skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an older, experienced developer, this is honestly just a sign of a changing shift in the nature of software companies, and, like it or not, if you want to survive you have to adapt.

I started in software over 10 years ago. At that time all of the exciting jobs where for small startups and the best way to get hired was to have a great github profile or some cool projects to show off.

But small startups need a hand full of really talented devs who can solve a variety of problems, and quickly get up to speed on new domains and tech stacks. A few good developers could make a company. So hiring focused on individuals who stood out and had something unique they could bring to the team.

But FAANG companies want to hire engineers that they can treat as replaceable parts. The "rockstar" talent that was required a decade ago is a liability. This may sound like a critique but it makes perfect sense from the business standpoint, and while you can protest this all you want it won't change a landscape dominated by large software giants to one fill with disrupting startups.

It's just a different world and if you want to show that your "experienced" and not just "old" you need to show that you can adapt just as well as a decade ago. I had a moment of enlightenment when waxing nostalgic about github profiles to a really talented new engineer doing prestigious work in deep learning. I told them how much better profiles based interviews where and they reacted with horror. "How am I supposed to build a profile when I'm so busy with school, interning on the side and studying for interviews!?"

Software used to be dominated by passionate hackers, and now it's one increasingly of skilled professionals. The best work people just as hard but in a very different way.

Like it or not, software is not like it was a decade a go, and if you still want to be seen as a top tier engineer you're going to have to do it by the standard of today.
Absolutely untrue.

Whiteboard problems absolutely do work.

The vast majority of applicants cannot code at all. And I mean that literally: they're at a loss at how to write a function that adds two numbers or counts the number of elements in a list.

Worse is that these guys can be employed as developers (even 'senior' ones!) for years and years in 'serious' enterprises.

How, you ask? By using copy-paste and cleverly navigating their enterprise processes and dodging responsibility.

Maybe this is what you mean by 'being good at working with others', but it's definitely not what I want in a software developer.

Source: I've interviewed a great deal of people for lots of positions over the years.
I assume the idea behind it is to prevent the “flash of unstyled content”.
When I was involved in hiring at a company, we found some amazing candidates through code screens whom we never even would have interviewed otherwise. They were terrible at resume writing, didn’t present themselves well, but could code well and were very engaging once they got past initial discomfort.

I get the frustration of senior devs at going through this stuff, but the alternative is a weird form of credentialism based on seniority.
Your Internet Data Is Rotting
It is. But why "invert" and not "mirror"?
Using your example, I think

"My name is {name}, I'm {feet} tall and live in {location}.".format(name="Bob", location="USA", feet=7)

is less explicit than

"My name is Bob, I'm 7 feet tall and live in USA."
If the CS 201-style problems annoy you, then... stop doing them?

I don't ask algorithm questions, and I wouldn't even dream of asking brain teasers. I ask questions like "Here's a pile of text that claims to be CSV, let's explore how you'd generate an HTML report out of it", and branch out from there depending on how the interview goes. I've got all sorts of directions I can go from there, from screwing up the input in various real-world ways, discussing HTML security and injection attacks, algorithmic complexity of the report, how to build a service out of this, how we're going to handle reporting errors, there's just an endless number of ways you can take the interview from there.

CS 201 doesn't usually come up.
I would pay $1 a month, which would be exponentially more money google extracts from me than with ads I'll never engage with.
Or just hook them all up, and rely on the chip select line (and maybe selectively power them off too for thermal reasons). No moving parts necessary.
>Yeah, but ignoring spelling and instead listening to how it's pronounced - it's the same

I’m Scottish and pronounce the two words quite differently. “Bairn” sounds like “bear” with an “n” at the end and “barn” has a much harder “a” sound.

Interestingly, “burn” is a common word for a small stream in Scotland, but I digress.
Another option for getting involved is: https://climateaction.tech/

"Technology professionals from many companies — such as Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Etsy, Github, SoundCloud, Lyft and many more — are coming together under the banner of ClimateAction.tech to find ways to accelerate solutions to climate change."

There are lots of interesting projects and support in the slack workspace.
Everything You Need to Know About Elon Musk's Satellite Launch Tomorrow
I wrote up a similar experience a little less than a year ago: https://medium.com/@suzzer99/how-not-to-do-a-job-search-1e99...

I was rusty from traveling from 6 months and definitely wasn't prepared. But I finally landed a job at a place that was a little more old-school in their hiring process, and as soon as they could they converted me from contractor to full time. So I guess it's working out for them (and me).
You aren't the hero we need, but you're the hero we deserve. I'm changing my vote from, "reflect" to, "Alley oop".
That's what irks me so much with the vogue of utilitarianism, and all the silly articles about "what a self-driven car should do if a one-legged man crosses the street with an old lady and a pair of young dogs". This just doesn't work, people.
White House will not sign on to Christchurch call to stamp out online extremism
So basically, an IQ test.

