Rant HN: I hate hackerrank - <AUTHOR> I'm currently going through interview stages for several companies for the first time in years and the en vogue trend seems to be a timed hackerrank test. Without fail this involves an algorithms-heavy rip off from leetcode/projecteurler/googlefoobar/topcoder culminating in some trickily smart O(N) DP solution. I'm an experienced developer with 5 years of thorough product experience in the domain. I'd completely appreciate the importance if the role actually did involve trying to eek out efficiency in a distributed system with high throughput... but 9 times out of 10 it's boilerplate business logic.
On the one hand I like that it normalises the application process against prejudice (I was lucky enough to go to a top engineering school) so it allows a fair entry level to all, however, it appears to be just an utterly irrelevant IQ hazing.
Anyone else going through this pain? What are we to make of the recruiting scene going forward? Are we now at a point where an engineer should at all times be intimately familiar with competitive programming and codegolf techniques? <comment><USER2> I hire engineers for a living, and find intellectually dishonest any interview practice I wouldn't enjoy myself. Paper coding, whiteboard coding, brain teasers, and algorithmic beatdowns are out. Representative take-home work samples and conversational problem solving are in.

My candidates are told throughout the process that what we're looking for is a demonstration of how technical collaboration might work if we were employed by the same company. This takes away most of the stress of interviewing, which I know via candidate surveys.

My advice would be to steer clear from employers who use a soulless cookie cutter process that makes people feel like a commodity. This is how you'll also be treated during daily interactions and in conversations about your career development. Don't be under any illusion that you'll be able to find yourself on the right side of such a situation.

<comment><USER3> > soulless cookie cutter process that makes people feel like a commodity

I agree most should steer clear from them, but the interview process is often an accurate representation of the level of the team:

* If the interview involves a copied a set of questions off the internet, verbal or written, they don't have the skills on the team to have a dynamic discussion.

* If the interview doesn't have enough standard questions, then they're either inconsistent or might rely heavily on certain people's intuition, the latter which could go either way but the former could mean complete disorganization.

* If they expect you to know the circumference of the Earth (equatorial 24874 mi/40030 km, meridional 24860 mi/40008 km) and capital of Sumer in 2281 (Uruk), then they could be interested in someone that has a scientific mind, great memory, and likes trivia or is very into history.

* If they give you problems to solve, they want to see and hear how you think.

* If they give you homework, they probably just want you to provide solutions in code and figure things out on your own to some extent, and the amount of time they give you to do that is indication of how they estimate tasks.

<comment><USER4> "* If they expect you to know the circumference of the Earth (equatorial 24874 mi/40030 km, meridional 24860 mi/40008 km) and capital of Sumer in 2281 (Uruk), then they could be interested in someone that has a scientific mind, great memory, and likes trivia or is very into history."

===> ... or who has the skill of typing "google.com" on a browser

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recruiting and hiring are garbage right now in the industry. Part of the problem is easy to recognize -- idiots designing interviews. This is where the puzzle crap comes from, as well as theoretical stuff that's far removed from the day to day of what a person will be doing.

The other problem is that the people who could be designing better interviews aren't stepping up. There are plenty of intelligent people who aren't 1) taking the time and effort to introspect and think about why they are effective as people and 2) taking those insights and translating them into an interview process that selects for important traits in simple, reproducible ways.

It's bizarre. A job could require years of experience with linux, programming, and networking, all of which could be tested with a multiple-choice style test to get a sense of where a candidate stands. Instead, we look at their resume, check off that they have our requirements buried somewhere in the forest of buzzwords, and then move onto whether someone can finger-paint their freshman year CS lectures onto a whiteboard. Then when we end up hiring a completely ineffective person who spent their entire time trying to game the interview system, we are surprised, even though we've been selecting for that kind of person all along.

<comment><USER6> Another thing missing from interviews is being able to find various talents in engineers for the diversity of the engineers out there. Are they good at finding corner cases, are they creative with product design, are they good communicators with a non technical audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Went through this a couple times lately. No pain.

And the battery of automated tests _helpfully written for you_ saves a lot of time.

If the companies you interview with choose problems you don't find relevant, it may be their fault, not HackerRank's.

Or even not a fault: they have to screen out a number of applicants who are good at boasting but can't actually code. You obviously can. It can be a bit boring, bit it gets you to the next stage with significantly fewer contenders.

<comment><USER8> Yes, the test itself is fine, however the issues I've seen:

\- Hidden tests/metrics that also get evaluated

\- Companies with an exaggerated sense of self-importance and unrealistic expectation of results

This is a test, you don't have the feedback that you have on a company (code reviews/talking to a colleague/better understanding of the conditions/real data tests/etc). Don't expect me to guess your conditions.

Also, I can't cover all points in the time you give me, I'm focusing on making the thing work, other stuff is secondary.

<comment><USER9> I feel the time limit is usually the most ridiculous part.

I enjoy solving hard problems as much as any other engineer, or I wouldn't be in this field. But if you want to judge me on code quality, expressiveness, architecture, and test coverage, _in addition to_ performance and correctness, you should really give me enough _time_ to review, refactor and test my code to cover all of those criteria. You know, time that any responsible engineer would spend on any piece of code they write before sending it off to production.

If the position does actually involve writing production-ready solutions to hard algorithms problems within ridiculous time limits like 1 hour, let me know beforehand so I have the chance disqualify myself from it, and we can both avoid wasting any more time with each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It could be worse. My personal recruiting peeve is what I call the "Dunning- Kruger interview", where they ask algorithm questions they don't understand and _don 't even realize that fact_. It is unfortunately common, and made doubly worse when it is plainly my area of expertise and the reason I was recruited in the first place.

More than once, I've been recruited by executives at Famous Tech Company to run major new initiatives involving vast volumes of spatially organized data, since my expertise in that area is well known, but there is a technical diligence step where I am grilled on spatial algorithms by a shockingly ignorant (e.g. doesn't understand R-trees) Principal Engineer or similar who actually believes no one can know more about the space than they do. (If that was the case, they wouldn't be trying to recruit me.) If an interviewer wants to test my expertise, they better be able to have a substantive discussion on the subject matter and understand the limits of their own expertise.

I view algorithm gotcha games as disrespectful of an experienced software engineer's expertise generally. I like to turn it into a substantial discussion about the algorithm class generally; if the interviewer is incapable of having a substantial unscripted discussion about said algorithms, it is a red flag and they have no business asking those kinds of questions. These days, I just walk away from an opportunity when this kind of nonsense happens.

<comment><USER11> ... maybe the point of putting you in with the shockingly ignorant Principal Engineer was to figure out if you could work with them?

<comment><USER10> Heh, possibly, but in practice it usually appears to stem from complete disinterest -- it is an assignment and they do minimal background investigation. I go along with it, but in one extreme case I had a PE-type flatly accuse me of not understanding the theoretical details of a particular algorithm, being unaware that I invented it (and I never mentioned that). When it gets to that point, it is a lost cause.

Some computer science domains are worse than others. Spatial is particularly bad because very few computer scientists realize the theoretical foundations of spatial data structures are completely different than the more ordinary ones they are familiar with -- their intuitions don't apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll post to this thread because this is very relevant for the hiring companies. Hunter and Schmidt did a meta-study of 85 years of research on hiring criteria. [1] There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields.

      - General mental ability (Are they generally smart)
        Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use them as proxies.
        Using IQ is effectively illegal[2] in the US, so you'll have to find a test that acts as a good proxy.

      - Work sample test. NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing. Try to make it apples-to-apples comparison across candidates. Also, try and make accomidations for candidates not knowing your company shibboleth.

      - Integrity. The first two won't matter if you hire dishonest people or politicians.

         There are existing tests available for this, you can purchase for < $50 per use.

This alone will get you > 65% hit rate [1], and can be done inside of three hours. There's no need for day long (or multi-day) gladiator style gauntlets.

[1] [http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

[2] The effective illegality comes from IQ tests disadvantaging certain minority groups.

<comment><USER13> > Using IQ is effectively illegal[2] in the US, so you'll have to find a test > that acts as a good proxy.

You've posted this before and been called out on it. Please stop spreading misinformation.

There is nothing special about IQ tests specifically. Any proxy test will have exactly the same legal ramifications. As long as you can show that the results of that test are relevant to job performance, it is fine. Whether it is labeled an "IQ test" is irrelevant.

<comment><USER12> Put plainly, the callout and yourself are wrong. To muddy the waters about this may put small companies at risk.

I've spoken with an lawyer about this. There is case law directly concerning IQ tests.

The bar for acceptance to prove the use of IQ in hiring in a discrimination case is unattainable by most software companies. Hence, it is effectively illegal.

NB: I would desperately love to use IQ tests in the US myself. I _want_ to be on your side and use IQ tests, but wouldn't risk my supper for it.

<comment><USER13> I didn't intend to imply that IQ tests are okay (although the test I suggested is in fact what you have to prove). I'm actually concerned by the suggestion that IQ proxy tests are any different. They are bound by exactly the same requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Are we now at a point where an engineer should at all times be intimately > familiar with competitive programming and codegolf techniques?

