skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of the places I've worked at had me do a coding challenge. Either they already knew who I was through networking or they asked me to show them a personal project and explain how it worked. Each job was a great opportunity.

When I start looking for a new opportunity in a year or two, I may consider coding challenges to be a soft red flag in that I don't think they're worth wasting time over. I spent so many hours in the last 6 months doing various code challenges, some of which were borderline unreasonable, none of which landed me a position. I ended up getting hired by one of the top 3 places I wanted to work, and it was mainly because I had already networked with my interviewers. Maybe they looked at my GitHub, but I never asked. Regardless, coding challenges of any kind have consistently been a waste of time for me.

Unless I really really want to work for a particular company, from now on I will immediately end my interview process if they ask me to do the following:

- On-site coding challenges

- Take home coding challenges

- Whiteboarding

- Brain teasers

I don't have time to waste on that shit anymore. If having years of experience and a GitHub don't demonstrate to you that I can write code, then I really can't help you with whatever it is you're looking to achieve. Developers have to shotgun apply to many places in order to play the numbers game of getting hired, and life is too short to work an extra hour or more every night to code something no one will ever use that won't get me hired anyway. People are generally biased towards feelings rather than facts, and any of the above bullet points mostly serve as a Rorschach test for interviewers who have already decided whether they like me or not. Someone just breaking into the industry might want to go through the hazing process of hammering out coding challenges, but I refuse to have my personal time wasted.

To anyone reading this, networking is a biggie. My dad used to tell me that and I never took him seriously because I hated the idea that schmoozing outperforms merit, but it's absolutely true. In reality, networking should be better because, at the end of the day, most people can tell whether you're competent and if they want to work with you based on how you naturally interact with them. Formal interviews barely work because everyone rehearses for them and they only prove that you were able to tackle one problem(which recruiters often alert candidates to anyway).
Not to detract too much from the author's point... But as a climber myself, I think climbing technology does actually contribute to advances in pure climbing skill more than you might think.

Take just a single aspect of the gear - climbing rope, modern rope is a technological wonder, light, super strong and extremely dynamic, it's part of what makes it possible to push yourself to the limit and repeatedly fall off routes safely, with zero injury. After a certain point you cannot improve in climbing without pushing beyond your limits and failing, modern technology allows you to push further and further and survive and retain your skills, and this is a significant part of why the pure climbing skill of climbers today is so advanced.

The author has made the same observation but ignoring climbing technology and focusing on internet etc for spread of knowledge - but there are many skills that do not survive conceptualization and communication in tact, for those, you need specialist technology to advance your learning beyond the basics.

Go back 80 years, you will find weak, heavy hemp rope, rope harnesses that will probably kill you, and people literally carried rocks as gear, shoving them in cracks with the rope behind them. It's not hard to see how limiting this is in learning the skill, as you move forward in time gear becomes more advanced but still very heavy.
As both an interviewer and interviewee I prefer in-person. Where you simply meet 1:1 with a few people - some talk to you about fit / experiences and some sit and work with you on a problem. Ideally, you would do the second in a work environment you're used to on a real computer instead of a whiteboard, and I haven't had a chance to do that before. I've seen a few poor performers slip through this before, but I do feel it gives a lot more room for people who just misinterpret what you're going for initially because there's more room for immediate feedback [1]. I've also had some disastrous experiences working with people who were amazing coders but were terrible and sitting down and talking through a problem with someone - I'd rather have a mediocre coder I can talk to. It gives the interviewee a finite time bound, and the company is spending equal manpower resources of their own (instead of giving you a 5-hour problem that you might secretly spend more on, when maybe they already are leaning towards a no but wanted to give you a final chance before ghosting). The downside here is it depends a lot on the consistency and skill of the interviewers, but I believe with good culture and training you can make most people good at this.

[1] edit: Also, I think you can tell a lot about how qualified someone is by how they clarify the problem and how they communicate their thinking - not just the code they arrive at.
If Facebook disappeared overnight, my life and that of most of my social circle wouldn't change that much. I think the issue of Facebook penetrating everyone's aspects of life is perhaps unique to your side of the Atlantic. They only have the power people chose to give them. You could opt out any time you like, it's maybe not convenient but it's liberating. See Stallman on freedom etc.
None of this has anything to do with maximising actual objective performance - I suspect its just a way of executives competing by having their teams work longer and longer hours to show how "tough" they are.
People are willing to put up with shitty service to save a couple of bucks. Not everyone, but almost everyone. People prove it time again. See the success of no frills airlines like Ryanair and Spirit.
> Multiply yourself and the situation by a million, you will always make the same decision using the same apparatus and the same factors, unless there is a random element, but that is random, not free.

