skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally hate the "take home test" approach to interviewing. I've had multiple such tests that take anywhere from 10-25 hours to complete because simply answering the question isn't enough; you need to give textbook correct answers and your code must be formatted perfectly with the requisite comments and documentation. In short, it's pretty similar to an upper-level college course's final exam; however, in college, you can get a good grade with a few mistakes; in interviewing, you get rejected for a few mistakes. I'm done giving a company 15 hours of my time just to get to a first interview; this is arrogant, condescending, and completely devalues my time.

The reality of hiring is you're going to make mistakes, like every other part of running a business. Even in an extended "interview" such as dating for a potential life partner, people make mistakes so I'm not sure how the hiring process can be quantified to remove said error. The interview process is so excruciating these days I often hate the companies I'm talking with.

While we're at it, the skills requirements listed with jobs today are astounding. My experience is that a company wants to hire a programmer with at least a journeymen's level of expertise in 6-8 skills. If you have 5 and are comfortable you can learn the other 3, you're dead in the water. Let's be honest, the latest Javascript framework isn't that complicated. The latest NoSQL database isn't that hard to learn.

The truly hard parts of joining a new company are learning how projects are managed, getting the political lay of the land, finding a sherpa to answer your questions in the first couple of weeks, and learning where you fit within the organization.
Do the Simple Thing First: The Engineering Behind Instagram
Hah, I had to try this out to believe it.

You can do `foo d: {:y => 2}` or `foo :d => {:y => 2}` but not a raw hash literal without parens.

That's parse.y[1] for you...

[1]: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/parse.y
I get cable for four months a year to watch college football. Then I cancel it. Kind of a pain, but that's what it's come down to.

Incidentally, it is WAY easier to cancel a Cox account in person at the local office than on the phone.
I put all my sample libraries on SSDs to cut down on project load times. It helps immensely.
Many removed dams aren't really worth a damn. I looked up the first one on the list, it was providing power to a single residence.

http://www.westcoast.fisheries.noaa.gov/stories/2015/03_0303...
No, right place / right time / right choices etc still plays an overwhelming role in the wealth generation.

For every thousand geniuses that try to get really rich, there's one Simons or Buffett that pulls it off. You could run a simulation with a large number of people of equal mental capability, almost all of them would fail. Just the broader requirements alone would be enough to instantly flunk most people out of the running (the other skills required that Simons possesses beyond his intellect).
No, but you might with Shake: http://shakebuild.com/
My apologies, my response was not meant to have an adversarial tone.
If you have over 5 conference rooms, you can afford $3k/year.
Lean Advertising for Startups by Brent Halliburton – Kickstarter
It's easy, it's just old school. Subscribe to high quality periodicals. Pay people who work full time to curate for you and you won't have to work part time to curate for yourself. Avoid rags that are willing to waste your time with filler.

The Economist is a good start, and I really enjoy the Baffler.

You don't have to entirely avoid "social curation" like HN or Reddit, but once you've replaced it with something less noisy, you can be more honest with yourself about how much that time is actually benefiting you.
Your own words were "some can rock" and "most don't", thereby casting the two against each other, so I stand by what I said.
Ah, but the willing aren't able and the able aren't willing. In any case, I'd avoid companies that recklessly fleece applicants just because they can. Once you've proven your worth professionally, begging for scraps is pathetic in any job market. For every greedy business with ten desperate applicants, there's an honest organization or untapped market ready to pay fairly for what value you offer.

The question I consider when asked to perform for free: why should anyone simply donate their knowledge to a profitable business after spending a lifetime to attain it?
Storm8 is hiring for all levels of software engineers
I have some of those same books. Is there anything interesting on the bottom half of your bookshelf?
I said free/extremely cheap, should have said relatively cheap. Cloudflare is relatively cheap (significantly so) compared to the competition.

Source where moot says cloudflare's low cost keeps 4chan running https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324.
It's amazing to me that a real human who has experienced job interviews could think that common workplace situations are comparable coding in front of a stranger at a job interview.
Basic income will probably result in even more antagonism towards immigrants. As Milton Friedman said, "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state".

I feel immigration to the US is too restrictive as it is, let alone what it would become if it meant giving everyone a paycheck. You basically have these options:

1. Restrict immigration (perhaps you are OK with this, I am not. I feel immigration is one of the fundamental things that helped this country succeed, and that we should be moving to make it MORE open, not less).

2. Allow immigration but not offer basic income until you are a citizen. Now you have a classist system. If you were born in the US you are part of the citizen caste, that is guaranteed income from taxes (a nobility if you will), if you were born outside the borders you must work for your income here. Sure, eventually you could be "admitted", but it seems weird that an 18 year old would be allowed to do whatever he wants but someone just entering the country with three kids would be forced to work.

