skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear you. It just sparked a pet peeve of mine as an interviewer and employee. ;)

I suppose it's easy pointing out flaws without offering solutions.

I think one possible solution would be a system where potential new hires were given real world problems under real world working conditions. Today, people often study for months to "pass" the interview tests. Generally taking up many hours of multiple interviewers time.

Instead, if a potential candidate were given a sufficiently unique and difficult problem and a time window to complete it representative of the desired work output it would provide a much better idea of what kind of employee they would be.

- Did they complete the job earlier than the given time, but turned in sloppy or a less than ideal solution?

- Did they eat up the entire allotted time, but turn in truly stellar work?

- Best of all, turned in early, unique solution with good, commented, test driven code and asking for another problem?

And really who cares if they had to review their algorithms or operating systems book to do it? That's why we keep them on our shelf.

I'd say for sufficiently hard, and original, problems I spend 80% of my time with my nose in a book or reading papers and 20% engineering a solution....unless I'm doing it day in and day out.

After that, it's mostly about personality and team fit. Bring them in to do some white booarding (full access to resources) and work with the team, make sure they aren't smoke and mirrors. Then make a call.

edit

For example, take your ops guy. Best interview I've ever seen for ops is to throw them in a broken sandbox environment, give them root & tell them to fix it, and walk away.
How to get Travis-like GitHub pull requests using Bamboo
They may indeed try to evolve a species out of another. In all examples in your link, they stay within the same species, however. There is simply no convincing experiment in which they evolve one species out of another. It does not exist.
Speaking foreign languages opens truly opens many opportunity that most monolinguals (especially English-speaking ones) do not even suspect. Yes, my German colleagues and friends all speak English and we could get along fine using it. However we wouldn't be able to share our personalities and cultural differences as well as we do on a daily basis if we didn't share a native language (for them) spoken at a high level (for me).
Please Crush this site (while donating to cancer research)
The worst type is the: "We would love to have your feedback" popup overlay upon entering a site.
I've just landed on your site! How am I supposed to have an opinion of it already? Well I do now, the first 3 seconds sucked big time!
When you try to download the software, they try to make you sign up or log in for no reason.
The bAbI project
I'm not. We weren't fans of php either. Even if you buy into the philosophy that all languages are technically equal, that still doesn't make them pragmatically equal.

It was probably our network, but we had a very hard time finding good php engineers, and a much easier time finding good python engineers. So that won.
Hi all,

I created this site along with my brother. We're supporting our friend who is currently attempting to raise $100,000 for cancer research as part of the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society's Man/Woman of the Year contest.

The contest is drawing to a close soon, so I figured, why not see if HN can take down the site with traffic and donate to a good cause while we're at it?

Brief technical background: It's a simple .NET MVC5 site hosted on Azure with some (hopefully enough) caching in place. Not making use of Azure's CDN service yet but hoping that caching a good deal of the response saves on some costs.

We trust you'll send traffic in good faith (please let me be right about that; the site isn't free to run.)

If for some reason the site truly is crushed, we'd still surely appreciate a donation -- the official URL is: http://www.mwoy.org/pages/nyc/nyc15/DonateNow?fundraiserPage...
I've used gatling on a few redesigns with success

https://github.com/gabrielrotbart/gatling

I have some tweaks i was going to merge in that gave the diff's as %'s (so you could ignore small differences like fonts being different) as well as animate between the two versions. On my TODO was grabbing the actual element style attributes and then actually just diffing that, so the differences would be more or less spelled out.

Still, cool stuff!
It's really the subsequent children that you should watch out for. Now they'll have an accomplice.
This might be a good starting point:

https://github.com/flashmob/go-guerrilla
It's not a problem. It's amusing. Juxtaposition is a common form of humor, and whether or not MIT indented the humor, it is funny to see a multimillion dollar autonomous robot get filmed with such a primitive technique.
You know, the age of ACTUAL pop-up windows really sucked, and it was amazing when browsers rendered them largely obsolete by limiting how websites could launch another window but at least all of those had the X in the SAME EXACT PLACE.

The new crop of lightboxed modal popups that are now ubiquitous are 100 times worse since they:

- are modal

- often work poorly on mobile

- have as many different dismiss mechanisms as there are popups

- web marketers love them
The value of uniform build and test infrastructure
I'll have to disagree with you on this when you say "useless". Most sites don't post a salary, and for those few that do, a range is listed.

I like using https://angel.co/jobs to find those companies that have raised $ and currently hiring. One thing about is that I'm not really sure how frequently these startups have the time to update this on Angellist.
I really wanted people to figure out how to make prototype systems work for them but either the web browser isn't the best context for them or people are just too used to class-based systems. I looked at Self and it was neat but I haven't seen any larger or shorter-lived programs that take advantage of the prototype-based system.
2015 Economic Growth Forecast Downgraded, but Housing on a Better Path
Is it popping up halfway through or when it thinks you're mousing over to close the tab? Sudden upward mouse movements trigger some of those javascript retention popups, even though you were just moving to the scroll bar or something.

