The trouble with VPN and privacy review sites - <AUTHOR> https://blog.privacytools.io/the-trouble-with-vpn-and-privacy-reviews/ <comment><USER2> I appreciated that Wirecutter's review of VPN services began with investigating which ones had contracted for 3rd party security reviews. This presciently excluded many providers that were all about marketing, like NordVPN. I think this is the best approach rather than the litany of mostly useless criteria that's cataloged on ThatOnePrivacySite. You want to extract out the high signal, and "will my VPN service get hacked and all my traffic get leaked?" should probably be your first question when choosing a service.

[https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-vpn-service/#how- we-p...](https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-vpn-service/#how-we-picked)

Full disclosure, I'm the author of AlgoVPN, a set of scripts for hosting your own VPN rather than using a 3rd party service, and was interviewed by Wirecutter for their article. You should use Algo if you're at all capable of doing so: [https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo)

<comment><USER3> In terms of privacy, isn't running your own VPN pointless?

I mean, it is basically just changing your IP and putting an additional hop in. You aren't mixing with other's traffic, making it very easy to fingerprint you.

I guess this is all dependent on someone's threat model, but I am not really sure if there is any benefit of running your own VPN besides being slightly more sure your VPN provider or someone who hacked your VPN provider isn't watching you.

<comment><USER4> It provides you protection on a hostile local network, such as a hotel or a restaurant. Like you said, it does not achieve the anonymity level a public VPN would.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > protection on a hostile local network, such as a hotel or a restaurant.

Or an American ISP.

<comment><USER5> Fourteen Eyes:

[https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/](https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This appears to be a story about how commercial VPN review sites are untrustworthy because they accept advertising from commercial VPNs, written on and with promotion for a site that provides reviews for commercial VPNs and accepts sponsorship money from those VPN providers.

A pox on the entire commercial VPN "industry". They all deserve each other.

While I don't think you should use _any_ of these commercial VPN servers, I'll give props to WireCutter for at least attempting to do a serious job of impartial reviews.

<comment><USER7> PrivacyTools doesn't have a deal with any VPN company or any other company. They can become our sponsors, but they won't get listed as our recommendation on the website [1] (we don't even have any sponsor at the moment), also we can't profit from it personally and everything is transparently shown on OpenCollective [2]. We even give a huge red warning that VPN is not going to help a lot and that you should probably use Tor instead [3]. Also we removed a lot of VPN services from our site, some time ago [4][5].

[1] [https://www.privacytools.io/sponsors/](https://www.privacytools.io/sponsors/)

[2] [https://opencollective.com/privacytoolsio](https://opencollective.com/privacytoolsio)

[3] [https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/](https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/)

[4] [https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/113...](https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/1139)

[5] [https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/pull/1174](https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/pull/1174)

<comment><USER6> Why can't every VPN review site say the same thing? Serious review sites don't accept sponsorships. This one does. Should it be taken seriously? I don't take it seriously.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Why can 't every VPN review site say the same thing? Serious review sites > don't accept sponsorships. This one does. Should it be taken seriously? I > don't take it seriously._

1\. We currently get _no_ money from _any_ VPN provider (our site makes other recommendations too that are not related to VPN services), our finances are very transparent:

• [https://blog.privacytools.io/privacytools-io-joins-the- open-...](https://blog.privacytools.io/privacytools-io-joins-the-open- collective-foundation/)

• [https://opencollective.com/privacytoolsio#section- goals](https://opencollective.com/privacytoolsio#section-goals)

2\. Being a part of the sponsorship program does not get you on the website, you must still meet the criteria which a VPN provider could do for free (so there's no incentive for them to pay us anything).

3\. We don't use referral links

4\. No single member of the team can add/remove things (everything is also logged in git commit logs). Pull requests also require more than 2 members to sign off. Technically jonaharagon as owner could add things, but it would be pretty suspicious if new VPN providers started appearing without any discussion.... lol. I know I'd be asking questions.

<comment><USER6> Or, like reputable review sites, you could just not accept sponsorships from vendors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use a VPN for privacy, which is great, but routing my traffic through it will exclude me from sites that try to block VPNs (mostly streaming services).

What I really need is Cloudflare's WARP via wireguard config. I love the idea that they'll shield me from my ISP but still provide my real IP to service providers.

I _can_ do this right now with a hack someone wrote [https://github.com/maple3142/cf-warp](https://github.com/maple3142/cf-warp) but I don't want to anger Cloudflare.

Cloudflare, if you're listening, is it ok to extract wireguard credentials from your app and use them on my whole network? I'll gladly pay the $5/mo, but I don't want to be banned from Cloudflare or do something you may construe is illegal by extracting keys from your Android app.

<comment><USER9> You could email them and ask for this feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem with free review sites is that once you've built up trust as an honest, objective reviewer, the most effective way to profit on that trust is to violate it.

<comment><USER11> This may be true. But that doesn't mean the best strategy is to completely burn your reputation. Even if the only way to profit is to sell-out, it's usually better to sell-out slowly and collect much more sustainable revenue over a longer time frame.

There are a lot of equilibria where most free review sites are mostly, but not completely, trustworthy. With enough review sites in that model, an end-user can effectively triangulate the objective truth with arbitrarily high certainty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article misses the most vital point: VPN providers are asking you to trust them, and there is no way to verify that. That's why I think DIY (e.g. Algo or Streisand) is the only way to go.

<comment><USER13> This is why I desperately want Apple to build a VPN service. They are already committed to privacy, and they've got a lot more to lose than some fly-by- night VPN service.

<comment><USER14> > They are already committed to privacy

They're also already committed to censorship, so I don't fathom how they'd run a VPN service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I started wondering which VPN might be best to use, then I realized, there's little comparison to _your own_ server. Outline VPN is a neat open source tool that makes this possible with no server setup or maintenance required: [https://getoutline.org/en/home](https://getoutline.org/en/home)

<comment><USER16> The point of using a commercial VPN is that you can share an endpoint with multiple users. Thus "blending in" with the crowd. If you choose to use a VPN endpoint that only you use, you lose all privacy benefits except the one against your ISP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The best approach I feel is how [1] does it.

A list, what features each provider has, and leave it to yourself to make the judgement. If you're being told why it's good there is bias involved somewhere along the line.

Of course, you need to understand whether the site has updated their information and presenting it truthfully, which should be easily verifiable.

[1]: [https://thatoneprivacysite.net/](https://thatoneprivacysite.net/)

<comment><USER18> That's mentioned in the article, but it does bring up the caveat that many consumers are just looking for an answer, not the information they need to form their own answer. That's why VPN review sites are so common, it's a quick and easy response rather than a list of features to sort through and compare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're looking for VPN review sites, this is the only one with credibility IMO: [https://thatoneprivacysite.net/#detailed-vpn- comparison](https://thatoneprivacysite.net/#detailed-vpn-comparison)

My personal recommendation is AirVPN, but I wish they supported wireguard.

<comment><USER19> AirVPN is the best, but PIA is ok if your not doing anything illegal. They will shield you from any copyright liability. It all depends on your threat vector.

I think alot of this vpn hand-wringing is really just meant to discourage vpn usage in general. There have only been afew cases of paid vpn services giving up user information and they are well publicized.

<comment><USER20> Funny you mention PIA as they've just been acquired by a reportedly shady group.

[https://www.techradar.com/news/cyberghost-owner-buys-pia- for...](https://www.techradar.com/news/cyberghost-owner-buys-pia-for- dollar955m-to-create-vpn-giant)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just a SEO blog post that posts something obvious.

They mention ThatOnePrivacySite.net but criticize him:

"Here's the difference. They include virtually every provider — the good and the bad — and present them at equal value to sort through. Instead of providing their readers with answers, they provide them with information that can be used to deduce their own recommendations, based on their values as an individual. "

1st: providing them all guarantees that there is no conflict of interest

2nd: "Instead of providing their readers with answers" You can not provide this answer since there a tons of reasons to use a VPN

"Your VPN provider should not be hiding away in Panama controlled by anonymous leadership."

This is also bullshit. In fact, some of the most resilient VPN provides provide no legislation at all. They only exists in Cyberspace. "Sue us!"

I actually have written the ThatOnePrivacySite.net guy and asked him to put this VPN on the list: [https://www.rapidvpn.com/setup-vpn-softether- ubuntu](https://www.rapidvpn.com/setup-vpn-softether-ubuntu)

It is the only VPN that I am aware of that works out of the box with softether. I have not tried it yet. I currently use Astrill. Astrill is not cheap but works pretty well to circumvent censorship. A disadvantage of Astrill is that it often leaks DNS like a motherf....

This should prevent DNS leaks on Linux if UFW is installed.

ufw default deny outgoing

ufw allow out on tun0

ufw allow out on tun0 to 18.104.22.168 port 53

<comment><AUTHOR> > _It is the only VPN that I am aware of that works out of the box with > softether. I have not tried it yet. I currently use Astrill. Astrill is not > cheap but works pretty well to circumvent censorship. A disadvantage of > Astrill is that it often leaks DNS like a motherf...._

Should also keep in mind a few years ago Astril was using weak keys like ExpressVPN. That really makes me wonder what they know about running VPN servers. I think you only get one chance with your reputation on things like this.