Yes, we are. Accepting that trend seems to be better than ignoring it.

There is one not-so-bad way to look at these programming challenges. In silicon valley, we live in a condition wherein the company could fail at any time. As a developer, most often, we have to learn something entirely new and ship the code for the business. Those challenges are quite enormous with lots of unknowns compared to these programming contest problems where it is just preparation. The general idea is, if a developer is diligent enough to prepare for these programming contest problems and delivers when required, he is probably going to be helpful as well when the business has a dire need.

<comment><USER15> On the flip side, now you have no idea if a developer is any good, because all they have to do is memorize a bunch of garbage interview algo techniques / questions.

<comment><USER16> I think this mentality is actually wrong. I've definitely met good engineers who were rejected for jobs they were qualified for because of these questions, but I've never met someone who was extremely good at these questions who turned out to be a dud after hiring.

I don't disagree with the hate towards the current interview process at larger companies, preferring take homes myself, but I think it's harmful to say that all they have to do is "memorize a bunch of ... techniques" \- they're going to have memorize a whole lot to get through the interview process. In the process of memorizing (learning) those techniques, you're likely to learn a lot about the foundations of mathematical problem solving.

I guess I'm biased because I studied math in college, but I think we can both criticize the current interview process without taking away from the hard work of people who are actually passionate about algorithms.

<comment><USER17> I have met many people in my life who are/were way better than me in chalking out algorithmic solutions but didn't even had a single bit of knowledge how computers and real softwares work. Many of these people are not good team players, don't understand the importance of delivering things, or simply aren't interested in the work they are doing.

On other side, I have also met many people who are extremely good at competitive programming and extremely good at their workplaces also.

So taking these two as suppositions, I have concluded that competitive programming skill is not something which can't be relied upon as a judgement factor for a good candidate.

Note- I once used to be a good competitive programmer during my college so I have seen both sides of it.

<comment><USER16> I agree - I don't think competitive programming should be used as an interview tactic. That being said, if you look at the rating distribution of TopCoder/Codeforces problems, most interview problems (even at Google) tend to be around the 1500 Elo level. Around the 1900 Elo level and above, I think it's an extremely strong signal for a very talented thinker.

I'd much rather prefer a discussion about a previous project (open source or at work) with pointed questions about the code/design choices, a take home, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > I'm an experienced developer with 5 years of thorough product experience in > the domain. I'd completely appreciate the importance if the role actually > did involve trying to eek out efficiency in a distributed system with high > throughput... but 9 times out of 10 it's boilerplate business logic.

This is what I don't understand about software engineer hiring. They are ignoring important criteria about fit for the actual job, and focusing on criteria that is either orthogonal or completely irrelevant.

It's worthwhile to ask in these situations if the exercise is representative of work you'd be doing. It almost never is, but they tend to excuse it as...

> it normalises the application process against prejudice

But does it? By ignoring the actual criteria relevant to the job, they're dumping qualified people who don't do well with the hazing, and delaying evaluation of everyone else until after they're hired. That evaluation tends to be a lot less objective, because "hiring is expensive"; it selects for people who do well with the hazing, and reproduces the problem for the next round.

<comment><USER19> > This is what I don't understand about software engineer hiring. They are > ignoring important criteria about fit for the actual job, and focusing on > criteria that is either orthogonal or completely irrelevant.

Oftentimes, the people actually designing the hiring process have an imperfect understanding of what work software engineers actually do. They ask the software engineers for input, but optimizing the hiring process to be orthogonal a software engineer's core work responsibilities, so they aren't necessarily going to give ideal advice.

</comment></comment><comment> git-pull For their own expedience. It's an employer's market. It costs 2.5k/yr to keep an SO posting up and get thousands of resumes in your inbox.

I'd also say a fair share of those in Who's Hiring on HN aren't in dire need of filling seats, but just trying to see how far people with fling themselves through the mazes. Blissfully unaware they're not the only startup and have no way of offering the stability of a large company.

At one of the places I've seen, we didn't read every resume. We overlooked _mountains_ of talent and shot ourselves in the foot.

Instead of hiring coders that had their heart in the right place, we hired streetwise careerists that put their own interests before the team. But they could do palindromes, fizzbuzz, and whiteboard data structures and algorithms.

But when we wanted them to do something generalist or in another language, they'd refuse. One even went so far as saying if they could program X in Y editor, they'd just leave the job. What use is passing all these tests if you're totally inflexible?

We also snubbed people enthusiastically espoused the startup gumption and idea of building, but didn't cope well with the white boarding we thrown at them. Those whose heart was in teamwork and open source, we overlooked ignorantly, while continually putting up walls to see who finally gets past all of them.

There is some toxic cultural thing amidst in startups of insularity and smugness. If I could go back, I'd say screw it with the whiteboard games, come freelance with us for a week. That way I can gauge your temperament, how you work with teammates, your technical skills, etc. in a realistic setting.

And if someone asks for a code sample, and you already have projects on GitHub or your portfolio, don't be afraid to redirect them to that instead. If they don't look, assume the employer is not serious about filling the spot, but just putting in the least effort themselves to see how many hoops people jump.

It's not you OP / other programmers. If an employer doesn't bother to give you a phone call to talk to you as a human being, maybe they're not so eager to have a position filled.

Don't let it effect your self-worth. Always be coding. Don't be afraid to stick your head out there at a meetup and shake some hands, you'll be surprised how much more decency you court when you represent you're a human being, not another resume in a stack of thousands.

<comment><USER19> "Come freelance with us for a week" seems even worse to me.

For starters, there is a very small and fairly specific subset of the population that can afford to carve out a whole week for an extended interview, even if you do pay them for their time.

<comment><USER20> Yes, this omits the people who already have a job and wouldn't want to quit just to freelance for a week.

But I doubt this would leave out genuinely interested people who aren't employed. Assuming a preliminary acid test on the employer's side for skills needed and on the candidate's side for interest, this seems reasonable.

You may want to have a Plan B for the employed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As an aside, I also dislike hackerrank; for me, it's the sheer ham-fisted ineptitude of some of the alleged learning exercises.

Look at this mess: [https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/preprocessor- solution](https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/preprocessor-solution)

This purports to be teaching use of the preprocessor. It's horrific. It's someone's amusing "look at how you can create your own programming language by abusing the preprocessor" mess; fair enough, it's always fun to see someone do something this painful, but this is being genuinely presented as a preprocessor learning exercise.

One day I'll have to work with people who learned from this (and others like it), and it will be a long painful road to help them unlearn.

<comment><USER22>
      One day I'll have to work with people who learned from
      this (and others like it), and it will be a long painful road
      to help them unlearn.

Quoting from the link you've mentioned:

      #define add(a, b) a + b

I couldn't agree with you more.

\--

To elaborate:

      add(1, 8) * add(5, 1)

wouldn't yield 9 * 6 = 54, but

      1 + 8 * 5 + 1

which is 42. One might say that it's correct, since it's the _Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything_.

<comment><USER23> Which is why anyone who has experience programming in C would instead write:

      #define add(a, b) ((a) + (b))

<comment><USER22> One may also do:

      add(x, foo(x))

Which is why anyone who has experience programming in C would use (an inline) function instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I loathe algorithm questions, and I almost always never ask them when I'm interviewing a candidate. Too often have I seen candidates who ace 6 rounds of algorithm interviews, only to struggle when it comes to building actual products and require a ton of handholding.

On the other hand, I've seen candidates who fail interviews that are algorithm heavy, but have done exceptionally well when it comes to the practical world - doing actual work and building apps and contributing to the team instead of writing the next (insert your fav tricky algorithm question here) solver.

It's unfortunate that while many companies that are hiring are just run-of- the-mill SaaS and apps companies that don't require you as an engineer to use algorithms or DP on a daily basis (or even ever), you still see algorithm heavy interviews at these companies.

On Hackerrank, I don't necessarily hate it as a tool, but just the questions that get asked through it. I don't like that it automates an interview process to a certain extent, as a candidate's potential and skills and experience and fit in the team can't exactly be measured via an automated process but requires actual human to human interaction. If a company rejects you on the basis of failing a Hackerrank question and hasn't even talked to you, you're better off working for a different company.

<comment><USER22> I've also seen a similar tool that claims to do a partial evaluation of candidate's code. Guess what does it do! Assume that the expected answer was

       42

and your code emitted

       4

it'd give you 50% marks for the test case.

\--

As an aside, such tools would give you a 0 even if you coded the perfect algorithm but goofed up the final _printf_.

Robotic evaluations might work, but not in the current form.

<comment><USER25> I've had a similar problem with one of more recent HackerRank challenges. Part of the input were value pairs, the example contained only two pairs and the ordering of the pairs was not clearly specified, ie it could have been:

x1 x2 x3

y1 y2 y3

or:

x1 y1

x2 y2

x3 y3

The worst part way that their example still produced the same result if you read the values in the wrong order! I spent 40 minutes debugging my solution not understanding why my test cases work perfectly but HR does not accept the solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I completely agree with you. Measuring our skill based on HackerRank is completely bullshit. I'm 100% sure, every programmer-beginner (even every math student) can solve the problems on HackerRank but can't even deploy a application on server nor know how to deal with real customers nor read a build-script nor... (image a lot more things here)

</comment><comment><USER27> I have +6 years of work experience as a developer and for the last two months I have had +36 pre-selection interviews via HackerRank with a wide range of small to medium sized companies. I am not ashamed to say that I have failed every single one of them, but I have to recognize that I have learned more things during the last couple of weeks about algorithms, data structures and prioritization than in most of my career.

