skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Whiteboarding" has become too large of an umbrella term, one that groups together everything that's wrong with the interview process.

That general premise is right, we've lumped too much into the term "whiteboarding", and it's worth unpacking into the different interviewing practices we may like or dislike. Some things people don't like have nothing to do with an actual whiteboard (e.g. testing esoteric CS knowledge or deliberately creating a stressful environments), and some things that involve a whiteboard IMO are ok (e.g. sketching out a system diagram).
Thanks for the kind words! Yes, we are definitely looking to expand our use cases to support a variety of scenarios and parameters so that we can give the most comprehensive evaluation for people looking to store time series data.

And not you specifically, but hopefully others feel free to post a proposal or even a PR if there is a use case they really want to see supported.
I don't think people should play CS-quizshow during whiteboard interviews. Being asked to implement a breadth-first search, or whatever, is kind of annoying - especially since there's effectively one correct answer. At best, you're testing my memory and whether I read the right interview book.

I had to do that at my last interview. I got through it ok-ish. The more interesting question was a more general system design question - how would I architect a system to do X, under constraints Y and Z. What would I do if a new constraint came up? Ok, now how would I make it more resilient? There, the whiteboards is just a tool I can use, not the primary focus.
The posts in question are frankly pretty awful, but this does kind of put the lie to the idea that if you don't like FaceGoogleBook's censorship you can just set up your own website.
I think he means that stock picking is way more dangerous than a well diversified "safe" Fund like most retirement accounts push you to invest in (with high management fees of course).
It's not just that real working engineers would go look it up. It's that the culture around these "prove you can code" problems got into an arms race, where companies kept trying to come up with ever more difficult problems and stringent requirements on solutions. It finally reached the point where, at some companies which use them, the bar for "can you code at all" is actually "given a problem you've never seen before, can you match or beat the absolute best solution the world's best CS researchers have ever come up with, in twenty minutes, on this whiteboard". If you aren't able to, they label you a bozo who can't even write a for loop, and pronounce you unqualified to do any type of programming, and pat themselves on the back for having kept "fake coders" out of their company.

(and if you wonder how anyone ever gets hired there, the answer is: by cheating. If you're going to interview at one of those places, odds are their interview problem and an accepted solution will be online somewhere, so you just go look up and memorize)
"Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding."

My sister, a pediatric ER nurse would disagree with you. The interviews are largely behavioral and are a breeze. No dummy is wheeled in with head trauma, random "new" diseases aren't invented and asked to be treated, etc. The simple fact of the matter is if hospitals hired in the same way, they would have no staff.
Most definitely - the systems apparently "talk to each other" throughout the day whatever that may mean in their case.
Very much this.

Most effective bushfire combat involves fuel denial, rather than directly putting out flames. And one of the most effective forms of fuel denial is setting backfires.

Fires spread generally via embers.

Bombing bushfires does nothing against fuel, and will likely increase ember spread.

And the prospects for ground crews encountering UXB might be problematic.
Ahh yes, multinational corporations worth hundreds of billions, also known as the left. Insightful.
They're fine but they need to be understood properly. Whiteboard interviews don't really capture how well someone codes. They are better at capturing thought process, high level understanding, system architecting ability, and a candidate's communication skills.

If you want to see how well someone codes, look at their code. Or ask them to write something for you. Don't do a whiteboard interview and think it is the end all be all. Take it as a data point.
This is not relevant to net neutrality as the phrase is traditionally defined.
I think we are not in a simulation. Though our world is pretty close in principle to a simulation -- there are certain (small number of) building blocks which contruct this complex world. That should be it.
Goodhart's Law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
You can either go the route:

1. Discrete Math -> Algorithms

or

2. Discrete Math -> Abstract Algebra

or

3. Discrete Math -> Real Analysis

Discrete Math will put you in a mathematical state of mind whatever that means. Discrete Math to Real Analysis (or Abstract Algebra) is like weightlifting (and general body conditioning) to a sports discipline like classical wrestling (or soccer).

Real analysis will teach you to be an opportunistic problem solver who rock-n-rolls (street-fights) their way through problems.

Abstract algebra will turn you into a morosely formal, orderly and pedantic systematizer and generalizer.

You want to be both a formalistic thinker and a flexible one.

For intro to math try [0] Infinite Decent Into Math by Clive Newstead / John Mackey, [1] Book of Proof by Richard Hammack [2] Math Foundations of Computing by Keith Schwarz (ALL LOOK TO BE FREELY AVAILABLE)

[0] http://www.math.cmu.edu/~jmackey/151_128/infdes.pdf

[1] https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/

[2] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs103/notes/Mathematical%20Fo...
Is money all you care about?

