skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We really need to stop pushing this HW assignment nonsense. It's offloading the cost of hiring on to prospective candidates. The asymmetry of cost makes it plainly exploitative.

So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing. They get a sea of responses and they get to pick a few of the best ones. The 100 responses they got cost these candidates 400+ hours of time for no cost to the employer whatsoever.

Take home assignments are fine, but the employer needs to put up something as well. Either pay for the time I spend on it, or have the assignment late in the interviewing process and have employment contingent on passing some known bar ahead of time. That is, I should be the only one doing the assignment and there should be no wishy-washy rejections.
> I wonder if there's a converse effect?

If the inaccuracies are due to the meter's assumption around the current waveform then there probably is a way to exploit that. I suspect (from the little I have read) that the meters in question are: 1) assuming a sinusoidal current wave form, 2) assuming that the peak observed current is the peak of that sinusoidal wave, 3) effectively integrating under the area of the curve (with respect to voltage) to estimate total power. If all that's true, then to 'cheat' you'd need a device for which the current waveform looks like a 'fat' sine wave - same peak height, but wider peaks and steeper gradient through zero. In the extreme case it would be a square wave, but that might have too much harmonics.

For example, you could create a heater (a simple resistive load) that alters its resistance at 60hz. When the voltage reaches its peak the heater would have its 'normal' resistance, and during the next 1/4 cycle it would ramp down its resistance, reaching a resistive low as the voltage passes through zero, and then ramp up its resistance for the following 1/4 cycle until it reaches its 'normal' resistance at the peak 'negative' voltage (1/2 a cycle from where we started), then repeat over.

I think that would trick a meter that only looked at peak current and assumed a sinusoidal waveform. But who knows what other things it might break...
If you have dimmers on those LEDs then you should check it out.

I've seen once little screw for bulbs it said on the box that it corrects wave so it's stable. It said that it extends life of bulbs. Not sure if it would help or not as the problem seems to be coming from appliances having chaotic usage wave patterns, but who knows maybe those work both ways, anybody knows?
Scary stuff
> What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing.

Unless you've been in the shoes of a hiring manager, I'm unsure as to where this idea is coming from?

Having been a hiring manager, it is a horrible experience. Unless it's extremely naive, homework sets generally take time to come up with and formalize, and certainly take time to review the results for.

I suppose I can understand conflating the motivations of an interviewer with their employer, but it's not generally true to say that interviewers are just trying to exploit those they interview.
Compelling arguments for why next generation wireless networks should be standardised by a more open and inclusive body?
The SF Bay has the Raccoon, a trash collection boat operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, out of Sausalito. It's for bigger stuff, like logs, that could hole small craft if hit.
This seems to say more about the incentives around patents at Apple and Google than it says about innovation or anything else at those companies. In particular, it seems to say that patents are more highly encouraged at Apple and that there's more incentive to put them in your own name at Google.
One forgets most of that stuff over years in the industry. They are not difficult to remember either or solve in real time - but it does require practice for achieving consistency. Only having to revise them for an interview is really a waste of time. Let me elaborate with an real life example - programming challenges that require graph traversal and other approaches. If I give one after preparing and revising for few hours over 1-2 days, I can solve all 3-4 questions in an hour. If I revise for one or two hours, I am likely to solve 3, but maybe falter on the 4th. I am the same person in both the cases. Maybe that elaborates the problem and disgruntlement - it pisses me when I pass some and get rejected in another. There is no consistency in the test. :)
It all really depends on the device hardware and what interference they see.

My iPhone to Subaru OEM radio: Drops out if my I swipe my hand over the phone in my pocket while sitting in the seat.

My iPhone to Pioneer aftermarket radio: I can be walking well into the house before it finally drops off.

Dualshock 4 controller with Bluetooth adapter plugged into the computer: Struggles to stay connected.(Due to motherboard interference.)

Dualshock 4 controller with Bluetooth adapter plugged into an USB hub a few feet away: I can play games I can't even see through floors.
Nope, it took me a while before I realized I wasn't just stupid and that that graphs were completely unrelated too.

Here's a link to a version that seems to have the correct graphs: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1080/03906700500038819

I found Figure 3 particularly striking. Education (pre-1950) used to be correlated with greater trust in government, now it's correlated with less.
>the point of asking graph-traversals and similar algorithms questions is not that they are the relevant job skill.

Actually, my codebase has an honest to god graph traversal in it, on the front-end no less. Basic manipulation of graph relationships without much friction should be standard.
How exactly does this compare to Caviar? Screenshots show the app used to support delivery, so sounds like they scaled back to pickup only. Why did Square buy them when they could have just added a pickup option to caviar? Was it just to add their merchants to their network?
He is saying that the company needs to tell their people to fix the process and do what they are paid for. Not offload it entirely to the applicant.

