skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A false dichotomy.

Managing complexity is a valuable skill that should also be screened for at interview. At most top companies you are there for at least 4-5 hours so there should be plenty of time to evaluate that skill.

I think whiteboard questions are good, I want to know that this person is capable of writing difficult code if we need them to.

I also think we probably ask too many of them.

I have been on the hiring side and my experience so far has been that almost always the feedback is close to identical across multiple whiteboard questions. The questions are also so abstract that asking multiple to "prevent bias" seems ineffectual. What bias could there be, you either solve the problem or you don't. Bias is more likely to come in on the behavioral interviews. There should be multiple of those for sure.

Generally someone is either a good enough coder or not and they will display that consistently across all the interviews. You will see the same stuff throughout (good or bad variable naming, good or bad communication etc) thus asking > 1 coding question by default is a waste of everyone's time.
Good software is reusable. I can import functions from 1,000,000 different npm modules all into my project and they don't fuck with each other, right?

Let's say you wanted to pull in a button from Bootstrap for one part of your page, a button from Material UI elsewhere, a button from Semantic UI elsewhere, etc.

These things are made to be reusable right?

What are the chances you can do that without issues? Do you think any of their style rules/selectors would clobber each other? What about the base/assumed CSS that they all most likely require? What about components more complicated than a button? Without actually trying it, how much confidence do you have in your guess, vs. your assumptions about importing other things (like functions from npm modules)?

Good software is reusable without worry.
I was intentionally equating them to emphasize the problem. If you're not educated to discern the difference between traditional education and advertisement, then there is no practical difference.

Coca-Cola (and advertisements for it) is more widely available than basic education. I personally think this is unethical on part of the advertiser, doubly so when you're selling something that's both unhealthy and somewhat addicting. There are populations in the world who can't read, but can recognize the Coca-Cola logo.
I ask what they've built, and how it was done.

This shows you way more than what a technical question can answer.

There are edge cases to this. Expertise positions specifically.
OK, right. You are totally right, I under explained.
Even thought _theoretically_ Argentina is part of SWIFT, it's not being activelly used. I.e., bank accounts do not get assigned a number in the SWIFT system, thus making it impossible to receive an international transfers.

The banks where I checked where #52, #55 and #77

All in all, I received the same information in all 3, even thought they all have a SWIFT code assigned (So that probably mean they don't even have a registered account for the bank).

Here's a page from a rather large bank, where the process is exposed:

http://comex.bancogalicia.com/optimice-su-operatoria/bancos-...

It's in spanish, but if you click in either "Dólares" or "Euros" you get some bank icons below (3 in "dólares", 2 in "euros") with the details of the bank accounts where you could send the money. For any other currency, you have to call to get the instructions.

Can't get any more clearer.
> What specifically do you think is the reason black people should not be expected to achieve demographic parity in academic math?

I don't expect demographic parity in anything.

> And how does that relate to “blank slate-ism”?

You only expect demographic parity in everything if you think genetics doesn't play a role in what type of careers people choose.

> You seem to be implying that there is some inherent characteristic of black people that prevents them from attaining equal representation in math academia.

Well, for one, it looks like Black students choose Math as a major significantly less often than Asian students do. Blacks having some genetic predisposition to prefer other subjects seems like a pretty decent hypothesis.
I have been doing this for years, my favorite tool is Monodraw [1].

It’s unfortunate they decided to discontinue its development [2].

[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com/

[2] https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/
Until the 51% attack problem is "solved" I can't take any cryptocurrency for serious. You can't use the word "secure" with this attack vector being possible.
The only way I would consider paying for a course like this is if, upon successfully completing it, I would not have to do the technical portion of the interview at companies I applied to. They would accept this cert and just do the soft skills interview.
Yes I really dont know much about Roman history. Thanks for the suggestion.
I read what you linked. No, he is not "openly contemptuous of the academics who do research in his field, while wildly mistepresenting their work" (at least not in the linked article). It would be more fair to say that he doesn't think that, in the real world, types will carry enough weight to deserve the emphasis that they are given.
The article makes a bold and simplistic claim but in reality the economic transition happened for many more reasons that are undoubtedly complex. Overall it is an interesting article but be careful on basing too much analysis on it!
Well, as one other commenter mentioned, with regard to Bitcoin miners have essentially become a centralized authority, and their decisions on block-size have made Bitcoin less liquid, and less useful as a currency while making transactions more profitable to them.

Another example would be exchanges: a vast majority of people do not use cryptocurrency in a peer-to-peer fashion, but instead go through a small number of centralized exchanges, which have been known to freeze withdrawals, have been riddled with theft, fraud, and a playback of all the financial schemes dreamed up in the last few centuries which have not yet been regulated against in cryptocurrency (pump and dump, Tether etc.).

