zainny

He was interviewing at a startup dude. They probably didn't have a hiring manager and have no clue about how saying stuff like this can backfire.

Which, incidentally, Android does.

Can anyone explain the interrelation between sports players and college for me? We don't really have such a concept in Australia as far as I'm aware. Am I understanding correctly that to play a sport professionally a person must first attend a college and complete some degree? Why does the US even have this system? Do any other countries do this as well?

We're creating an environment now in which it is practically impossible to discuss this topic in tech. Our general irrationality and desire to completely and utterly jump down the throat of anyone who even remotely touches on this topic means that in the future any gender topics are just going to get "no comment" responses.

That's sad and not without a touch of irony precisely because in stifling the discussion we're probably doing more harm than good.

Honestly I don't think any part of the question is genuine. It's all basically a setup for complaining about his coworkers.

Pretty wild. I opened your first link maybe 20 minutes ago and the price was $650. And now it's $750.

The volatility is just crazy.

A great deal of intent is telegraphed by how you say things and the words you choose to use. Starting out with something like "[the agreement] could help all of our economies and strengthen relations between the United States and several important Asian allies" definitely is putting a positive spin on something which I find a bit odd given the text of the agreement isn't even public .

Accessing this from Australia it still shows as available and you can order it. Must be geography specific (presumably, while inventory still lasts).

This article is from August.

About a week ago, the situation got much much worse. S4BB, the offending company, submitted another 138,792 apps: http://crackberry.com/s4bb-submits-additional-138792-apps-bl...

BlackBerry is an embarrassing joke of a company for permitting this (and from quotes I've read, even encouraging it).

I don't think "making out like bandits" is accurate at all. Tenured academics don't seem like they make all that much money and I think most would make more in corporate.

This entire post is absurd.

It's almost entirely analogous in my mind to the idea that because there are books that perhaps feature words like "sex" and "miniskirts" that this is offensive, the entire author community is broken, and this is why women don't read books! GUYS GUYS, we absolutely need to start censoring what people can write about! FYI, I think we should all base our moral code on the American christian values...just sayin'!

Here's an idea - women aren't all delicate flowers you need to white-knight on the internet. They can handle seeing words like "bj" and "shag".

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Android yet. When you add in the Android factor, Java is probably still one of the most widely used programming languages today.

It's funny the article straight away brings up the verbosity argument as well. You want to talk about verbosity - take a look at Objective-C and Cocoa (again, hugely popular today!)!

Personally, I quite like Java.

I wonder if people will look back at this period and shake their heads or if things are only going to get worse from here on out? Is our obsession with these gizmos a temporary aberration caused by their newness and the fact that we haven't yet adapted to having them in our lives?

This video sure does hit home, if only because I see a little of myself in there.

I think maybe only two or so years ago BlackBerry had over 17,000 employees so in total we're talking about more than half of the company being cut in the space of a few years.

Huge when you think about it like that.

I live in Australia and use Whatsapp and so do lots of other people I know.

And at the same time as releasing this, they've just laid off 40% of the company. The tried and true PR tactic of trying to hide bad news: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732380820457908...

Alternative source for those who can't access WSJ: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/18/wsj-blackberry-expected-t...

Your post is the one that's hard to take seriously given that you continuously to refer to the poster as "he".

Near the end of the article, she writes: "I'm a single mother working in tech publishing — believe me, I get it".

My guess is you barely read it.

I think the difference here though is conferences like this are intentionally positioned at being more casual and less formal/professional. I doubt lawyers even have similarly casual conferences of this nature. In the tech world, we've intentionally positioned our conferences to be this way. I honestly think therefore that people will be more likely to bring their normal set of standards to bear in situations like this.

Now, I have a question for you. Imagine that you're a woman and you're walking to the restroom, past a line of 40 or 50 men. And now imagine those men have any time recently walked past a magazine store where upon they saw hundreds of magazines depicting women naked (ie. every single magazine store anywhere).

Or imagine those men are discussing the latest episode of Boston Legal, a typical TV show depicting a professional setting (legal firm) which contains highly sexualised themes (like, again, pretty much every show on TV today).

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm simply making the point that the standards people seem to be applying in the tech world seem to me to be completely out of whack with what society in general deems appropriate.

I wonder if the biggest reason why things like this keep happening is because we're all on a state of "high alert" in the tech community. Hear me out.

Right now in the tech world we've got ourselves in a big damn tizzy over anything even slightly sexual in nature.

By contrast, almost every single other medium we encounter on a day to day basis (TV, movies, magazines) is HIGHLY sexualised and makes absolutely no apologies for it. I've seen TV ads on primetime more offensive than some of these presentations.

I wonder if we're just going to keep running in to this issue again and again in the tech world simply because our standards are so out of whack with what the average person deems appropriate?

In case anyone is wondering, what motivated me to submit this was simply the fact that while I've known about this section forever, a quick poll of people I know who visit HN revealed that it wasn't common knowledge.

