skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How often do you need to write palindrome functions for your job?

That's like answering "how often do you need math?" to the question "what is 2+3?". It is an utterly, completely, stunningly trivial question that even a CS101 student on their first semester should be able to answer.

> used pandas, it's a 1 liner. You could see the wretched face of the interviewer since he was expecting a with open() as f: do_some_shit

I would be perfectly fine with the pandas answer, but my point is "csv parsing" wouldn't be my first question, I'd start with something much easier and if you managed that, I'd gladly accept pandas as a valid and then asked you to elaborate further (what does this pandas function do, how would you implement it yourself etc).
this is a cool tip, especially considering the security implications! afaik, police can coerce you to unlock with fingerprint, but not to give up your password
No.

Corporation Tax in Ireland is 12.5%. Europe is insisting only that Ireland actually collects it. If, as alleged, someone in Fianna Fail made a deal with Apple thirty years ago to charge it, and it alone, a different rate? It's not on the statute book, the power to do that is not included in law, and therefore it's Not A Thing. Oh, and also someone committed a serious crime, but it's Ireland and they'll never be prosecuted.
At least in nyc, it seems to be a mix -- small non-profits/start ups who need a professional looking space but can't or don't want to deal with office management as well as some big companies who need a lot of extra space and will just rent whole floors for fairly lengthy timeframes.
> I thought stealth aircraft is already visible on the latest Russian gear

That's just a usual FUD stuff from Russians.
> They will ask you to do hours worth of homework for them, but then can't be arsed to discuss it with you for five minutes.

This has been my experience with homework assignment interviews (Though I still prefer them to whiteboards).

In no cases, has any interviewer reviewed my homework before the interview. So the homework critique/qa sessions end up being more like a presentation or walkthrough of your solution, like a presentation for a meet-up, even though they are often described as more of a code review/interrogation about your choices.

Which I don't mind honestly. If you know that going in, and are prepared - its an opportunity to impress, if you can be polished.

Talk at them about your solution for the allotted time or until they make you stop :P
I haven't see the latest docs yet but I don't think so. They're still there as of the latest v9.x release so I'd imagine there still in v10.x as well.
How a network of food banks fed more people by embracing the free market
We set our in-house recruiter up with a coderpad question that screens candidates with a simple question:

"Write a function that counts the number of vowels in a string"

Candidates are allowed to run it multiple times and just have to produce a correct result within 10 minutes. It's not a trick question -- the test case in place makes sure you pay attention to case.

Success rate for mid to senior devs? Only 60%.
Effort aims to sequence the genomes of 1.5M organisms
> In so many cases, being able to use a program/service on many platforms is a huge part of what makes it valuable to the end-user.

Sure, some users, in some cases, may happen to use some features that are new. The pitch isn't "this is a good tool", it's "you have to use this tool to interact with others or retain data portability." Seems pretty user hostile to me.
Microsoft stock is up 80% in the last 2 years.

edit: and they are ahead of google in market cap again. Been going back and forth for the last little while.
I use a coding test not only to see if someone can write basic code, but also to assess general intelligence and see/hear their problem solving process. A resume definitely doesn't tell you all you need to know and experience does not necessarily mean effectiveness.
> I typically red-flag potential employers who doesn't sufficiently validate the skillset of potential hires.

I'm beginning to take this to heart.
They don't really want to unlock your house and your car, just one of them. Assuming that you don't have some secure alternative for receiving packages. I don't think they expect (or want) every customer to use one of these options.

I wouldn't use either service since my porch is relatively secure and packages can be left out of sight -- I have a porch-cam, but have never lost a package to theft.

I don't think I'd be comfortable giving Amazon the ability to unlock my house, but maybe my car. For that matter, I wouldn't want any kind of cloud-connected lock that gives any remote unlock capability. I do have an electronic keypad lock, but I like knowing that it can only be unlocked locally.
Scientists who work on atomic clocks believe that they will be able one day to put up a network of quantum-entangled atomic clocks in orbit as a kind of ultra-GPS.

According to an article[1] I read, they should be able to gravimetrically image the volume of earth to within about a cubic centimeter resolution.

At that point it becomes very hard to hide high-density materials, like concentrations of U or Pu, anywhere.

[1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-timekeeping
I find personal blogs covering the topic I'm looking for are typically much better.
yep. also, spares some compute cycles for your app
I've had more luck with IRC in recent years. It's less crowded so it's more like the early years of SO. There's a billion channels so you can be as broad or specific as you want.

I'm in one channel where it'd be fine to say "I think I want a UI control that's sort of like ..., except more ... -- any suggestions?", and I'm in another channel where anything that isn't about compiler internals is strictly off-topic.

