skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis.

If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is?

I'd actually argue that for many companies this post is true (i.e. that getting it "right" is less important than the journey) but I still won't forgive companies that design the most hostile interview questions possible, and are then surprised when interviewees complain.

You can read the types of questions Google asks here:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer...

I'd never interview at Google or any other company that operates this way. If the very first interaction I'm going to have is off-topic trivia, we're done, the company failed MY interview. The questions Google asks are disrespectful and unprofessional.

But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field.
Not really a reply to your point. Thanks for your post, I think i finally understand my sleep "problem" now. I think I have the same "disorder"
Slitherin – Solving the Classic Game of Snake with AI (Part 1/3)
Yeah, it’s a combo of Latin and “archaic”. “i” was the most prominent one.
Just a warning. A couple of days before the switch over, all my filters stopped working. Not sure if it's related, but be careful if you rely on them.
Humans do. Humans are the only species with the capability to transcend their nature.
It's one of those things where I believe only mathematical/physics model could potentially show us answers, as that's the only way we'd ever be able to get "exact" resolution of what's going on between interactions. Whether we can ever model these systems to be as refined as reality is impossible to know - however perhaps we should start trying and see if what we are able to model shows anything that could perhaps help us direct more inquiry into; it makes me think of the Periodic Table, and how we were able to discover new/missing/unknown elements simply by ordering and seeing gaps in the model.
Why can't any code that want's to steal your passwords in firefox's DB just use firefox's open source code to decrypt? Firefox requires no password to start up and access your passwords so why couldn't any other code just follow the same process?
The key bit of context is at the top of the page:

Engineer. Diagnostics at Google Cloud. Keeping things boring. Personal opinions.

Emphasis mine.
To me OP seems to assume a competent, unbiased, and well meaning interviewer: always giving hints, knows exactly what they want, will field and answer questions comprehensively. At Google's scale with hundreds of thousands of interviews on the books, thousands of interviewers who like all human beings have good days, sick days, angry days, and depressed days, this will not always happen. What happens when its the interviewer trying to have a "smartness" contest? There are too many testimonials of this happening at Google to just ignore it.
Why are manhole covers round, and similar brainteaser questions have been banned at Google for ~5 years at least. They're only the new normal if you're a decade behind the curve.
They're bringing in a weird traffic rule so the police can selectively pull over whoever they want who happens to make the mistake of falling in their cunning illegal left-turn trap, thus giving the illusion of probable cause for a traffic stop.
It's true, the website doesn't say crazy, that's my word.

You know what's beautiful? The fact that the vast majority of humanity is awake, engaged in their major activities (school, work or leisure) at 12:00, no matter where they are in the world, and that this is a shared point of reference.

It's not an exaggeration to say that timekeeping is at base, about the daily cycle of day and night. Every development we have created in the past four millenia is an iteration on that same idea. There is day, and night, and our clocks are just more precise ways of marking that cycle. You want to abolish that, for what? A nicer API?
I was seeing this when they first forced the new interface a few weeks ago. The performance improved quite a bit when I killed all my firefox processes and restarted it. It's still not great, but it's tolerable.
I've had Google recruiters reach out to me multiple times over the years and I've never taken them up on an interview. This last time, I told the recruiter I just wasn't interested in going through the process, and his response was a shocked "but why??" Is it so shocking that I don't want to subject myself to grueling demoralizing interviews to likely be rejected? I can get good work, with people I know, making good money, without going through any of that. I'm not interested in the Google Hazing.
Went to test Fastmail after some other poster suggested it. Granted, inbox is empty, but feels way faster that gmail, on par with basic gmail, with more functionality.

No cache reload: 28 requests, 114KB, 2.45 seconds.

With cache: 28 requests, 12KB, 2.65 seconds. Funny: UI seems ready after 1 second, but there's an eventsource request that dwarfs the rest in the waterfall, taking the rest of the time.

Edit: playing around with the UI, feels close to native.

Edit 2: downvotes, feel free to engage in discussion. Getting tired of the HN mob.
> However implementing this in this age would be impractical as it would break interoperability with every other (still alive) OS out there.

It's deeper than that, although this is a very good point.

Who teaches the OS what file types exist? How is that updated?

You could rely on the OS vendor, but that's a bottleneck, especially for a consumer-focused OS where most of the applications (and, therefore, most of the application file formats) are not created by the OS vendor, or entities working in concert with the OS vendor. You could have a great new file format and a great new application and be unable to use it, or get anyone else to use it, because the people behind the OS haven't caught up yet, or because the OS updates haven't percolated out yet.