Well yes. And that is what the current crop of "programming puzzle" interviews essentially are; the next iteration of attempting to measure people on a cardinal scale instead of an ordinal scale.

The key to remember is that evaluating on a cardinal scale is much more efficient than evaluating on an ordinal scale, so companies will do everything they can to transform the "secretary problem" into one where they measure absolute metrics instead of relative metrics.

Now, whether those metrics align with business value is a separate issue. All evidence suggests that they are largely independent of business value.
Direct link to the news release (PDF): https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-357464A1.pdf

tl;dr the action would allow carriers to default to blocking calls on the part of their customers. Once SHAKEN/STIR (caller ID authentication) is available, this means carriers can block calls that don't include authenticated caller ID. Presumably they already could do this if the customer opted in.

This all seems like a good idea, but I think Pai is overselling it a bit by calling it "bold."
Microsoft open sources code to give any app Bing-like intelligence
Yes, Swift is very close. I know I'm moving the goal posts here, but...

My personal itches are usually web projects. Once Swift gets async/await and Vapor|Kitura switch to it, I'll probably jump to Swift. I really dislike dealing with futures/promises. The Swift web frameworks also don't generate standalone binaries like Go/Rust do...the tend to push you to cloud/docker solutions. Swift is still pretty Apple platform centric, but that feels like it's changing even now.
Yeah, that's kind of where I am with all this - if you're going out of your way to try to stump me, you'll probably succeed, but you're probably going to stump most everybody else, too, and end up not hiring anybody.
_may have_. Those are weasel words. Why demonize a nation and a group of people because of Apple's buggy operating system that's falsely marketed as "Secure by design?"
de.wiktionary is less optimistic about it. AFAIK \sk should reflect in German "Sch-", not "H-" whereas the s-mobile going amis or never being there is yet unexplained; assuming k-, it is a lot closer to casa; The clue for \sk would be shed, but a shed is not a house, by far. Ii is not impossible that a few family terms (house of [family X], caste, husband [cp. Persian band* "dear") where exchanged or reinforced before the sound shift, perhaps mediated through Celtic; Or a the other direction, into Latin ... As far as Ger and Cel are concerned, 0 BC counts as prehistoric.

PS: if Haut "cutis, skin" and Haus "house, family, sex" ("race"?) share a root, is that a remnant of racism? Scandalous!
+1. I’ve interviewed senior guys, with medium to high salaries, who couldn’t do fizzbuzz. What’s worse, a lot of them were fully confident in awful solutions, and didn’t even want to test them.

Talented people frustrated at the process just don’t get how bad bad coders are. I would never have believed it myself until I experienced it.
Well, you almost had a point, but then you lost me. You are conflating two things, they sold you "a license" not "a license with free unlimited labour".

It sounds like what you're saying is that a company has no "right" to determine whether they wish to distribute a product of their labor using a copyright license of their choice. Under your system, they would be forced to give up this right and open source the product, or provide free unlimited updates. Sounds rather harsh on smaller software companies that don't make billions of dollars!

> but I do think people should have the freedom to fix software they bought ("right to repair").

People have been patching binaries themselves for the past several decades. AFAIK they haven't sued a user. But yes, it would be nice if this was codified in law that an end-user can patch a binary on their machine.
6B Cockroaches are being groomed in China
My frustration is that this is the only industry I know of that makes you perform a pre-hiring test. Can you imagine if a construction worker had 1 hour to assemble a dog house as proof that he can build?
With any cloud computing, they very well could be.
All of the major brands are crap if you really care that much about the data on the card. I've seen major brands fail even in RO.

You want an "industrial" SD card if you have a hard need of recovering the data.
About your last comment - c# was explicitly made similar to java (at least at first, it diverged in time but the basics are close to being a superset of java).

My first job using c# was in 2010, and I have been programming in java since 2002 at that point. I was productive pretty much since the first day & not because I'm a genius - c# is that similar to java...

I suspect that if you'd have hired a php or a python expert they would have taken more time to get used to java (not that that would have meant you shouldn't hire them!)
Truth be told I'm far too busy writing software for my current employer to maintain anything decent on Github. I can't imagine I'm the only one.
Actually MetaTron has such a thing: https://metatron.app/feature/share/
This is all well and good (really), but I'm a bit disappointed that the entire post omits the word "efficiency." Yes, we must do everything he mentions – but we waste a TON of energy. Reducing our demand will only make any other solution(s) easier to achieve. One salient stat: it's estimated that commercial office buildings in the U.S. waste about 30% (!) of the energy they consume.

Shameless plug: my startup (bractlet.com) uses physics-based simulation models to try and claw back most of that 30%. If you're interested in that sort of thing, I'd love your feedback on our website/offering. Feel free to email me: brian@bractlet.com
Laravel and Symphony, in particular, have the terrible code smell of elongated toolchains, that are specific to the frameworks.