They're both useful channels, and have knowledgeable and helpful people, but both positions are much more extreme than are allowed on SO.
$20 billion for a co-working business with 234 locations (works out to about $85 million per location)... I know they own some real estate and stuff, but man, that's a serious valuation (for something that can be copied in a heartbeat, no?)...
Intellectual life is still catching up to urbanisation
> The getpid command has a pretty self-explanatory name, but I wondered what the parameters that were passed to the function were.

Does anyone know what's going on here? It looks like all syscalls are shown to have 3 arguments, even when they wouldn't need that many... Except close() which is shown to have only one.
Actually, the revenue won't end up in ireland. All member states will send a bill to ireland, and ireland will split up the money to them (based on Apple's relative sales around Europe).
Maybe just luck? I interviewed someone for a senior position last week and that candidate didn't know what an array was. That was probably the worst case I've seen but by no means the first time I've seen someone struggle with the very basics.
I think that there must be many more than 1bn though? The area of the disk is roughly 3.14^10 light years, and it must be 10K light years thick on average so 3.14^14 cubic ly... stars seem to be much more densely packed on average than 1 per cubic ly but if we assume that Sol is the measure then the nearest star is not in a 16 cubic ly volume - so we could say 3.14^13 ish stars as an estimate. So I'd be guessing many more than 300 bn stars in the galaxy?

Google says 250 +/- 150 bn. I think low...
>and they have to unlock after a year anyway.

Your point is that it's pointless to lock it if you have to unlock it without the customer asking. That makes sense if you have to do it automatically. The carriers in the US don't have to. They have to only if the paying customer asked first, and after the contract expires, and with a whole bunch of other conditions met.

>But the point is that they do not have fewer subscribers, they have the same amount of paying subscribers, they just have to provide fewer services to those subscribers.

You are seeing it in an extremely short term.

Let's say I pass on my 2-year contract phone originally on AT&T to my cousin who wishes to use it on Tmobile at the point of 1 year and 5 months. Your argument was that since I already had to pay for 2 years, AT&T will save the troubles of serving and supporting my cousin for 7 months if he actually brings it on on TMobile. Your genius plan of being AT&T and not serving my cousin for 7 months only works if you know for sure after that 7 months of free service ends, he will switch anyway. Any carrier will happily provide services if that means they have a legitimate chance of having a subscriber on board. Who cares about giving a potential 10-year subscriber a 7-month head start (especially when that cost is already accounted for)?

>That's a win/win for the phone company.

Nobody ever says having a customer to switch to another network is a win for them.
_._. _ _._ _.. . CQ DE. Seek you from

K0MGD
To take a more nuanced view, I think there is an important distinction, frequently lost, between "can't code" -- which is all too common in practice -- and "can't easily code a stream-of-consciousness solution to a synthetic problem unrelated to anything I've ever built". Or its close cousin "can't easily code a toy solution to your toy problem since I've only worked on massively scalable versions of the same problem". Something I keep in mind when interviewing candidates is that there is that good understanding of the general design of algorithms does not imply that they should be able to throw together an implementation of an arbitrary algorithm with minimal effort unless they've needed to do it in the recent past. Expecting people to spending many days practicing the implementation of arbitrary and often irrelevant algorithms is unreasonably in my opinion. I am more interested in figuring out if they could given adequate time.

A valuable practice, which surprisingly few tech companies do, is to ask candidates about diverse and orthogonal problem domains, or alternatively, allow the candidate to pick from a diverse set of problem domains. In the former case, you often find that candidates have difficulty writing even simple solutions for some problems but on others they instantly and fluidly can code up a good solution. Because they've had to do it in recent memory and still have the "muscle memory" from doing it previously. You often see bipolar results across the problem set this way.

For senior engineers with deep domain expertise in an area, there is an additional trap in that they use more sophisticated and often very different algorithms in their day to day lives than are applicable to the toy problem domains. Graph algorithms are a good example of this, and they are popular in interviews. The representations most engineers know (e.g. adjacency list or matrix) don't scale but the extremely high scale algorithms operate on a different set of principles that aren't trivial to code and aren't relevant to non-parallel cases; coding up an adjacency list graph traversal algorithm is going to be very unnatural to a software engineer used to doing the same on trillions of edges in real-time. It would be crazy not to hire an engineer on this basis but I've seen it happen, ironically because their expertise caused them to show poorly on the coding exercise.

Interviewing for technical skills is intrinsically difficult but I think that as an industry we are much worse at it than we could be. For all the claims of companies that they only hire the "top 10%" or whatever of engineers, the interview process is often optimized to the benefit of the median engineer.
From 2005. Also posted several times before. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=webtypography.net
Ask HN: Interview with Microsoft tomorrow, how to prepare best?
This will be my first ever interview with a big company, even though I have almost 7 years of experience as a developer. This means that my experience with interviews is pretty down-to-earth, talking about what I've done in previous jobs and where my focus lies.

