skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you compete against 2000 other applicants for a job?
Was browsing Linkedin for a job. Saw that 900+ applied for a position at Google, 600+ for a company like Intel, and 300+ for other companies. Even companies with one or two star Glassdoor ratings had at least 100+ applicants as well.

Add the other sources and those numbers probably double or triple.

How do you compete against 2000 other applicants for a job? Yes, this is a serious question. And no, I don't know anyone who works for Google, Intel, or even that one star Glassdoor rated company.
The time argument is another one that I really disagree with. It takes less than 5 minutes to dump some beans, water, frozen veggies, and taco seasoning/ranch dressing mix/misc other flavor packet in a rice cooker (you can get a nice one with a slow cooker setting for less than $30) or crock pot. You can also throw ground hamburger, sausage, chicken, etc directly in there with everything else and it'll cook up nice and tender. Want variety? Switch up the frozen veggies you add, the type of bean you use, the flavor packet you add, etc.

You don't have to cut out salt to eat healthily (unless you are a sodium sensitive hypertensive).

I will concede that most people have no idea how to season and flavor food to make it taste good.

Ultimately, it is entirely possible to eat an incredibly healthy, very tasty diet with a moderate amount of variety for very little money and time investment. It just requires a little knowledge and some up front thought.
Recommended:

Floating Point Numbers - Computerphile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZRI1IfStY0

Tom Scott's fun and simple take on Floating Points is a good video explaining why such weird errors happen
I live in New York and pay $70 for 300 Mbps down / 25+ up from Time Warner.
That makes sense, but it's not specifically what the quote says. The quote seems to be referencing total sales, and this sounds more like converted sales (for lack of knowing the best term to use).
American allies in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. We don't care about human rights in the Middle East; we prop up horrible administrations there and shield them indefinitely. Why you think elite concerns like free speech and open source software should be a special case is beyond me.
>Credit was pushed very hard at consumers, and politicians do control the extent to which that's legal, even if they're not really to blame for it being possible.

Credit must be pushed hard. Credit is the origin of money, under these systems. Credit must expand so that the periodical interest obligations can be met by those with existing credit obligations. When credit no longer expands at a sufficient rate, the systems enter contractions, which will quickly end the system, unless credit expands enough to save the system for a while longer.
Is it interesting this is in downtown Detroit?

Of late there have been some interesting photosets of the decay of formerly "high end" real estate (residential and commercial), and I seem to recall theories that Detroit could see a resurgence as tech businesses look to take advantage of the power infrastructure formerly needed by manufacturing companies.
A former elementary student compares her Chinese and American elementary schools
To argue, that forfeiture does not harm your defense, since in theory, the wealth of a person should not change your chances at court (where in practice it is!), is absolutely not helpful. To defend an unjust system by a theory that is not holding in practical life, is really dismissive.

First fix the problems of the US juristic system, before trying to crush the ordinary citizen with further ordeals.

Even the Magna Carta defended the possessions of a free person from the access of the state without court trial. What the US started here, is a slap in the face of the base of our civilizations.
> I'm half way through my time on this task already and I haven't even touched the unit tests.

Well, generally, if you're wanting to do TDD/BDD, start with the tests first. Then write your code until the tests pass. That being said, TDD/BDD isn't exactly a timesaver in most cases, so I'd understand why you'd do it in the opposite order.

But anyway, to answer your question: I write a crappy/sloppy solution first, as fast I can. No thinking... just pretend you're coding for fun on a low-stakes project that nobody will ever see. Then I go back and try to plan a better way to do it. If I can refactor/recode it before the timer goes off, then that's great. If I can't, no biggie.
It's a few years old at this point, but the 2013 Velocity talk "there is no talent shortage" is still one of my favorite resources on the topic: https://youtu.be/P_sWGl7MzhU
Well.. that doesn't say he didn't have ties to Western intelligence.

But I followed the links and sent an email to Syrian ambassador for the UN appealing for Khartabil's release.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/get-involved/take-action-now/syria...
The problem with using the liberal and conservative labels and assuming a continuum between the two is that conservative isn't a fixed ideology anymore and many people conflate what conservatism used to mean with what it currently means. Neo-conservatism changed all that. Today's conservatives don't believe in small government or reduced spending, they just want the government to be bigger and spend more in different ways than the liberals do.

Note: that this isn't unique to conservatives...modern-day liberals have sold out their core constituency to an equal degree, but I focused on conservatives because I believe the conservatives that you find yourself agreeing with are the kind that don't really play a part in the Republican party anymore. They've been marginalized by Fox News and talk radio (Rush et al).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speck_%28cipher%29

Speck's pretty nice and tiny, but who knows if it's backdoored or not :)
There's compelling evidence for a causal link. Hundreds of millions of years ago the atmosphere was much more oxygen-rich than it is today. Insects were also far bigger.
"The tech talent shortage is a lie... you just have to train people so there'll be no shortage several years from now."

