E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel - <AUTHOR> https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/25/e-e-cummings-advice/ <comment><USER2> Probably an unpopular perspective here,but, I look at feelings as something that must be understood with applied wisdom.

Feelings can be extremely deceptive,and self-deception is the worst kind. One should completely distrust and be hostile towars a "feeling" until one is confident he/she understands _why_ the feeling exists and is the way it is.

To add on that,we should strive to make conscious and intentional decisions, making sure we understand our own intent.

I am not saying emotions are bad or it's bad to say "I feel ..." But rather to know why you feel that way and _if_ you make a decision based on that feeling,make sure to be conscious of that _why_ behind the feeling.

<comment><USER3> > One should completely distrust and be hostile towards a "feeling" until one > is confident he/she understands why the feeling exists and is the way it is.

I get the impression this is a very common sentiment in the engineering community, actually - I was raised this way. In my family, step one of "digesting" a feeling was always understanding why you felt it. Someone told me recently that "your feelings do not have to make sense to be valid and action-worthy", and I was stunned — all these years no-one had told me. It is immensely true.

If you insist on understanding your feelings before taking them into account, I think it's easy to fall into the trap of disregarding ones you think you shouldn't have, or choosing not to act because rational beings rise above their feelings. There are also some feelings you may never understand, and you could spend years sitting around trying to grok them.

It is perfectly valid (at least to me) to say "I made this decision because I felt this way at this time." No further explanation required.

<comment><USER4> To continue that thought, intuition enters in engineering after several years: you see the work of someone else and think, "yuck." Often, I then search for a reason and voice that instead of "yuck," but it still starts with a feeling.

This is relevant because when you're hacking away, you can "feel" out the solution of a problem, instead of approaching it axiomatically (even if the latter is often useful)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone lived in a pretty how town //

with up so many antennas down //

bit by bit and byte by byte //

they laughed their is //

and cried their was //

smirked their are //

sneered the been //

//

//

then one day everyone died I guess //

and no-one stopped to book their face //

busy people buried them side by side //

all by all and deep by deep //

and dream by dream and sleep by sleep.

<comment><USER6> I like it! The original is a terrific poem and personally makes me feel some strong emotions not many poems do. I'll put it below:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

he sang his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn't they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few

and down they forgot as up they grew

autumn winter spring summer)

that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf

she laughed his joy she cried his grief

bird by snow and stir by still

anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones

laughed their cryings and did their dance

(sleep wake hope and then)they

said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon

(and only the snow can begin to explain

how children are apt to forget to remember

with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess

(and noone stooped to kiss his face)

busy folk buried them side by side

little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep

and more by more they dream their sleep

noone and anyone earth by april

wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)

summer autumn winter spring

reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars rain

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it just me, or is everyone starting to capital-case cummings' name again? Anyway, this reminds me of his poem, which is especially apt as someone who has to pay attention to syntax as part of my job:

        since feeling is first
        who pays any attention
        to the syntax of things
        will never wholly kiss you;
        wholly to be a fool
        while Spring is in the world

        my blood approves
        and kisses are a better fate
        than wisdom
        lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
        —the best gesture of my brain is less than
        your eyelids' flutter which says

        we are for each other: then
        laugh, leaning back in my arms
        for life's not a paragraph

        and death i think is no parenthesis

<comment><USER8> I like the poem. I also like this take on what we should do about capitalizing his name, it feels like it's as close as we can get to a rule: [http://eecpoem.pbworks.com/w/page/9068325/Decapitalization](http://eecpoem.pbworks.com/w/page/9068325/Decapitalization) ... Where he changed it, keep it changed, everywhere else, use standard capitalization.

<comment><USER9> I don't know about that. Should we also do such things w.r.t. gender pronouns? Current etiquette suggest that no, we should follow the preferences of the person on this. Why not then do the same about the _spelling of their name_?

<comment><USER8> I agree we should follow the preference. That's what I'm saying to do. My understanding from the link I posted is that EE Cummings did not want to always have his name lowercased: he chose to do it in certain contexts for specific artistic reasons. When we lowercase the name as though he intended to communicate something by having his name always be lowercase, we're creating an artistic statement for him that he never intended to make in the first place.

<comment><USER9> > _EE Cummings did not want to always have his name lowercased: he chose to do > it in certain contexts for specific artistic reasons_

On careful reading of the link, I can not find any support for the claim that he sometimes used a capitalized version of his name. If he did normally capitalize, and only used the lowercased version in artistic contexts, that would certainly give credence to your idea. But the link does not give any support for this.

<comment><USER10> Here is some support for the claim that he sometimes used a capitalized version of his name.

Quoting from [http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps2.html](http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps2.html) :

> As we may have mentioned, due to the kindness of D. Jon Grossman's son, > Jerome, we have the complete file of Jon's correspondence with Cummings. On > making a preliminary tour through these letters, we found Jon preparing a > French edition of his translations of Cummings' poetry, and on 27 February > 1951 he wrote to the poet: "are you E.E.Cummings, ee cummings, or what?(so > far as the title page is concerned)wd u like title page all in lowercase?"

> The poet replied on 1 March 1951: "E.E.Cummings, unless your printer prefers > E. E. Cummings/ titlepage up to you;but may it not be tricksy svp[.]"

> That seems definitive to us: _may it not be tricksy!_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really hard to truly be yourself. Comparison is the root of many problems.

</comment><comment><USER12> Emotions and feelings being a chemical imbalance of the brain causing irrational thought or actions. Yet this irrational thought is expressed, protected, and considered valid reason to justify actions in society.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if people acknowledged feelings yet did the rational thing ?

<comment><USER13> The problem is that emotions affect rationality - what is rationality even? You feel confident that your thoughts or actions are rational, but that too is an emotion.

To invoke Godwin's Law, the nazis were rational in their policy of exterminating certain people, they listed the traits and stereotypes and decided that the best course of action was to isolate and exterminate them. The US is rational in their policy to label terrorists as 'enemy combatants' and not respect the Geneva conventions when it comes to those.

Yes, underneath those is a certain type of hatred, the emotion, but for all I know that emotion is applied or assumed after the fact - that is, "surely they have to really hate someone do to that", instead of having to admit that it was a rational decision. I don't know which is worse, treating someone badly out of emotion or out of rationality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Real TLDR:

""" As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we're not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel. """ -ee cummings

</comment><comment><USER15> The article is striking in how similar his description on "becoming a poet" is to some insightful advice from Paul Graham and others I've read about "moral weight" and becoming an entrepreneur.

Both paths also promise a more enriching life.

<comment><USER16> I think you're confused. When poets talk about "enrichment" they mean spiritual enrichment.

<comment><USER14> I'm not so sure "confused" is exactly the term. "Hackers and Painters" was largely about mastery, less about wealth, and in many traditions, mastery of craft _is_ spiritual enrichment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Feelings are such a tricky thing.

I was raised to suppress them. Or, well, not even that. Feelings were so thoroughly suppressed in my family, that they never even featured. I must have learned that any expression of emotion gets me nowhere by the age of 0.5

In my 20s, throughout various failed relationships I began to re-examine what feelings are. Why did people (and, anecdotally, women) have so many feelings, of such strength and seemingly of such unpredictability?

It wasn't long until I decided to get therapy. To see what's lurking beneath.

Lo and behold, there were some feelings there. Lots of them surprisingly strong, yet hesitant to surface. It was a bizarre dichotomy to have to deal with. One that affects me to this day. It's like the stronger a feeling within me, the further it is hidden away, leading to this cat and mouse game of 'who am I?'.

Feelings offer a surprisingly absolute way to perceive the world. They are always there and they are always exactly what they are. So long as you allow yourself to feel them.

For the last decade I have been doing nothing but trying to feel more and more. This is still a lot less than most people. At the same time it makes me feel much more 'at home' in the world, it has made me able to connect with people better, it has reduced my stress and anxiety.

It has also lead to some other curious changes within me. I am feeling myself become more and more incompatible with the 'business world'. I know that's a very vague term, but I have found corporate culture and the striving for endless profits, no matter what the human cost, to be incredibly despiccable. Nauseating, icky. Misguided.

I wonder whether feelings and emotions provide a certain common ground for what a human being 'should be' or 'wants to be', which runs counter to capitalist incentive. After all, you want a herd of obedient workers, not uppity individuals causing trouble with their free spirited antics.

I should add that I am of German heritage and I feel there is an entire generation of people who have lived through historical events enabled almost entirely by the suppression and eradication of all feelings (apart from, ironically, hate and fear).

