How chaos rules complex systems and our existence - <AUTHOR> http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19457

<comment><USER2> _Today we try hard to find a theory of everything in physics, something that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena. But I believe that this isn't possible._

This really touches on the philosophy of science, and I don't think this will ever be possible inside the "box of spacetime" that we exist in.

I would love to see a complete explanation that explains Bell's Theorem in alignment with the phenomenon of quantum entanglement before I die, but I'm pretty convinced that we have reached the ultimate limitations of how far we can zoom into the wall on our own little "box" that we live in.

<comment><USER3> We can not, from within the system, conclusively _prove_ that we have found the correct laws. For all we know, in a thousand years, the laws of physics will completely change, with absolutely no clue given in advance. And I don't mean different vacuum states or anything like that, I mean, _completely_ different physics. We can't prove it won't happen, only be Bayesian-very-sure it won't, which isn't the same.

However, nothing _necessarily_ stops us from determining the laws of physics all the way to the bottom. There's no contradiction there, only a question of whether they are "too far" away for us to see them or we are unable to gather enough information, not because it is fundamentally impossible to figure out the substrate you are running on but simply because the substrate itself happens to be too fuzzy to tell. Already, we're to the point where if you built a universe off of the standard model and added some hacks to cover the cases where we know it doesn't work, you could probably build a correct-enough simulation to support life.

(Also, rather than posting again: I strongly disagree with the author's claim that the real world is more complex than math. Math is _radically_ , infinitely more complex. The real world is a vanishing subset of possible mathematical structures, regardless of what shape it takes.)

<comment><USER2> _Already, we're to the point where if you built a universe off of the standard model and added some hacks to cover the cases where we know it doesn't work, you could probably build a correct-enough simulation to support life._

You really think we even understand .1% of all there is to know about this universe?

<comment><USER3> There's a meme where it is chic to claim ignorance about even things that we know. Yes, the truth is that we do in fact know a lot about particle physics now. The problem with knowing things about the universe doesn't lie at that level. The problem is knowing what 10^40 particles are up to at any given point in time.

You are conflating understanding the laws with understanding all implications of the laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting post, but I don't agree with its conclusion. The "Theory of Everything" in Physics is equivalent to finding the axioms of Mathematics. It does not give us a way to determine the truth of any physical law (say about climatology, just like knowing the rules of Conway's Life doesn't allow you to determine the status of any theorem about it) and so it does not cross the halting problem. The relative "complexity" of math vs physics is not relevant and anyway, until we have a TOE we don't know its complexity.</comment>


Help me understand developers in US - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am Vivek, CTO & Co-founder of HackerEarth. It's the largest developer community in India where developers solve coding challenges, network with other developers and get job offers from the best product companies. The employers also have access to the best SaaS application to assess coding skills of a programmer as part of HackerEarth Recruit. View details at http://www.hackerearth.com/ and http://www.hackerearth.com/companies/hackerearth/.
I am in Palo Alto for 2 weeks and I am curious what drives the developers here, what kind of jobs are they looking for, how big is the issue of talent crunch for employers? I would love to meet and discuss all these, share my insights from India and understand the ecosystem here.
I also hack on Python & Django and we run the largest Django deployment in India. Engineering posts are here: http://engineering.hackerearth.com/. If your technology stack is similar, we can sit down together and have interesting tech conversation.
All I am looking forward to is meeting you in your office if this interests you. Help me understand the Valley culture and developers here and I would be grateful.
From a fellow hacker and founder.
Vivek Prakash email@example.com, @vivekprakash <comment><USER2> Let me know if you're ever in London. I'll shoot the shit with you.</comment>


Show HN: Test chatbot Ellie to find your health plan and ask health care queries - <AUTHOR> https://www.explain.care/ellie <comment><AUTHOR> Test our chatbot Ellie at www.explain.care/ellie.

Ellie is a digital assistant powered by Artificial Intelligence to answer your questions on health insurance and health care.

Currently, Ellie can help you understand all those complicated health insurance terminologies that you wanted to know better. Ask in this format-

"What is HMO?", "What is a deductible?" and so on...

Also, Ellie has learnt to give you a list of insurance companies offering health plans in California State in a particular zip code. More features will be released shortly, so watch this space! Start this interaction by writing- "I want to select a health plan" ...

Please complete our feedback survey and stand a chance to win an Amazon gift voucher !</comment>


Handshake: A Peculiar Chat Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://nomasters.io/posts/handshake-alpha/ <comment><USER2> So if I understand correctly, in order for Alice to catch up on the messages she might've missed, she decrypts the pointer to the HEAD of the message chain, and then decrypts that message. That ciphertext contains the address to the preceding message in the chain. Alice goes there and decrypts that. She continues doing this until she finds a message that's already in her chat history.

Doesn't this construction make forward secrecy impossible? Normally you'd ratchet your key on every message, but if you're decrypting backwards, you can't do that. Also I suppose the fact that it's a group chat makes everything harder.

<comment><USER3> oh. I love these questions. Handshake author here. Handshake provides a way for Alice and Bob to generate a large pool of one-time pre-shared keys as well as a set of one-time lookup hashes to go with these keys. Both the lookup hashes and the pre-shared keys are generated using separate KDF processes and the input bytes are destroyed upon generation. This pool of "lookup hashes" are unique to both Alice and Bob and can be used in any order. There is no further coordination of future key generation, so this is very much the "impractical One-Time Pad" pattern. In fact, there is no reason that a true XOR based OTP couldn't be implemented as a "strategy" for Handshake.

So, no ratchets, just a bunch of "dumb" one-time-use symmetric keys with a lookup table for each chat participant. The value prop here is that, for some reason, you suspect that Eve is capable of cracking assumptions of difficulty or implementations of PKI at a level in which you want a symmetric-only crypto alternative. This puts Handshake squarely in "cyber-punk vanity project".

Operationally, the biggest known risk with Handshake is device security. If Eve was able to get a hold of your device, she'd be able to decrypt all future messages related to that chat conversation (though she wouldn't be able to decrypt messages before interception, since keys used by both the sender and receiver are aggressively destroyed upon use).

<comment><USER2> Ah, thanks for the response! So the number of messages you can send is precisely the number of keys that you generate at the start? How many is that? This also probably means you don't support long-running (think multi-year) conversations or the ability to add/remove people to/from the group, is that right?

<comment><USER3> > So the number of messages you can send is precisely the number of keys that > you generate at the start? How many is that?

Bingo. The demo only generates 10K keys per participant, but 100k keys in storage takes less than 200ms to generate and only uses 6MB of storage space. This will be user configurable per chat. It's important to note, each message burns two keys. The first key encrypts the message, the second key encrypts the reference to that message for the rendezvous point.

> This also probably means you don't support long-running (think multi-year) > conversations or the ability to add/remove people to/from the group, is that > right?

Correct. There are plenty of other tools that do a beautiful job of handling that. This is designed specifically to provide short-lived chats with specific guarantees. The handshake happens just once at chat creation and all participants must be present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious about how this works for dead-drops, especially when I think about journalism, political dissent and whistle-blowing. It means, I assume, there has been some previous offline interaction where keys can be exchanged, but how does that stop the keys getting into nefarious hands? Isn't that always a concern?

<comment><USER5> Check out their post on Killcord on nomasters.io - I think it would interest you regarding dead-drops. (Sorry for post/delete/post. I was moving quickly and wanted to make sure I was accurate.)

<comment><USER4> Yes that was a great read, thanks! [https://nomasters.io/posts/killcord- alpha/](https://nomasters.io/posts/killcord-alpha/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty cool. I think mapping the code to words would make it easier to type out during the handshake. Are there alternative ways to share the private key? For instance, if both devices have mics, maybe a local sound could be cool too.

<comment><USER3> for the mobile app, the plan is to use QR codes + cameras, but its just byte blobs, so other transmission methods could be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is neat. I'll have to look later when I'm at my computer but at a glance I'm not seeing a mobile app. Is it supposed to be compiled and sideloaded?

<comment><USER3> The mobile app has some early proof-of-concept drawings and code, but that part hasn't been built yet. Right now its just core library in go with a simplified CLI interface and the ability for the code to compile to gomobile. The plan is for the mobile app to be reactNative + go (gomobile) with the ability to compile and sideload on iOS and Android. I plan to submit to the app stores, but using that depends on your risk model.</comment></comment>


Supreme Court: first amendment allows mature video games to be sold to minors - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/06/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-video-game-law-on-first-amendment-grounds.ars

<comment><USER3> I understand how quite a few game hackers would be in favor of a ruling like this, but if these are truly your convictions, I would like to see some video (not screencast, video) of your 12 year-old son playing some game with his mostly nude, thoroughly adult female character slavishly hacking on the corpses of other characters. Is that normal?