So there is a shortage. But clickbait gets clicks.
Your original comment was a top level comment on the article, and is verbatim:

> If we want to have a reasonable discussion about this

The "this" in that sentence (to any reasonable human) would mean that you were talking about the subject of the article, the people that got their money seized, not "in general asset forfeiture".

So no....not a red herring.

If you wanted to be careful, your first statement should read: "if we want to have a discussion about asset forfeiture...".
Roberts (a conservative court member) was in dissent as was one of two of Obama's nominees (Sotomayor). Plenty of liberals oppose civil forfeiture. There was no corporations side in this lawsuit. There was no middle class people in this lawsuit.

This reads as a non sequitur.
I don't think you understand what he is saying here. The value is stored in memory as a precise number.
One reason not to institute the same penalty for the police is that taxpayers end up paying.

You might say, good, that means voters will try to ensure future police don't do this shit. Which is a nice theory, but probably doesn't work out in practice.

In practice, you have small towns that can be bankrupted by a good-size suit, which is probably not a good outcome. You also have large cities that have room to minimax what they can get away with, and now all you've done is possibly deterred really egregious cases.

It gets substantially more complicated with the intersection of feds and state agencies, where (depending on the state) police are good at gaming where the money goes depending on how and what is charged by whom. (There are complicated revenue sharing arrangements between, for instance, the DEA and local cops for forfeitures.

If your hypothetical bank robber needs to be deprived of the money (and I don't think I agree, but that's a different discussion), the proper way to align incentives is to ensure the police do not see any of the money. Period. Give it back to the bank, put it in the state general fund, give it to a random orphan, burn it, whatever[1]. But as long as the police can by shiny toys with it (conference attendance, margarita machines and outright theft have all happened), they have an incentive to push it as hard as they can.

[1] Giving the funds to the state still has incentive problems, but they are muted. I don't know that there's any empirical evidence if it is sufficiently muted to align police behavior with what most non-cops consider reasonable.
What did Assembly do, and can we have their domain name?
Contractors That Defraud the Government the Most Also Spend the Most on Lobbying
one of my favourite things about living in london was access to museums

i would go into a museum just because i was walking by

on my walk from work i would stop in three different museums along the way just to look at a single piece in each

it is very freeing, critically and creatively, to be able to examine a single piece and then leave

there is often a pressure to 'get your monies worth' at stateside museums causing a numbing fatigue that informs the popular opinion wherein museums are boring or intended for 'someone else'

one of my favourite pieces in the british museum was a bust of apollo(o) where the sculpture had apollo tie the hairs from the side of his head into a square knot across his forehead

when i got into the street view i quickly walked the route i so often did in building

but lo, they must have moved, or removed?(i), the bust.. heartbreaking

if you are in london right now and have yet to have seen either the hunterian museum or the sloane museum(ii), they are across the street from each other, do so now

the hunterian is a surgeons museum, basically accumulated by a single individual, that boasts some 300 bottled specimens and a huge collection of medical instruments through the ages.. a textbook on mid 19th century lithotomy was eye opening

(o) https://www.ancientsculpturegallery.com/bust-head-of-apollo-...

(i) https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/u/0/asset-viewer/Aw...

(ii) https://www.google.com/maps/place/hunterian+museum+london/@5...
>part of the institution of privilege and power that has driven diversity from our ranks

Satirical piece right?

For my own well-being I'm gonna assume this is satire.
> Few businesses give interns real coding assignments or support them adequately. Many can’t or won’t pay interns, which erects a privilege barrier by excluding anyone who doesn’t have savings to weather working for nothing for a few months.

I'm a university student in a co-op CS program and most of my classmates, many with no previous programming experience, found good jobs that pay well where they get real experience after 1 year of school. This paragraph doesn't seem true to me at all. Demand is extremely high for CS interns, many even make it to earning $100k+ before graduating. These internships can also easily pay your entire tuition, you can even end up with tens of thousands of savings after you finish your degree.
Alternatively, "I want to do everything in JavaScript", and not learn any other languages.

A lot of recent "innovation" is mislabeled laziness.
You can't call it a shortage when you expect developers to work 80 hour work weeks so you can squeeze $$ out of all your clients who decided not to hire in house for their main product on Android.