</comment><comment><USER18> Tldr, I was busy on Facebook.

<comment><USER19> TLDR, "Kids these days have no idea"</comment></comment>


Punch Card Programming (2013) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG2M4ttzBnY

<comment><USER2> This video actually shows a keypunch machine being used:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVwzYN6BP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVwzYN6BP4)</comment>


Ask HN: What's wrong with the HTML in this line? - <AUTHOR>

A friend of mine had to take a test for a job as a TV presenter that, strangely, had some HTML questions on it.  I guess the station has decided that everyone needs to know something about the web.
Anyway, one of them was "what's wrong with the HTML in this line:"
<p>(<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flip-MinoHD-Camcorder-Minutes-Black/dp/B001HSOFI2" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a>)</p>
As far as I can tell, there is NOTHING wrong with that line.  But am I missing something obvious? <comment><USER2> They may be objecting to use of target, which isn't allowed in html 4 strict as far as I remember. But if they're expecting TV presenters to hand-write html, that's a bit picky.

</comment><comment><USER3> I regard this as a chance to learn something about the technical details of HTML, so my answer whould not be regarded as definitive. Or even correct.

However ...

It depends on the variant of HTML, but surely "
" is not a, what's the technical term, container? In the variants of HTML that use
 you don't then have to have a
 because it's not of the open/close variety.

<comment><USER2> "Block element"? Yes it is. The "
" is optional, not banned.

<comment><USER3> OK, thanks. In what variants? And is it regarded as "Good Style" (whatever that might mean)

<comment><USER4> In XHTML, the
 is required. In HTML, some people prefer to close all tags for cleanliness; others prefer to leave the
 open. It's really a personal preference. Personally, I like the more minimal approach of leaving the closing tag out (one less thing to try to match up). Others like it to look like XML (everything closed).

As far as the original post's question -- that HTML snippet is perfectly fine.

<comment><USER5> I find unclosed tags to be ambiguous, hard to format, and that they lead to more errors, I'd be interested to see why you prefer working with the opposite, personal preference aside.

<comment><USER4> I don't leave _every_ tag open; just a few: tr, td, p, li.

To me, it's intuitive that when the next row/listitem/paragraph begins, the first one ends. So I think this is perfectly readable:

Item1

Item2

Item3

            Foo
            Bar
            Baz

            Foo
            Bar
            Baz

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's not a technical question, but a logical question.

It's a direct to product link labeled as a company link?</comment>


Reordering of reads in Java - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37240208/reordering-of-reads/37241534#37241534 <comment><USER2> Reading "Concurrency in Practice" and diving into these stuff is a good read for anyone doing Java. Possibly anyone doing x86 who hasn't dove down this deep before, although many lines would be boring.

On the flip side several of the "bad things" that the Java Memory Model allow won't happen on x86, and no one runs SPARC, so they are kind of moot...</comment>


Debian i386 architecture now requires a 686-class processor - <AUTHOR> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/05/msg00001.html <comment><USER2> The most recent CPU affected by this is probably the AMD Geode, which has had a stupidly long production run (and I think is still in production) for billions of embedded devices and doesn't _quite_ implement the full 686 instruction set.

<comment><USER3> I played with Geode and Debian some time ago (over one year, which means in the hazy past as far as I'm concerned --- not good with dates ;), and they were not supported already. I forgot the details and when it happened exactly, but they're not full 586 as expected by Debian i386 builds. Some needed instruction is missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like it is OpenBSD or FreeBSD for my old 200 mhz Pentium/MMX gateway box with 32 megs of memory. Which refuses to die.

</comment><comment><USER5> Intel Pentium not supported in Debian stretch???

That's really bad. There are people still using that, especially in academic environment.

<comment><USER6> I guess they mean the original Pentium. Is that still actively used?

<comment><USER5> Hm... I thought it was about the Intel Pentium series.

<comment><USER7> It is, the original one, the Pentium (translates roughly to '5') which actually gave a symbolical name to the _5_86

The name Pentium is now used for relatively cheap CPUs, these CPUs will remain functional, as they are not 586.

The following wiki page calls it "P5"-based CPUs. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_micropro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_microprocessors#P6_based_Pentiums)

<comment><USER2> The first 686 CPU was the Pentium _Pro_ , which despite the name was a full redesign. The earliest consumer variant would be the Pentium II.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Star Wars Hologram Vinyl - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEbAaL7fPl4 <comment><USER2> This is so cool!</comment>


Chip Startups Abandon Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/01/30/startups-abandon-moores-law/ <comment><USER2> Ubicom, a _12-year-old startup_ .... ?

</comment><comment><USER3> _Many consumer chips targeted at consumer applications, like those above, don't have to be that fast. Other types of chips that don't require speed as a differentiator, such as power management chips or RF chips that have antenna modifications, are also viable targets for older manufacturing processes._

It's the _long tail_ of lithography.</comment>


Is Walmart the Tipping Point on Masks? Let's Hope So - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-15/walmart-covid-19-mask-move-may-be-tipping-point-for-america <comment><USER2> > Politics have been getting in the way of Americans broadly adopting a > crucial preventative health measure: Wearing a mask in public

The experts got in the way. Fauci, the Surgeon General of the US, and the WHO all strongly discouraged masks for quite a while.

Fauci finally admitted:

"We were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply," Fauci told The Street. "We wanted to make sure the people, namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in harm's way to take care of people who you know were infected with coronavirus, and the danger of them getting infected. We did not want them to be without the equipment they needed."</comment>


Bragg Diffraction of Large Organic Molecules - <AUTHOR> https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.033604 <comment><AUTHOR> >Physicists Find a New Way to Reveal The Strange, Wave-Like Nature of Massive Molecules

[https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-find-a-new-way-to- sh...](https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-find-a-new-way-to-show-massive- organic-molecules-behaving-like-waves)</comment>


How small game makers found their community with Bitsy (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/23/how-small-game-makers-found-their-community-with-bitsy/ <comment><USER2> (2018)</comment>


Guide to speaking at tech conferences - <AUTHOR> https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/ <comment><USER2> Duplicating a comment I posted on a previous conference thread that is even more relevant here:

"... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers. Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors.

Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.

I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently)." ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372))

<comment><USER3> I was particularly disappointed with re:Invent for this reason. Everything I attended could be found in blogs that had been published for years and very few "higher level" sessions that were still very trivial. Most of those weren't even discussions, just follow a lab sheet that you won't have time to finish or doesn't work at the time. I'm not sure if it was always this way, but the only people who seem to benefit at all are those in sales-oriented position. It is basically only good for meeting people and you may as well just skip all of the actual content to pursue that.

It was the first real conference I've attended (luckily not at my expense) and will likely be my last.

<comment><USER4> I worked as an AWS instructor (not for AWS directly, for one of the big technology training companies) a few years ago. Some of the other instructors had been to numerous re:invents and said that the two real reasons to go were:

* Networking with other attendees

* Getting to meet face to face with AWS employees

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although I have no interest in speaking at a tech or any conference,the sheer amount of work put in meant that I had to check it out. Good work mate.

You should really add the ability to exchange email for a downloadable PDF of the guide. And that bottom bar that slides in "20+ new CFPs every week", it won't close no matter how many times I click on x. Browser: Chrome.

Cheers, Ace.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up, and I appreciate the kind words.

I interviewed over 30 speakers myself, plus read through several dozen articles to compile this guide.

I will eventually offer a PDF download option, but I wanted to start off by putting it out there for free to the public. After I've made some revisions and improvements and it's a bit more stable I'll go the ebook route too.

Thanks again!

<comment><USER6> Look forward to reading it as it's something I do a lot of. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd long since forgotten I created a gist for speaking resources, but I've added this and a few other links, and cleaned up some older broken (sigh) links:

[https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837](https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837)

</comment><comment><USER8> The useful information (IMO) starts from section 3: [https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/how-conferences- choo...](https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/how-conferences-choose/)

</comment><comment><USER9> A variant of reason #11 is that you improve your own skills by being able to teach it to others. That is why course tutors are people who have recently taken a course. The material and obstacles are fresh in their minds.

</comment><comment><USER10> In the list of 11 reasons people speak at conferences, I can't help but see that a good 7 of them or so are vanity related. I think this is the number 1 reason I don't speak at conferences (and probably the number 1 reason I find conferences to be of very limited utility).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is a fair critique. Many people who are drawn to public speaking probably tend toward the "vain" side of the personality spectrum.

Anecdotally, I acted in a play when I was in college. Almost every person in it was studying acting, and the level of self-absorption was overpowering at times.

