MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumaturgy | 2025-05-14 04:23:09+00:00
Conversely, if you can't handle some straightforward feedback to a candidate that took the time to interview you without violating decorum or hurting their feelings, then how can I expect you to be a good manager or supervisor? How are you possibly going to be able to handle minor personnel conflicts or provide guidance during the training period? It comes across as a complete lack of basic managerial skills.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-14 04:23:31+00:00
> what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements?

Then they should have responded to his questions in email?

I personally love working on projects that are vaguely defined because it means getting to interact with people and understanding the heart of the problem. My favorite roles have involved reaching out to non-technical people and figuring out how to solve their problem. Often it's not the solution they even initially asked for.

But if your role is to guess about vague specs with no communication, then you're going to fail no matter how senior you are.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-14 04:23:51+00:00
The same way the USSR lost. People talk about final-point reasons like economic issues caused by an arms race or whatever, but that's just the final steps of a long lost race. Empires collapse long before they finally fall due to inertia alone. And I think the "real" cause is always the same. When enough people inside an empire want it to fail, that empire will fail.

And a common cause for creating that sentiment (that applies to everything from Rome to the USSR to the US) is Empires naturally tend to spend an increasingly disproportionate amount of their time focused on affairs outside their borders rather than within them. You have urban left leaning types becoming increasingly anti-capitalist, and the more right leaning and rural types feeling neglected by both internal and external policy.

People agree on less than ever, but the one thing they all agree on is that the system sucks. This will likely result in over more radical shifts between presidencies. You end up with a country that's starting to feel a lot like a boat being rocked back and forth with increasing vigor. And obviously this isn't just the US. It seems many political systems throughout the world are headed towards dramatic shifts.
by jen729w | 2025-05-14 04:23:52+00:00
> Chesky figured that Airbnb’s experience in attractively displaying homes, vetting hosts, and responding to crises could make it more trustworthy than competitors and therefore the go-to option for virtually anything.

Online reviews are totally broken. I recently spent a week at an Airbnb in the Gold Coast, Australia. The property was rated 5* but was tired and worn. The photos must have been 5 years old before a soul set foot in the place.

I rated it 3*. Shortly after, I got a phone call from the owner. He had my number because I'd had to call him because one of the two toilets in a five-bedroom 14-guest 'villa' was blocked. As in, overflowing with fecal matter blocked.

He essentially tried to bribe me to raise my review. I refused. The house is currently listed as 4.9* with those same photos. A preposterous exaggeration of its quality.
by pyuser583 | 2025-05-14 04:25:23+00:00
Being in your early 20s during the economic crisis, would mean spending your early to mid career during the economic boom of the 2010s.

It would mean some harsh years at first, but it’s a good time to hit the market.

I remember being told I’d never be successful, or make as much money as my parents.

I only wish I hadn’t listened to those people so long.
by LPisGood | 2025-05-14 04:25:52+00:00
> What if you did terribly and I wouldn't hire you in a million years? Do you really want me to tell you that?

Yes, that sounds like extremely valuable feedback.

Why do you suppose asking a question like that shows narcissism? To me it shows a willingness to infest feedback to improve.

I will add the caveat that if someone asked me that in an interview I would likely give a non-answer because I’m not totally sure what all I’m even allowed to say.
by itake | 2025-05-14 04:26:11+00:00
IMHO, the author's approach of validating his ideas mirrors modern engineering workflows. Coders don't spend hours independently coding an MR and then getting feedback from prod, tech leads, QA, and UX after the feature is "finished."

Work environments that "code first, review later" have been some of the most toxic in my career. It really sucks when you spend days building a feature only to find its not wanted. Which is why explaining the feature in English and getting approvals is the industry standard for shipping projects.

This candidate followed modern software practices that healthy workplaces follow.

(I'm also a hiring manager at a 1k+ engineer company).
by quantadev | 2025-05-14 04:26:19+00:00
But if you're unable to determine if someone has this knowledge via a phone call, instead of 4 hours of their work without you even being present, then that failing is on you, not them. If you can't judge someone's knowledge by asking questions, then you don't know how to come up with the right questions. Again that's on you. The only thing a 4-hr take home test will filter for is desperation. You'll get the most desperate candidates, and you'll do so by wasting days and days of people's time once you add it all up. It's just utterly disrespectful to demand these silly homework problems. I always take it that way. I take it personally, tbh. I find it absolutely insulting to even be asked and I simply refuse.
by qmmmur | 2025-05-14 04:26:22+00:00
This is a classic case of misreading the subtext. They want you to be independent and able to create your own work and goals. The ambiguity of the take home task is not there for you to interrogate over multiple emails, rather its an open palette for you to show how you take a relatively broad task and produce your own interrogation of the problem space.