You could trust the application vendors to do it, which is a security hole: The ScuzzyTech Hyper Word Processor really, really wants to open your word processing documents, so it can synergize your monetization with microtransaction-based leveraged technologies. Therefore, all of your Normalcore Text Documents are now ScuzzyTech Hyper Word Documents only to be opened by the ScuzzyTech Hyper Word Processor, because the ScuzzyTech code helpfully updated all of your filetypes and, therefore, file associations.
Technically yes, but realistically no. Those options are very spread out and many are named in a way that sounds different from advertising (like Cortana Suggestions).

Making a default in a mainstream OS where many people would not know how nor would care to put in the effort is basically making it forced.

I think the main issue in this thread though is that it is just not worth the hit to brand and UX compared to the trivial money it might make.
I think one of the keys features is lazy evaluation. Nixpkgs is one giant expression that evaluates to the complete set of packages that it provides. But since only some the attributes of that set are evaluated in any given invocation, it's still efficient. That can be vertical (eg, a package and it's dependencies) or horizontal (eg, the names of all the packages).

Guix shows that this isn't the only way to do it, but it is a good way.
You can downvote comments you feel are not relevant. Flag comments that are otherwise breaking rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I dare you to write us such a story. Remember, it has to be short.
The rules of racing (2014)
Time of onset only helps you if populations are relatively immobile, or latency time is relatively short.

If latency time is decades long (not unreasonable for brain cancers, for example, which are very slow growing), then every brain cancer survey will pick up people who moved in from other areas and were exposed at different times and rates, considerably lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Also relevant:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-studies-link-...
My link from Glassdoor has feedback from interviewees from as recently as days ago. You can see the types of interview questions Google is asking right now.

The sentence you're referring to was in the context of the FIELD which is why it said as much, and the specific question is a very well known stereotypical example:

> But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field.

If you browse my link you'll see that Google continues to ask off-topic questions, even if they aren't riddles or brainteasers.

Why don't they ask questions relating to the job? Why don't they do practice tasks that you'd be expected to do on the job? Those are the core issues.
To further this idea, while Twitter is probably paying for the privilege of being pre-installed, for Windows 10, I wouldn't be surprised if (shortcuts to download) Candy Crush and Twitter are the result of market testing and focus groups and such. Not understanding being able to download apps via the Windows Store may be totally foreign to us, but non-technical users may need some hand-holding.
Definitely not within the 5-10 year timeframe that the article quotes though... if a computer can follow completely open-ended instructions that well in a decade then we'll be living in an entirely new world, and making movies will frankly be the least of our concerns.
This is the quote that stands out to me:

> You won’t be promoted for doing your job, you will be promoted by focusing on your promotion.

Well, yeah. That's how it is in a lot of companies, especially big ones. Doing what is expected of you in your current position is proof that you are well suited for your current position. Exceeding expectations for your current position is how you get promoted.

If the company has a documented promotion process, (and it seems like Amazon does based on the article), then focusing on that process is not a distraction from doing your job: it is doing your job! They went to the trouble of spelling it out for you because that's what they want you to do!

It seems like the author's idea of "doing your job" was different than his employer's, so of course he had a bad time.
... what the hell is gmail doing to suck up that much memory? It shouldn't take more than 1KB per message to store all potentially-relevant message headers, and even the textual content [i.e., no attachments] is unlikely to consume more than a few KB. That takes 100,000s of messages to reach 400MB, which is roughly on the order of "save every message you have ever received for several years."
My Google mail is already a personal domain I just manage through Google apps. To be honest the main reason I keep it on Google apps is the six-ish people I talk to exclusively through hangouts (and momentum).

If I do get forced to the new gmail web version I'll likely switch to a desktop client or write my own client if I can't find a tolerable one.
I had a google recruiter reach out a couple years back, and I asked for just some ballpark idea of salary range. No dice - they wouldn't discuss even a ballpark range until I'd flown and and given up a couple of days or my time for travel and interviews. I didn't followup.
And how does he know this? Intuition of course!

Circular reasoning aside, his initial definition deals with "the gut" but later on morphs into "...a clear understanding of collective intelligence."
He points out that most websites are organized in "an intuitive way" after the web "evolved after many years of chaos online, as common wisdom emerged."

Can't this be seen as not intuition or common knowledge but rather the treating of UX as a science? For example: AB testing, conversion rates, quantifiable measurements from observation.

Next he says that "intuitive design can be described as 'understandable without the use of instructions'."
So it seems less about tapping into some grand common knowledge and more about reducing the interface to the simplest level possible. (Does Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" come to mind?) And this simplest level is the hallmark of intelligence?

