The Chomsky Puzzle - never-the-bride http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Chomsky-Puzzle-Piecing/237558 <comment><AUTHOR> The whole premise of this article is flawed. There is nothing divisive or puzzling about pursing intellectual work and trying to make the world a better place. The only puzzle is how he finds the energy to do it all.

It also didn't really convey just how critical the scientific community is of Wolfe's take on linguistics. There's a pretty good takedown here: [http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/the- sludge-a...](http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/the-sludge-at- bottom-of-barel.html)

<comment><USER2> "It also didn't really convey just how critical the scientific community is of Wolfe's take on linguistics."

Uh, the article literally has a link to the takedown you posted. I agree though, the premise of the article is flawed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As the foundational figure in modern Linguistics Chomsky has had an outsized role in shaping the field, some of it good and some bad. IMHO the usefulness of mainstream generative grammar has waned since the 70s or so in terms of its applicability to engineering and empirical rigor. But it remains dominant, in part due to his influence and the logical conclusions one draws from a strong interpretation of Universal Grammar. Since much of that foundation is ultimately philosophical, there are bound to be challenges from the field now and again, and acolytes of the Chomskyan school are likely to attack them ferociously. It will probably be a few decades before there's a major shift.

</comment><comment><USER4> The subtitle is "Piecing together a celebrity scientist".

A celebrity?

I've seen him interviewed once on Charlie Rose.

In May 2002 CNN put him on with Bill Bennett.

In 1986 he debated Boston university president John Silber on local Boston TV.

How is he a celebrity?

He mentioned in a speech once how someone on NPR wanted to talk to him, and how the higher-ups at NPR canceled and then limited his appearance, as he was apparently banned.

He also was prevented by the IDF from attending a talk at Birzeit university in the West bank, something he said hadn't happened (being refused admittance to a country he was to give a unievrsity talk to) since he tried to enter Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Even The Nation has spiked positive reviews of his books.

Someone with so little exposure on US airwaves over the decades is not a celebrity.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps this[1] is what you are looking for. 165 credits as himself on different programs. 155 in the last 20 years. Currently in no less than 8 documentary productions that are in stages from post-production to nearing release. For comparison, Neil deGrasse Tyson only has 83 credits as himself[2]. I think that makes a good case that he's a "celebrity" scientist, as I certainly consider Tyson one. Both are on the short list of active scientists that I would expect random people to have at least heard of, even if they aren't sure who they are or where they heard of them.

1: [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159008/](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159008/)

2: [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1183205/](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1183205/)

<comment><USER4> >> Someone with so little exposure on US airwaves over the decades is not a celebrity.

> [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159008/](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159008/) > 165 credits as himself on different programs. 155 in the last 20 years.

Well this makes my point. Let me look at the earliest ten.

Third from bottom is UK. Fourth from the bottom is a Canadian documentary. Sixth and seventh from the bottom are Canadian. Eighth from bottom is Australian. Ninth from bottom is the UK. Tenth from bottom is UK.

Second and fifth from bottom appear to be musical programs, not sure of the country.

Which leaves the earliest, Chomsky's 1969 discussion with William F. Buckley. So 1969 to 1996 that's one credit.

If you look at the other credits, many of them are for non-American programs, or very independently made films (not on the US airwaves as I said).

More recent documentaries like "Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?" are made by Europeans.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has been on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN etc. much more than Chomsky has in the past decade. He is much more of a US celebrity.

<comment><USER5> > Well this makes my point. Let me look at the earliest ten.

That... seems like an odd choice, when the question is whether he's a celebrity _now_. He could have had _no_ exposure until a few years ago and still be a celebrity, so I'm not sure why looking at his oldest media appearances is relevant.

Maybe you would prefer google trends?[1] For a real treat, change it from US to world wide. Chomsky is a global name, NGD is more of a US phenomenon. NGD has eclipsed Chomsky in recent times, but event at half or more of the current exposure NGD has, I think that points towards a celebrity status.

> Neil deGrasse Tyson has been on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN etc. much more than > Chomsky has in the past decade. He is much more of a US celebrity.

That doesn't actually prove that Chomsky _isn 't_ a celebrity though, as it's still possible for NGD to be more famous and for Chomsky to be a celebrity. Also, I think you have a fairly narrow view of what "celebrity" is, if it's mostly informed by television exposure. Sure, television is a quick way to celebrity, but there are other ways (and those used to be the only ways). Einstein was a celebrity. Stephen King _is_ a celebrity. Being well known is the definition, not being an entertainment personality.

1: [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0b78hw,%2Fm%2F06b26l)

<comment><USER6> You don't need to defend yourself, you're earlier post including Imdb links were sufficient. Chomsky is a celebrity scientist. Pretty much everyone who knows anything about him knows that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whenever I encounter the Chomsky Language Hierarchy in programming or Noam Chomsky talking politics on TV, radio, or print, I always ask myself 'is it the same guy?'. Only because the topics are usually so disparate.

</comment><comment><USER8> Allegations that Chompsky was unfair to Dan Everett?

Dan Everett is a primarily media-phenomena and fraud (in a whole variety of ways). His claims about the Pirahã has been debunked at this point. The main thing is that Everett used the tactic of presenting himself as an outsider challenging a "great" man (who naturally has many enemies). In considering Everett's dubious claims, take into account that Everett isn't an expert on tropical languages but a missionary who got an impression of one language and leverage this into an entire career.

<comment><USER9> Where have you read that his claims were wrong and have been debunked?

<comment><USER4> Everett himself debunked Everett. Originally he said Piraha was recursive. Then he changed its mind and said it wasn't, thus, all of Chomsky's theories are wrong. He learned to speak Piraha training to be a Christian missionary, not as a linguist. His talk here was with a conservative author, not a linguist.

<comment><USER9> Everett was chair of the dept of languages, literatures and cultures at Illinois State and former chair of the linguistics department at university of pittsburg...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "As a broad generalization, [my] stance in any controversy will be the opposite of Chomsky's" \- Mencius Moldbug

Is Chomsky the archbishop of the Cathedral?

<comment><USER11> Only in a bizarre conspiracy world where everyone who disagrees with someone must be allied, even if a more logical explanation is just that your opinions are terrible. So, the Moldbuggery answer is yes, absolutely.

<comment><USER10> Well, to be fair, here we have a neutral media source calling Chomsky the most important living intellectual. Seems to fit Moldbug's curious side-note.

<comment><USER12> Well, in a 35-yr-old quotation

<comment><USER10> Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Chomsky's personality reminds me Dijkstra - so full of themselves that they don't entertain anyone challenging their ideas.

Take a look at how Chomsky writes emails, see his correspondance with Sam Harris [https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of- discourse](https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse) \- the arrogance in his reply to a genuine offer of conversation is staggering.

<comment><USER13> I don't really understand at all what that email exchange is supposed to indicate.

Chomsky starts the entire chain and every subsequent email with some equivalent of "we don't have enough common ground on these subjects to have a reasonable conversation, so let's not have a stupid back-and-forth in which we do nothing but loudly contradict each other's basically axiomatic interpretations".

And then there's a lot of back-and-forth that's frustrating to everyone involved (and particularly to the third party reading the exchange). It's frustrating because Sam and Noam are talking past one another, and clearly don't have enough common understanding to take part in a productive discourse, and one party is trying _the entire time_ to just get out of the damned stupid back-and-forth of nothing but mutual contradiction.

To me this reads like a very common occurrence at parties I attended in college: two people who disagree, with one person trying to avoid a public argument that's bound to be fruitless and irritating to all involved, and the other one _insisting_ on having the argument anyways. I never had much sympathy for the Sam character when the Noam character finally snapped and told them to change the topic or fuck off.

 _> so full of themselves that they don't entertain anyone challenging their ideas._

There's a _HUGE_ difference between realizing a particular conversation is pointless and refusing to have any conversations with dissenters. The latter is arrogance, but the former is an important social skill.

 _> to a genuine offer of conversation..._

1\. Noam's primary complaint is that he _doesn 't_ believe this is a genuine offer of conversation, and that even if it were, he doesn't think the conversation would be remotely productive.

2\. Noam has far more patience in this thread than I or most people would've displayed. I probably wouldn't have replied beyond the second email with anything other than "We obviously disagree on some pretty basic facts. Any further conversation on this matter would therefore be fruitless to both of us. Have a great day!"

<comment><USER9> Realizing a particular conversation as pointless is dismissive if you aren't open to attempting to understand other perspectives.

A religious person telling a scientist that a debate about religion with him would be "pointless" is indeed dismissive. It may end up being pointless to the people making the arguments but not necessarily for the listeners.

<comment><USER13> _> Realizing a particular conversation as pointless is dismissive if you aren't open to attempting to understand other perspectives_

1\. Your original charge was that Noam is _arrogant_ , not that he is _dismissive_. Dismissiveness and arrogance are not the same thing.