As someone who works at a university this is very reminiscent of students who don't understand the assignment then complain when they get an unexpected mark.
by jaredklewis | 2025-05-14 04:27:01+00:00
Maybe it was a catalyst, I buy that because CEOs and thought leaders are still talking about it.

I just don’t understand why it would be. It’s an example you can’t learn anything from (since the company is private). But even if Twitter were still public, all the variables are confounded with the fact that the CEO is also a chaos agent, political operator, and potentially insane.

Sorry if my comment came off as attacking your post. I think your observation of the effect the Twitter cuts had on others is probably right. I am more criticizing the unscientific thinking of the people that claim to have taken a lesson from Elon’s management of Twitter.
by theamk | 2025-05-14 04:27:03+00:00
Were there? The question clearly said, "build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt". Candidate completely ignored that part and built a tool which is nothing like terminal email at all.

Would any of their emails give a hiring manager idea that the candidate failed to understand the assignment in such a gross way?

Email 1, "What kind of extra feature do you value highly"

Interviewer thinks: "UX improvement could be VI-like megacommands, "pretty UI" must mean creative use of colors and font attributes, privacy-related must be encryption at rest... It's all good, we are happy to look at all of those!"

Email 2, "A webapp with golang accessible online, deployed through AWS using ECS Fargate, with SSL (https), integrated with an email sender provider, with authentication through a login screen, with the ability to send emails through a form, and displaying incoming emails in the user interface."

Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that, but nothing in the list above will be graded as a negative. The important things we care about are that it's inspired by terminal apps like mutt, and that "it should feel fast and intuitive" and one can totally do that using technologies above"

Without seeing the screenshots/mockups, how would one even guess that the candidate was so off?
by Crestwave | 2025-05-14 04:27:08+00:00
They explicitly asked for a minimal, terminal-inspired email client for their Email Backend Engineer role. OP built a ton of infrastructure, created a generic web app that has no semblance of terminal inspiration as far as I can tell, and outsourced the backend to third party APIs.

Concrete and working? Technically, yes. This would have been an excellent submission for a different assignment and role. But it doesn't seem to suit the specifications for this one.
by keepamovin | 2025-05-14 04:27:14+00:00
Aw fuck!!

I was looking forward to curing a few more deaths and bringin the Bitchun Society to yet more barbarian tribes in the outer reaches. I wonder if all my whuffie will last that long? I really don't want to deadhead so hopefully there's plenty more interesting things to do in the tail end. Hahaha :)
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-05-14 04:27:16+00:00
> It seems they wanted

This is the problem. Your guess is different from the author's guess, because nothing is explicitly stated.

For others who did not click the link, the explicit requirements are:

> - Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app

> - Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality

> - Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real IMAP/POP/JMAP/etc backend

> - Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext

> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya. It should feel fast and intuitive, and you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement.

The word "keyboard" does not appear. Inspiration from X, Y, and Z is entirely subjective, and you should not be punished for not reading the interviewer's mind.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-05-14 04:27:27+00:00
Sorry, but what in gods name is this passage:

> Despite never meeting Jobs, “I feel like I know him deeply, professionally, in a way that few people ever did

As opposed to all the people that did actually met him, or worked for him?

This is such a painfully gushing puff piece and this sentence is peak cringe that just makes the man sound mentally ill.
by britch | 2025-05-14 04:27:32+00:00
Yeah the company has to give a timebox. It's true that candidates could abuse that, but open ended "impress us" is asking for trouble for both parties. And honestly you should be able to tell of someone spends 20h or something you said to take 4h on.

My take on the proposal: the hiring contact is not the person who wrote or will review the prompt. The candidate sent this long message and I doubt the hirer even read it. That's some nativety on the candidate's part, but the company absolutely should indicate "you're overthinking this"
by Lanzaa | 2025-05-14 04:28:00+00:00
FWIW, i think their description for the radiation shielding is fine. Your analysis is off. If we assume the spherical case, the mass of the shielding is proportional to surface area, not the volume[0]. You might be confusing general radiation shielding and thermal shielding. Thermal shielding is easier because you can point things towards the sun, earth, and moon.

I am more concerned about heat dissipation, which should scale with surface area, but heat generation scales with compute volume.

[0]:

shell thickness, t

compute radius, r

shell volume is (r+t)^3 - r^3 = 3 r^2 t + 3 r t^2 + t^3 = O(r^2)

shielding/compute is O(r^2)/O(r^3) = O(1/r), ie their linear decrease
by accidc | 2025-05-14 04:28:00+00:00
“but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness, which is essential in R&D projects like Kagi Labs”…. Also based on the nonsense responses by the hiring manager, it sounds like one of 2 things

Either someone had a vision and is saying ‘Read my mind’

The alternative explanation seems to be, there is no vision, and the interviewee needs to define it.