Perhaps "intelligence" isn't the right word, and instead, as he clarifies definitions again, maybe intuition is just the guide to that which lies beyond observation. Something that generates new hypotheses and paradigms, which are then supported or refuted by experimentation and systems. His Einstein quote speaks to this: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant."

I'm on board with that.
I can't handle yet another article about the Google interview. It's not 2005, people don't care about working there anymore.
If laser efficiency were good enough for this we would have laser fusion.
I agree 100%, there are too many testimonials about people asking about things like linux syscalls and the different bits in TCP headers for me to believe that all Google interviews are conducted without any tech pissing-contest shenanigans.
As an outlook.com and gmail user, I have to say it's going through the same crap as gmail. More features getting tacked on. I stopped using outlook.com's web interface once they started throwing Skype in my face at every chance.
Unfortunately a lot of product manager roles are hired based on how many new products/features that person launched, and not the actual impact to the company or customers (that information is usually confidential or impossible to tease out from one product anyway).

In reality the Product Manager roles should often be to nurture products to perfection over the long-term, and to be an absolute expert on the category.

Often though those people who want to nurture great products over the long-term just go on to start their own businesses! So the field is left with flashy people who launch flashy products very often, but who don't really understand the business, the industry, or their customers.
I am not sure if this is in the interest of any company but why not provide feedback, as it can only help the interviewees in the future and the companies attract better talent.

Even if it's not standardized, a rubrik across X attributes with a scale and a number. (Which is what I am assuming they are doing anyway -- as it sounds likes the interviewers are rating them across different dimensions)

Not sure if this is some sort of a thing to do with liability but the interviewee can get generalized feedback.

Ex: Technical skills (2/5),Communication skills (4/5) etc. and they can improve on the relevant dimensions or compare notes with other companies / candidates as well.
> Why don't they ask questions relating to the job?

When I hear of this sort of behaviour in interviews, I have to assume that the culture of the dept is such that x% of your job will entail fielding issues that are things that you consider outside your 'job'. If 20% of the time you'll be talking about stuff that you consider tangential, and you don't react well to that, you may self-select out. ?
I don't mean to sound smug, only offer a perspective. I've heard of what you're talking about, but I've never actually seen it for myself. On every Windows 10 system that I've used, including developer preview (& excluding my work laptop) is one that on which I've installed Win10 myself. During the installation process, I selected 'advanced' settings -- there was a glaring option that said something similar to "allow Microsoft to show ads in places like the start menu and apps" -- That was on by default and I turned it off in quick order. Additionally, I turned off every single setting that attempted to "learn" from my behavior and "provide" what I most likely wanted. I've only set these settings during installation, but here's what I found online. https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...
Show HN: Acrnms – the home of acronyms, abbreviations and jargon
I agree. I have a heavily multithreaded program, and I had to write my own thread-safe data structures, and spent ages debugging and tuning them. Then one weekend I read about Clojure core.async, and wrote a little 50-line prototype (much simpler and easier), and got something that worked correctly every time (first try!), and was (without tuning) only about 15% slower than my production system.

I've read about how they plan to glue some better concurrency support onto Swift, and I dread it. The language is already so complex that they're having trouble with the basics. I've got workarounds in my app because switching on an enum doesn't always work right (SR-1121). Now we want to add concurrency after the fact? Oh boy.

If I had to do it again, I'd definitely write the core of my software in some other language (maybe Clojure), and just use Swift for the GUI. Swift looks like a language designed for AppKit/UIKit, so it's fine if that's all you need it to do.
If you need total system order then that will always be your bottleneck, although you can make it very fast by scoping it to just a sequence number generator and doing the actual work in separate processes.

Otherwise, most event sourcing uses different "streams" of events for different application functions, so you can shard by stream in whatever way works for you.
Why does everyone on HN seem to care so much about what Google does in interviews? We get it, no one likes weird off-topic brainteasers. Be a better engineer so you don't have to worry about having them on your resume and you'll be good.
Stories like this make me even more sure that my path is not to join a tech giant as an engineer. The money would be great, but at what cost?

I think the best option for me is to not derive all of my happiness from the amount coming in to my bank, and instead work on things that I have a clear impact on.

When I graduate this spring I’m going to be looking at medium-sized companies with a bright future, not the shadowy giants.
I remember the story. The bank's CEO (the guy is a billionaire of considerable notoriety in Russia) threatened to put the story's protagonist in jail for fraud for 4 years.