2\. Noam _isn 't_ dismissive in this particular. Refusing the reply to the email or replying only with terse non-acknowledgements would be dismissive. Spilling hundreds of words worth of ink to elucidate _why_ you don't want to have a conversation is anything but dismissive.

3\. Charging Noam with being dismissive toward his critics is a different claim with a different burden. It requires analyzing the preponderance of evidence, not one specific case. Just because Noam is dismissive of one particular critic doesn't mean that he's dismissive of his critics in general.

 _> A religious person telling a scientist that a debate about religion with him would be "pointless" is indeed dismissive_

I fail to see how this is necessarily the case. For example, if the scientist's point is to _change the religious person 's mind_, and the religious person is firm in their faith, then the religious person isn't being dismissive. On the contrary, the religious person is saving both parties from a fruitless and frustrating endeavor.

 _> It may end up being pointless to the people making the arguments but not necessarily for the listeners._

More analogous to Noam/Sam, if the scientist's point is to _demonstrate the falseness of religious by disproving transubstantiation_ , and if the religious person _explicitly said they do not believe in transubstantiation_ , then the religious person is well within reason to refuse an invitation, because regardless of the outcome of the conversation, the end result won't be informative to anyone.

3\. If the Scientist pushes for a debate even though the religious person is not interested, he's most likely being a bit of jerk.

<comment><USER14> Funny because I thought Harris was quite dismissive "I don't appreciate your tone" (!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Chomsky is a wonderful proof of the fact that it does not matter who the idea comes from, what matters is the idea itself. I.e. you can be an expert on some things and err on others. Nobody is an intellectual authority on all things. Many scientists are wiser than to meddle in political affairs with broad strokes and only stick to their topic of expertise.

<comment><USER16> So, you're the intellectual authority on politics then, capable of declaring with certainty that Noam's ideas in that arena are flawed?

<comment><USER15> As you may have noticed, I precisely did not go into any details about Chomsky's politics because I know how the large majority of HN thinks and it's pretty much useless to reason about this here. The fact that his political ideas are barely backed up with data speaks for itself. If you look at what he writes, it is obvious that his view on history is strongly influenced by the lens of his ideology. This is very unlike his work on grammars, which I greatly appreciate. That is all I'm going to say about this. Judge for yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> The fact that his political ideas are barely backed up with data speaks for itself._

This is an objectively ridiculous assertion. His works are _extensively_ cited with primary sources. He regularly has hundreds of footnotes per book. _Manufacturing Consent_ and _Necessary Illusions_ are just two examples of a scientific, ideology-free approach to political analysis. There he compares and contrasts how the U.S. media covers similar international events -- by state friends vs. foes -- and it is quite damning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Many years ago I read a New Yorker profile of Chomsky. [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/noam- chomsky](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/noam-chomsky) I got the strong impression he has autism, or at least is on the asperger's spectrum.

I think that's a real problem for his political views. Political philosophy is about how you design a good society, and that means a society in which people treat each other well. To do that you have to have a good understanding of human psychology.

But people with Asperger's are very low in their psychological understanding skills. With Chomsky, I get the impression that leads him to fall into a simplistic moralism for explaining why people behave in good or bad ways.

<comment><USER14> I think you should read more Chomsky or watch some of his talks. His political views are all based on pretty much common sense, and widely accepted moral principles. He doesn't give any simplistic moralism for explaining why people behave in good or bad ways. He acknowledges that human behaviour is very complex and poorly understood. Actually be usually avoids explaining why people act a certain way and instead just describes their actions.

I do think he has a powerful analytical brain and is very dry in his descriptions, they are consciously unemotional and descriptive in nature. However he has a real deep sympathy with the sufferer of his fellow man.</comment></comment>


F.C.C. Sides with Hot Spots, and Hospitality Industry Feels a Chill - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/business/mobile-hot-spots-fcc-hotels-convention-centers.html <comment><USER2> How could they possibly think that jamming public frequency bands would not be illegal?

[https://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/jammer- enforcement](https://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/jammer-enforcement) clearly states "Federal law prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment, including devices that interfere with ... wireless networking services (Wi-Fi)."

<comment><USER3> There is a debate here about whether syntactically valid 802.11 frames count as "jamming".

<comment><USER4> From the horse's mouth: [https://transition.fcc.gov/eb/jammerenforcement/jamfaq.pdf](https://transition.fcc.gov/eb/jammerenforcement/jamfaq.pdf)

 _Section 333 of the Communications Act : "No person shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communications of any station licensed or authorized by or under [the Communications] Act or operated by the United States Government." 47 U.S.C. § 333._

If you're willfully screwing with other people's transmissions, you're breaking the law. It's that simple. The method being used doesn't really enter into it.

<comment><USER5> Wifi operates in unlicensed spectrum and transmitters and receivers are required to handle interference in this space. Is it still jamming if it's not a licensed station doing the broadcasting?

</devilsadvocate>

...I suppose it does say "authorized" there, and 2.4 and 5Ghz transmitters are authorized.

<comment><USER6> It always feels funny to me to refer to the ISM bands (the spectrum itself) as "unlicensed".

\- Devices operating there have to be approved

\- There are rules about how the devices work

\- There are rules about how the _operator_ is allowed to operate the approved devices ("Operation is subject to the following conditions" sticker on most equipment).

(all of this under FCC part 15 rules)

<comment><USER7> In other bands, the operator in control of the transmitter generally needs to file paperwork with the FCC to get a license (in some systems like cellphones, the base station is in control so the subscribers don't need licenses, just approved equipment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an interesting story, but I have to wonder if the writer did their research. This caption really stuck out at me:

> A mobile hot spot can be transported in a carrier the size of a briefcase.

I mean, this is technically true, but it's pretty crazily misleading about the size. The picture itself shows some massively bulky thing. It also shows what appears to be an ethernet switch with _one_ cable plugged into it, which is about 25ft long, coiled up, and has the other end just dangling free. And it shows a power brick large enough to use as an actual brick.

<comment><USER9> One thing I'll add about this is that these wireless hotspots need to cover different types of uses than what you assume with traditional hotspots.

The event director of the American Public Human Services Association is not trying to put people on a MiFi or a Karma device—she's trying to ensure an entire room full of people at an education session or a large hall have access to an open wireless network.

That's a lot different usage than the average person might expect to run into. Her $30,000 bill is essentially to manage the wireless for the whole event.

I think it's actually misleading in the other direction than what you're suggesting–generally it's the vendors who are running into these frustrations with wireless blockers, not the event managers for the associations. The people who usually feel the brunt of the pain here are the vendors on the tradeshow floor, the startups and companies who are running stands that rely on a lot of multimedia gizmos.

These are the folks who are reaching out to the FCC, not the event planners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Although Wi-Fi might work fine for checking email or conducting a brief product demonstration, activities that demand more bandwidth or more security, like transmitting a live broadcast or running credit cards, still often require wired Internet access."

Why would running a credit card require wired internet?

<comment><USER11> This logic is a few years old, but back when WEP was popular and HTTPS less- so, I was nervous about buying things online over such a connection. WEP was/is easily crackable and without HTTPS, that credit card info is plaintext over the airwaves.

Nowadays we have WPA2 and HTTPS is more common. But I still prefer an ethernet cable.

<comment><USER12> There was NEVER a time where credit card info was sent over http. When are you talking about?!

HTTP over wired is not secure, either.

<comment><USER13> > There was NEVER a time where credit card info was sent over http. When are > you talking about?!

Amazon launched in 1995, and SSL only launched the same year, so they might have taken plaintext credit card info for a short while.

That's a technicality, though.

<comment><USER12> Well, even then, 802.11 didn't come out until '97, so no one was ordering from Amazon over wireless then!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good. It's too bad that this same stance can't be taken for other aspects of this industry. There just isn't market capacity in even semi-large cities for multiple convention centers so there is literally no competition at that scale and thus nothing to prevent predatory pricing and restrictions of all sorts. Also there is a tendency at the smaller scale for hotels to horizontally integrate so as to form a micro-monopoly on a 'full solution' for their building, meaning that you don't get to pick and choose different providers for different services, you only get to pick at a whole package (and availability) level.

</comment><comment><USER15> This story is your regular reminder that the world does not owe anyone a workable business model.

<comment><USER16> Hey, MPAA, RIAA, Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast, and 90% of car dealerships (to name a few), please pay attention.

<comment><USER17> Capturing rents is the original workable business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Regardless of whether or not sending deauth packets counts as jamming, the root problem can be solved by simply enabling and requiring protected management frames on your router/hotspot/phone.

Once you have protected management frames required, the only way to block your devices from connecting to your hotspot would be the kind of _actual jamming_ that I'm sure we can all agree is illegal. Problem solved.