The Frankfurt cases debunked the principle of alternate possibilities as necessary for free will. I suggest reading my other comment where I go into further details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19928438
Private moderation is censorship. The definition of censorship is not restricted to government actors.
Those strides made through nonviolent means are only feasible because the implied alternative of violent means.

Martin Luther King understood that his methods were viable only because they were much more palatable to people than those of Malcolm X for instance.
I'm sure they have; everything I've read about Airbus FBW is that it's triple-redundant.

Remember, with FBW, that's the plane's primary control system, so of course they're going to be ultra-conservative and make sure it's right. With Boeing's MCAS, it was tacked on at the end as a cheap hack to try to make the plane have the same flying characteristics as the older 737s. Basically it was an afterthought.

Also, Airbus has a longer history of pushing fly-by-wire.
What you're saying makes rational sense, but people's egos are not rational. It's the principle of the thing: why tolerate a pay cut when there's a long line of companies in the valley itching for your skills?
Also civil disobedience in the face of state violence tends to attract a different sort of reporting and public opinion than riots and violence, which usually - not always - generates the opposite.

Violent action usually ends up as a PR gift for the status quo.
Also called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
The future in the trash: China’s William Gibson on the power of sci-fi
Well put. Compatibilist arguments typically hinge on some bait and switch and this is a popular one. The author does this exact thing in his weather example:

> At the level of individual air molecules, there is no such thing as weather. Perhaps the system at that very fine-grained level of description would indeed behave deterministically according to classical physical laws, but as you move to a more macroscopic description, you abstract away from this microphysical detail. That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities.

> When you consider the macroscopic weather states, the system is not deterministic, but stochastic, or random.

The high level weather pattern is just like the output of the pseudorandom number generator. It appears stochastic to someone who is only given the high level description, but it is still deterministic in the actual world. Given the Laplace's demon description of the system, there is no room for alternative possibilities.

I think the author is only added the part I have bolded to try and deflect this. He is saying "we don't want the Laplace's demon description of the system, we just want the high level precis." Weirder still, he seems to suggest that getting the Laplace's demon is a realistic possibility, which obviously it's not.

But the fact is it doesn't matter whether it's possible for a human to get the Laplace's demon description, or whether you actively pursue it or whatever - if your accept that it's there, as List seems to, then it fully determines the higher level phenomena and this idea about higher level indeterminacy is moot.
The article explains so little, so it's hard to know.

Neural networks generally don't learn by themselves, they require some kind of optimisation outside of their operation. It seems to me that they're saying this is more of a cognitive architecture which learns continuously by memorisation.
It would actually be a pretty good way to see if a candidate can be persuasive, logical, able to acknowledge opposing points of view, and capable of divorcing argument from emotion on heated topics. Pretty crucial skills in the workplace!
Yeah you can get tool suites on various darknet hacker forums that can mimic specific fingerprints, which are used to login to banks or even (stolen) Paypal accounts. There is a site (not linking to it here) where they even give you a SOCKS5[0] proxy to spoof your geolocation so that Paypal doesn't flag your behavior as suspicious, and you can then proceed to drain the funds from the account.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS#Use_in_cybercrime
Outrage culture is nothing new. Orwell wrote about it, in 1984 outrage culture in Oceana was boiled down to a daily 'two minutes of hate.' It's just moved to twitter rather than the dinner table or the work cafeteria or other meeting places, where you might see the same circular outrage opinions although perhaps with more restraint. The trope of 'racist grandpa' goes back a while, for example.

That said, when everyone you know or follow is echoing the same thing, there's a sense of entitlement that builds. That you are entitled to outrage, and now with social media you have a platform to echo like minded opinions from the hilltop. It's easy to forget that you inhabit an echo chamber on the internet (1), and all too tempting to equate it into a worldwide crusade. You used to have to earn a platform through persuasive arguments or hard earned authority and expertise.

1.
https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-use...
>Bad answers had...

Asking a politically charged question on statecraft and judging the answer based on your own personal ideas about how to run a state strikes me as a bizarre way to conduct an interview, even for an exec.

>The worst answers had the exec killing people

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
Growing intolerance and lack of compassion to new developers on StackOverflow
Based on what we’ve done with hospitals... yes.
The vast majority of mathematicians hold platonist views. There are interesting alternative views (e.g. ultra-finitism) but I'm not well-versed enough to tell you if they yielded interesting insights or have a significant audience.
> It's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private speech and private moderation are the same as censorship.