I was in an ethics discussion in my military surgical program and started to see how the effects of these policies. Full disclosure: a number of my friends have died in the current conflicts, starting with the Pentagon on 9/11. One of the situations we were posed with, by staff who were there, was this:

CIA officers approach you, as a doctor, in Kandahar, with a captured informant-turned-double-agent. They want you to give him Ativan so he'll talk. They tell you he knows where a weapons cache is that could be used against Americans. You say no, there's no medical indication. They say, if you don't, they'll torture him and get the information anyway. You're role will only cause him more pain or less.

The overwhelming consensus of medical students, interns, and residents was to give him the Ativan. Three of us took the opposite position: you can't let people cajole you into making moral decisions based on threats. Then your just complicit.

The irony was that the majority consisted of essentially everyone who hadn't thought about these problems before. In the minority of three were two of us with prior service, and the philosophy major.

Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. It's just shit. I don't care if it points in the right direction or the wrong direction. I, your comrade in arms, don't know where it's going to point next time. And that's not the guy I want be sharing a tent with.

So enjoy your expanded access to an audience willing to pretend they understand violence. Moral consistency matters. Reliability matters. You can look forward to further international embarrassment when they grow up to make the wrong, randomly wrong, decisions behind the trigger or, worse, at the voting booth.

Edit: Look, I'm all for the first amendment. I took an oath to defend it, and I carry a copy of the Constitution with me everywhere. I read it regularly. Genuinely, I support the ideas in the opinion. My concern is that waiting in the wings around this particular opinion, there's a lot of unscrupulous adults salivating over the opportunity to take money from my kids in exchange for making my job as a parent, doctor, military officer, etc, harder.

Edit 2: For those asking for evidence: here is the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement on Media Violence, which includes abundant (3500) references if you would like to dig deeper: [http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...](http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.full)

Preview of that statement: "The strength of the correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior found on meta-analysis is greater than that of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection, or environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer."

Edit 3: I would like to point out that here is a thread full of programmers justifying, essentially to themselves, why their industry is best off with less regulation. Do you extend your arguments to other industries gray areas? Meat processing? Tobacco? Defense? Isn't "corporate self-regulation" best for everyone?

<comment><USER4> While your point may or may not be true - I fail to see how this pertains to whether the state should be involved in legislating morality? I feel that if you picked some other moral issue - say gay marriage for instance - <USER2> majority of us would be of the opinion that the government has no business telling gays that they can't get married because its "immoral." But on this issue its okay for the government to dictate what's moral because you happen to agree with it?

How easily we seem to be willing to trade freedom for comfort when we agree with what's traded. Certainly I wouldn't want a 12 year old's perception of reality to be entirely shaped by video games, but that falls to sound parenting and not the government.

That being said - I'm not entirely sure I even agree with your premise, I grew up on Doom, Wolfenstein, etc which were graphically violent for their time and have turned into a successful well rounded "moral" person.

<comment><USER3> I love the number of replies who have claim to be well-rounded "moral" persons. A little bit of selection bias there, eh? Granted I must be victim to the same bias. Thus the anecdote. The point is that if you haven't been faced with the actual situation, a video game can only be a bad substitute.

<comment><USER4> Ya, that is why I put it in quotes. Who is to say what truly is moral? I'm sure there are some things which we can universally agree on, but others maybe not so much. Morality is a relative thing. Personally I tend to follow the non-aggression principle which I feel puts me on fairly solid (though not infallible) ethical grounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found it interesting that Scalia, who is the most conservative/religious member of the Court, not only voted with the majority but even wrote the opinion.

My guess is that as a father of 9 kids and a grand-father of even more, he's seen firsthand how nominal an impact video games have on minors.

In my experience, the most vocal opponents of violence in video games don't actually have any video-game playing children of their own.

<comment><USER6> It's more simple than that: Scalia is a constitutional originalist. He belongs to the right-wing judicial camp that believes the constitution means what it says. Sometimes he gets it wrong and I have no doubt his personal life and culture influences his decisions. But a strong first amendment stance is consistent with originalism.

Outsiders might not realize it but not all "conservatives" are cut from the same cloth. There is a rich and diverse right-wing ideological taxonomy.

<comment><USER7> Although I don't understand how he reconciles that with his rather strict views on "obscenity" and how that can be strictly regulated.

The constitution doesn't specifically address either, yet nudity can absolutely be regulated (or according to Scalia completely banned) while violence is just fine.

<comment><USER8> Justice Scalia considers historical exceptions that were accepted at the time that the First Amendment was ratified. His view is that there was such an exception for "obscenity", but not for violence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I posted a link a PDF of the opinion, but I wanted to highlight this quote from Scalia, writing for the majority:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones."

Opinion (direct link): <http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf> [PDF]

<comment><USER10> another good one:

7One study, for example, found that children who had just finishedplaying violent video games were more likely to fill in the blank letter in "explo_e" with a "d" (so that it reads "explode") than with an "r" ("explore"). App. 496, 506 (internal quotation marks omitted). The prevention of this phenomenon, which might have been anticipated with common sense, is not a compelling state interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This pretty much solidifies games as a protected art form. I couldn't be happier with this decision. There's some choice bits in there as well, slapping down California.

This is good for everyone, now games can avoid becoming comic books all over again.

<comment><USER12> Can kids buy R rated movies?

<comment><USER13> If the seller chooses to. The MPAA rating system is voluntary, not a government mandate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was actually puzzled as to why pornography doesn't fall under First Amendment rights. After googling it, I found an interesting piece on the wiki article talking about the guidelines used to discern an _exception_ from the rule:

 _Instead, the Roth test for obscenity was "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest"_

I find it disgusting that after all this time, we're still using a moral- ethics based approach to determine whether a broad ranging law can apply to a specific form of media. It is not that I particular agree or disagree with whether minors should have access to this - but I do disagree on how this decision has been made.

I'm hoping that with this decision, we'll be forced to reconsider how expressions are perceived.

<comment><USER15> Yes, the standard is vague. But at some level, all laws come back to moral judgments of one kind or another. Even if you start with practical concerns, you end with moral values.

For instance, why do we value free speech? Because we believe that free speech is a human right. This is a moral belief. If a dictator says "I don't believe free speech is a right," I might argue that society functions better with it.

But the dictator doesn't care how well society functions, in terms of outcomes for other people; he only cares about his own power. In the end, my argument would be that people have rights that "shouldn't", in a moral sense, be violated.

And that is exactly what the United States' founders said - "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."

<comment><USER16> I don't think the moral judgement is always so easy to find, though. Look at the second amendment, for example:

 _A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed._

It should be pretty clear to any strict constitutionalist that what's being laid out there is not a moral, inherent right to carry arms but a means to an end. Yes, there is a moral judgement in that it's worth doing things to preserve a free state, but it's several times removed from the actual question being addressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can understand why some parents are outraged about this. Despite my parents' best efforts, I managed to watch Terminator with some friends at a sleepover. That's why I grew up to be a homicidal cyborg.

</comment><comment><USER18> Last fall I did my uni moot court competition, and the case was a (simplified) version of this.

What the case came down to was whether violence can be treated the same way as sex. Ginsberg v. NY, a case from the 60s, gave an exception to the normal obscenity test--media could be regulated if it depicted sex and was sold to minors. Ginsberg v. NY, however, didn't touch on violence, and the issue was whether Ginsberg v. NY is content-specific, and only limited to sex, or whether the fact that that decision hinges upon harm done to youth means that other media that harm youth, ie, through exposure to violence, can be included in the exception. And, as you guys may guess, the trouble comes from the fact that damage can't really be shown.

That being said, if it was ruled Constitutional, I wouldn't have a problem with this law. Community values should reinforce parental values. There is a reach to what parents can do and control, everyone knows that.

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree that mature video games are no worse for kids than any other form of suggestive media. Teens are exposed to a lot of violence in the world, and banning just one type of it isn't going to do anything to protect them. Parents are going to bring their kids to suggestive movies, and buy their kids mature games. Restrictions will do nothing to stop that, and that's something we're going to have to deal with.

Just my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like how this passes just a few years after it no longer applies to me...

Growing up in the heart of this ESRB rating era, I can honestly say I was rarely if at all effected. Like a lot of kids, if I wanted a Mature game, I'd get an adult to buy it in the same way kids buy booze. It wasn't a real deterrent and at the end of the day I was still playing the games that I wasn't supposed to. Right or wrong, doing dumb things, and seeing the world that you're not supposed to is just another rite of childhood and growing up. The only thing this new amendment really does is it makes things easier for kids--psh the kids today have it so easy.