I thought it was pretty much known that the concept of SW-shortage was a big lie?
Eminem Invests in Genius
That doesn't seem to have anything to do with generics; it looks to me like a great showcase of Traits and having an Optional type. Although I agree that those are more powerful constructs than what you can use in C#, that doesn't quite answer my question about how Scala generics themselves are such a great feature. Perhaps the OP was referring to the type system instead?
He propably refered to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War - the Allies did basically nothing until Germany invaded France
I think, in this case, bribing will work better than taking arms in Syria. The problem is finding all the people you need to bribe and engage in a conversation.
In the country I actually live in reports say that there is a huge shortage of waiters and chefs at the moment. And there is -- most of them are leaving for richer countries. What this means is that there are a lot of businesses who don't want or cannot afford paying more for chefs and waiters, and not that there are simply not enough people who could serve pizzas in a countryside restaurant.

Same goes for tech talent. I was testing the tech market in my home country a couple of years ago, and a multinational company who is (also) complaining about extreme lack of tech talent said that no engineer is allowed to be paid more than ~ $40k/year (in that particular office). They pay three times as much in the UK. Well, tough luck then. :)
You are not powerless. You are never powerless. Your mind is the most powerful thing on the planet. Finding your power rests in realizing that.
Fixing IT – Too Big to Succeed?
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990
2015 Software Startup IPOs and M&A – What Does the Data Imply for 2016?
I doubt there is a shortage but if there was one I'd think it's simulated by non-coders hiring coders.
I have said it a million times before and I will say it as long as necessary to fix our employment-education conundrum: you do not learn how to work by sitting in class, you learn to work by going to work. We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force.

There is a place for higher education - I must say so, for it is my employer - but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class. My grandfather was a combat engineer in WWII and quit his unenthusiastic GI Bill college career to start a successful restaurant instead. College doesn't work for everybody - working does.
Drinking too much is borrowing tomorrow's happiness

Debt is borrowing tomorrow's prosperity
Startup employees, before you buy your options…
> In your case you pay taxes, and your society holds everyone up to this bunch of collective agreements, including not taking away your property just willy-nilly (confiscation).

Except that's...not happening, in one of the largest, and without doubt the most powerful, "democracies" in the world. Police do take away your property willy-nilly in the USA without trial.

Does this mean we get to stop paying taxes?
Can confirm, I don't know a single person who studied CS at Waterloo and graduated with $1 of debt. Most had cars and hefty savings accounts along with job offers by senior year.
Not likely to have success there, either, but here's a list of sellers.

https://boardgamegeek.com/geekmarket/browse?objecttype=thing...

Where can I find this for less than $150?

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1338344/where-can-i-find-le...
Greater Boston becoming preserve of the very rich and the very poor, report says
1 Store, 1000 Times: Five Questions with Philz Coffee CEO Jacob Jaber
> In practice, you have small towns that can be bankrupted by a good-size suit, which is probably not a good outcome.

It's an excellent outcome. Particularly in small towns, the police strongly reflect the attitude of the people.
From what I gather, it sounds pretty much like any other semi-corporate job. The thing that has me a little sketched out is the whole front company thing.
Inter-Process-communication Protocol Definition Language – By Mozilla
I'm looking for a package airline/foreign government deal.
The unofficial guide to JSONB operators in Postgres – Part 1
Sorry, that wasn't intended to come across as patronizing. My house is just over 1400sq/f, which is on the smaller side by American standards. I think a lot depends on whether you have a family. As a bachelor I lived comfortably with a roommate for years in a 600 sq/f apartment, but I wouldn't want to do that with kids and a dog. In short, I don't think we're really in disagreement.
Ellipse 2.0 AI for research
DARPA's Robotics Challenge Is Basically Making Cylons
I have dipped my toe in this industry. At the end of the day it is just a job and you get desensitized towards any content you see.
Nobody Knows What They're Doing
I think the major disconnect here is in the industry's general inability to recognize ability through the standard interview processes.

On one hand you have the common whiteboard coding interviews popular among the big tech players (and much of the rest of the industry). I'm definitely biased here, as someone who is average/below average at these types of interviews but an above average (I hope) developer, but I don't think these interviews are very good indicators of on-the-job performance.

On the other hand you have many startups who won't even interview you if you don't have side projects or open source contributions to show. As someone who has side projects to show, I understand that most people do not, and it's unrealistic to expect everyone to.

The best way I can think of to predict how someone will perform is to have them do something relatively close to what they'd actually be doing, like going over some of your actual code with them and asking them to talk about what it's doing, and doing some pair programming with them on an actual computer.

Has anyone had success with something like that?
Of course it's a lie. Like with many industries, worker 'shortages' only exist at the price level the corporations want to pay. So they artificially inflate supply to lower wages. Nothing new here.
No, they keep leaving little crumbs of this here and there. I usually see it on Kotaku and Polygon but once in a while on Verge and Guardian.

It's propaganda by a thousand cuts. Eventually you'll just slowly buy into it. Or your dumb kids will.
> There are always drugs when property is seized this way.