I switched to C# development last year, before I did PHP, JS, and ERP (Dynamics AX) development. This means that my professional experience is limited, even though I've done some after-hours C# development for a little less than two years.

Even though I haven't yet had a "big" interview, I am currently studying for a masters in CS which means that my knowledge of CS theory should be OK. The biggest problem is that I don't know what kind of interview this will be and how I should prepare best.

Any advice is much appreciated.
Why would this work better? Not to be cynical but it seems from a engineering perspective that the trade off is security for data robustness? Anyone who takes control of the network will take control of all property title insurance data. In return at least i know up time will be 100%...
Real life example: how do you isolate a wireless guest SSID from your main work network without different subnets? Those are still needed but said ISP will just hand you one network.
nobody involved in buy/selling High-Yield debt uses the term 'Junk'. It's a term from the 80s before every major investment bank serviced that market. Even the journalists at bloomberg are spinning clickbait language, sheesh ...
Should be AMGAF right now.

This seems hard to keep accurate.
The logical conclusion of this line of argument is that we are nominally ruled by elected representatives, but in fact ruled by a nine-member panel of philosopher-kings.
Thinking beyond bots: How AI can drive social impact – O'Reilly Media
Show HN: Timelinr – The most fun you've ever had planning
Would love feedback on our planning app. Supports both macro and micro planning. Much more to come in the near future (mobile, integrations, etc), but for now, a really fun way to roadmap products, projects, teams, or just your personal goals.

Cheers!
It's also a substantial premium relative to their competitors. WeWork offices are admittedly a bit more fancy, but in hard times fancy temporary offices are the natural thing to cut.
The polite term nowadays (at least according to a FA internship I had many moons ago) is High Yield Bond
> and not a lot/any real choice or nuance.

Exactly! And people still get it wrong.

It's a low-pass filter to weed out programmers who can't even do FizzBuzz, because despite their lack of coding prowess their résumé will still look similar to yours.

> and not feel like there's some degree of insult involved.

That's just reading far too much in to it.
I meant gps in tablet. It has everything smartphone has, but with reasonably sized screen.
"And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier."

Programming is complicated enough, and we should see our mission as making it simpler. That would benefit everyone, not just newcomers.

I see the eventual harshness and gatekeeping in every forum (not just Usenet and SO) as the inevitable consequence of accidental complexity. We've got 173 layers between what we want to accomplish and what we have to type on on the keyboard today, and that naturally leads to ultra-specialization and Barton's "high priests".

I don't think I can describe the modern web stack with a straight face. It's become its own parody of software development. I no longer think I understand how to stay secure on the modern internet, except by mindlessly following "best practices" I've been told. Complexity has a real cost for everyone.

To change the background color on my C=64, you had to consult a memory map -- but there weren't dozens of other abstraction layers to think about, so even my parents weren't afraid to crack open the book and help. Abstraction is a necessary tool, but a lot of the layers we've got today are just plain bad, and exist mostly by historical accident.

You either have to study the archaeology of all your software and hardware, or you have to memorize bizarre cargo cult rituals and recite them back without understanding why. The root cause can't be solved with a Q&A website, no matter how much you tweak the phrasing of the form fields.
Amazon and the Maryland tax incentive
The main reason it's a problem at many of the companies which ban it is they have a lot of engineers who readily patch and combine code from disparate sources and might not always apply the right discipline to keep AGPL things appropriately separate. Bright-line rules can be quite useful.

It is true that MongoDB's AGPL contagion and compliance burden, if you don't modify it, is less than many fear. It is also true that those corporate concerns are valid. MongoDB does sell commercial licenses so that such companies can handle their unavoidable MongoDB needs, but they would tend to minimize that usage.
Google DNS issues?
I suspect OP is in a space both professionally and physically where the job market is poor and a ton of cruddy candidates show up.

I relate though, although I'm in Seattle area, which is a great place - I interview really badly. I strongly agree that hoops are getting added.

However, I have found that great companies do compete on hiring process. Microsoft remains the Gold Standard for me in how fast they turnaround their hiring when it gets going.

> The job search takes much, much longer than it used to.

No. I'm picky and I don't practice stupid questions. It's always taken a long time for me. If you hit the right company and have the right skills, it'll be under two weeks for a hire though.

> No one believes that anyone can actually code.

Yes.

> Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers

Yep. Probably 10% of the time I have a "frick, I blanked" moment.

> Extensive homework is now normal.

Nope. Find better companies?

> Every company’s “process” is different

Every company believes they are snowflakes.

> Outsourced hiring “services” are very much in vogue

Yes, but I think this relates to competitive hiring spaces with lots of poor candidates.

> Companies Really Want to Know Your Salary; Don’t tell Them

Sigh.

> Interviews Matter Much, Much More to You Than to the Company

Yep.

> Age discrimination really exists.