But while we're on the topic, the recent trend of "No thanks, I don't want to get all this awesome stuff" or "No, I don't want to become a master in subject X" buttons are very condescending.
Microsoft would ask if you wanted to take a survey when you were done with a site, then pop-under a window that would detect when you had closed the first one and start a survey.
In my experience (of which I unfortunately have far too much), creationists fundamentally don't understand what science is, which is why they think their ideas qualify. They simply don't grasp the depth or the quantitative nature that underlies statements like "the universe is 13 billion years old" or "humans evolved from single-celled organisms."

It's basically cargo-culting popular science articles. They see something like "continental drift is demonstrated by how the coastlines of Africa and the Americas fit so neatly together." They then come up with something that sounds similar, like, "the Grand Canyon could have been carved by a huge and sudden deluge, demonstrating Noah's Flood." The fact that the Africa/Americas thing is just a brief summary of mountains (sometimes literally so) of data is completely lost.
An Overview of “Blueprint” – Facebook for Business
AutoCad got AutoLisp as an update to R6 in January 1986. AutoCad got solid modelling in R11 with the "Advanced Modelling Extension" add-on in 1990.

The whole history of AutoCad's feature evolution is that of a successful startup. There's an overview on AutoDesk's website:

http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/autocad-release-...
If it needs no proof, it is not science either, and that was exactly the point I was making.
Awesome collection of DevOps Resources
Actually no, not in the younger generation but absolutely in the older generations. Ireland is one of the most rapidly secularising/atheist countries in the world at the moment with the UK close behind.
I have seen that, but some of them pop up partway down a page or even on a timer.
Great work. I agree with others that maybe Uber and Instacart aren't exactly startups, but I'm sure candidates can filter that on their own.

One minor suggestion: when posting a job, perhaps indicate the 300 character limit in the "why should candidates apply" textbox title, and maybe a little character counter would be helpful.
I found FreeCAD ideal. It has a language (python), an object model, a boundary rep kernel, and a GUI.
These start ups don't get the talent they need, because they purposefully don't hire the talent they need. Atleast three times in the past I've had recruiters tell me these yet to be named start up's can't hire me because they hire from the IIT's only. In short don't bother to apply if you don't belong to our self congratulatory crowd. One time I was told this in an onsite interview, I had to tell them on their face if such was the case they need to tell me before hand, instead of wasting my time having me travel to their place.

And the interview methods are so badly broken, you are only likely to hire mugpots who memorize math theorems and repeat them in interviews. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying algorithm knowledge isn't important, but these people aren't test your algorithm skills, they are testing your skills to repeat the algorithms you memorized. Honestly I don't know of any serious math problem worth solving can be solved in minutes, unless you already know about it(Or you are Terrence Tao or Gregori Perelman). Which in case your are not testing problem solving skills, you are testing how many problem solution sets the candidate has memorized.

Now guess how people get around these interviews. Most people who ace these interviews are from so called elite colleges nearly spend all the time in the day on interview forums. Instead of actually working. And since they spend so much time there, they feel obligated to use that effort in switching jobs more often for better pay. This leads to a big crowd of people who abandon projects mid way only to hop from one company to another. All the while day productivity at offices being very low.

Now if you are hiring such people why should you complain? You are getting exactly what you wanted.

Hire for productivity and for people's commitment to make your projects and company successful. The results will follow.
Spelling and Vocabulary Website: SpellingCity
Because it works.

I had a small deals aggregator site which got most of its traffic from Google. When users landed I knew they were interested in the content, and I showed it through a semi-transparent background and forced them to enter their emails before being able to click through. I remember conversions going from 10-20 new emails per day to over 100 emails per day.
By that line of reasoning schools should no teach anything at all. 2+2=5 is just as valid math as 2+2=4, anything else would be allowing the government to hide the truth!
The crucial usability difference is that lightbox style "popups" are all gone instantly when you close the page/tab.
If it dissolves into something harmless and possibly recyclable, then there is not much difference between it and nature - everything alive is built to decay and be used for something else.

But I agree that people seeking rent will be a problem. As usual.
This is great. On Ubuntu I always use "apt-get install mail-stack-exchange" which leaves you with STARTTLS enabled SMTP, IMAP, POP3 and, with the removal of 1 #, 587 submission. the users are the normal users of the system which automatically have a Maildir created upon receiving their first mail.