It's extremely dangerous to continue to erode the spirit and meaning of free speech by narrowly defining it as a government only concept. We're collectively losing our ability to tolerate different views and have a level playing field of discussion. We need to get back to "I may not agree with what you say but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it". Both in spirit and in law. Tech companies and political parties have been attacking the spirit of free speech.
my hands were showing early signs of repetitive stress

I learned to type 37 years ago and type 160 WPM with 100% accuracy and have the www.typeracer.com profile to prove it.

About 15 years ago I started having RSI symptoms and ended up sleeping in braces every night because it got so bad. EMG studies showed significant damage to median and ulnar nerve conductivity. Someone on slashdot.org pointed me to the work of Dr. John Sarno. His theory is deceptively simple but if you take the time to truly understand and practice it, you won't have RSI issues any longer.

Resources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsR4wydiIBI

http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/mb_what_is.html
I was thinking the same thing. Also family run ryokans or Buddhist temples in South Asia or east Asia, but as others have mentioned it probably mostly has to do how Guinness qualifies their records.
The cost of technology falls much faster than wages rise.

Wages currently are responsible for about 4% of the cost of the burger.
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q3/study-raisi...
Your friends gave your phone number to Facebook via uploaded contacts data.
Yeah, it's almost like the Internet has no inherent effect one way or the other on the rise of anti-vax beliefs or something.
So, you haven't encountered the photo at the gate? Just at security or border? Weird. Pretty sure the flow for me was...
De-plane in Terminal 5, follow signs to Connections, through border control (non-EU), immediately enter automated passport scan/photo machine, re-enter gate-side Terminal 5. Then, at boarding gate, there was another photo machine which appeared to matching that photo with the one taken back at the border check.

And Inverness had none of the above. Just a normal manual check of passport in the security line. Not surprising, given the size of the airport.
> To be a successful business, compensation decisions can't be based on people's feelings

Great, good point, so let's base it on what's equitable and humane instead. People aren't mad because their feelings are hurt, they're mad because they can't make ends meet or prepare for the future.
Do you mean it’s a bad answer because that behavior doesn’t fit the type of person you’re looking for?

I don’t know anything about Libya’s political and social situation. For example, how many people decided I was the leader? Is the military on my side? Is there an opposition with a tendency for violence? Have they attacked before?

There are too many unknowns for me to decide what is and isn’t a good answer. But definitely, the exec’s response would be good to identify culture fit.
Random people forgiving or not forgiving Boeing isn't going to change much.

Hopefully, other nations' air regulators will refuse to certify the 737MAX, and will be extremely reluctant to certify any other Boeing planes to fly in their airspace in the future. They cannot be trusted, and the FAA can't be trusted to do their jobs either.
>> After being pulled aside, the man told police: 'If I want to cover me face, I'll cover me face. Don't push me over when I'm walking down the street.'

Jesus, it's a good thing cops in London don't have guns. Can't imagine how this would have ended in one of the whitebread suburbs here in the US with our 'roided-out school-yard-bullies-turned-pro.
> But when you start getting into things like frequency-dependent phase response, radiation patterns, reflections... there's a tremendous world of logically audible speaker behaviors that could maybe be measured in isolation, but you get so many of them that you can't assemble a meaningful picture of how a speaker is going to sound.

These things aren't particularly difficult to measure, we even have standard plots for them. Polar response, energy time curves, cumulative spectral decay, electrical phase and group delay are all standard measurements for a loudspeaker.
Another similar project in addition to the ones mentioned here is the BMOW: https://www.bigmessowires.com/bmow1/
I thought it was obvious, but I forgot there are some real geniuses here who can’t tell the difference.
It used some pretty interesting strategies around creating Git statistics such as the concept of seperating "new code" vs "churn". They defined churn as "modifying a line that had been previously modified in the last month" (I forgot if it was month or some other timeline).

It would chart if an engineer made a large number of "churn" diffs vs new code vs "legacy/refactoring" which was modifying code that was last touched a long time ago.
UN chief concerned nuclear 'coffin' leaking in Pacific
One issue is there's a huge number of fake/bot accounts on the site that won't be subscribing. Since twitter is a public company, shareholders would not be pleased with loosing a huge swath of user base as it would indicate they've been deceived on the scope of their investment the whole time.
Ha I remember reading that years ago, thanks for the reminder!
I am 100% sure that somewhere in the US government, a bunch of contractors are working on data collection tools. The Shadowbrokers and Snowden make that clear. I doubt that Palantir is doing it- there has never been any allegations of that, and almost all public articles on them make clear that they specialize in the analysis side. They are sexy enough- you know their name and would definitely click on a link with them in the headline- that I bet it would come out.