On top of that, the crypto media sphere seems to be completely unreliable: I've seen many headlines which are deliberately misleading with the intent of stoking a one-sided, glowing narrative about cryptocurrency (I.e. a crypto startup opens their account at Chase bank and the headline reads: "X Coin Begins Partnership with J.P. Morgan Chase", and related online
communities are heavily moderated to support the official viewpoint while silencing others.

Long story short, when I bought a little bit of Bitcoin to play with a few years ago, I could buy a coffee with it, and I could even make purchases with it on Amazon. Since then it's gotten much less useful to the average user.
I still wouldn’t do it. Why should I, when I can do the entire interview process with another company with only a day’s worth of time expenditure on my end? If the task itself takes more than an hour or so, I can get to an onsite interview with far less effort than that by doing a recruiter chat and a phone screen.
Why I don't write CSS in JavaScript:

people disable it
The thing is that you don't get "out of memory errors" you get the kernel to almost randomly choose a process and sacrifice it in order to free ram.

If the chosen process is a database... That's not funny. At all.

Edit: you could adjust the oom score to avoid Linux killing important process, but I don't want to discover if Linux is actually going to follow the oom score or just "keep it in mind" when choosing a process to sacrifice.
No, you're falsely projecting your own concerns about your interlocutors onto me. It doesn't follow from "sharply disparate outcomes suggest unfairness" that I must be a "blank-slate" purist. And, in fact, your response suggests you're the one with the extremist take: that disparate outcomes are most likely the result of fair processes running on unequal inputs. Approximately nobody on HN believes processes in general to be fair (see: any thread about which companies VCs choose to fund, or about the impact of lobbying on government decisions).

I conceded something about the point you made --- that disparate outcomes are not dispositive of structural unfairness --- and you responded to that concession by trying to caricature me. In this exchange, you have not come across as someone trying to discuss a complicated issue in good faith. Try again.
This is basically already the case. If you aren't experiencing it, you're a Ringo. Edit: or you work with a ton of Ringos.
Except for people over 50 who have probably realized there is more to life, why would some demographics be willing to grind less than others?

Edit: By "over 50," I mean age demographics in general, which is the main thing that raises your family obligations. The only demographic division that I can think of that would reduce someone's willingness to abandon their personal life would be age.
> When you need to execute arbitrary programs, not being TC buys you a lot of guarantees that can be useful.

Please, elaborate! What are these useful guarantees? Can you name some?

> Did you even read the link?

I think so... the first sentence says you don’t need an extension. The linked Mandelbrot set example is “SQL:2008 conformant” and depends on “nothing”. https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set Is that using an extension?

> By the way Turing machine doesn’t involve human interaction, so all your examples that involve interactivity (UI loops) are outside of scope of this discussion.

Okay, so Turing completeness doesn’t apply to GIMP or Animstack at all, right? That’s what I was trying to suggest before. ;) Your own stated reason for removing TC from Animstack was UI.

Who says human input doesn’t apply? Alan Turing didn’t say that. Wikipedia says that interaction does apply: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine#Interaction “In principle, it is possible to model this [interaction] by having an external agent read from the tape and write to it at the same time as a Turing machine...”

> The fact that the entire stack is TC is not a proof that TC is needed

No, it’s just proof that TC languages are common and useful, and that not many practitioners would agree that TC is a “bad thing”.

> Indeed, some of the components of the web stack, namely CSS, are not TC

So? What does it prove if a few parts are non TC, when so many of them are?

CSS is for styling, not for writing programs, unlike Animstack and sed and the other examples you’ve been using. It tends to undermine your points a little bit to hold up CSS as an example of a non-TC language. I wouldn’t want to use CSS to compute things, so I don’t care if it’s Turing complete or not. For that matter, I don’t care whether any language is Turing complete, as long as I can get my work done easily, why should I?

> no, please don’t look it up on the web

Okay, I won’t. Just kidding, here’s the answer, not just a claim, but an implementation of Turing Completeness. So what’s clearly wrong about it? https://stackoverflow.com/a/5239256

To be honest, I don’t care what’s wrong with it. Or with sed or any other language. Not in purist academic theory. I wanted to hear if there are practical reasons to care, but since you won’t answer and I haven’t heard any, then I don’t care.
Diary of a WebObjects Developer (1998)
Go to tradeshows or conventions. They are the biggest concentration of business owners anywhere.
The thing with prejudice is nobody will ever admit to being prejudiced. All you can do is piece it together. Sometimes your working hypothesis is that it's just noise, other times it's prejudice.

I brought in a woman to work on a project once, and it was awful.