What happened to solidarity?
If you had a receiver with a nanosecond precision you can measure the distance to the key with enough accuracy that the relay attack doesn't work anymore. I don't know why manufacturers don't do that yet - I guess the parts necessary are still not available at scale yet?

I personally just keep the keys in a metallic bag at night, blocks all signals perfectly.
For oil, we should add in all the US spends on Middle East wars.
> $55,000 is a modest pension?

Yes, it is, especially compare to public safety pensions it is compared to.

> That is a lot more than social security is paying.

Social security is a minimal safety-net pension designed to mitigate crushing old age poverty (and it's barely adequate even to that task) in the event of absence or failure of workplace-specific retirement plans, not a primary retirement vehicle.

> Maybe we should move teachers to SSA?

You want the Social Security Administration to take over delivery of classroom education from state and local agencies?
OT - Someone smart once said that Lotus Notes was an email/groupware app wrapped around one heck of a robust sync engine.

As an even more OT comment, I always loved the password entry box for Lotus Notes. When you typed in your password, it would do a simple animation of cycling through hieroglyphic symbols.
Putting the “Venture” into VC
Nobody on "the left" has ever argued that companies can't have a terms of service that prohibits bad behavior.

Net neutrality has always been about preventing the companies that control the last mile for consumers from extorting additional money from server operators that are already paying their own ISP for bandwidth.
The github repo that this references is either private or doesn't exist.
You could say "heartbroken at the loss of a friend".
> It seems pretty odd to me to distrust someone because they ...

... are using a platform "you" don't trust.

Really? That's not really odd.

At least, it's not odd, if that usage and what it entails is the denominating part of the persona in this question.
The same sort of reasoning behind my Java web apps interfacing with a database system that doesn't understand booleans; and needing to interface through RPG programs in order to actually get any business logic done.

As a web developer, it makes me scream sometimes. I get it (somewhat), but I still want to scream.
The only two other comments in this thread are saying that this is "good".
I think that scenario was what happened with one of the more recent swattings in the news.

Person A and Person B are getting hot and bothered about something stupid. Person A says "come at me bro, here's my address." Person A gave Person B Person C's address instead.

Person B swatted Person C. Person C had no idea what was going on, went outside, maybe panicked, maybe whatever, but Person C was shot and killed because SWAT had no idea.

I believe A and B were arrested, but usually the cops don't get lucky. They couldn't find the idiot who tried swatting me, but they don't exactly have a ton of resources either.

Shit's scary, especially since it can happen anytime.
I think doing a master's is a great way to find out if you are cut out for/want to do research. I did a master's, was very happy I did, and very happily didn't pursue a PhD afterward.
Lmao they have a different font and text color on every single page, what are you talking about? It looks like absolute, pure garbage. I would never want that to be my company website if I was a CEO, even if my company did just support systems that are 20+ years out of date.

Honestly, the more I look at this, this may be the worst website I have seen in quite a few years. I can't believe this is a currently-existing tech company.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17726493.
Story time!

When Octave was getting a lot of traffic from the first Coursera machine learning class, when it was just Andrew Ng doing a course and before the Coursera org existed, we were getting a lot of novice users who would do something like

some_matrix(i,j) = 5

and get cryptic errors about how matrices cannot be indexed by complex numbers. This is because by default, in Matlab and Octave `i` and `j` are functions that evaluate to the imaginary unit. You have to overwrite the function names with `i=2, j=3` or whatever beforehand, which novices often forget. This was happening often enough that I pushed some patches to warn, "did you forget to assign i or j?" if someone tried to index matrices with complex numbers.

Point is, people in Matlab and Octave often unintentionally try to index by complex numbers.
And if you are on win7? :)
IMO Go's error handling is a flop. I constantly see code with the same verbose error checking that simply shoves the error further up the stack. No better than try/catch. Maybe and Either are much more elegant solutions that allow errors to be checked when values are needed rather than when they are created. I also really like monadic catch/throw.

Panic is an anti-pattern, I think, and seems oddly placed as I think the article was illustrating. Once again, these types of failures would be easier to represent with a richer type system.
I don't doubt lots of companies do this, but I skeptical about the coding on a whiteboard. They talk in person, sketch out diagrams, highlight important aspects - why? because these things are all easier on a fluid analog medium like a whiteboard or piece of paper.

Actual Code? Not a chance. Portability, Durability, Efficiency - It's the worst of all worlds.
> some DP algorithm you might not have used since college, and proving its correctness and run time to some stranger who may be barely out of college themselves.

I'm not opposed to white-boarding, but to reinforce this point I'll note that I would have done much better on some of these problems when I was just out of college than I would today, because they were all fresh in my mind.