The protagonist took the threat very seriously (as he should have) and in a later interview to banki.ru (i.e. banks.ru) said that he was fleeing the country to a destination he preferred to keep secret. Reason being the precise "4 years" that was used. Not 2, not 3, not 5. Meaning that the CEO had already made "arrangements".

Then 2 days later there was an article that both him and the bank have reached a peaceful resolution and were recalling all mutual lawsuits.
I think this is getting upvoted because everybody likes to dogpile on Amazon. But nothing this guy says seems to reflect especially poorly on Amazon. If the author is going through another job search now I might recommend taking the piece down; it's not doing you a ton of favors.

The summary: guy interviews and accepts an SDE1 role at Amazon, guy resists building alliances with those holding power in the org, guy is surprised that his work is boring and nobody trusts him to make big decisions, guy quits.

Reality: No large company is going to let newbie junior hires call the shots. Everything in this piece was completely foreseeable and does not reflect poorly on Amazon. You have to earn trust in any company, especially when hired into a low-level role.

I also don't understand why the candidate with 10 years of industry experience decided to move forward with interviewing after being told it was for an SDE1 position. It seems like he missed a big opportunity to realign expectations at that early stage of the interview process.
> However even Rust thought Rust has lots of tools for preventing concurrency issues, it still doesn't have builtin ways for easy concurrent programs - and e.g. for solving the problem that is described in the article.

Rust's Mutex type seems like it would be a good fit for this situation. Also this kind of callback -- which is executed immediately instead of stored and executed later -- doesn't require any heap allocation. You find callbacks like this in e.g. the scoped threading or rayon::join APIs.
>Although I appreciate skepticism

Well, this gave me a laugh at least.
A Gurgling Mud Pool Creeps Across So California Like a Geologic Poltergeist
Azure Functions with path param starting with CON causes 404
> Supposedly, every employee should be guided by the leadership principles during their day-to-day routine. The principles actually make a lot of sense, when used appropriately. As time went, I discovered that the most common application of the principles was to creatively find a leadership principle that best supports the situation.

Bryan Cantrill has a sometimes hilarious takedown of Amazon's "leadership principles" here, which definitely corroborates this blog post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc
No using maths on messages! Just read more ads!
> You won’t be promoted for doing your job, you will be promoted by focusing on your promotion.

You aren't recognized for doing your job, you are recognized for worrying about your job.
...the spring is acting like a moving sinkhole, with mud about 40 feet (12 m) deep. As it moves through the region's mudstone (a soft, sedimentary rock), it leaves behind a sunken trail...
Couple this to the fact that you can search for the class at

https://search.maven.org/#browse

to find the artifact hosting it, and it tends to be a couple minute job

Bonus tracks: gradle dependencyInsight is great for a similar task: finding out which artifact is bringing the dep.
One of the cooler things to do with your corpse I ran across over the years is to end up at a body farm [1]. Helps the CSI types learn new forensics science!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm
This comment/complaint is basically completely orthogonal to the posted item.
you can google the salary range, its not too hard. protip: its pretty low unless you have competing offers then it can be a little larger than your largest competing.
It was enough for me to take my staff over to a Microsoft-hosted email account. Outlooks just sits in the background using a few dozen megabytes, and has a better UI than Gmail. You don't need to hunt through Chrome tabs to find your email client, or load a webpage each time you want to check email. Having a native desktop application is a much better experience.
> Why does everyone on HN seem to care so much about what Google does in interviews?

Because all other companies just cargo cult what google does in interviews. If you want to switch jobs then this is interesting.
Yup.

Anything you say can and will be used against, in the worst possible way.

Feel free to learn as much as you can about the larger circumstances of the company during your exit interview, but don’t give them any negative feedback.

Don’t lie, but don’t give them any negative feedback.
I see two questions on that page, one about string generation/ds&a and one about "networking stuff".

The rest are paywalled or something. So I'd implore you to be more specific about what kinds of questions you object to.
There's skype on there too? My experience was.

- Ah stupid MS login

- Oh that loaded fast

- clicks email loads instantly on right hand side and can still see my list.

- Oh this is clean and fast!

I've been debating loading gmail into a desktop client now that the UI is so sluggish for me. (for the first time since gmail came about) but as of saturday, i'm wondering if I should try using my outlook email more.
Agree 100% it’s part of your job. You need to manage your promotion rhythm in any company or you will be left just to the context or interest of your manager.
I interviewed there last year. Definitely didn't get brainteaser type questions.
Yep I posted something similar earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284264
For me it's fast, lots of requests (200+) but only 600kb loaded. UI feels fine / snappy and I can compose within seconds.