Maybe just open separate channels for people who have an open source portfolio. I have about 30 repos in my OSS, but still have to take these assignments. Its such an utter waste of my time.
They care, just not as much as they would if it were their flagship product.
OK, first I never expect to read "Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill.." :-)

That said, it is very hard to argue with the power company. As the article points out you can have the meter sent to a special testing lab but if it works, well it you are out of luck. About 10 years ago a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains got a bill that was out of whack (and he was a EE) and the power company would not be budged, so he pulled his meter out of the socket for a month[1] (don't try this at home!) and still got billed for a bunch of power use. It turned out that someone had 'tapped' the power wires leading up to his house, and PG&E wasn't bothering to read his house meter, just looking at how much their transformer sent to the 'only' house up there. Whoops.

One of the things I suspected, and then later proved, was that my 1st generation SunnyBoy inverters from SMA on my Solar system confused the smart meter when they installed it. It would not accurately read the power generated by the panels so was under reporting power generated. That got "fixed" when one of the inverters failed (unrelated, it was over 10 years old) and we replaced two 2500W inverters with a single 5500W inverter. The modern inverter and smart meter get along fine.

[1] Since he lives in the mountains and outages were not infrequent he had a whole house generator powered by propane that he could use.
Final thought for tonight. It is certainly an extremely weak argument because it is root in intuition from our macroscopic world, but based on this it makes sense that elementary particles have to be points. At least for me it is somewhat hard to imagine how something could be spatially extended and elementary, i.e. not subdividable. If it has a length, an area, or a volume, I should be able to break it into pieces. This of course immediately conflicts with string theory with which I am sympathetic, sometimes more, sometimes less. But as said, it is an extremely weak argument rooted in a world many orders of magnitudes from where I want to apply it.
> The reality is that the human body is fragile. Yet it seems to stand up to the test of time even to things that were never faced during evolutionary development.

No more so than any other animal, there's quite simply nothing miraculous about it, or humans, it's just the normal functioning of biology.

> But ask enough questions and you will eventually get exhausted with how shallow the explanations are or how unable you are to explain.

There is nothing more shallow and empty an explanation than "God did it", it's the height of anti-intellectualism and laziness. It's easy to see miracles everywhere when you're too lazy to seek a real answer because real answers require effort and understanding. God did it isn't an answer at all, it doesn't explain anything, it's nothing more than admitting you don't know the answer and aren't willing to look for it.
not really, as I believe any router that uses more than one channel at once must disable that feature if there are any other APs that are trying to use any of those channels.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense! :)
I completely agree with your last-resort comment, but the discussion has made me curious about Cirrus' spin-entry and spin-recovery behavior. After an admittedly cursory search, I get the impression that in neither case do they behave badly. The problem here is that the Cirrus' spin certification is predicated on the parachute being the only method of recovery. The article below offers several justifications for not getting the aircraft certified on the basis of standard recovery procedures, which seem to boil down to the principle that the rule 'pop the chute as soon as you are in trouble' is most likely to reduce fatalities. From the point of view of pilot training school economics, the cost of a certain number of write-offs must be balanced against a smaller, but non-zero, probability of fatal spin accidents (beyond the number that not even a parachute would save.)

http://www.kineticlearning.com/pilots_world/safety/06_05/art...
Google Maps tells me a few hundred meters in advance so the car AI can know, too. The location does not need to be precise down to a centimeter, it should be enough to know "the alley is somewhat near" so it can start to get into the rightmost lane. Just as we humans do it. There are enough artifical obstacles on the road anyway (wrongly parked cars etc).
Exactly! You phrased it better than me. Storage of customers' data and "mostly ok" should be very far from each other.
How many companies waive the coding requirement or postpone it towards the end, if you already have open sourced a bunch of code. It is also possible that the HR managers are just happy taking a route, where they can offload most work to the other party. The can instead act as better intermediaries, aligning the hiring goals of the company and the experience for the applicant. Whats wrong with asking them to create better value or understand the domain better so as to be able to create better value?
is it possible (as in, allowed) to have dedicated Google Account just for AdSense? it's very risky to tie this to account where you have Play Developer, GSuite and Cloud attached to it.
Would this apply to thalassemia too?
We recently hired an ops guy into a dev role and the guy just does not know what he's doing. Merging his own pull requests before code review or before tests have passed the build system. Downs development/staging servers because he's "testing something" and forgets to bring them back up.

Our place has a 12-month contract before being made perm. Once you are perm you are not getting let go unless it's part of larger cutbacks (government). He was made perm before 12 months and I was astounded. They didn't even ask me what I thought before they did it.
Here's a list of Obama's "Mostly Falses": http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/stateme...