This week I was invited by an in-house recruiter from one of the _" Big 4"_ to resolve two coding problems via HackerRank in 120 minutes, plus a third exercise asking about the time and space complexity of my solution. I am 99% sure that I will fail this pre-selection too, but I really do not care, the more I practice now the more opportunities I will have next time. I have talked with people who were hired by Google, Amazon, Booking.com after 8-12 months being unemployed, so — in my case — two months is certainly nothing, I can use the next six months to train myself and maybe next year one of these companies will extend an offer and then I will forget about all this hiring madness.

</comment><comment><USER28> Knowing the implementation of a specific algorithm is much less important than knowing what class of problem you're facing, where and how to look up the details of algorithms that could help you and how to work well with others to get the work done. If your employer uses hackerrank to choose candidates, you really don't want to work there. People who do those things well are often the worst kind of people to hire: they're really good at certain types of problems but suck at almost everything else. I end up cleaning up systems after these people all the time everywhere I encounter them in the workplace.

<comment><USER29> You are overstating your case. Hackerrank is useful as a pre-screen. Give a fizz-buzz type problem on Hackerrank, then proceed with the normal interview process. The kinds of people you are describing would be filtered out in the subsequent interviews.

<comment><USER28> I can only hope you're right. The tone of the OP doesn't directly support either/or however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> One of the things that always interests me around our industry is this.

I'm wondering how other industries do it, I mean, once Doctors get their medical license, if they want to move to a different clinic or hospital, do they have to attend an interview demonstrating their knowledge, doing a whiteboard session on a "Dr House" style medical problem that they have to diagnose in < 10 minutes?

Or do they present their medical credentials, and get interviewed on their bedside manner, their ability to work in a team (if applicable), anecdotes about their past experiences etc?

<comment> lloyd-christmas Med school is difficult. An internship is difficult. A fellowship program is difficult. Undergraduate degrees are a rubber stamp, CS included.

There are 20k oncologists across all fields of oncology within the US. That's also about the number of engineers Google employs. Most other industries we like to compare ourselves to are leagues above ours in individual merit. My father is an oncologist, and I'm reasonably confident he has some familiarity with every genitourinary oncologist in North America, Australia, and Europe. More importantly, he's on a first name basis with all of their educators. When he needs to hire a new doctor, he doesn't post an ad on health stack exchange. He makes an offer to a specific individual who he already knows.

One thing that we as an industry fail to understand is that we're not special. We desperately claw to it in these conversations. I'm willing to admit it: I'm easily replaceable. Very few of us have any name recognition that exists in other fields. I worked in finance for half a decade before moving to software. When I'd go to interview, people already knew who I was because of the basic human interaction I had as part of my job. When I walk into the door of my next interview, the only thing people know about me is what's on my resume/blog/stack overflow answers.

Personally, I find technical interviews to be a cheap and easy filter. You may not always get the best person from your pool of applicants, but you get someone that's better than most of them. The marginal benefit of one vs. the other is rarely meaningful. OP complained about having to do this, but some of the other applicants might have found it difficult. Sounds like it was successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's how I was assessed for my job at Pivotal:

1\. I did a simple tech screen (the RPI). 1 hour. My interviewer had a laptop and asked me questions about what to do next in the scenario.

2\. Hey, come pair with this engineer on this real code on a real project on a real task.

3\. How about lunch?

4\. Hey, let's have you pair with this other engineer on real code on a real project on a real task.

5\. Get offered a job on my way out the door.

I know from feedback that we don't always do this right, that we sometimes drop the ball, that many people find the RPI or the pairing to be frustrating, intimidating, or uncomfortable.

Most importantly, many people find that they just don't want to work the way we prefer. Which is good! It saves them the unhappiness of committing to a situation that won't enjoy.

But the core insight is: the best way to see if someone can work alongside us on a real problem is to ask them to come in to work alongside us on a real problem.

It's the best proxy we have short of hiring you. When it's available as an option to do this, I don't understand why anyone would choose a less accurate proxy.

<comment><USER32> I really like this approach and I reading about it here makes me inspired to try it on our next hire. We do pair programming, so it would work well for us.

What I've been doing which is similar is hiring the dev on contract for a short term to see if it works out. But I think this approach is much more efficient. Do you get and check references?

<comment><USER33> I suggested a try-before-you-buy contract to a few companies that I applied with and none of them were interested. Maybe it is because the company is afraid of the contractor saying "What is the upside for me to join you as an employee? Just extend my contract if you want to keep me around." :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I face this problem. I am into server side scripting and automation and this hardly involves algos and stuff. The problem doesn't seem to lie with hackerrank but with one-size-fits-all HR approach. I would also pin the blame on lack of understanding on the part of HR personnel (they seem to be the drivers behind recruitment drives) of how the tech landscape is.They need to educate themselves on what sorta interview process to be conducted for different profiles.

<comment><USER35> That seems... limiting. Are you sure you want to specialize that much, and rule out doing any programming that does require understanding something about algorithms?

<comment><USER34> I do know algorithms, it's just that I don't use it in my day to day activities. When confronted with an online challenge with time constraints I seem not to cope since I hardly use algos in my day to day automation it isn't right on top of my fingertips!

Without time constraints I am able to solve the problems.

Timed Algo assessments are very similar to exams u write in universities.. u need to keep practicing to complete those assessments in time and get a "pass mark".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is one of the reasons I'm eyeing management for long term career growth. I've learned that the problems given to sr. and jr. engineers are roughly the same, and that the interview process is biased towards jr.

<comment><USER34> I think the same way. Mostly biased towards jr. And management seems like a good option for long term career growth.

<comment><USER37> Isn't it a bad omen for any industry when the most realistic career advancement path is management?

<comment><USER38> Isn't that how most industries work, from flipping burgers to the legal profession? Why should tech be any different?

<comment><USER34> True, also the industry prefers younger population coz they can burn more hours and are available for a cheaper than the experienced folks.

Also, the industry somehow seems to stereotype a developer as some younger geeks. The stereotype works against experienced folks sometimes (not always).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> @OP: You sound almost exactly like me. I have not done any interviews for a bit more than 5 years. I think the what really can be improved is to test us in a more familiar and friendly environment. I have to spend time on handling time-pressure, and fix/adapt with my thinking habits.

## Coding Problems:

I do think coding challenges(algorithmic) has merits, but I think there are two factor that really hinders a interviewee's performances:

\- time limit

\- require an unfamiliar algorithm

Time limit is obviously needed in a test, but problem solving in real life is never instant unless it's done before. Nevertheless everyone have their own pace. I have to dedicate hours each day to train myself to adjust my brain to act quicker yet calm for these algorithmic questions. Sometimes my initial solution in my mind turns out to be the best, but I discard it. Nevertheless if one is stuck, the time limit just makes it worst. I'm also known to be the slowest in turn-based board game -- I have high win rates though!

## Possible Solution?

* Allow interviewee pick from a pool of equally-difficult-challenges to solve (within a minute or two). This can solves the "obscure algorithm" or "trick" question. This also helps the time-limit problem as the interviewee WILL interpret the question twice in two different VIBES (with and without time pressure)

Even choosing 1 out of 2 would dramatically reduce nervousness and time pressure.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the problem is people generally look to the big tech companies like Google for guidance on designing their interview process and for those companies it may actually matter that your approach is o(n) vs o(logn).

Big fan of 'homework' to walk through/extend in the onsite interview. The homework should avoid any UI elements and ideally just talk to a database or another API. Another thing to do is try problems that require the candidate to learn something new like a new language, database design, cryptography, distributed consensus, machine learning, geo-fencing, telephony, etc. Strong candidates learn very quickly and enjoy learning new things which usually becomes pretty quickly evident.

</comment><comment><USER33> One company I applied at last year used hackerrank as part of the interview process. There were two tasks, neither was an "algorithm puzzle". The first was a very simple one that can be checked for correctness automatically (e.g. "remove duplicates from this list of email addresses").

The second one was basically a homework assignment, just timeboxed to 45 minutes or so ("refactor this simple frontend app"). In the following call I expected that we talk about my solution to this task, but we mostly talked about previous projects I've worked on (which was a better use of our time, IMHO).

So I guess what I'm saying is that it is possible to make good use of sites like hackerrank.

</comment><comment><USER41> The important thing is not to ace the final result. The important thing is to communicate your thought process, identify bugs, talk about options in architecture and design, stay calm under pressure and keep a positive attitude even when asked to do something you think is silly.

The interviewers know "this exact problem" is not generally applicable to their work. They are looking at how you interact with the problem.

Projecting a bad attitude toward being asked to code on a whiteboard is the opposite of what you should do and misses the point entirely. Code golf and competition (right answer in min time) is not the point.

