skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They build everything in-house - software and hardware. You can read about it in detail in Musk's biography - https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future-ebo...
Hacker rank allows a company to set up a time limited programming challenge. The company gets back a score based on how many of the tests were passed and the code itself.

Maybe not a bad means of ensuring that “this should only take an hour of your time” really means that.

The flip side is that fast and good aren’t one in the same, but I don’t think there’s any perfect answers here.
This works, for some value of working, in structured corporate teams but good luck forcing open source developers to use a specific editor per project.
Matching a database of current PhD candidates among other things. This message just puts the registration on hold temporarily, and you will be able to register once manually verified
I've been doing some hobby signal processing in Ruby just for the challenge and checking the results with Octave. Ruby is such a nice language, it's a shame it doesn't have anything like Python's scientific libraries.
If you interested in Typescript, GraphQL, or React.js you might like my channel https://www.youtube.com/c/benawad97
> tested positive for synthetic testosterone and the female fertility drug clomifene

Neither appear to be illegal (although require prescription in most countries) and neither are performance enhancing.

What is the purpose of these rules in this case?
I agree with what you say as-is, but the other side of it is that the company might not be making optimal hiring decisions by doing this discrimination. A 22 year-old can choose to spend a full weekend on an interview task and do a great job, but once hired that doesn't mean they will actually work more hours (though they might). If we assume that once hired both the 20yo and the 40yo will work 40 hour weeks (i'm in europe), then it wouldn't be optimal to compare their take-homes evenly if the 20yo had spent way more time on it.

Anyway its complicated. Seems like on-site open-book 90 minute real-world problems would be a nice solution.
from https://leanin.org/book

In response to Sheryl’s 2010 TEDTalk on the ways women are held back—and the way we hold ourselves back—viewers around the world shared their own stories of struggle and success. This overwhelming response inspired Sheryl to write this book. In Lean In, she shares her personal stories, uses research to shine a light on gender differences, and offers practical advice to help women achieve their goals. The book challenges us to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what we can do, and serves as a rallying cry for us to work together to create a more equal world.

I guess that in a more equal world men and women can more equally act in a morally reprehensible way.
Picking a JavaScript Library
However other brands in China also obey the same law, that means you have to choose some brands that never have business in China, which excludes (Samsung, LG, Moto, ....)
What makes you think they'll be toxic and counterproductive? If, as you seem to think, whiteboarding is a test for this, then everyone should have whiteboarding tests where the good whiteboarders don't get a job.
I agree. System 4 shipped in 1987.
It also may be the last kicker needed for some to start moving to Node, Rust, Go, etc.
PHP, math or stats PhD. You can send an email to hsx at hessix dot com if you want an account
I couldn't disagree more. With modern tools like gofmt and Prettier for code formatting and Vagrant for dev VMs, it basically doesn't matter what environment anyone works in. Code style should always be enforced in an automated way, and running all your software in a VM means you don't need to install anything locally except for an editor and Git.

Edit: Obviously this doesn't apply if you do platform-specific work (like iOS development) or rely on tools that are only available on a single platform; in that case, you're probably right.
The whole bent against white board questions is that they are unrealistic as to actual working conditions and thus are artificial. So if you are a successful engineer, using your work time efficiently, and yet, you have family obligations that prevent you from spending enough time as someone else on a take home challenge, is the take home challenge showing realistic 'working conditions'? Or is it a measure of freetime?

>If that's the case, that's a fine, very reasonable trade-off you've made to prioritize your family over your work.

I'd advise that if you are ever involved in a hiring situation you never write that down. "I'm sorry my project wasn't done so well, [my baby, pregnancy, illness, religious service] took most of my weekend".

That is a prime example of age/gender/disability discrimination. You should never assume someone's out side of work life presumes an inability to do the job during work hours.
Maybe thoughtful kids aren't supposed to leave church after all.. maybe they just need to find a good church.
I've interviewed engineers on computer science problems on a whiteboard and those who did great turned out to do great on the actual job.