[http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great- firewal...](http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewall-of- china/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Everyone is commenting on privacy, but isn't the main use for VPNs (at least in the US) to avoid the consequences of digital piracy?

<comment><USER23> Piracy is a case where you can't afford to give up your privacy for convenience, and common in the US, so probably yes. It is different in other countries. Lots of countries don't care about digital piracy enough to enforce restrictions. Pornography, access to uncensored social media, or just being able to email people outside of your firewall become the major use cases. It is still fairly rare to find people who are prepared to pay the costs for privacy just because they want privacy. I think that would change if the friction was reduced, such as Apple, Google or Microsoft including free VPN services built into their products.

<comment><USER24> Google already includes free VPN services for Android, although limited to public/open WiFi [0] or Fi users [1].

0: [https://www.howtogeek.com/275474/how-to-use-androids-wi- fi-a...](https://www.howtogeek.com/275474/how-to-use-androids-wi-fi-assistant- to-keep-your-phone-safe-on-public-networks/)

1: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/13/googles-project-fi-gets- an...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/13/googles-project-fi-gets-an-improved- vpn/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had to giggle a bit. The article claims that "[...] you'd have to scroll down to #6 before you found a provider that wouldn't pay them [...]" on an "unnamed review site". The service in their list at #6 would be "Mullvad".

Looking at their own list[1], "Mullvad" is the only VPN provider listed at the top of the list under "Recommended VPN Services".

Just something that caught my eye and which I considered an interesting coincidence.

[1]: [https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/](https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and this is because it meets the criteria [https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/#info](https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/#info)

specifically the item that got it there was that they had external auditing.

> Mullvad's VPN clients have been audited by Cure53 and Assured AB in a > pentest report published at cure53.de. The security researchers concluded: > [https://cure53.de/pentest-report_mullvad_v2.pdf](https://cure53.de/pentest- > report_mullvad_v2.pdf)

We would like to see more VPN providers do this. Then we could have more good choices to choose from. A lot of the larger ones could certainly afford it.

<comment><USER26> The audit looks actually legit, but still they are located in a 14 eyes jurisdiction, not really the best for privacy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In a world where HTTPS was the exception, I could see a use for this sort of service. Now not-HTTPS is the exception, not so much.

Privacy from your ISP? Okay, but I've replaced that problem with privacy from my VPN provider. Is that a better problem? Is my VPN provider going to exploit me less than my ISP would have?

Geographic restrictions? That's a genuine benefit. Alas, it would end up as a bit of an arms race as websites that really don't want me to visit would start blocking VPN providers.

<comment><USER28> > Is my VPN provider going to exploit me less than my ISP would have?

Well, probably the answer is yes, since we have many years of experience with the terrible behavior of ISPs. VPNs have a much smaller userbase, so I suppose they have less of an opportunity to screw you over, but come on, even the worst of them has to be better than something like Comcast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In addition to PrivacyTools.io and ThatOnePrivacySite/Guy, RestorePrivacy.com is a site I've used for privacy related research.

<comment><USER30> Restore Privacy uses affiliate links. This article criticized recommendations from sites like Restore Privacy, because the financial compensation creates a conflict of interest.

<comment><USER29> Sure. I read the article and understand the concern. But to me, RestorePrivacy is quite different than the spammy ones the article alludes to.

I think Sven does a decent job of analyzing each service/offering and presenting the information in an approachable way.

That being said, it is wise to take his rankings/thoughts on each service with a grain of salt.

I just wanted others interested in this topic to be aware of another resource that I have found useful.

<comment><USER30> Restore Privacy's NordVPN review doesn't mention its 2018 security breach, which was widely covered in the news:

[https://restoreprivacy.com/nordvpn](https://restoreprivacy.com/nordvpn)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/after-the-breach-nord-is-asking- us...](https://www.cnet.com/news/after-the-breach-nord-is-asking-users-to- trust-it-again)

Their "Best VPN List" doesn't mention it, either. That's extremely damning to Restore Privacy's credibility as a review site, and highlights how financial conflicts of interest can degrade the quality of a site's content.

<comment><USER29> Maybe it's been added in the last 8 hours, or perhaps you never actually checked.

But it's mentioned, right at the start, on the page you link:

> In October 2019, news broke about a NordVPN security incident.

Which links to a full article on it[0].

He sort of downplays the hack, which then led me to read the article you posted. And the TechCrunch article it mentions.

They take a more "trust is compromised" stance. So to reiterate:

> it is wise to take his rankings/thoughts on each service with a grain of > salt.

[0] [https://restoreprivacy.com/nordvpn- hack/](https://restoreprivacy.com/nordvpn-hack/)

<comment><USER30> The new "Trust issues?" paragraph was added to the review after I posted my previous comment. I checked before I posted, and it was not there.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191118050427/https://restorepr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191118050427/https://restoreprivacy.com/nordvpn/)

[https://restoreprivacy.com/nordvpn/](https://restoreprivacy.com/nordvpn/)

The most recent Wayback Machine archive (November 18) shows that the "Trust issues?" paragraph wasn't in the NordVPN review until very recently. Thanks for getting the paragraph added in, because transparency is important.

However, you might want to consider using the pronoun "I" or "we" instead of "he", because astroturfing is not a transparent thing to do. It doesn't take a genius to see that you're affiliated with Restore Privacy just as Restore Privacy is affiliated with NordVPN.

<comment><USER29> Thank you for pointing that out. My mistake, sorry about that - I should have checked there before replying to your original comment.

Interestingly, it looks like he doesn't censor/hadn't censored the couple of comments mentioning the breach on that page.

His article on the breach/hack was published in Oct. But his Nord VPN review was published/updated the month prior (from your waybackmachine link). So a month later.

It's plausible to me that he just never got around to updating the original post/review. But apparently your comment prompted him to do so.

However, he hasn't bothered to jump in this thread and comment that was the case. So although I think RestorePrivacy is still a useful site, perhaps a larger grain of salt is needed.

> However, you might want to consider using the pronoun "I" or "we" instead of > "he", because astroturfing is not a transparent thing to do

Not Sven and not astroturfing. Merely suggesting what I thought was a decent privacy resource - in a related topic's thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Some years ago, I looked at a bunch of these VPN review sites over time, relying on archive.org captures. At any given time, there were just a few distinct sets of rankings. Some of that could have reflected shared ownership. But it likely also reflected changes over time in advertising budgets.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's the new "Web hosting review" site. 10-15 years ago there were hundreds of similar commission-funded sites recommending shared hosting providers, all with the same problems. Where there's a commission, there's someone ready to write a good review :-)

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd recommend giving a try to "sshuttle". It's easier to use than it seems, and it's been working flawlessly for me.

</comment><comment><USER34> TLDR: they're just like _every other review site_ and are either run by the companies rated best or are affiliate link sites.

(I accurately guessed the above before even going to the article...)

<comment><USER35> Mattresses seems like another one so over polluted by affiliate links, you can barely find a real comparison. (sleeplikethedead.com seems pretty good.)

On its face, affiliate reviews are ok if the company has integrity, like Wirecutter attempts. If they pick a profitless product as first over one that makes them money.

Credit card reviews are another one that have gone off the chain. There are thousands of identical sites ranking the same cards.

<comment><USER12> Undisclosed affiliate relationships are against the law in the US: [https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/ftc...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking)

<comment><USER36> The problem with a lot of these affiliate sites (which I alluded to in the conclusion of the article but perhaps didn't spend quite enough time on) is that they provide a small disclosure of their relationships in their footer or in the article. But they do it as inconspicuously as possible to avoid the drawbacks of disclosing anything.

I have a lot more respect for the sites that prominently disclose their relationships, like Wirecutter. Most of these sites are a business, they've gotta make money somehow. But IMO most readers aren't seeking out such disclosures automatically when they see a "review", so the hidden-in-the- footer nonsense is entirely useless.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android Pie ruins do not disturb - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/95wg7t/changing_do_not_disturb_ruins_android_pie/ <comment><AUTHOR> When you enter DND mode the only things silenced are the two things you would _not want_ silenced — alarms (so you can wake up) and media (so you can fall asleep, aka, brown noise).

Also, you cannot privilege an app now, like PagerDuty, to bypass the DND scheme.

Really—how tf did this ship?

/AC

Does anyone know if it's fixed at all in Android 10? I websearched but didn't get any hits on this.</comment>


Piet – A programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings - <AUTHOR> http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html <comment><USER2> Some of the sample programs are kind of amazing: [http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html](http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html)

Hilarious idea.

<comment><USER3> The Pi calculator text just made me burst out laughing, waking my girlfriend + baby. Still worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There used to be a couple guys that would submit solutions to the qualifying round of the Google Code Jam (the round with the 25-hour time limit) in this language. I think he had to zip a png file containing his program with another file explaining of how to run it in order to submit.

