skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Never forget Balkanization or fragmentation. For example 90% of the population has been permanently kicked out of big city coastal real estate and will never, ever, live there or own property there via hyperinflation in real estate prices.

Yet, the sun still rises in the east and 90% of the countries population lives on, under different goals and interests.

Its highly likely crony capitalism as we know it will never end and income wealth inequality will increase until almost no one owns everything, but as long as everyone else is alive, they'll just play a different game. Getting ahead of that trend is likely to be very useful. This gets into weird sci fi alt-future world "whuffie", etc, but when the game gets weird, the results get weird.

You can see echos of this in historical academic studies during economic depressions, here and otherwise. Once the economic system fragments, people figure out other things, in the old days, barter, for example. Or crime. In the future the NYSE and NASDAQ will likely continue to operate, yet be utterly irrelevant to maybe 99.999% of the population, who will consider craigslist, uber, or some new startup that doesn't exist to be the real "the market".

(edited to add, I really screwed up the above paragraph by failing to mention the NYSE will never go away, much like the once universal giants of the past, gold trade still goes on, fur trade, spice trade, virtually everything but the slave trade keeps right on running, just no longer important to much of anyone anymore)

Anyway the point is a good long term place for a startup to be is post-business as usual. As per the famous gawker article, startups trying to replace "mom" for rich coastal yuppies are very popular, but the future is likely owned by a startup that replaces the existing commodity trading system for most people, or replaces retail, or replaces package delivery or ...
Cleaning and repairs startup Homejoy is up for sale
Hardly. Before the v4 disaster almost everything posted on Digg's front page had a complaint saying "This was posted on Reddit yesterday."
I think it's really on the interviewers (and us) to show that people who freeze in tech interviews would also do poorly in a job. It's probably sometimes true, but many times not.
Using Google trends basically shows you the people who type "reddit" into their search bar increased. :)

I know that isn't entirely true, but yes, for the most part reddit's popularity in the press exploded afterwards because the press needed something new to write about.
How to Critique Your Startup Like an Investor
Anyone know how they figured out the coefficients for the Homer Simpson one?
This is what happens in the post scarcity society of Iain M. Banks's Culture series. No one has to work, but the ones that do devote themselves to intricate creative pursuits or the study of some highly obscure field. Attention and social capital is the currency of success.
Digg spent a lot of money on marketing, while reddit spent none, so yeah, that was a big part of it. They had a lot of articles written about them because they had a fabulous marketing and PR team. One we were a bit envious of.
See a simple one like that where if I need to spend time researching the question will only take up to an hour is one thing.
But the last one I got from one of the video game engine companies required building a full crud app with live db, documented api, and multiple feature sets. all for a front end job. Some places just take it too far and sour the idea.
Operation Clandestine Wolf – Adobe Flash Zero-Day in APT3 Phishing Campaign
Traffic didn't change much, but user behavior definitely did:

http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_score_reddit....

http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_comments_redd...

Source: http://minimaxir.com/2014/12/reddit-statistics/
Great perspective on volatility of ups and downs.
How did you get that early traffic? Was it just google traffic?

What do you think made people stick in those early days without much happening on the site?
No. There is no connection between the lottery and your visa except if you win. You do not win the green card, you win the application. Not sure why you thinking that the lottery is not free, but it has been free forever (except for the scam sites).

Military service only gives you green card and residency if it is war time. During non war time, it allows you to apply for citizenship after you served (instead of waiting 5 years), but you need a greencard before that.
Moses vs. The Texas Board of Education [video]
Well, the candidates doing both screens is better, but it doesn't totally solve your problems.

It doesn't address the survival bias issue, and when you say a significant percentage dropped out, that's not reassuring. But it's not the case that you need a lab to solve the problem. Even a basic questionnaire of programming ability self-assessment might tell you if there are meaningful differences in the population that quits your process. At the very least, you should understand and talk about survival bias in your article to indicate you're aware of the issue.

Even if you still want to claim a difference between the quiz and coding exercise, you're not yet in the clear. For example, did you counterbalance the order you gave them to people? E.g., if everybody did the quiz first and the fizzbuzz second, that meant they were mentally fresher for the quiz and slightly more tired for the fizzbuzz, which could again create a spurious result. And this definitely doesn't require a lab to test.