That's a one way implication. It is possible there are people who do poorly on coding interviews but great on the job.

Whiteboard coding is simply a quick test that has few false positives in my experience (around 40 interviews).
Convolution is a tool with many applications, so naming it for just one of those applications would make it harder to see its usefulness in the others
> Linux

Linux is not a OS, it's a kernel. You would also have to force all developers onto the same distribution.
https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.AP
https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.NT
https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.NA
https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.OC

etc..
You would of course, you can do the exact same questions on a whiteboard with a shared computer. In my experience of doing either, some people are better at one or the other, but the challenge is essentially the same.
Ok, that also fits my understanding of the market - I don’t receive all the applications, because our HR team is good at filtering. Unfortunately, German businesses are very strong in salary negotiations, so it’s a whole big thing to sell the idea of fair market compensation inside the company.
Not slicing is nevertheless slicing. The trivial selection. Rush's song "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice"
Where I come from, we call those people "assholes".
So, what, you'd rather hear some bullshit PR excuse about maximizing customer value or whatever?

Also, as a customer I do not mind thinking about a business' costs. In fact I want to know that a business is pricing a reasonable margin above costs and no more. I have way more respect for companies that don't see the need to mindlessly pad their profits. Not everyone is you.

(Not saying RS is being honest here but it is important to push back against this "pay no attention to what's going on behind the curtains" thinking)
Freeman Dyson is excellent. I'd say my favorite of his is Disturbing the Universe, technically a memoir but not so different from his essay collections.
Mongo was open source. They copied the api under that license.

My understanding, and I’m not a lawyer so don’t consider this legal advice, is that you can’t copy a commercial api or it’s infringing on their intellectual property.
The RAT is not an engine and doesn’t deploy unless all other engines have shutdown in flight, and it induces drag because it’s a kind of ‘wind turbine’ that drops into the airstream and generates electrical power (and maybe hydraulic pressure)
Well, we have made the experience that people that are not seriously considering to take the job are filtered out by a homework. It helps both to save a lot of time and energy interviewing people.
I like the idea, but why do software types seem to be so allergic to state machines?

State machines have well-defined semantics, can be visualized nicely, implemented in a straightforward manner, and tested against specification.

The only thing that I would point out to people is that "time" is an input to your state machine. That's single change makes most state machines deterministic in software.
This isn't true, because lining things up visually works differently with tabs than with spaces. (Although, personally, this is why I never visually align code like that, but that's the standard style in many organizations/languages.)
Open results on LGTM: The key to securing open source
Companies can, at least somewhat, figure out their false positive rate, but it’s very difficult to determine the false negative rate. Maybe someone like LinkedIn could do it depending on what their data collection agreement says (I’m betting it’s pretty permissive.)
what? no they don't.. This is completely dependent on where you live. In stockholm, absolutely the roads are kept clear first in many areas, as well as the rails with plow trains. Then they have plows for the sidewalks. In Ursvik it was certainly the case that they kept the roads clear first

Not to mention many kommun areas' snow are managed by its citizens (t.ex. the areas southwest of Farsta Strand). It's not uncommon that areas don't get plowed at all and people just chance driving it.

Blatant exaggeration of limited cases where this is true imo.
So, out of curiosity, was there one person responsible for SpaceX operating in this manner? Was it Musk, or someone else?

Unless they accomplished a miracle by building a world-class engineering team from zero, there must have been a catalyst.
Who has a better sense of humor–Liberals or conservatives? (2008)
there is a failed kickstarter from five years ago[1] which imagined an alternative to the traditional spreadsheet software. I imagine it would be fun to work on building such a thing, and I already know it would be more usable than Excel etc for many situations.

e.g. the company I work for give me a credit card to use to buy fuel for my car, with a soft limit (i.e. nothing technical to stop me spending more, but they may revoke this privilege if I abuse it), and there is an additional discount which is not displayed at the pump or on the receipt. I track how many litres I purchase, along with the pump price at the time, and currently use Excel for this. But it's not really designed to show me how many litres I can still spend before the end of the month, based on recent fuel prices etc. I believe such a solution could help with this, but the dev that had this idea only wrote a UWP app, nothing cross platform or super fleshed out...