All that said, speakers and topics are only a small portion of what I find valuable about attending a conference anyway. Most of the opportunity for learning and advancement comes in meeting other people you wouldn't have been able to connect with otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Whether or not it's vanity, there's an element of enjoying being in the public eye--at least in some contexts. If someone really doesn't like being publicly visible they're mostly going to self-select out of being a speaker unless they have some other compelling motivation for doing so.

Whether or not it comes naturally or it's a persona they've developed for professional reasons, most public speakers like the energy of the crowd or other audience. (Personally, I'm much more comfortable live than on video-- which is a somewhat different skill.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you for creating this, I've already shared it with a few people

</comment><comment><USER12> Wonderful work. Hopefully this will go a long way toward accomplishing my related new years resolution to speak at tech conferences :)!

<comment><USER13> Eventually ideas like this always eat theirselves. The "speaking at conference" meme is now thoroughly eaten; there's a cottage industry of bullshit around the whole thing. People do it now to advance their careers and achieve an extremely modest amount of e-fame. Most talks are pointless. It's people giving talks to give talks about helping other people give takls about giving talks for their boss's arbitrary stipulation that giving talks is a required feature for "team lead" engineers, etc..

<comment><USER14> It's a goal of mine to speak at a conference so that I can have a photograph of myself speaking at a conference for my LinkedIn profile.

<comment><USER6> I assume you're being sarcastic. But, if not, that's a pretty bad reason.

I've been pretty critical with some other comments on this thread but I actually agree that naked self-promotion is not a good reason to give a conference talk.

<comment><USER15> It's actually a great reason if you're optimising for the amount of money you make in a career in big business. Which is entirely the point of this thread.

<comment><USER6> If that's your only motivation, I'm guessing you're not going to do a great job. There are exceptions of course.

<comment><USER16> Although there are many people out there who do good jobs based only on their love of what they are doing I believe this number is dwarfed by the number of people doing good jobs for money.

I bet the number of people doing bad jobs based only on their lover of what they are doing is also dwarfed by the number of people doing bad jobs for money, but it would be nice to see stats on these things.

Still, since I only do jobs for money almost everyone I've ever interacted with that was doing a job good or bad was also doing it for money. I suppose the parent comment might do pretty good dependent on how well they are actually motivated by money and their skills.

<comment><USER6> There's a vast gulf between being motivated _only_ by money and being motivated _only_ by love of what you're doing. I enjoy my work, including speaking, most of the time. But if someone weren't paying me to do it I would be--at a minimum--much much more selective about what I took on.

<comment><USER16> sure I like programming also, but I realized some years ago when I got my first really big consultant paycheck that a lot of the stuff I used to hate about working just flew out the window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Speaking at conferences is a strong urge in the dev community. Some do it because they want to improve their public speaking skills or to prove something to themselves ('I can be as outgoing as the marketing guy next door, har har'). Or to improve their market value.

In my early days, I had also this urge but it's wrong. The whole post is wrong. Ask yourself WHY you want to speak at tech conferences. What's the aim of your speech? Most of the times and most people don't have an answer.

You want to have nice Google SERPs on your name?

Why?

To increase your personal market value?

You think one speech is enough?

Not at all. You need so much more. A topic, more than your vim config or some Github repo which got five stars. You need achievements, first. You need a damn story, a sharp profile. Then go out and hold 10 talks/year, shotgun Google's video search with your talks. I promise you, once you have a good story, public speaking is easy, it feels like talking. But if you don't have anything to tell you sound like the odd & boring AWS sales guy who wants to sell some new overpriced AWS service and paid for the speaking slot.

And be aware that public talks don't necessarily improve your market value. One so-so talk on Youtube about your vim config at some third-class conference is worse than nothing. Besides, most tech conference are third-class created by some greedy local meetup tycoon rebranding his useless meetups. The best is that the meetup tycoon gets free content, YOU on stage, on Youtube, for a crappy conference he sold tickets for 500 bucks. He doesn't care if the entire world makes fun of your speech about your vim config.

I remember one guy who did music with hard-coded JS decades ago, not impressive, maybe a bit interesting. This guy was on several speaking gigs with always the same topic, his stupid JS music. After the third time I saw him, I started to hate him, I swore to never hire this person. Remember, speaking can backfire if you don't have a topic.

I've another guy: Jared, he wrote amazing Formik, a great lib. His talks though are so-so, promoting his company (I think it's just a shell for him freelancing) too much and yeah not on par with his repo. When seeing his talks on a shabby meetup, my first thought was, better fix your repo's issues instead of doing this self-promotion. Again: it backfired and didn't improve his market value. Rather the opposite, before I thought Formik, Jared, the king. Once I saw the speaches, OMG, Jared got jarring.

I rather prefer a cozy Youtube video on a living room couch on Svelte like from the Youtuber Harry Wolff (highly recommended!!! => [1]). Good speakers like Harry are entertainers, they understand to be authentic without even trying and it's hard to deconstruct what they do right.

So, public speaking skills are overrated. It's enough to be able to moderate a meeting/standup for 10-50 people. To do proper speaking, you need to do it frequently, you need to understand entertainment, you need to get deeply into story telling, how to plot narratives, sometimes you need script writers, media trainers and you MUST be in shape, no need to look like James Bond but getting on keto few weeks before sounds like a plan.

If you still think you should be a public speaker, test if you have the basics for being a good entertainer. Do internal presentation at your company, bigger ones where you invite multiple departments, do Youtube videos, screen recordings. Test how people react on your voice, on your appearance, your jokes, If you see positive signals or slight growth, continue.

Otherwise just don't. Public speaking is a profession and imagine a public speaker who wants to pair-program with you in C++. I mean why not? If you can hold a speech he should be able to write some kernel code.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPVQ3M9b6CY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPVQ3M9b6CY)

<comment><USER18> I'm an occasional lurker here but I created this account because of this comment as it represents what is so annoying about this community sometimes.

What exactly are you aiming to achieve with this comment? Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all.

> In my early days, I had also this urge but it's wrong. The whole post is > wrong. Ask yourself WHY you want to speak at tech conferences. What's the > aim of your speech? Most of the times and most people don't have an answer.

Who are you to say it's wrong? Even if people are doing it for the wrong reasons, the fact that they are doing it means that this post is relevant to them. To call the post "wrong" is so arrogant and adds nothing to the contribution. All it does is give you a useless delusion of grandeur that makes you think you know better than this author, or those that find value in the post.

> \- To increase your personal market value? You think one speech is enough? > Not at all. You need so much more. A topic, more than your vim config or > some Github repo which got five stars. You need achievements, first. You > need a damn story, a sharp profile. Then go out and hold 10 talks/year, > shotgun Google's video search with your talks.

This makes no sense. If you're still advocating for eventually going to give talks, why did you start off by calling this post wrong when it gives advice to people that want to speak?

> And be aware that public talks don't necessarily improve your market value. > One so-so talk on Youtube about your vim config at some third-class > conference is worse than nothing. Besides, most tech conference are third- > class.

This sounds like a personal problem for you. And no, one so-so talk on Youtube about your vim config at some third-class conference isn't necessarily worse than nothing

> Public speaking skills are overrated. It's enough to be able to moderate a > meeting/standup for 10-50 people. To do proper speaking, you need to do it > frequently, you need to understand entertainment, sometimes you need script > writers, media trainers, etc.

If you're moderating a meeting with 10-50 people, good public speaking skills will go a long way into making the meeting worthwhile for the attendees.

I have no relation to the author of this post, but it's jarring seeing comments like that throw away nuance and kindness, and let out arrogant statements all under the guise of intellectualism.

<comment><USER19> Long term lurker as well, but your comment comes off in bad faith. When you decide to try and break apart each point piece by piece to address, instead of his whole argument as a whole, it signals that you're only trying to argue for arguement's sake. Please don't do this, because it ruins the vibe.[0]

In one enormous post, you have managed to tip-toe the line of civility with passive aggression, but also outright hostility "so arrogant," that it comes into question whether or not the GP's comment was directed at your specific demogrpahic: people that do things because they feel they want to, and not because they have thought it through.

Perhaps you should ask yourself the same question: "What exactly are you aiming to achieve with this comment?"

From an onlooker's perspective, it comes off as needlessly aggressive, but without clear motive. One could say the only purpose of your comment was to express that aggression, and not to spur interesting or novel dicussion.

In that likely case, you are posting in bad faith, and as you said "sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all."

[0] I've been around message boards since usenet. This behavior isn't new, and neither is it appreciated.

