skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if you were compensated for your time?

My three favorite evaluation processes so far (from the POV of the interviewee):

1. Quick phone screen with someone technically competent enough to call me on my BS if it were painfully obvious, followed by a "come in and let's get you working as a contractor".

I went through this scenario twice, and both times it worked out rather well. Of course, there was risk involved with both parties, but it seemed to work fine for both a 5-person startup and 100-employee agency.

2. Phone call to talk generalities and big picture, followed by a lunch meeting that doubled as a conversational technical interview, followed by a take-home exercise on a paid-for-time-if-no-offer basis.

I went through this scenario once, and liked it even better. The idea behind paying me if no offer follows was that I could be (and was) given a real problem the company needs solved (small, fairly standalone feature in my case) that I could work out for them for a reasonable fee. They'd get full rights to the work, I wouldn't feel like it's a waste of my time if nothing comes of it, and it would all be nil and void if I were offered a job in the end.

3. Quick 30-minute phone call with a few team members to get a sense for what the position, team, and I are all about, followed by a 5-hour marathon in-person interview, but broken up into more digestible chunks: 45-min chat with one of the leads, 45-min chat with someone more on par with the position, 45-min whiteboard problem, 45-min session of actually solving problems at a real computer (while being encouraged to do it the way I would, using Google, Stack Overflow, asking them things as I would ask coworkers, etc.), etc.

This last one was at a BigCo in the Valley and I felt was a pretty damn solid way to go about it. I actually basically bombed the whiteboard problem, but didn't feel like it was an unfair question to ask me, as the single interviewer present was more interested in my process than my reciting a memorized answer.
There isn't a single definition of "molecule" that includes fewer than two atoms.
Candidates must be able to withstand the smell of urine for a number of minutes...
You make some good points, I'm definitely not hating on the US because I've lived there on for a number of years on a couple of occasions and I love the place. I'd love to actually settle there one day.

I suppose with a nation as big as the US and the media presence there, it would probably be much more difficult to hide such stories as it would in various European nations.
Docker Basics: Linking and Volumes
Crazy. I'm up in the Northern Territory and it feels like anything goes here. (Almost).
They'd be worse off?

Blackberry has two problems right now, they don't have any apps so nobody wants to buy their phones, and they don't have any market share so nobody wants to make apps for their phones.

And yet.

In terms of both market share and app availability, they're better off than Sailfish, or FirefoxOS, or Ubuntu Phone or Tizen. In fact, it probably has more users and more apps than all four of them combined. Switching from their current OS to any of the other alternatives in the marketplace besides Android or maybe Windows Phone is a step BACK for Blackberry, not forward.
I want to personally thank you and your ilk for being such shallow morons that you felt excluding Mr. Yarvin from this conference was a bright idea. What an incredibly foolish mistake for you...and a lucky turn of events for humanity.

I bet you actually think "your team" won something just now. But the only thing you've done is ensured you go down in history as the immature fuckwits you sadly are.

I'm OVERJOYED that you are personally too stupid to understand what his code is good for. This guy is like a gold coin laying on the sidewalk, being constantly trampled underfoot, which nobody is smart enough to bend down and pick up.

Without y'all making him into a martyr, we'd likely have never heard of him, or his project....and the future might have been a very different place. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being an unimaginative, clueless, self-absorbed asshat.

We just so happen to have a use for his invention that will make him a multi-millionaire in short order. You'll be reading about Mr. Yarvin in the magazines in a few years.

You may want to reflect on what is so seriously wrong with your way of thinking about the world that it causes you to fail, time and time again, to appreciate and respect genius when you see it.

Could it be your massively overinflated ego and sense of self-worth?

Maybe you're not the special little shit you've always imagined yourself to be.

Could it be because you have spent your entire life searching for something to be pissed off and offended about, and thinking of about how you can rank up in society and step on others to do it?

Maybe it's because you're busy doing anything and everything but what the geniuses are doing: studying technology, and thinking new thoughts.

How many new words and concepts have YOU invented, you judgmental prick?

Nathan Klein

(Remember that name.)
Anyone know what a dag is? Seems like a term from finance, but it is literally unGoogleable.
Or simply not probe too deeply into a really perfect story about how horrible things have gotten. Might not be the case here but, if it were, hardly unique. See, for example, this discussion of the Rolling Stone Duke story: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-21/a-messy-ans...
I read absurd stories like this and try to understand how so many individual people who are involved drop the ball. All it would (should) take is one person involved to have the nerve(as if it should take nerve) to speak up and say "this is ridiculous".