In either scenario, the amount of communication, feedback, specificity, lack of respect for the power dynamics is appalling.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-14 04:28:35+00:00
> In the UK where I am, most standard (not budget) property policies would cover theft from an unlocked entry point.

How is this supposed to be assessed? You can demonstrate that a door was locked, if some kind of obvious measure was taken to circumvent it (destroying the lock, destroying the door, destroying the window...), but you can't demonstrate that it was unlocked. Burglars aren't limited to destroying things to bypass locks. One obvious approach is to pick them.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-14 04:28:42+00:00
They've gotten much much better in the last 5 years. After all the small time would-be "empire builders" who overcharged for shoddy units and abused residential real estate laws got cleaned out of the system, it seems like what's left is a decent middle ground of professional operators running full time rental units, with a few of the original style unique experiences left here and there. The standards have gone way up, and it's generally better than a hotel at the same price point again, which it was absolutely not for most of 2015-2020ish.
by quantadev | 2025-05-14 04:28:53+00:00
That's basically my feeling too. No one would ask for a maid to clean their house free for 4 hours, in order to decide if they want to hire her long term. And that's precisely what hiring managers have been getting away with for decades, because no one is pushing back. The managers are essentially abusing their power. It's all about abuse of power and utter arrogance.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-14 04:29:01+00:00
Sometimes when I leave it on too long and it actually boils for a minute or two, there's a coffee ring around the inside of the stainless steel pot. Scrubbing it with a green dish scrub pad gets it off, then soap and water fixes the rest. I never really understood why that ring gets there, but it also gets there from the starch when I boil noodles. I figure it has something to do with electrons on the inside surface of the stainless steel pot losing their ionization or polarization or some sciency stuff. I haven't cared enough to even google it since I know how to fix it and I haven't died yet from it.
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-14 04:29:10+00:00
My daughter was reading a trilogy when this school year started; she had finished the first book and was excited about it. Unfortunately, her teacher this year demanded a lot of reading, and only from books she approved of, so my daughter never had a chance to read the other books in the trilogy. It's been an endless deluge of assigned books, some she likes, some she dislikes. The teacher made no effort to facilitate students reading things they were personally interested in. Sad. At least now that the school year is ending she can finally read what she wants.
by shermantanktop | 2025-05-14 04:29:52+00:00
I built a similar thing using Bluetooth to a ESP32.

The hard part is reliably detecting camera status. I’m currently using a utility called Oversight, but it is event-based and the dodginess of the Bluetooth connection means the device gets out of sync.

The python script takes a different approach, so I’m going to check that out.
by motorest | 2025-05-14 04:29:55+00:00
> you have no idea how luxury this belief is.

I know very well what working with non-10x engineers is.

I also know ver well that performance is a management and HR issue, not an engineering issue.

Your job as a competent engineer is to make your team work. Your responsibility is to help out fellow team members whenever they need to be unblocked, and create a healthy, accepting, tolerant work environment. Your job is to be trustable, not make others hate their job, and not be the toxic asshole who makes everyone miserable and drives others away from your team. Because otherwise it is you who create high-stress work environments, and burn out people.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-14 04:30:25+00:00
Why would I spend time producing something if I don’t get paid for it? If you want the public to benefit from something you create, you have the right to go out there and spend your own money to doing so

The open source movement didn’t ask to get other people to write stuff and give it away.

I’m assuming you don’t work for free, why should creators?
by sheepscreek | 2025-05-14 04:31:26+00:00
Chesky is having a Jobs moment, when Apple went from making Computers to smartphones and much much more. It didn’t happen in a day though. More importantly, by that time, Jobs had already built Next from the ground up, and supported and funded the growth of Pixar into an animation powerhouse. He had all the additional experience shaping his perception on what people want and how people will react to something.

I think Airbnb will have a branding issue. By transitioning from rentals to offering a wide range of services, they might dilute their brand before people have the chance to fully embrace and experience the new offerings.

Perhaps they should reinvent themselves as a platform that manages travel and stays, emphasizing that their “airbnb certified experience” includes access to specific facilities and guarantees. This way, users can choose from other service providers in their marketplace with their own standards. That way, expanding to more services over time would seem like an organic expansion.

Essentially, Airbnb could transition from managing services to a marketplace model that also hosts managed services and other providers. However, by maintaining a focus on “stays” or “travels” and slowly adding more ancillary services would prevent dilution before their metamorphosis is complete.
by bschwindHN | 2025-05-14 04:31:45+00:00
For those who don't like coffee because it's served hot (as mentioned in the article), try a pourover on ice. This is just _one_ recipe and not _the_ recipe but good to start somewhere:

* 15g of coffee, ground for drip/pourover

* 150g of hot water

* 4-5 ice cubes (around 80-100g of ice)

When you're ready to brew, put the ice in the vessel you'll brew into (I use a simple hario glass server). Do the whole hand-drip thing with the 150g of hot water, letting it drip onto the ice cubes in the server. By the time you're done, pretty much all the ice will have melted.