This solution also gives you webmail though and DKIM. Very nice, I use the OwnCloud webmail which works ok for me (less features but very, very much better looking than Roundcube and I can sync calendar and contacts to the same server!)

I think it is very important that projects like this one exist, they take the annoying details out of running your own server software. Thanks a lot!
What do you suppose a government is, if not people "gather[ing] together [to] fix it themselves"?

I'll also note that if parents feel strongly about their children learning creationism, nothing prevents them from teaching it themselves, or buying books that teach it, or even inviting "learned" lecturers to present the topic. This is just about taxpayers not paying for the teaching of nonsense.
I lost it at DJ Deliverables.
That's the power of Virtual Reality
Since this is relevant today. Here I want to recommend this awesome game to you guys. It's two of my favorite games in one (portal+smb): http://stabyourself.net/mari0/
The average person in the UK cannot save 51% of net income. It is totally impossible. Difficult even for someone earning above the median wage.

Is paying the rent 'living high on the hog'? I don't get it. Rent alone on a studio flat in loads of places is 10K. If you move away you earn less than you save on the rent.

What's the suggestion? Live 2 to a room? Live in a car?

Theoretically possible if you're determined I suppose.
Sure: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_45
>Try having an absurd (approach infinity) number of dollars and, even if circulation speed is near zero, dollars will have near zero value.

That only matters if those dollars are being spent and remain in the flow of funds. Say the Treasury printed a few trillion dollar notes and buried them in a hole, it's not going to affect the price level any (aside from the real resources used).
Have a frank and honest conversation. Any good manager doesn't want his employees to be stressed. Mention the S word and you'll get his attention.

Have you brought this up with him previously?
what is a bodyshop? in the united states a body shop is where they repair cars
Workfarce
Grad students are cheaper than a robot.
> How is it OK to work for a fake company, but it's bad to work for free for a real company and gain some real experience... How come?

These people are unemployed, right?

What if you let a company hire them for free? Let's see...

1. company has one paid secretary
2. company hires free secretary
3. company lays off paid secretary because the free one is cheaper
4. previously paid secretary is now unemployed
5. previously paid secretary gets hired for free by company 2

You KNOW this is what would happen. Don't even start about how companies autoregulate themselves and how the market will punish bad behaviour and how employees can simply choose to work for a better one or whatever. These things are wishful thinking.
One of the devs said yesterday that API integrations are coming soon. After this, replacing Meteor's Blaze for something like React could make this a serious slack alternative...
Its worse than that. They're deliberately hijacking the catchphrases of science to appear legitimate, so they can insert their religious message into classrooms. Its as cynical as can be. No need to impute goodwill or mistaken good intentions; they have an agenda.
A guide to blowing up Google
Consider this thought experiment. Suppose that tomorrow, your city council decides to put more money into work making the city more beautiful. More people will be paid to tend to municipal gardens, among other things. Does this mean that suddenly, society values a beautiful city more? Did preferences change over night? (...) People noticed the discrepancy and effected political change to bring the money in line with underlying valuations.

My city council has existed for decades, as have the gardens. Why did people chose this particular moment to effect political change? I think that clearly indicates that preferences did change.

That said, I do agree that monetary value is just one possible measure of value.
Will this work on Debian Jessie?
Prototype-type based systems are cool in theory, but aren't much fun to use in practice. They are incredibly powerful and easy to abuse. Basically single inheritance in disguise.

Classes aren't great either, but at least using class inheritance makes you feel icky, you're not likely to have shared state on the prototype being randomly mutated, and it's pretty readable.
"Species" is an artificial distinction that human biologists use to make it easier to talk about what's going on. There is no objective distinction between species. The idea that the universe somehow permits evolution within a species but does not permit evolution from one species to another is nonsensical, on roughly the same level as thinking that it's possible to walk one mile but not possible to walk ten miles.
> The huge gap between the university curriculum and the real world industry

I'm not sure I agree with this though. "Real world" is very different from company to company, domain to domain. It also changes dramatically in just the few years required to attain a degree.

I've always viewed universities as providing the foundation and discipline needed to adapt to any of those situations rather preparing or trying to guess at the needs of any particular one.
Oh man, I'm not a full blown gamer, but I do play games. I fondly remember getting violently mad at my nintendo playing SMB in the livingroom. Throwing the controller, screaming. All that good stuff. I remember fighting endlessly to get to the end and save the princess... Just to be on the final level and my mom comes in, hits the power button and says "Time for bed."

Those moments growing up were the bane of my existance.. Super Mario Bros was the first game I ever fell in love with.. To this day, even with modern gaming and modern graphics. Super Mario Bros still holds my attention longer than any of those games ever could imagine.