3. Offer basic income to everyone that comes in, have no restriction, and default immediately.

If you think Americans are xenophobic now, just wait to see their attitudes if basic income ever passes.
If 90% of the people pass the take home test, then why was that step necessary in the first place?

I've also soured on take-home test. I recently did a C/C++ one, I know I aced it, and I didn't even get a phone interview.

I figured out afterwards what they were doing. They were giving the take-home test to EVERYONE who applied. Then, after you submit a solution, they read your resume. After looking at my (correct) solution and my resume, they decided I wasn't worth a phone interview.

No more take home tests for me.
Farnam Street
The hardest part of J is revisiting old code and trying to figure out what you were thinking when you wrote it.

The cognitive cost of writing the same program in J versus your current favorite functional language (let's assume Scheme) is basically the same. The J version will be much more concise, and probably quicker to write.

But I found it much harder to review and extend my own J code. Where the Scheme program I wrote last month will be mostly self-documenting and easy to modify, the equivalent J program may as well be machine code.

I feel like I _should_ appreciate J more, because it is powerful, but it may be too concise for me to be comfortable with.

-survived the same class (Hi Ryan!)
If only there was some way that people could spend a couple of years proving they had basic competence, so they didn't have to prove basic skills on every interview.

Why did I get a CS degree if every interview starts with the assumption that I'm an unqualified loser?
You weren't paying $150 just for the TV package, I hope.
It is an interesting definition of independent - they are still owned by another company, and have a minority on the board of directors.

Sure, they are off-leash now, and have been for years. And that may even be the long-term intent. But if someone owns you, they can always change the status quo.
IBM also did this. My X31 can attest to that.
UCSC, SRI release new game for Darpa crowd-sourced software verification program
There is no way in hell that you will get someone to pay an application fee on top of having to burn a vacation or sick day.
Because, unfortunately, a lot of people receive CS degrees but are completely technically incompetent.
> I wish I knew how low the Thinkpad brand has sunk under Lenovo before buying this machine.

The BIOS whitelist goes back at least to the T61, if not further.
29 is a good age to be thinking about this.

I have an alternate philosophy that doesn't make you quit your job to find yourself. See if it resonates with you.

You can't be too emotionally attached to your job. Jobs have value but they come and go. You change jobs throughout life. Some jobs that used to pay really well are now becoming extinct etc.

Eventually you retire. My dad has been retired for ~15 years. My mum has been retired for ~10 years. (He lectured in music and she taught primary school.) Even if your job is awesome, you can't do it forever. Circumstance forces you out. Life moves on. I've been kinda retired for 1 year.

Most people have different jobs throughout their working life. I've been through a few as have my parents. The grass always looks greener from the other side.

You chase each dream and when/if you get it, you realize you probably had some unrealistic expectations of how great it should have been. Even the jobs that seemed super important at the time turn out to be not that mind blowingly significant over time.

In whatever work you do, you have to detach yourself a bit from the triumphs and tragedies. If it all goes bad, you don't take it personally. If things go really well, you don't get a swelled head about it. That's the nature of true professionalism.

Maybe if you cure cancer or something, you can take the time to do a quiet double fist pump. But then you move on! :)

Essentially, you should perform your work like a machine. Or like breathing. There's no emotions necessary, good or bad. You act how you believe another professional should act without bringing your personality into it. In engineering jobs, people want you to be the engineer. They don't need the other parts of you. Outside of work you can be yourself.

In Australia, we tend to say, "Work to live" rather than "Live to work". It means do your work then enjoy living.
First world problems can be worth exploring...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uLL418S1GQ
> The H1B is now primarily used by outsourcing companies to move jobs overseas.

How do they do that?
A monopoly in live sports is what keeps the Murdoch empire afloat and free to fund his political intervention.
Funding Request for Our World in Data
We run into each other every time there's a submission about J.
I wonder if Google calls their algorithm ED-209.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559134
If you want a laugh, https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30111370-Content-comcast-i...
And you forgot the 19 9/11 hijackers who killed more than 3000 Americans : immigrants .
Surely the simplest optimisation to add would be anchors? Instead of starting the 'good' line "[12]", start it "^[12]".

As it stands, the 'good' regex will look through the whole line for any occurrence of 1 or 2 in the line, then start applying the rest of the regex from there. Putting an anchor in means it only looks at the first character for that 1 or 2.
Quick search says the Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $99

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2...

Expecting 60% drop is not that crazy.
Looks gorgeous but I wonder how big a deal power is? I suspect many rooms won't have power nearby and recharging every 1-3 days sounds dreary.
A song about agile software development
I don't watch TV but the rest of the family does, and there's no way they'd put up with cord cutting. Right now we have an overpriced TV package from Comcast but it's convenient because it's one service. My wife knows her channels and when to tune in, and can do it with a single remote control. Done.