I'm definitely not looking as young as I used to and it worries me.

> You’ll never really know why you weren’t hired.

That's because they don't want to be sued.
> if you have enough rep.

This is a substantial part of the fighting over the site, though - there are lengthy guides to picking up enough Stack Overflow rep to render the site usable.

I usually see this dismissed with "just help some people and ask some good questions, you'll be there in no time", but when I talk to friends who are getting a self-taught start with programming, I consistently hear a different story. They're getting questions closed as dupes, either because they aren't experienced enough to recognize duplicate questions with different terms or because mods are squelching their genuinely novel questions. And they're new, so they can't answer hard questions - and the easy ones don't produce rep because they're inevitably closed, removing all the payouts for answering them.

I understand the logic behind the rep gating system, it's not a bad idea. But it's just fuel on the fire when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot in the form of wrongly closed questions.
I think the bigger issues are bandwidth and power consumption. If software is doing heavy IO, it doesn’t really want to have to contend with the HMB for PCIe and memory bandwidth.

Also, a DRAM chip is a DRAM chip. I’d rather pay a couple dollars for a local DRAM chip in the NVMe device than a couple dollars for extra host RAM that will be permanently reserved for the HMB.
I see a lot of people complaining about SO because of duplicates, barriers, etc but it seems that none of those people actually read the article.

You have to go through all these hoops because you can't force your way through this learning process the same way as you can't have 9 women give birth to a baby in 1 month.

Contributing to SO is a journey and the milestone system is geared towards helping people through it.

You have to admit that nothing is perfect and complaining won't help.

Criticizing something is easy but I see close to zero suggestions for improvement.

Just ask yourself whether you can do better than Joel and the others or at least give some suggestions for improvement.

Disclaimer: I'm also one of those 2% people and I also see problems but I think that it is not that serious as some people claim it to be.
Wilder'sTeam Say Hearns and Joshua Not Serious About Fighting WBC Champ
Revisiting Small Batch Training for Deep Neural Networks
SQL Server Live Query Statistics Viewer Tool
That's exactly it, by using very old precedents you essentially make the law random due to a range of conflicting cases none of which map 1:1. Often 'is X legal' is only decidable by a court case, that's not the rule of law that's effectively amending the rules after the fact.
What information could you not store in a database?
There is a difference between the laws changing and affecting future behavior and a change being applied retroactively.

An earlier message indicated that the money was being put in escrow because apparently there is still a dispute about how the law should have been applied in the past.

I think it is reasonable to be upset about after-the-fact changes to the application of a law/regulation.
Another thing to keep in mind is that all tenants are not created equally. Coworking spaces like WeWork will give preferential rates to anchor tenants (already profitable/hugely funded/well known) to help attract tenants that pay the sticker price but with higher turnover.
> If you have no expectations of career growth at work then big companies are fantastic.

Pretty much.

You can end up in a spot where you can grow fast.

Or you can end up stagnating for years (me).
That is interesting. There has to be a way that IE gets a significant cut from the Apple money tho. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't. That or in future the recompensated EU members agree to invest more in IE.
Very valuable mate, I'll be downloading and will spread the word!
Where is most of your user base located?
Yeah, I always smile bitterly when I see "Any halfway decent programmer shouldn't have trouble landing a new job in 1-2 weeks."
While I agree in the abstract ...honestly, it's not that hard to write at least pseudocode for problems like that regardless of the "stress" of an interview

Is it reasonable to ask things like that? Maybe, maybe not.

But as stressful as an interview is, it's still a basic problem (I can English describe it to you in 30 seconds...coding (in C/C++) would take me another 5-8 minutes (and, probably, be pretty damn inefficient ... but it's still a simple problem)
I think that's how Ford used to make their keys by default, one key for the cabin and ignition and one key for the trunk, this is what my dad's 1988 ford taurus did and I remember it was pretty annoying.
They probably found some silly anti-pattern they were doing previously that was killing performance for no good reason.

The entire history of npm screams "we're pretty much learning all of this as we go, please bear with us".

While there's nothing wrong in that (people have to learn somehow) it does make it very, very hard to put any trust in that project. Especially when said project is at the very center of an entire ecosystem, it makes it hard to trust the ecosystem as well. I'm already seeing a lot of good developers move away from node as they gain experience and realize things should be much better.

Its pretty much standard for literally any project I've seen without senior devs to see these bugs before a release.
I love thinking about the sheer scale of it all. This is a billion stars of the ~200-400 billion stars in our galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy (the closest to us) has ~1 trillion stars.

There's an estimated 100 billion planets in the Milky Way alone, and who knows how many in the Andromeda galaxy.

There could be another satellite somewhere in this galaxy charting space just like this and we'd just be a bright dot to them among billions of other bright dots.
searx, because I can use google, bing, ddg and startpage in one go.