<comment><USER18> If your assessment is that my comment was to express aggression, that would be correct. I thought about what I was trying to achieve and I felt that I didn't owe the OP any grace, since he failed to extend grace to the author of the post. My goal was to express how I felt about the OP's comment as directly as I could, so they could perhaps consider it the next time they want to make another comment like that. Whether or not being less aggressive would make my point more useful is a separate discussion, but at the time of writing the comment, I opted for a bit of aggression.

And FYI, I've not spoken at any conference and I have no interest in speaking at one, so I don't think the comment was directed at my demographic, I just found it to be distasteful.

<comment><USER19> I thank you for expressing self-awareness and civility in your reply.

Emotions are what make us human. Complex expressions of neural impulses that manifest as many different feelings which move us to action. However, like any other impulse, the understanding of and their proper utilization, always brings greater utility to one's life.

We can all agree that unbridled emotional expression -- that is the actions those emotions move us to do -- can become harmful by their unchecked nature. We can also all agree that emotions have a purpose, and to repress them is not the best of decisions.

Then perhaps there is a useful middle ground. Call it, "emotion, but in moderation." That by stepping back and analyzing our emotions, what caused them to appear, and why we feel the way we feel, we can in-turn make better, more productice decisions.

What flowers from this post, is of no concern of mine, but I felt moved to plant these seeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> These threads always bring out the jealous introverts getting mad at more outgoing people that are able to speak in public.

Guys you can do it too, really. It's not that hard.

<comment><USER21> Introverts can be, and often are, very outgoing. They just find it exhausting and need time alone afterwards to recharge.

I have an evergreen recommendation that anyone who wants to understand want introvert, extravert, and ambivert _really_ mean should read Quiet by Susan Cains.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would you build if you had access to health data? - <AUTHOR>

My company is in "health insurance" industry, and basically we have a large amount of health insurance claims data from various insurance funds.
This consists of hospitals, members, doctors, service providers and the various claims, which were made over the last couple of years.
We also have list of service providers, hospitals, doctors, members, their location, birthday etc.
If you put your developer/hacker hat on, and if this data was available to you, what kind of COOL things would you want to build? I'd love to hear some suggestions. <comment><USER2> I'll tell you what the State would be interested in: Suspicious prescription activity. Unjustifiable amounts of Oxycontin prescribed by providers or gotten by individuals. You might not know how big Oxy abuse is. A pill -- one pill -- fetches $30 on the street at a minimum. I don't understand this addiction. I've had to use Oxy for pain relief and have never missed it after having the pain relieved. Anyway, this is something of interest but I don't know if you want to be in the rat business.</comment>


HTC One and the harsh reality of the Android ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/05/22/htc-one-and-the-harsh-reality-of-the-android-ecosystem/

<comment><USER2> I am a proud owner of the HTC One and absolutely love the device. I've owned a few HTC devices in my life (Apache 6700, Hero, Touch Pro, Evo 3D, and now the One) and have never been disappointed. Excellent build quality and a sleek look.

<comment><USER3> I also own an HTC One; my first Android device was the HTC G2, another unique and well-built Android device that was under-appreciated by the market (it had a pure AOSP build, even!).

But these devices are not the reasons why HTC is failing. For too long, they have been pushing crap device after crap device onto the market in search of low-end customers. The MyTouch 3G, the Droid DNA, the One V, and now the First are examples of this failed strategy; and there are countless others.

Samsung can get away with its low-end offerings because it has one flagship that it throws all of its marketing weight behind. HTC has only recently begun this strategy with the One, but I fear that this decision has come too late.

HTC should be doing what Apple and Samsung do: one flagship device per year, with the largest marketing budget you can afford. Samsung won mindshare by portraying itself as Apple's underdog; now that Samsung is huge, HTC has the same opportunity. And its industrial design prowess is an advantage that Samsung does not have.</comment></comment>


Startup Death Clock - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupfoundry.com/deathclock/ <comment><USER2> We have a death clock on our company dashboard. Cash on hand/burn rate/revenue are updated a couple of times a month manually. We have yet to figure out a way to get the data programmatically.

<comment><USER3> What do you use for accounting?

If you use something like Xero.com then you can use their API to poll for the data whenever you want (though likely daily unless you're also performing reconciliation via the API).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last time there was noise about startup death clocks (let me find the link to the last discussion later), I thought it was a good idea but not at all what I wanted. What I wanted was to be able to plug in the actual income/outgoing for individual months/days and be able to see when the trend lines change, or choose which time frames to calculate over, and not just to determine "when will I run out of money?" but also "when will I become rich?" using the trend of the last month, six months, year, total, what have you. Not only that, but early in a startup, in/out costs can be highly variable month to month.

So I implemented some basic java scripts to record and update incoming and outgoing transactions and I realized as I was starting to put data in, that I would much rather not input all transactions but just get the data from my bank.

Then I realized that this would be much better as a plugin for a ledger/budget balancer program, or for something like mint.com. And I kind of abandoned progress on it there, as I don't use mint, and I started looking at various programs to help me track money but realized that keeping a spreadsheet of "money at start of month, money at end of month", still works fine for me, and with some macros I can determine what I want to know.

So... for some one who does use these programs, would a plugin (or just a script on exported data) be worth it? Should I learn to use mint or gnucash or whatever for this?

<comment><USER5> I posted my app here last week and lots of people liked it: <https://zetabee.com/cashflow/> \- I use it for my personal expenses but you should be able to use it for a small business.

<comment><USER6> Neato. Feature suggestion: add a waterfall chart.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Try entering anything with monthly revenue >= monthly expenses.

<comment><USER8> Bootstrapped, profitable, and proud!

<comment><USER9> try entering monthly revenue == monthly expenses

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> $2000 in revenue a month and I'm 37 signals? I'm flattered :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Please don't superscript the "1/2".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> P.S. Little easter egg - Watch the clock as you plug in your numbers.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you accidentally mouse down on the page and begin selecting things (I do this habitually), Chrome will begin scrolling right, and then you're unable to scroll back without doing the same in the inverse. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER13> Meh. All I get is "37Signals?".

<comment><USER14> Yeah I don't really follow either.

        if(revenue >= expenses && expenses != ''){
            $("#time").html("37signals");

<comment><USER15> This might explain it for you: <http://www.quora.com/Is-37signals-a-lifestyle- company-Why>

<comment><USER16> Oooooooh! I get it now. According to this death-clock, my larger than small but smaller than medium company that is making very good money is a lifestyle company, like 37signals is. Actually, that's true! But do me a favor, don't tell anyone that. Please don't tell my hard-working and talented employees, for whom I am very grateful. Please don't tell my friends and siblings or my vendors. Let's just keep this between you and I. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Apparently since we're earning money, we're 37signals.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm working on a death clock right now. It's called the yearly budget for our non-profit grant funded project.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is this an ad for 37Signals? They're the only startup with revenue exceeding expenses? I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Haha this is hilarious! Reminds me of the death clock that was so popular forever ago - oh man, it's still alive and kicking! <http://www.deathclock.com/>. Wonder how much that guy made all these years.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you type in enough 9's in the "cash on hand" slot, the "middle box" will get out of bounds. Should add some JS to make the fonts a bit smaller when there are too much symbols in the row ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed this too but I figured if you have enough "9's" in the bank, you probably don't need to use a Startup Death Clock :)

<comment><USER22> I just amused myself by figuring out when rounding would kick in, I set the delta of cash in and cash out to 100 and put in 99.99 then just began appending 9's to the end until it switched from 'now' to 'one month' never has .000000000000009$ mattered so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We've been using a similar death clock in a spreadsheet, but it calculates the date that we go broke. Nothing to fire you up like impending doom!

Not sure why a break even company == 37signals though...

</comment><comment><USER24> This doesn't work for me in any browser at all.. clock just spins around and message says: is your startup 37signals? Or I have missed the joke.

<comment><AUTHOR> You might have caught me mid-upload on a script. Sorry about that it's working now.

<comment><USER24> You're most probably right, works now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 200 revenue, 200 expense, 5 in bank == 37 signals?

</comment><comment><USER26> o.O It says ours is dead "Now?" hah. nope money ain't the only factor.

</comment><comment><USER27> If only it were this simple.

<comment><USER28> Please elaborate.

If you aren't making enough money to cover your expenses, and you have no cash on hand, how are you still in business?

<comment><USER29> Because if you spend $100 a month and make $200 a month, you're profitable, but by no means living off that money (at least in the US).