Don't misunderstand me, I appreciate your attempts to quantify all this, and I actually think you guys have roughly the correct result (given the limited nature of fizzbuzz-style coding), but when you step into the experimental psych arena, you need to learn how to properly analyze your data. Given that your business is predicated on analyzing the results of how your hires do in the real world, you need to really up your analytical game.
The Death of Linux
and [0-9] is more specific than \d

"In most flavors that support Unicode, \d includes all digits from all scripts." [1]

EDIT: But I guess for the majority of use cases it doesn't matter [2] since PCRE is the norm almost everywhere.

[1] http://www.regular-expressions.info/shorthand.html

[2] "Notable exceptions are Java, JavaScript, and PCRE. These Unicode flavors match only ASCII digits with \d"
How to Securely Share Your Private Docker Registry with External Clients
"Last but not least, this initial release includes our universal search tool package. In a large, multi-language codebase like ours, finding files and symbols quickly and efficiently is important for our engineers. Here's a glimpse:
SEARCHES INDEX.PHP"

sorry thought that was funny
Yeah, I just mean "short programming problems of a difficultly similar to fizzbuzz"
So no one seems to mentioning the one obvious fact (to me)... it seems like it's working as designed and there is a good reason why:

Part of US diplomacy is to educate foreigners and let them go back to their own countries so that those who are improving/leading said countries are more friendly to the US. It also is part of diplomacy to spread education so that the rest of the world can buy into our model of functional capitalist countries so we can have trade and not war or famine.
ZUI zoomable groups

ZUIs are far too esoteric for the average WIMP paradigm nearly all computer users are familiar with. I wouldn't count on it anymore than I would on getting an Oberon/Cedar-like programmable text window interface.
why would you think that just because you are active on GitHub, that someone would be bothered to look at links on your CV? 99.9 of the world population aren't software development minded.
The blog post kindly shared here reports on a startup's experiments with offering a new kind of hiring screening service. "We launched Triplebyte one month ago, with the goal of improving the way programmers are hired. . . . Well, a little over a month has now passed. In the last 30 days, we've done 300 interviews. We've started to put our ideas into practice, to see what works and what doesn't, and to iterate on our process." They are currently validating what they are doing on the first steps just against what happens at the later steps in their process: "For now, we're evaluating all of our experiments against our final round interview decisions. This does create some danger of circular reasoning (perhaps we're just carefully describing our own biases)."

I agree with the blog post author that current hiring processes mostly show that "too many companies are content to do what they've always done." And the idea of a standardized, automated quiz of programming knowledge sounds interesting. But what has to happen next is to an actual validation study and find out if programmers hired by this process do better as programmers in actual workplaces than programmers hired by some other process.

Regular readers of HN are aware that I have a FAQ post about this topic of company hiring procedures.[1] Company hiring procedures are the research focus of industrial and organizational psychologists, who have almost a century of research to look back on with long-term, large n studies to provide data on what works and what doesn't work for hiring capable workers. It's a shame that most company human resource departments ignore basically all of that research.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543
I see that little robot and I get images of the little guy from Silent Running tending his plants
FirstOrDefault in Linq
Linux Certification courses: prepare for the LPIC-1 exams
The article flat out assumes that "If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions.", and that "Most people want to work, and are miserable when they cannot."

Put succinctly, the article poses as its fundamental thesis that unemployment itself leads to social degradation. But I could find no actual supporting evidence for that claim.

The Youngstown example is just as likely a posterchild for the alternative theory: the dangers of unmitigated poverty.

Now, I grant you, social pressures likely lead people to feel shame and so forth in the face of unemployment. But that just means a cultural shift away from the idolization of work is necessary, not that we must find some way to employ those folks who might truly be unemployable.
If I invest time to do something, it better be worth it for me.
I should add, sad because it is very hard to build and plan a life where you do not know where you will be in 3 or 6 years. For example, why would you try to buy a house if you don't know what will happen? Because of all this I am probably considering to not even bother with H1B.
In the USA, male participating in the wage economy has been in the decline since the 1940s:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001

For women, the peak was in 2000:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA

Wages for men have been in decline since 1973, which demonstrates one of the obvious ways people deal with declining opportunities: lower wages.

In the 1800s Western nations conquered the world, and were thus able to export their unemployment to other countries, thus creating what we now call The Third World. As late as 1820, India was still producing more steel than Europe, but all such industries were eventually closed in India and moved to Europe, leaving India in a bad situation from which it is yet to fully recover.

It's unlikely that Western nations will have an easy time exporting their unemployment in the 2020s or 2030s. Among other things, they lack the military power that is necessary to do so.
Also keep in mind that applying to jobs is frequently throwing your application into a black hole and just praying. Sending a resume into the black hole is one thing. Sending a large codebase or project you worked on as part of the application is entirely different.