Unfortunately most phones' hotspot apps don't let you configure this setting (and disable it by default), so we need to push OEMs to enable it by default or at least make it configurable. I for one have it required on my home network, and it gives me peace of mind knowing that I can't be deauthed by random strangers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wait: Conference internet, as in that thing that rarely works without a hitch and is often super-overwhelmed, is being paid for by organizers for up to 6-figures??? Does anyone else find this to be absolutely insane?

<comment><USER8> That's what happens when you effectively have a monopoly: a terrible product with a huge price.

Only it turns out they _don 't_ have a monopoly! And like most monopolists, rather than try to compete, they want to just shut down the competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've covered this issue closely in my role as a journalist in the association space, and this is definitely a clear divide between the hospitality industry and the associations. The thing is, associations and businesses bring in thousands of people to each event, and they drive major economic benefits.

Why do those economic benefits have to come from the wireless access? If you want to drive massive revenue from a conference, build a restaurant that profits off the many instead of a wireless business that profits off a small handful of people.

Here's a take on this issue that's specifically targeted to those in the association space being targeted by these high charges: [http://associationsnow.com/2015/02/learned-fccs-wifi- blockin...](http://associationsnow.com/2015/02/learned-fccs-wifi-blocking- saga/)

</comment><comment><USER20> My organization occasionally sends people as exhibitors to conferences. At the biggest one of the year, renting a wireless hotspot from the hotel costs $900 (for a poor connection).

Rumor has it, one year, they rented a hotel room for a few hundred dollars and then sent an intern up to the room every hour to sync up everyone's devices.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm with the FCC on this one... though on the flip side, I wouldn't mind if movie theaters were lined with materials that block wireless signals altogether in the theater/screen rooms.

<comment><USER22> The people who are saved by oncall surgeons who might happen to be in a movie theater might beg to disagree.

There are entirely valid reasons why it is illegal to block wifi / cellular signals.

<comment><USER8> Seems like a classic case of looking for a technical solution when human solutions exist and do just fine.

All you have to do is make it clear that any and all phone use, including just looking at it, is not allowed. Encourage people to report offenders. Make it easy to do so anonymously, for example by passing a note to an usher. Eject violators and do not refund their money.

(This is stolen from the Alamo Drafthouse's policy, not just something I made up. It seems to work just fine.)

<comment><USER22> THIS, SO MUCH! Yes, I completely agree that this is the correct solution. Be very strict about people being ejected who use electronics and interrupt other patrons. That is the proper solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When the lady featured in the article "brings her own hot spot network", what is powering it? Is she plugging it into the network jack in the room? Is it cellular?

<comment><USER3> The article is talking about cellular-to-wifi equipment.

<comment><USER23> I suppose that should have been obvious. I would have liked to see rough prices quoted for this since I imagine it could be pricey as well.

<comment><USER24> No need to get something that fancy for short-range use in a conference booth. I have a $40 T-Mobile Wifi hotspot that I activate for $10/GB when I need it.

It came in handy at a conference where the provider's network went down and we could still process credit card orders over the cheap hotspot. Though I imagine that if everyone used them, the cellular networks would not keep up with the demand.

<comment><USER8> As long as the cellular networks are on top of their game, they shouldn't have a problem. Conference centers can be blanketed in microcells to ensure good coverage even when spaces are extremely crowded and utilization is high. My own (limited) experience is that cellular is more reliable that WiFi in such an environment. Your problem would more likely be accidental interference from other hotspots on the WiFi end.

<comment><USER3> _Conference centers can be blanketed in microcells..._

Except the conference centers would charge the carriers millions to install any equipment, so the signal usually has to punch through windowless buildings from the outside.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stephen King quits Facebook over concerns of 'false information' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/02/us/stephen-king-quits-facebook-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> I agree with his sentiment. However, I feel like when a popular writer/actor/etc says things like this, it's only 'false information' in one political direction.</comment>


Russia just blocked 4 Amazon subnets in an attempt to restrict Telegram access - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6391716557592018944/ <comment><USER2> "This post is not publicly viewable - please join to see it."

No, thanks. Does anyone have a copy?</comment>


What are your top 3 questions about how to turn your idea into a startup? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> What are your top 3 questions about how to turn your idea into a startup?

My top 3:

1\. How do I get money?

2\. How do I get a good deal?

3\. How do I recruit great people?

I'll collect the responses and post the results here on news.yc.

\- Nivi from Venture Hacks, <http://venturehacks.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> It's all about the story:

1) Who is my audience?

2) What will I help them do that is better than what they have to do now?

3) How am I going to build it?

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) how do I get 1 million + users in 18 months?

2) how do I manage 1 million + users with the smallest team possible?

3) how do I turn 1 million users into at least 10 million dollars?

When I think of startups I'd like to be, I think of Winamp, hotornot.com, del.icio.us, reddit. These are companies that won big with only 1-5 people. I've been involved with startups that focused on getting a good series-A, hiring 20-30 people, then fucked around for 3 years and vanished off the face of the earth.

At this point, i think a better approach is to stay small and cash out for $10M in 18 months, rather than try to get big with an increasingly diminishing chance of success.

Of course if you're sure you've got a Google or YouTube, the "traditional" silicon valley venture-backed startup isn't a bad way to go. However it is kind of a bummer when you sell your thing for $1.4 billion and 600 million of it goes right to your investors... Would rather be Justin Frankel than Chad Hurley.

</comment><comment><USER4> After developing the idea, researching the market and such:

1\. What's my business model? 2\. How do I get to prototype/alpha/demo? 3\. What investors are interested in this stage, industry and business model?

</comment><comment><USER5> 1) Whats my business model going to be?

2) Whats my business model going to be?

3) Where am I going to get a cofounder?

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Where did I put the doritos?

2\. Man, these doritos are good.

3\. Wow, someone just handed me a lot of money.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Do people want this? 2\. Are you ridiculously passionate about the idea? 3\. Are you willing to suffer deeply to make it successful?

</comment><comment><USER8> 1\. Would I have fun working on it? 2\. Would people use it? 3\. What's been done and how do I make it better?</comment>


Ask toolbar components are silently installed on OS X along with Java - <AUTHOR> https://rainmannoodles.com/blog/what-the-hell-oracle/ <comment><USER2> YCombinator itself invested in bundleware.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why-a...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why- are-y-combinator-andreessen-horowitz-backing-drive-by-toolbaradware- installer.shtml)

[http://www.istartedsomething.com/20130115/y-combinator-is- fu...](http://www.istartedsomething.com/20130115/y-combinator-is-funding-the- future-of-spam-in-windows-drive-by-crapware-installers/)

And pg justified it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711)

>The apps that get installed are "crapware." This one seems a matter of opinion. A lot of the world's most popular apps and sites seem like junk to us. But the users are choosing to install these things.

The users are choosing to install the original app, not the bundled crap. This is sad.</comment>


How Photographers Tried to Capture the Terror of Night Zeppelin Raids During WWI - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/01/05/history_of_zeppelin_raids_in_wwi_postcard_imagining_of_a_raid.html

<comment><USER2> Looks like blogspam. Doesn't contain anything that the actual piece doesn't: [http://alembicrarebooks.com/products/photograph-first- world-...](http://alembicrarebooks.com/products/photograph-first-world-war- zeppelin-raid-london)

And in either case, "how photographers tried to capture" seems to be entirely described as: they made a composite image and changed the date and re-released the same image every time there was interest. I expected a little more detail of how the composite was made from that title.

</comment><comment><USER3> interesting project. thanks for sharing!</comment>


The AWS SDK for Go is now 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-version-1-0-of-the-aws-sdk-for-go/ <comment><USER2> I've used the SDK in the past (before the 1.0).

I am far from being a Go expert but you can see this has been written by Java developers.

The usage is so verbose and you need to pass pointers around all the time. Even when it's clearly not changing the original instance (when passing by value would be enough).

If you compare it to another lib like goamz you can clearly see how easier it is to use comparing to the Amazon SDK.

There's also an issue from June 4 that discusses this: [https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/issues/265](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk- go/issues/265)

In my lib I ended up going with goamz, it was much simpler to use and required much less boilerplate.

<comment><USER3> The original code was autogenerated, which is why the style was very terse and verbose. It's still like that:

[https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk- go/tree/master/models/apis](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk- go/tree/master/models/apis)

The fact that it feels very Java-esque comes from two things, in my mind:

       - the AWS API has Java-esque RPC calls
       - the request/response paradigm is easier for
         code generation

Personally, I don't like the style of the SDK, but at least it's maintained by AWS; you can always wrap the parts you use to get a nicer interface.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by "terse and verbose"?