<comment><USER30> Sure, but if you absolutely need to take a salary, why not just include that in the expenses?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Color.com

revenue: 0

expenses: $100k/mo (who knows, but let's err on high side)

cash: $41m

dead in: 34 years

nothing at all wrong with their raise. nothing at all.

<comment><USER32> $100k/mo is high? They have 7 founders and a 400k domain name.. I bet they burn more than that.

 _Edited: I should add that yes, 100k/mo is high for a normal startup. :-)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> dead in 1 years?

Is that Julia Allison grammar?

<comment><USER34> Fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is this another sign that we are entering a Web 2.0 bubble? You bet it is!

37 signals is sending an awesome message to the community; one that emphasizes that you don't need millions of funding and that net income is your #1 objective as a business owner. Make more money then you spend. End of story.

I love the message.</comment>


In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 <comment><USER4> The original article - [http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head- huntin...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big- data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html) Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz.

Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

<comment><USER5> We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?

<comment><USER6> 1\. when I go to this link: [http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous- brainteaser...](http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteasers- were-completely-useless-for-hiring/)

It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.

2\. In general, people would rather read the real article instead of a summary of the article. When someone submits a summary of an article to a site like HN or reddit, it is usually flagged as blog-spam because we'd rather read/support the original content than a summary with questionable value.

3\. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page to get rid of all the sidebars, comments, ads. Look at the print preview page: it is not possible to get less distraction free than that. Any other format has more distractions.

Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best information architecture in the business. These are the guys who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head- hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big- data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&pagewanted=print)

4\. Some visual issues I had with quartz:

4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.

4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.

4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.

4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen that convey no useful information to me.

You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to have your business model and be as distraction free as possible. The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.

<comment><USER5>
      1. ... It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.

It shows one article initially. It will load the next one as you scroll down and approach the end. This is not counted as a Page View unless you actually continue down into it - you'll notice the URL change at that point)

      2. In general, people would rather read the real article
      instead of a summary of the article.

I would argue that this is a "real article". The NYT piece were 8 questions and answers. This article is based on just one of those questions - <USER2> expands on it. I'm not an editor/write so I'll avoid going deeper but thats my take-away.

      3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page...

Tru dat.

      Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best
      information architecture in the business. These are the guys
      who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.

I used to work there :)

      4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:
      4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.

The Featured Image (between Headlines and Text) is meant to be full-width to a max. Inline images should have left/right whitespace

      4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.

Can you email me a screenshot (email in profile)? There are a few Firefox specific bugs we're working on this week. This may be one of them.

      4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen
      all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.

True. Intentional. It can be expanded which reveals the large site map. There are big pros and cons to hiding it. Its an on-going conversation.

However we used to have it disappear altogether and people complained about that too....

      4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen
      that convey no useful information to me.

Its a list of Headlines - thats all that is meant to be conveyed.

      You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible,
      but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to
      have your business model and be as distraction free as possible.
      The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.

I'm confused. That doesn't make much sense to me. Yes, I am saying that we intend to be "distraction free as possible" \- I'm not sure that I have to add a big asterisk * that covers "within the confines of an ad based business model" any more than I should also add "within the confines of a browser running a web site thats not a book" \- I'm not trying to be snarky, just hard know what to make of what you said exactly..

Also - take a look at the ads... do we have them all over the place? Nope - <USER3> have them at the end of an Article - not in-between, not embedded, not inline. Thats important.

We are not perfect, but we aspire to continuously improve. Focus is on the user and the reading experience but with recognition that we have to pay the bills for 20 or so editors and journalists across five (maybe more?) countries. (I'm not counting devs, sales, hr etc in that)

<comment><USER7> The pages also won't show in my favorite Android HN client: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksoftware.hackernews). I always have to open in a browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand people's problem with estimating. It's a useful skill. Perhaps it would be better if the questions actually related to technology, rather than golf balls - but the principle is the same.

For instance - "how many hard drives does Gmail need?" requires a rough guess of how many users Gmail has (if you're interviewing at Google, you should know it's 1e8-1e9). How much space each one takes (probably nowhere near a gigabyte on average - let's say 1e8 bytes). And that the current capacity of hard drives is (1e12 bytes).

Then you can say that they probably need 1e5 hard drives, link it to redundancy, availability, deduplication, backups etc. You can comment that it's feasible to build a datacenter with that many hard drives.

No one cares that the actual number is 12,722 - but you've demonstrated a broad set of knowledge about the current state of technology. Saying "dunno - a billion?" is not going to get you anywhere, and with good reason.

The Monopoly question is crap, though.

I'd like to know how useful [http://google-tale.blogspot.com/2008/07/google- billboard-puz...](http://google-tale.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-billboard- puzzle.html) was.

<comment><USER9> The problem is, the interviewers often judge how accurate your estimation is, and not the fact that you know (the highly flawed) Drake Equation.

These estimates are completely useless in real life, because in real life nobody guesses how many drives you need for GMail, or how many gas stations there are in LA.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure where you've worked, but doing resource estimation for projects has been pretty important for most greenfield projects I've worked on.

It's also good for sanity testing, it's a useful skill to be able to spot that something is out by an order of magnitude as it can allow you to catch problems early on.

<comment><USER9> Data-backed estimation is completely different from random guesses you will make during an interview.

Not only that, even if your guesses are decent, multiplying them can drive you orders of magnitude in the wrong direction.

<comment><USER10> The underlying data might be different but the process is the same, you need to figure out what are the contributing factors, how they relate and establish an upper and lower bounds for the values you're assuming.

Once you have data you can make corrections to those bounds, but other than that the process is the same.

It's a skill that a lot of first time startup founders lack. They have no-idea how to estimate the market size for their startup, you need to understand the process of how to build an estimation model.

<comment><USER11> Process is not the same, in one case you have real data, in the other one you pull the data out of your arse.

<comment><USER10> It sounds like you build estimation models by looking at the data you have and combining it together to try and figure out your goal.

The disadvantage with that approach you often end up missing factors (because you don't have the data to hand) and end up with a suboptimal model.

In the same way that a lot of startups end up analyzing user behaviour by page analytics rather than user analytics simply because Google gives them page analytics.

It's a good idea to know how to do both top-down and bottom-up estimation models, as best practice is to make estimations using several different models and compare the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a crutch. Nobody knows how to interview. Interviewing properly is a lot of work. There are two people who can do interviews--people who have knowledge of the job and people who have time to interview--and they are so infrequently the same people. These sorts of things were appealing because they were easy, a way to not spend a lot of time on interviewing, or a way to not need a lot of knowledge about the job.

And these things are important, because job candidates are not people, they are OEM replacement parts being order from Pep Boys. Call up the recruiter and requisition a J6-252: Programmer, seasoned 5 years, with degree from MIT. Oh, those ones are too expensive. Guess I'll take the knock-off version, but I refuse to pay full price!

Hopefully, because it's Google saying it, everyone will cargo-cult on this bandwagon too.

</comment><comment><USER13> From the original New York Times article that Quartz has linkspammed here: "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

Long before this was reported in the New York Times, this was the finding of research in industrial and organizational psychology. A valid hiring procedure is a procedure that actually finds better workers than some different procedure, not a hiring procedure that some interviewer can make up a rationale for because it seems logical to the interviewer. We have been discussing home-brew trick interview questions here on Hacker News for more than a year now.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879803)

Brain-teaser or life-of-the-mind interview questions do nothing but stroke the ego of the interviewer, without doing anything to identify job applicants who will do a good job. The FAQ on company hiring procedures at the Hacker News discussion linked here provides many more details about this.

<comment><USER5>
      From the original New York Times article that Quartz has linkspammed

No, this is Linkspan:

      Link spam is defined as links between pages that are present for
      reasons other than merit.[9] Link spam takes advantage of
      link-based ranking algorithms, which gives websites higher
      rankings the more other highly ranked websites link to it.
      These techniques also aim at influencing other link-based
      ranking techniques such as the HITS algorithm.

Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkspam#Link_spam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkspam#Link_spam)

Lets be clear, there is link-spam and then there is writing an original piece based on information from elsewhere.

The NYT article is about 8 questions and answers from a HR person at Google.

The "puzzle" aspect is 1 of those 8 questions.

From that Quartz references that, links directly to the piece and then expands upon it and links out to other relevant and related information.

<comment><USER14> I think you should have made it clear in this comment that you work for Quartz.

<comment><USER5> I take it for granted so I forget - but I think its spelt out very very clearly in my profile so I don't have to put an * every time I comment.

<comment><USER14> What percentage of readers of your comment do you think click through to your profile?

Of the comments you read, what percentage do you view the profile of the author of?