In this case (assuming this story is true, but there's no shortage of similar stories if this one isn't), it took a fucking child to have the nerve to state the obvious:

*
But then, according to Cindy, "My son spoke up." He said he wanted to talk to the judge. Surprised, their lawyer asked the boy: Did he have the courage to go through with this? And would he tell the truth? The boy said yes. "He went back there and spoke to the judge for about ten minutes," said Cindy. "And then the judge came out and called the two lawyers to the bench and talked to them for about 10 or 15 minutes. And with that, our lawyer came to us and said that if we admitted that we didn't know that it was wrong to [let our son] stay in the backyard, but that we know now that it's wrong and we will never let it happen again, and that we will explain this to our son, he would let the children come with us."

Cindy and Fred promised. The judge released the kids and closed the case.
*

I wonder, how does this happen, and why does it happen mostly in western countries?

My best theory is, unless you are a true revolutionary/disruptor, if you are just well-above-average skill, but not Elon Musk level, your easiest ride is just playing the system. This case (ignoring that it shouldn't have even happened in the first place) could have been closed immediately, if people in the justice system were interested in administering justice. But they're not - they are interested in revenue. Stretching cases like this out for weeks / months increases (or at least maintains) federal funding requirements, but it also pulls external money into the system (defense fees) that goes to your brothers and sisters you attended law school with. Think of the $ this one case generated, and it's just a kid hanging out in his back yard!

It's not just the legal system that is like this, although it's one of the worst offenders. I see similar behavior working in IT (in medium to large companies)- things that are obviously easy to fix, problems that aren't difficult to solve (or don't even need solving at all) turn into multi-hundred-thousand, or even multi-million $ projects. And if you say "wait a minute, does this make sense what we're doing", your head will shortly be cut off, because so many people have skin in the game. But if you just keep your mouth shut and go with the flow, you can make an entire career out of it.
Well I didn't admit that I didn't know it - two wrongs don't make a right. This was my first interview in 8 years, second in 24 - admittedly I was a little rusty.
Strange and Beautiful Seeds From the Atom (2011)
The same Wikipedia page on molecules that says they have "two or more atoms held together" also says this in the next paragraph:

In the kinetic theory of gases, the term molecule is often used for any gaseous particle regardless of its composition. According to this definition, noble gas atoms are considered molecules despite being composed of a single non-bonded atom.
Remove Vaastu Defects of  South East Cut Corner
State legislation rarely makes the news, unless it's about a new highway somewhere :)

Last Week Tonight did an episode on how state legislatures in the US are passing heaps of legislation "on the sly" (scare quotes because it's not really sly, just no-one watches them...), and it's similar over here. Hell, I keep forgetting our current premier's name, and I voted for him... and I couldn't tell you the name of a single other state politician who isn't a party leader. I've even forgotten the name of the guy involved in the union scandal last week...
Please elaborate! I am curious what your experience and setup is. I have zero interest in consuming media or games through VR but I am really wondering how it can be productive. Do you get more work done compared to regular monitors, or is it the same work while feeling 199% cooler?
Building REST API in F# Using Suave
My friend worked at Google a few years ago (in a non-engineering role). After his in-person interviews, the recruiter called him back to ask him how many hours he worked during college (to pay his way), so as to excuse is less than 4.0 GPA to the hiring review board. He had completed his undergrad degree was 20 years in a subject not directly related to the Google position. He since had an relevant MS degree and real-world work experience, but that undergrad GPA was apparently still really important.
Unfortunately the picolisp dot org website linked in that discussion is now a parked domain.
directed acyclic graph
Every time I can fact check a story from reason.com it's almost always not telling the whole truth.

I like alternate media picking up on buried stories, I just wish they could do it without lying but perhaps this is why the stories are not picked up, they are more complicated than reason.com's simple tales.
I wish Blackberry had a strong data firewall between Android apps and QNX apps.
This is spot on. "Enterprise" dev life is way different than HN dev life.
Directed Acyclic Graph maybe?
Google and Facebook keeps most loud noise on internet happy by giving them free stuff. Actual quote from a comment here: "Google gives their software for free, I don't see any reason to oppose them".
So don't be disappointed if people don't hear you out. Nice article, thank you and good luck
This is great. Mainstream media should be eating this up, but where are they?
I looked up the relevant part of the legal code:

3)(a) "Neglect of a child" means:

1. A caregiver's failure or omission to provide a child with the care, supervision, and services necessary to maintain the child's physical and mental health, including, but not limited to, food, nutrition, clothing, shelter, supervision, medicine, and medical services that a prudent person would consider essential for the well-being of the child; or

2. A caregiver's failure to make a reasonable effort to protect a child from abuse, neglect, or exploitation by another person.

Neglect of a child may be based on repeated conduct or on a single incident or omission that results in, or could reasonably be expected to result in, serious physical or mental injury, or a substantial risk of death, to a child.

If I'm reading it correctly, an incident like this could have been legal grounds to charge the parents with neglect if and only if it was repeated conduct - e.g., they had repeatedly locked the kid out of the house. If not, any judge would through this case out immediately.