<comment><USER3> Ugh I failed at english ='(

I mean, "terse" in the sense that it is very mechanical, raw, not very elegant. Verbose in that you need to type a lot of characters, or read a lot of instructions, to understand the meaning.

<comment><USER5> raw instead of terse?

I am not native in English too. anyone can think of a better word.

<comment><USER6> Maybe "inelegant" or "rough".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> aws.String just to get a pointer to a string rubs me the wrong way. I guess that lets it be nillable but I still don't like it.

I have been watching it's development fairly closely, seeing their strange decisions, and hoping they would rectify them. They haven't, and as a whole the API is not written "the Go way". It's written like they are fighting the language.

I assure you that in Go there are better solutions to much of this. I pray V2 to be better but if it's anything like their other SDKs they'll avoid breaking changes to the interface until its simply no longer reasonable.

Their PHP SDK is largely powered by magic getters, setters and method calls, and the methods therein are largely defined by a file describing the API. This works but is hardly ideal particularly for static analysis. I was at able with a PR to talk them into putting the method hints back at least.

You can really tell they were missing the magic in Go and working very hard to try to make it work in a somewhat similar fashion.

</comment><comment><USER8> Full points to Amazon for not treating client SDK's like some sort of third class afterthought. And double points for not just palming off client SDK responsibility to "the open source community".

A cloud feature does not exist unless it is supported by the SDK that you program with.

<comment><USER9> The crappy design of this library screams after thought. The google cloud go sdk is far better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://github.com/minio/minio-go](https://github.com/minio/minio-go) is a nice S3 Client library in Go

</comment><comment><USER11> Now introducing random 500s in Go!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great. I've been using it for the past few months. Documentation is terrible and there was quite a lot of breaking changes, but other than that it works... so I am okay with that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, but does it play Doom?</comment>


After 15 years as shareware, Ad Muncher is now completely free - <AUTHOR> http://www.admuncher.com/free

<comment><USER2> Zero technical info on the site, weird. But since it also filters out ads in non-browser apps, it should be some sort of proxy. Then how does it handle https'd ads? Self-signed certs and all? Perhaps dwindling supply of http resources and increasing privacy concerns are the reasons why it's "now completely free" :-/

PS. I've been Windows user since 3.11, I am very pro-privacy and I've never even heard of Ad Muncher. Make you what you want from it.

<comment> rational-future Haha, quite self-sentric, aren't we.

I've been reading sci fi books since the 1980s. I guess, by your logic, any title I haven't heard about is just bad ...

I've been using AdMuncher since 2002 or so and IMHO it's absolutely great. It's the number 1 reason I didn't switch my desktop to Linux. It's also the reason I'm using a Windows tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro).

This is the statistics, since last I installed Windows:

Statistics for Ad Muncher v4.93.33707/5539 Adverts removed: 181,604 Bandwidth saved: 5,346 MB Counter started: June 7, 2014

I've tried AdBlockPlus and uBlock many times, but they leave way more ads than AdMuncher. One of the reasons may be that they are more popular, so advertisers put more effort in defeating them.

<comment><USER3> You haven't really refuted any part of GP poster's points. There's no technical info on the site, there's no telling what kind of user data they may be taking and doing who-knows-what with it. This is solid grounds to stay away from the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.admuncher.com/privacy](http://www.admuncher.com/privacy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't use AdMuncher because it will slow down web surfing and increase the bandwith usage. AdMuncher only supports HTTP 1.0 - it strips out important HTTP headers like gZip compression or keep-alive connections. 15 years ago this might have been OK, but doing this in the last 10 years is plain dumb. Adblocking makes more sense if it is done in the browser directly, like AdblockPlus does.

</comment><comment><USER5> What? 100,000 people decided it was worthwhile paying for this product, but you feel guilty about taking their money, so now it's free? This is one of the most bizarre things I've read recently!

<comment><USER6> There are a few clues in the text like "I've made a net loss running you for the last two years" and "At some point in the future, I may need to offer complimentary software products to Ad Muncher user" hinting that he thinks that bulding a bigger userbase by being free and then bundling ads into it would make more money, as paid users were no longer paying the bills.

<comment><USER7> Bundling ads may be the wrong business model for the target audience... doubt that that's the plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't mind free stuff, but to be honest I don't see why you release it for free. Seems like you had something sustainable going on. One person selling everything he owns to pay 3 persons' salaries don't seem sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would this be an optimal scenario to open source it? You could still bundle the install for the "official binary" with other things.

<comment><USER8> Also thinking about this. Wouldn't it be a good idea to open source it and cut down on your staffs' working hours. Seems like you got a fairly big user base so there should be developers out there willing to contribute. Perhaps you could cut down on your costs and merge pull request from open source contributors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely something I'd like to do, but preferably with our new v5 codebase.

[http://www.murrayhurps.com/blog/ad-muncher- version-5](http://www.murrayhurps.com/blog/ad-muncher-version-5)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> never heard of it. might've been different 15 years ago, but its probably the only choice nowadays with AdblockEdge on Firefox and µBlock on Chrome.

and on that note: how does this differ from them? different block lists? alternative blocking mechanism?

<comment><USER11> From the "blocks ads in all browsers" tagline this appears to be a filtering proxy server, so it essentially MITMs your connection to filter stuff out and/or modify it before it gets to the browser.

I've been using Proxomitron, which is a similar (discontinued) freeware product, for the same purpose. The only real pain is HTTPS - which AdMuncher doesn't appear to support - but Proxomitron can filter HTTPS too (you need to install a local certificate), albeit it was written at a time when single-core was the norm and so needs to be constrained to run on one core due to some race condition that I'm not too bothered with figuring out and attempting to fix at the moment...

Proximodo is another open-source alternative which aims to be compatible with it but also lacks the increasingly-needed HTTPS MITM feature. (Should we call this "benevolent MITM" since it is completely under the consent and desire of the user, as opposed to the usual "malicious MITM"?)

<comment><AUTHOR> If I may, I'd like to take a moment to honour the memory of Scott R. Lemmon.

He was a hell of a coder, and person, and ten years after his passing his work is still hugely appreciated.

Cheers wherever you are Scott.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case anyone is wondering, it works fine on Windows 10 [http://i.imgur.com/TIwVPBD.png](http://i.imgur.com/TIwVPBD.png)

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks Murray. Glad this went freeware, I will recommend it to friends who have been complaining about ads in non-browser apps since Ad Muncher blocks them system-wide and isn't limited to browsers.

Looking forward to trying v5 when it comes out in the future since it'll have SSL blocking.

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone knows how to block popups on pirate bay?

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get blocking some ads. What does it hurt to have a basic banner add next to the story you are reading? They took the time, effort, and money to create content you want to read why block it? I understand blocking ads that take over your page but not basic ads.

<comment><USER15> Where is this banner coming from? Whose servers are you contacting to get it? Whose javascript is it running? Is it loading flash or java rather than an image? How many people end up tracking you for requesting "one banner"?

As far as I am concerned the advertising industry has screwed themselves over by allowing security threats to be delivered via their networks.</comment></comment>


Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/interviewing-front-end-engineer-san-francisco/ <comment><USER3> We were hiring a non-senior full-stack developer recently and I noticed there were no "frontend" questions on the list, so I added what I thought would be a question that any developer with frontend experience could answer, and would also pave the way for some more interested discussions for an advanced candidate. The question was something to the effect of "In JavaScript, what is the value of 'this' in a method?"

I would have accepted an answer as simple as "The value of 'this' depends on how the method is called" or even "The value of 'this' confuses me because it's often not what I expect."

It was a disaster. We may as well not have asked the question at all. Nobody seemed to even be aware of anything about it.

<comment><USER4> I've been doing Javascript for a few years and recently answered a few StackOverflow questions. One was regarding "this".If anyone wants to hire my ass feel free to contact me. One of my techniques for learning has been by going on interviews and flopping, then going back and learning all the interview question material on my own time. Wash and repeat.I've been doing this bullshit since the first day I started teaching myself. It all began with an interview that required knowledge of strictly HTML & CSS. Suffice to say after I tried to mimic an unordered list with 12 div blocks I didn't get the gig. Things are better now. I promise! Where am I? Whats this padded wall doing here? !!!!

<comment><USER3> If you're looking, we are still hiring for a third position (we've been on a bit of a binge lately with hiring). [http://agency.governmentjobs.com/washington/default.cfm?acti...](http://agency.governmentjobs.com/washington/default.cfm?action=viewJob&jobID=775637)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I'll fill it all out in the next 24 hours

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are algorithm questions really that useful when looking for a candidate? I find myself being really nervous about applying to other jobs because I'm not formally trained in CS.

My job and side projects are mostly web sites that require knowledge about how to architecture software but I very rarely write complex algorithms.