My guesses would start with Booz Allen Hamilton (who has had two notable people on NSA contracts: Snowden and Harold Martin) for where the data collection tools come from.

Look at https://www.thenation.com/article/five-corporations-now-domi...

Five companies dominate USG intelligence contracting, and Palantir isn't on the list: Leidos, CACI, SAIC, Booz Allen, and CSRA. One or more of those companies do provide data collection tools to the government, I'm certain. They are boring companies that no one really cares about, and you would never click on a link about Leidos, so that's where it's happening.
> "Why would anyone ... care to do more than the most basic job requirements?"

They are called promotions or achievements for your next role. That's a terrible attitude to have above, and as someone who started out working minimum wage, people who had that attitude generally didn't do as well.
Less other side of the aisle than the Mail being an issue for having a long, long history of inaccurate and plain made up "reporting".
I don't understand why interview tests are so prominent, why not just hire the person as a test for a bit and fire him if he's not up to par? Doesn't cost much and is a much better predictor of success in the company
I watched and really enjoyed this movie. Essentially for both of these reasons.

1. The psychology of fear and how we can learn to overcome fear. I think there is a lot to say about the tantalising experience of facing death.

2. The evolutionary nature of a discipline. Some disciplines improve with technology, others with knowledge.

I really love technical sports and am inspired by the amount of sharing in the communities. It is also easy to see in the newer sports how much progress has been made.

It's exciting seeing how far we can push ourselves through what we previously thought was difficult/impossible and redefine the frontiers of the sport
> have produced the most realistic AI simulation of a voice we’ve heard to date.

No you didn't. Please do not lie.

There are a number of projects replicating Google's Tacotron 2 research from December 2017 that achieved human parity in text-to-speech as measured by MOS score. Google's Tacotron 2 model was then successfully deployed by Google in a service called Duplex.

Following up on this research, there are a number of open source and commercial projects that have used Google's Tacotron 2 human-parity TTS research:

Open source projects:

- https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

- https://github.com/Rayhane-mamah/Tacotron-2

- https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2

Commercial TTS projects:

- http://deepzen.io/

- https://wellsaidlabs.com/

- https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...

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> he didn’t actually endorse our work like this, it’s a clip from the video the team created featuring their work. Video and more after the jump!

It's absolutely unresponsible/illegal to clone a person's voice without consent. To use Joe Rogan's likeness for your publicity stunt without his consent is unethical in its self. It's Joe Rogan's legal right to control his own likeness.

Furthermore, this presents a number of safety risks to Joe Rogan including the possibility of identity fraud.

--------------------------------------------------

Finally, at this time, TTS human parity technology is at human-parity when tested on phrases and sentences similar to those in the training set. Google's Tacotron-2 models showed a significant decrease in performance reading 37 news headlines. They mentioned in their evaluation:

> This result points to a challenge for end-to-end approaches – they require training on data that cover intended usage.
actually talking to the interviewee and getting a sense of what he's accomplished. it depends / person so it's not cookie cutter case.
Normally I can only do about 4hr/day of productive work, but with my ADD meds I can do 6-8 (big surprise: amphetamines allow you to work more). I do work longer hours, but I don't try to squeeze every ounce of mental energy; I spend the extra time catching up on all of the planning and documentation that doesn't involve intense mental focus. In my middle age I've actually started enjoying the planning and documentation process; to me, it's part of the craft, and what makes the difference between good software and great software. Trying to code for 12 hours straight is counter-productive, but spending an extra four hours tidying up really does add a lot of value.
> By all means raise thresholds 10 years later "because studies", but not shortly after the accident

I don't speak Japanese, so there are obviously some assumptions I'm making, but ...

If there are thresholds then those thresholds are being used to stop people selling products or as guidance for things like the evacuation and exclusion zones. If they are not in line with the current best knowledge, then people will be losing their livelihoods and being ejected from their homes and barred from returning for no reason. That is a crisis and should certainly prompt immediate action.

Your complaint seems to be that they should have toughed it out with inappropriate regulation because that would instill a sense of confidence in government.

(1) That is unfair to the people they displaced.

(2) I have no way of checking how the Japanese feel about their government, but at some point we can't be that pessimistic about the public's ability to deal with reality. The truth has intrinsic value and should be supported by regulation.

If a law, regulation or standard is inappropriate the government should change it promptly. If the population are being superstitious, maybe work on improving the education system. Spread some knowledge.