<comment><USER42> you can't communicate your thought process on hackerrank or triplebyte it is a timed online test

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Organizations seek out formulaic ways of qualifying candidates because actually assessing an individual's talent and personality takes time and effort, and is a significant investment. The pressure to streamline the process grows as the company grows and hiring becomes a more frequent thing. It's one of the main reasons I like working for small companies. As a case in point I'll describe the process that led to my current position.

After the application and a brief phone call I was given a take-home project with a one week deadline. The project was directly related to what the company does, and was interesting and fun to do. I submitted a pull request in four days. The pr was reviewed by their engineering team and they all voted to move me forward. The next step was a work along day for which I was paid. These are typically done in person but for various reasons on both sides we did it remotely. The entire engineering team participated in a dedicated slack channel as we walked through my homework project, suggested and implemented changes, joked and in general had a good time. At the end of the day I said my goodbyes and an hour later the recruiter called to tell me they were preparing an offer.

The advantages of this process should be readily apparent. By the time my first day arrived we already knew we'd get along, approached work in compatible ways, etc. The costs of the process should also be readily apparent, and it would probably be really hard for a larger company to do things this way.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't mind algorithms and brain teasers if they are presented well. As in the interviewer makes it clear they aren't looking for a single right answer but want observe how you solve a problem. Plus I enjoy a good puzzle.

My problem with hackerrank is that the problem statements are often unclear and have artificially short deadlines. I feel like it forces my to use unreadable and sloppy coding to just get any solution out the door before the timer runs out.

</comment><comment><USER45> These things are really just filters. Due to the legal aspects of hiring/recruiting, especially at large companies, these exercises are par for the course. Once you're in a large company, firing can be very difficult, so I'm all for filters.

Personally, after having taken many of these tests myself, if you're having even minor problems, that is a huge red flag for me. They're really just binary filters on basic skill level.

<comment><USER46> With the USA's at will and limited worker protection you must be kidding about how hard it is to fire people

<comment><USER45> In my experience, it is very hard to fire people if they are simply incompetent. You can fire them for mistakes, but just sucking at one's job is this awkward grey area where you wrestle with HR and they usually suggest investing in training, etc. That is fine and good, but when I got a deadline, I'm not going to tow deadwood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not many within a team that is hiring either have the time or skills to _assess_ candidates. Employers are looking for a _magic solution_ to fulfill their staffing needs.

Companies such as Hackerrank have thereby managed to convince employers that they have the solution to all the hiring problems. Essentially a _magic wand_ which would enable them to hire Einsteins.

</comment><comment><USER47> As an aside....

I find it ironic that almost all companies talk about ___" culture, family, work-life-balance"_ __yet they treat recruiting as robot selection....

IQ Hazing is a good way to put it...

but how do you measure, ___" Do I even want to fucking work with these people/this company???"_ __

</comment><comment><USER48> Our hiring process uses only homework. We give you a problem to solve, a single Java file to do code review on and some database problems that you have to solve with MongoDB. Based on how well you do we go for a phone interview and if it goes well we bring you in for an onsite interview. I tried HackerRank a while back but it does not give us too much value. The competition going on it can be fun for programmers who like challenges like that but it has almost zero indication how well you are going to do in a production environment working on a mission critical system with a team and where your code is running on any infrastructure. Using it as a hiring tool is fundamentally flawed in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER49> If you look at it, the main problem here seems to be that the way evaluation essentially works (even on the first level of the funnel) has not evolved over the years. People ask algorithm-based questions for assessing developers because there's simply no other tool that allows you to evaluate on these actionable skills. For example, how do you evaluate someone on their understanding of JavaScript's prototypical inheritance? Sure, a text I/O based problem (which HackerRank and others) use cannot help you do this. So you resort to MCQs. Asking a JavaScript guy to solve a problem using dynamic programming simply doesn't make sense.

Technical evaluation needs to evolve.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's annoying, I agree, and sometimes on hackerrank the problems are miscalibrated, but the best way to handle it is to just do it. They aren't _that_ hard, so spend a week or so getting your skill level up.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think the point of the take home code example is just filtering out candidates who don't really know how to code. So, I personally think it's ok if you don't pass ALL the tests. An experienced candidate when presented with a DP problem should at least be able to code up a recursive solution, maybe with memoization. They may not get the DP solution correct but at least have an idea of how it should work roughly. You SHOULD NOT have to be intimately familiar with competitive programming to be able to do those things.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm going through this right now. I've taken some time (1+ years) off and do admit to being rusty. However, I've dedicated time to studying and I'm not getting past some technical phone screens because of these algorithms-heavy questions. I do well enough on them yet are passed over. I thought the market was "hot" and this would be relatively straightforward, but it has been anything but easy. I'm also starting to wonder if there are other factors at play (ageism, female).

</comment><comment><USER53> What about for people with no experience or education? I'd love the opportunity to prove myself through testing rather than relying on credentials I don't have.

</comment><comment><USER54> The worst part of Hacker Rank is that it takes arguments as STDIN, forcing you to to a "read from STDIN" ceremony before actually getting to the problem.

<comment><USER55> If reading from STDIN is something that's considered a "ceremony", I'm already concerned about the rest of the code.

STDIN is one of the most common input methods I use for most of the commands I interact with on a daily basis. It would be like discovering that somebody found "logging errors to STDERR" to be a "ceremony"

<comment><USER56> In real life, I agree. But if I'm trying to solve an array sorting problem, why can't they just give me an array? LeetCode does it and it works fine. I get to focus on how to sort the array.

The other commenter (natdempk) makes some good points though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> There is no shortage of reasonably competent software developers in USA and West Europe. The very existence of things like Codility and HackerRank proves that. However, there is significant shortage of sanity and common sense in the culture of developer hiring.

</comment><comment><USER58> I just wouldn't apply anywhere that does that, it's a ridiculous way of testing a developers fit for the average role and a strong warning indicator that it'd be somewhere not to work.

</comment><comment><USER59> maybe what you should really hate is a company that adopts the en-vogue trend as the standards for recruitment. think about what that says about the team that passed their interview

<comment><USER34> Well said!

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Hiring manager who recently added HackerRank to our interview process here.

While far from perfect, I think these types of systems do have some advantages. Keep in mind, I think they are best used as a tool for pre- screening candidates for graduate positions (where we have a LOT of applicants), or candidates we may otherwise pass on due to a lack of well known engineering school or well known companies on their resume (and I'm sensitive to this given that I moved to SF with neither of these). Also, my company is in a very technical problem space, so we do actually use algorithms + data structures on a daily basis.

* I don't buy the "I have 5 years of experience, I should be exempt from coding in HackerRank / phone screens / on-site technical questions" argument. I've done interviews with many people with years of experience and Senior Engineer on their resume, who are unable to solve trivial problems like finding simple patterns in an array. This might not be the majority, but it's enough to create a lot of noise in resume screening.

* As a hiring manager, my job is to make sure that engineers on our team are not getting pulled from their day to day work to do phone or on-site interviews with sub-par candidates. While lots of people on HN tend to complain about interview processes, the reality is that once you start at a job, most of the time you want to focus on writing code and solving technical problems, not performing multiple phone screens per day. Designing a good interview process involves BOTH creating a good experience for the candidate, and not overwhelming your existing team.

* Certainly a strictly better alternative is take-home challenges (which we used to use, and still do for some candidates). However, to get any valuable information from these (and give justice to candidates who spent a couple hours building something), an engineer on our team has to spend time unzipping, running and looking through them, and writing up their thoughts. This might take 30 minutes of their time, and probably an hour or more out of their flow. To do this with more than a couple candidates per week is not possible (not to mention the fact that understandably engineers might not get around to reviewing it for a few days, which is not fair to candidates). For this reason, I think simpler HackerRank type challenges are a better way of pre-screening candidates.

* As a candidate, HackerRank is one of the _easiest possible_ steps for you to pass. Almost all of the problems are up on their website! They may not be exactly the same as the ones given to you by specific companies, but there is a lot of overlap in these types of questions. If you spend a few hours practicing you will be able to ace almost any HackerRank challenge given to you.

That said, HackerRank is a tool, and I think there are a few implementation details needed to make it work well:

* Many of the suggested questions for candidates are terrible (e.g. "will this code compile", or really unclear problem descriptions). For our quiz, I chose all the questions and answered them myself before ever giving them to candidates. If a company lets their recruiters set up a default quiz, it will be really bad for candidates.

* As I mentioned, we usually use this for grads, or candidates who we are not sure about based on resume alone. If you come in through a referral, cold outreach, or TripleByte (who only work with really high quality candidates) you usually get to skip this step.

* I don't think these systems can every tell you how _good_ a candidate is. They can and should only be used as a method of filtering out candidates who don't meet a minimum standard. As others have mentioned, writing algorithms is only part of the job of a good engineer, and they do nothing to test your architectural skills, teamwork skills, motivation level etc. For this reason we only use it as part of our hiring process, as a minimum bar for entry into further interviews.

I'm also constantly looking for ways to improve our hiring process, so open to suggestions to any of the above.

</comment><comment><USER61> if you don't like hacker rank. suggest a technical phone screen over a shared notebook or a homework problem as an alternative. See how that works.