Despite her doing objectively better work than what was available before, my partners decided everything she did needed criticism. Never anything substantial, just pretend criticism meant to look like they knew what they were talking about. And one of them wanted veto on all the work, despite knowing very little about it.

They questioned whether she'd have been on the project if she didn't know me, which is pretty out there given she did this for a living for some very well known firms.

Then they called her something offensive in front of her, and when I called them out on it, they pretended it was a joke intended to make her feel like part of the team.

Can you ever conclude what people's true motivations are? Not really. Could someone genuinely have felt that some person's work was substandard, they didn't get the job legitimately, and could they screw up some office banter? Sure.

It took me a long time to think this through, but in the end it misogyny seemed to be the only answer. We'd worked with plenty of incompetents before without saying much, and hired plenty of people (all guys) through the friends network. We'd never had anyone get bullied like that in the office, though.

Story got a whole lot worse later, but that's for another time.
I found Thums Up to be foul. Maaza (the mango juice) was my jam though!
I'm aware and agree, and it also – even if less so than other solutions like Styled Components – counts as CSS-in-JS. So welcome to enjoying CSS-in-JS :)
Sounds like Microsoft in the 90's https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_...
On 2. the consequences can be real, as in the article linked below where people keep accusing a couple of stealing their phones. I believe in that case their house was located at the centroid of a zipcode and whatever tool was used to map it simply put a pin at the centroid. This suggests that just lowering accuracy is not sufficient to protect innocent parties if that lowered accuracy isn't reflected in the visualization, and an approach like highlighting a region is probably a better way to go than giving a precise but inaccurate location.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/26...
Want to learn math but come from a poor neighborhood? Good luck. You’re probably locked in a school system with bad teachers and few if any math courses beyond calculus.

I've read and listened to a number of accounts about how peers in poor neighborhoods are the biggest barrier to academic achievement.

Even if you’re talented you probably know 0 people that can help you. Now your growth is prematurely stunted.

Or worse, your peers punish you for your ability. In my personal experience, they can even tell you that you are sexually inadequate and somehow less essentially human. This feedback is all the worse, because it is genuinely believed by the one giving it.

That kid from a better off family that shows talent in math? Probably get recognized for it from an early age and gets tutors and advanced training. Probably already completed proof based courses in analysis, algebra by the time they completed high school. They get into better schools and have ahead start. Even if they are just as talented as you the poor kid.

There are cultural contexts where children form groups and help each other and offer moral support. Such social interaction seems to be attached to high performance in just about every human endeavor where skill and knowledge are important. One study found that Asian kids were very good at forming such peer groups to study math, and that African American children were much more prone to studying alone. Asian cultures are noteworthy, in that academic achievement is prized even by the poorer segments of society, though I've also known African Americans who are from families with such a subculture which prizes knowledge and academic achievement.
What do you believe about the "51% attack problem"? It's a very overblown concept.
I don't see how affirmative action makes sense. I can understand spending more resources to catch people up from poor backgrounds, so that they can pass the bar, but I don't see why you would want to lower the bar.
Why .fm? I instantly felt confident this was internet radio related.
This is good to know, typically it should be in concurrent with the existing employment. If we plan to switch companies, we commit time apart from existing office work for interview prep anyway. This interview prep time is what we would end up
committing to work on their tasks etc. I think working on a project or task from the prospective employer would be much fun than preparing / memorizing interview questions etc. What do you think ?
Ah, I guess I just assumed it was implied at this point. People in the space consider it pretty important, I think, and it's well understood as one of the principal motivations for the switch to proof of stake.
I don't understand. Making money is the goal of a company. People start company to get rich.

> Become an SV software engineer or a wallstreet banker

I don't know what a "SV" software engineer (non english native, sorry if it's obvious). I m a Web developer from Belgium and I make just a little more money than a factory worker.
It's not the US here...
You realize people do that with fiat money too, right?
Justice Clarence Thomas would disagree.

https://www.newsweek.com/lithwick-what-clarence-thomas-and-p...
Thanks for the compliment. In my mind the biggest advantage was - and reason for building it - was to help me take a Day 1 approach to life. That every moment is the youngest you'll ever be. Not quite so apparent when all the days of the year are projected on a flat surface and arranged in rows.
To be fair, you don't really need that. I did software consulting without any insurance for almost 20 years. At one point, I had a client who required it as terms of a subcontract, so I had to get it.
why? I don't mind being downvoted, and I enjoy reading the responses. Is it infringing on peoples' safe spaces?
I cannot believe you got downvoted into grey text already despite how obviously terrible this person's comparison is. Not to mention the insinuation that the experience of racism may just be the spotlight effect. Literally the most general and ubiquitous claim you see made whenever topics around racial experience come up.
Broadly speaking, that used to be how design patterns were often treated in interviews. Could you recognise, describe, code, discuss pros, cons and applicability for pattern X in given circumstance. Pretty easy stuff to cram unfortunately, which may be why they may have fallen out of favour in recent times as proxy measure for brains, but depending on the role in question that sort of material was often more likely to be useful in the job than a similarly broad knowledge of algorithms
Not a great way to increase diversity, and totally incompatible with referral bonuses.