<comment><USER5> Looks like it was done twice in 2010 ([https://www.go- hero.net/jam/10/languages/Piet](https://www.go- hero.net/jam/10/languages/Piet)) and once in 2015 (by me!) ([https://www.go- hero.net/jam/15/languages/Piet](https://www.go- hero.net/jam/15/languages/Piet))

I sorta cheated with an assembler ([https://github.com/sl236/Piet](https://github.com/sl236/Piet)) though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Many more esoteric languages are on the esolang wiki:

[https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page)

Enjoy :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Slightly non technical question about these. After looking at this and BF esolang derivatives, are these esolangs essentially a category of intermediate representations that would be useful for automated software analysis? Given you can encode the language anyway you want (e.g. Ook), and while they aren't efficient for writing and running programs, they are simple, consistent (if large) inputs into an analysis engine. Is this considered a thing?

<comment><USER8> You're better off going for lambda calculus. Which, admittedly, looks more like an esolang than anything else

<comment><USER9> Unlambda is an esolang based on this concept

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> & through [https://github.com/shinh/elvm](https://github.com/shinh/elvm) here's a lisp implementation: [http://shinh.skr.jp/elvm/lisp.png](http://shinh.skr.jp/elvm/lisp.png)

Good tut: [http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~diddesen/piet/index.html](http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~diddesen/piet/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I bet the people who write this language has no concept of "time" in the way they perceive the world, therefore able to time travel freely.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tangentially related: The Whitespace Programming Language (WP[0], Homepage[1])

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_\(programming_language\)) [1] [http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/tutorial.html](http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/tutorial.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Taking inspiration from this, my friends and I made a programming language where each program is chess games: [https://github.com/VitamintK/Passant](https://github.com/VitamintK/Passant)</comment>


Uber engineer barred from work on key self-driving technology, judge says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/05/15/uber-engineer-barred-from-work-key-self-driving-technology-judge-says/ttbtIpBHf9jn3viyX4RWzO/story.html <comment><USER2> Given that Uber is using the "we had no idea this happened" defense, they were already forced down this path earlier: [http://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-no- longer...](http://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-no-longer-leads- uber-self-driving-cars-2017-4)

So, not terribly newsworthy.</comment>


A hiring test I'd like to run - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/12/a-hiring-test-id-like-to-run/ <comment><USER6> I interviewed at Twilio. My resume and phone chats made it abundantly clear that my professional experience was 95% backend in languages like Java and Go.

I looked at their Glassdoor where people wrote they were heavily biased to the algorithm type questions, for better or worse.

In reality I was given only a single coding interview my whole onsite, and it was to build a JavaScript SPA, including routing/linking, without the use of any framework, just vanilla JS.

I was allowed to Google whatever but 50 minutes is still a crazy time crunch to figure out a lot of the stuff that needed to be figured out.

It felt like a massively unfair way to evaluate me. I have honestly never felt more screwed over and time wasted by an interview than at Twilio and I would highly recommend avoiding interviewing there.

My overall point being, is there's no silver bullet. It's not necessarily about this magical process will work well and this one will not. It's about the small details, especially things like making sure all of your interviewers actually read the candidates resume and that everyone knows what type of role they are interviewing for, and that the interview is designed to discover both the candidates strength and weakness. I've been on both sides of the process and I know too often shortcuts are taken and churning the pipeline forward takes priority over doing a diligent job and respecting the time of every candidate you engage with.

The very fact that the foundation of tech recruiting is inexperienced recruiters, with minimal tech knowledge, who are incentivized by sales type numbers, and churned through themselves at a comical rate, speaks to how the industry views recruiting. College athletes get recruited, top law school graduates get recruited, engineers aren't recruited but relentlessly spammed in hopes of finding more bodies to feed into a process straight from a Kafka short story, the problem starts there and no a-ha process improvement will fix that.

<comment><USER7> I don't do much hiring, but when I do I make an active effort to avoid reading candidates resumes.

I've found it's not possible for me to enter an interview with an unbiased mind having read a resume.

<comment><USER8> This feels weird to me.

If you have advertised a job and I've given you my resume, it is to give you some information you can use to avoid wasting your time and my time.

Just like I would hope your advertisement is accurate and useful enough to let me decide if it is a good use of time for me to send you a resume (e.g., saw an ad for "react developer" \-- got to the interview and they were looking for a "server side java dev" \-- I mean -- wtf?).

Not reading a resume before an interview feels... rude. It feels like the path that leads to you asking a Java/Go programmer to do a Javascript coding challenge in 50 minutes, which is a waste of everyone's time.

<comment><USER7> It is rude. People put lots of effort into resumes. But it's ruder to reject a candidate based on age, gender, martial status, education or lack thereof or doing non sw jobs in the past.

I always talk on the phone before and that's where we both make sure the interview is of relevance.

<comment><USER9> If you can't read someone's resume without rejecting them based on age, gender, marital status, education or lack thereof, or for their non-sw work history, then it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates. The concept of "unconscious bias" might be true in an academic sense, but in a very real way you should be treating people with respect regardless of their characteristics, especially during an interview process. Not reading someone's resume isn't just rude, it's supremely disrespectful.

I take a completely different approach, because I have been on the receiving end of disrespectful interviews and I won't stand for it and I don't expect the candidates I interview to accept it either. I carefully read the resume and research the candidate far in advance to the interview. I only ask questions during the interview which are open-ended, not trivia questions, and are directly related to either the content of the candidate's resume or things we're actually doing day-to-day on my team.

The dog and pony show interview style is intensely disrespectful and so is the idea that you won't even read a candidate's resume. I've walked out of interviews where both have happened, and I hope everyone on HN gets the personal confidence to do the same. I'm a professional, I expect to be treated like a professional, and I return that by treating those I interview like professionals. End of story.

<comment><USER7> >it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates

We agree on that one, but the alternatives are worse. Would you like to take my place interviewing? It's a time consuming task I'd love to delegate to someone more experienced.

<comment><USER10> I would honestly love to take a job that was 100% focused on interviewing and hiring technical people. I have been through so many bad interviews (on both sides of the desk) that I think it really should be a dedicated position staffed by people who actually understand the major defects in the industry.

<comment><USER7> You can always apply to triplebytes and get exactly such position :)

<disclaimer: my affiliation with triplebytes is that they've rejected my application twice - possibly cementing parent suggestion that I'm underqualified to interview developers>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The single best interview experience I've seen was given by Oracle when I worked there a few years ago.

The onsite was a panel interview where candidates were given a laptop with a configured IDE and codebase with a specific set of bugs. Their task was to debug the various issues and complete as many as they could with the understanding that it was not expected for them to solve them all or even most of them. There were also tests to help them. And a different section of the interview asked them to right some tests and some code for again brain dead easy coding algorithms like reverse a string.

I thought it was great because it closely resembled what being a dev is like and actually tested for the skills we cared about. No you didn't get to use your own custom vim configuration but I'm not sure how that would have really worked even if they wanted.

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of the story of the young intern that went around a few years ago. They sheepishly admitted to their boss at the end of their summer internship that they had just googled all the Excel things that were required, that they hadn't actually known any of it.

"But your generation KNOWS to look for help, and knows where to find it! That's where you were doing it right," was the boss's response. And that's heartening.

<comment><USER13> This is such a valuable skill. For our work we've found this ability to google or find answers without incredibly specific step by step instructions to be lacking from many younger workers. I've wondered if others have found this for many smart people under 30 as well?

<comment><USER14> I really believe there are too many important things to know at this point, and so I instead concentrate on memorizing the bounds of the Realm of the Possible. I know what my tools can do, I know where the pitfalls are, but I don't always recall the exact details of those boundaries. I often have to look up why, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

Where that doesn't work well is in interviews, and in places where people think it's perfectly reasonable to have technical discussion meetings where laptops are banned. We're really going to make architectural decisions without looking at any code? Who thought that was a good idea?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At my previous company, the technical interview was 2 hours long. The candidate was given a choice of about 10 very small, simple projects. Then we sat at a pairing station and paired on the problem. The candidate can use google, their favorite editor, write tests, anything they want. The goal is not to finish the project, but just code with them for 2 hours. It's the best technical assessment I've yet seen in an interview setting.

One caveat is this company really believed in pair programming, and virtually all code was created in pairs. So that's part of why this interview approach worked.

<comment><USER16> I did an interview once at a company that is religious about pair programming. I found the exercise unsettling: would they evaluate technical ability or culture fit more? If they were focusing on the former, I should take the wheel and try to demonstrate my chops (perhaps making me appear arrogant); if the latter, I should try to demonstrate how I can collaborate with the other developer to make both of us better (perhaps at the expense of me not demonstrating as many skills within that brief window of time).

It turns out that they were really focusing on how I interacted with the fake "client" and whether I had the proper "consultant mindset". Didn't see that coming (perhaps that's my fault). Though I feel I ended up dodging a bullet in not getting an offer from them.