</comment><comment><USER62> Sort of surprised to see most of the comments on here actually defending the companies that put so much weight on these types of tests.

I think many people _assume_ that interviewers are looking for "thought process" but from my experience as a hiring manager for 6 years, in reality you'll find that most are just looking to "gotch-ya" the candidate. Many interviewers seem to enjoy making a candidate "sweat" as some source of pride. Again, not saying everyone does this, but often times programmer interviewers believe that the harder and more obscure a programming question is the better.

We should all agree that coding tests are helpful in assessing a candidate's programming capabilities, but not all coding tests are equal.

From my experience, bad coding tests that have little relation to whether a candidate will do a good job are these arbitrary ones. For example:

* Implement a merge/quick/radixx sort algorithm that you maybe did 10 years ago in college and have never had to do since.

* Implement a linked list/hashmap/some other random data structure in Java even though you would never write on yourself.

* Write a program to determine whether a string is a palindrome.

* Implement an algorithm to solve this random problem from Project Euler

Ones that have been worked better attempt to be comparable to what they actually might do in the company:

* FizzBuzz - (While controversial, this helps weed out people who just don't know how to code)

* Build a JSON REST API in whatever language you want to manage groceries in a shopping cart.

* Write a web scraper in whatever language you want to count the most popular words on a website

* Here is a random UI framework that you have never used, use whatever documentation you can find on the web and write a To Do list application with it.

Again, YMMV, and depending on your domain certain questions make more sense to ask than others. If you're interviewing as a researcher for Google/Amazon/IBM/Microsoft, then you actually might need to know how to implement some random sorting algorithm because it may be what you will need to implement it in some new SDK/library. But I don't believe that for most companies this makes sense.

If you are a hiring manager, ask yourself this: If you had to run one of your current (positive) team members through your current interview process, would they make it through? Would they say they had a positive interview experience?

<comment><USER63> > _I think many people assume that interviewers are looking for "thought > process" but from my experience as a hiring manager for 6 years, in reality > you'll find that most are just looking to "gotch-ya" the candidate. Many > interviewers seem to enjoy making a candidate "sweat" as some source of > pride._

What you describe is a horrible approach to interviewing, and points towards dysfunction more than anything else.

In my opinion, the second most appealing non-technical character trait for an engineer is _empathy_. (Curiosity being #1.) If you have an interviewer who goes on a power trip and actively tries to abuse a candidate, what does that tell you about their company?

Everything is PR, and how we interview engineers tells a lot about how we deal with each other. Would you like to work in a place where being nasty is considered normal - or even desirable?

<comment><USER62> > _Everything is PR, and how we interview engineers tells a lot about how we > deal with each other. Would you like to work in a place where being nasty is > considered normal - or even desirable?_

Couldn't agree more. I tell my employees this religiously.

I would also say that the 'power trip' isn't a boolean characteristic. There are different levels for different employees at companies. I think most of us have probably experienced or known those who tends to be on one side of the scale or the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to add two points that bother me the most:

1\. It doesn't actually test my ability. Most of the time there is a stackoverflow solution and I'm going to just look it up and regurgitate it. I can't remember where I read this but allegedly it took Knuth a day of thinking to come up with the most optimal solution for one of the presented challenges (it was either the maximum subarray sum or stock sell problem).

2\. It's all very well preparing for these interviews at my age (under 30, no responsibilities or family, generous severance from my previous employer), however, what happens 10 years down the line with responsibilities and hungry mouths to feed.

</comment><comment><USER64> Seriously why was this flagged? Can't there be some level of criticism without it being censored? Jesus christ anything not in the best interest of making YC money will be crushed.

<comment><USER32> I agree, not sure why this was flagged. The title is clickbait, but it seems this guy genuinely does hate hackerrank. fair enough.

<comment><USER64> Because its bad PR for hacker rank. That's why it was flagged.

<comment><USER32> Ironically often any PR is good PR. So many people who otherwise would not hear about hackerrank will now hear about it and many will use it regardless.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LulzSec Topples EVE Online, Minecraft, League of Legends and other Servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/220418/updated-lulzsec-topples-eve-online-escapist-magazine-minecraft-and-league-of-legends-servers/ <comment><USER2> When they're attacking Sony it's "righteous" and "good", when they're attacking companies we _like_ they're "bad" and "immature". They've always stated their intention is to create "lulz" and just do whatever damage they can, apparently people overlooked this when they were attacking people _everyone_ "hated". Luckily Minecraft wasn't down for too long, some of us are directly affected by this stuff, sigh.

The internet is a shitty place.

<comment><USER3> These attacks are annoying and damaging but in the long run they make our internet stronger. If these didn't happen so often people would care a lot less about security and robustness.

<comment><USER4> Sure, and I can go around punching people in the face and tell 'em that I'm doing 'em a favour by reminding them to always wear a full-face helmet when out in public.

But if nobody except me is a big enough asshole to go round punching people in the face at random...

<comment><USER5> The difference is that one of those people could very well return the favor and give you a proper ass kicking, or determine your identity with relative ease and file a complaint with the police.

The disincentives that exist for your example and those that exist for actions similar to those taken by lulzsec are radically different.

The conclusion that people should walk around with full-face helmets is ridiculous because of the existing disincentives for assaulting someone. The conclusion that companies should secure their networks, not such an unreasonable expectation.

<comment><USER6> Right, the problem is that 'digital criminals' are a) not likely enough to get caught, and b) not punished enough if/when they are.

What we need are stronger punishments against digital vandalism and profit- oriented digital burglary alike, and more and stronger enforcement.

(not being sarcastic, in case anyone's wondering)

<comment><USER7> Good thing our politicians are listening and are prepared to clamp down hard on illegal filesharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone want to go conspiracy theory with me and wonder if some government agency wants more power to go after groups like anonymous and wikileaks and so are doing this themselves to get both people and the rest of government on board to give them more broad and exciting new powers (at our expense) to go after the real groups?

<comment><USER9> I _keep_ hearing this conspiracy theory pop up in almost every thread both here and on reddit about lulzsec's activities.

Can somebody give me a "worst case" scenario for a government crackdown on the internet?

What's to stop me from running tor? From VPNing out of the country _myself_? How would this alleged crackdown affect me?

And are you all new to the internet? Hacker groups like this have been around since...ever. I will admit that their publicity seems to have been waning in the last 5-6 years, but we're not really seeing anything new here. The only new thing about it is that this time it's happening on twitter.

This isn't a government cover-up. This isn't a conspiracy. It's one or several nerds doing what most nerds love to do: cause trouble. It's just that _this time_ , it's happening on a much more public forum.

<comment><USER8> What's to stop you? the government making it illegal to run hacking tools like "tor" (see the silk road/bitcoin post on HN from earlier) etc illegal and forcing your ISP to record any use of such and block you off the internet (see france's 3 strikes, you as a person are not allowed on the internet law) and report you and then possibly criminally prosecute you as well.

<comment><USER9> What you're suggesting is impossible.

>the government making it illegal to run hacking tools like "tor"

Do you think that there is nothing illegal that happens on the internet _now_? How long was it illegal to export encryption? How many people actually cared?

>forcing your ISP to record any use of such and block you off the internet

The encryption standards that we all use are the same encryption standards that are recommended by the NSA. Unless my ISP knows something that the rest of the world doesn't, it's functionally impossible for them to see what I'm doing if I'm either using tor, or tunneling out of the country on the back of a VPN.

Tor was invented by the NSA, by the way, for exactly this purpose.

Look at what Iran/Egypt/etc have done to try and crack down on internet usage. Or even China. Look at how successful that has been.

(It has been a failure)

<comment><USER10> Was Tor actually invented by the NSA? I didn't manage to find any sources for that, could you provide one?

<comment><USER11> Not the NSA, it came from the Navy. See here: <http://www.onion-router.net/>

<comment><USER9> Hmm, is the NSA a division of the Navy?

<comment><USER4> Nope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How is it that so much coverage of LulzSec still hasn't understood their motives?

      The group's agenda isn't entirely clear right now

Yes, it is, they're doing it because they find it funny.

<comment><USER13> I think it's dismissive to jump to that conclusion - they're likely turning a healthy profit by dumping lists of emails, credit card numbers, and zero-day vulnerabilities on the black market.

<comment><USER14> If they wanted to do that, then I don' think they would announce it. Offering someone a bunch of private data, 0 days, credit card info, but then making it useless in a few hours because you announce it to the world, hardly seems like a viable/profitable business.

<comment><USER13> That works under the assumption that they release everything, when they have explicitly said that they do not.

Specifically - information gained in the Bethesda <http://pastebin.com/i5M0LB58> and whitehat <http://pastebin.com/MQG0a130> raids has not been released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not that LulzSec has made sense up until now but why bother taking out online video games? I feel like that's alienating the population that would normally support or at least be indifferent about a group like LulzSec.

<comment><USER16> Not to be too cheezy, but i'd like to quote The Dark Knight here: "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

<comment><USER15> Valid point and a great quote. It's just hard to believe such people exist outside the realm of comic books.