If something comes up where I need to optimize something I can usually spend some time Googling for some insights on how to improve it, but it's been 15+ years since I've written a sort algo. The idea of being forced to come up to a solution to an unknown problem on the spot makes me feel inadequate.

<comment><USER6> I'm a full stack developer. Currently focusing on iOS. Interview questions should really depend on the expectations of the type of software being developed.

I've been to a couple interviews lately and this has been the first time (in my career) that I have been tested (with time constraints too, mind you). I was either pointed to a whiteboard, or sat in a room with nothing but a couple sheets of blank (unruled) paper, a non-erasable pen, and a list of ~10 algorithms questions with a few to be implemented and their running time, and memory footprint to be explained.

I was not prepared, at all.

I have been developing software for about 17 years. Do you have any idea how many times in my career I have been asked to write a heap sort, a trie, or create a power set? Never. So, I had forgotten some of the specifics of how to implement them. Let alone on paper. A quick note... My handwriting is atrocious. I'm 41 and I am extremely embarrassed as to how bad it is. I can play classical guitar, but I screw up everything I write or attempt to draw. I thought it was a dyslexia thing or something, but I don't seem to have enough of the symptoms for that. That's pretty much why I liked using a computer when I was younger; I could fix my mistakes. So, needless to say, when I am asked to write stuff down I kind of freak out.

Anyway, there is a reason I have reference materials and the Internet. If I don't remember the specifics of something, I go look it up. I know what a lot of data structures and algorithms are, but I just don't bother memorizing all their specifics. I know what to look for. I read the description and can decide what the best thing to do is. Sure, I remember the basics of the major algorithms and data structures, and some of their their Big O characteristics. Implementing these isn't really what I do on just about any given day.

So, what have I been doing about it? I've been spending the last couple weeks going back over the "Algorithms" book ([http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/](http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/)) and grabbed all the videos from the Coursera courses on the same book/topic.

I admit it's all my fault. I have written a lot of very successful applications over my career. These have fulfilled requirements for power generation, real estate, healthcare, search engine, and marketing companies. Using higher level abstractions (like using an OO language) with industry tested APIs for sorting, lists, trees etc.. kind of makes you push that stuff to the side because for 95% of the development, that kind of low level detail is just not necessary.

Now, of course, this really depends also on what type of development you do. Sure, if you are writing a lot of C code, you may need to manually write these structures. Or, if you are writing low level code (game event loops, collision detection, file system stuff, you know) that needs to run as optimally as possible, sure. A lot of us write applications that take in data, and spew it back out. Heck, a lot of developers are forced to write just a hell of a lot of SQL queries and they'll never see a data structure beyond a class file, an array list, and a result set.

Again, I am attempting to better myself now. I don't know how long it will be before I can answer some of the more crazy questions I have been asked though.

TL;DR I was not prepared, at all.

<comment><USER7> It's not "all your fault".

The problem is that there is a belief in the industry that 15-30 minutes of technical interviewing tells more about a candidate than that person's entire career history. I have seen no actual data to support this belief.

I think someone who has a history of having built successful applications is far more likely to be qualified than someone who happens to have a good memory for algorithmic solutions and performs well under the stress of an interview situation.

This interviewing approach may make sense for entry level candidates who have nothing more to show than what they have learned in their CS classes but applying it to an experienced professional is simply brain-dead.

<comment><USER6> One of my favorite quotes:

"Never memorize something that you can look up."

\--Albert Einstein

<comment><USER8> Then again, you probably should memorize it after looking it up for the 10th time.

<comment><USER6> Statistically speaking, I haven't had to look them up that many times. I've a high percentage of the JDK memorized though, and a pretty good portion of the CocoaTouch and Objective-C Foundation framework. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One problem is that many people associate front-end development mainly with HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are not programming languages.

I say this a front-end developer who has to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a daily basis. Yes, strictly speaking, HTML and CSS may be considered programming languages, but they lack control structures, design patterns and other interesting tenants of computer science. Like the author, I'm much more drawn toward the CS-related tasks of the job such as writing JavaScript.

To be clear, I have an enormous amount of respect for people who enjoy the design aspects. Writing CSS, using Photoshop, etc., requires a lot of skill. My point is simply that there is a divide among those front-end developers who are drawn toward programming and those who are drawn toward layout and design.

As more sites gravitate toward complex JavaScript-driven web apps, it may be useful to ditch the general term "front-end," differentiating C.S.-oriented front-end developers from those who prefer visual design.

This might make the expectations of a front-end development position much clearer, allowing for a simpler interview process.

<comment><USER10> Post author here. I agree 100% that HTML and CSS are not programming languages. However, any application that you build on the front-end is going to require your JavaScript code to interact with the HTML and CSS, so a solid understanding of how all the pieces fit together is crucial.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen back-end engineers hack together a 100+ line JavaScript solution to a problem when one line of CSS would have fixed it.

If you don't know CSS, HTML and DOM very well, then you're probably going to be over-engineering your front-end apps.

<comment><USER11> Any book recommendation? I can say I know JS as a language sufficiently well (I can write basically anything on Node), but I almost completely lack a systematic understanding how the HTML+CSS and DOM work together (layout engine, rendering, etc). I have some basic knowledge here and there, but reading "We need to make outside div relative to be able to use absolute on the inner one" leaves me staring out of the window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning."

False dichotomy. How about a smart person who knows a lot about X and is creative and logical? They do exist.

I feel like many interviewers want to categorize someone in to one of those two categories from the outset - "this person already knows a lot about XYZ, therefore, I'd rather look for a smart person who doesn't know XYZ and teach them". Sounds crazy writing it out, but it's the impression I got years ago interviewing. It's also the impression I get from friends of mine who have interviewed in the more recent few months.

<comment><USER13> It's more like, "we want smart people, so let's optimize our interview process to find smart people, and give everyone the same interview questions."

The problem here is that firms tend to prefer giving "engineering interview problems" to everyone, and do not want to segment interview questions by position.

<comment><USER14> Because that takes a lot more time for the interviewers. For a growing tech company, they could have as many open reqs as they have engineers. Crafting questions for all of those positions takes a lot of time that most companies don't have time to do.

<comment><USER15> Hiring is pretty much the most important thing you do as a company.. if you can't spend an hour per position developing applicable questions for each position, you are setting yourself up for failure.

<comment><USER16> Yet, time and time again, these posts come up and the comments contain a not- insignificant of anecdotes about hiring processes that resulted in high failure rates in interviews, so they hire someone kinda smart anyway and teach them the concepts that other interviewers failed to answer satisfactorily in the interviews. Why ask at all, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related, I just found out that Darcy Clarke put this list together of good front-end interview questions. I would have included it in the article if I'd known about it ahead of time.

[https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer- Interview...](https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview- Questions)

<comment><USER17> "Whats your favorite feature of internet explorer"

I think I see what she did there..

<comment><USER18> The ability to emulate different versions of IE. Of course, the only reason this is necessary is because of the many breaking changes that the different versions created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _I 'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning._

This!

That one sentence pretty much addressed all of your questions and concerns. So instead on hacking the apparent process, read that sentence again and _get it_. This is pretty much an absolute truth in almost any industry for almost any skill. It's especially true in tech because:

      - "X" will be different in 2 years anyway.
      - "X" will be VERY different in 4 years.
      - Well funded companies want long-term talent.
      - Start-ups seeking their place want long-term talent.
      - Companies with long-term vision want long-term talent.
      - A jack of all trades is usually better than a master of one.
      - If it's so complicated to learn, it's too complicated to use.

<comment><USER20> I've done very little HTML,CSS but I feel confident that I could become proficient as a front-end dev. But it is going to take months. I assume you are saying that these companies are hiring based on expected performance at 1+ years. They don't expect the person who gets the job to be making major front end code changes the first month?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Note: I work for Grooveshark, which is in Gainesville, FL, about as far away from San Francisco as you can be in the continental US...so what I'm about to talk about might not be like what is going on over there at all.

When we bring someone in for an interview, we generally already have a pretty good idea of their technical skill level. Part of the filtering process is asking to see their work, either code samples or a portfolio. For frontend engineers it is especially easy to see their work since you can load it up in the browser, inspect, interact with the console, etc.

If we are impressed by their work, the interview is 90% making sure they are a good personality fit, 10% making sure the work we looked at was actually theirs. We probably end up asking slightly more frontend-specific questions than the author experienced, but probably not much.

We find that this process generally works quite well, but a few people that we gave offers to did tell us they were surprised because they felt they had bombed the interview, assuming that since we didn't get into a lot of nitty gritty technical stuff or ask them to write code on a whiteboard, that we had already decided we weren't going to hire them.