My suggestion is to try to give candidates specific times to demonstrate various competencies (technical, colleague interaction, customer-facing), and tell them which ones are the focus of each exercise. Yes, that's not how the real world works (you need to utilize them all at the same time, of course), but an interview setting is hardly the real world. And you'll still see glimpses of their overall capabilities in each stage.

<comment><USER17> > would they evaluate technical ability or culture fit more?

Why not ask them that? "What are the roles in this roleplaying game? Am I a driver and you are evaluating me? Are you a client? Are we colleagues?" Or even more directly what you asked: "Are you evaluating technical ability or culture fit more? "

I don't think there would be a point in keeping that a secret.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, from a candidate perspective that's a good idea. From an interviewer perspective, though, it's important to remember that many very good candidates will feel uncomfortable doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some of the tests in my current company work like this. We don't expect you to have everything memorized. We give you a problem and then say, "feel free to use any reference you want, help, man pages, google, stack overflow, whatever."

Some people still stubbornly refuse to look for help.

Some people act on the first google search result even though it's obviously wrong.

Some people don't know how to read a man page.

I find it very illuminating, but I don't really have enough data points to say how successful it is.

<comment><USER19> > Some people still stubbornly refuse to look for help.

The thing is that some people might feel that they will get assessed lower if they look for help rather than come up or even luck into a solution.

Despite making it abundantly clear to candidates that they should take the test(s) as a pair programming sessions, we had candidates struggle with some basic stuff and not ask questions. They just kept trying things while getting more nervous.

A lot of people would feel that it might be held against them. The thing is a lot of people under pressure will forget the basics

<comment><USER20> One thing I've had help melt the pressure on both sides of the table is a laugh. I'm fortunate enough to be able to sort of slice through tension and get a rise out of most people.

Stressing exactly what you're looking for, that you're not perfect either, that there's no one solution, and letting them know things can be collaborative has been helpful too.

Let's ping pong off each other and see where we get, I mean that's what we'd be doing in the day to day right?

To this end I've sat down and added new questions to the interview guides at my previous position because I was concerned that any person asking the same question over and over again would really start to be biased towards some sort of "ideal" solution.

But there's really nothing like a good laugh to put people at ease.

After one interview I mentioned that I felt I did a good job of interviewing because I could usually help relax the tensions which generally gets the best out of people and someone said that they didn't think they'd ever gotten a laugh out of someone during an interview.

That's a bit too serious for me.

<comment><USER21> Thank you for doing this! I'm doing several processes now and it's so unpleasant and stressful just before the interviews, that taking some weight off of it is really helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I'd tell them that at the start, obviously. This isn't The Secret Rules For > Getting Hired.

> "I know you've never used Blender _, " I'd say, "And this job doesn't > require it. But we want to see how quickly and accurately you can learn to > use something unfamiliar while under pressure."

>_ Or whatever.

The main problem is that the level of pressure that people feel under interview conditions will vary dramatically. Personally, I would find this a very bad test as I get horrendously stressed at interviews yet somehow manage to portrait a facade of calmness (to be fair I've been told once that I looked remarkably calm).

To the usual refrain of:

If you can't handle the pressure of an interview then maybe you are not a good fit for our company

I normally reply:

If day to day working at your company generates interview like levels of stress, then please do not offer me a job

<comment><USER22> If someone says there was a lack of culture fit, it stings and certainly could be some type of illegal discrimination. But at the same time, it's necessarily true! Unless your culture is discriminating unfairly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well this is exactly like a test I went through at one time. It even used the same reasoning pretty much.

The job was fullstack node and react, I went in and they said we want you to look at this game written in Python which is really slow and tell us what is wrong with it (I hadn't done python in years and back then wasn't very good at it). We will sit with you. I said I was game, they said lots of people weren't - one guy evidently got offended and said he didn't do that language (I can definitely think of one friend of mine who is totally competent who would get offended at being asked to work in a language that did not have anything to do with the job he was applying for)

The game was using a big dictionary in an array and you had to look up words from it and it was slow (about 7 minutes to do searches). So I thought to myself, damn I cannot remember the name of that algorithm for this (binary search), ok let's stall a bit maybe I will remember the algorithm name.

So what's the first thing you would do?

Uhm how about checking a profiler. So we checked and found some simple things we could optimize. And then I looked through the code and I saw there were parts I could cache etc.

So after all those things were done the time to do a search was a little bit more than halved and I still couldn't remember "binary search", so I stared dumbfounded at the screen for I think about a 3-4 seconds and I started to say "uhm" and then the guy sitting with me I guess ran out of the time he wanted to spend and said "ok well there is an algorithm for this blah blah blah" showed how to do it in python. Thanks for your time.

I actually didn't want the job but still felt somewhat let down that I couldn't remember.

<comment><USER24> Of course there was pressure, but why not just say that you know an algorithm that can do this faster, but you can't remember the name of it, and then just provide the intuition behind it?

<comment><USER25> In my experience on both sides none of that matters, also none of the "how do they look stuff up" matters, what matters is did you just know what to do and do the right dance.

<comment><USER26> My experience has been the exact opposite.

<comment><USER27> Most interviews and interviewers are poor, meaning jump thru ten hoops, miss any and disqualified. Highest score wins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm a mechanical engineer by training and still occasionally do some entry level hiring in it.

My favorite question in recent years has been posing an advanced project - <USER2> unreasonably difficult, but one I know they won't have covered in school. Make it clear I don't expect them to have the answer, but have them talk through their approach to this project with me. "How would you get started?" "What would you need to know?" "What resources would you use?", etc.

For us it's been a great filter - both a gauge of their current knowledge and ability to tackle an unknown.

<comment><USER29> I'm an electrical engineer, and I have a similar question that I ask my entry level candidates - "How would you measure the voltage coming out of a wall socket?"

It's familiar enough to be accessible, but technically just far enough out of their reach that they don't know exactly how to do it. We talk about approaches, tools they could use, some potential problems or issues they'd need to overcome.

If they get flustered about where to start, I laugh, and say "Don't worry - <USER3> don't know the right answer. I'm actually afraid of AC mains electricity." Never fails to calm them down, because, well, it's kind of funny to hear an electrical engineer admit that they're afraid of electricity!

It's a question that I've gotten a lot of mileage on.

<comment><USER30> Couldn't you just jam a multimeter into it?

<comment><USER29> You could!

My immediate followons to that would be:

\- How would you jam a multimeter into the socket _safely_?

\- What information will the multimeter _not_ tell you about the AC voltage signal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is very specifically a terrible idea.

I passed an analogous interview to this once when I was much younger, and then subjected several applicants to it thinking it was a useful filter.

It's not, it's abusive psychological torture that rewards sadistic amateur psychologists and interview administrators. The only way to succeed is to submit to the interviewer by asking for help. It filters for people who know to implicate others in failure while taking credit for small successes, and bullies people into submission.

The interview I passed was a variation (I learned after) on the bridges of konigsberg, where instead of asking for help, I asked if it was impossible. The person administering it hired me on the spot, but even this was wrong because the place was full of people who thought the reason they were there was because they were intelligent - something they didn't have control over - and they acted As pettily as psychotically as you would expect.

The problem on teams isn't individuals not asking for help, it's managers who don't have the confidence of their teams to ask.

If you are reading this and I put you through that exercise 15+ years ago, I apologise.

<comment><USER32> From the article:

> I'd tell them that at the start, obviously. This isn't The Secret Rules For > Getting Hired.

> "I know you've never used Blender*," I'd say, "And this job doesn't require > it. But we want to see how quickly and accurately you can learn to use > something unfamiliar while under pressure."

<comment><USER33> I don't think I've ever had to learn something very complex under the same short time constraints and high do-or-die pressure as an interview. Tiny things (think: new-to-me unixy commands), yeah, but nothing very complex. With as many unknowns as that introduces, should it ever come up in a real job situation with a very short time window available, my expert (I'm quite serious using that term here) advice would be that we should count on having it take quite a while, and immediately begin whatever mitigation is required to allow for that, rather than waiting to begin planning for and mitigating the harm that'll do and simply gambling that this complex thing won't surprise us and end up taking longer than we'd hoped (likelihood that it will: extremely high).

<comment><USER14> I end up doing a lot of technology selection and so I have to have these skills and the ability to ask hard questions.

I don't for a second believe this should be the skillset of every member of a team. A team where everyone is adding new tools all the time is chaos. Learning new tools isn't really a goal. Getting better at your job is the goal, and learning new tools is either a means to that end or just moving the goalposts over and over so nobody knows what's going on.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, sure, I do evaluative work just fine, but I don't think "build [non- trivial thing] with [fairly complex software or tools you've never used] while we watch you, you have 50 minutes" resembles that very much. The closest I've seen is situations along the lines of "meeting's in 50 minutes, could you find out about [thing similar enough to other things you've done or worked with that you are qualified to evaluate it on short notice]? I just learned we'll be talking about it in there and your take on [a couple specific aspects of it] would be useful." Not "you've never used this, I want a demo of [more than hello-world] in 50 minutes, or it's your ass", ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> We do this at retriever.co for our virtual assistants, in two areas:

1\. we have applicants do a data transform with an esoteric excel function that they've /almost surely/ never used, and prompt them to find videos / tutorials on how to use it if they don't know (which, we assume, they wont)

2\. we have people answer fake customer support tickets that require them to do some on-the-job learning about the Internet Service Provider industry -- to a level of detail that requires that they read through and grok a page on wikipedia explaining up-time calculation.