<comment><USER20> "In my day when we wanted some mature video game, we'd pay a hobo to walk into gamestop for us"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium_

I don't know much about 1st ammendment law, but aren't mature books and movies regularly prohibited to be sold to minors? I thought porn couldn't be sold to kids? Or is it merely a suggestion?

<comment><USER22> For movies it's like the ESRB for video games: a voluntary system, but pretty universally adhered to.

I'm not sure about porn, but I skimmed this ruling and it makes frequent reference to how obscenity laws are a special case where speech may be prohibited, so it might be different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It will be interesting to see if the video game stores of the world, like the movie theaters and 'R' ratings, decide to self-regulate and prohibit minors from buying 'M' games anyway as corporate policy.

<comment><USER24> Almost all stores (Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop, etc...) already do this and have for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What does this mean for the sale or showing of movies to minors?

<comment><USER26> That was never illegal to begin with, in the US.

<comment><USER27> I thought kids couldn't see R-rated movies in theaters without parent supervision.

I remember being turned away from a ticket counter for that.

<comment><USER28> I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure you legally _can_ watch an R-rated movie, it's just the policy of the theater that you don't.

<comment><USER29> This is correct. This is also the reason why you would be hard pressed to find a venue that would show an NC-17 rated title in some places since most major theater chains refuse to show NC-17 rated films as policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> guess I'll need to send them some tornadoes. Hope I don't miss and hit Kansas</comment>


Dear Programming Job Applicants (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://joshcarter.com/software/dear_programming_job_applicant/ <comment><USER3> > He reasoned through the problem, wrote the code, it ran perfectly the first > time. I hired him.

I get the overall sentiment, but come on, "I hired him" sounds like self- absorbed anecdata - so this post is about how to quickly appeal to some manager dude on the interwebs? A more useful metric would be, did this hire survive the first two years, and what do the people around him have to say about his performance.

> It's funny how many people can't edit text on any machine but their own

How often does this person himself get thrown into random-ass editors and forced to quickly work through some rando algorithm while absolutely not forgetting to eloquently detail out loud their entire thought process? Self- absorbed, out of touch with how humans work.

<comment><USER4> Bullshit. It'll go like this:

Interviewer: here, a laptop with vi

Applicant: I've never used vi

Interviewer: just hit "i" to be dropped into insert mode, then just navigate with the arrows and use backspace like in any other editor. Ask me when you're ready to save and I'll teach you the magic incantation.

Applicant: _types away_

If you're not able to code in what's essentially just a test box then that's a useful thing for an interviewer to know. It's a strong indication that you don't fully grasp where the editor stops and the language begins, and unless you're applying for a junior role that's a negative sign.

<comment><USER5> > just hit "i" to be dropped into insert mode, then just navigate with the > arrows and use backspace like in any other editor. Yeah, no. Let me call > bullshit on you calling bullshit.

I've been working as a mediocre programmer at the same company for the last 10 years. when I landed this job, I had never ever even heard of vi. I was "gently" introduced to it by my boss, and eventually got to kind of get used to a basic usage of it.

But in the box where our server run it is configured to highlight syntax, maintain tabs and shit, delete deletes, you can move using arrow keys, and a slew of other non default niceties.

Over the years I more or less got acquainted with different tastes of Linux, and used and installed it in a few of my own boxes (Debian, mostly).

Even thought vi respects arrow keys by default now it seems (thanks god I don't have to use hjkl. It is hjkl, right?) there's this conf issue that I've never been able to fix _because I don't know how to formulated the question in order to google it_ and it's the fact that when you're in non edit mode, _the cursor never goes to the end of the line_, so if I have to let's say add a new line, and the last word is `return;` I have to convert that to `return;;` put the line jump between the 2 ;; and then remove the extra ;. Plus, arrow keys in non edit mode add lines with crap in it.

I can't even fathom how stressfull would be doing a job interview under this circumstances.

Force a person to use a different OS than they are used to? Well, may be. Even thought I don't like nano, it would be a better choice than vi because at least it beheaves as a "normal" editor.

force a person to use vi with default settings? thank you very much for your time.

<comment><USER6> I had your same problem for years (I use vi extremely sparingly) and the answer is "a" - which means "append": it will go to the end of the line and leave you in insert mode _after_ the last character.

Found out when I was looking for something else, and improved my quality of life quite a bit. (I still hate distributions where arrow keys in insert mode don't work like any reasonable human would expect, but they are thankfully getting thinner on the ground).

<comment><USER5> Yep, well thanks for that. But imaging having a job interview, you are forced to use an editor you never in your life used and that _doesn't behave as a normal editor_ and you can't even inser a line _normally_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of this is good, but one real WTF:

"Editor Flailing

It's funny how many people can't edit text on any machine but their own. I tend to interview people on a laptop running Ubuntu, and I open gedit for them to use, with the offer that they can use any other Unix editor they like. Most can barely navigate gedit, and it's stupid simple.

Don't ever let yourself get hung up on the editor. If you can't figure out the magic command keys to indent code the way you like, just press the damn space bar and indent it yourself. Flailing in the editor wastes time."

Talk about an arbitrary condition. Sure, being adaptable and/or pragmatic with respect to tooling is a nice thing for your candidate to have, but to prioritize it at a similar level to _knowing what your company does_?! Are you really going to hire the incompetent-but-familiar-with-emacs Linux user over the capable-but-rigid Windows dev? Unless you're looking for an SA or full- stack dev, this seems rather arbitrary, especially considering the availability of plenty of cross-platform, fully-featured editors.

<comment><USER8> This is a great reason to learn vi for basic editing tasks. It's everywhere. Even if you typically use a different editor/ide, vi is a common ground.

Disclosure: I'm an emacs user

<comment><USER9> It's kind of weird to NOT know basic vi/vim if you get to a certain point in your career. If you can't at least open the software, go into insert mode, and save/quit, have you ever had to ssh into a remote server and edit a config file before? Only excuse I could think of is if you literally did everything in windows for your entire career.

<comment><USER10> What's wrong with using nano for that?

<comment><USER11> > It's everywhere.

It almost litterally is. Even busybox contains a vi clone. While I have encountered more systems without nano nor Emacs than I can remember. Plus, there is no excuse for learning the basic set of commands: i,ESC,x,u, and maybe navigating with the letters (which I'm not proficient at).

<comment><USER12> I only have to edit a file on Linux once every couple of months of so - <USER2> tired of forgetting how to exit vi (or enter/exit edit mode, save the file... just about anything really), so started installing nano as the first thing I do on any system. Nano is _so_ much more obvious than vi.

<comment><USER13> Most people can't install arbitrary software on every system they access.

<comment><USER11> This exactly. I am pretty sure that if you gain [adb] shell access inside of an android recovery partition (as a random example), you have read-only access to the system, with only busybox at your disposal. Thus vi, but no nano.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So author, who are you? You start already with an authoritarian touch. What makes you believe you are not an incompetent interviewer? How can an applicant assess your skills, you could easily be the greatest fuck up in the company. Is your company really that cool that I should want to die to work there? Did you first weed out all the incompetent staff that is duck sitting there playing business politics?

IMAO most companies are not any better than the applicants applying. And no, you didn't hire only the best from all candidates, you just have a rich imagination that favours your ego.

<comment><USER15> And what makes him think that his company is so special that I would be willing to deal with his attitude at the interview let alone accept the job?

I've rejected plenty of offers because I didn't like the interviewer.

<comment><USER16> I once rejected a company because they had a big framed picture with 4 naked girls full frontal in the interviewing room. And because the manager pointed to it saying how "open minded" the company is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "I'll spend hours brushing up on Scheme just to test you on something completely irrelevant to the role just because I like playing Resumé Gotcha".

Yeah that's a thanks but no thanks from me. I wouldn't work for this guy in a thousand years.

<comment><USER18> It's a good investment for the company, if the interviewer can red flag a candidate who is blatantly lying on his resumé because the candidate would assume no one would know said technology, it would save a lot of money from cutting ties with an employee in a later stage.

As an anecdote, I used to work for a company and would require candidates to know some Ruby, for one guy with several years experience in Python we changed the requirements of the home assignment so he could write it using whatever he wanted. he hands over a nodeJS application claiming he took the opportunity to learn something new(why not Ruby?), seemed like it was well done, so we bring him in for an interview, unlucky for him, there was one member in our team with some nodeJS experience(me), having reviewed the code, I asked him to do a minor feature addition to his own code, he froze, couldn't do it because he didn't write the code(copying from some repo) and didn't know any nodeJS at all, asked him to do it in Python instead and he still couldn't do it, he had just spiced up his resumé with tech we didn't use to see if he could weasel his way in.

<comment><USER19> Imagine he got the role and did well. Trying to find the perfect person doesn't always work out as expected.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, but lying to that extent is a huge red flag, not just saying your Spanish is "mediocre" instead of "beginner".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > So, your code isn't working, what do you do? Stare blankly at the monitor?