Here I am sitting at my computer having just turned 30 years old 5 days ago, and I see this. My childhood friend just turning 30 years old too. I can't wait to introduce my daughter to the wonders of Super Mario Bros, and I will do it on the same Nintendo Entertainment System that my mother bought me and my sisters in 1985, that I've kept this whole time and still works flawlessly today.
So long as they keep working, those popups aren't going anywhere.
"Why is it bothersome that the goverment decides that it is illegal for schools to teach a lie?" Creationism is not a lie. It is just not science. But then again, the same holds true for evolutionism, which is also not a lie. It is just also not science.
Creationism isn't even a philosophy. Its a cynical attempt to inject religion into the classroom by masquerading as another subject. Its not 'fine to teach'; its deliberate quackery that should be rejected.
Deploy meteor.js apps to the cloud with a chromebook
IIRC on the old versions the installer had your login data attached so you did not have to relogin inside the app once installed. But I believe this does not work anymore since code signing.
If that's the case, GP should have used the proper <sarcasm/> tag !
I remember once reading an interview with a supposed hyperpolyglot, in which he revealed that he spent nearly all of his time (8+ hours/day) reviewing flashcards. I guess it's possible, if you really like doing flash cards.

These popular narratives about "hyperpolyglots" tend to have really naive views about what "fluency" in a language means. It's probably feasible to have rudimentary knowledge of many languages, but there are large practical limits as to how sophisticated your competence can be unless you're using that language regularly to communicate in a variety of domains.
Personally I prefer syslinux, where the config resides in a easy-to-understand textfile, /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg, which can be on FAT or ext2/3/4 or btrfs. The only limitation is that all files that syslinux reads must be on the same partition.

Grub2 OTOH is definitely an abomination. Whoever thought it a good idea to require compiling the bootloader config into a binary should be given a thorough slapping with a medium-sized trout. That thing is an overengineered solution looking for a problem.
Typechecking SQL in Slick and Doobie
Open floor plan mimicry is a physical equivalent to those management bibles read, or at least propped on the desks, by management.

Take successful company, ignore the root causes and context ov their success, and mimic those things they did and used during their successful run because transplanting those wholesale without much thought or understanding should definitely result in our own success, or, in the least, we did something different to try to succeed. And if we failed, well, we just didn't try hard enough. Obviously there wasn't enough buyin.

It could be time to overhaul the team with new members who don't have the baggage of how it was before and start anew.
Consultant looking for advice “how to productize?”
Dear Hacker News,

Some background to help you determine if you can help us. We have two separate activities going on at once:

1) To pay the bills, I write MRP/ERP software for Aerospace and Medical clients. A big part of my business is helping people who run some critical part of their business out of an old DOS program or Excel and turning it into a Microsoft Access program.

I feel like I'm somehow putting myself in a "monkey zone" where they feed me peanuts but to anyone else they throw great big wads of cash. I have two customers that bought $25k servers in the last year. They didn't even mention it to me until after the fact. I sold them both servers for my software for cost (~$3k) a few years ago.

2) I have two others people that have been programming with me for about six years now. We built a tool for building business applications on the web. In some ways its very much like Microsoft Access for the web. Its crazy good now, we're on something like version 10. We use it for most of our clients as a supplement to MS Access.

Unfortunately, at this time, it only works with PostgreSQL and every time we show it to PostgreSQL people they love it but want it to be open source. Obviously, we had hoped to sell it so that's a big disappointment.

We have an address book and a calendar. We're mulling over writing a webmail client and offering it as a "small business server" since Microsoft seems to have stepped away from that. I'd rather not do the work unless there is demand. With this tool we could build practically any website app pretty quickly.

Based on the above, what do you think is the easiest, quickest route for us to something that is likely to be profitable as a product?
People in general seem to underestimate how important it can be to speak the same language as a group[1], even when you happen to share another language. If I were to move to another country for many years, I would definitely start learning the most relevant language there. Even if ~98% spoke English.

Being able to speak something like English in some part of the non-English word might make you able to communicate with people there. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to have meaningful connections compared to speaking the native tongue.

[1] Like the native language in some country or region.
One Reason It’s So Hard to Become a 'Creative Superstar City'
I was thinking exactly the same thing. I'm always amazed at how many times a lyft or uber driver does not see a "situation" a little further down the road, resulting in the need to swerve to avoid it versus changing lane early to avoid the last second reaction.

I've noticed it in cases where I'm a passenger in a friends car also, but I've always chalked that up to the conversation being a distraction.
Not so. If somebody generates a link to a file on their Dropbox account, then you'll see that popup when you click that link. A Dropbox account is not necessary to view such links (thus the "No thanks" button at the bottom of that screenshot) but they use it as an opportunity to market to you anyway.
At Harvard, Natalie Portman acknowledges what many of us feel: Impostor syndrome
Dead Sites Posting
interoperability is pretty much the whole point of Web Components.