate in the conversation at a sufficient level that I'd be able to work the rest of it out. Which was true. Great process, completely appropriate for that situation.
Part of "get stuff done" is that you manage yourself and communicate with your manager well enough to ensure you accomplish something of use to the team.

Interviewers should understand your contribution to the company isn't in your control, but your contribution to the team was.
When you say that your markup is HTML5, do you just mean that you changed the doctype at the top (That's trivial, and its only real effect is saving a few bytes, though I suppose it's a nice symbolic gesture), or that you are now using all of the new semantic elements like <article> and <section> and <footer>, using <video> instead of plugin-based video, including features like drag-and-drop, or offline use of data-heavy apps, &c. &c.?
I did not sign an NDA. Good point though. This company truly did have very sensitive IP to protect (unlike most companies IMHO). The CTO chaperoned me the entire day and made sure I didn't see/touch/hear anything too sensitive.
Because you have an incentive to "sell" work, even if it isn't in the interest of the company.
Ok, perhaps I wasn't clear. I love everything in this article, but it's hard to say anything that doesn't increase the complexity of it, which is the whole problem with people hiring programmers. So I'll say it again.

Yep.
I came recommended by someone inside the company, as almost everyone else there did.
Cloud computing, circa 1965
It's a tradeoff. You either support a bunch of versions on a wide array of different hardware, very badly (c.f. Microsoft -- we diss them, but to be kind, the problem they have set up for themselves is truly challenging), or you try to do a better job of support, in which case you must constrain yourself to supporting fewer options.
2004/09/18

Just polished off Release 1.6. I've also moved my development off of my laptop onto a Subversion repository. Subversion is so nice!

The project has been inactive for a while. Anyone knows other active option?
The only plausible alternative that anyone ever set forward is complete stagnation.... I’m hard pressed to call that preferable, especially if we’re talking about “foundations”. Be sure to notice that browsers still haven’t finished implementing HTML 4 and CSS 2, more than a decade after their specification. Also notice that when you say you write "XHTML", your code is almost certainly not being treated as XML by browsers.
"Turn right at the next crossing, then at the 4th street turn left, then after you see the Buddhist temple turn right". Major streets also have a name, and there are maps at a lot of places, most importantly at the train station. Around my place there are even detailed, apparently hand-drawn maps with the shops' names written on them.

In the block themselves there may also be a map of the block with the houses and the family names of the owners. Houses themselves don't have a number plaque but they have the owner's name at the entrance. Apartment buildings tend to have a (more or less pompous) name as well. Here "mansion" means an apartment :)

Generally you don't need to ask though, since the websites for japanese shops usually have a detailed map, and people who invite you will give you landmarks.
Thanks.

I used the term "prima facie" on purpose, because it's very apt here.

It roughly means "on first glance" or "on the surface". IANAL, but as I understand it, it's a way of saying "just glancing at the evidence here, it certainly looks like X"

The interesting part about this term is that it's all subjective. So as soon as one lawyer uses it, the appropriate response is to say, "but wait a minute! You're taking this out of context, words have more than one meaning, there was nuance involved, you're twisting what was actually said, etc."

I provided #4 the way I would provide it to anybody on any side of the discussion. I understand the appropriate reply is to get into meanings and nuance -- and I don't mean that as a slam. At some point it gets silly, such as in the famous "it depends on what you mean by the word 'is'" but we're nowhere near there yet.

The problem is that the requester asked somebody to explain it to him. As "somebody", I felt it appropriate to explain what I found prima facie and also my bias.

In highly emotional environments I've found that it's impossible to strike the right tone. Apologies if I could have done better.
It seems to me like top-down centralized education has historically done a somewhat poor job of teaching, and extra top-down education funding probably wouldn't make us more educated. Whereas top-down military seems to be the best way to defend against aggressive foreign powers.

I'm not entirely certain of my history, so here's as good a place to ask as any: when was the last time the United States was under threat of invasion from aggressive foreign powers?

Not that the general thrust of your argument is incorrect or anything; it just seems a little bit like Russia being worried about unreliable oil imports.
Doesn't work on this piece of text.
Scientists don't rely solely on tree ring data for historical temperatures, it's one of many methods used. Thus the tree ring data can be correlated against other measurements to know it's accurate for past time periods. This should be obvious.
> we just don't have enough details yet

What do you mean we don't have enough details?http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/

> So much could change

Like what?
As physicist and climate historian Spencer Weart told The Washington Post: "...[W]e've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance..."

