They can truly measure the value of the service by charging for it and seeing what service providers are willing to pay.
All the fake phone number does is measure how many phone leads the site generates, but it does nothing to measure the value of those leads. What if it generates 30 leads a month from consumers that are a bad fit for the service provider? On the other hand, what if it's 3 leads a month that turn into valuable business?
I'm with the plumber on this one. If you're trying to gain favor with a business you don't do it by hijacking their name and representing them as something they are not.
Thanks for the good read, Jason. I'm looking to build a newsletter for my travel site and am always looking for examples of companies that are having success with one.
Another company that is doing really well with newsletters is Dogster. Sarah Lacy interviewed the Dogster founder for Yahoo a year or so ago and I was amazed to discover how lucrative they can be.
I'd love to hear more about your methodology. Could you give an example of a problem that you ask the candidates to solve? What types of questions do you ask them when they are done?
Here's one of my favorite examples that can work for almost any language.
Remember, before any of this happens, I have already helped the candidate get comfortable and have made the purpose of the exercise clear: to assess where they're at and how/where they might fit in. It is not a test. Just an exercise to help us both. I offer them a soda or coffee, a little privacy, and this little problem...
You have an array. Call it "a" or whatever you want. It has a bunch of elements, numeric, alphanumeric, or whatever. You decide. Sort it. Without using a second array or a pre-existing function or routine. While I'm explaining this I'm sketching it out with my own pencil and paper. I suggest that they sketch out what they want to do themselves and then write some code (in the language being evaluated) or just pseudo code for general purposes. Be prepared to discuss whatever you want to present. Don't go nuts, just a few pages and 15 to 30 minutes. And have fun.
When I return, I have them explain how they approached it. (Here's what my code will do...) Then we go through the code line by line. At this point, it's incredibly easy for me to ask questions, such as...
Why did you name that variable that name?
Why did you use a for loop?
How else could you have done iteration?
How would you do it with 2 loops?
How would you do it with 1 loop?
Which variables are global? Which are local? Why?
Why did you reuse the variable "i" in the inner loop? (Oops)
How can you make it faster?
How could you make it clearer?
How would you change it if you knew the probability of the original order?
How would you refactor this?
How would you extend this to do...?
Which code would you put in a library for reuse?
You kinda get the picture. No 2 interviews are the same. Imagine the programmers you already know having this discussion with you and how much you'd learn about them.
There are no right or wrong answers, just learning. Which is what you want.
This simple test eliminates the 90% of applicants who are not suited for this work and 100% of the posers. You can tell right away who they are.
OTOH, good programmers shine on this. It's actually fun to hang out and talk about this stuff with them. I have even had candidates email me later with revised code based on our discussion. Those are the motivated ones. Big points for that.
If you know how an insertion sort (for example) works, then you can pretty much answer all your questions fairly easily. Knowing algos is good, but does not in itself make you competent in every respect.
Having said that, I am not trying to be critical. I completely agree that having a discussion like this is extremely valuable and can let you find out a lot about a person and even eliminate most of the chaff (although I have met a couple of people who I wouldn't necessarily hire, but who could have done well in a discussion like that).
After your discussion, you might even decide you really like a person, but does your team like them? How about this, can you tell if a person can stick to a deadline? A longer discussion is necessary before this becomes apparent.
OP here. This is a Reddit IAmA thread where a guy is claiming he writes covert software that allows ISPs and governments to snoop Internet traffic in real time. I found this discussion fascinating and horrifying at the same time.
Assuming this guy isn't a troll, what do you think about the claims he's making? Do you think hardware/software combos like this exist?
You put together custom regex-processing silicon (eg: what Tarari used to make) and related hardware (eg: entropy calculators, that kind of thing) and mix in various types of content-addressed memory and you could get some nutty performance #s on specialized tasks like what's discussed there.
of course it's possible. isp's require equipment like this to troubleshoot problems and detect/isolate denial of service attacks.
i used to work at an isp and built two sniffers like that that were used on a per-incident basis to watch traffic going to certain places (usually all traffic to and from a particular colocated server). in my case the devices weren't anything more than openbsd servers with tcpdump, snort, and other pcap utilities, but at larger isp's they would use something more proprietary to handle larger amounts of traffic. i'm sure if we had a good reason to we could have just left them on all the time and used something like snort or another deep packet inspector to trigger alerts on certain traffic.
The Bloop has always captured my imagination ever since I first heard of it years ago. I was delighted by The Slow Down as well! I love hearing and learning about strange undersea phenomena; that we have delved into space and still don't understand all of our own planet is a constant fascination of mine.
I don't know if I'd say simpler. It's different, and both have their pros and cons.
I think it would depend on how many different pills you're taking at once. For me, I liked the way the Maya was laid out in a grid. It makes it easier to see the big picture.
All the fake phone number does is measure how many phone leads the site generates, but it does nothing to measure the value of those leads. What if it generates 30 leads a month from consumers that are a bad fit for the service provider? On the other hand, what if it's 3 leads a month that turn into valuable business?
I'm with the plumber on this one. If you're trying to gain favor with a business you don't do it by hijacking their name and representing them as something they are not.
HelpHive got this one wrong.