<comment><USER17> Think of the Lulzsec activities as more of an art than an act of vandalism. (Most taggers/spray painters feel the same way, and are also known to deface their own stomping grounds)

edit to the downvoters: I'm not defending their actions, just putting myself in their frame of mind

<comment><USER18> The do because they can. and the immense butthurt of the gamers is music to their ears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Acting like defacers wasn't low brow enough, now they're just borrowing a ddos botnet? What's next in this high tech crime spree, supergluing all the lock tumblers at the local mall?

Is the lulz from laughing with them or at them?

<comment><USER20> With them my friend, with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Honestly (ex-Riot Games, League of Legends contractor) I wondered how well the infrastructure choices for their login server would hold up. There was a huge amount of complexity involved in it, which is REALLY hard to get right.

I just hope it wasn't code that I actually wrote that let them in. :) If I was betting, though, I would bet that it was a vulnerability in Adobe LiveCycle Data Services.

<comment><USER22> As far as I can see, they didn't hack game servers, they DDOS'ed them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> CCP statement: [http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=4616&...](http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=4616&tid=1)

I admit, I was at work for the entire downtime so it didn't bother me, but I am pleased with their response to the situation. Hitting the big red button may be a drastic step in response to DDOS, but at least they were willing to take security seriously.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if there's an ideological "faction" (not an actual group or organization) of Anon hackers, the ones behind the hacktivism (pro-Wikileaks, anti-dictators, anti-corruption in democracies), who feels like groups such as LulzSec are tarnishing the reforming image of Anonymous. Prior to this month, they were getting almost mainstream approval as supporters of liberation movements in the third world.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this exactly what we're seeing? A split of "anonymous" into folks who want to piss on things for (often misguided but still there) political reasons and folks who just want to piss on things for the, as it were, lulz?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There is a good expression for cases like this -

      To break is not to build

meaning it is much easier to break something than to build it in the first place. And it holds so very true for virtually any networked app or service.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is just getting tired and dumb now.

It's no longer funny.

It's like the joke you told at a party that everybody laughed at. Then you told it 5 more times before you left the party.

Unfortunately, I don't see them stopping any time soon. Soo....

<comment><USER4> Ah, but to _them_ , the more you complain that it's not funny any more, the funnier it gets.

It's kinda like a destructive version of people who say "That's what she said".

<comment><USER20> Very true, indifference would make them stop.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. I wasn't going to say anything about it, but then every other day I see a new story and I roll my eyes in disbelief that they have struck again - then I don't say anything thinking it will be the last and wake up 2 days later and the cycle repeats itself. So I had to say something this time.

The most ironic thing about all of this though is they are likely destroying the very feature (anonymity) that they are exploiting.

All this does is give ammo to the record companies that want tight restrictions on the internet. Once that happens, it's game over. They can't win that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is this article suggesting people change their login details? Is this anything more than a ddos, have the servers actually been compromised? Or is it a warning to change _before_ they get compromised?

<comment><USER28> Better safe than sorry. After the DDoS, CCP took the entirety of EVE down to do a security audit. Minecraft seems sure that it was only a DDoS, but they don't personal details on their servers like CCP does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> These idiots won't be happy until the internet is locked up into a corporate controlled gated community.

Being a p.i.t.a is not cool. Throw the book at them.

</comment><comment><USER30> For those wondering what the motivation was, earlier in the day there was a thread on escapist complaining about LulzSec hacking into Brink.

So LulzSec decided to take down that site and what I assume were a bunch of other easy gaming targets.

</comment><comment><USER31> 'Hackers' used to have a special status, but soon enough they'll be considered like pirates were in the 17th century. It's just isn't cute anymore. Or harmless.

<comment><USER20> But pirates are considered cool by a lot of kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> They have an twitter account, thus a quick phonecall to twitter from US gov for an IP and mac address should put an end to all of this. Also they have a site up, so simply check their dns and domain provider for a whois (most likely private - so might require pushing). They are also on The Pirate Bay, so they might have some IP data too. meh

<comment><USER33> No. Not that easy. They use VPNs offshore chained together not to mention the off shore vps' they have. Of course they would use protection when even just getting on Twitter, so a phone call from the government would do very little as the give would receive an IP from somewhere offshores that doesnt give a damn about US law, providing time and security to lulzsec.

<comment><USER34> I wonder how secure those VPN providers are. Regardless, my bet is that these guys will get taken down via a Kaczynski vulnerability. That is, someone that personally knows them will figure out that they are responsible and report them to the authorities.

<comment><USER35> Where did "Kaczynski vulnerability" come from? Your comment is the first result I got googling it.

[http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Kaczynski&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&source=hp&q=Kaczynski+vulnerability&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=2d73352299cad304&biw=1192&bih=664)

<comment><USER36> Probably from Ted Kaczynski:

"David Kaczynski had once admired and emulated his elder brother, but had later decided to leave the survivalist lifestyle behind.[74] He had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was leaked to CBS News in early April 1996."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Arrest>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone else see this as an excuse to limit Net Neutrality by various world governments? I hope these actions which are carried out for the sheer 'lulz' don't lead to more concerns with the freedom of our wonderful worldwide web.

That, is the opposite of 'teh lulz.' :|

</comment><comment><USER38> I doubt Minecraft is too upset by this. The free publicity probably gained them many more customers.

</comment><comment><USER39> Makes me think how much of this is going to be used as a pretext for new legislation.

</comment><comment><USER40> Freaking idiots! Get off my lawn!

</comment><comment><USER41> Something does not add up....

Notice that certain targets are avoided? What I mean by targets is that everything is low hanging fruit only..a sql injection here and sql injection there...nothing really highly skilled. Also targets missing from the list is heavy duty military and gov sites. For example, a low level FBI contractor was attacked not FBI itself, not CIA, non DoD,etc.

The conclusion I come up with is that LulzSec was infiltrated to get anonymous by government agents. After they get anonymous they might figure that they than have info on how to get wikileaks.

<comment><USER42> Or, Hanlon's Razor, LulzSec aren't magical security geniuses and they're taking low-hanging fruit precisely because it's low-hanging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I just hope that the league of american white old men doesn't meet and decide that the answer to Lulzsec is naturally the removal of more freedoms for the sake of security and much easier wiretapping by the FBI.

<comment><USER4> Really? You had to bring race into it?

<comment><USER44> If he's talking about the FBI, he's talking about USGOV.

If he's talking about USGOV, the demographics of Congress, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court are pretty clear.

<comment><USER43> It has apparently become unfashionable to mention this fact. I hereby retract "league of american white old men" and substitute instead "league of american over-reacting nannystate citizen-leaders of indeterminate age, race, or sex". _(1)_

 _(1) They also may or may not have formerly said "Ni!" Hacker News, like Camelot, can sometimes be a very silly place._</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Stopped Using a Computer Mouse for a Week and It Was Amazing - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3m8ga/i-stopped-using-a-computer-mouse-for-a-week <comment><USER2> As the article points out, very few websites and applications have keyboard shortcuts.

If anyone else is interested in reducing mouse usage and has some familiarity with vim keybindings, I'd recommend the Vimium extension[1]. It's natural to use, and replaces most mouse use cases.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb?hl=en)</comment>


UI Engineer Lead - <AUTHOR> http://www.zivity.com Zivity is a privately held, well-funded startup located in the SOMA district of San Francisco. Beauty.  Glamor.  Community.  This is what drives us. Creativity.  Enthusiasm.  Professionalism.  These are the characteristics our team requires. Care to join us?
Zivity's ideal UI Engineer Lead will:

  * Morph conceptual designs into addictive online experiences.
  * Create a captivating experience that engages our users on an emotional level.
  * Bridge the digital photography world with the limitless potential of enlightened UI-design.
 To join us, we require that you are:

  * A UI design expert with demonstrated fluency in Javascript/HTML/CSS/AJAX.
  * Masterful with CSS layout architectures.
  * Adept with Adobe CS3, especially Photoshop and Illustrator.
  * An expert in graphic design with a fanatical attention to detail.
  * Deeply familiar with the ins-and-outs of cross-browser, cross-platform UI design.
  * Coding knowledge of at least one major web development language (e.g. PHP, Perl, etc.).
  * Comfortable in fluid environments and thrive upon creative evolution.
  * Able to easily navigate diverse ranges of communication styles, both online and off.
  * Highly tolerant of photographs of nude women.
 About Zivity:
We are a team of kinetic and diverse professionals united by our passion to create an elegant and meaningful web experience that empowers artists.  This is a place where like-minded people are redefining what female beauty means on the web.  We work hard.  We play hard.
We offer competitive salary, stock options, 401k, health benefits, generous holiday and vacation policies, as well as in-office snacks and yoga classes.  We are located not far from South Park, a short walk from public transportation and close to lots of great places to eat. <comment><USER2> According to this you're looking for a Designer not an Engineer.

<http://www.zivity.com/jobs></comment>


Big Fucking Field – Oklahoma tris to lure Elon Musk with meme website - <AUTHOR> https://www.bigfuckingfield.com/ <comment><USER2> That made me grin widely and think a bit, too. Thanks for posting.</comment>


Plague Reached Europe by Stone Age - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42083252 <comment><USER2> Plague doctors were an interesting phenomenon. People finally caught on that the plague could "jump" from person to person, so they developed armor to protect themselves. Unfortunately they left their ankles exposed. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oDz0OrRZOZ0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oDz0OrRZOZ0)

<comment><USER3> >Unfortunately they left their ankles exposed.