The alternative is to subscribe to 4 or 5 of these streaming services, and have to explain: "Well, honey for this show you need to use this service and navigate it this way, use this HDMI input on the TV. For that show, you need to use this other service, on the media player (so different remote), and this input. For movies, you need to use Netflix and do it this way.. For cartoons for the kid, you need to use this service..." No way that's going to fly.

What I really want is a service where she can just memorize how and when to get to the already few things she wants to watch, be able to get to them by just turning on the TV, and not have to switch inputs, devices, remotes, UIs, etc. Hey, wait, that's called standard Cable TV service!
Yes, that is valid. Yathern's corollary?
50 Smartest Companies 2015
Public Slack room
I apologize if this is not an appropriate post (spend most of my internet lurking on subreddits).

Anyways I've set up a public Slack team for coders. Kind of like Freenode/IRC, but with a much better interface. Just a place for people to hang out, chat, ask questions, swap ideas, etc. Not a lot of active users yet, but I only launched it a few days ago so I am hoping to eventually build a large community in it. Let me know what you think!
There's a higher order solution. Read the AWK book, do the exercises, then ignore blog posts about regexps. Make an exception when it's Russ Cox demonstrating how often this wheel has been reinvented in square form.
I'm sure there is some huge technical hurdle that someone will educate me about, but how is bittorrent streaming of live content not a thing yet? All these would-be cord-cutters say that sports is the only thing holding them back. Why can't content be made available for torrenting in small chunks as they become available, with the swarm prioritizing the chunks chronologically biased way? Seems achievable that you'd only be lagging a few minutes behind live.
Wow, what market are you in that you're paying $60/mo for 150mbit?

I'm in the philly suburbs and paying that much for 20mbit and no TV.
Because lots of people with CS degrees don't have basic programming competence?
You Can’t Build One Company Culture for Engineers and Another for Office Cleaners
I'm really not that well versed, but disorder and complexity seem to be used interchangeably which is incorrect:

"According to this fundamental law, entropy - and with it disorder - should always increase with time. This is manifestly not happening in the universe"

I'm completely baffled that they'd put that in their abstract or what they could possibly be thinking. In what way is entropy and disorder not increasing? And I think here is where they are confusing disorder and complexity. For a given system, as entropy initially increases, so does complexity, and then at some point, complexity peaks and falls.

A system with very low entropy is not complex. It is very easy to describe. Additionally, a system with really high entropy is also not complex, it is also very easy to describe.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=762
Aren't images and video webpage stuff?
It's fair to complain that a better option doesn't exist. It's not fair to take no action given the existing options and then complain the system was unfair and against you.

The author had choices available, but chose not to avail himself of any of them, then wants sympathy for not pursuing. Immigration was simply not as important to him as other things, and those are the choices he made. I don't feel any particular sympathy for him having to suffer from the consequence of those choices.

I wish he had better options available to him, but he didn't, so he didn't even bother trying.
My wife received a C&D from Lush a few years ago. Neither of us had ever even heard of the brand as we are from the US. She's had a home business selling hand crafted essential oils perfumes for about 5 years. Among her 100+ varieties she had a scent she had named Lush Alchemy. The C&D basically said they owned the adjective lush and it could not be used for any of her product names. Etsy informed my wife if she did not remove the word Lush from the name, they would pull the listing and sanction her account for a time. That was my introduction to Lush cosmetics. Now this is the second time I've come across them and of course it's about how they own an adjective and this time it's not even related to perfumes. I'm forming a very despising attitude towards them.
"Warning: Here Be Amateurs
We aim for high-quality science, but we're not EEG experts or professional researchers. There may be bugs in our code, glitches in our mathematics, shorts in our circuits, or flies in our ointments."
There is a building in your town (almost) dedicated to dead tree media. They might have a couple computers for occasions when that's insufficient.
Ok, maybe this is the mechanics:

"some of the most active users of visas for visiting workers are Indian outsourcing firms, which appear to be training workers in the U.S. and then sending them home"

http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2007/02/outs...
Microsoft will bypass carriers, push Windows 10 updates directly to phones
Can I come to the Netherlands with the two of you? I am sick of America and I also enjoy riding bicycles.
Time, like space, is a relation. Causality indicates that things act according to their nature. This is how relations change. Change, what we commonly think of as the passage of time, is the inevitable unfolding of an entity's potential to actuality, acting according to its identity.

How would change switch direction, actuality revert to potential? would change still be change? I suggest reading Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Aristotle.

With eternal, metaphysical love.
Wasn't even single blind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment

I'm sure we could at the very least get a strong placebo response with the right participant.
Can the equipment detect differences between brainwaves, outside of binaural beats?