</comment><comment><USER22> A coworker and I wrote a script that's been through a few iterations based on feedback and tailored to whatever company I'm hiring for. Based on the participants self-rating (1-10) you can ask increasingly more nuanced questions in each area of CSS, HTML, and JS. Here's the front-end interview script I use: [https://gist.github.com/potench/e71e09c882628054c119](https://gist.github.com/potench/e71e09c882628054c119) So far it seems to do a good job at promoting conversation and identifying thoughtful and talented FE developers.

<comment><USER23> This is a good list. Can I ask you something though? I've always been curious about the value of questions like these (just to take a sample):

> On a scale of 1-10, what is your comfort level developing with HTML, CSS & > JavaScript?

> How well do you think you work with other fellow developers?

> Given a choice, would you rather work alone or in tandem with someone?

What are the "correct" answers to these? Or more specifically, in your opinion what are the "wrong" answers?

On the first, the problem I see is one of self-reporting. We have seen developers self-report a 9 on something, only for us to determine later based on the interview that they were more like a 5. We didn't put value on either of these numbers, because both were relative - the "9" was presumably relative to his previous job environment, and the "5" was relative to ours. (At another company the person could've been a "2", for example.) Fact is, it doesn't really matter - we were just looking to see if the person can add value, regardless of whether they were a 5 or a 10.

On the latter two: we have had "loners" crank out incredible bits of code on their own, and "team people" do the same as part of a larger group. We have also seen people switch between the two "personality types" based on context - the specific project, their team mates for the project, and so on.

So we prefer not to ask these types of questions as we don't seem to get any relevant information out of them, but perhaps we're missing something, and so I'm curious as to what your motivations are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a follow-up to my earlier comment, i'm doing a phone interview right now and the first interviewer started off with questions about how IIS internals worked and some obscure C# questions. I immediately asked him "Is this a front-end position or not? I know C# and .net MVC but i'm focusing my career on Angular" his reply "I honestly don't know, they just told me to call you and ask you a series of questions on advanced C# development" Job posting title "Senior Frontend Developer with AngularJS"

<comment><USER25> It seems that JS MVC frameworks change every year, maybe they decided that asking questions on the flavour-of-the-month is not an indicator? Would expect some JS questions though.

<comment><USER24> As a bonus, finally got to talk to the hiring manager a second ago and he informed me that there would be NO javascript or front end development in this role, just converting Crystal Reports into some other obscure reporting system. So I ended the call promptly with a "Thank you for your time and good bye"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've had similar experiences in the last month of interviews i've been through. I was asked how i'd design a secure backend API in asp.net, various algorithm questions, some basic javascript questions ("what is a closure?", "what does the var keyword do?", etc") and other very non-specific things. At the end of most of my interviews when they ask if I have any questions about the positions I tend to have to ask "Is this a Front end Developer position you just interviewed me for?" Not once have any of the interviewers been front-end devs, only SVP of Development or Director of Design or some other inflated title. I want to talk about problems i've had building Angular or Knockout apps or or cross-browser JS/CSS issues.

<comment><USER26> Interesting so I hope you said get ready to spend a fuckload of cash on state of the art secure key stores as this is the only way to properly build a secure back end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems fairly typical, and I understand the rationale on both sides.

In any kind of engineering role, not just front-end, having domain experience/expertise certainly helps you be more productive from the get go. In a previous company we hired developers with good CS chops but no iOS experience to build our iPhone app - they picked it up, but it took a couple of years and numerous rewrites to get an awesome product. Thats a huge opportunity cost. You'll end up with a better product right off the bat if you hire an expert, especially with technologies which have a ton of quirks and nuances.

So why wouldn't you want to hire a front-end expert? In a lot of smaller companies flexibility can trump expertise - having an engineer who is smart and can work across the entire stack is essential in smaller teams. That doesn't mean they won't be primarily doing front-end development, but its helpful if they know their way around the back-end to some extent without hand-holding from other engineers. A good candidate needs to be smart enough to quickly pickup new tools and techniques, and it is important to determine this in the interview process.

<comment><USER28> I was just thinking about the similarities in iOS development. I have worked on a project where the original authors weren't iOS developers but were very competent front end developers, and it wasn't pretty. It doesn't just affect the code, but also things like the build environment and documenation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You were interviewed by back-end engineers. That's what they knew.

My question is why didn't you leave the interview upon seeing it was a waste of time?

<comment><USER10> To be honest, I was actually having a good time. I'm one of the crazy people who likes interviewing. I think it's kind of thrilling.

Also, they flew me up there, so what was I gonna do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You'd hope that before they bring you in they know that you know basic front end stuff. To be honest most front end tech is simply memorization of standards and idiosyncrasies between browsers. Anyone can go through and figure this stuff out via a simple google search. On the other hand taking say data from a Ajax call and sorting it or filtering it with custom logic takes some creative problem solving to do it gracefully.

Interviewees always forget to figure out why they interviewer and company is asking these questions or requiring particular knowledge. Next time just ask them!

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm a PHP/WordPress dev shipping product every single day, but I think I'd probably fail questions like these if I was asked in an interview setting.

I don't really worry about functions like these until a need arises, and when it does (and I don't know how to do it), I learn until I do.

This is an absurd way to recruit front-end talent and partially explains the so-called talent crunch.

<comment><USER32> Nothing against you, as I don't know you or your work, but "shipping product" does not equal doing good work. People ship crappy, buggy code every day. Just because one "ships daily" doesn't mean that what they're shipping is worth anything or means they know what they're doing. I've seen people that have no clue how to write code copy and paste crap they find all over the internet into a file and ship it. It's a slow, buggy and ugly hack, but it shipped. It will come back days later as unexceptably bad by the customer. That's the purpose of these tests. To weed out the people that have no clue how to write proper software that deals with high loads, scalability and performance criticality.

<comment><USER33> Software engineers make product, not code. I'd prefer talented developer with good practical experience in "releasing products" rather than an algo-geek who can only solve stupid hiring quizes.

Slow buggy ugly WORKING RELEASED product is a much-much better than ideal clean and effective thing not yet ready for release for a few years in row.

<comment><USER32> Not saying I disagree with that, except for releasing slow buggy code. Why not accept either of those people? There are efficient ways, as described in the article, to interview for people that are great at releasing quality code in a productive time frame. I was simply pointing out that releasing code daily doesn't mean you know what you're doing. If you can't answer at least some of the questions that were in this article, I'd question your ability to write productive code. That's not to say that only questions like that should be a determining factor for ones ability to produce.

<comment><USER31> You're right that shipping !== good code, but I wouldn't be able to keep shipping the same product if it weren't somewhat valuable to my customers.

The point isn't that I'm a unicorn, but that good developers can exist outside of code challenges.

People like me, that are self-taught and work super hard in order to improve our craft...we're not appreciated enough.

Everyone wants a rockstar, forgetting that drummers and bass players add a lot of value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I had a similar experience with a well known bay area company. I was interviewing for a front end job and they gave me a live coding interview with a recursion question about assembling trees from strings (or maybe vice versa).

I had spent the majority of my time preparing for the interview preparing for front end stuff. I stuffed my brain with Javascript quirks and made sure that the stuff I already knew I could articulate really well. And I gave myself a quirk algorithms review because I knew that is something the Bay Area values.

I struggled with the first question. They asked me if I was interested in a non-dev job because apparently they liked my personality and thought I may be a good cultural fit. It struck me as odd that they liked me enough to inquire if I'm interested in other positions, but only gave me one chance to show them I could be a frontend candidate and the sole interview question wasn't even frontend oriented.

</comment><comment><USER35> It could have been a sign that they trusted your front-end skill. If I know someone has a skill, I don't waste my time interviewing them to prove it. I try to figure out what else they can do, where they can grow, and how well they would fit in with the team.

So I'd pose the question back to you -- did you provide them a portfolio or any code samples that would have made the front-end questions redundant?

<comment><USER10> Yes, I provided a detailed resume as well as my Github account for all of these. The problem is it didn't seem like the individual interviewers had taken much time to actually look at what I'd done.

If they had, then maybe I'd agree with you, but it seemed like many of them were just going through the motions. It seemed like they interview people all the time.

<comment><USER36> "It seemed like they interview people all the time."

I bet you hit the nail on the head.

At my current job, I've had weeks where I've been on an interview loop every day. At that point, I'm not going to spend much time looking at your github code in depth beforehand each day. Especially when it's a candidate whose area of expertise isn't the same as mine, so I wouldn't know what to look for. Ideally we'd be better able to match interviewers with interviewees, but if we had enough people to be doing that, we wouldn't be in the mad hiring rush that ends up with a developer doing five interviews in a single week around career- fair season. ;)

(My last job was a much smaller company where each hire was weighed a lot more, and we absolutely would've looked at all that stuff there.)