This always gets me. When the interviewer asks a question, the correct answer is literally never, "let me think about it quietly for a moment". This is one of the disconnects between interview programming and real programming people get frustrated over.

<comment><USER22> Hmm. The point of an interview isn't for an applicant just to solve the problem, it's to prove they can solve the problem. I think saying "let me think about it for a moment" is perfectly acceptable. But going quiet without guiding the interviewer is not communicating what your plan is.

Not saying interviewing isn't broken in a myriad of ways, but asking a candidate to talk through their process to illuminate it isn't unreasonable.

<comment><USER23> I have had such hard times with this. I find it very hard to think about the problem and to think what to say to this person without fucking up the interview.

I mean, you don't want to say: "I'm going to trial & error this shit while the fucking compiler builds and the stupid tests say it works" which is how must programming is done anyway.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't use those exact words, no :).

But hopefully you have some ideas on what you want to try (and what your experience says you shouldn't, equally important) and talking about that thought process is exactly the kind of data I would want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oof, this is pretty antithetical to hiring. Author seems pretty frustrated. I hope this guy takes a long vacation. If I'm a candidate, I'd say this guy is clearly way overworked and I'd bail. Good points, but the volume of negative sadly speaks louder than the rationality of the points.

I see there being two parts to an SWE interview:

1) What experience does the candidate bring? Do they have _compatible_ core competencies? If yes, then what's novel about their experience—- will they help the team grok unknown unknowns? (And if the team's burning issue is not unknown unknowns... then how does the candidate's background add to the team's creativity?)

2) How well does the candidate adapt on their feet? How effectively can they communicate? (If English is not a primary language, can they still get an idea across, perhaps using code instead of prose?). Can they code their way out of a paper bag?

The interview session is the _interviewer's_ responsibility to make the strongest case possible for the candidate. Let's say that again: the interviewer needs to play doctor and _adapt to the candidate_. The interviewer is getting paid, not the candidate. Only once that sample has been taken properly can a hiring manager (who might very well be the interviewer..) begin to make an effective prediction as to how the candidate might do on the job.

Folks, demand for SWE jobs far outweighs supply. And it's gonna be that way for at least another decade as universities catch up. It's time to stop discriminating for the wrong reasons.

<comment><USER12> This is mostly agreeable, but you do need to actually _test_ the competencies the candidate says they have.

As someone that's done aot of hiring, I can concur with the author that there are _many_ poor candidates out there, many who grossly "stretch the truth" about their capabilities and experiences. Unless you want to be lumbered with a dud, some kind of practical test is a must.

> It's time to stop discriminating for the wrong reasons

I wasn't sure what you meant was the discriminating factor here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A few more things:

1) Be humble. Don't expect people to take it easy on you because you got street cred (You are a ruby contributor? You still need to show them how good you are at coding Ruby). Many people with creds get offended when they realize they are not as good as their credentials would imply.

2) Know yourself. Most candidates I've seen, including myself, encounter a moment in the interview where they get hit by the nerves. Know that it's going to happen, announce it to the interviewer, recompose yourself, start again when calmer. You are not going to fail an interview because you are nervous. You will not succeed if you are terrified, panic, and shut up.

3) Explain your reasoning. The way you approach a problem, which is a large part of what the interviewer wants to see is in your mind only unless you vocalize it. With a good enough mental approach, you will get a lot of slack on the actual code by most interviewers.

4) Interview your interviewer. Go prepared with smart, non-trivial questions on the job and the company. Ensure your interviewer is an empathic, intelligent, and humble person. Assume anything annoying you experience is going to be relatively permanent at the job -- will that be acceptable or not?

<comment><USER16> ad 1.) yes, being a contributor doesn't automatically make you good programmer. But having 7 years of coding practice in several companies kinda does, because why else would those companies have you for so long? Yet these programming interviews are required even for them. Probation period is much much more telling about a programmer than the 15 minute coding task.

<comment><USER26> > But having 7 years of coding practice in several companies kinda does, > because why else would those companies have you for so long?

Several jobs in 7 years might very well imply several companies gave that person a chance and then gave up.

I often got questions about that years ago, and it was completely reasonable, at one point I'd worked in 4 different positions in 5 years. (There were good reasons for it and I had good references so I just explained it and it was OK, but I can easily see why they asked.)

<comment><USER16> > gave that person a chance and then gave up.

Nobody "gives a chance" for a year. Either the problems were discovered during the probation period, or they were not as bad. Definitely not so bad that you'd have any chance discovering it during the interview. Besides, this high fluctuation is quite normal in IT.

<comment><USER27> You'd be surprised. A common scenario is that manager A hires a bad employee but doesn't want to admit their mistake. Then they move on to another position and the new manager B has to go through the lengthy PIP and termination process.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but say 4 times in a row? And 3 times without discovering how bad the person is during the interview? That says something about the prediction power of an interview...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > I brought in a guy that hadn't programmed professionally in years, in fact > he didn't even have programming on the first page of his resume. However, he > had been practicing while looking for a job and he rocked my programming > interview. He reasoned through the problem, wrote the code, it ran perfectly > the first time. I hired him.

And yet, I have a computer science master with an 8.1 (equivalent to a 4.0 GPA) and companies like Spotify/Google won't even give me a chance to do an automated online coding test.

> One other thing: if I ask for a program sample ahead of an interview, don't > even think about sending in code that doesn't include unit tests.

I haven't learned about testing in school or at my previous jobs or freelance gigs. Where's a good place to practice it? I mean, I know what assert does and all but I don't have a strong mentality to write a unit test, unless I'm writing code that is finicky like a Red Black tree, then I do write some tests.

I hate these snarky posts, because I don't even get to an interview. In all fairness, maybe I shouldn't apply to A-tier companies such as:

\- Google

\- Facebook

\- Spotify

\- Digital McKinsey (I did some business studies back in the day)

Shout out to Optiver and OpenAI for giving me a chance though. Optiver made me realize I needed to brush up on my algorithms in the first place. OpenAI made me realize that I need to brush up on my math.

<comment><USER29> I've written tests before, but there ain't no way I'm writing unit tests for a throw away coding exercise that used 4 hours of my time already.

<comment><USER30> usually for a coding challenge i include in the instructions to add unittests. ;)

since I consider the ability to write well designed unittests as crucial.

<comment><USER16> Just writing a unit test for an existing code would actually tell a lot more about the applicant's skills than a coding interview with vi. Or a task like "here is 100 lines of code, there is a bug there, show me how would you look for it". I wish more companies were doing these kind of coding tasks. Instead, all we get where I come from is "write a simple todo list application in your free time".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Some people completely blank when they're under examination like conditions. It doesn't make them bad programmers.

<comment><USER22> Sure, agreed. Except in very special circumstances (devrel, prod system admin, startup first hires) the ability to think clearly under pressure isn't key to success as a developer.

That's why I think that a paid take home test is the best way to understand how someone can program.

But the job of an interviewer is to get data any way they can, and the job of the interviewee is to provide that data as best they can. For the interviewee that means it is almost impossible to over communicate what you are thinking when faced with a problem. (I know, it's not easy to do, I have been there.) It's not natural or what you do when you are programming typically, but an interview is not a natural environment, nor should it be.

<comment><USER32> Interestingly, I've heard people say: if you can't code under pressure then you might not be a good fit here, to which my reply has always been:

If day to day coding in your company generates _my_ interview level of anxiety and stress then you are 100% right that I would not be a good fit and you are doing me a favour by not hiring me.

The problem is that some people don't realise just how stressful interviews can be due to them not suffering that level of stress, anxiety etc. so it's difficult for them to see themselves in that position.

<comment><USER22> I interviewed for the first time in years in 2018 and hell yes it is stressful.

I wish every hiring manager had that experience as it gave me a lot of empathy for candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Dear Programming Job Recruiter,

If I get your job, you and I are going to share our lives together. We will spend a lot of time creating something new out of the ether, and it will be a rocky, adventurous ride for both of us. Hopefully, you will be worth working for. The job market is large - me coming to you means I'm interested in what you have to offer, too.

If I accept your offer to spend a sizeable portion of my life working for you, it will be because I evaluated your authority, calculated the effect that your snark will have on my life, and decided it was worth it.

Programming interviews are where I can see, for myself, just how ignorant you are of Putts Corollary. Don't know what that is? You just flunked the interview. Got some clue about it, and have designed the interview to test me on it, too? Great, we're going to be able to work together.

</comment><comment><USER34> \- "Hey, I worked at FAANG or better, creating latest super-duper tech you use daily, was featured on TV, got multiple awards etc."

\- "Let's see if you can do Fizz Buzz!"