Note: I'm not a lawyer and may be entirely wrong.
The part you didn't mention is where CPS, and individual CPS employees are sued, and lambasted in the press when they don't act, and then something happens downstream, and they end up taking all the blame.

I tend to agree with your general theme though, that what we're seeing is the result of system systems that have been funded, and now are doing what they were created to do.
She has a pretty good reputation, and has had no shortage of stories like this to report on, so I doubt she want or need to would tarnish all that.

It might just be that in a country with 300 million people, this is going to happen once in a while. It may or may not represent a general erosion of parent's rights and civil liberties.
I have the same experience. There are no other reports of this story (apart from Skenazy's blog). I went looking through Florida police blotters in April for neglect charges. I read some pretty heinous shit (cages, for instance, were involved in one case). Nothing this dumb.

Skenazy doesn't even need to be biased or dishonest for this story not to be the whole truth (or true at all); she just has to not fact-check it.

I'd be curious if anyone came up with a way to independent corroborate any part of this story.
Pair programming is incredibly divisive.

In a company that does pair programming, sure, do that, because those of us that hate pair programming would then instantly tell them we're not interested and leave rather than waste time on an interview somewhere we won't want to work.

But likewise, if you're not actually doing pair programming day to day, don't do it in an interview setting.
I interviewed and was hired almost 5 years ago. My experience was largely positive, though the process took a long time.

I had 5 interviewers. I made it clear to each up front that I had never worked in one of the canonical languages (Java, Python, C++, Go) and that my background was mostly C#. All of my interviewers seemed to take that point, so the questions I was asked were mostly pseudo-code. The one language-specific thing was about Java iterators, so I had to ask about the Iterable/Iterator contract before I could start. My pseudo code was pretty C#ish and that's pretty close to Java, so I was able to intelligently discuss differences or explain my intent.

The crazy thing about my interview (and the interviews of most people that I talked to) was that I thought that I crashed really hard. One guy let me fumble around for almost the entire time trying to answer his questions (it dealt with statistics and big data). Of the five, I feel like I knocked it out of the park with two of them, flubbed it with two of them, and the fifth was meh.

Later, I talked to the recruiter about it. I was feeling a lot of impostor syndrome (very common) and trying to understand why I was hired and make sure that it wasn't an accident. In the end, recruiters are looking for very high or very low scores from your interviewer, and interviewers give a lot of points for trying. Even the ones that I thought I failed on gave me medium scores because I did a good job of connecting with them on a personal level, and I talked through my work as I did it. So I ended up with 3 moderate scores and two high ones, which was enough.

As for passing but not getting hired, that's a little different. You don't really pass the interview. You do a phone screen and then the recruiter decides whether to proceed. After that you come in for interviews, and once you're scored again the recruiter decides whether to proceed. Then you go to hiring committee, where they decide hire or no hire. The recruiters have a pretty good idea of what hiring committee will say, and they tend to send borderline people. After hiring committee you go to offer committee and then you get the offer letter. After you accept the offer, if you're a general purpose SWE, then you talk to teams to determine placement. The whole process took about 3 months for me.

For my prep, I actually went on other interviews and read books (particularly on solving by induction - these things show up often on interviews).

Everybody has a different experience, but when I read posts by people who claim they were passed over because they couldn't solve a specific problem, I suspect the problem was really poor culture fit, resulting in low scores across all of the interviewers.
And Google Maps was built from acquisitions like Where 2 and Keyhole. Their data processing has improved vastly, but the product seems mostly unchanged.
I would rather be strongarmed by a corporation and have recourse, than be strongarmed by a government, legally authorised to do so by a secret court which overrules all other courts, or told to change my actions and never tell anyone why under punishment of imprisonment.

If Google's a dick, I can post on Facebook or Tumblr about how Google's being a dick. If my government is a dick, my life as I know it is over.
Game over: FTC goes after board game campaign in first crowdfunding case
You should worry about more than the false negative rate. You should worry about the reputation Google has developed that means a lot of those who have choices opt to not even consider interviewing at Google any more because it's not worth the aggravation.
Did you consider the possibility that you might not be the only person tailoring their resume?
>The first programmer with/without a shadow walks in. He's quite annoyed, because he was neck deep in jira or git or debugging some hairy stack-trace on eclipse, and he's been unceremoniously yanked off to interview YOU - the new dude, who has no fucking idea how things really work here. Well, he must show YOU your place. You lowly worm...