However, I always start off asking about a specific project from the candidate's resume, usually the one that I think sounds most interesting to me. Depending on how long they take to explain it, or how interested they seem to be in explaining it, I'll follow up with a more open-ended question of what their most interesting or challenging project was -- if you can sell me on that project, it's just as big an influence on me me as the coding or design question that I'd also ask.

But I have coworkers who don't ask about other projects like that, which I think kinda sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have friends who have politely refused to answer or indulge the interviewer in the algorithm questions labyrinth. As someone being interviewed, you should atleast try to divert the interview toward your strengths. On the flip-side, if a company is interviewing you for a front-end position and not asking enough DOM, CSS questions, they're doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER38> Great writeup. This is pretty much the same experience that I had when I moved to San Francisco. I got a lot of "college memorization" questions. Basically, you could read a book, memorize the answer and come up with it. I was also interviewed by some young guys out of Stanford who asked me a question that they probably spent a few weeks in class working on that I had 45 minutes to figure out. When I look at the interview process, it seems more like a battle than an actual interview, but it is engineers we are dealing with.

When I do interviews, I want to know that you can program, but I care more about whether or not I can work with you.

</comment><comment><USER39> I am honestly a little shocked by this. I am a university student and this past semester I interviewed with around 10 companies in the Bay area, all of which were for Front-End engineering positions. I can only think of one company which did not give me any 'front end specific' questions. I was asked everything from hoisting and closures to explaining how Webkit works and various ways to improve page load time. Are you free to elaborate on what companies you spoke with?

<comment><USER10> Maybe offline. I'm not interested in publicly calling out any companies. I mainly wanted to shed light on the process and my experience.

I will say that when interviewing for previous jobs in the past (at smaller companies), I got asked a lot more front-end questions. Maybe it's just a big company problem.

<comment><USER40> It's true on the business side as well. Small companies ask relevant questions because they have to - their survival depends on finding someone who can _do the job_.

Big companies, even famous ones, have moved so far beyond their scrappy "gotta survive" days that they have become quite lost in their bureaucracy and arrogance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I do lots of front-end work and have tended to do front-end phonescreens for the past few years. I'm a huge fan of Steve Yegge's five essential phone screen questions: [https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential- pho...](https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen- questions)

Good breadth, no one gets bounced for not knowing a couple of the answers, great way to get a larger picture of what the candidate knows (or doesn't!).

Designers-turned-JSers tend not to do so well on data structures and bits and bytes.

After the five questions, I move to HTML/CSS questions: inline vs. block, what does float really do, the display property, valid values for display besides "none", visibility: hidden vs display: none, position, absolute vs. relative (with relative offset parent questions thrown in).

For the JS portion, I ask scoping, closures, global object, the values of "this" based on calling context.

I like front-end engineers who are also, y'know, _engineers_. I like working with people who I can say "that distributed system has performance characteristics akin to a hashtable" and they know what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER42> As a former front-end engineering manager that has screened, interviewed, and hired tons of developers for large corps and small startups, I hear this guy's frustration and have felt it myself. I've often stepped into interviews for other departments and teams that had no FE developers to give them a hand.

At the same time, I've come across far too many developers who assume "front- end" only meant HTML, CSS, and jQuery.

NOTE: Not JavaScript, but jQuery, which are very, VERY different things. The author does himself a disservice by citing a jQuery example instead of a general JavaScript one. I get how prevalent jQuery is, but if you can't describe some of the inner workings of JS to me, then I may weed you out. That's just my preference though; other hiring managers differ.

In my particular cases, we needed FEs that knew JavaScript and server-side scripting languages - to the extent of being able to write some presentation- layer logic if necessary.

So whenever I've coached technical hiring managers who have no experience with front-end development, I'd tell them to go right ahead and ask questions on general programming logic. Even if the candidate's verbal answer is incorrect, the thought process behind trying to answer it can be helpful.

FYI, the type of phone screen questions I would ask are:

\+ Why is a doctype significant? (HTML)

\+ What is the box model? (CSS)

\+ Describe the event model. (JavaScript)

(You'd be surprised at how many purported front-end engineers get these wrong.)

These were accompanied by general programming logic questions. They all designed to assess the developer's ability to communicate and explain, and not the developer's technical skill. For that, I looked at code samples and the results of a take-home code exercise. And the specificity and difficulty of the questions would depend on the stage of the interview and level of candidate's experience. The "What is the value of 'this' in a method?" question is a great one too.

<comment><USER43> This guy hired me based on my FE skills even though I didn't had any development experience. It was my first job as a FE engineer.

I won't be able to get a job based on algorithm/standard CS interview questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think these problems stem from the job posting. Like the author, I've come to love interviewing and I've conducted a good deal of interviews myself. I've noticed that a job titled "front-end developer" with a poor description casts too wide a net and wastes everyone's time.

If I see that you mentioned design experience and Backbone in your job posting and then you quiz me on Rails and database queries I'm going to feel like I'm attending amateur hour.

However, if you state that data structures, algorithms and all that other great CS stuff is fair game in the job posting or the follow-up emails – then go ahead.

Don't envy the front-end developer. At this point we have to be prepared for anything.

</comment><comment><USER45> I believe the mindset behind this behavior is A) they take it for granted that you're proficient in your stated area of expertise, B) they're not necessarily proficient in your area of expertise, so wouldn't be able to assess your skills anyway, C) algorithm knowledge is hard to fake, so your false positive rate for hardcore engineers will be low, even if your false negative rate will be ridiculously high.

Google's publicly available prep material reinforces this third point, even if they don't say it explicitly. They recommend books, point you toward places where you can learn the concepts, and tell you if you fail once, try again in a few months.

</comment><comment><USER46> Similar in NYC. I remember an interview where I was asked to bit-shift in Javascript, for the sake of itself.

I've also had good experiences though--I liked one where I had to build certain UI components and get my code evaluated in real-time.

<comment><USER47> Since it's just *2 (right shift) or /2 (left shift), I'm pretty sure they wanted to quickly test how are you with general programming knowledge.

<comment><USER48> In javascript, the number type is just number. To truly bit shift with this method, you'd need to convert the bitwise representation into a number, perform the given operation, handle the corner case of odd numbers when dividing, and the convert it back into some representation of bits.

Trying to judge people with questions like this seems like a misguided endeavor. Yes, it's probably valuable to know that bitshifting is roughly equivalent to *2 and /2\. But that's more like trivia - the chances you'll actually use that in real life is really low. I've had to work with people that think bitshifting is an appropriate optimization for division/multiplication by even numbers. I then have to explain overflows, underflows, and the fact that the compiler will compile it to shifts if appropriate anyway, so don't sacrifice readability in the name of micro- optimization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm sorry you had to go through that bullshit.

That generally sucks when you're interviewed by assholes who have no idea that the specific platform that you might work on requires.

Consider most front-end engineers ALSO to be designers, and I'd suspect thats where I would drive the interview. I would wish the same treatment.

Also lol that the interview questions are basically EITHER memorizing formulas and remembering why something was that way or trying to cram down a solution on the whiteboard in the little time you have.

The latter is more admirable, but depends on the situation at hand. 5 minutes, white board, using your fingers as eraser.

<comment><USER50> I think we are also seeing the rise of the frontend developer, where they spend most of their time on JS, with maybe some time in HTML and CSS - <USER2> least, that is what I do for work, although I am fully capable of excelling at CSS as well.

<comment><USER51> My career as a developer has been coming up through the role of front-end engineer, really from when that was first being defined as a separate role (2004-2005, around then). In hindsight now, I would never hire myself. Either you're a developer, in which case you should be able to traverse that stack (so for example JS as well as PHP/Ruby/Python) or you're a designer, and you can traverse that stack (so you design, implement your designs in HTML/CSS, maybe a little JS as necessary). But while there is crossover between the two domains, there isn't a separate role in the middle. Trying to fit development workflow around people who just do HTML/CSS/JS ends up creating too many bottlenecks, on both sides: "I'm waiting for designer A to deliver X" or "I'm waiting for back-end person B to deliver Y". When you just have people who work their whole stack, that bottleneck is removed.

<comment><USER50> It gets necessary at some point - it's not cheap finding highly skilled full stack developers, and they're not the most common beasts around. Everyone wants them, but they have their pick of jobs. It's far easier to hire for the positions separately, and if your company is in need of rapid expansion, I'd say almost necessary given the market.

While I term myself as more of a frontend developer currently, I also know CSS pretty well (I sometimes fix bugs the UI team can't figure out), and I am currently transitioning to doing some backend work at my current job as well.

All developers should strive to be full stack, and designers should strive to know code more, but realistically speaking, not everyone is there yet of course, so you have to focus on developing the talent or hiring it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I was full stack at my old job, so I do phone screens for front end engineers now. It's incredible how many people claim "front end" and fail at basic JS, HTML api, or page optimization questions yet do well at algo questions. I am far from an CSS expert but if we didn't ask questions like "how would you optimize the static content of the page?" I'm sure we would end up hiring OK general devs who actually don't know anything about front end.