While neither of these pieces of knowledge are necessary for their day-to-day at Retriever, they allow us to stratify candidates' ability to learn new skills and grok new information.

100% would recommend!

<comment><USER35> I've been thinking through how best to screen personal assistants, and these are both very helpful ideas. I particularly like the first idea to screen applicants on esoteric utilities - thanks for your comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This made me laugh - I first applied for temp jobs around this time and there was a typing test.

"Wow," said the person who had left me alone with a computer that felt old in the 1990s, "I've never seen anyone score 50WPM before."

"Uhh... I could type a lot faster, but the letter T is sticky and I had to delete a lot of Ts"

She looked mortally offended by this.

I was given a job as a dishwasher which I was sacked from after one shift.

</comment><comment><USER37> I partially agree, and it depends on what you are interviewing for. In the end, getting a job done, on time, without error/bugs is generally most important to the people you are going to be working for.

As for algorithm questions at some FAANG or wannabe startup, it can be rough. Personally I tend to blank on a lot of terminology, similarly on names a lot of the time. Some trivia games kill me, I can see the answer's face, the movies they've been in, but just blank on the name.

All the same, in my life and career, I've managed to learn, adapt and create both simple and complex systems in new languages and platforms.

On the other side of the table, I tend to ask maybe 3-5 trivia like questions only to gauge where a person is at, and let the conversational parts determine if the person would be a good fit. I think you need some of both. I feel drive accounts for more than even skill, knowledge and experience.

<comment><USER22> Maybe you just can't figure a person out in an interview. I got my current job as a contractor/temp, and thinking back to a previous company, one of the people that was the best and stayed the longest was a contractor that "graduated" to permanent. The simplest way to prevent people from keeping up a facade is just time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Are they able to read a manual?

Uh, I can read a manual (in fact, I enjoy reading software documentation), but it's going to take me longer than an hour...

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me amend that. Are you able to look up information in a manual - <USER4> using the index or hitting CTRL+F?

<comment><USER10> It completely depends on the manual. If this is the first time I have ever seen it, and it's about something I have never used, it very well might take me a while to figure out how to look up information quickly and effectively.

Does the manual having working code examples? Then is it probably a good manual. If it does not have working examples that you can copy & paste (and they actually work), then it probably is terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> After a couple of years working as a web developer, I decided to go to College. I took a "Web Development" class. I failed the final. The assignment was to code a website by hand. I used BBEdit to pretty print my hand coded HTML and it inserted a <meta name="editor"> tag that I didn't catch. I dropped out and went back to getting paid. Been doing it for 20 years now, though I use Prettier to do my formatting these days.

<comment><USER40> OOf I had the same final. I had to create a website by hand in a basic text editor like notepad++. I passed but I honestly don't see any value in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is very similar to what I do for roles that are supposed to be independent and to work with customer software. I ask the interviewee to do something with a technology or software they don't know, but give them no other constraints. They can use whatever programming language, whatever OS, whatever IDE, whatever existing libraries online and even IRC/Slack if time permits - the goal is to see that they can solve a problem that is new to them without panicking. In real life they'll have a lifeline or two in the form of colleagues, but those colleagues might also not have the answers.

Obviously a terrible solution for a standard product engineering position, it is only relevant for special roles.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't mean to be derisivs but at that point - testing for reasoning, understanding, personality - Why stick with a software tool?

You'd be better off arranging to play a strategy, preferrably collaborative, boardgame.

One day I'll use Pandemic as an interviewing tool. I wonder of it'd work as a pre-formal interview stage

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been to group interviews where they pretty much do that. Randomly divide all the candidates into groups, give them a task, see how they work together.

I can't say I enjoyed the experience - and I've no idea how good it is as a tool - but it was illuminating to see how people treated each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> First test of any software dev: Do you know how to look for answers on stackoverflow?

Second test of any software dev: Do you know how to ask a good question on SO?

<comment><USER44> I've never found anything of actual use on StackOverflow in my ~decade of doing this professionally. The only time StackOverflow provided useful answers to my questions was during my first year of programming courses in university.

<comment><USER45> StackOverflow is fine when learning a new language. But indeed, hardly seems to help in real-world problems.

<comment><USER43> Thats why I put in the "know how to ask questions" part. Sure, a lot of the time you don't get an answer. And you end up figuring out stuff the hard way yourself. But then I always force myself to go back and answer my own question. It might help the next guy, but more importantly if I have to answer the question myself I need to put what I learned in writing.. and in an understandable way as well. Often the exercise of explaining it will make me understand even better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I had that same automated Microsoft Office test at a temp agency in the 1990s.

Funny thing, it had a bug. As long as you didn't let go of the mouse button, it would let you open and navigate all of the menus. So I simply browsed the menu UI until I found the correct choice. 100% score.

</comment><comment><USER47> I've always wanted to run one where we bring them to a room to interview. Maybe take a break. Move their stuff to a slightly different room. Pick back up right where we left off. Maybe change out the furniture and people outside during the interview. Introduce them to numerous employees, who will respond to names swapped amongst each other. Another break - switch interviewers. Pick up right where the first one left off - insist that this employee has conducted the entire thing. If they drove there, it would be best to move their car.

I'm not sure what position I would be hiring for, but this is the interview I would like to conduct.

Other possible ideas would be a background check that is either insanely deep (so you're 3rd grade teacher was unavailable for a recommendation) or raises issues that they have no part of, "we see you've spent time in North Korea."

<comment><USER12> ... But why?

<comment><USER48> To see how they respond under pressure.

<comment><USER47> Today's changing markets demand employee's who can adapt quickly.

Or static old companies seem to want employees who don't notice change around them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I love this.. Definitely going to set something like this up.

And anyone who does go for the help gets an immediate offer.

I hate people too stubborn to admit they don't know.

</comment><comment><USER50> I hear a lot (and believe myself I suppose) that I would rather hire someone that knows how to learn than someone who currently knows thing x but can't pick up and learn things on their own. But I feel like it's VERY hard to figure this out about someone. It's pretty easy to test how well someone knows a particular technology or tool (given some variance for operating in a high- pressure scenario etc.) but it seems pretty hard to tell if someone can learn new things quickly, and learn the right things. I feel like this is what algorithm tests are trying to do, but I also feel like a lot of algorithms are based on having a key insight into a problem that is, at least in my experience, pretty hard to have when you're in a room with strangers on a timer and being judged, so if you don't know the particular algorithm to apply, good luck. And also it's pretty easy to go study algorithms and hope you remember how to implement DFS if that's what they ask you in the interview. And there is some non-zero value to just knowing about different data structures and algorithms for certain types of work for sure. I don't think many of us web developer types will be implementing DFS ourselves, but I run into issues pretty often where having knowledge about different data structures and algorithms comes in handy.

So I can see the appeal to doing a test like this that has nothing to do with a particular skill, where you're trying to evaluate someone's judgement and how quickly they can absorb new ideas or figure something out on the fly etc. BUT, I just think there are too many factors that can really muddy this up, and I still don't feel like there's an objective way to measure "smart and learns quickly". Even "learns quickly" is somewhat vague; I personally wouldn't expect someone to pick up, say, functional programming in an hour just by saying "go read about it." Some things take longer to learn than others.

Anyway, there's no silver bullet. I still feel like we end up making pretty subjective decisions about other people when interviewing them. I don't think we're even all that aware of them ourselves. I would say though that if you're interviewing somewhere, you're getting useful information about that place by how they interview you, and so I wouldn't feel too disheartened if you feel like the interview is unfair or doesn't work for you. That's probably a good sign that you wouldn't enjoy working there anyway.

<comment><USER10> I totally agree. The best solution I have come up with for trying to assess if someone can learn new things quickly is simply to ask a candidate to describe the last new thing that they learned. It doesn't have to be job-related at all. Just the last thing they learned. And then ask some follow up questions about how they learned, why they learned it, and how have they used the knowledge.

If nothing else, it will give you a general idea of how often they learn new things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think the primary issue with interviews is that the interviewer doesn't share expectations. I think it's totally fine to evaluate how a person asks for help, as long as it's clear they aren't expected to solve the problem.

Further, you'd need some standardized way to evaluate how well someone asks for questions. Otherwise you'll have interviewer bias.

Which is why designing interviews are very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER52> Interviews should be personalized. That they are conducted en masse with little consideration for applicant background is an artifact of the difficulty of adequate personalization. Targeted ads are valued precisely because they are targeted, presumably increasing the chance of a match. Has anyone heard of any startup companies in the personalized interview space?