I assure you I wasn't a better programmer or employee then.
Easy-Type Passwords: A boon to air-gapped credentials
nah, it's a refraction in the lens -- eg, i see it offset from the actual light source.
Improving websites with a multi-armed-bandit recommender system
Like automatic twitter updates containing personal thoughts being rebroadcasted. This will reduce the already thinning content on facebook further.
The highest margin software consultancy I ever saw was specialized in maintaining legacy sw applications, running on setups that were popular in the late 80s and early 90s. A little niche, but extremely high margin.
Be sure to read "Appendix 2: Changes in Python 3" at the very end of the document! I was preparing a long "Actually..." rant before I saw that.
Like many of you out there, I use an encrypted keychain to manage credentials, so remembering all of my passwords is no longer a problem. Unfortunately, those long, secure passwords I like to use are really annoying to read and type in situations where I can't auto-fill them from my keychain. This is a particular annoyance with air-gapped or legacy systems where I have to read stuff like this off of my phone screen:

C5BWVEQRE7BTxmSeNF7n3E8C

Minor annoyance, sure, but easily solved. The Easy-Type password generator uses only grade-6 and under vocabulary words and short numbers to provide a password with a good amount of entropy but one that can be very easily read and typed:

SorryNorthern73RepresentStood

The word list is currently 634 words long and the generator spits out 4 (pseudo)random words and inserts a (pseudo)random number between 1-99 into the mix as well.
"Practical application" is the domain of the engineer, the business person, the sales department, etc. Science and pure curiosity are one and the same.
There are literally thousands of hosts other than Azure. Worst-case scenario, they could run their own servers or use a colocation service.
True, it's probably not _that_ hard, but I doubt it's all that great an experience either. At least with towing there is arguably a significantly higher chance of witnesses or CCTV footage of a number plate, and on most modern luxury vehicles will trigger the alarm. With this attack it looks like the driver simply opened the door and drove off as if they were the owner, which is far less likely to arouse suspicion in most neighborhoods I would imagine.
Unfortunately, some companies' HR departments actively encourage "trivia questions", because they ask interviewers to ask every candidate the same questions so that a "fair" comparison between candidates.
I'm currently experiencing a heartbreak and I want to thank you for your comment. Very insightful.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523056
It's rather long-form content to do well on HN.

Typically most readers want a good title, and to have a good TL;DR of the article in the first 3 sentences.

These articles don't even really get their point across in the first 3 pages.
> Why invest in your company if you don't have the conviction that it will be worth more 3-6 months from now.

This is a nonsense statement. Companies control their revenues, profits, budget, etc. They have very little control over their stock price, and they especially have no control over short term stock prices, like 3 to 6 months. Companies should be focusing on the long term and not looking at the stock price, but employees care about liquidity.
I'm working on a large-ish project right now, and into one of the more tricky bits literally today. And you know what? I take breaks. I go read something on the internet or post a comment, or I go for a walk, or I go do one of the smaller housekeeping tickets I keep in my queue to give my brain a rest from continually focusing on the hard parts of the problem.

Can't do that in a whiteboard session.
What's OT?

[ Please don't dismissively downvote. Google search for OT yields a wide variety of expansions, none of which seem to explain this abbreviation. https://www.google.com/search?q=OT ]
> writes C/C++ every day.

> C is is stupid and breaks things

> C++ has serious mental health issues
A total shame. No other country in the developed world lets this stuff happen to its elders; Without whom all of us wouldnt be here.

As long as a billionaire gets to keep an extra few million bucks, to hell with them ageing losers!!!
I did a interview with Google last summer. They didn't use a whiteboard, but instead had me code in a shared GoogleDoc. Pretty similar issue, limited time, somebody staring over your shoulder, not your usual development environment. Even more frustrating when you _know_ they have a web-based IDE for internal software development but make you write code in a GoogleDoc.
The best I have come up with if you are requiring them to write actual code is to give them a problem to solve for with code prior to interviewing. Have them bring that code along and then have them explain the code and why they did things the way they did. It is not 100% verifiable that they wrote the code, but being able to talk to why things were done the way they were tends to be good enough. I have also found that understanding how people approach life and problems in general are more telling of how good they will be than actually evaluating their coding skills. Monitoring coding exercises will weed out many good candidates as well as the poor ones in my experience.
net neutrality has nothing to do with freedom or neutrality of speech online, especially in regards to a private company's terms of service.
In Sacramento car theft is a big problem. The scheme there is to steal a nice car, purchase a wrecked one at a lot (salvaged) for pennies, then swap the vins and serial numbers with the salvaged car then sell it. It works really well. So if you buy a used car in sacramento there is a %90 chance it has a salvaged title.
Well, they kind of shot themselves in the foot by leaving big social media platforms... for a big server hosting platform. If they wanted to go Henry David Thoreau on the corporate internet, why didn't they buy physical equipment?
To me, it's not about the code on a whiteboard vs a computer and correctness.