<comment><USER35> > \- "Let's see if you can do Fizz Buzz!"

Yes, exactly. I'd like to verify that you can string a few lines of code together to solve a trivially simple problem. This is not an unreasonable ask, and I really don't care how impressive your CV is. If you can't solve fizzbuzz you're not going to be able to solve any of the much more complicated problems we wrestle with on a day to day basis.

<comment><USER12> It's such a simple task, but in reality it's a fantastic way to weed out those that really don't have a clue what they're doing. Saves a lot of time interviewing.

<comment><USER34> ...unless the person you are interviewing decides you are childish, immediately walks away and doesn't respond to your mail ever again, and your business goes belly up as you can't find anyone on the market with the skills that person was bringing, essential to your business. Frankly, not sure why anyone competent in the current climate should take you seriously if you attempted that.

It's equivalent to asking a partner of another law company you want to join you what were the most important things that happened in 1753 and then rejecting them because they didn't know.

<comment><USER26> > ...unless the person you are interviewing decides you are childish, > immediately walks away and doesn't respond to your mail ever again,

...in that case they just proved they were childish and I'd be happy to avoid working with them.

> and your business goes belly up as you can't find anyone on the market with > the skills that person was bringing, essential to your business.

I think you are overestimating the value of childish ex-FAANGs :-)

If someone is too full of themselves to write a FizzBuzz once they are too full of themselves for a number of other tasks as well.

<comment><USER35> > If someone is too full of themselves to write a FizzBuzz once they are too > full of themselves for a number of other tasks as well.

Agreed: and one of the related issues that's worth stating is the damage and demoralisation to your team(s) that's likely to result, were they hired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This interviewer seems to have a machoistic view of interviewing people. At all times you should be treating people with dignity and respect, not trying to nail them to the ground to see them flounder.

Interviewing people by waiting around while they plod away at a text editor isn't appropriate use of your or the candidates time. You should be interacting with the individual via talking to them. If they claim to be an expert in TCP/IP then you can peel back the layers back asking open-ended questions to see where the conversation goes. If they have the depth of expertise then it'll become pretty apparent when you discuss the intricacies of the topic.

Trying to trip somebody up with returning int V long is just redundant. That is an mistake to make and will be trapped by the compiler at compile time.

To interviewers I say stop wasting everybody's time and focus on discussion not exam style questions.

</comment><comment><USER37> Honestly, the guy has valid points, but he is probably an asshole I wouldn't want to work for. I appreciate getting valuable advice, but the tone doesn't have to be like this. Maybe he is mad because of the "bad candidates", but that is his job, so he should be able to handle it.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd bet 10 bucks this guys built one shitty ass team of people and I'm not even talking about their programming skills. He's so caught up in being cheeky and a dick he shows how unskilled he is at building an actual performant cohesive team that works well together. He's not building a team of robots, well maybe he is. I'd bet another 10 bucks his salary/hourly rates are also sub-market.

</comment><comment><USER39> Looks like the author favours candidates that are able to adapt to his hiring process.

I think this approach results in too many false negatives. I prefer adapting my hiring process, asking questions and/or helping.

I feel that this makes it easier for the candidate to demonstrate their skills. Staying humble helps too.

EDIT: it's possible that this article doesn't represent author's current opinion; we should add "(2010)" to the title.

</comment><comment><USER40> This guy seems like the kind of interviewer to quiz you on how to type-cast a binary-void floating function-function pointer array to a U64_INT_WIDE TCHAR and then fail you for not using the right number of spaces in your code. Lmaoo. Would not work with / 10.

</comment><comment><USER41> > It's funny how many people can't edit text on any machine but their own. I > tend to interview people on a laptop running Ubuntu, and I open gedit for > them to use, with the offer that they can use any other Unix editor they > like. Most can barely navigate gedit, and it's stupid simple.

No, it's not funny. Accessibility is important, what if, for example, the person is used to a different keyboard layout?

I would always encourage people to use their own machine and setup. If a programmer is uncomfortable on a different machine that might just stress them out and ruin the interview.

Also, you could be missing out on some hidden skills. I could show off some ninja moves in sublime text or emacs, or in my customised shell, but I'm pretty sure I'd suck on a fresh ubuntu in Gedit.

I agree that most programmers should be able to ssh into a server and edit a file without any issue, but that's different from completing a programming task. It's like testing if a tennis player can ace a serve with a golf club.

<comment><USER42> This is why I bring my split ergonomic keyboard with dvorak firmware to on- site interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The thing is that the candidate does not know if the interviewer falls into the pragmatic or dogmatic camp. I've absolutely had cases where the interviewers insisted that the applicant was proficient in a specific compiler toolchain + hardware debugger setup (for pretty generic embedded ARM where skills transfer nicely from other commerical ARM ecosystems), and cases where the interviewer gets hung up on coding style.

So, yes, I'll fiddle with the editor, because I'm not a fucking mind reader.

Besides, putting the candidate into gedit and then talking about debuggers is a bit inconsistent. If you put me into this situation, I'll of course use printf() debugging, whereas in a familiar environment I'd use the debugger.

</comment><comment><USER44> Summary: if you don't know little thing X for sure you can't do Y! now and forever! because Y can no longer be learned!

 _" you can't program anymore"_ and forever?

 _" can't edit text on any machine"_ and forever?

 _" can't figure out the magic command keys to indent code"_ and forever?

He sees the developer as having static knowledge that somehow, in the very moment of the interview, becomes frozen in time and nothing can be done about it.

I should copy/paste this article and change the name "How not to hire -the best-"

<comment><USER44> Oh, after they complain about everything that is not really important, they spend 2 weeks to create a user/pass for you and months to learn the project because the senior left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If you interview for Java or C# positions, editor matters. Give me an IDE. It'll take me hours to get the details right, because I'm used to the IDE fixing it

</comment><comment><USER46> "if you haven't been programming for a while, you can't program anymore."

I do not agree with this at all. For a person who has a proper understanding of how a computers works from the basics, getting up to speed on any language and paradigm might take a short time but telling a person they cannot program anymore is complete BS.

Ok, object oriented environments are now more common but so what; they were invented 50 years ago and most of us have had some exposure to them at least on a general level.

So telling us we can't program anymore because we cannot pick up your laptop and your editor and toss out a program in five minutes is not a test of the person, but more designed to make the tester feel superior.

I am happy that I do not have to interview with Josh Carter.

<comment><USER47> He doesn't mean that you don't know the JavaScript framework of the week.

He means if you have not been writing any code regularly recently (because you have been a Manager or Architect or whatever) then your programming skills will be rusty. You will struggle with FizzBuzz because you have have spent less than 5 hours programming in the last 12 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This brought me to full stop:

> it's worth a few hours of my time to prepare for an interview

So, how many interviews he did in one week? 1 or even 0.5? Today typical manager with 2-3 open positions performs no less than 3 interviews a week. I personally will not spend all my time learning some irrelevant languages or frameworks just to show off in front of random people passed through HR screening.

</comment><comment> daniel-s > I'll brush up on Scheme myself just so I can give you a Scheme programming > question.

That's when I realised the author was quite obviously lying.

</comment><comment><USER49> >Write code on Gedit?

That's fascism, what's your problem if I write my code on CLion? Should I write code on a hipster typewriter and scan my printed document straight to the compiler? Does that make me a qualified programmer?

</comment><comment><USER30> > if you say you're a master of network protocols, guess what, I've maintained > a TCP/IP stack, and unless you're really a master I'm going to bury you.

yep. :) all lot of applicants should take a note at this.

</comment><comment><USER50> > If you say you're a master of network protocols, guess what, I've maintained > a TCP/IP stack, and unless you're really a master I'm going to bury you.

The goal of interviewing is never under any circumstances to "bury" someone with obscure, difficult questions. Even as the OP is obviously impressed with his own skill set ("I've maintained a TCP/IP stack") I'm sure someone coming from a different vantage point could stump him easily, there's too many nooks & crannies of a field that vast.

> I've interviewed several people that couldn't write Fibonacci sequence. I'd > tell them what it was and write on the whiteboard the first ten numbers so > they could see it. They'd start typing and immediately go into the weeds.

There's a lot of pressure in the live format to produce right away. Maybe you should consider take-homes instead of instantly assuming the candidates lack your superior communication and abstract reasoning skills?

> Don't make me point out cases where your code breaks.

Right. I'm sure you've never written a bug in your life -- especially as a C programmer.

> I tend to interview people on a laptop running Ubuntu, and I open gedit for > them to use, with the offer that they can use any other Unix editor they > like.

I run Ubuntu desktop but why throw someone out of their comfort zone? Just ask them to bring a machine, or remote into a Google Hangout. The point of the interview is not to surprise candidates in unknown environments then feel superior because they don't know what you know.