Stir the server, and then pour all of its contents into a mug/glass filled with more ice. Since I moved to a hot climate I make this once or twice a day, I'd say it's a pretty solid recipe.
by silisili | 2025-05-14 04:32:45+00:00
I found myself thinking the same thing - perhaps came from a bigger/more established company. Reminded me of the PRD/ERD process. And that's not necessarily bad.

But from my experience, the two types look at each other like the other is insane. If you write up an ERD at a scrappy 6 person startup, everyone is going to think you waste time.

Conversely, if you join a larger team with established processes and begin flinging code at the wall unabated, people are going to think you're reckless and possibly inexperienced.
by NobodyNada | 2025-05-14 04:33:03+00:00
> Theoretically it could tell by introspecting the function body, but the compiler only works on signatures

Note that this is an intentional choice rather than a limitation, because if the compiler analyzed the function body to determine lifetimes of parameters and return values, then changing the body of a function could be a non-obvious breaking API change. If lifetimes are only dependent on the signature, then its explicit what promises you are or are not making to callers of a function about object lifetimes, and changing those promises must be done intentionally by changing the signature rather than implicitly.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-14 04:34:43+00:00
All of those things are true, and I'd like to echo them as a longtime Aeropress owner and enjoyer.

One other factor that matters for some, including me, is that nobody else in my family drinks coffee, and the Aeropress is an incredibly great way of doing coffee for one that with maximum results and minimum cleanup.

Other people in my family drink tea, so we keep a teapot and the Aeropress immediately next to the kettle and it works out great for us.
by thaumaturgy | 2025-05-14 04:35:15+00:00
The author didn't really ask for a code review, though a lot of people imagining themselves in the position of technical hiring manager are already taking care of that.

Anyway: I don't think homework assignments are a valuable mechanism for filtering out candidates. Setting aside shoulds and shouldnots and the ethics of it and everything else, it simply provides a really poor signal for the value of a potential candidate.

Especially today, when something like this particular assignment could just be pasted into any of the popular LLMs and returned as completed within a couple hours.

If an organization wants to hire developers that can take vague project descriptions and convert them into code that may or may not do whatever was in the heads of the people that wrote the project description, then (a) that's a bad practice, but (b) it would be better for everyone involved if you handled this over a video call. If your staff are too busy to do a small pile of video calls with potential candidates over a couple of weeks, then they are too busy to properly onboard a new candidate and you should probably just pack it in. (i.e., they are not too busy to do this.)

If the goal is to hire somebody that knows IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc. inside-and-out and can crank out RFC-compliant code without using any of the third-party libraries that already exist for this sort of thing, then the assignment description should have asked for that.

Homework assignments are an unfortunately common practice, but worst of all, most of them are carelessly designed.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-14 04:36:38+00:00
I think the huge proposal (after several rounds of questions) was what sunk him. The instructions did not request a proposal, and submitting one, especially one that detailed, conveyed “OP cannot take the initiative and proceed with work without seeking approval beforehand.” The project was about asking a few questions, listing a few assumptions, and giving yourself approval to confidently dive in and build something ambiguous. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the code mattered after that email was sent. The company should have just ended it there without him wasting his time building the assignment.
by jimjimjim | 2025-05-14 04:36:38+00:00
This is the "Hello World" of PDFs.

Most pdfs these days have all of the objs compressed with deflate.

and then, because that didn't make it difficult enough to follow, a lot of pdfs have most of the objects grouped up inside object stream type objects which then get compressed. So you can't have text editor search for a "6 0 Obj" when you are tracking down the end of a "6 0 R"
by isatty | 2025-05-14 04:37:04+00:00
You had the right idea to begin with - never do take home assignments.

Second - this is the wrong approach. Nothing wrong with writing a small doc. Write it, then implement the necessary features (terminal inspired client that can read and send email), and test it. Literally a cli for read and send, tack on curses or use imgui. Do IMAP/POP/SMTP or emulate it. The job position is for a backend role in the email team.

Tack on bells and whistles later.
by freddie_mercury | 2025-05-14 04:37:23+00:00
I think the people who say hotels are better than AirBnb aren't traveling with kids.

Having an actual kitchen when you travel with kids is great. Having actual separate bedrooms so we don't have to go to sleep at 8pm when the kids go to sleep is great. Being able to do laundry without tracking down a laundromat or pay exorbitant hotel prices is great. Having a living room or similar area with at least a few square metres of floor space where kids can sprawl is great.