History had to wait for Victorians for this problem to be resolved..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that the plague is very climate and fauna dependent:

[https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/07/daily-...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/07/daily- chart-1)</comment>


Here's hoping Mark Zuckerberg will start the overdue paternity-leave revolution - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/24/heres-hoping-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-will-start-the-overdue-paternity-leave-revolution/ <comment><USER2> I used to think that paternity-leave was almost useless, that 2 to 3 weeks was plenty. Then I had a kid :)

Now I can't understand why it's not self-evident that a couple needs at least a couple of months off after having a baby. Both of them, together, to figure this sh*t out!

It would be great if the parents could get equal leave, but parents are not equal, blame nature. If a couple decides to go with breast-feeding there isn't much alternatives.</comment>


Fotofoo – An image management solution using SproutCore and Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.github.com/devinus/fotofoo/

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if you guys have any questions/comments/concerns. :]</comment>


Lettering.js - A jQuery plugin for radical web typography. - <AUTHOR> http://letteringjs.com/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the linked example sites:

<http://www.danhigbie.com/>

Firebug says the font pack from Typekit is over 575kb. That's a lot of bytes to add to your pageload, and (in Firefox at least) it causes noticeable page redrawing as the font files are loaded.

So, while this is neat, I'd probably still go with a simple png file for things like site logos.

(I realize this is more of a critique of Typekit than the jQuery plugin; the plugin itself comes in at under 1kb.)

<comment><USER3> No redrawing was observed while viewing in Chrome 9.0.597.16

<comment><USER4> Webkit based browsers don't show the text before the @font-face font is loaded. You can achieve the same effect in Firefox and Opera by using WebFont Loader: [http://24ways.org/2010/using-the-webfont-loader-to-make- brow...](http://24ways.org/2010/using-the-webfont-loader-to-make-browsers- behave-the-same)

<comment><USER5> And if you're serving pages to the other end of the world it becomes prohibitively slow. I waited about 30 seconds for anything to show up on the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great stuff! Now all we need is good sense of typography in people who are going to use it. Or this is a weapon of visual noise in wrong hands.

</comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I much prefer Cufon -- <http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/>. It has less features, but works much better for basic typography.

<comment><USER8> Cufon is great, but this something for manipulating individual characters.

<comment><USER9> we used cufon for the last few years. looking to switch now since google preview doesn't support canvas and you end up with screenshots with no text

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"★★★★★ L@@K!"_

That's some recommendation there!

But seriously, this neat, I just worry this will be abused.

</comment><comment><USER11> Too bad this breaks the fundamental rule not to us JS for basic layout. Rules are meant to be broken, but still…

<comment><USER12> Not really, all this seems to be doing is programmatically adding spans with classes around letters/words/lines. The layout is still being specified in the CSS.

I don't think it's really violating any 'rules' as much as just providing a bit of convenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The font they chose for the body text looks horrible in Chrome.</comment>


OLPC 2.0: One Laptop Foundation Reboots With New Focus and Big Plans - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/01/29/olpc-20-after-layoffs-one-laptop-foundation-reboots-with-new-focus-and-big-plans/

<comment><USER2> "This is not a surprise, as OLPC officials last spring announced plans to make a version of the laptop that runs Microsoft Windows rather than its original Linux-Sugar software stack."

This reminds me of when Palm started shipping Windows mobile in addition to Palm OS. That pretty much signaled the end of Palm as a significant player in the cell phone space, soon after eclipsed by Blackberry and iPhone, both of which have an emphasis on software. The reason that people are interested in Palm now is because they are doing interesting software again with the Pre.

Without Sugar, OLPC is just a netbook with a screen readable in bright light, clever networking, and low power requirements (and I wonder how running Windows will impact the power requirements and networking). It greatly reduces the way they can distinguish themselves from being just an underpowered netbook. I don't see this ending well for them.

<comment><USER3> It sounds like Sugar will be an installation option for the foreseeable future; most of the Sugar crew is still participating in SugarLabs, and Sugar is on all the shipped laptops so far. OLPC is just no longer paying people to develop it.

Technically, there's nothing preventing someone from porting Sugar to another netbook (some ports are, in fact, underway), so it's a weak differentiating factor for OLPC.

<comment><USER4> To me, Sugar was the essence of OLPC. The hardware was absolutely necessary and cool, but I cared about OLPC because I thought that constructionist learning could significantly improve the lives of persons living in developing countries. Sugar seems like a good way to advance educational goals, in stark contrast to the MS Office training that sometimes passes for education. So, when OLPC seemed to shift its focus from learning tools to Windows machine production and distribution, it became much less interesting to me.

I gave less to charity this year because of my personal circumstances and the broader economic condition, but that just means that my giving was more carefully targeted. I think serious differences in values between OLPC leadership and the interested public accounted for more of the g1g1 drop off this year than Negroponte realizes or is willing to admit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> '"Going forward, I'm fond of saying, our first four years we behaved like Apple," he says. The XO, he says, is "designed beautifully, it's in the Museum of Modern Art, it's the best of breed. In the next four years, we've got to behave like Google and get to lots of people doing lots of things that are really for learning, for kids and for the developing world."'

Uh, yeah. Because OLPC is just like Google in the way they...I mean, obviously, if you compare...

No, actually, I can't think of any way they're like Google whatsoever. Sorry.

<comment><USER5> "No, actually, I can't think of any way they're like Google whatsoever. Sorry."

You're right, they aren't like Google. Currently at least. From the quote he wants to become more like Google and foster a better community.

You're being a bit harsh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Summary: most success has been in Latin America with some potential in the Middle East. Leaving Sugar development to the Open Source community. Striving for no-cost connectivity. Trying to build a library of 1 million digital books. OLPC 2.0 to distribute specs so others can assemble and distribute?

<comment><USER2> "Trying to build a library of 1 million digital books."

This one I don't get, relative to what's on the web already. You can probably find 1 million books that have been made freely available, converted to either PDF or HTML.

So does this mean 1 million different books? 1 million books specifically geared for kids in the developing world? Books that take special advantage of XO features? It's not clear from the article.

<comment><USER7> > _You can probably find 1 million books that have been made freely available, > converted to either PDF or HTML._

In which case their job is to catalogue them and put them up in a common format so they are easy to get at.</comment></comment></comment>


This is why I've started to come to NH more - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/AN/status/10817664565907456 <comment><USER2> Er, s/NH/HN/ ??</comment>


Former Drupal dev compares the project to Scientology - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/unconed/104331390d4054b33b43 I can only conclude that Drupal has become the Scientology of open source. It's an ant mill of sincerity, each person taking their cue from those that came before, all convinced there is cake in the middle. <comment><USER2> And yet Drupal works.

There are few better frameworks if the goal is to very rapidly turn out a secure, extensible, supports-up-to-mid-level-traffic site that more or less fits an arbitrary set of goals. For example, it recently took me two days to assemble a URL-shortening Drupal server - including server set up and a from- scratch simple front-end theme. Very little actual back end coding was needed, just some simple tweaks here and there to better fit third party components together, or remove unwanted functionality. For any number of goals in site design, someone has already and published written an 80/20 solution as a Drupal module.

Drupal has its issues, just like every major open source project. For example, the whole ctools/views ecosystem - that really needs to go away in some shape or form, such as into a major fork with a different project name.

Nonetheless, Drupal works. Few open source projects have as great a breadth of contributed functionality, making it possible to build almost any common type of supports-up-to-mid-level-traffic website very quickly if you know what you're doing. Of course there are other narrow-focus platforms that are better for their specific use case. If you're building a blog you should probably go with Wordpress. For a wiki, then use MediaWiki. Both of which can be integrated with Drupal, if you care to do so, which gives you the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER3> "the whole ctools/views ecosystem - that really needs to go away in some shape or form" -- Drupal 8 has Views in core and a lot of ctools (plugins, exports) functionality is also in core now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Five years, still going with the complaints... <http://acko.net/blog/on-not- doing-drupal-anymore/>

<comment><USER5> Is that the same guy? or are we just listing people who bitch about Drupal?

<comment><USER3> Same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i was a drupal core developer for almost 10 years. I had a falling out with the underlying premise of Drupal, which led me to question a lot of it's base assumptions. In the end, what made me leave was that I realised it was far far simpler to build up, than break down.

The amount of code and resulting complexity of building something to be completely generalised / abstracted, was not in any way justified by the supposed benefits. Even when developed to make as few assumptions as possible, you end up running afoul of the assumptions there are. This then requires you to spend considerable time and effort, using increasingly byzantine and labyrinthine API's (some of which I even invented), trying to trick the underlying system to work the way you want.

The entire thing becomes an exercise in the [1] Inner-platform effect, and won't stop until you have had to re-invent an entire turing-complete programming language driven by multi-dimensional arrays and subsequently serialised and cached into a database.