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/395431036/threads-a-mod...
I do apologise. For a moment I thought I was talking to Alasdair. Having now checked your name properly, everything you wrote previously is seen in a new light and my post is the twaddle in this instance.

Agreed that things can always improve.
The Osborne Effect on the Auto Industry
I've used similar online coding challenges, even proctored ones. I've had very mixed results, and the challengers are typically nearly identical to ones put on whiteboards. They are often used instead of phone screens.
Yes, but are there any conceivable details that would have made it less silly? I read the headline alone and immediately it sent to a tournament bridge playing relative with a cautionary note. Perhaps the Guardian could have stooped to the click bait standard and I might have read a little more:

You won't believe what happened to this bridge player!
I love TransferWise. I live in Canada, and had 2k USD sitting in a Canadian bank account. I was going to convert it to CAD, but the bank's exchange rate is atrocious. So I opened a free US-based account with my bank's US division, transferred all my USDs there 1:1, then sent it through TransferWise to my Canadian account. A bit convoluted, but I saved close to $100 and it didn't take long to set up.
Check the bathrooms. The condition of actual working facilities will tell you more than you want to know about how a company treats its employees.
Good luck making the UI developers use the same tools as the autonomy and perception engineers.
Same thing happened to NASA, started at 43.6% success rate for 1950s then 85.1% for 1960s, etc. etc. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1659/what-is-the-s...
Moments Turned Memories
That's why I love languages with formatting tools like gofmt. There's no arguing about style, you just set it to format your code on each save.
I'm assuming that the value of these papers are self evident from the title if you understand the topic/context of the paper, much like HN with many of the white papers published here.
I have to disagree with your assessment of vehicle utilization. Maybe where you live cars are underutilized, but in my (poor) part of the country, vehicles get drove until they are scrap heaps, I don't see how you can expect more utilization out of a car that gets drove for 400,000 miles. Yeah sure, more passengers could help, but only if you were going to drive to the same location without them anyways, and only if the timing matches up. People do ride share to work if it is far enough away and we even have mini parking lots for that purpose, but unless you work at the same place or next door with the exact same schedule it would be an even bigger waste of time for poor individuals who are already constrained by time to slit it up even more. And it's not like a car rots away because you don't drive it 24/7 with full passengers either.
I agree that autoformatters are the only way to go. It is nice if your editor kind of gets it close, though, so it's less jarring when things move around after save.
Yes, Gentoo.
I ask most candidates to write code on a whiteboard in front of me and I’m not apologizing for it!

The problem is usually fairly easy and if the candidate cannot get to a “describe solution in words” milestone then I will guide them to one. After that I ask them to write code. I will also tell them “the code is the part I care about”.

The specific competency I am evaluating here is “can you turn thoughts into code”. I repeat that phrase in interview training so much I think people make fun of me for it.

Imagine I give you a python list with 100 elements and I ask you to write code that will find all instances of the number “5” and move them to the front of the list. I don’t care about performance.

You know you have to write a loop and whenever you see a 5, remove it and put it at the front. Easy. Not even really an “algorithm”. Some people can make code happen very easily and accurately. But some people really need to really think about it - what control flow to use, off by one errors, bounds issues - and make mistakes. Some people don’t see their own bugs. Some people do weird stuff that makes me think they haven’t seen a lot of code before.

I teach interviewers to evaluate the act of the writing as much as the end product, kind of like when airport security asks you “where did you stay in New York” and doesn’t really care about the answer so much as how shifty you look when answering it. It doesn’t mean you have to materialize perfect code on the board to pass - not even close! But this exercise provides information, and when other exercises corroborate that information we use it to make a hire/nohire decision.