I remember a few months ago, I was applying for an internship with a company and they requested that I write a web app to test coding proficiency before they thought about granting an interview. I spent about 12-15 hours writing the thing, deployed the app to Heroku and put the code on Github. I sent a link to the app and the repo to the recruiter. I never got a response of any kind.

Although some companies do try to make the application experience as pleasant as possible for the applicant, the majority of companies don't give a shit about the people who want to work for them, and make no attempt to respect the time of their applicants. Placing greater demands on the applicant is an easy way to shift more of the workload from the recruiter to the applicant. The applicant is the loser in this situation.
I looked around the site a bit. Looks like pretty interesting data collection using simple IP cameras and computer vision algorithms to identify unique foot and vehicle traffic and counting and time tagging each one. The business use case that I read - narrowing 4 potential new retail locations down to one due to some logic about foot traffic and their target market seemed plausible. Of course we don't really know what would have happened if the store had opened in the higher traffic location but with lower foot traffic and the desired times. Bricks & mortar locations are not A/B testable in quite the same cost effective manner as a digital store.

Still there is often remarkable strength in doing something as simple as counting - when you are able to do it more accurately and afford to do it continuously over extended periods of time.

Question: can the computer vision capture behavior such as speed of gait, stopping and turning to look at the store-front, dwell time before turning away and continuing to walk? Distinguish and code for type of clothing to distinguish between someone on their way to work and someone such as a tourist? Could you distinguish between someone arriving at a store doorway purposefully - like they already knew to come here versus someone who has stumbled upon the store while walking?
Seeing as how this is facebook's hacked up editor I'd love to see some more social features to share with other developers. Get advice, show something cool, share a branch, etc. with teammates or even the world.

I'm sure it is nice to have an editor that understands javascript better and it is nice to see that yes they have syntax checking and auto suggestion. Experience tells me the devil is in the details of the architecture for how much their integration will survive tool churn vs composition model of different tools.

What I'd really like to see in my next editor that seems hard to find is:

- Ability to easily share code and screen with other developers. I know the lone gun is typical in software development but it would be great to work with other people seamlessly as well.

- Working with files/shell on a remote server. All to often these days I find myself with large data set that is hard to move so I end up using console tools to debug the problem on the box.
> For countries that are based on a unique language, ethnicity and culture, it is damaging.

Where are these places? Very few countries are based on a unique language, ethnicity, or culture, and those that are have generally only become so as a result of active suppression of minority cultures and languages.

In fact, apart from a few microstates and isolated islands, I can't really think of any monocultural nations.
Data Silos Are Killing Data Flow
Do if we let them default and the lenders lose their shirts, this is a good lesson for both. Lenders learn to not make bad loans and governments learn fiscal responsibility. Most people in the U.S. More or less think it was a mistake to bail out so many big banks (decrying the too big to fail rationale) why do we have a different opinion when it comes to Greece and German banks? Let them lose the shirts.

In the end, I think Greece will blink, they'll try to work something out, but pretend they had the best of the EU negotiators. My gut feeling is that if it came down to it, Germany would let them leave the EU. I think psychologically they have written them down and if a deal happens, well, the better.
I agree that comment was probably unnecessary, but to be fair he said "... this assumption that foreign workers are cheap Indians on H-1Bs". He did not say all Indians are cheap or on H-1B's.
My last company had a screening coding problem that was designed to take around a day (although it didn't have to; when I did it as a reference point, it took a couple of hours). I was always kind of astonished how many applicants were willing to do the whole thing, given, as you say, that they often already had a full-time job and/or were applying for multiple positions.

We always gave really extensive feedback on it, partially because one of the things were were looking for was how people would react to that feedback (I was generally surprised at how many people got defensive about fairly objective observations/questions).

Overall I think it was quite a good data point. It was nice to have a more low-key and extensive complement to the more stressful live whiteboard interview (yes, we did have one of those, and I still think it was useful).
1. > This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis.

Only if you attribute raising children, maintaining your house, or other activities as equivalent going to a desk job every day. I don't believe this is the case - I believe there is a pretty significant difference in doing things because you want to (raise children, beautify your house), and because it's required to put a roof over your head and food in your cupboard.

Given that, you can see if the guilt will fade just by looking at stay-at-home mothers and fathers, or by looking at retirees. Being a retiree is not much different from being unemployed, other than society (and consequently the retirees themselves) viewing them as having "earned it".