</comment><comment><USER53> I was pretty happy with the interviews I went through for my current position, although that might be selection bias because I passed them. They all shared some important attributes:

1: Fairly open-ended, there was no "bzzt-wrong" moment like the Office 97 case in TFA, so I didn't feel a lot of pressure. It was definitely enough rope to hang oneself, so the interviewers could form an actionable and objective judgment, but as a candidate, I didn't feel that I was on trial, more just chilling and talking tech with some other nerds.

2: The underlying skills (understanding one's audience, breaking a large problem into pieces, making reasonable assumptions) were obviously directly applicable to the position. I never felt that I was doing senseless work, even when the questions were clearly contrived, because the connections were self- evident.

3: Despite the above, the actual questions didn't require a lot of domain- specific knowledge. Even the one that sorta did, could be answered by assuming that it was similar to a more common system, and that's how I approached it.

4: In every case, there were "plan B" options and accommodations for having a gap in one's knowledge. "I don't know this off the top of my head, but here's where I'd go to find out and here's the guess I'm going to use in the meantime" was a valid answer. Perhaps the best answer in some cases.

The result is that I work with a team of people who are super adaptable, can think on their feet, but have a keen interest in pushing towards correctness as soon as real information is available. Whenever I think about possibly going elsewhere, I remember that most HR departments don't select for any of those attributes, often quite the opposite. (And those places tend to be the clients whose problems we get called in to help solve, as a result.)

</comment><comment><USER54> I experienced an extremely simple (and IMO effective) version of this.

For a dba-adjacent job, I sat down with a dba and was shown how to connect to a sql server instance and change some particular setting. At the end of our hour of discussing other technical matters and my resume, he asked me to demonstrate recall of this simple command.

</comment><comment><USER55> There must be a serious dearth of candidates in my area, because the last time I was subjected to a time-constrained test was almost three years ago, and it was a Codility challenge, so I had some time to prepare for it.

I quit my job recently, and in order to find another I went full-auto with the applications - I've sent close to thirty of them I think, so a long series of recruitment processes followed.

They were all mostly the same - I either received some homework to do or had a 1-2h technical interview during which I was asked a set of questions which were easy for the most part. And that was it.

My point being: I've discovered that I can't really relate to the stories other people posted in this thread. Does this mean I wasn't ambitious enough regarding my applications, or are the others subjected to a difficult job market? Maybe both? Or none? I really don't know.

</comment><comment><USER17> I keep hearing and reading horror stories like this one on HN and other website. I never did interviews at big companies, nor did I do any in the US, in 15 years of freelancing, I only had once a technical interview, with a C++ guru, I failed most of the questions but still got hired because "you still did good, kept calm and asked good questions".

In my last gig, it was for a work on a Java application. I was upfront that I only did a bit of Java in school, but that I was more of a C++ guy. The Java guru hirer was like "Yeah, if you know C++, you'll get Java quickly" they were more interested in my experience with video and image processing.

I basically avoid to do HR-based interviews. Short-circuit them when you can.

</comment><comment><USER56> That's how Holberton School (we train people to become software engineer) select and train students. We are a college-alternative where students learn by working on projects, in group.

The whole education is flipped compared to a regular one. We give students problem sets and they have to find the answer. We never give lectures (we have no teachers), just guidance so that they can get started on a topic, but never enough that they can actually achieve the tasks we give them.

> Are they able to read a manual? Candidates (no prior experience in coding > needed) need to answer questions on a specific command that can be found by > reading the manpage. At first we provide the manpage, then we show them how > to find a manpage, and finally, we don't provide any guidance, because at > this point they should be able to do it on their own. In the curriculum, > once students, we have a quizz to makre sure they can answer basic questions > on the topic before jumping into the coding part.

>Can they formulate a search query? We ask trivial questions that can be answered just by Googling. Might sound like a no-brainer to the developer community, but not everybody is good at this.

>How do they assess whether the tutorial they found is suitable or reliable? That's the tricky part, but basically, because the school is not providing material that contains the answer, candidates and students have to navigate the ocean of information/tutorial that can be wrong/incomplete of correct. By pressing a button, students work (code at this point) is automatically and instantly corrected, so they can easily figure that what they built is correct or not.

> What steps do they take to make sure they're finding - and learning - <USER5> > right information? On this one, we as a school, are the one providing this > guidance. Basically when students are doing their projects, we define > learning goals. Getting coding part done is great, but we also want to make > sure that students have been able to grasp concepts that are key to becoming > a great software engineers. So students look at these "learning points" > before, and by the end of the project, they must be able to discuss all the > points.

</comment><comment><USER57> Haha, that's funny, and an awful idea. At a previous employer, as a hiring manager, I offered candidates an option of bringing in their fully-configured IDE in their own laptop with the language of their choice and I'd give them the problem to solve. Essentially, act in the environment that you've already mastered.

Only one guy did (I had maybe 10 a month) and for some inexplicable reason he couldn't figure out how to create his `main` equivalent in his language in his IDE. He must have been incredibly nervous because we tried "perhaps you could sketch out your thoughts in broad strokes and then we can return to the IDE" etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> I just got interested in the way the school 42 works. Especially the month- long "test" that they have to accept tuition free students.

The idea is to make you complete a lot of programming projects in languages and tools you normally don't know at all. When you start. The evaluation does not only take into account if you finished project but also if you helped others, knew how to look for help (basically: google or other students). Its goal is to select students who would work well in a peer-learning project- based-learning paradigm. This, in my opinion, is much closer to real-life conditions than any academic test.

</comment><comment><USER58> Our team uses hacker rank or something similar (I forget) to weed out bad profiles (most of them). We combed through their question base to remove things that felt too specific. But I'm happy with the result, because there's nothing you can't google, and googling is allowed.

We're a python and R shop. You can choose either test. As a non R user, I can get a decent score on the R test, because I can read docs. And that's great.

We have also dabbled in game based assessments, and while I have qualms with it, the same kinds of skill sets seem to be the primary differentiator of success.

My 2c on two types of assessments people probably normally disregard

</comment><comment><USER59> Another take on what the author proposing is to simply not care about the output of the task, but focus on how that person approaches the problem (even if they don't manage to complete the task at all).

</comment><comment><USER60> Honestly, I wish more companies would just tell you in advance of the interview what the specific prompt is going to be (and perhaps the evaluation criteria too).

Sure, you could "cheat" by Googling the answer in advance or asking someone for help. But if the question's sufficiently open-ended, it's not that hard to suss out in follow up questions whether you have a deep first principles understanding of the subject area or you're just repeating something you read.

<comment><USER61> I'm pretty sure if you give me a subject I know nothing about and a couple days to study I can teach myself about it, at least to the level of someone who has real experience in the subject which may be a couple of years out of use. So then how does a hiring manager know to filter me out?

<comment><USER60> Presumably, at some point, you'll be interviewed by someone with more up to date experience. And if you study enough to fool that person, that seems fine? It's a good sign you're capable of the job, prior experience be damned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't know about this. I don't think I should spend most of my time learning completely new tools.

If people spend most of their time learning tools, that encourages tools which are easy to learn but lack deep and powerful functionality. I think it's fine, and even good, for tools to require focused learning to understand, and in exchange have a worldview and tool use that is really powerful. Like Emacs or vim or Excel, for example.

</comment><comment><USER63> See also _Kobayashi Maru_

"a test of one's character or a solution that involves redefining the problem and managing an insurmountable scenario gracefully"

</comment><comment><USER64> I do hiring interview in my company and one of the test we like to do is to give the interviewee a problem out of his area of expertise and open a browser and an editor for him and tell him that he is allowed to search for things. Most of people I interviewed do not use Google help they are afraid you judge them negatively for it even if you say you will not.

</comment><comment><USER65> This reminds me so much of Vernor Vinge's story "Fast Times at Fairmont High". It's set in the near future, and one plot point is that high school tests cover this skill--to read through the manuals quickly and get things done with new tools. I recommend it, and the related book "Rainbows End".

</comment><comment><USER66> I like how one of the comments is about someone getting a job by telling the interviewer they knew what a computer was.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is an excellent idea!

</comment><comment><USER68> rather than give them the application, just show them the file (location, name, and extension) and ask them to make some useful revision to it

</comment><comment><USER69> fwiw this describes my experience of interviewing at Databricks

</comment><comment><USER70> If the test doesn't reflect the job you'll be doing then it's not a good test of whether or not you'll be able to do the job. If you're applying for a role that expects you to know an application then looking in the help _is_ cheating. If using the help is acceptable in the job then it's not.

It's also worth noting that people don't like "proxy tests" for the skills they'll need to use on the job. If the test only tangentially assesses a skill then it's going to be influenced by other skills or flaws and won't give an interviewer a good idea of how good you are at something. This is why people complain about whiteboard exercises in developer hiring. Unless remembering and explaining an algorithm on a board is something you'll actually be doing in the role then it's not a good test - it _sort of_ assesses how good you are at explaining an algorithm, but it really assesses memory, presentation skills, etc. Someone with brilliant whiteboard skills isn't necessarily a good developer, so hiring them on because you were impressed by how well they explained something in front of a board feels wrong, especially to people who aren't good at the tangential stuff.