It's about the thought process when breaking down a problem and the ability to organize and communicate their thoughts. It's also about exploring a problem space. How carefully does an engineer consider edge cases? What kinds of things are important to them?

A whiteboard to me is a much simpler and accessible medium through which to explore a problem vs setting up an environment and having to type code and dealing with all the minutiae that comes with actual development.

Of course, it isn't the ultimate method of evaluating a candidate but it's certainly valuable.
Neutrality is about the pipes, which are a natural monopoly. It has nothing to do with the users of the pipes.

Microsoft has a right to choose not to participate in broadcasting speech that it disagrees with, and the reason that's OK is because there are many other platforms for Gab to move to.

For many (most?) people, switching to a different ISP is impossible or comes with severe drawbacks.
shrug. Same way the 'average' person does. Looks totally wrong. I notice it from the first minute it starts to shift. I notice it every time I look at the display of a coworker who uses it. I tried it for a few months thinking it would cue me to go home, at least, but I just started snoozing it the instant it began sunsetting -- forget the more extreme ends of the progression.

I never work in a perfectly dark room. My office is next to a window, both at home, and at work. The lights are on. Plus, all of these things help keep my pupils small which apparently helps prevent the blue light harm to begin with.
I believe that may be cited in the article (but its not in an obvious place :) )
Is there any engineer who you'd regret not hiring, who is unable to code FizzBuzz in real time in front of an audience? I'm skeptical.
Yes, my favorite was a while back, someone's list of algorithmic interview questions got posted on here, and a couple of his answers were wrong! And he STILL insisted they were good interview questions!

Our field is full of some of the smartest morons on the planet.
Oof, I've had that experience during a technical phone screen with a different "hires only the best" company. I was asked to write (over the phone) a trivial statistical algorithm and started to describe the algorithm: "Function F returns a double and has two parameters, pointer to the start of the double array P and integer N for length of array." Apparently on the other end of the line was a human compiler that kept rejecting my input and preferred "double F open parens double star P comma int n close parens"!
It's achieved it's highest rankings ever on TIOBE this year. We have also seen record high numbers of Clojure language, ClojureScript language, and library artifact downloads this summer.
> Facebook is not a public good

I thought Facebook was on the stock market...
"taught to count"

I think that is the key. "1, 2, 3. There are 3 apples." is a little easier than "0, 1, 2. There are 3 apples."
Counting the first item as "1" total items leads to 1 being more natural in the same way that incrementing a pointer by 0 giving you the first element is more natural.

The former is the abstraction layer most people are more familiar with.
No matter where they end up hosting they'll most likely be breaking some ToS of either their colo or ISP.
Another thing no one considers. If the simulator or maintainers of the simulation identify that the individuals being simulated are aware of or close to determining they are in a simulation, they may alter the observations in the minds of the individuals being simulated to indicate there is no simulation.
It’s worth looking into Hofstede’s power distance index when thinking about how hierarchy effects behavior in different groups/countries: http://clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimension...
> Suppose we live in a computer simulation with the following x-xˆ property: for
each memory-bit x in any computer in our world, there is a memory-bit ˆx in the
simulating computer such that ˆx is used to store which value is stored in x. Then
any such x is subject to two different types of soft errors:

One thing I've never understood about the simulation theory is that if we live in a simulation, we have almost know basis for making any assumptions at all about the nature of the reality in which we're being simulated. If you assume it's like ours in every way, then it's also equally likely to be a simulation, and on to infinity.
I don't think that characterization of use is true for either Go or Clojure.
Many people believe that it is completely unreasonable to ask an interviewee to write code on a whiteboard at all. I disagree with such an absolute position. I do think it can be a reasonable thing to do, but only if you are asking the interviewee to code something really simple.

When I say simple, I mean really simple, like FizzBuzz simple.

There are interesting questions you can ask that are really simple which are not FizzBuzz. I've used the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm and more recently Selection Sort. I should stress in both of these cases that I carefully explained the algorithm before asking the interviewee to code it up. Even though these algorithms are quite simple, I do not expect the interviewee to have memorized them.

I do expect someone who is a professional software engineer to understand the algorithms after a decent explanation and then write code which will implement them.

I also don't necessarily expect the interviewee to get the code exactly right. I just expect them to demonstrate that they could write correct code given enough time and access to an actual computer to test the code on.
Pretty much. I've told amazon in particular I have no interest in working for their company because of how they treat their employees.

Of course, that hasn't stopped me from getting hit up by at least 7 more recruiters from Amazon since, including one lovely person who decided cold calling me was a totally reasonable thing to do.