There are two hypotheses that might explain this behavior. The first is unprecedented boldness of the enemies of science. The second is one I suspect Dr. Weart is not yet ready to face.
this is all pretty good advice, especially the reviewing past [code] experiences and getting a sense for what it'd be like to work with the person.

i like staunch's "spend a day with the team" method a lot, though talking about strengths/weaknesses and role playing certain scenarios is also a good way to get a sense for potential clashes ("tests are for monkeys" or what not)

what i didn't understand was the "smart" part. i don't think it's possible to get a sense for whether someone is smart--especially technical smarts as opposed to, say, leadership or empathy smarts--simply by talking with someone. in fact, the whole concept of smart is exactly what pressure-ful, fanciful interview questions are trying to get at. i'm not even sure "smart" is a single or useful concept.

specific interview questions do try to determine technical skills or thinking process...but it a chat over coffee, a single, brief encounter, any different? in a good way?

i'm nitpicking here, but i felt that the solution to smarts--assuming we define smart to something useful--is kind of weak.
> This should be obvious.

Thus, either (a) it has already been done, or (b) it is more difficult than you would expect for non-obvious reasons. So what is your point? Have you even bothered to find out if anyone has done it or not?
Overcoming Bias gets the gist right:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/its-news-on-academia-n...

The links from that post are other reasonably unemotional commentaries.
this is a repost from a while back. couldn't find the original discussion thread to link to, tho. eit.
Reversible business models
It's from http://www.judegomila.com/2009/05/mapping-out-your-web-start...
There's also http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Pretty good summary. I would add that there's a summary and references of some of the emails here: http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/11/climategate-executi...

For point #3 - there is speculation that the emails were leaked (and not "illegally hacked") not only because it would seem a correspondent saw a number of the emails prior to their release to the general public but because it only contained emails that would be gathered as if in preparation to meet a FOIA request. If they were leaked, the person(s) who did so could be protected under whistleblower legislation and would have done so legally.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/ent... "It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)"
Perhaps they just don't use anything so retro as radio anymore, and are so much more intelligent that they have no interest in communicating with us.
That has not been my experience, and my direction sense is nil. The address system also has not harmed the Japanese distribution industry, which is quite possibly the most efficient in the world.

(These days all the routing is computerized, but prior to that all routing made use of the fact that Japanese addresses get progressively more specific. You used that to sort the parcel at every location so that it got to a distribution center closer to the destination, at which point one of your carriers who had worked in that neighborhood for years would get it directly to the proper door.)
Hacking analog tape: the doctor who theme music
listen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF2x5IKxmAQ&feature=relat...
That's really weird. I'm still seeing $389. Also that page at one point for me today said there will be a monthly fee of $20 something dollars instead of what it says now.

They must be updating their site today or something, but that doesn't explain why we see different prices.
Can you direct me to papers correlating tree ring data to temperature data outside of the 100 year range from the mid 19th to the mid 20th cenutry? You indicate it's obvious, but I'd like to see the actual papers.
The Japanese system is better for finding a place on a map. If someone says, "3211 Birch St., Hickton" that could be anywhere in the city. If they say, "Hickton, West-区, Birch-町 3-2-11" you know to first look for the western part, then find the Birch area, then neighborhood 3, block 2, house 11.

Anyway, GPS makes the whole issue moot. Use your damn iPhone!
previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634494
The five secrets of innovation
Close the deal ASAP, else sun will start reducing their work force more,..
Just because future mysql(Which has enough forks and have support from multiple vendors) both Java and Solaris getting suffered,... which is not a good sign for open community,...
Russian girls
Russian woman seek Western man for romance
woops, Sorry about that! I wonder how it got through HN's filter.
Programmer here. Canvas tag excites me because for years the desktop programmer in me has wanted simple pixel addressing so that I could implement my own full-featured input/form controls, such as a grid control.
Exactly.

One billion years really is not that long, and we're still living in a young universe. I accept that as time goes on, the possible amount of intelligent life that exists/existed increases.

Though speculation is fun, it is not meaningful until we have have another data point to connect.
Thanks for telling me. I'll have to dig through the settings and find it.
It would be nice if HN got a real API. I like to read HN from my phone, but the table-based layout just doesn't work. Being able to write a "rich" interface would be much nicer.

(Plus, it would be nice to get notifications about comment replies, etc.)
I love it.