In the case of the suggested hiring test in the article, it doesn't test someone's job skills. It tests how well they look for help, but it _also_ tests how well someone copes in unfamiliar applications, or with esoteric UIs (in the case of Blender), or if they've actually used the app that's being used as a proxy. None of those things are necessarily a good assessment of whether the person can do the role they're applying for, so the test fails.

<comment><USER71> > If you're applying for a role that expects you to know an application then > looking in the help is cheating.

If you discourage your employees from learning you are going to have a lot of dumb employees. Even the developers who made excel do not know how to do everything that excel can do.

<comment><USER70> Some businesses need to hire people to do a job using an application in a very standardized way from day 1, there is no expectation that the person doing it will learn anything in the role, and when the software changes training is provided. The employer is in complete control of what is done and how the software is used. Figuring something out yourself is considered a bad thing because it's not the standardized way of doing the thing.

Please don't go through life imagining every job is like a developer job. We get far more freedom, creativity, and responsibility than a lot of other workers.

<comment><USER72> That is all well and good for those types of jobs. But no one can remember how to use all of Excel, and they should be able to search for help and understand that help.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feyerabend on empiricism and sola scriptura - <AUTHOR> http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/07/feyerabend-on-empiricism-and-sola.html <comment><USER2> Hmm, if this blog article is accurate then Feyerabend's analogy to sola scriptura appears to be a strawman. "Sola scriptura" was never a claim that _nothing_ helps you interpret scripture -- its advocates all claim that this is the role of the spirit. There's an odd paragraph towards the end of Feser's blog post:

"But you can ask such questions of an authoritative interpreter who stands outside the texts. And such an interpreter -- in the form of an institutional Church -- is exactly what the Catholic position posits."

That prompts the rather obvious retort "authoritative interpreter who stands outside the text ... I wonder who all these God-believing protestants could possibly think that might be..."

This seems obvious enough that surely Feyerabend would have recognised it, so perhaps Feser's summary of Feyerabend is flawed?

<comment><USER3> Andrew Fulford raises the same point in his criticism of Feser's post - [https://calvinistinternational.com/2015/07/14/feyerabend- and...](https://calvinistinternational.com/2015/07/14/feyerabend-and-feser-on- sola-scriptura/) \- thus beginning a back-and-forth with Feser which lasts for several posts - see [http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/empiricism- and-so...](http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/empiricism-and-sola- scriptura-redux.html) \- I found it an interesting read, although I've always been very sceptical of sola scriptura (unsurprising given I was raised Catholic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Possibly related simultaneous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10328699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10328699)

</comment><comment><USER5> Heidegger's Being and Time provides a similar critique of modern empiricism. He argued that our most fundamental knowledge of objects comes from our history and potential future with them. When we know "There is an apple", the self embedded in time (Dasein) provides the "There is".</comment>


A Theory of Jerks (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/so-you-re-surrounded-by-idiots-guess-who-the-real-jerk-is <comment><USER2> I don't agree that jerks are people who don't care about other people's individual circumstances. Jerks are people who think that everyone else is a jerk, which is how they excuse their behaviour.

It's not that they don't care why the waiter messed up their order, it's that they think the waiter messed up because they're a jerk.

<comment><USER3> This strikes me as circular.

<comment><USER4> > the waiter messed up because they're a jerk

That's a subordinate clause where "jerk" is referring to the waiter, not the main subject, hence it's not circular.

<comment><USER5> And people think singular "they" is OK in writing.

Try:

the waiter messed up because he's a jerk.

<comment><USER6> "They" is generally accepted as a singular gender neutral pronoun.

<comment><USER7> And has been since the Canterbury Tales! It's a modern development that it isn't considered "correct" English.

<comment><USER8> 600 years is long enough for me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One interesting quip I've heard from a psychologist recently, is that communication only really works well going down the dominance hierarchy. (I think it can work across.) I see a lot of the outrage driven viral media of today as being "punching down" by aspirant upper-echelon socioeconomic people onto lower-echelon people.

Also, if communication only really works well going down the dominance hierarchy, doesn't this suggest that power is contextual, so that it can change directions and allow communications to flow in different directions?

EDIT: Relevant to the article - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVTogKE25aQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVTogKE25aQ)

<comment><USER10> It's known that "communication can only happen between equals." Otherwise it's order giving no matter the semantics.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I don't mean to sound too crass, but maybe you should keep calm and hit the pub for a pint, read some literature... something.

"It's known" sounds a little final.

In a more level tone: there are venues for equalizing communication, because of course in society there are hierarchies that we've struggled with for ages. The charge for any individual is being willing to expose themselves to those environments and being willing to engross themselves in the mess of what that kind of interaction can turn up.

Then again, I kind of side with Bohm about the connectedness of people, and yet...

I raise you Bohm on communication problems:

> _If each one of us can give full attention to what is actually 'blocking' > communication while he is also attending properly to the content of what is > communicated, then we may be able to create something new between us, > something of very great significance for bringing to an end the at present > insoluble problems of the individual and of society._

Scratch all the drunk talk that follows and I also raise you this:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/17/archives/the-irish-pub- is-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/17/archives/the-irish-pub-is-a-great- equalizer-the-irish-pubwhere-drawing-a.html)

There traditionally (in some cultures, anyway) venues where people from various social hierarchies were equals when they passed the threshold, and communication is then wide open. They still exist -- but if you're North American don't count on finding them on the strip.

<comment><USER9> I've been in places all across the US billing themselves as Irish pubs, and this is corroborated by my experience particularly in Ohio and Houston. (Yes, I know I went from a state to a city.) I've literally been at sessions where left leaning doctors, devout Christians, gun shop owners, republican judges, wiccan radicals, Discordian internet hipsters, polyamorous librarians, liberal engineers, and libertarian programmers can all bond over a love of music and even be friends. The level of actual Irish Pub authenticity can vary. The actual communication from different points of the socioeconomic ladder and political spectrum is real. What's more, it seems to work better in red states than in blue. In Red states, there's enough left leaning in the music communities, such that a left-right balance of power occurs in such places. In Blue states, there's an overwhelming left lean, so sometimes people far enough on the right are shunned. (And the center-left is labeled "right.")

<comment> 52-6F-62 I agree with just about everything you said excepting your implication that communities that lean further left are not as welcoming to communication (shunning opposing views).

I don't argue that doesn't happen, but I don't think it's isolated to one end of the spectrum. I would bet the symptoms are the same at either extreme -- right or left.

If you mean "center-left" when you say right, I think what you're actually implying is communication is better tolerated in communities with more balance between political viewpoints, and less given to extremes.

But traditionally, outside of movements, it's been somewhat bad form to bring politics into the pub at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found this article very insightful.

However, let me make one important addition. The author says that the person who is not a jerk is a sweetheart. However, following Aristotle's theory of the golden mean, let me point out there is also a third type, namely someone who discounts their own perspective and always thinks the other person is right, and so goes around feeling guilty and inferior.

<comment><USER12> That seems to be a type of negatively expressed sweetheart, in these terms.

There is a magical center of action, greatly to be desired, where one neither runs over others nor lies down to be overrun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is interesting that the meaning of"jerk" has moved very recently from meaning something like "bumpkin" to something closer to "arsehole". As the author points out, this is similar to the change in the meaning of "villain", along with several other words where a class-based insult eventually became moralised.

But most of the words he mentions are old words that changed their meaning back in the days when litteral aristocrats, kings, dukes and princes ruled the English speaking lands and their neighbours. "Jerk" changed recently and I wonder if the change hints at a new class system.

<comment><USER14> Jerk has been synonymous with "rude person" as long as I've been alive. If there was a shift, it wasn't all that recent.

<comment><USER15> And yet "rude" itself has also changed -- from meaning "unsophisticated" to meaning something more along the lines of "obnoxious".

<comment><USER16> Is not saying hello when you see someone that you would normally be expected to say hello to not considered "rude"? It is to me, but it's not obnoxious...

<comment><USER15> There's a reason I said "more along the lines of" \-- I was having trouble coming up with a definition which was precise without being circular.

In any event, I'm sure you can agree that "rude" no longer means simply "unsophisticated".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Third, I've called the jerk 'he', for reasons you might guess. But then it seems too gendered to call the sweetheart 'she', so I've made the sweetheart a 'he' too."

Absolutely hilarious. I guess one point he's making is that men have a problem with noncompliance, but seems to have forgotten the upside entirely

<comment><USER18> I think the reason is that if he had used 'she', there would have been a shitstorm.

If you do a word-replace of all instances of 'he' with 'she' and 'his' with 'her', it becomes an entirely different article.

<comment><USER13> Maybe, but actually a masculine avatar is fine here. The whole thing would have worked just as well if, instead of "sweetheart", he'd used the term "nice-guy" as in the claim "nice-guys finish last."