Have they run the same tests where they're trying to find the difference between someone resting (i.e. watching television) and someone being very mentally active (i.e. deep programming or whatnot)?

That would give an idea of how large the effect should be.
The whitelist exists because Thinkpads have various certifications for companies and organizations that require them...e.g. a military use where the entire system needs to be certified for obvious (in the sense that security may dictate that a machine cannot have arbitrary hardware installed) reasons. It's the tradeoff one makes for a laptop that is of sufficient quality that it can be certified.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#Use_in_space

Over time, alternative bios's with different whitelists often become available for Thinkpads. Not sure if this will live through UEFI.

Good luck.
So you're interviewing someone and basing a large part of the experience on something that would otherwise happen maybe 0.1% of the time? Also that CEO sounds like an asshole.
I'll admit it's less broken than most places, but it's still pretty nuts at times: http://gyrovague.com/2012/08/10/notarizing-your-fingerprints...

Singapore used to be ridiculously awesome (work visa approvals usually processed in under 24 hours), but they've really tightened the screws in the last few years, particularly on granting permanent residence, due to political reasons.
Trends That Will Change the Future of Online Advertising
Certainly possible, except that quartz crystals grow in hot watery solutions, and those are equally hard to come by in space.

It would be interesting to stack up the set of conditions that would need to be true for them to form, perhaps a watery core undergoing tidal heating while silica dust is deposited on the surface and transported by meteor impact into the internals of the asteroid. A lot of steps though.

For what its worth its also why the metals idea are statistically unlikely, as the distillation out of various metals would be hard to explain.

That also makes the puzzle exciting though, the harder it is to guess what it is, the more interesting the answer in my experience.
I recently graduated and moved out on my own. I moved to a decently large city in the Midwest, where my apartment company had signed an exclusive with AT&T. To get cable is quite expensive, but the AT&T contract here means they don't do any sort of packaging. I've got neighbors who are paying 50-60 a month for basic cable... Which would be fine, except that you can buy a $50 antenna from Amazon and get channels with much, MUCH better quality than what you can get with cable. Plus, it's free.

I also thing a major part of this might be that colleges don't really have cable... So students spend a year without cable, realize that they don't really need it and that it's expensive. I definitely think that not having cable at Universities causes some of "I can live without" attitude you're seeing here.
Sounds like you have too many devices. Couldn't you just have an HTPC hooked up to a single HDMI input on your TV?

As for the different streaming services, it doesn't sound like any more work than what she is doing now. Instead of memorizing which show is on which channel at what time, you just memorize which show is on which service.
Is your name Nate?
> Is it much easier in the EU?

You still need a job offer to first enter the country, but changing jobs will involve less bureaucracy than in the USA, and after having been employed in the country for 5-10 years, and speaking a local language, you can apply for permanent residency or citizenship yourself, so the hassle of needing you employer to do it for you, does not exist.
When you get a coding assignment, you have no idea if they're going to give honest feedback if you submit a solution, or if they're just going to say "Thanks for applying, but we decided to go in a different direction."
I totally agree with you that the "ask about projects" question requires care. And, yes, I did see differing results depending on how the discussion went. When I did the question, I've run it as both a 1-minute quickie and a 15-minute conversation. I tried my best to dig an solid technical exposition out of the candidate if I could.

Typical cases where the project discussion was not helpful:

* Senior engineers could often talk in great detail about things they'd built, but then would most often bomb coding questions.

* A lot of MS/PhD-level new grads could give great talks (about almost anything) but again would bomb coding stuff.

* Lots of ESL candidates struggled tremendously to convey basic project details, but nevertheless were solid coders. From my TAing experience in grad school, I noticed that there are a lot of ESL CS students who have poor oral communication skills but are orders of magnitude stronger at written communication. (This made strong textbooks and written references crucial to the courses I TAed).

* Sadly we hired quiet a few senior / PhD-level people who could give great talks, were highly responsible, but were eventually fired for poor coding. (There were also some management disasters associated with those cases, but stronger coding skills would have helped them nevertheless).

Interviewing has both subjective and 'objective' parts. The most objective data one can collect are things like completion times, the actual code written, and (perhaps) raw contextual data like a measure of the candidate's mood (were they sweating like mad?). Project discussions rarely recover solid objective data. So, I'd definitely recommend against outsourcing those questions to a service like Triplebyte, and junior employees should probably also not be spending 15 mins on projects for /every/ candidate.
As work becomes more and more abstract, probably fewer and fewer people will find satisfaction in it. Some will, but the majority will not. We're just not built for doing this sort of thing for extended periods of time. We've evolved operating in the real, physical world, and our reward mechanisms are fine tuned for it.