Actually, I went looking for this exact product but for windows earlier. Sort of like R1Soft, but for windows + encrypted with a key only I know. (I dont trust mozy/carbonite/etc.. )

Anyone know of anything?
Why stop at geo-redundancy? Let's set up an online backup store on the moon and Mars, too - http://domaingang.com/short-news/nasa-secures-moon-and-mars-...
It basically was. HP had what we'd recognize as 80s-era 16-bit micro as early as 1972-1973. It just never occurred to them to knock an order of magnitude off the price tag and add a speaker.

It took someone of Woz's stature to put a lot of very obvious things together and make it accessible at a price the masses could handle.
The end of MVC. Seems to be banished
Meanwhile, the Arctic is melting...

Maybe some of the climate change scientists got caught up in the politics of the situation and inappropriately exaggerated matters. But consider this: every single national academy of science in the world agrees the basic theory of global warming is correct. That's pretty overwhelming.

So there are two possibilities: it's all a big hoax by scientists, or it's nearly certain, but an unwarranted level of doubt has been fueled by, well, the industries that want to keep burning fuel... So what, really, sounds more likely?

Let's say there's only an 80% chance the theory is correct. If it's not, then we're screwed anyhow. If it is, we might just be able prevent a whole lot of trouble if we act soon. How certain do we have to be?
Claims to be the new modernized version of MVC, is it really promising?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but unreliable oil imports are exactly the kind of thing our military does worry about for us.

There are several ways to strike a serious blow to America besides outright invading it. We have always been blessed by geography and our good relationships with our immediate neighbors to lessen that particular risk. However, since the 1970s we have become increasing dependent on resources found outside our borders (oil isn't the only one, but it is the elephant in the room). In the same period, our allies have become increasingly dependent on us to assist in providing their defense as well.

Aside from all that, this whole discussion is born out of the idea that more money will automatically improve education. I'd argue against that. Sure, there are lots of way money would help in a lot of places, but every extra dollar doesn't translate into an extra well-adjusted knowledge worker. Also, a stable society that doesn't have to concern itself with wars and violence has a lot more time to spend learning, rather than surviving, so military spending indirectly benefits education.
Ask HN: rate my social experiment on Twitter
It's a website where you can rate twitterers (tweeps, tweeple?) based on their profile picture only. Inspiration was an ex-colleague who used Hot-or-Not to A/B test his resume pictures and avatars.

The basic question you answer is: Would You Follow Me on Twitter (base on my profile picture only)?

It's totally minimally-viable-product as you'll surely see from the design straight out of 1999.

I'm looking for feedback on how to make the website more engaging & what to do with the data.
I'm often inspired by the software that Yongfook churns out (fan of Sweetcron and Open Source Food). This just shows that it doesn't matter who you are or how talented you are - you have to find a problem you're passionate about solving. If the passion isn't there, there results won't be either. I think that's another way to state the article title.
Great use of WA. Slightly easier to parse: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=indian+population+/+(us...

The graph is especially interesting.
why can't the answer simply be that we have not received any signs of ET life because the signals simply have not reached us yet?

Assuming that the speed of light is still the fastest possible thing in the universe, we can infer from the vastness of space that the time required for a signal to reach Earth could be in the millions of years.

Furthermore, just because a civilization is advanced, still doesn't mean it is capable of conquering the vastness of space. I think we've been watching too many Startrek and Starwar movies. Space is not something that an advanced civilization can just wonder through.

These two points combined probably explain why we haven't encountered any real proof of ET life. Not to mention our time in the universe is merely but a spec in the grand scheme of things. Hardly a blip on anyone's radar.
blackhat. web sockets and cross-document messaging thrill me like midget porn never could.
I suspect the "being smart" is in terms that the employer can relate to - do they think about things in the kind of depth that I like / appreciate / can work with.

From my personal experience, I've dealt with smart people and smart people - one kind knows / understands a lot of things in a broad field, the other kind knows a lot about things but is almost completely devoid of common sense. I'd prefer the first kind in any situation where I or my friends would have to deal with them over the medium to long term. I'm pretty sure this would be reflected in all areas worth measuring for a company too.

So trying to define smart as a concrete measure may be missing the point, as you will actually have to work with the person, and what you feel is what tends to form your opinion / bias and affects your future interaction in such a way that it generally tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Facebook makes everyone who walks in the door sign an NDA, including visitors and people coming in for interviews. It literally takes 15 seconds to do.
Two things I've recently read:

Not free (10$): Chris Langan's (aka the smartest man on planet earth) The Art Of Knowing | Expositions On Freewill and Selected Essays is a good read. I won't link to his site since there's been a breach of security there, but I'm sure you can sleuth and find the ebook.