<comment><USER5> I take your point. I click through to most people - but I do not think that is the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are questions that are actually fun and I can sort of see them starting a conversation with the right kind of interviewer that tells both parties a lot about who they're dealing with. From the article:

      > How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Basic economics estimating - probably not that useful and a bit dull, but hey why not. At least the problem has several angles to it that might be fun to explore.

      > Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco

That's a nice one. Kind of open-ended, a lot of things to consider, a lot of ideas to be had.

      > How many times a day does a clock's hands overlap?

Why? What happens to the interview after you counted them (possibly on a whiteboard)? It's a dead end and the question is dull.

      > A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

Now this has the potential to be great or absolutely horrible, depending on the intent behind the question and the nature of the interviewer. If it's taken as a "fill in the blanks" kind of challenge it would be a fun way to explore the candidate's imagination. But I'm guessing it's not. It's probably one of those "clever" questions that have only one "right" answer that makes no real sense except creating a few moments of uncomfortable silence.

      > You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so
      > as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender.
      > The blades will< start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Again, this could be a fun physics and chemistry question and I see a couple of possible solutions that might or might not work out - might be fun exploring them. But again, it _sounds_ more like a trick question with one standardized answer. Bad.

The problem with trick questions and standardized answers is that the nature of the question makes the candidate uneasy and even if they eventually figure it out, nobody will have learned anything during the process. It's more like a hazing, not a hiring interview.

<comment><USER16> > A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

horrible question, it took me a few seconds to figure out they are talking about the game Monopoly.

<comment><USER17> Not sure what the point of this question is. It seems all it does is to test whether the candidate has heard of Monopoly.

<comment><USER18> I'm familiar with Monopoly and I didn't think of Monopoly when I read the question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've never seen any citation that Google _ever_ used these kinds of question. Especially the idiotic one about pushing a car to a hotel. I think it was just an urban legend and a good piece of linkbait.

There must be thousands of people on HN who interviewed at Google over the years. Did anyone ever get a question like this?

<comment><USER20> From the article

> "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of > time"

That implies Google has some data to back it up, whether they themselves previously asked those types of questions, or they derived it from some other means. Either way, they aren't doing themselves any favors to dispel that urban legend. Most reading that will just assume they used to ask brainteasers, but no longer.

<comment><USER21> Yes, it's a rather strange objection to make... How could Google possibly use data on its employees to disprove that brainteasers work - if they weren't using brainteasers at some point?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I interviewed at Google 5 years ago they weren't using those brainteasers.

There are many posts online about the actual, CS-y questions that you can expect in a Google interview, I had just assumed that the mentions of brainteasers were merely urban legend.

<comment><USER23> I've interviewed at Google. Years, years ago. I didn't get the job. Similarly, no brainteasers, but something worse: they made me write syntactically correct code on a whiteboard. I have never written code without using a keyboard; turns out, I just didn't have the neural pathways for anything else. My brain kinda seized up. I specifically recall failing to recognise the fibonacci sequence (especially horrifying given that I read mathematics at Edinburgh). Things went downhill from there.

Ever since, whenever I've interviewed someone, I ask them to demonstrate their strengths to me first.

<comment><USER24> What do you mean by "read mathematics at Edinburgh"?

<comment><USER25> It's standard (or slightly pretentious) British English; I guess the US equivalent would be "majored in math at Edinburgh" (which would be equally incomprehensible to a Brit)

<comment><USER26> It's not really pretentious – it kinda depends on what university you went to. I typically say 'studied', but my friends who went to other unis say 'read'. I would take 'read' as a pretentious term.

<comment><USER27> > It's not really pretentious

> I would take 'read' as a pretentious term.

I'm confused...

<comment><USER28> I think he meant "wouldn't". It's not pretentious per se, it just would be interpreted that way to an American because we wouldn't use that phrasing, therefore we can only imagine it being spoken in an upper-class English accent, pinky fully extended.

<comment><USER23> Quite so. Having been raised by the BBC World Service I actually do have a somewhat received pronunciation, albeit gently deflected by many years abroad.

The disposition of my pinky, however, shall remain a mystery.

<comment><USER28> If only it were tea time in Australia. Blast, foiled again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was contacted by a Google recruiter a few months ago, I had no intention of changing my day job at the time, but for shits and grins I went through a couple phone interviews. The position they were hiring for wasn't an area I have any experience in (the recruiter had made a mismatch), but I thought the questions were reasonable for somebody who works in that field and were kind of fun. They were quizzy, but could be practical. It was a management position so there weren't any coding questions, but things like basic cost estimating that sort of thing.

I had fun and wouldn't mind it again, it didn't feel like a bunch of stupid random brain teasers like I've experienced before (how many t-shirts would it take to make sea worthy sail? why are manholes round?) etc.

<comment><USER30> "It was a management position so there weren't any coding questions"

Interesting; when I interviewed for a management position (test manager) it was nothing _but_ coding questions, including the infamous "reverse a string" question. ("Would like that optimized for space or speed? In-place, or do I get a buffer? Can you tell I've heard this a zillion times before?") I can understand wanting a test manager to be more than an empty suit, but _yoiks_.

<comment><USER29> There's different kinds of management positions other than software development management. HN is notorious for forgetting that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This topic/discussion reminds me of a movie I saw recently It was called "That guy...who was in that thing". It is a documentary about working actors. Not Big time superstars like Tom Cruise, but the small time 'character' actors.

Anyways, there was one part in the movie where they start talking about auditions. All four or five of the actors they were interviewing for the movie unanimously spoke badly about the typical audition process. Some quotes taken from memory:

"I love acting, but I hate auditioning"

"You've seen my demo reel, you've seen me when I was on Star Trek, you know I can act, then why not just give me the part? Why make me go through this tedious audition process"

"90% of acting is reacting. You can't fully demonstrate your full acting abilities when you're standing in front of a panel of producers 'acting' out a scene that consists of 5 lines of dialog"

What the actors were saying about how they hate the audition process reminded me a lot of my frustrations surrounding hiring during tech interviews. Making an engineer do puzzles like FizzBuzz is a lot like making an actor act out a 20 second scene without any time to prepare or a proper "scene partner" to act alongside of.

I wish I could like to a youtube of the movie, but I can't find one. Its on netflix though.

<comment><USER32> _Making an engineer do puzzles like FizzBuzz is a lot like making an actor act out a 20 second scene without any time to prepare or a proper "scene partner" to act alongside of._

FizzBuzz is self-contained tho, so maybe a better comparison would be to asking for a dramatic poetry reading?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> They aren't using the brain teasers right. The Idea is not to create a barrier to entry, nor is it to stress the candidate. The objective of the brain teaser is having the candidates think slow enough that the interviewer can observe how he approaches a problem.

It's hard, when using problems that are common, to really understand how the candidates gets to the answer. Often, he's building on pre solved sub problems he encountered on his professional life, so the resolution process didn't even occur at the interview.

I personally don't use brain teasers, because they stress out valid candidates who do not work well under pressure. However, I think teasers, when properly used, are valid tools in an interviewers toolbox.

<comment><USER28> Totally agree with this. The essential skill of a software engineer regardless of position is to be able to approach any problem no matter how unfamiliar or intractable and formulate a means of attacking it and verifying the solution. The right type of brainteaser can be a great way to demonstrate this provided: A) The interviewee hasn't heard it before B) It's meaty and not relying on some flash of insight (the manhole cover question is absolute garbage) C) you are able to capture the thought process in sufficient detail, either through verbally talking it out or writing down or whatever.

This has the potential to reveal a certain high level problem solving ability which the lack thereof will not necessarily be revealed by more concrete "write pseudocode for X" type of interview questions. What I mean by that is that there is a continuum of skills ranging from rote copying of solutions all the way through synthesizing solutions to business problems and designing architectures to fulfill a malleable list of requirements. A mediocre engineer can inch their way up the continuum through raw pattern matching ability (which humans excel at) without ever attaining mastery of the high level abstraction that are driving the implementation detail. Such engineers can appear tremendously productive at the ground level, but they are dangerous for an technical organization to have many of them because they tend not to see where technical debt is piling up and can often paint themselves into corners because they're not considering the bigger picture. Knowing someone has strong reasoning skills from very high level human tasks down is a good hedge against this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I took an i/o psychology course during school and a chunk of it dealt with interviewing and finding best candidates (from an employer stand point and equity standpoint), as lots of people who took the course tend to pursue education with the idea of obtaining an HR-related certificate.