<comment><USER19> feminists have totally discredited nice guy though, turning it into a passive- aggressive hanger on who hopes to get rewarded with sex from being nice.

<comment><USER20> I've seen that image of "nice guy" far more from MRA, PUA, and other anti- democratic than from feminists, despite having a lot more interaction with the latter.

<comment><USER20> Missed the edit window, but "anti-democratic" should be "anti-feminist".

Stupid "smart" auto-correct on the phone keyboard...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Compare "Assholes, a theory", which is a serious book.[1] It could be subtitled "Why Sociopaths Get Ahead".

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Assholes-Theory-Aaron- James/dp/080417...](https://www.amazon.com/Assholes-Theory-Aaron- James/dp/0804171351)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this article what a professor of philosophy considers work? I hope not. I skimmed it, seemed to have little to zero content.

1st half, longwinded exploration of semantics. 2nd half, making some random assertions based on no data.

<comment><USER23> Are you a jerk though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the heart of the professor's theory: _the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers._

so, a sociopath?

is this theory really new or interesting?

<comment><USER11> No, a sociopath is someone who lacks a conscience, and so they work to get what they want, even if it harms other people.

Some sociopaths are very good at understanding other people's perspectives, and they use that understanding to trick them, as in the case of con artists. Other sociopaths, the thug-types, instead use force and threats, and so they are not so concerned with understanding other people's psychology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This theory is regularly independently rediscovered by jerks. [https://www.pftq.com/blabberbox/?page=Three_Tiers_of_Mind](https://www.pftq.com/blabberbox/?page=Three_Tiers_of_Mind)

</comment><comment><USER26> please add 2014 to the title

<comment><USER27> Done.</comment></comment>


PRISM Confirmed by gov & Denied by companies - and we do what? - <AUTHOR>

I understand the outrage brought on by this reveal (most coders I've talked to have assumed this has existed before it was confirmed).
My question for everyone here is simple...what will you do now that PRISM is confirmed.
What I've done...nothing different...still using google, typing this on windows, and playing a youtube video in the background. <comment><USER2> The damage this did to american tech companies doing business overseas is HUGE.

How can you trust Amazon won't give access to your RDS account to someone? A hyperbole now but could happen in the future: How can I trust a judge didn't ask cisco to add backdoors to give NSA access to our networks???

I do business with the government (in Brazil) and they asked me to move out of amazon ASAP, we pay a small fortune every month to amazon, we will have to set up a custom environment to this one single contract now.

</comment><comment><USER3> the majority will stay using Facebook and Google, because they have advanced technology, they have worked hard to make the user experience mush better, and they give all of that for FREE. I believe that 80% of people don't care if some agency see what they do, because they don't do much, and they seek for the cheapest method to stay entertained. For Google, it's obvious that it's leading the search technology on the internet, and a such leak won't make it stop spying on users, but for Facebook, and even its huge base of users, this leak can make it change its privacy policy if and only if it is threatened by a new social network (it's not easy but possible), it's a matter of money, people search for the cheapest and the better technology. the rest of population which is 20% for me is the people who believe in the right of privacy and they are ready to make some sacrifices (pay money, or use less- tech encrypting methods). in general, I think people will accept that by time, because if someone have the intention to be private he can, but if he just want to talk with his family, this is not important, and any agency haven't interest to spy on that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe we should start using decentralized technologies? Go back to bittorrent, tor, irc. Teach everybody to encrypt, the same way we teach them to wash their hands. And for similar reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> PGP has existed for how long? The real problem here is "teaching," others.

While I do agree even the lowest cryptography or 'security through obscurity', would benefit alot of people...the real issue becomes ease of use and the user experience.

>teach them to wash their hands. And for similar reasons

lol, nice

<comment><USER4> Yes. The bottleneck, as usual, is cultural.

Still, I have hope. Some people refuse to touch or even be near people who aren't clean. That forces others to be clean and propagates hygiene through society.

I wonder if we could do the same with information. Teaching little children that putting private information in public sites is dirty. The same way we teach them not to go around naked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! This is exactly why I posted this, b/c even I fall in this category. I'm a hacker that got in trouble with Google and was convicted through the Patriot Act[0]...yet I still use their products. Reason: ease of use and I do like google.

My next project after my current one was inspired by the ECPA[1]. Simple concept: employ PGP, a simple UI, and sell users a custom WD My Book Live[2] (I'm sure you can see where this goes).

[0] [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/05/man- allegedly-b&#x2...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/05/man- allegedly-b&#x2F);

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/when-can-the-government- read-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/when-can-the-government-read-your- email-2013-6)

[2] [http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=280](http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=280)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Codero.com Is Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.codero.com/?is_down

<comment><AUTHOR> A few of my domains on dedicated IP addresses are down as well, but my server and all of the websites using default IPs are up and running.</comment>


The Predicate Module Pattern - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.com/2013/09/12/the-predicate-module-pattern.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea be careful of this causing slowdowns: right now every time you `extend` any object the entire method cache gets blown away ([https://charlie.bz/blog/things-that-clear-rubys-method- cache](https://charlie.bz/blog/things-that-clear-rubys-method-cache)). I think this is being worked on but not sure of a target release for the fix.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is it different from DCI?</comment>


Staticwebsync: automating the fiddly bits of hosting web sites on S3/CloudFront - <AUTHOR> http://staticwebsync.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> There seemed to be a lot of interest when Amazon announced the new S3 features for hosting web sites a few weeks ago (I think I saw three separate HN posts about it), so I thought I'd announce this new tool here. The idea of it is to take out the painful bits of using S3 and CloudFront (like doing cache invalidations) so that you don't need to know anything specific about how the services work to use them. Hopefully it makes syncing to CloudFront as easy as using FTP or rsync.</comment>


How to be a Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/ <comment><USER2> Any Learn To Be A Programmer text that has "Learn to debug" as step one has me won over from the start.

<comment><USER3> Debugging is a fascinating experience. On the one hand, it's the Jungian shadow of design, forcing you to look at everything that's wrong and unintended and resistant to conscious control in your work. On the other hand, there's the thrill of the chase. I really started to enjoy debugging when it dawned on me that it _always_ ends in a surprise. That follows trivially from the definition: if you knew what the problem was, you wouldn't be hunting for it. But experientially the surprises are often rather dramatic -- as if there's a built-in Agatha Christie plot generator -- and can be quite enjoyable as long as one's genius ego knows how to take a punch.

<comment><USER4> I love that thrill. I've gotten around the ego-punch by making "I can debug _anything_ " part of my ego. With that thought in mind, I just don't give up.

<comment><USER5> I concur with this thought. For me, the act of debugging is an act of pure problem solving, even more so than the act of programming. Why the hell is this code acting this way rather than the expected way? And what is the right way to fix it? Oftentimes, programming can be (almost) reduced to pasting together libraries and putting a nice UI on the resulting code[1], but debugging is always a fresh experience.

[1] Of course, I know this is a total oversimplification.

<comment><USER3> Your comment reminds me of another thought I've had, which is that debugging is the part of programming that's closest to empirical science. You're faced with a piece of reality (a running system) and you don't know how it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How to be a programmer, step one: if you publish an HTML document, please get your encoding right. (No `Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8` for latin-1 documents.)

<comment><USER7> way to be pedantic. maybe you should read some of those sections about communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Embedding a programming language into a system has an almost erotic fascination to a programmer."

That's a classic line, and too true.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why doesn't the PDF have hyperlinks, but the HTML does? It seems this is an epidemic for PDF versions of text also available as HTML. Is it really so hard to make a PDF that has them?

(serious question, actually. I've never tried.)

<comment><USER4> It's trivial if you know how to do it: <http://www.tug.org/applications/hyperref/manual.html>

Include that package in your Latex document, and it automatically makes all section references internal-links. It's great, and too few people use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I haven't read the book but the table of content looks almost perfect. I wish I had something like this to preserve my sanity when I first entered the industry.

</comment><comment><USER11> All hail my Alma Mater.

\-- just another Shootin' Fightin' Dynamitin' Mining Engineer

</comment><comment><USER12> Is "Michael Tiemann2" the real name or a typo?

<comment><USER13> In the HTML version the 2 is superscripted and links to a footnote. Must've been converted to pdf incorrectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, that's long.

<comment><USER15> Yes it looks long, but for what I have been able to read so far (the first couple of chapters) its a worthwhile read. The programmer inside me is afraid that if I don't read it before I sleep I will never be able to find it again!

<comment><USER16> bookmarks are awesome.

<comment><USER17> so is instapaper</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"It's not going to be okay" - Microsoft manager on getting a bad review/rank - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eric_brechner/archive/2012/09/01/it-s-not-going-to-be-okay.aspx

<comment><USER2> It's going to be okay for me. I would never work in a place with a ridiculous rating system (and culture) like Microsoft's. If you have a team with five brilliant performers, the manager has to pick one each for the ratings 1 through 5? Perfect idiocy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course it's not. You're working for Microsoft.</comment>