> ...I ask if you've got questions for me, and you say, "so what does your > company do?" the interview is over.

If it's cheapfurnaces.com, sure. But most companies it's not completely obvious what the company does exactly, even if you browse the company website or LinkedIn -- don't be so snide in your assumptions the candidates did no research on the company first, maybe they're just not articulate in their phrasing when asking what exactly a company does. They applied for a developer role, not to be CEO. This seems like an arrogant position to take.

> I'm not trying to beat up candidates because I'm a sadist, I'm looking for > people I want to work with.

There's also a fair amount of chest-beating going on here, IMHO. The OP doesn't just want to assess the skill level of the candidates he simultaneously wants to assert his own perceived superiority ("most programming job applicants suck").

OP should consider acting more humble and try to demonstrate more empathy toward others -- often it's not the candidates "sucks" but his or her particular skill set or career level isn't ideally suited to the open role.

<comment><USER51> Exactly, it sounds like this guy sees interviews as a way to feed his ego and make himself feel smarter than the candidate.

He would be a massive red flag to me as an indicator I don't want to work there.

<comment><USER38> Definitely a solid pass on a job here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Programming _is_ like riding a bike...after a brief reimmersion. Maybe a little wobbly at first, but it's never taken me long to jump back into something that used to be an old friend.

</comment><comment> Pierre-ch The colleague who interviewed me later confided that i was the first he ever had who brought his own laptop for the interview. Apparently, it is not common!

<comment><USER53> Interesting, I brought my laptop to every interview for a software job I've had. Figured that's the best way for me to show and talk about some of my code, and maybe even code too if it comes to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The article was okay to read but calling people out for not being able to use an editor you know how to use is low.

</comment><comment><USER22> Note this is from 2010, but still has many relevant points. As someone who has made some of these mistakes, I'd say the tl;dr is:

Good hiring managers prepare for an interview, so you best prepare as well.

<comment><USER55> Depressingly, the difference between then and now is today's blog post would be advice for how to ace your 3 part interview, each with a 1 hour coding test and the take home project for which you are expected to sign an NDA

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Something I don't see enough of is developers who have a lot of recent interview experience (as an interviewee) being the interviewer. These devs are inevitably contractors so they are rarely chosen to be the interviewer in a company. Rather, the team lead who has been there for years is chosen. The thing is, as a person who has a lot of experience at being interviewed, I know the mistakes that interviewers make and they never get to learn this information. An candidate gets to correct their mistakes and become better at the interview process in preparation for the next one they do. An interviewer learns, 3 months down the line, that they have made some mistake but never learn what went wrong.

Here are some common mistakes that interviewers make:

1\. Not testing the candidate's argumentative skills. The interviewer should take a questionable stance on a topic and see how the candidate argues their point.

2\. Never testing a candidate's ability to read and understand code. Without this skill a candidate is more likely to reject your team's existing code base and rewrite things from scratch. Instead of asking them to implement an algorithm (which, btw, they already may have practice doing - making the test pointless) get them to read a lot of regular code. Not a complex algorithm but something that spans multiple files and is quite large. It could be your codebase or something you found on GitHub. "Tell me what this does" "Tell me what you think is wrong with this code" "How would you change it?". Being able to read code and write it are two separate skills and both need to be tested in the interview.

3\. Making the candidate feel uncomfortable. For example, two interviewers against one candidate could make certain devs uncomfortable. Why is this important? A developer is going to get settled in the team at some point and feel comfortable. Wouldn't you rather test them in that state rather than a state they would rarely be in? Unfamiliar text editors, interviewers watching you code; these are further examples. Sure, some devs are unfazed but others are, and they may be good devs that an interviewer is chucking away.

3\. The interview should always involve a tech test and I strongly believe that the candidate should be left alone to do the test. However, this depends on how pair-programmer heavy the team is. Regardless, the most important part comes later when going through the results. So many interviewers miss the opportunity to question the interviewee on what they have written. It can be quite distracting if the interviewer is constantly picking through the code as it is being written.

4\. Not going through the candidates cv during the interview. This should happen first and is part of the prep that an interviewer should make. As boring and full of exaggerations as other people's CVs sometimes are, it is a good way to increase the confidence of the candidate so that the interviewer can get the most out of them for the rest of the interview.

</comment><comment><USER57> TFW Dwight Shrute is your programming job interviewer...

</comment><comment><USER58> I can feel the pain here but in my own way. As a hiring manager it must be so frustrating to be assaulted with massive idiocy when you are looking for a candidate. Think about it:

\- candidates have zero penalty for applying to something they know they aren't qualified for

\- there's constant noise about getting one of those well paying "tech jobs"

\- everyone who has ever logged hello world to the console thinks they are the best programmer in the world

\- people are desperate and will lie

\- the ratio of unqualified to qualified candidates must be 100 to 1

It must be like dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. The one thing I love about this, though, is the "senior developer" who hasn't read a book in a decade and has to get a new job. ahahahahaha. The moment when that mountain of BS collapses underneath them must be ga-lorious.

Also though, I get the feeling it's a different job market than it was in 2010. I'm still trying to understand what I think I see.

Languages seem to be able to cover multiple platforms now. Programming I don't think is as technical as it once was. At the same time everything seems to be a mess right now. Everything's broken. There's a million and a half frameworks for everything. ...It's like programming as a field has become much more broad, while simultaneously lowering in quality, with knowledge that was once spent on technical mastery now being traded for either lower wages or domain knowledge. So if you went to school and got a degree in programming that was once pretty impressive but now you're just some dude who can "code".</comment>


EFF: Biometrics in Argentina, Mass Surveillance as a State Policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/biometrics-argentina-mass-surveillance-state-policy

<comment><USER2> To put the seriousness of this into perspective for the average HN reader:

Short version:

 _No one in Argentina trusts the police_

If what the EFF is writing about comes to pass, every single despicable and ill intended individual in this country is going to have all biometrical data about any citizen he wants at his fingertips. This includes banks, drug dealers, telemarketers, and angry ex-husbands/wives.

Long version:

The police in Argentina is usually a completely corrupted institution, at the mercy of whatever drug lord, human trafficking organization, or powerful family that needs its service. This has been a problem since democracy returned to Argentina about 30 years ago, even with governments massively winning elections and having a really tight control of the whole executive and legislative branch of Argentina's federal government. This corrupt structure survived many purges and reforms announced and carried on by the executive branch of the federal government, and also the government of many provinces... even when those purges are continually announced in elections and in the usual political-propaganda-spaces as the end-all crime fighting solution.

This goes to the extent that Cristina is not even relying on the police for the custody of some of the key infrastructure of the country. For example, its common for protected witnesses in criminal investigations about human trafficking to be under custody of the gendarmerie, because of the obvious police involvement in those type of crimes.

Now, pressured by a (measurable but between the norm) increase in violent crimes, that is as usual blown out of proportion by the press, they are going to give the federal police access to huge amounts of biometrical data.

<comment><USER3> I would add that nobody trusts the intelligence service here. For example if you are a journalist, or just a public figure, and say something against the government they can tamper your phone as if you were a possible terrorist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't believe people here in Argentina when they compare Cristina's actions with the military coup from 76'. Many will go as far as to compare Cristina with Hitler and insulting her with gender slurs.

Cristina takes the blame for thwarting our freedom of expression, but she certainly did otherwise. The opposition says that freedom of expression is very low, while it is clear to me that it has never been higher. I have never seen this much freedom to say anything you want to say. This is why it saddens me when I hear people saying that we are heading into another dictatorship. Take an example, if you will, Cristina's derogation of the Calumnias e Injurias (Slander and Injuries) felony. This law has been used by torturers from the Dirty War to avoid and dilate their process.

The amount of confirmation bias is incredibly high nowadays in Argentina.

What do I mean by this? This government has done some really great stuff, and they also screw up other stuff up (I might say that practically every government does, depending on the looking glass). This has brought an enormous scrutiny on the media's role in deciding elections and shunning candidates they deem contrary to their agenda.

Particularly, the situation boils down to Clarín's massive monopoly vs the Kirchnerismo. You may call Clarín our local version of Fox News. Cristina Kirchner and her late husband Néstor are certainly right in that there is a monopoly. They are, on the other hand, criticized by not giving press conferences and having a huge pride and elitism. Perhaps you can relate this to the republicans claiming that the Obama administration is very secretive about their intentions.

I find it hard to sit in a grey area, seeing both sides trying to bring me closer to their particular interpretation of the truth.

I've personally debunked many lies that were presented by either Clarín or media affiliated with the government. I think due to my unhealthy thirst for information. But other people will just close their minds and simply settle for something they've read. Cristina's opposition will stubbornly defend many things that simply aren't true, and they will never concede a point. Sadly, the same happens with Cristina's loyalists.