The comment about brainteasers vs structured rubrics is sort of surprising to me, given Google's reputation for quantitative data. Speaking from a very high level, structure was really what was emphasized for interviews. It's interesting how culture can get in the way of proven 'fact,' and I love that Google is using their own (much larger data sets) to make these improvements and in/validate other research

</comment><comment><USER35> How to drive clicks in four steps:

1\. Invent a bunch of silly riddles that a non-technical reader might accept as tech interview questions.

2\. Pull a major tech company out of a hat (today it's Google), and claim with no evidence that their interviews are based around silly riddles. The article will be cited for years as proof that people working at $COMPANY are weird and obtuse.

3\. Wait a couple years. Ignore all evidence that $COMPANY does not use silly riddles in interviews.

4\. Once traffic on the original article dies down, write another article claiming $COMPANY has "admitted" silly riddles aren't useful for interviews.

<comment><USER36> I see you didn't read the article. The basis for the article is a NYT interview with a SVP at Google, claiming that the brainteasers are not useful (among other things). Surely that is good source? I haven't got a clue if Google actually used these kinds of questions but the interview sure seem to suggest it.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head- hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big- data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

That said, the riddles listed are of course a bit clickbaity but they did not conjure the story out of thin air.

<comment><USER35> The same list of riddle questions has been circulating for at least twenty years. Before Google existed, it was credited to Microsoft. I know they've been explicitly banned at Google for many years, and have seen no evidence that they were ever in common use at either company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> A problem I see with many of these sorts of questions is that they often require the candidate to have some supposedly common knowledge which is not required for the job itself. Cryptic word games surely are much more difficult for a non-native speaker of the language in use. Questions related to facts about cities probably require local geographic knowledge. Surely the evacuation plan for SF must consider the capacity of various bridges? Someone who has lived in northern CA for most of his life would have a much easier time thinking through the logistics of moving people off a peninsula. And, of course, there's the Monopoly question (which I had to Google).

I like estimation questions in general for many of the reasons other commenters have cited. However, I wish those using them would consider the knowledge implicitly required of a candidate.

</comment><comment><USER38> > _Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is > particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, > and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, > and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero > relationship._

Can we see the study?

Also note that performance on the job is a noisy measurement, because people who get to work on impactful projects (through luck or people skills) get rated higher than others. I wouldn't be surprised if interview scores were a better measurement of "true" skills.

<comment><USER39> > _I wouldn 't be surprised if interview scores were a better measurement of > "true" skills._

Possibly, but in a sense "true" skills don't really matter. What matters to Google, ultimately, is Google's opinion of the worker. It's almost certainly skewed / flawed / distorted in some way from the individual's true skills, and that's unfortunate but mostly a fact of life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sounds great, although like with any retraction I doubt this will be enough to stop the spread of interview puzzles. Even I'm guilty of asking my share before I realized that the only thing that matters about the candidate is whether they can sit down and start writing code (and the quality of said code).

<comment><USER41> Google still ask puzzles: they just don't ask _brainteasers_.

For example, _write a program to find every possible word in a given Boggle board_ is a puzzle, but one you're going to solve by coding...rather than "how many piano tuners are there in New York", which is a rather different matter. I've interviewed on-site with Google several times, and always found the CS puzzles to be challenging but fair.

<comment><USER20> > Google still ask puzzles: they just don't ask brainteasers.

Isn't the only difference between "brainteasers", "puzzles", and real engineering challenges, just the usefulness of the result?

I get what you are saying though. Asking someone challenges rooted in technology seems so much more useful and natural than something involving ping pong balls and Lake Michigan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The best book on hiring, no doubt, is Who: [http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A- Method-Hiring/dp/0345504194](http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method- Hiring/dp/0345504194)

We used it to build our hiring process for [http://www.thinkful.com/](http://www.thinkful.com/) and it consistently proves valuable.

We also use it to help our students prepare for job interviews.

<comment><USER43> I'm seriously put off by any talk of topgrading and 'a/b/c player' ranking.

Have you gathered much data on the success of this book's approach in your firm? I'd love to hear a positive take on it.

<comment><USER31> Agreed. I think anyone can be an "A" player under the right conditions. Under different conditions, the same person can be a "D" player. I know I've had jobs were I was the wonderboy who was regarded as an A player all around. I've had other jobs where I was the black sheep "F" player who gets fired after one week of employment.

<comment><USER44> First commenter's co-founder here: Sure, you definitely need to screen for culture fit. There are great people who would be bad fits here. That said, we want people who have succeed in most positions they've had in the past. If there are two people who have had 4 jobs in their career, you're way more likely to pick the better if you favor the one who outperformed in 3 of those 4 jobs rather than 1 of the 4. When you combine that with looking closely at their experience as it fits with the role, and their fit with the culture, then you have a complete screening process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> "How many gas stations in Raleigh?"

I had a couple questions like this at a couple of interviews more than a few years back now. In both cases, I sat for a minute, and asked a few questions back, like "do you mean the city limits of Raleigh, or the metro area?", "how do you define gas station - do we include public-only, or private fueling places?", etc. Part of this was buying some time, because the question caught me off guard, but I think my questions back caught him off guard a bit too.

That interviewer told me I was the only person who asked clarifying questions before blurting out an answer or walk through. Another one was "take this marker and design a house on the whiteboard for me". So I took the marker and asked questions like "how many people will live here, do you want one or two story, do you need a garage/shed/basement, etc?" And again, was told I was the only person who'd asked questions before starting to draw.

I don't think the intention behind those brain teasers was necessarily to determine how you react to those sorts of problems, but it may have been a useful determining factor for some interviewers nonetheless.

<comment><USER46> > _That interviewer told me I was the only person who asked clarifying > questions before blurting out an answer or walk through._

I once got negative feedback from an interviewer: I'd asked too many questions about the questions.

<comment><USER47> That probably means you two should not work together.

<comment><USER46> Definitely. We both dodged bullets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Every time I click any link on HN that points to qz.com I get QZ without any reference to the article in question. Currently it points to "Why Tesla wants to get into the battery-swapping business that's failing for everyone else"... in Chrome. Firefox seems to work. Terrible website.

</comment><comment><USER49> These sorts of questions didn't start with Google. They're known as Fermi Problems for a reason: they're named after Enrico Fermi, the physicist.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem)

Knowing how to quickly estimate something _is_ useful.

I imagine that Larry Page does a few quick estimates every day. How many Loon balloons would it take to bring Internet to 90% of Africa?

But not everybody at Google has a job like Larry Page. It's gotten to be a big company full of accountants, HR people, and other jobs that don't require much thinking in unfamiliar territory.

In other words, guesstimation is a useful skill, but not for every Google employee, so it's not going to show up as useful on average.

</comment><comment><USER50> Some of the more flippant sounding ones could be useless but I thought the idea of the simpler ones (how many golf balls etc.) is to get a feeling for how people's minds work and whether they can make sensible best guesses in the abscence of concrete facts and make judgements based on those guesses. Weed out the ones who have no appreciation for how the volume of a golf ball relates to the size of a bus.

Good logical thinking shown here could indicate an ability to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail.

<comment><USER51> On the other hand, demonstrating evidence for being able to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail also indicates an ability to rapidly prototype systems without getting hung up on too fine detail. And it does it much more directly (i.e. there is an obvious link rather than a tenuous at best one) and with much less stress, awkwardness and mind games.

<comment><USER50> fair point :) I guess I work in an industry (design engineering) where my interviews have only ever consisted of a "nice chat"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think you'll find this response by @gayle to be spot on. SORRY, FOLKS: GOOGLE HASN'T CHANGED THEIR INTERVIEW QUESTIONS BY GAYLE MCDOWELL, EX-GOOGLE ENGINEER & HIRING COMMITTEE MEMBER [http://blog.geekli.st/post/53477786490/sorry-folks-google- ha...](http://blog.geekli.st/post/53477786490/sorry-folks-google-hasnt- changed-their-interview)

</comment><comment><USER53> Insofar as this interview speaks to the relevance of brainteasers to actual software development / engineering, it fails to provide a meaningful topic of conversation. It surprises me that nobody's pointed out that at best the conclusions are relevant to engineering "leadership" performance, rather than -- as I expected for "Google" and "head-hunting" \-- coding performance. Sure, people skills and team skill are important, but if you're going to get good at selecting for leadership and ignore selecting for productivity, to the extent they're not related you're not going to be very good at creating and maintaining software. Although software isn't 100% of Google's success and coding productivity isn't 100% of software success, it's pretty important.

</comment><comment><USER54> Why are they talking about "Big Data" rather than just "data"? I doubt the data sets they used were so large that they could not be easily analysed on a cheap laptop using normal statistical packages.