Oh man, I hope I n ever come off that way when I'm the interviewer. I always try to give myself a good fifteen to twenty minutes to cool down before the interview and get prepared mentally. But I generally kind of look angry when I'm thinking and listening. Would it be helpful to explain to candidates that I have rbf?
Android vendors got out of that market for two reasons: because omitting a hardware keyboard makes it easier to compete on screen size, and because hardware keyboards require hardware localization. However, Blackberry's original target market was people who wanted to take their email on the road, and their remaining users are far more likely than most to want to hold onto their keyboards.
NT doesn't have a proper state parliament, so you miss out on a lot of the fun. Fewer services, but fewer restrictions.
Thanks for pointing out, my bad, fixed now. I meant Hamiltonian path. Guys might have leaked on Glassdoor among other questions.
To prove the crime of Neglect of a Child, the State must prove the following three elements beyond a reasonable doubt:

1.	(Defendant)

a.	[willfully] [by culpable negligence] failed or omitted to provide (victim) with the care, supervision, and services necessary to maintain (victim’s) physical or mental health.

b.	failed to make a reasonable effort to protect (victim) from abuse, neglect, or exploitation by another person.

2.	(Defendant) was a caregiver for (victim).

3.	(Victim) was under the age of 18 years.

Florida jury instructions.
Left-Leaning Red-Black Trees Considered Harmful
Edsger W. Dijkstra's Manuscripts
uLambda, just like AWS Lambda, but with REST API that you can actually use...
Reddit AMA: Nassim Taleb
It's not just CS, but probably more common with CS. There are two kinds of engineers.

1. Those that love love love solving Puzzles.
2. Those that question whether solving this or that puzzle is going to bring in any money for the company.

For a places like google or deranged YC startups, whether what you are assigned has any bearing on cash flow is something way above the typical engineers paygrade. There are a lot of companies where that isn't true.
I've heard rumors Bloomberg is trying hard to dump Oracle and move to OS like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

So it's interesting they published this article.
Show HN: EnnoDB, a simple NoSQL database
Cool, I stand correct. Thanks
Just because codes of ethics are sometimes violated doesn't make them not useful. Consider the outcry that happens whenever a serious publication has even a minor failure to disclose (Stephanopoulous, Olbermann, etc). Now consider what kind of deterrent that must have on journalists for taking cash for favorable news coverage.
HN: What are you most excited about in the world right now?
I really want to read and be inspired by all the awesome things are happening in the world right now :)
Node's Express Get/Post Rule of Thumb
I figured every full-stack programmer worth his salt should try to write his own database at least once, no?
By comparison my sister had a truly horrible interview experience (long ago, some of her problems have been addressed). Ultimately, if you're in CS, you're in demand so they bend over backwards for you. If you're not in CS there are thousands of competitors for each position, which makes it much much harder.
Of the three, I'd contend <$> is the most reasonable to do since it's very similar to $ (which is commonly used), but applied to a boxed argument (Functor).
Ed Snowden’s Life on Ars Technica (2013)
I interviewed at Google twice in Mountain View after getting through the whole phone interview and coding process each time, but failed in person. I was way too nervous and performed poorly, but did well enough that they wanted me to come back a third time. I said no thanks.

Ironically, I wound up working at Google anyway after my startup (where I was a core developer for years) was acquired. Another case of real-world skills not being borne out in Google's interview process.
Thanks! I've been following the course and so far it's been awesome!
Yes, they were, but they hadn't really hit the public experimentation stage at that point. Guitars were around for centuries before guitar music really took off (and instruments similar to guitars go back millenia).

I have the opposite view of sampling - I find it feels heavily artificial and manufactured (not always corporate, but still manufactured), and it doesn't really feel like you can 'hear' the musician's mood. Just a matter of taste, though. I just think you're giving the 80s a bit of rough stick - that corporate management increased through the 90s and 00s, and was around before the 80s, too - see the infamous 'wall of sound' methodology :)
Just because something is public or leaked does not automatically make it declassified. This material is still classified until officially declassified by appropriate classification authorities. Persons with a US security clearance should avoid viewing this material. I don't know what the NSA is telling its people. When I was a fed, before the Snowden leaks, we were already warned about not visiting Wikileaks, and to avoid viewing classified material outside of the proper facilities established for doing so (that meant the internet, for one).

Of course, if the government had its way, no one would view this material. But that's another discussion.
I wrote my own Lisp compiler in college using this as the foundation: http://schemeworkshop.org/2006/11-ghuloum.pdf
"POS" in GP post expands to "point of sale". Square is doing well.
Erm, it's the second result when I google 'dag'.
Application Weezchat: bons plans rencontres sur Android
How the team placement looked like? You weren't actually assigned to a team and were given a choice?
Blackberry's remaining users are a rounding error. If Blackberry could make money selling phones to their remaining users they wouldn't be thinking of making Android devices. Blackberry would need to find some way to sell Android phones to people who are using either Android or iOS devices now or to people who are still using feature phones. Either way, I don't think that the keyboard is the big differentiator that will let them do better than LG or Sony or HTC, or even help them catch up to those.
While standing on one foot and facing North, of course.
Yeah this one is simple, trees don't have loops.