skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having spent a lot of time being interviewed recently, I've noticed a certain type of question asked in technical interviews that I think can sabotage perfectly qualified engineers. I'm not sure if my view is sound, but maybe someone can pipe in and tell me why I am wrong.

Imagine being asked this question in a technical interview:

> When do you decide to use frontend validation?

(yes, this is based on questions I've been asked IRL)

The problem that I have with this type of question, even though it can be answered and seems reasonable, is that it's not even how engineers tend to think most of the time. It's about a solution looking for a problem.

When I'm faced with this kind of question, I often stumble to come up with a hypothetical need for the solution being proposed. It's not that I can't come up with an answer, but I end up lacking eloquence and saying "ummm, well, okay, so..." a lot while using my imagination. It would be like handing a hammer to someone and asking them to find things to nail with it.

In essence, it's backwards from how I would tackle most problems.

Here's the sort of question I would rather be asked:

> Let's say that we've built out a web form that the user can submit, and there are a lot of inputs they have to fill in. They can only know if they made a mistake once they've hit "submit", due to backend validation. How could you improve this experience for the user?

I find this preferable because it's a lot more realistic and natural. Instead of looking for problems to fit the solution, I have a problem and need to come up with a solution. To extend my hammer analogy, this is like providing the pieces of a wood table and allowing the candidate to show how they would assemble that table. Anyone can memorize terms like "frontend validation" and what sort of problems they are associated with, but it demonstrates more skill to be given a problem and know where to go from there.

My guess is that there's a lot of good engineers out there, even senior ones, who get weeded out in the hiring process because they're being asked not to approach problems like engineers but like they're contestants on Jeopardy.
In Nashville, public transit is free for all public high school students and most middle school students. The school system reimburses the transit authority for those rides.

It allows kids to participate in more after-school activities (when school busses don't run). But yeah, they also go to the mall on the weekend.
Also wouldn't steel make the concrete less effective over time as the steel rusted and made the concrete weaker?
They definitely aren’t, but I wonder if their existence will force big tech employers to realize their interviewing process is being gamed and is even more of a sham.
I'm not sure how much this is considered but in my state, which is an at-will employment state, being unable to preform job tasks due to lacking the knowledge or technical skill is explicitly defined as NOT a demonstration of cause for termination that would absolve the employer of their financial responsibility toward unemployment compensation.
reminded me of this: https://sivers.org/horses
I'd argue for paying at least pro-rata signing bonus in the event of a not-for-cause termination like a layoff. Probably for letting the employee keep the entire signing bonus in this case. (More likely yes if it's a lower level employee, less likely if it's a very senior executive and a larger amount, but those are more often in equity or explicitly to make up for lost options in a previous company.)

Otherwise, yes, termination and NDA/non-disparagement are fine. She has every right to be upset, but isn't really helping her case with irrelevant details. DV status is irrelevant to civilian employer.

Performance bonus would depend on the terms. Was it a 2018 bonus for work in 2018, with a payout date in 2019? In that case, if terminated for cause (or quit), sure, don't pay, but they should pay for a layoff. Again, above the legal requirement, so making it conditional on NDA/nondisparagement is fine.
There is a great pragmatic programmers book on building a ray tracer that just came out: https://pragprog.com/book/jbtracer/the-ray-tracer-challenge

Its langauge neutral, which is interesting.
Somehow the jobs which you want to do the most in tech screw you the hardest.

Like if you do back-end database boring stuff of moving data around at random Enterprise X, then you can charge through the roof because they know that the only reason you are doing this job is for the paycheck.

But if you are working on video games/Tesla/Other cool stuff and obviously passionate about the mission, you get screwed on compensation and if things go wrong, treated inhumanely.

Also, why treat people like shit when they get laid off. Can't just manager meet with the person and say, hey our division got cut, I am sorry it turned out that way, happy to help out with the job search.
Because studies like this are sheer bullshit. There is no one "plant-based diet". Eating fat heavy (avacado, nuts, seeds, coconut, acai berry, olives etc...) and carb heavy (rice, fruits) diets and whether you eat few protein rich plant sourced (basically only beans) will have very different macronutrient, micronutrient profile and will have very different effect on human body. Same goes for animal-based diets. Moreover, people who were able to adhere to this study might have just been more disciplined and healthier. This study does not control other important risk factors such as alcohol, regular exercise etc. I find it very hard to believe we can really derive any useful information from "we forced people to eat plants".

As a meat-eater I think the most stupid strawmen vegans hit me with is the belief that I only eat meat. I think very few people advocate "only eating meat" (e.g. recent 0carb hype, which I think is clearly pseudoscience). You can still eat plants but supplement your diet with meat to get more protein and healthy fats. You can still get 75% of your calories from plants but still eat meat. Also, there will be a huge difference between highly processed meat (bacon, salami etc) and unprocessed, grass-fed meat. Studies like this simply ignore all these factors.
I mean, I've seen very technically proficient devs fail to deliver because there's too many cooks in the kitchen, or because they drown themselves in tooling or bikeshed their project to death. Maybe something like that happened?

There's definitely tons of senior devs out there that care way more about linting and unit testing than they do about writing the code that implements the spec.
No causation, I'd believe any day. But correlation? I'd want to see a statistically rigorous test done before I'd believe that. Correlations are everywhere and pretty much all good traits are correlated with each other. Hell, even vocabulary size and reflex speed is correlated. And this is probably why even terrible methods for selection usually kind of work.
I don't imagine a whole lot of altruists donate significant sums of money to projects that run contrary to their beliefs.
Why bother making that distinction when Netflix doesn't themselves? If they're going to put everything they license on the same level as Stranger Things or Roma, doesn't that show that they want all those "Netflix Originals" treated the same in the eyes of viewers?
Redundancies are a natural part of business and working life.

It's how you do them that is important and it revolves around treating people with dignity. Give them notice, allow them time to say goodbye to others, don't escort them out the building, don't make them sign NDAs etc.

Most companies do not have the spouses of former employees jump on Twitter to complain. So the mere fact it has happened means something went wrong from Tesla HR.
>As raising a single big bird is more efficient than raising two smaller ones, it now takes farmers just 1.3kg of grain to produce 1kg of chicken,

The 1.3 kg of grain for 1kg of chicken statistic is amazing. Chicken is really the closest thing we have to “lab grown meat”.
Because it's the stable branch, and it gets no major version updates for anything after release, nor any new packages, just bugfixes to the current version.

There is backports, and I've thought about maintaining a newer Python interpreter in backports (when I was working for a company using Jessie and trying to use a Debian stack for everything and sort of wanting async syntax). You could introduce python3.6 or python3.7 as a new package in backports. But it would be extremely hard to update the Python modules in Debian to the newer version, too, because there's just a "python3-foo" package for each module, so you'd either have to recompile all binary modules and patch them to work on the newer Python as necessary (and patch anything using async or await as regular identifiers....), or you'd have to introduce an interpreter that intentionally wasn't compatible with modules installed as Debian packages. (Or you could introduce an interpreter that tried its best and failed randomly, which seems worse than either option.) I'm personally sympathetic to wanting to get /usr/bin/python3.6 from my OS even if the only useful thing to do is put a virtualenv on top, but I think it makes sense to just install Python yourself into /usr/local at that point.

Re latexmk, it looks like the volunteer maintainer hasn't updated it since 2015, and there's a culture of not stepping on people's toes and waiting a while before assuming they're inactive or no longer care. But it's been updated in the development release. The current changelog https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/l/lat... has a bunch of "NMU" entries, non-maintainer uploads.
> Giving someone 0-day notice and physically escorting them out of the company is simply unacceptable.

This is a pretty common practice, especially when dismissing employees that work with sensitive information (e.g. architecting trade secrets), or work in public-facing positions (e.g. spokesperson or PR). It avoids the risks found in the question of "what will this person do when they know they're on their way out?".
The deadline for applications is in two days. January 22.

Looks like this was launched a few months ago?
Yup, and with remote, you can buy from the entire country, maybe even the whole world! talk about a huge candidate pool. compare that to hiring locally: where you're limited to 30 miles (4 times more than 15 squared), or maybe even 15 miles, if the infrastructure is really terrible.
> I don't think the 3D (game engine) library I want to use is supported

Which one? It's entirely possible that it is (or that it's not 'supported', but you could easily compile it there anyway).
Disabled veterans should be given generous benefits. These benefits are owed to them by the government for the services they provided to the government. Private companies have no responsibility for this.
Programmers in a company work with other programmers. If they cannot explain some work they've done then they are useless. Or would you hire a programmer who does not speak English?
Sorry about the late reply.

Typically with an index fund, imagine a pie of the money. It's split up and invested into companies, but the allocation depends on the market cap of each company relative to the whole pot.

This means returns aren't based on the ability of companies to perform it depends on how big they are at the time. The bigger they are the more allocation of capital they get. Say you have a small company with a very high return rate on its investments, it would get a meagre rate of return compared to say Phillip Morris/Altria which has a lower rate of return, but is just big so it gets a bigger allocation.