Free: When The Sleeper Wakes by HG Wells: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/775 . I just got done with that and it is very good.
Disclaimer: I was a Director of 6.370 for four years, so I think I have a decent understanding of your requirements and the motivations behind them.

As you mentioned, using bytecodes to measure computation time is a good approach since it results in deterministic gameplay -- and that's one of the reasons 6.370 stuck with Java for so long. A nice corollary to this approach is that if you can instrument the contestants' bytecodes, you can easily run your game engine alongside contestant code in the same VM, which is a pretty clean and fast architecture. And of course that still allows for JIT compilation if you really care about speed.

As for the programming language, I'd cast a vote for Python, since it shouldn't be too hard to instrument [I've never tried] and contestants will be happier coding in a more productive language. If you want to keep Java around, I believe Jython compiles Python source to Java bytecode, under the hood. Java contestants would have a home turf advantage, but perhaps the Python language is worth it? I don't know anything off the top of my head about compiling Java source to Python bytecode, but I imagine that situation would put Java at a heavy disadvantage.

Of course, any bytecode will work, so if you're considering going multi-lingual an obvious suggestion would be the .NET CIL which nets you all languages in the .NET framework. But my impression, at least from my time at MIT, is that contestants would be less happy with .NET.

You could also just instrument machine code. Piece of cake right?
I actually have a map similar to this that I devised to make sure I'm spending the right amount of time in the right ratios. This was to solve the age old question of "How much time should I spend coding vs other stuff?".

But, it was broken down differently: Product, Marketing, Sales, Business Strategy, and Customer Support is how I have my groups organized.

Suspiciously absent from this map is Customer Support, which I see as very integral part that supports Sales (helps convert free to paid) and Marketing (good support = good word of mouth). A good CS strategy is extremely important for a small business.

Also, one should think of the Core Product and Retention as one group, because you really can't have one without the other.
By "apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information" don't they mean deliberate deletion of data and an illegal campaign to deny specific people a handful of requests for data? And most of those requests were just follow-ups after initial denials.

Spin spin spin Scientific American, at least we know what your true colors are.
Your blood will not boil, that's a myth - it's not true.

You might not be able to breath though, but that's why we have space suits.
>"I never assumed the programming questions in an interview were really about getting the right answer in ten minutes or however long you spend on it, but more about giving the interviewee an opportunity to explain their thought process and problem solving approach to the interviewer."

That's what they say. But do you know anyone who failed the questions and still got hired? My experience has been that even when I nail the algorithmic questions, I miss a few trivia questions and don't get called back. Nuance cannot be replicated at corporate scale.
I agree.

But it shows me what a PHP and MySQL based web application may look like. It's a good glimpse of what web application looks like.
I have no peer group such as you describe, but I'm a very odd person.
Great story guys. Glad you guys never gave up!
Potentially worthless anecdote: I mostly botched an algorithm for finding Pythagorean triplets in an interview recently, and still got called back. (For round 2 I brought a nice big cup of coffee ;-)

I don't have the experience to know how well it works in the general case, though. Anyway, I don't think Aaron is arguing against interviewers using the technique wrong, but rather that it doesn't correlate at all with "good hires", even when used more intelligently. I don't think that's true.
Getting Started with Testing in Django
why is this insightful comment downvoted?
You're registered
As far as I can tell, for example by reading the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Clime Change) report (summary: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm...), the overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus is that global warming is real and man-made. I've yet to see anyone critical of this view make a case (much less a convincing one) that anything in these emails provides any reason to doubt the overall scientific conclusions and policy implications. Until someone does, I'm planning to ignore this "controversy" and use any time I spend on climate change to better educate myself on the general scientific consensus and the implications for policy. If we're interested in doing something about global warming, we shouldn't be nitpicking about whether some few lines of code were commented out or not. We should be making the case for cap-and-trade legislation and doing what we can to get it passed here in the U.S.
I often hear people assert that engineering isn't done under pressure, so an interviewee's performance under pressure doesn't matter. I don't think that's necessarily true: lots of systems have to be designed for life-and-death situations, web sites often have major crises/bugs, every team faces last minute deadlines, etc.

I wouldn't want anyone on my team who fell apart under stress. Performance under pressure isn't the only factor, but it is a factor.

That said, if anyone has a zero-stress engineering job, please tell me.
Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo