skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As verbatim as I can remember our interaction:

Me: "I'm going to just put some user input checks here, no guarantees they'll actually input X or O, yea?"

Interviewer: "Oh, don't worry about that, assume for now that you'll get X on X's turn, O on O's turn."

Later:

Me: "Normally I'd extrapolate this to a function, so let me just - "

Interviewer: "For now, just focus on getting the program to response to the next user input."

Me: "Ok... well the fastest way to do that right now is just copy paste this code down here."

Interviewer: "That's fine."

But, it turns out, it was not fine.

I felt I was bamboozled.
> helped differentiate a modern dining concept — the restaurant — from the coarser table d’hôte, where your choices depended on whether the proprietor liked you...

And as is customary with fashion, the table d’hôte is now an exclusive, where it can be used to connote "freshness" (itself another concept called out in this lovely essay).
Using TypeTokens to retrieve generic parameters
I am sure that the fact that someone believes he is a "black token" is a problem, I am also sure that this could (almost) only happen in a place were there is quite some racism.

What I pointed out is that not all racism is the same; all of it is bad and all of it should stop, we agree on that, but as most human endeavour it is complex with complex motivation. If you and I want to stop it we should better think about how every situation can be different and how different type of racism require different solutions.

In my case above assuming incompetence and hiring minorities just to have better statistics are very different form of racism led by often different people, often with different motivation. If OP clarifies more I will trust that, but the wording itself was quite ambiguous to me

(also I have the impression some comments have moved around...)
I’d agree but on the condition interviewer actually know ehat they are doing.

As I gained more experience (300 interviews and counting, baby) I realized that I pick up more on candidates skills that are not directly related to their performance on particular question. At this point the question itself is just a conversation starter and so it’s better if it’s simpler and more broad because it leaves lots more avenues for the conversation to go.
Show HN: Vue-cloudfront – A self-hosted cloud-storage alternative
Sounds fair enough :) Agreed. I have just proposed one of the alternatives which i could imagine / think of from the top of my mind. The problem isn't solved yet - or rather solved well yet. We could always brainstorm on a better alternative. :)
Most workers in the US are under the "at will" regime: they can be let go at any time in theory. In practice, companies (especially big ones) usually try to "build a case" to justify the move.
A mathematics PhD is going to be in the far right tail of aptitude for a lot of relevant skills. This is the admittedly very rare case where altogether tiny differences in "inherent" ability will get amplified to the point where they actually start to matter - whatever "inherent" might mean, in the first place! Yup, crucially, even differences that are generally understood as "not inherent" can be so hard to address that they might as well be, for all we can do about them. If you ate too many lead paint flakes as a kid, the probability that you're going to be a successful math PhD drops quite a bit. And, short of tearing down and rebuilding a lot of homes that happen to have lead paint, lead pipes, etc. in them, we're unfortunately not going to be able to address this "inherent" unbalance for the foreseeable future.
Good article. I've long felt that people who accept climate change are surprisingly complacent about it.

I suspect the nature of the problem is poorly understood. A lot of the focus in north america is on personally reducing. This feels similar to not littering, not spraying pesticides on your lawn, in other words not polluting locally.

But CO2 isn't a local problem. It's global. Reducing use in one spot or making use in a given case doesn't necessarily work. There's always a use for more energy globally, so someone else with a lower standard of living will justifiably want to take up what you don't use. Meanwhile, if a process is made more efficient, this frees up energy to be used elsewhere in the system. Jevon's paradox plays a role here too.

Global emissions are up, not down. Greatly up. Everything we've done so far has accomplished precisely nothing on the global warming front. We are richer, more people are out of poverty. Because we optimized for that, and not for lower co2 production, globally.

The central issue is that co2 is cheaper than alternatives, in at least enough cases that it's still widely used. Solar etc are dropping in cost, but not so much that they've cut carbon.

A carbon tax would raise the price of co2 and encourage use of alternatives. This could be combined either with an international agreement in other countries to tax carbon, or a system of tariffs on countries that don't.

The system wouldn't be perfect, but it would actually stand a chance of having us switch to non carbon methods.
Panama Papers ‘tightened the noose’ on offshore assets of Maduro’s inner circle
I’m not worth as much as a race horse, but is it possible to get this done on a human (maybe in another country)?
I’m sure it works out well for you in that the candidates that pass can probably do the job. But, you basically have lost me by the time you’re asking for more than a 20 minute recruiter call, 60 minute phone screen, and a ~5 hour onsite.
"If a malicious party can control 35% of the stake, that is very bad."

That didn't happen in this case. The Chinese government never took anyone's keys or controlled any stake, which is the point of the example.

The malicious parties don't need control. They don't need to take anyone's keys or access their servers. They just need to be able to bring it offline, which is much easier to do.

Which raises the question I asked and you didn't answer: if 35% of the stake goes offline with no signs of coming back, how do participants reach consensus?
It's not as productive. Anyone can create a REST API in any language in a few minutes, that's the easy part.

Building a complex app is different though and much easier and faster in a proper environment that has strong typing, OOP, interfaces, reflection, dependency injection, a solid standard library, and more. Being able to use that same environment to create frontend views and code will greatly improve productivity compared to the current Javascript frameworks and limitations.
> Not knowing when to use a hash table instead of a nested-for loop

On the flip side, the O(1) look-up nature of hash tables make them the no-brainer data structure to use, at least for passing programming interviews. Perhaps more interesting test questions would be when not to use hash tables.
Although I agree with the base of your point, I think it is worth noting that there are likely plenty of folks underneath him with the knowledge to sway policies and implement them. In other words, a department can still be functional and even successful if their boss listens and applies the ideas offered.
I just don't think 'my prejudices are actually true' is the conclusion to draw from 'tokenism exists', that is all.
They have kids. Developing a sentient being is a higher priority and more difficult than developing React Redux.
Oh come on. Bitcoin uses the same amount of energy that the country of Iraq [1] uses, home to 38 million people.

Bitcoin has about 500k active bitcoin addresses [2], most of which contain less than $100 [3].

So what are we actually getting for all this energy usage, and couldn't we get that same result for a fraction of the energy usage?

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[2] https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

[3] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-activeaddresses...
Also by definition, judgement biases underlying racism are common across people. There's no more racism in whites or republicans, rationalization is different. Splitting the world in racist and no racist is simplistic and poor argumentation.
No it couldn't.

A majority of hashing power attempting to change monetary policy spins off a forked coin which does not have economic value because it does not have economic users.

If the overwhelming majority of bitcoin users (98%+) wished to do so, they could possibly change the monetary policy. Of course this will never happen, because there are die-hards like myself who will always stick with the non-inflationary bitcoin.

And then, the market decides whether to stick with the non-inflationary coin, or to use an inflationary one.

The worst that a majority of miners could do the the non-inflationary bitcoin is temporary denial of service, or attempted double spending of their own money. It's going to cost them an awful lot in electricity to try either, and they're not going to get that money back unless they're generating coins that are in demand to buy.
I'd bet that sample efficiency is a factor in translating they most hyped bits of RL into solving IRL problems. So many business problems translate to "Learn which of these things to do, as quickly and cheaply as possible."
"It could also sew some bitterness within the engineering team: it might be seen as unfair that some people can get hired through the nepotistic route, while others have to do the tech loop."

More importantly, it will reinforce your organization's demographics. If your trusted referrers are white and male, their networks will be overwhelmingly white and male and it's just putting up another block toward those not already in the system. If that happens in one company, it's likely not a big deal. If it happens systemically, you'll see a bigger problem.

(People build networks in college, with people of the same demographics -> people use those networks to get people in with a lower bar of entry while those without the benefit of the network will face a barrier that the people that were hired might not have been able to clear.)

The problem is that we don't have a better solution to the technical interview.
Fastify and Preact for quick web app prototyping
The major ones seem to be Outco and Interview Kickstart. But agreed, there's far fewer whiteboarding/interview process-specific bootcamps compared to web/mobile bootcamps.
HTML is not a programming language, it's a markup language. And SQL is Turing complete.
Just want to add that historical British society has a pretty amazing, filigreed culture of bigotry that has clearly been perfected through centuries of refinement. I didn't know this until I had a product management job where I had to work directly with a decent-sized direct sales team, and we had an upper-class and a lower-class person on that account team. The British take things beyond skin color, or even the old 1900s notion of whether the Italians are "truly" white --- they've got their hierarchy of parentage calibrated down to the county.
It's not residential scale.
People from some demographics are less likely to have the option to spend all their time grinding. Spending all your time grinding means that you don't need to work toward supporting yourself or others.
Well, kids, family obligations and any other non-work related stressors that zap your free time.
Bitcoin is a terrible way to use energy. It's deliberately inefficient, and it's a constant arms race to become even more inefficient. You're literally killing the planet to enable...what? Tax evasion? Selling drugs and child porn?

It's a moral and ecological atrocity. I agree that capping and/or taxing carbon emissions is the right policy approach, but I would seriously question the values of any humans who then decided to spend our limited carbon budget on something like bitcoin.
I didn’t interview with Facebook or Google either, both because I didn’t want to grind leetcode, and because those companies are pure evil.
How to Organize Your Messy Albums on Photos on MacOS with Some SQL
Sounds like a neat segment for Triplebyte to move to- or for a competitor to capitalize upon.
It is not irrelevant. Crypto mining provides a very nice energy sink for inconsistent renewables to put their energy into, when that energy would have gone completely to waste.

It is a subside to renewables, where they can make money on energy that would have been thrown away. It allows better managements of the peaks and troughs that commonly plague reneweable energy sources.
'...an ecologist who works on insects: this study simply does not show evidence that global insect declines are happening, nor does it provide evidence that insects will be extinct in 100 years... but it is a wakeup call.'
Incredible as it may seem, I've actually seen that asserted. Years ago when I was a kid, before we had internet, my family would get a lot of magazines. Whoever picked up the mail, usually whoever came home most recently after it was delivered, would flip through every magazine and tear out all the advertisements and throw them in the trash before putting the magazine on the counter for the family to read. I wonder, was that 'theft'? We also used to change the channel or mute the television/radio whenever advertisements came on. Was that 'theft'?

Usually people who call adblocking theft start squirming when these pre-digital examples of ad avoidance are put to them.
People who have other responsibilities have less time to grind - and those other responsibilities fall more heavily to under-represented folks. Consider things like taking care of children (including siblings), elder parents, and other household work.
This is dangerous because it will just create a shadow workforce of contractors without any health benefits or rights as an employee. We already have this issue in tech.

Many companies are "contract to hire" but never hire and keep contractors on as long term employees.
That's the problem with autarky. It sounds really awesome: we make everything we use! The problem is that what it really means is that we're not free to choose the best available, but rather must use the best we make.
There is simply no comparison. The banking system is many many, many orders of magnitude more efficient and to suggest otherwise is frustratingly disingenuous.
Well, if you'd care to let us measure the bumps on your head, I'm pretty sure we could now come up with an equally moronic theory about related misshapen heads with a predisposition for making irrational, racist comments on the web.
I love Matrix and I am planning on running a home server of my own and integrate it with all the different chat services I use.

Last time I checked there was the Matrix reference implementation and Riot. Today, there's a bunch of gorgeous Matrix clients that I can see people actually use. Alternative clients like Fractal and Nheko can make or break the ecosystem and I'm glad to see continuous improvement in that area.

It's especially nice to see the cross-signing proposal approved, as trying out just a few Matrix clients over time has added 9 separate keys I need to approve to my account already. Stuff like this will make it easy to switch phones/desktops/apps and will be wonderful for public uptake.
Transferwise does £ to pesos. Fees for £1000, £11.88. Rate 50.06 vs google saying the market rate is 50.07.

By the way if you are buying BTC, Kraken is much cheaper than 2% (more like 0.2%) and I think they take GBP.

It does sound like the banks are iffy.
In some parts of the US, you get your window broken when you leave your car locked. Unlocked, your stuff just gets ruffled because you know not to keep anything worth money in the vehicle.
But they are not supposed to be boring? At least to me they never are, it's just that they are rarely high on my list of important (or fun) things to do on my self-improvement time.
You understand that the perception that you're looking at someone's skin color or facial features, making a prediction as to whether they ingested lead paint as a child, and then acting accordingly is going to be problematic, right?
I don't know. I've seen people do some crazy things with pure CSS that look quite a bit like programming.
TaxJar sounds insane. So after I go through up to 4 weeks of poorly paid work (while working my existing full-time job and raising a family), I get to participate in their hazing rituals!

https://life.taxjar.com/taxjar-traditions/
I don't think you need to be over 50 to realize there's more to life. Some demographics are less likely to live to work v. working to live. Some demographics may not have time to juggle interview grinding with other responsibilities (children, existing job(s), etc.)
Hire HN: Remote – Partner-Senior Software Engineer at Invisible Technologies
Do you know why? Were they just confirming that you hadn't wriggled & they got the right spot?
That depends on what you do with the trash.

If you burn it for heat and electricity, this is actually an excellent use for it. As long as your region has oil- or coal-powered plants, burning plastic waste means that you got more use out of the oil than if you had burned it directly.

You are absolutely correct in that recycling is an unquestioned good, everyone "knows" you should recycle, but noone thinks about what it means and what actually happens with the stuff that gets recycled, or how it is recycled, or if it makes economic or environmental sense to recycle a material.

In Sweden, which doesn't really have landfills, and where recycling is also elevated to some kind of saintly status, there was an article published by some environmental agency a couple of decades ago which challenged this. They basically got labeled heretics, but the points they made were actually good:

1) Aluminium should absolutely be recycled, the energy costs of converting bauxite into aluminium are astronomical, compared to recycling used aluminium containers.

2) Glass should be recycled for the same reasons, it's cheaper and easier to do than to make new ones.

3) Newspaper, cardboard, and similar low-plastic paper products should be recycled, you can easily make new newspaper or cardboard out of it, saves you some trees.

4) The rest - fuck it - burn it all. Recycling plastic is hard, you can't turn it into high-value plastic products such as clear plastic packaging, you can only make low-value plastic products, and then you might as well burn it, and offset your oil-powered plants.
This is sadly true, but even more true for PMs, the average engineering skill required to be inside the organization went down. When Eric Schmidt was selected as the CEO, having a strong engineering background was a requirement for him, and he was great at connecting with engineers inside the organization (probably not that great with connecting with sales, they had to accept that Google was an engineering driven organization in the past, now it's a mix).
Agreed. I'd much rather not advertise for anyone/company, and especially not throwing sticky residue all over my expensive laptop.
I think it's wrong to narrowly conceive of interview questions as a test of "natural aptitude", as though we're just trying to measure the CPU specs of the candidate's brain. I've done really well in coding interviews by taking a few weeks to practice when I start looking for new jobs. I spend a few hours a night studying, put up a whiteboard in my house, and then interview for a dozen low-priority jobs to get really comfortable before going after the big guns. This has resulted in a near-perfect success rate in the application -> offer funnel. At the beginning of the process the idea of interviewing is anxiety-inducing. By the end, I'm completely in my element, it's fun and rewarding and I often blow the interviewers' minds.

Now, hearing this story might piss you off if you think interviews are supposed to be measuring "natural aptitude" for software engineering. I posit that there is no such thing. The personal characteristics that actually exist are commitment and determination. And you need to be decent at communicating in English and a programming language or two. These characteristics that make someone succeed at interviews will also make them succeed at work. You need core knowledge about how to code, the ability to play well with others, and the willingness to apply yourself, to condition your brain to succeed at the task at hand. If you can do these things, making software is a piece of cake.

In short, if you're too afraid of adversity to get good at interviewing, how well can you fare in the jungle that is a software company?
Lately noticing 3 big agendas being pushed in a more obviously biased way than I've ever seen before:

1. Look at how evil the tech majors are.

2. Save American institutions from Trump (worst offender was the lockstep outcry about troop withdrawals).

3. Look at how evil China is.
It's not a subsidy to renewables. Bitcoin miners don't give two shits about whether their energy is green or not.

You want to help level out peaks and troughs of electricty production: Improve battery technology, don't just waste the energy generating sha256 over and over.
I shared a pattern. The problem is, the reversal of motives (Are you writing the test to demonstrate ability or fooling the system to move ahead or virtue signal ?) and the inconsequential nature of the test once there are "cracks" available. In our country, we have very competitive examinations conducted every year, and people have cracked it with high national level ranks without much understanding of the subject - thanks to tutoring institutes that spawned as a sub field to coach these people.

I have also known a couple of people who aren't that smart ( when you talk to them in person ) but who wear badges of honor about their SAT scores etc.
One reason is that, as as society, we've agreed that we value (and want to reward) hard work over god-given talent.

So, if there is a prestigious position available, we would rather award it to someone who is slightly less capable but had to work much harder to get where he/she is.

This value structure arguably hurts productivity, but it's not inferior in an absolute sense. It all depends on what we value.
Oh yeahhhh! Also, play Doom 2 ASAP! iddqd ftw.
I have no idea where you're trying to take this. I'm saying that it's not productive to argue over the subtext of a hypothetical conversation neither of us are a party to. At some point your argument is going to have to boil down to "no, that person relating that story is not being fully truthful". Ok, that's a coherent argument, but not one I'm interested in having with you.
At a previous company we interviewed by giving the candidate a choice of a dozen or so problems. All of medium-ish difficulty. Then we together sat at a pairing station and paired on the problem for 2 hours. Candidate can use the internet and anything they want really, as close to real coding as we could make it. Two hours was enough to get into the problem a bit, and get a feel for what they would be like to work with and a feel for how they approach problems. Still not perfect, but by far the best interviewing method I've found.
What’s frustrating to me is that we haven’t found a way to teach programming that doesn’t rely on natural aptitude.

It’s really a travesty that we can’t teach it the same way that we teach maths or natural languages.

The end result is we’re left trying to divine whether someone is the programming equivalent of being illiterate. As with illiteracy people find ways to fake it.
I recently purchased an 5d mk iii and installed magic lantern on it. The 14bit raw video is AMAZING. Also, this particular camera can now record at, I think the limit is 3.5k vs 1080p from the factory.

https://youtu.be/6yKbwXYmpD0
Financial Cryptography 2019
Seems like another option is to generate points inside a bounding square and throw them away if they are outside of the circle.
Challenges for Scaling DevOps
Most companies won’t allow such a thing, especially if the other company is a competitor. In any case, doing so would likely require me to take 1-4 weeks off from my regular job. Again, why would I want to blow all my vacation time working, just for the possibility of another job?