You'd think its Darwinian but it has odd effects because what's big stays big, and it has nothing to do with the ability of the company to perform now, but what it did decades ago.
AIFF and Wav are proprietary digital formats?????

AFAIK every modern DAW saves its audio files to AIFF and WAV somewhere inside the project folder. Granted, this does not include MIDI tracks that have not been rendered, so if you don’t want to lose the sound of those tracks and any virtual instruments you are using, better render the MIDI tracks when finishing the project. The only downside to all of this is that raw multi-track files in a project don’t include any additional processing or edits (depending on DAW), but that’s what stems are for.

It would be good practice to render every single track to equal-length WAV files when completing the final mix.
If you look at their FOSS projects you'll notice they generally tend to be released under the Apache license. A look at their license requirements will tell you why - Google employees are required to use it unless they have a reason not to[0] and appear to be strongly discouraged from using copyleft licenses[1].

[0] https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/preparing/#lice...
[1] https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#rest...
"0 percent" meaning break-even -- fares and ads cover all (variable, at least) costs.

No transit agency in the USA accomplishes that, to my knowledge.
Same here. Dataclasses and type annotations are fantastic, not to mention f-strings.
i dunno. the machine has beaten me more more times than i care to admit. some problems are hard.

i’m L7.
One should also be careful of how the bonus is structured. If a “sign-on bonus” vests over time, it’s just a bonus and at-risk. Real sign-on bonuses are paid when the offer is signed or in the first paycheck.
From your link:

SFA is now believed to play a much smaller role in CHD than was previously believed while that of sugar, whole grains, and cereal fiber have moved in the opposite direction.

Which is not the same thing as no correlation.

I'm sure it's vastly more complicated than just fat content, but the stuff I've seen indicated that one study of a vegetarian diet as post cardiac therapy explicitly set a goal of keeping fat content down to 10%. Prior to being put on a vegetarian diet, the typical diet of participants was much, much fattier. Participants were just blown away at being able to eat all they wanted for the first time in their lives and lose weight without even trying.

My personal experience: I dropped several dress sizes without intending to by completely ignoring both calories and fat percentage and focusing on consuming nutritionally dense foods to redress known nutrient deficiencies.

So I have absolutely no doubt that it's vastly more complicated. But I tend to get a lot of flak for talking about what I think about diet, the gut biome, medical stuff, etc. So I really wasn't looking to get into that.

I was only looking to add a little more information about such studies. The main takeaway as I understand it: they stopped being obese. There are people who eat meat who are not obese.
To my mind, the simplest and most straightforward way to combat any fraud is also beneficial because it gives you even more information about the candidate:

Talk to them about the code they wrote.

Have a conversation, as if they were already your co-worker, with the exercise as the subject. Go through it, ask them -- non-adversarially -- why they did X, what they thought about requirement 2, how they could get better test coverage for Z. If you see something that seems to be a mistake, talk about it. If you see something awesome, discuss it. I can't imagine someone incompetent being able to bullshit their way through detailed discussion of code they were supposed to have written.

And this provides valuable info about how this person thinks and communicates about the work you want them to do.
Of course it does - "I don't like the look of that guy". "Dodgy looking fellow". "He had an honest face". etc. The basic principle as a first-pass heuristic is tried and tested. Kneejerk reactions to this kind of tech always seem to completely ignore the question of whether it's actually effective.
Tesla seems to be working very hard to cultivate a really poor reputation.

They could find it more difficult to hire in the future. Maybe that doesn’t matter for assembly jobs but software engineers don’t grow on trees.
Why are we going through all this trouble to make something that in the best case is not worse than existing IDEs?

I can't help but feel that a visualization window + a cacheResult(data, fileName) function would be superior to what Jupyter can ever hope to be
Happened to me. I hired someone onto my team who did great during the interview. The questions weren't puzzles, but live coding sessions. He got all the way to the point at which he had written a semi-functional web server.

This guy couldn't deliver a single project and would spend days debugging issues before he asked for help and I or someone else on the team would solve it in a couple of hours or less. I have no idea why this happens, but I've seen it twice.
Your comment reminds me of a very recent hilarity in Austin: the city has set aside $100k to put up a 10 foot fence to prevent crime in a popular shady alleyway: https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/01/city-hopes-10-...

It has all the hallmarks of the things you bring up in your comment. Contractor was going to build it, but fire department demanded a special lock in case of emergency, screwdriver for a nail problem, etc.
Globalization 4.0 – what does it mean?
Plenty if you can cycle and get paid over $300k. If you had to, you could buy several walkable-to-work lots and join them into one big one in some cities. Or Uber literally everywhere.
What do you think of BitMitigate?
Are there any good resources for filing your own taxes?