They seem right in line tonally with this one from Trump.
If you've spent 17 years in industry and haven't written a graph traversal algorithm... you probably don't recognize when you're writting a graph traversal algorithm.
Report the Bluetooth problem at the Subaru service. When my wife drives back from work, our '15 Forester pairs with my phone on the kitchen table as soon as my wife stops the car in front of the house. Easily 15 feet and there's walls and the car's chassis between us.

This is pretty hilarious by the way because if the phone just about pairs and she turns the car off, iPhone keeps playing the music, just switching to the internal speaker. We have a running joke about her "walk-in theme playing".
When Life Gives You Options, Make Sure Not to Choose Some(null)
Politifact is a consistently fact-biased source. What you're objecting to is their inclusion of the clear implications of a claim, not just the letter. Here Trump was clearly implying that his administration is more fiscally responsible than Obama's in the first month. That is mostly false. These things are not impossible.
Laughable. Strong states exists off satellite cultures, until they collapse from the plaque of stupid that grows around their weak inbreed elite.
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Ask HN: How to get more working hours in a day?
I usually start work around 8-9 and get a lot done in the morning. But after lunch I can only get maybe 2 hours before I get sleepy and lose motivation around 16. After that I can't concentrate any more.

I'd like to get maybe a few more hours in, but how can I get my brain back to the clear-thinking and speed of the morning ?
Daydreaming here: If every company's "homework" was representative of what kind of work you'd actually be doing, it'd be valuable enough to do.
> As far as we can tell elementary particles are point particles.

When elementary particles interact with each other, they appear to do so as a point particle. However when they move they do so as a wavefunction which might be spread out over a large volume in space.
Nice. I wonder where I can post corrections?
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I didn't watch the entire video, so maybe it happened by the end, but I feel like he's going to have a bad time with the law at some point.

That said, it was pretty funny how he could just repeat "am I being detained?" until they all just gave up and let him go.
Most of those other professions you listed have much more meaningful and standardized certifications than software. A board certified cardiologist has already demonstrated real proficiency by going through the process to get certified. In software, the whole reason for these complicated hiring processes is that no one really trusts software certifications, and even company pedigree is not always a reliable signal.
Facebook's Bistro: Scheduling Data-Parallel Jobs Against Live Production Systems
The Art of the Smear
"Show HN:" is for HN users showing their own work... Is LordWinstanley the developer or designer of this site?
> Square won’t take on any of the San Francisco startup’s employees, according to a person familiar with the matter.

So they just bought their customer list?
Even after all the years that have passed, this story is still heartbreaking to read. And I was born in the soviet union.
This is exactly why HW problems without any commitment by the employer is plainly exploitation.
I'm no electrician but I'm sure 3-phase meters are a norm in Estonia. You would usually have devices with high power requirement like electric water heaters and ovens connected to separate phases. And they are often sitting idle as well.
New Zealand Offer Free Vacations If You Interview There
just added your suggestions, thanks.
I'm curious as to the details of your friend's story.

Maybe they do it differently in CA than FL, but I have never seen any device that measures "how much their transformer" sends installed in any normal situation.

A more reasonable explanation would be that they were using "estimated" billing -- billing that is based on a few spot checks of the meter reading, but not a check every month. This is common in places that the electrical meter is not easily accessible, such as behind a gate or being guarded by a dog(or out in the mountains). In this case they would have extrapolated previous months to produce an estimated usage and billed on that.

I have had direct experience with a local power company billing for a "demand"[1] rate that exceeded by >300% the actual capability of the transformer and wires to supply. If that amount had actually been consumed, the wires would have caught fire and/or the transformer would have failed, possibly spectacularly. After I pointed this out to them, they quietly refunded the amount without an explanation and assured me there were no other errors of this type.

[1] https://www.talgov.com/you/you-account-plans-demand-billing....
It's entirely unintuitive, inconsistent with the syntax, and is generally senseless. "var" lacks an easy to explain meaning because in many cases it doesn't even introduce a variable.
Thank you for applying this to a mental model I can relate to. If there was an equivalent of Reddit gold, I would give you one.
Jerks play dirty and will always try to find a way to play dirty to gain advantage. It's really hard to reform a jerk.