When trying to work out what best predicts job performance, the quality of your data is by far the most important thing to focus on. I would very much like to know more about the details of their internal studies. There are a lot of difficult problems in trying to use statistics to improve interview processes. One of the big problems is that you will always have a truncated sample of only those people who were selected: you would then expect the importance of certain variables, such as GPA or test scores, to be lowered because those who scored lower on such metrics will have had compensating characteristics...

</comment><comment><USER55> _Google reputation in shreds; funds transparent PR stunt_

<comment><USER56> Huh? Google's reputation in shreds? How so? If you're referring to NSA issue, that's the American government's reputation you're talking about. Google (and almost every other big tech company) was simply compelled to follow the law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> If you're a hiring manager who uses these things, you should know that I (try) to train/prepare my students to answer them. I do think there is some utility in watching how people approach an unconventional problem, but don't be too impressed with people that can solve them easily, compared to those who don't do well the first time they see them. I see a huge improvement in the quality of answers of most students, once students know it is a gag and once they've been shown how to estimate things. Most students are constrained by having been in a learning environment that provides them with well-defined boundaries within which to form their answers. IMO failing to perform well with these problems is not always a failing of the student as much as it is their educators.

</comment><comment><USER58> The article also mentions:

"It's also giving much less weight to college grade point averages and SAT scores"

In 2004 I interviewed for a Creative Maximizer position. I received a glowing review from my brother who was a Googler. I studied all the ins-and-outs of adwords back then and the British interviewer confirmed: "You did very good on the assessment" (which was working through real ads that needs to be maximized). My opinionated experience has been that in these kinds of situations, Brits embellish less than Americans.

However, she told me that my college GPA was "a major question mark" because it was 2.99 and Google only hires people with 3.0 and above (I didn't know what I wanted to do in college). Looking back I'm glad I was never hired, but that burned me bad for a while.

</comment><comment><USER59> The only true way to tell if an interviewee will be a good employee is actual work/product output with the right amount of responsibility. Product focused people not just coders looking to code lots of tricks to compete.

Contract to hire is one way, another is what they have done previously as a good predictor. It is a risk for sure but that really is the only true way in the end.

Plenty can be gained from just letting the interviewee talk and maybe looking at some of their code they have done previously while they talk about it. Whiteboard coding should not apply as it is completely out of element for many coders.

The type of person they are can't really be detected correctly until they are in the team and delivering because everyone is selling themselves on an interview.

</comment><comment><USER60> I think companies would be better off hiring people not based on their IQ or skill level but by hiring people who love what they do, have done side projects and achieve flow in their work. People who achieve flow in their work will work harder and are more creative than others because they enjoy the process of solving problems. So the interview process should be to identify how often the given candidate achieve Flow (as defined by mihaly csikszentmihalyi)

[http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html)

</comment><comment> alok-g >> After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You're also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

While the analysis is correcting some beliefs about interviewing techniques, do I sense them draw a conclusion again not supported by data? How did they conclude the lack of correlation is "because" the skills required are different and people think differently a few years out from college.

</comment><comment><USER61> This is great news both for Google and the candidates. Of course as long as the behavioral indicators for the competencies will be defined right - according to actual goals and tasks on the job.

</comment><comment><USER62> So how useless exactly were they? As long as you are looking for a "right" answer not a correct one, they are a very good metric for testing problem solving skills.

<comment><USER63> I got off to a real bad footing in a job interview using a questions like that once. With a guy looking for a 'right' answer, and it didn't go down well when I challenged his assumption.

He asked how many plumbers worked in the city, to which I replied you could check the industry registry for qualified plumbers, you can probably filter them out by city. There was silence then I had the question clarified to how many 'plumbing businesses' where there not individual plumbers.

To which I replied you could get the company registrar office but it was impossible to calculate as so many plumbers work full time while also holding businesses of there own as free agents. A very unimpressed look came across the guys face and I was told there is a very simple way to find out and asked to try again.

I sat in silence for a 30 seconds or so trying to think of something that would be more thorough than the registry offices, I think offered a few alternatives like tax department records, government statistics office. All things I could think of that would keep fine grained data. But I could see the guy growing impatient with me so I stared at him and asked him what a better metric was than what I had offered.

After a few moments I was told the correct answer was to check the phone book, any practicing plumber business would be listed.

Startled but what seemed like a completely faulty answer I pointed out what seemed obvious to me... not every business needs to have a public listing... some deal directly as sub contractors ... some could be umbrella companies for subbies ... again some are free agents... some might use unlisted cellphones... not everyone is a legal company, not all plumbers where qualified. It was a terrible way to get a dataset you could rely on.

Angry swept across the guys face and I was told sternly I was wrong the data was perfectly suitable, onto the next question... which was all down hill from there as he didn't want to hear my answers, didn't challenge me back, just rip through the rest.

To this day I laugh when ever I think back to that interview. It was probably the most uncomfortable interview I've ever been in.

<comment><USER64> So, is Google admitting the questions are hopeless, or are they saying that their interviewer's reactions to the answers to those questions are hopeless?

Because fixing interviews is harder than just working out hwat questions to ask.

<comment><USER63> I dunno about google, but my experience was more copy cat behavior by someone that didn't get the purpose of it I think... maybe I was to blame as well as I pushed back expecting to be challenged more.. not just told I was wrong.

It ended up worse then useless for both of us involved.

<comment><USER65> Dodged a bullet, anyone can see your answers were at least a good as the phone book one. Nothing worse than a managers who relies on authority to backup their flawed decisions just to spare their own ego. Sounds like a toxic org culture

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This always seemed so overhyped to me. I did hundreds of interviews at Google and I never once asked anyone a question anything like the ones described. It was generally stuff like "oh hey, you're going to do deep work on our unix systems? What is the difference between kill and kill -15?" We also didn't care about GPA. This all seems like super old information if it was ever true at all.

<comment><USER67> _What is the difference between kill and kill -15?_

Well, for one, the second isn't syntactically correct.

I can't decide what's worse, brainteasers or brainless trivia questions.

<comment><USER68> Pedantic nonsense. Most of the time when you're using kill you're going be using the bash shell built-in, where it _is_ syntactically correct.

 _kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] [pid | jobspec] ..._

Even so, with /bin/kill -sigspec is still valid and common usage, even if it is not documented in the manpage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> "Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco" Why not Mountain View? At least, it would be useful for Google... if the big one comes

<comment><USER70> How's an evacuation plan going to help you with an earthquake?

<comment><USER71> Escaping after the services are all shot to hell?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'm still a student and like to interview at a lot of places, shop around, and keep practicing my interviewing skills.

I STILL go to interviews where I am ONLY asked these kinds of questions...It's embarrassing. If you ask me these questions for a 2 hour long interview then I'm not going to work for you...it's that simple

</comment><comment><USER73> Why so serious? Isn't hiring about maxing out the potential of a company?

Anyone can help maximing it out. I know for myself that having 'clue' reduces self-esteem. Which can be balanced by having the right co-workers. End result: Maxing out the potential.

A(Technical intelligence) + B(Social Intelligence) = (Innovative potential)

<comment><USER73> Why does Google want the PERFECT candidate, isn't anything less better? Aren't they ok, with 90% of the human population?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> So a lot of "difficult" manager decisions can be equally well solved by the toss of dice.

</comment><comment><USER75> Those type of questions are plain stupid. Wont take anywhere and wont solve any problems.

</comment><comment><USER76> I had to go look up what quotidian meant - it means everyday.

</comment><comment><USER77> Well, at least, they know how stupid it is now.

</comment><comment><USER78> Oh really? what a surprise.</comment>


Chrome 17 - Plus symbol missing on new tabs button - Google Chrome Help - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0e34eb149130970d&hl=en <comment><USER2> Issue on Google Code: <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=98264>

It seems that this appeared in the development builds 6 months ago and it was still carried out to the stable branch, even though people complained.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thing is, its not an issue - its a design decision (my mother would never guess that that button opens a new tab)

<comment><USER2> It's an "Issue" in Google Code terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly I didn't even notice that. I usually use Ctrl+t to launch new tabs anyway</comment>


The Future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@maxh/the-future-5084e0a8183c <comment><USER2> I was talking to friends about the same idea, that somehow in the past few years the world was turning into the Sci-Fi (somewhat dystopian) of my youth. That night on Ars Technica, I saw two headlines: "Pope's plane hit by a laser in Mexico City" and "Humans started having sex with Neanderthals over 100,000 years ago" and I realized the world was turning into _BAD_ Sci-Fi.</comment>