I’ve always relied on family members and want to take a crack at it.
How often do you see 0/O ambiguity inn non-programming context?
> How do you know if you need frontend validation as opposed to the backend?

You _always_ need backend validation. Never trust the client. You can then layer on frontend validation where it's needed to make a better UX.
It makes perfect sense, but it's worth noting that there are plenty of safer exercises for beginners that will improve core and posterior chain. Think glutes bridges, dead bugs, planks, Pallof press, etc.

Some people jump straight to the big compounding lifts (because they are amazing for building strength) with no guidance from a trainer or much care for their form. You deadlift or squat heavy wrong and it's extremely easy to injure yourself or do more harm than good.
Basalt rebar looks pretty good. It's too new to be in wide use yet, and prices aren't lowered by wide use either. Non corroding, though.
The maker in the article must be an incredibly disciplined and smart person. I’m so impressed.

FWIW, I’m a software developer, and music is my biggest hobby. I bought a foot controller at one point to interact with Ableton, and while I had no specific goals in mind, it is not a walk in the park. I still haven’t figured out how to program a set to do something like “when I get to this part, automatically loop the last 4 bars of incoming audio track X for 16 bars, then play the next clip Y for 8 bars”. I think these are called clip triggers though and should be possible...
This was enjoyable:

The state is so flat that the off-the-shelf software produced a flatness value for it of 1. This value was, as they say, too good to be true, so we did a more complex analysis, and after many hours of programming work, we were able to estimate that Kansas’s flatness is approximately 0.9997. That degree of flatness might be described, mathematically, as “damn flat.”
Okay, then how about "pretend you're a human" as opposed to the lizard people who design and write computer software. Spin it however you like. You still have to make the distinction between techies and "the rest of us". Systems have been designed that do not make this distinction and assume the user will be able to figure everything out, the most notorious of which is Unix -- when unadorned with Apple treacle, arguably one of the most user-hostile systems in common use. Normies perceive Unix as being more arrogant than the systems which "condescend" to them. It seems to say "Oh, you don't belong to the super-secret cabal of users who know these arcane commands? Fuck you, then!"
Of course that happens, but you're taking a real risk in hiring someone who can't get through the interview. I'd rather miss out on a good hire than make a bad one. You only have so many ways to determine whether or not someone is competent.
Likewise with a "2018 performance bonus". If it's a "2018 performance bonus" you don't get to take it back because he is laid off (or even quits) in 2019.

I'm sure there is legalese behind the bonus that backs up Tesla's interpretation of both. More likely than not they would win in court too. But calling it something it isn't still strikes me as fraud.
Guessing you’re all life-insured and critical illness insured? If not, make it happen. Money certainly isn’t everything but it’s a great deal.
ha. i would have hung up. but then i’m pretty gruff.
This is what government debt looks like across the globe
There is an entire community of homeless who ride the all-night VTA buses across Silicon Valley.

VTA likes this because it artificially inflates their census.
Thanks for the explanation.

Re latexmk: so am I getting the development release on Arch? I get the 2018 version with texlive-core.
As a junior I’d much prefer a whiteboard where I just need strong CS fundamentals and reasoning to a work sample where there are 10+ different dimensions I could be judged on like style, maintainability, whether I used the latest language features, how I solved the problem ( use libraries or from stratch?) there are just way too may variables and potential bias in the judges VS did you correctly turn the problem in a DP algo.
That seems like a good idea, but does somewhat detract from the notion that once a candidate does the work-sample he is done with the technical part of the process.
Bullshit artists are honestly easy to spot. They are easy to trip up because they think they are good at fooling people. If they said all the right things, the questions were probably low quality. I would throw a zinger in to see if they can react to it. I honestly expect a candidate to say, "I am not familiar" or "I'm not sure I'd have to look that up" once during an interview.
How can you run a fire department and think you need or even have any use for a special key for every fence in the city, when you already have master bolt cutters.
Agreed. His recent Impact Theory interview [1] is worth watching, as is his free mini class. Some pretty incredible claims, but underneath the possible exaggerations, I believe there is enough substance to help people out.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM6WKeZ43s4
My uncle who named me passed at 39 of a heart attack. This resonates.
I think it's ok for big tech companies to do this (from their point of view) because they have an endless list of candidates and don't care too much if many good people are put off or fail. They will get good people through the sheer volume of people applying and these processes do get good people if you can afford false negatives.

I think the middle and smaller companies need to change their processes more. If they just copy what the large companies do without understanding they don't have the same ability to attract candidates and pay high salaries they will just lose good people that they actually really need.