A hidden cost here would also be exposing perceived statuses (eg an engineer who isn't as well respected would have their recommendations denied).
The cinnamon pop-tarts are good, kind of like sugar pie. The rest are unsatisfying.
No, they wouldn’t — they would just yell the same words louder and keep moving the goalposts so their side could “win”. I could respond with all the differences between the US and Israel borders, or point out that the US government runs two very large single payer health plans already, but that’s not what happens. An actual discussion like that is exactly what democracy needs but seems impossible to have right now.
I feel like your comment is disingenuous. He's saying that we all feel slighted, and perhaps cases where minorities feel slighted, is just that.

A case mentioned from the article that gave me this vibe:

> “A couple of them were at a board writing something,” he recalled. “I went over and asked, ‘What are you guys working on?’”

> “We’re too far in to catch you up,” he said he was told.

I know personally, I used to feel very "in tune" to how people perceived me. I read a book on body language when I was younger, and would constantly analyze how people moved ("head tilted, they think this is interesting", "arms crossed, they're defensive"), etc. It went further than that - analyzing language etc.

But, there were some cases were I was certain someone was being an asshole to me - but I learned I was wrong. Now I'm much more restrictive in how I pass judgement on someone.

I hope others give me that benefit, because I constantly find myself thinking of how something I said in conversation could be misunderstood, etc. Communication is hard.
These aren't hobbies. Number theorists and topologists have minds that work in profoundly different ways. Talented 12-year-olds will like some kinds of problems much more than others. I think a great outreach goal would be to get them rooting for one team or the other -- to give them an identity within mathematics, in other words.

I'm not suggesting we can eliminate all other subcultures at the stoke of a pen. But do think they can grow or die in strength as a result of our actions.

I have more sympathy for the seeing-someone-like-yourself argument when talking about aspiring pop stars (or politicians) who need to imagine themselves being on TV. But I'm dubious for mathematicians, most of whom apply to grad school because they still like solving problems, not because they imagine themselves in a job.
I mean, this is literally how any kind of industry with a test develops.

Do you think the MCATs or the Bar exam are flawed because they have books on how to do well?

Whenever there is any kind of standardization for testing, some ecosystem will evolve around it.
I don't see a "good reason" in your comment.
goto is fine but anything that uses setjmp or longjmp for error handling is absolute garbage code
The difference is that if you're a trusted referrer and you start referring people who suck, you could easily lose that status.
Can anyone here provide an intuitive explanation for why you'd prefer NMF over SVD or Truncated SVD? It seems to be simply another way of accomplishing something very similar, but with this non-negativity constraint. But it's not obvious to me why that would be useful, or produce a better factorization. Can anyone shed any light on that?

My sense from reading about it and understanding what's going on to the extent that I do, is that it's simply an alternative factorization. And there's no real reason to prefer one to the other, but since they are similar but non-equivalent you can try both and see which one works better.
Is it just me or does there seem to be a mainstream media narrative trying to stoke the fires of nationalism against China with Huawei being the current lightning rod?
Yes. I was required to do it at work, and it's fairly seamless to set up.
You understand that there are many coherent rational arguments in favor of affirmative action, and that what you're really having is a disagreement over some pretty complicated premises that are unlikely to be disposed of in short, pithy comments, right? I try hard to listen to conservatives despite being a liberal and have learned to dial my hackles down in conversations about race-based affirmative action because, while I disagree with conservatives on that point, I'm not going to get anywhere by claiming that the fairness and practicality of affirmative action is a received truth. You're going to have to do the same thing with your opposition to affirmative action.
No, again, this is your racism. What you are saying is that certain demographics are underrepresented because they have lesser abilities, while you discount a universe of other factors.

The fact that you reach for "genetics" first and foremost is exactly equivalent to racism.
Memory allocators use memory for two reasons: to dole it out to application, and to keep track of what memory is used and what is free.

From the pictures, I thought merging only merged the first, but rereading, I guess the former is stored in the same blocks as the latter. They still need to make sure that multi-threaded access through different virtual pages works, but that seems doable, too.
Exactly. As I said before, in a world where both Google and Knuth exist, they aren't hiring me to be a algorithm reference book.
Hahaha is this the one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4VHUXV77hA

Will add to feature list asap.
Firmware perhaps?