Anyway, bottom line is whiteboard code is a completely reasonable technique to deploy in an interview setting and if you do this you shouldn’t feel bad about it. Much more depends on (a) whether the interviewer is trained and calibrated and (b) whether the company knows what it is even trying to evaluate than the question format.
Could you elaborate on the vision behind the "selection" criteria? Also, it would be best to clearly explain that in the Hessix user guide, in the spirit of communicating clearly with your audience :-)
happy to see that security is part of the evaluation :-)
Companies like you describe are the primary focus of Rackspace these days.
Beat me to it! LOL
>The lifestyle and working environment is generally considered acceptable if not exemplary.

Isn't Amazon known for having the worst lifestyle and working environment out of all FAANG? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
> I wonder if this guy is just on testosterone replacement therapy

More likely he was trying to have kids.
Fractional scaling has landed in GNOME 3.32 (and may make it into Ubuntu 19.04)
The vast majority of jobs I've worked at have required some flexibility in working off hours. Whether it was something that went down at off hours that needed to be addressed, or an unforeseen (and unforseeable) change in a business that required a last minute scramble, these things happen.

True, there may be some jobs that are truly 9-5, and if that's the case, so be it. But frankly, as someone who is willing to put more dedication into my work, it feels like complete discrimination against me if someone willing to do less work then demands the same level of compensation and advancement opportunities.
That ship has sailed, I’m afraid. Use AWS Lightsail for an equivalent and learn from the ground up.
It's easy to make the case that make is insufficient. There are three very distinct domains being conflated here:

1. The day to day experimentation and iteration by a computational researcher.
2. The repeated execution of a workflow on different data sets submitted by different people, such as in a clinical testing lab.
2. The ongoing processing of a stream of data by a deployed system, such as ongoing data processing for a platform like Facebook.

For (1), there is a crucial insight that is often missing: the unit of work for such people is not the program, but the execution. If you have a Makefile or a shell script or even a nicely source controlled program, you end up running small variations of it, with different parameters, and different input files. Very quickly you end up with hundreds of files, and no way of tracking what comes from which execution under what conditions. make doesn't help you with this. Workflow engines don't help you with this. I wrote a system some years ago when I was still in computational science to handle this situation (https://github.com/madhadron/bein), but I haven't updated it to Python 3, and I would like to use Python's reflection capabilities to capture the source code as well. It should probably be integrated with Jupyter at this point, too, but Jupyter was in its infancy when I did that.

For (2), there are systems like KNIME and Galaxy, and, crucially, they integrate with a LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) which is the really important part. The workflow is the same, but it's provenance, tracking, and access control of all steps of the work that matters in that setting.

For (3), what you really want is a company wide DAG where individuals can add their own nodes and which handles schema matching as nodes are upgraded, invalidation of downstream data when upstream data is invalidated, backfills when you add a new node or when an upstream node is invalidated, and all the other upkeep tasks required at scale. I have yet to see a system that does this seriously, but I also haven't been paying attention recently.

For none of these is chaining together functions with error handling and reporting the limiting factor. It's just the first one that a programmer sees when looking at one of these domains.
Except a recent gcc will refuse to compile that code because of a technicality.

Here's some modified code that runs on my machine if pasted directly into bash:

gcc -x c - <<EOF

#include <time.h> // Robert Nystrom
#include <stdio.h> // @munificentbob
#include <stdlib.h> // for Ginny
#define r return // 2008-2019
#define l(a, b, c, d) for (i y=a;y\
<b; y++) for (int x = c; x < d; x++)
typedef int i;const i H=40;const i W
=80;i m[40][80];i g(i x) {r rand()%x;}
void cave(i s){i w=g(10)+5;i h=g(6)+
3;i t=g(W-w-2)+1;i u=g(H-h-2)+1;l(u-
1,u+h+2,t-1, t+w+2)if(m[y
][x]=='.') r;i d=0;
i e,f; if(!s){l(u -1,u+h
+2,t-1 ,t+w+2){i s=x<t|| x>t+
w; i t=y<u|| y> u+h;
if(s ^t&& m[ y]
[x ]=='#' ){d++; if(g (d
) ==0) e=x,f=y; }}if (d
== 0)r; }l(u-1,u +h+2 ,t
-1 ,t+w +2){i s= x< t ||
x> t+w; i t= y<u ||y> u+
h; m[y] [x]= s &&t? '!'
:s^t ?'#' :'.'
;}if (d>0)m [f][
e]=g(2 )?'\'':'+';for(i j=0;j<(s?
1:g(6) +1);j++)m[g(h)+u][g(w)
+t]=s?'@' :g(4) ==0?
'$':65+g(62) ;}i main(i
argc, const char* argv[]) {srand((i)
time(NULL));l(0, H, 0,W)m[y][x]=' ';
for(i j=0;j<1000;j++)cave(j==0);l(0,
H,0,W) {i c=m[y][x]; putchar(c=='!'?
'#':c);if(x==W-1)printf("\n");}r 0;}

EOF

./a.out
Skiplagging: The travel trick that airlines hate
I fully agree it would be great if the masses would somehow absorb and process this information, but in this case I'd like to think the Guardian a very effective venue.

No politicians on a European level, especially female representatives, would want to be caught dead getting cosy with Facebook. Facebook lobbying efforts are effectively dead in the water for the EU for the moment.
TIS Internet Firewall Toolkit – An Overview (1993) [pdf]
Convolutions show up in a lot of places. Multiplying polynomials is a convolution. This provides an interesting technique to create all the partial sums of a sequence. If you have a generating function for the sequence, divide it by (1-x). You'll get a new generating function where the nth coefficient is the sum of the first n coefficients of the original function. Remember 1/(1-x)=1+x×x^2+... ?
Hah! I'm in a similar position. I have a really old machine at Rackspace ($20/mo) from about 2010 that's running websites for some family and friends. I could easily transition to a ~$5/mo VPS elsewhere but I really don't want to deal with the migration hurdles.
You should probably make it more clear on that page. If the email address is only required to verify current candidates, why is it required for all registrants?
Can’t have Bezos Prime intimdating others at the bridge table.
> The issue people take with biological essentialism is that it uses the plausibility of genetic/developmental differences driving sex differences to dismiss or outright deny the very obvious reality of coercive social forces that also definitely drive sex differences.

This is a huge strawman, and fallacies seem to be part of a lack of intellectual rigor from people who object to discussing biological differences.

Why not flip your point on its head: can you show me a model of discrimination that focuses purely on the social component, and shows that the results we see with, eg, the wage gap result purely from social components — or have a social component at all?

Because what I see is frequent dishonesty — discussing the “wage gap” but not “hours gap” or “risk gap”, for instance — and the denial of inherent biological differences has become dogma to people pushing false social statistics, because an analysis of those differences would show them to be liars.

It’s just gaslighting to demand a rigor from people advocating biological differences that’s never been shown by the cultural differences crowd — we have massive evidence of biological differences in evevery system of the body, including the brain; we have no quantitative models for how culture impacts outcomes. (Actually, we have a bit: it seems to be that more liberal countries express greater gender variation between jobs, because there’s less social pressure to accrue power, eg, fewer women go into programming in better off countries. This is what you’d expect, if there’s an underlying difference in biological preference.)

The objection to your position is that it’s an anti-scientific, anti-intellectual one that drives you to public dishonesty, such as the fallacies and double-standards made here.

It’s entirely political people don’t want to talk about this — sex based differences might imply the ratio of, eg, CEOs is skewed for the same reasons the ratios of top athletes are.
Tomorrow: Panel on Tech and Gov with White House EIRs
"The World Bridge Federation (WBF) is recognised by the International Olympic Committee and as such abides by World Anti-Doping Agency rules."
Previous analysis of CTBTO hydrophone data (augmented with IMOS, Australian SOSUS clone) back in 2014: https://www.nature.com/news/sound-clue-in-hunt-for-mh370-1.1...