Nope. Several years ago the FBI stole $6M in Platinum, Gold and Silver. Some of the theft was of protected political speech-- literally copper & silver pieces with Ron Paul's picture and a campaign slogan on them. No allegations of drugs was involved, and the criminality claim -- that using gold and silver as barter threatened to undermine the US dollar -- was absurd on its face.

> IT IS NOT DIFFICULT TO CONTEST A CIVIL FORFEITURE.

BS. The $6M in precious metals was melted down (reducing its value actually) and sold off to the profit of the FBI, despite a very large and expensive legal effort to try and reclaim the money. The owners of the assets were never convicted of a crime.

> The money does not all go directly to the seizing agency. Much of it goes towards drugs programs, oversight for civil forfeitures, and other programs.

IT's still theft.
Nobody Wants Your App: Lessons Launching an App in 2015
Well the issue, in both the waiter and chef situation and the tech one, is that the company who employees them has to make enough from the labor that it is worth paying the higher price. There might just not be enough opportunities that will generate the level of income to support paying the higher wages.

In other words, there are a lot of companies that have tasks for tech workers; the problem is that a lot of those companies don't make enough profit to afford to pay those tech workers.
Yes, it does. Our current system is based on corporatism (labor unions are not exempt from this behavior); where those with power and connections help make the laws that keep them in power and from competition.

In a libertarian society (or even in a Constitutional Republic sought out by the founders), laws are made as close to the people as possible, with the Federal government having 14 explicit powers (the power grab by interpeting the 'necessary and proper' clause broadly would not exist, and the 10th Amendment wouldn't be ignored), so you'd see Local ordinances, county ordinaces, and state laws most; and very few federal laws (again, they'd only need to cover their 14 expressly granted powers).

Corporations (and labor unions, and any other 'special interest') wouldn't have to just lobby the Federal government, they'd have to lobby all 50 states, plus any localities; in short, it'd be a monumental proposition (even if we assume they were capable).

Also, since the Federal Government would be necessarily weaker, there wouldn't be an incentive to try to lobby them -- no one lobbies the person that has no power.

Currently, you can lobby 51-60 senators and 271 Congressmen and effectively rule the country (Remember, the ACA was written in part by the insurance industry), and in a libertarian society, there'd be no basis for that to ever happen.

Also, sustained monopolies are a by-product of Government intervention (either through regulation, or explicitly by making rules against competition, much like the Railroads). In our lifetime, anyone who has 'had a monopoly' has sustained it with government help (think of Ma Bell; where utility providers are considered to have a 'natural monopoly' and as such competition is purposefully limited or non-existent). In Microsoft's case, nothing happened and their 'monopoly' was very short lived (1995-2005, Maybe?) because everyone innovated around them. There were no laws restricting who could get into the browser business, and Microsoft found themselves out-foxed. They're still trying to make up lost ground.

Before saying "Libertarian policy would be far, far worse for the middle class right now", you have to ask yourself if you really understand what a Constitutional Republic actually calls for.
Yeah, actually, the bike route network for Mountain View is really terrible in comparison to Palo Alto! But that's a different discussion... I see bicyclists on El Camino in Palo Alto at night without lights all the time!
Every seed stage founder should send monthly investor updates
$70 a month to Comcast for 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up.
Its important to understand that 0.1 + 0.2 is actually 0.3, and Scientific is giving the correct answer.

The Haskell type annotations aren't casting values that are interpreted as binary floating point (as might be the case in some languages), it is instructing the compiler how to treat the literals. Scientific is arbitrary precision decimal, so it can exactly represent 0.1 and 0.2, and return the exact result 0.3, rather than representing 0.1 and 0.2 as binary floating point approximations, adding them, and then producing some decimal approximation of the binary floating point result when asked.
I used to be on the hiring committee at Google, and sometimes we'd ask for extra interviews if the person was very strong, but feedback was mixed in a particular area. For example, if a candidate bombed one algorithms question but performed strongly on an algorithms question from a different interviewer, then we might want a third data point.

That happened for <10% of people -- it was really the exception case.

So I think b) and c) could be that process.

a) sounds like they were just disorganized -- which happens a lot with early stage startups. Takes founders time to learn how to hire well and I don't think any accelerators or VCs are providing interview training to their startups.
You should sit with them and explain what it really means to your business what they're doing.

If it doesn't help, you should probably hire a senior person to teach the rest of your team what software engineering is all about. I don't think the consultant will help you, since from what you describe, it's an attitude problem and lack of the global point of view issue in your team. e.g.: once the consultant leaves you with $5k+ bill, they'll likely come back to their practices.

Bear in mind: if it's a startup, sometimes it's messy and it may get some time before people will come back to the "usual" state.