2. I agree with benaiah here - "drinking with buddies every night" would get damned expensive, even when you have a job.

3. I won't disagree with you, but it's something which needs to be investigated and addressed.

5. My reading of that section revealed a viewpoint which seems to only view the role of the government as a job creator/maintainer, which doesn't strike me as sustainable. At least, no more sustainable than just paying people directly.

For example, the government created quite a few jobs as part of "the new deal" - but where are those jobs today? Where are the workforces to maintain our bridges, our roadways, and the other parts of our failing public infrastructure? Those jobs disappeared, those workers retired or had to find another job (or were disabled by the hard labor and became wards of the state in another way).

Forcing people to work to survive seems old fashioned, and completely incompatible with the coming future of automation. We can forestall the day of 80%+ unemployment, but that will only make the drop-off that much more steep when it actually arrives. I'd personally rather we try and do something about it now, while the overall unemployment numbers are still below 50%.

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to put this in earlier, but I do appreciate you taking the time to stop by and answer questions like these!
Yes, obnoxious. But 30 churches? A couple of years ago, I cam up with an estimate of 30 churches (and two synagogues and two Buddhist temples) along 16th St, NW, in the roughly six miles between the White House and the Maryland line. It's a bit rash to say "even in church" if there are 30 churches in the whole of the US doing this.
Weird how the article keeps reusing the word "paradox". I don't think it means what they want it to mean.

The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing. - if you haven't found out how to live your life without the framework of work, then yes - you will feel miserable. The work routine is pretty useful in that way - it fills up your time and you don't have to define what you want to do yourself. Kind of like the difference between someone serving you bland food, but food you can rely on to feed you to some degree vs. you having to cook for yourself from raw ingredients you chose.

Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically, technology is the reason. - this is still not a paradox. You could insert "ironically" in there and it would be about as good a choice. And their choice of just "technology" sort of reminds me of this short segment https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s
Rare earths are not rare; the problem is that they don't often occur in concentrated ores. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element#Geological_...
As long as there is supply surplus on the labour market, of people willing to work for any wage, this will keep driving the wages down. I am indeed a little surprised adjuncts are still paid at all.

And pet-sitting and bagging groceries as a way of supplementing one's income? -- Being so bent on finding the least-paying part-time work, perhaps the angle should be, minimum wage enforcement should have more teeth?
This is exactly what I came here to say.

It's all well and good that certain things (quiz) correlate more to performing well in a long-form remote coding task.

But part of the problem of hiring is that these test-style code questions are themselves not necessarily good indicators of future job performance.

The only way to truly analyze whether a given technique is working or not is to follow the candidates through into their jobs and see which ones actually become good long term employees.
You are very emphatically rebutting an argument that nobody made!
Loved the general idea and the non-programmer manual.
Would also love if it will be ported to http://www.pygame.org/project-Pyjsdl-2888-4709.html
in the future, so it could be played from browsers.
that can be compiled to a state machine where a decision to switch states is taken based on current character only, and when all input is consumed you are either in an accepting or rejecting state. In your case I think it only needs 2 states: state 0 moves to state 1 when it sees an A, and state 1 moves to state 0 when it sees either A or B.
For your string it'll be in state 0 when it sees a B and thus rejects it.
So your argument seems to be "that damage is part of life, deal with it". That's fine, I was just trying to answer your question:

damaging in what sense?

I don't assume all immigrants are foreign invaders, thank you very much. On the other hand, I have known some immigrants who expressly wanted to get rid of the people in the town they had just moved to and import their old country's people, culture, and government. That's not my characterization, that's what was said.

China Town et al are great because they are integrated. You don't have to be from China to go there. But not every immigrant wants to integrate. Does that mean we repel all immigrants? No! Does that mean we embrace every immigrant no matter what? Also no. I see no reason to welcome people who want me gone, and say as much to my face.

It is possible to understand both these realities at the same time. We don't need to get all black-and-white, "all immigrants are evil" or "all immigrants are God's gift".
> If I were building a speed-freak analytics database I'd be focusing on making my CPU implementations as fast as possible, since that's what 99% of potential customers are already running.

Well, this is by Nvidia, so of course their incentive is otherwise...
I've found Pandora to be a better discovery service than radio ever was.
Exact same thing here. I've made it a personal policy not to tolerate these types of take-home tests. My time is way too valuable to spend hours on a project only to have it ignored by the company.