Having said that, I'm very uneasy about this particular measure. In this country, you can very easily access someones private data such as banking history, every possession they have, _even medical history._ Adding an extra item to the list sure creeps me out.

You may say: "Why, Hrundi, surely there must be legislation that prevents that sort of data leak, right?". Well, we do have legislation regarding that, just like the US has HIPAA. Unfortunately, this has never stopped information from leaking out.

I guess its time to sand off my fingerprints!

<comment><USER5> We already had freedom of expression before, you could say whatever you wanted about previous presidents in public. But now the government has higher control of the press, by controlling the paper, it has also publicly attacked and tried to close some of our biggest media (regardless of their quality, that's a bad sign... the government arbitrarily choose to attack one monopoly very openly, while allowing other monopolies to continue as always), while it has funded their own partidist media -with our taxes-. Meanwhile we have seen violent, even physical attacks against people who talk openly against the Kirchnerismo, like Lanata (I'm not saying the government did these attacks, but they weren't as common before the Kirchnerismo).

If Clarin is like Fox News: what would happen if the POTUS decided to close Fox News, just because? The end result wouldn't be more freedom of speech.

I don't think the Kirchner did all wrong, but I do really think our freedom of expression is getting smaller every year with them.

<comment><USER4> Imagine, if you will, that Twitter existed during the Dictadura. Now, imagine all of the immense slurring and derogatory flaming that Cristina received in the weeks prior to the recent presidential election, but now switch Cristina for 1976' first de facto leader Jorge Rafael Videla.

I personally applaud and defend* their right to express themselves like that, but the situation would have been a wee bit different back then. A bit of packet sniffing and moments later you are being thrown off a plane.

My family paid taxes for government media (such as the official channel) for all of the presidents since the return to democracy in 1983. This government suddenly is the first to get the slack. The slack that Clarín has never given to previous governments due to the kisses and cuddles and proven corruption).

The government didn't pick a monopoly, there's only one! All other so called monopolies (not even close to Clarín's shadow) are also bound by law, and access to documentation from judiciary and administrative branches can offer a lot of insight into the enforcement of the law. The government passed a "Media law" against monopolies. It was certainly proven that Clarín is one. Clarín then manages to have the law stopped by a friendly judge, a friendship going all the way back to the military process!

It is not true that they tried to close Clarín. They don't want to control the paper. They want to make the single, biggest source of paper in Argentina (Papel Prensa) equally price their paper, and not have an unfair advantage to their owners. Cristina doesn't run an enterprise. The government is every one of us, and I'd like to be able to print 10.000 papers by paying the same competitive price that Clarín.

Don't forget Clarín's role on the Dictadura, let's make a toast for expropriation! [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Brindis_N...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Brindis_Noble_Videla.jpg)

Please, don't try to put all Kirchneristas in the same bag. The same goes for the opposition. The extremists from both sides will fling personal attacks all around, but there are a lot of people that enjoy having a discussion and trying to find the logic behind this whole clusterfuck of information crossfire. This discussion about the media is occurring all around the world (Brazil, Mexico are immense examples, I don't know much about the US). It's not that Cristina is Satan and woke up one day feeling bipolar (another stupid attack) and tried to destroy media concentration.

*: I also applaud and defend their right to consume a single source of information and blindly defend points that were heard in the background noise from a TV while they are having dinner. I understand the pain though. Trying to consume information and different takes on a story can be exhausting. "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."

I got a bit carried away, sorry for the wall of text!

<comment><USER5> I didn't compare current freedom of press to freedom during the Dictadura, I compared it to the years between Dicatura and the Kirchner.

I don't try to put all Kirchneristas in the same bag. I didn't even mention Kirchneristas.

And there are other monopolies (outside of the media), and Fibertel isn't the only internet company with issues. All of that was an excuse to single out Clarin. And the Kirchner didn't make too much of an effort to hide that really, they almost spelled that out clear in public speeches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where I live IDs are a fact of life. The government has got your picture, fingerprint, address, whatever. What's the big deal? Lying about your identity is a crime either way. Even if you don't have a national ID register, there is plenty of data to be gathered from your SSN, driver's license, business documents and countless other sources. It's unfeasible to run a civilized society without some kind of record. People expose much more dangerous information by themselves on facebook.

Americans seem to enjoy making a fuss over it - I guess when you can be arrested for basically any reason you really need the option to hide. It's not the IDs you should worry about...

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty much the same kind of database is going to be created in Israel, pushed forward by a single Member of Knesset, while ignoring advice from leading security experts. (see for example Adi Shamir, aka The "S" in "RSA.")

The law is currently in a two-year "trial" period (despite the fact that nobody bothered defining metrics and requirements for gauging the success or failure of the trial), following which it will become mandatory for every citizen under punishment of [possible] incarceration.

Let's just say I'm going to jail in two years...

<comment><USER8> I'd like to know more... Could you add some references?

<comment><USER7> A good starting point: <http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3816629,00.html>

Mentioning (briefly) Eli Biham's opinion on the database: <http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4069922,00.html>

Mentioning Adi Shamir's security suggestions: [http://innovya.com/2011/09/information-technology-israel- new...](http://innovya.com/2011/09/information-technology-israel-new- biometric-id-database-raises-significant-privacy-concerns/)

I've been unable to find an English source detailing the specifics of Shamir's suggestion to the Knesset. I'll add it here if I'm able to find one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my opinion, biometrics won't yield much more data about the average citizen than what is currently available in the wild.

The lack of personal information privacy in Argentina is astonishing. Having lived in other countries, I find it really scary that every retail store asks you for your DNI number the first time you make a purchase, and that public databases exist in the web with your address, phone number, date of birth, upper billing limit (with the CUIT number), etc.

What's also funny, a lot of software here use the DNI number as the primary key for their associates / customer / people tables.

Any other country would find this unnacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of Argentina's recent history:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War>

<comment><USER11> I've lived in Argentina for twenty years, and I have to say there's a huge qualitative difference between this and la guerra sucia.During those years, there was actual fear that if you fought against the dictatorship, your your family or our friends could disappear without a trace any day. Nothing like that is going on today. There's certainly repression and police brutality, and signs of a police state, but on a completely different level. A few days back I saw a list of people who allegedly where every single person that has died because of state mandated police action since the end of the dictatorship. The list is 66 people long. While this makes sick to my stomach, I have only to go to my college and look at the wall to see a list of people from that college that died during the dictatorship. That list has close to one hundred and fifty people on it. Just from one college. There's just no point of comparison. Most of this people simply banished, there corpses were never found, the women were probably raped, some of their kids taken and raised by the people who tortured them to death.

The current tendency towards a police state sucks, but I find it very hard to compare it with what happened between '76 an '83.

<comment><USER12> If you accept the police state now, you can expect that list to grow much larger than 66.

<comment><USER11> I don't accept anything, I just think the comparison between what is happening now and what happened in the '70s is flawed. The difference is humongous.

Not only because the number of people who died is smaller, but because there there's a huge difference between a person that is killed by a gunshot during a protest(violent or not, there were cases of both) and a person who just vanishes in the middle of the night and isn't heard of again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What technologies do you use to run your personal blog? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I use Hugo [0] as a static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterward you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean (starting with 5€ a month which scales well) [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

\- [0] [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

\- [1] [http://themes.gohugo.io/](http://themes.gohugo.io/)

\- [2] [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

\- [3] [https://www.digitalocean.com/](https://www.digitalocean.com/)

\- [4] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five- days/](https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/)

<comment><USER3> Or you can also use Netlify which has a ton of features. They're kind of taking static sites to the next level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Octopress, which is built on Jekyll. Unfortunately I bet on Octopress waaaay back in the day when it was essentially a very customized Jekyll install. This has led to a situation where updating to a newer release of Octopress, or even upgrading Jekyll itself is more or less a rewrite.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Jekyll as a static website generator. It hosted on GitLab Pages [0] with Let's Encrypt certificate for SSL.

[0]: [https://about.gitlab.com/features/pages/](https://about.gitlab.com/features/pages/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nothing. I have a Github page (and no im not using git to deploy), full html and I put my very simple but useful (for me) Javascript programs.

I have another page which is a LAMP stack but that is not actually a blog, just my applications for my use. But I am going to change it into Flask/Nginx. In time I am going to deploy all my Javascript into Flask too.

edit: wow, i said 'nothing'. I meant not anything fancy.

<comment><USER7> > I have a Github page (and no im not using git to deploy)

How else would you deploy to Github?

<comment><USER8> I think you can edit in-browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Svbtle.