</comment><comment><USER53> I interviewed for a long-term "Frontend engineer" role in June for a large cable company here in the Netherlands. I've been a full-stack developer for the past 3 years or so, and before that I was in game development, and before that still, I wrote enterprise middleware.

My frontend experience going into this interview was almost entirely jQuery, with the exception of one 2 month freelance project where I had a crash course in AngularJS.

I was asked a ton of technical frontend questions, and I was able to answer them at a conceptual level but not from experience. I got the job, and I think what was important was my broader experience as a programmer, not the answers to specific frontend questions.

The thing is, real frontend programming of large JavaScript applications is a brand new field. There are lots of people with lots of jQuery experience (it's telling that this article deals with jQuery as an example of frontend development), but not so many with serious JavaScript programming experience outside of a library or framework.

I think because of this, companies are just being realistic when they interview for frontend positions based on general programming knowledge and experience. Maybe in 5 years they will drill down more, as the pool of expert frontenders expands.

</comment><comment><USER54> I know it's a bit off-topic, but I'm a student so anything about interviews interests me a lot. For the Bacon Number question, I'm struggling a bit to get my head around a good way to do it.

My immediate idea is to derive a graph where nodes are actors and an edge between 2 actors means they've been in 1 or more films together. I believe the shortest path between them and Bacon could then be found by breadth-first search.

It looks like that graph would be quite slow to derive though - my naive pseudocode being something like:

        for bucket in hashtable:
            for actor in bucket:
                if actor not in graph, add a node for actor
                for other_actor in bucket (up to actor):
                   add an edge between other_actor and actor

That looks pretty slow without deriving a running time, so I'm guessing there's some optimisation that can be made from the current structure of the hashtable. Could anybody give me a pointer in the right direction please?

<comment><USER55> It is the final inner loop that is problematic.

Instead, your graph should comprise movies _and_ actors as vertices (edge = actor was in a given movie), and to get the Bacon number you just halve the distance in this graph.

So you code would look like

        for bucket in hashtable:
            add node for bucket
            for actor in bucket:
                if actor not in graph, add a node for actor
                add an edge between actor and bucket
                add an edge between bucket and actor

If each movie contains exactly K actors, and there are N movies, then your graph has O(NK^2) edges while mine has O(NK) edges.

<comment><USER54> Ah that's awesome, really smart optimisation, thanks. I hadn't really thought of the possibility of having the two different features in the same graph but that's definitely better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I have been a front-end engineer for over a decade, and if I were hiring for a position a decade ago I would understand and agree with your points. However, with the breadth and depth of skills required for great front-end engineering today, I would feel very uncomfortable hiring someone who only had the arcane skills required to "get the job done" on the front-end. If hiring for a smaller company, I would be concerned about this person's ability to contribute to more than just the tasks in their silo. If hiring for a larger company, I would be concerned about this person's potential for future growth. Also, it's usually apparent from projects or employment history that someone can do what's required on the surface for front-end work, so why would I waste interview time going over details and minutiae in that area? I'd rather take the opportunity to find out if they're a solid engineer as well.

</comment><comment><USER57> My understanding is that this is type of 'shallow' technical interview in SF with notable companies is not limited to front-end.

A good friend recently interviewed at multiple well known and respected internet companies for an Android position. This guy is perhaps a global authority on Android. Technical questions were of the computer science type, and did little to illustrate the substance of value the companies were actually trying to hire for.

Rather than take the time to understand whether he really, really knew Android, they wanted to see if he could traverse nodes in a tree. Two companies even asked the exact same non-Android specific question.

</comment><comment><USER58> Concerning that they ask you computer science questions when you will be working on the front end.

What if you were to ask CSS and Javascript questions to a DBA? Do you see how absolutely ridiculous that sounds?

<comment><USER59> More ridiculous than asking CS questions of a front end dev. I'm a self-taught front-end dev who has flunked numerous interviews because of a lack of CS degree and being able to get through the sorting algorithm questions. I then went home and have spent lots and lots of time teaching myself those fundamentals, if only to interview better. Those fundamentals have made me a vastly better front end dev, able to efficiently solve problems I wouldn't have been able to solve a year ago.

I have had the exact same experience with the author of the article regarding a total absence of actual front-end related questions, though. Not sure how to feel about not getting those gigs.

<comment><USER17> Can you give some examples of which algorithm have been the most relevant/helpful?

<comment><USER58> His silence is highly amusing to me. :)

<comment><USER59> Your condescension is highly distasteful to me.

<comment><USER17> Who was he talking about? Me? If so, I upvoted the reply, what more do I need to do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I interviewed at a well-known place here in Portland and they seemed really disappointed that I didn't already know Rails. That was surprising to me, since like the author, I am more familiar with the mindset that you prefer smart people rather than people who know technology X. Beforehand I spent all this time reviewing data structures, algorithms, etc, but they just cared about Rails. I also got one of those goofy OO-design questions about Human inherits from Animal. Not at all what I was expecting.

<comment><USER25> Times when Rails development was considered an out-of-box thinking have clearly passed...

<comment><USER60> Yep, just another orthodoxy now, for some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Just wanted to share that I had a very similar experience interviewing as a front-end engineer last year, and had made many of the same assessments about the process as you have.

It is interesting that the company I ended up at-- while they did ask some standard algorithm and 'how do you think' type questions-- there were also many questions probing my front-end skills, including some quick JS coding problems. The interview just felt SO different than anything else.

Thanks for posting this!

</comment><comment><USER62> Hey. I work at Twitter. I think that at certain companies the "front-end" role is not as specialized as assumed, and you tend to interview for a specific team that has an opening, rather than for a generic position among a hoard of similar developers.

Having said that, I'm surprised there was only one CSS question, and the suggestion to combine questions with front-end specific knowledge might be a good way to ease into the interview.

</comment><comment><USER63> A bit off topic,but is there a website that gather common computer science interview questions with solutions ? thanks.

<comment><USER6> I saw this on Reddit yesterday.

[http://www.grokit.ca/spc/computer_science_review/](http://www.grokit.ca/spc/computer_science_review/)

So, perhaps this can get you started.

I plan on getting a copy of: [http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview- Programming-...](http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming- Questions/dp/098478280X) too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> >"A correct answer to this will demonstrate both an understanding of basic computer science principles as well as a deeper knowledge of what jQuery is doing behind the scenes."

How does the referenced jquery statement represent basic CS principles? OOP? Definitely not that.

<comment><USER65> The referenced jQuery statement gives the candidate a chance to speak on: selector complexity (id look ups vs traversing to find descendant elements), first-class functions (passing a function reference to the .on() method), regular expressions (to add class names to an existing class attribute in older browsers that don't have .classList property on elements). There are probably other things but those are just a few off the top of my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> The two CSS questions I ask (but skip depending portfolio quality):

1) Make these two discs sit next to eCh other. What other ways you could do that? Why each way bad/good for what?

2) center this. Other ways? Bad/good about each?

</comment><comment><USER67> SF Tech Interviews. By recent college grads FOR recent college grads.

</comment><comment><USER68> Those are excellent suggestions in the "My Suggestions" section. Thanks for the article.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm almost entirely backend, but I can relate to the travails of interviewing in the Bay Area and dealing with unprepared interviewers.

The engineers were like anywhere else-- and a fair proportion of them were very good-- but there are just a lot of arrogant people in the managerial ranks of the Valley. After you get an offer and you get to the negotiation phase, most Bay Area firms try to lowball you because-- even if you're from an objectively better place like NYC or Austin-- _obviously_ everyone wants the privilege of working in California. (Expensive housing even in the suburbs, nightmarish traffic, and the most aggressive homeless population in the U.S. Where do I sign up?)

Then there was one silly game company (which, presumably unrelatedly, is now being sued) that wanted me to sign a full NDA just to do a coding test. Not an NDA over the material of the test (which I would have signed) but one that included a one-year non-solicit covering all employees of that firm.

I could be generalizing negative experiences, but it seems to be like they didn't prepare for your interview (recognizing that you were a _front-end_ engineer) because of that obnoxious (and completely false) assumption that, if you were any good, you'd already be in the Bay Area. Obviously they had enough interest to take time out of their day, but not enough to prepare.

In New York, there are a lot of startups that are of low quality; but the arrogance of Silicon Valley is unparalleled. Wall Street's reputation would have you expecting it to be worse but, by and large, it's not.

<comment><USER70> I haven't really seen the assumption that "if you were any good, you'd already be in the Bay Area."

I have seen sort of the opposite, though -- if you are experienced, you likely have a family and there is no way in hell you are moving to the Bay Area.</comment></comment>