Then, imagine that person does well, gets promoted, and once in a position of power goes full jerk again. Then your company implodes.
To add on to this, a take-home assignment should be more than just another filter. The companies I interviewed for with take-home assignments didn't actually discuss the assignments at all in the in-person interview - I spent the time to prepare for and do the assignment, at least pretend it matters.
They endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. No further example of bias is necessary.
Unless you're designing to spec, how do you not need to understand graphs and hash tables for front end work? I'd imagine understanding hash tables would be useful in reasoning about caching, and graphs for dependency management if nothing else.
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Thank you for this brilliant and detailed explanation showing the differences between CRIPR and the virus method! I haven't seen anyone explain the concept of viruses in the language of buffer overflows! Delightful.
Often the assignments are more complex than described. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was the case here. Also 2 hours is actually a really short amount of time, it can take 30 minutes or more just to understand what the person is looking for if the instructions are not clear.
Same in Norway. Almost all new installations have 3-phase.
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In the US, devices with high power requirements are generally connected "between" phases -- the phase-to-neutral voltage is(depending on your transformer configuration) generally 120v, with some configurations generating 208v from 1 of the 3 phases to neutral. Phase-to-phase voltage is generally 220-240v.

Loads that span all 3 phases are generally motor loads that will benefit from the rotating magnetic field that 3-phase service provides -- such as pumps and compressors.

3 phase power to residential is rare in the US.
How Did Denmark Spark Its Miraculous Food-Waste Reduction?
The interview needs to assess skills that will be used in the job. While I can appreciate the spirit of the homework assignment, our role requires client-facing capabilities. With that comes the necessity of being able to answer questions on-the-spot. Sometimes we have meetings with C-level executives with whom we can only get time once every month or every six weeks, and if something happens to come up in one of those meetings, "I'll get back to you in four hours" is rarely an acceptable answer.

I think what would really help transform the hiring process is to assess skills that would be required on the job. I think that was the spirit of the original submission here, but I just wanted to explicitly state that I don't think homework is the solution to remedying the current state of hiring in all cases insofar as actually assessing the skills that would be required on the job.
Shortly after I moved to the Bay in 2007, we were excited to get out the lights and decorate the house for Xmas. Our bill was $1,200 that month. We had a lot of lights, but usually ran them in Oklahoma, where electricity is much, much cheaper. No tiered pricing either.
Reduce (Composing Software)
Most cheap meters have a magnet and a reed-switch to generate pulses. As you noted they will generate pulses with backflow. However the dial count on the meter is correct.

Another issue that can come up is older reed switches can chatter as they close and open. Usually input debouncing eliminates that, if the firmware guy didn't screw it up.

Another thing I've seen is sometimes in a meter the magnet will rock back and forth. Careful design is needed to prevent that from causing the reed switch to open and close constantly. (Deboucing won't save you there)

Besides that another thing that happens is if utility selects the wrong scale factor for the meter. That's good for really angry customers if the error is in the utilities favor. If it's in the customers favor they get angry when the utility fixes it.

More sophisticated meters actually sense the actual meter reading using a bizarre electromagnetic sensing technique.
Another good piece on 172 here: http://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft/pistons/cessna-172-skyhawk...
What if a company offered to pay you a day's wages, or something reasonable still (if it's less than that)?

Whittle down the pool even further and the ones you think look good on paper, and after an interview (or a series of them), have them come in, on a paid basis.

It'd be a sign of good faith that they're both serious about finding a good candidate, and respectful of your time?

I know some companies do paid stuff like that. If only it were more commonplace.
This is super enjoyable thank you ^_^
Mathias Rust is another, more famous, unauthorized border-crosser. Thirty years ago, in May 1987, the then-18-year-old West German took off from Helsinki in his rented Cessna and due to various happenstances was allowed to not only enter the Soviet airspace unchallenged, but to fly all the way to Moscow and land next to the Red Square.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust

Much less known, and much more tragic, is the story of two Finnish teenage boys who, in 1946, set sail from Helsinki in their small boat. Their intention was to voyage to Stockholm to meet some relatives, but as a result of extremely bad luck and post-war Soviet paranoia ended up in a forced-labor camp in Siberia.

http://beaufortmagazine.fi/2014/08/seven-years-sailing/
I didn't reach out to many lawyers. After hearing a few not wanting to be David against Goliath, I just came to terms that I should not be building a business on a revenue stream like Adsense where an automated review can mean the difference between being in business and not, and moved on. I sense you may be implying that maybe I was breaking the TOS, but know that we were getting paid significant amount by Google already, and had no business practice change by the time we were canned at the $100K level.
I ran the test script on this sunset photo: <https://i.imgur.com/9EXyYlJ.jpg>. Output for the different algorithms:

* otree: https://i.imgur.com/AnqaTLE.png

* mindiff: https://i.imgur.com/2UMzyub.png

* mix: https://i.imgur.com/TJm6tJ3.png
Yes; we wouldn't want inconvenient positions to disrupt our curated narrative.
lyft financials

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