The issue I have with "technologies" and self-hosted stuff is that I'm constantly tempted to tweak things. A hosted platform with limited customisation gives me boundaries and means I can focus on blogging instead of tweaking the CSS or JS or server configuration forever.

</comment><comment><USER10> Over the years I've remade my blog several times but these days I try to keep it as simple as possible to maintain. I've come to realize the biggest obstacle when it comes to putting my writing on the web is the tendency to get sidetracked tweaking the html/css instead of actually writing.

I write in Org-mode.

To generate the static files I use org-publish with some handspun emacs lisp on top.

For hosting, just GitHub pages.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hugo because it's blazingly fast and fits my publishing process (markdown & git). I still have some legacy Wordpress sites but the WP update and patch process is a security nightmare. Also WP reeks of surveillance capitalism and PHP has never been my cup of tea. Drupal is slightly better than WP (IMHO) but still: se-cu-re-tay is poor in Drupal core.

<comment><AUTHOR> By git, do you mean GitHub Pages?

<comment><USER11> GP sounds great, but I'm just using git to version content and then update to that version on the web host.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My blog uses Postleaf, hosted on GKE.

[https://stephenmann.io](https://stephenmann.io)

<comment><USER13> GKE? A bit too much?

<comment><USER12> It's not the only container I'm running. I also have the backend for a mobile app hosted there, my fiance's blog, and some other projects. An entire GKE cluster is definitely overkill for just a blog, but I use it for a lot more than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I generate it statically using Hugo

[https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Self hosted Ghost blog on DigitalOcean, I will change it to static site once I get enough traffic that crash my server

</comment><comment><USER16> Jekyll + AWS (S3 + Cloudfront + Route53)

[https://maxmautner.com/](https://maxmautner.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> LAMP and WordPress.

</comment><comment><USER18> Free blog hosting with custom domain and https.

\- Hugo

\- Travis CI

\- GitHub Pages

\- Cloudflare

</comment><comment><USER19> html + css + surge.sh</comment>


Stackpoint.io Joins the NetApp Family - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stackpoint.io/stackpoint-io-joins-the-netapp-family-d0712ad54e81 <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what the plans are for the pricing plans and packages - Stackpoint's entry level of $50/month is quite different from than Netapp's "Only pay for what you use:Just add 20% to the hourly cost of your compute instance per month" (from here: [https://cloud.netapp.com/kubernetes- service](https://cloud.netapp.com/kubernetes-service))</comment>


Five Minute Rule - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-minute_rule <comment><USER2> Not gonna lie. I thought this was a reference to how long you can leave food on the ground before picking it up and eating it.

<comment><USER3> I know you're kidding, but can anyone explain why people believe the 5 second rule?

The instant food falls to the ground it's going to pick up any dust / mites / microbes, so it will be no less and no more infected after 5 seconds. It's perplexing to me, what mental model explains how the food is cleaner during the first 4 seconds on the ground?

Edit: the Wikipedia article is pretty clear that any bacteria attach basically immediately (each of the cases when tested showed no difference after 5 seconds).

<comment><USER4> I believe in a indefinite period of time rule. The food might pickup dust / mites / microbes, so what? There are dust/mites/microbes everytime you breath. You probably swallow other people's shit particles several times a day. It's OK, you have an immune system that can deal with it. If you do (very very rarely) get an infection we live in magical times where an antibiotic pill will clear it right up. You could lick the floor at the sports stadium bathroom and you'll be OK. People need to stop it with the cooties crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are interested, read all 3 papers on this.

Jim Gray pubished the first paper, 5 minute rule in 1985 ([http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf))

In 1997, he (along with Goetz Graefe) published the followup - The Five-Minute Rule Ten Years Later ([http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/5_min_rul...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/5_min_rule_sigmod.pdf))

Goetz Graefe published the 2nd followup in 2008 - The Five-minute Rule: 20 Years Later ([https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1413264](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1413264))

</comment><comment><USER6> The note at the bottom about web pages is interesting. I always wish browsers followed that behavior so the "Work Offline" button would actually work when I got on a plane. I'd be happy to sacrifice 10GB+ of my SSD for the browser to permanently cache (at least for the life of the Cache-Control header).

I wonder how performant a proxy like Squid would be to run locally with a disk cache.</comment>


Most College Students To Take Classes Online by 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/10/28/most-college-students-to-take-classes-online-by-2014.aspx

<comment><USER2> And almost all of them will have to endure shitty software...

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends. I don't think a web interface will cut it. Professors will still need office hours or a chat interface. If this was actually the case, don't you think students could just as easily sit at home and read the book instead of going to class? At some point, the lack of teacher-student interaction is going to cause the quality of education to suffer. I imagine this would be unacceptable to universities that take their reputations seriously.

<comment><USER4> One of the roles of a good teacher is to be able to look at the face and body language of a student and think "he's not getting it, I'll try another approach."

Another is to draw a student out, or egg someone on, like a conductor.

There's also the subtle communication and enthusiasm that races around a small group of engaged people, that I doubt we'll ever be able to replicate online.

Giant 101 classes taught in auditoriums by RAs are probably good for online teaching, but I would generally feel that you better be cutting me a break on my tuition if I never see my professors' eyeballs.

"Oh, you went to the U of Whatever? When? What major? Hey, I think I was your professor! What'd you think of that blackboard app? Yeah, pretty shitty. So hey, did you pass my class?"

Not saying we shouldn't, just that we'll lose something valuable if we go all in.

<comment><USER5> I don't think there is much question that one-on-one tutoring is superior to small classes which are superior to large classes. I agree that, initially, large classes will be the target. But in the longer term, it comes down to economics. Universities keep getting more expensive -- their costs rises faster than inflation. Much of the cost of a university is the salaries of faculty and staff. The only real way to keep the cost down is to teach students in a different, more efficient way. So I wouldn't be surprised if most students end up being taught in ways that don't allow for things like assessing body language. I agree that it's better, but it's expensive.

<comment><USER6> Yes, Universities DO keep getting more expensive. This is troubling in it's own right, and needs to be looked at.

You don't get to say it's inflation, because it's rising faster than inflation.

You don't get to say, "we need more money because we need to hire more faculty and staff to serve all our extra students", because those extra students bring more money with them in the form of their tuition.

You can try to say, "we have more students, so we need to build more infrastructure", but I won't let you, because that's why bonds were invented, and they've been used for centuries for this purpose.

These universities are charging more because they can charge more. It's a bubble, and it's going to collapse like a bubble, which is a shame.

<comment><USER7> I'm afraid your bubble metaphor is too subtle for me. Educations aren't tradeable investments like houses and shares, so the value of an education does not depend on its potential selling price. Can you explain more about how you think the education bubble will collapse? What do you think will happen to tuition prices in the future? Will universities go out of business? Will the collapse benefit students, or will it harm them? How?

<comment><USER6> I don't know. I can predict doom, without knowing how it will come about. Nassim Taleb gets away with it, so why not me?

I can only say that these price rises seem artificial, by the reasoning I already mentioned. Artificially high prices == bubble, since artificially high (or low) prices are not sustainable.

I fear the collapse will hurt students. If it collapses like a bubble, than it will bring chaos, which can't be good for anybody, students or universities. As to how exactly, I can only guess. Perhaps everybody tries to do the online thing, which, as others have noted, can never be as good as having a flesh and blood professor. Perhaps it just finally rises to the point that people just can't afford it, and the colleges go bust due to lack of students. Perhaps there's a cultural shift away from the notion that college is the most important thing a person can save 20 years of savings for. I don't know, I just see prices that don't reflect reality and fear the worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not just cut out the whole "teaching" thing and mail the student a diploma based on payment of $70,000 and submission of SAT scores? If you get a 1600, your diploma will say "MIT". If you get a 1400, it will say "University of Illinois", etc.

That will save millions of dollars on writing software for online course administration (and associated support staff). Then the professors can focus on doing free corporate research instead!

And of course, the student is just as prepared for "the real world", and the Universities can build up their billion-dollar endowments and live off the interest. Everybody wins!

</comment><comment><USER9> Where are the best places to see "top lists," such as best online _____ programs (design, CS, etc.)?

<comment><USER10> Good question. People love rankings. What is the most prestigious online degree ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I took a hybrid course which is online but you meet with a real teacher once a week and my biggest problem was that we used blackboards software to do discussions and such and it was a terrible experience.

It made me wish I had just taken a normal course.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I was a student at the University of Washington I worked at the Business School's IT department for a couple years.

One of my jobs was to set up Blackboard course websites for instructors. It was about as much fun as filling out a tax return. Nothing but filling out forms, selecting options, and other monotonous things like that.

Using it in my classes was about the same experience. We really just used to it download the syllabus, assignments, and other documents the instructor posted. No one used the Discussion Board or any of the other Blackboard features.</comment></comment>