I have no idea why this and other sections (https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) aren't linked from the main page in a prominent visible manner - especially /best which is great for people like me who check in every few days.

What really annoys me about Dark Souls is the shitty PC port. They're still selling tons of copies of the game for PC because of all the silly hype around it, and yet the game is virtually unplayable - even with all the mouse fixes, mods, etc. Why is it acceptable for game developers to completely abandon their customer base and continue to sell a broken product?

I picked up the game during a Steam sale, spent a good few hours trying to make it playable with a variety of mods, fixes, etc. and then just gave up completely. And for those few hours I did play it, nothing about it stood out to me as being incredible or ingenious.

One thing that really annoys me about HN is how damn contrarian everyone always tries to be. Responses typically take the most absolute narrow and unforgiving interpretation of any point you are trying to make and subsequently use that to spin a counterpoint.

Drives me batty.

Ridiculous. Good engineers solve engineering problems. The huge number of successful engineers out there in the world solving problems without remembering their CS course notes tells you everything you need to know about how important much of the algorithmic subject matter is.

I once worked with an individual with a PhD in Mathematics who wrote some of the most god-awful code you could possibly imagine. In an algorithmic test, he would have bested anybody I can think of.

Intelligence and usefulness at tasks are incredibly complex topics for discussion. If you think you can reliably go from A to B, you're dead wrong. The only reliable metric is, if you want skills A, test for A. If you want skills B, test for B.

I am actually pretty decently ranked on Interviewstreet because I do have a personal interest in algorithmic stuff (I was top in Australia for a little while :)). I used to do your codesprints just for fun.

My feedback to you would be that Interviewstreet is heavily heavily geared towards academic algorithmic questions which the average developer would not have a chance in hell of solving. For example, in order to solve some of your old Hacker Rank questions within the time and memory constraints you pretty much have to know the studied and documented solution you would only ever be exposed to in doing a masters degree in CS. Heck, your problem descriptions were often thin veneers around the exact academic statement of the problem.

Despite the fact that I'm someone who actually does excel at these types of problems, I think they are absolutely the wrong way to hire people and whenever I've seen companies actually use Interviewstreet it makes me cringe - and yes I know companies set their own questions, but you lead by example and so most questions are abysmal.

I would argue that, say, a recent graduate who can absolutely nail algorithmic questions would be the most likely to screw up on the big ticket items that matter (infrastructure, taste, independent thought) precisely because they have zero real world experience.

This exact topic came up yesterday in the HN post "Bullshit Interviews": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304911 (https://coderwall.com/p/yn9g2a)

I repeat now what I said then: I think there's a very simple rule anyone can and should follow to not fuck up interviews: Don't ask people to do things in the interview you wouldn't expect them to do in the job. Examples:

(1) Do people in this job regularly write code on the whiteboard? Lack access to a search engine? No. Then don't do it in the interview.

(2) Do people in the job design spice racks for blind people? No. Then don't ask them to do this in the interview.

(3) Do people in the job regularly find themselves coding something on the level of fizz buzz? Yes? Go ahead and ask!

(4) Do people in the job regularly find themselves writing code to find loops in a graph? Yes? Go ahead and ask (though, let's be honest - this is exceedingly rare in comparison to how often it is deployed in interviews)

Verify people have the skills they need to do the job you're hiring for. It really is as simple as that.

I think there's a very simple rule anyone can and should follow to not fuck up interviews: Don't ask people to do things in the interview you wouldn't expect them to do in the job.

Examples:

(1) Do people in this job regularly write code on the whiteboard? Lack access to a search engine? No. Then don't do it in the interview.

(2) Do people in the job design spice racks for blind people? No. Then don't ask them to do this in the interview.

(3) Do people in the job regularly find themselves coding something on the level of fizz buzz? Yes? Go ahead and ask!

(4) Do people in the job regularly find themselves writing code to traverse linked lists? Find loops in graphs? Yes? Go ahead and ask.

Verify people have the skills they need to do the job you're hiring for. It really really is as simple as that.

Just as with all the other such articles, there are probably going to be comments on this one talking about how interviews like this are the exception. That you just got crappy interviewers and as the article itself notes, you probably didn't want to work there anywhere.

If you are the kind of person who would write this comment, stop now. The truth is the vast majority of technical interviews for developer positions are conducted in this bullshit manner today. The only way to solve this is to do what this article is doing and continue to draw attention to the fact that the way people are hired for software developer positions is completely and utterly broken. We need to make shitty technical interviews the exception, not the norm.

I've been in interviews in the past where I've just wanted to scream at the interviewer - Why, why aren't you asking about my portfolio? Look I've built amazing things that people love. With my own hands. To a high quality. On time. You can see and touch them. And it's exactly what you want me to do here in this role. JUST LOOK.

Nope. Hey it would be great if you could please while standing on your head, design a spice rack for a blind person (I've seriously been asked this), with one hand touching your nose. Oh and can you wear this red clown nose. This shit's important.