codahale

That is an explicit appeal to authority.

These folks -- http://www.sportscanholder.com/ -- could sell their business for more than a million dollars.

(The odds of you having a successful startup are about that of you having a profitable beer cozy "company.")

What, you mean when services expected your machine to be running identd? When finger worked? When your IP uniquely identified you? When sysadmins knew your phone number?

If anything, the internet has trended towards anonymity as it's aged -- the more people are online, the harder it is to track someone down.

It integrates with a system (GrowlHelper.app) which runs with all your permissions and hasn't received any security scrutiny and was designed to take input from a few, trusted sources. What could possibly go wrong?

I, for one, am terrified by what the third derivative of his ignorance might be.

It's 40 lines of C++, most of which are of the `k *= m;` variety. You literally paste in the C++, fix the type declarations, and replace the point increment looping with standard indexed array iteration. Remember to replace `const` with `final` and you're done.

Using JNI for a high-speed hash function makes only slightly more sense than putting a SOAP interface on it.

The ideal candidate for this job knows when -- as Kenny Rogers put it -- to "hold 'em" and when to "fold 'em." By not simply walking away from a fruitless discussion with a self-admitted troll, you've shown yourself to place pride above the minimax of effort in the pursuit of solution. This single-minded devotion to a stupid, stupid task is not a quality we look for in our engineers.

Instead of readjusting strategies and avoiding the sunken cost fallacy, you chose the classic 6th grade technique of pretending you knew all along and the decidedly modern approach of post-facto appointing yourself as head of Hacker News' Troll-Baiting Brigade (official motto: "We Get Made Fun Of So You Don't Have To," official song: "Nearer To Thee, PG"). When faced with a losing bet, you doubled up.

You can keep the dry erase marker you're holding, but I'm going to have to ask security to see you out.

Hard to find quality candidates these days...

First, you're chasing an irrelevant point. My grammatical nitpicking has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I'm writing down "easily distracted by internet arguments."

Second, you're assuming importance. By bringing my "newish"-ness into play you're effectively asserting that hanging out in Hacker News makes you better at arguing your points, which obviously isn't true regardless of how high your karma is. I'm writing down "doesn't actually look up accounts' creation dates before tossing around seniority."

Third, you're assuming ignorance. I have no interest in talking about interviewing policies with you. I am trolling. You have been trolled. Do not feed the troll. I'm writing down "has been trolled."

Fourth, you're chasing the wrong issue. Actually, this is the same as the first trap. I'm not sure why you decided to list it as a separate bullet point. But hey! Traps! Bullet points! I'm writing down "overly fond of bullet points."

Fifth and finally, you're assuming irrelevance. Not in the "making an assumption about" sense of the word, but in the "acquiring the attributes of" sense. I'm writing down "GIGO."

Black eyes! Feathers in caps! Traps!

"It's" is a contraction of "it is." You mean "its" -- the possessive form.

Another black eye for you; another feather in my cap!

(Seriously, though. You're demanding tolerance of your cognitive differences -- which is perfectly reasonable -- but also asserting that engineers should approach problems by breaking it into finite automata, GIGO be damned. This strikes me as odd.)