My time with Drupal was definitely some of the best times of my life, and I will remember it fondly till the day I die. The people in the community are also amazing, but i do think there is a lack of critical questioning going on sometimes.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect>

<comment><USER7> My experience with Drupal is:

1) Okay, this is a decent system for people who can't code to cobble together a mostly-working prototype of the thing they need, so long as they're flexible enough to work with it.

2) Why aren't my clients flexible enough to just do things the Drupal way.

3) Why should they be? My agency sold them bespoke development, and their UX (both administration and end-user) should honestly be better than this, and adjust to their needs, not the other way.

4) Jesus Drupal makes deviating from the beaten path miserable, but it pays well and I've gotten good at it now so I guess I'll keep on truckin'.

5) Breakdown. Giving into the evidence that it seems easier to build up from a framework with nice tools and decent libraries than to chisel away at awkward building blocks, even free ones.

Currently though, cleaning up messes and adding missing polish to Drupal projects created by people who are still at step 1 is continuing to be a financially responsible decision.

Drupal's building blocks though, do have two important uses:

They give developers who have no right to be coding a way to be productive, and the people who employ them some insurance. Brogrammer gutter rails.

There are truly miserable projects that shouldn't have budgets to do bespoke development and have nothing at all unique about them, that can be built in Drupal with zero code. CRUD legos.

Neither being of much interest to me anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting analogy, but I think it's too sinister. Drupal is not a religion business, it's an actual shipping product. The reason backwards compatibility is maintained is because people are actually using it.

Personally I haven't touched Drupal in 7 years because I prefer working on bespoke hand-crafted solutions, not the cookie-cutter cram-in-everything-and- a-forum-for-$5000 type of sites that Drupal excels at, but at the end of the day that's a big market, and no one serves it better than Drupal. I have a lot of respect for the codebase even if I don't want to be involved with it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, the solution is to... write a spec? And then stick to it, and never change again? I'm reminded of "no plan ever survives contact with the enemy".

I don't doubt the author had some interpersonally toxic experiences in the community, but I don't see how the proposed solutions would fix that.

Am I missing something here?

</comment><comment><USER10> I've got two issues with this article: 1\. It's as if the author is completely unaware of agile practise and benefits as they apply to development and business. 2\. Many clients (including some very large ones) profit from Drupal-based solutions which carry lower build and lifetime cost than bespoke.

</comment><comment><USER11> It beats the pants off of Joomla, anyway.</comment>


Speed is hard [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/csclub/speed-is-hard-at-uwaterloo.pdf

<comment><USER2> > Wireless is way too slow

Way too slow for gigabit internet, not way too slow for what most people actually need.

T-Mobile LTE in one city had an average of 28 Mb/s, enough speed for Netflix 4k, and 95 Mb/s max observed speed. I hate to support cable monopoly arguments in any way, but really for most people 100 Mb/s _is_ overkill.

Of course the cell network couldn't support everybody's internet use with the towers covering such a wide area as today, but wouldn't fiber to the neighborhood and then wireless within it make a lot more sense than running expensive cable to every individual house? It wouldn't be gigabit, but if I could use uncapped tethering (due to smaller tower coverage area) that would be fine with me. T-Mobile LTE is plenty fast enough for anything I use the internet for.

<comment><USER3> Lets assume you get 100 ms higher latency with wireless. And you make around 100 clicks per day. Over your lifetime, you would have lost one hour of your life because you used wireless! When you are on the death bed you will think about all the things you could have used that hour for instead!

Lets take it a step further and count everyone who is using wireless today, that would be millions of hours lost. Think about what those millions of hours could have been used for instead!

That hour might be nothing for you, but for the whole humanity, it's a lot!

<comment><USER4> 100ms of network latency wastes a lot more than 100ms of user time per click, because loading a web page involves multiple round trips to the server. In the case of HN's front page, it took about five.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I am doing the math wrong, but I think the plot "Minor Violations of the Laws of Physics" has the Shannon Limit 2x smaller that what it should be. According to [1], for each 2x increase in SNR, the limit should increase in a full Bandwith. However, when we compare the plotted values at 45db and 60db, we see that SNR increased 15db = 5 * 3db => 2^5. That way, the limit should increase in 5 bandwidths. But the plot increased from 300Mbps to 400Mbps => 100Mbps. Hence the plot was made with a bandwith of 100/5 = 20Mhz, instead of the 40Mhz mentioned.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem#Statement_of_the_theorem)

<comment><USER6> I'll be honest, I find this math very confusing (as I am self taught using flakey internet resources similar to the one we're discussing :)). But my understanding is that there is a 2x factor somewhere that affects Shannon limit calculations. I think it might relate to the "negative frequency" mirrored half of the fourier transform at baseband. Or maybe I'm just doing the math wrong.

In any case, the underlying concept is correct: a 2x2 or 3x3 MIMO radio can exceed the Shannon limit calculated for a single channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's an article about "speed matters" for those that don't think latency is important.

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/speed-still- matters/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/speed-still-matters/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Does QUIC help with overcoming the bandwidth delay product? Are web page loads with QUIC enabled faster on 1Gbps vs 10Mbps?

<comment><USER6> The bandwidth-delay product is a limitation of physics so you can't exactly "overcome" it. But because QUIC is implemented in userspace instead of the kernel, assumptions the kernel makes (like "the bandwidth-delay product will never be >= x") can be avoided in a cross-platform way, allowing for interesting, low-cost experiments that can later feed into improved TCP implementations (which take much longer to deploy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great read, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Speed is hard, but low-latency is even harder.

<comment><USER10> Did you read the pdf? It does talks about latency.</comment></comment>


Five Technologies to Learn During Quarantine and Improve Your Engineering Skills - <AUTHOR> https://levelup.gitconnected.com/5-technologies-to-pick-up-during-quarantine-and-improve-your-software-engineering-skillset-68bd766bee9c <comment><USER2> Any technology that you find interesting and don't already know is a good one to explore during quarantine in my opinion.</comment>


Hi-Res Panorama of the Sistine Chapel - <AUTHOR> http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html

<comment><USER2> Until this, I thought the only painting was on the ceiling. Wow, I need to travel. Was just reading another thread about logo design, and then I look at this..

</comment><comment><USER3> _So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that._

Great movie that I just had to quote. I really hope to visit the chapel someday, and this site only reinforces my desire.

<comment><USER4> It's extremely busy in the chapel and you will have no time to smell anything. The guards will also try to keep the masses moving along, so there is very little left of the serene atmosphere you expect. That being said, it's still very beautiful.

<comment><USER5> Beat me to it. Italy is one of the most touristed countries in the world and the Sistine Chapel is one of the most popular spots in the country.

If you have issues with crowded places, be prepared for this one as it is nearly always packed with people. What you'll smell is probably primarily body odour and what you'll hear is yabbering tourists, and guards telling people off for taking photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else chuckle at the copyright notice on the floor?

</comment><comment><USER7> The interface is clunky. I don't like how the format is "the farther you are away from the point you started on, the more you accelerate." I prefer to have my mouse cursor stuck to one location, which I can then move around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea agreed. I think you can do what you're asking for by clicking the 'm' button on the bottom left hand corner.

<comment><USER8> Mouse over method seems to work the best and allowed me to see what I wanted to see without the camera zipping in one direction because I moved the mouse a little out of center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish they would have mapped the images to a 3D rendition of the chapel. It's not overly complex that it couldn't be done. It would fix the distortion issues present when you're not staring at the artwork at 100% zoom.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can't say I've spent much time on vatican.va and from a quick look at the site, it's not obvious... is anyone aware of any similar work done by the Vatican to make this sort of thing available online?

<comment><USER11> Via <http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-30009>, I learned that Villanova's Communications department is responsible for the technology behind the images. There are more links to 360 views at the bottom of that article, including this one to see St. Peter's: [http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/san_pietro/vr_tour/i...](http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/san_pietro/vr_tour/index- en.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Beautiful. I was only a child when i was in rome (5-6 years old) it's things like this that really make me want to visit again and see this

</comment><comment><USER13> It is a little clunky, and you can see some stitching errors (or possibly lighting errors if they lit it in sections), but wow.

<comment><USER8> Clunky or not, it still gives people who have never had a chance to see the chapel in person a perspective of how much beautiful art and history there is packed in this one little place.

Now on a side note, I must have came late in the day because I definetly do not remember it being that bright in the chapel when I went.

</comment></comment><comment> cool-RR Use Ctrl and Shift to zoom in and out without the mouse.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mute button please?

<comment><USER15> Try this:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stop- autoplay...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stop-autoplay/)

See also: <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Muting_browser>

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately flashblock and stop autoplay both prevent the viewer from starting at all, and once you click to start, it plays the unmutable music.

<comment><USER15> There's a Flashmute extension on there too, but it's windows-only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> wow</comment>


Our Phones Connect Us with Everything, but We Still Connect with Scrap Paper - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mikekarloff/our-phones-connect-us-with-everything-but-we-still-connect-with-scrap-paper-f9aad6ad1abd <comment><USER2> "Uncaught ReferenceError: yaCounter37647810 is not defined.

Line: 14"</comment>