> php artisan serve # laravel

> symphony server:start # symphony

Same poor thinking that NodeJS introduced, albeit less offensively integrated.

If you need additional toolchains, you're not using PHP per se, but another meta-language. There's literally no good reason to do this other than to remove the concept of tradeoffs for a "we know better" or "don't worry about it". These frameworks have never added anything that I couldn't do simpler and faster, nor have they provided me with constructive guidance in the design or maintenance of a project.
Soon, you might be locked in prison for life if you have a miscarriage In Georgia.

In a few other states, they’ve also banned terminating pregnancies because the kid definitely has a debilitating genetic defect, so there’s that.

Also, even in cases of minors involving rape and incest, some states will soon force the kid to come to term.

We’ll see if the Supreme Court upholds these laws or not, but it’s currently stacked with justices appointed specifically to ban abortions.

It’s definitely a bad time to be a female of child bearing age in this country.
I've written in so many languages that I wouldn't be able to answer how to sleep in language X off the top of my head. Is it time.Sleep()? delay()? wait_for()? nsleep()? timer().delayUntil()? something else? No clue, but I know how to find out.

You're not hiring me for my encyclopedic knowledge; you're hiring me because I get the job done quickly and effectively, using a proper design and clean, tested code.
In a modern IDE, syntax highlighting is quite important, and varied. On a light background it's much harder to distinguish differences in hue than on a dark background. With a couple dozen highlight types this easily becomes a problem when you can't tell two different but similar hues and lose the syntax highlighting signal. An attempt to reduce eyestrain by making not all colors garish makes this task harder yet.
> Not having a child is the single greatest thing an individual can do to reduce their carbon footprint.

No, it's not. Because, to start with, it's reducing someone else’s carbon footprint.

And for most people, it's not even the biggest thing they can do Tor educe someone else's carbon footprint, as, for most, reducing their own potential children's carbon footprints to zero is a much smaller reduction than could be obtained by murdering someone richer (especially someone richer and less environmentally conscious.)
That's a lot of data. The first harddrive I saw was a Tandy. 5 MB capacity, cost $1,000 and was as big as a pc itself. You had to issue a command to park the read heads before powering off lol. My father recently passed away, and he still has that thing along with his early tandy computers (TRS-80 in various iterations through the 4P). You were sooo 'leet in '83 if you had one.

https://amaus.net/static/S100/tandy/disk/Tandy%20TRS80%205MB...
While I agree with you conceptually, as a daily DataStage/InfoSphere user, there are plenty of buggy IBM products. I do think a general problem solving test is way more useful for vetting candidates than some stupid algo whiteboard assessment, and my company has been using something like that to great effect to recruit jr devs.
dril was doxed a couple of years ago. You can google around for his real name, which is not Richard Kyanka.
I think one idea you're thinking about is the idea of Social reproduction. [1] Warning it's a Marxist idea, so if that's just going to upset you, just skip the rest of this. But the core thought is that for people to continue civilization, there are a number of areas that just need support from financial, cultural, social and human areas. It maybe needs some refreshing to more explicitly add tech and environmental areas - but really they're covered under those categories.

While the eco side effects of reduced population pressure are beneficial, they are unintentional, while still letting all sorts of other industrial & financial processes continue to put pressure on problems like climate change. Reduced fertility can be bad from a social reproduction standpoint if poor financial and social conditions are what's driving down the rate. It drives all sorts of other economic and social problems (see Japan for a foreshadowing of this).

Still, reduced population is something we have to work through anyway if we want to make it easier to live at a sustainable level of human civilization on the Earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_reproduction
Flexible TypeScript Error Handling with the Result Class
Well not remote, but pay and hours very reasonable at G specifically. I do a little more for a bit less but I’m satisfied :)
I'm sure there are lots. This shows iphone dwarfs all other sources of revenue https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q4-18-Data-Summary.pdf

Apple is a phone manufacturer. Computers are a side business.
I've been getting this call[1] literally every month for about a year now. It goes straight to voicemail because their dialer can't get past my voice captcha. I tried blocking the caller id but they keep using a different last four numbers. I've now configured the call flow so that this entire exchange now has to pass the captcha to even get to voice mail.

What I'm saying is, this proposal can't come soon enough.

1. Transcription, for your amusement: Hi this is Carolyn calling from reliable resource communications. Reliable resource communications is a telecommunications service used by other companies to notify consumers on their behalf. I have made numerous attempts to reach you regarding an entry form that was filled out in your name within the last 12 to 18 months to receive a new car. Now this will be my final attempt to notify you that your name was pulled and you are going to receive one of our top three major prizes. It will be in your best interest to give me a call back at soon as possible. My number is 984-292-1515 at extension 3:21. We are not a telemarketing agency nor timeshare and this is not a cold call please do not ignore this message. I'm very aware of the do not call list but wouldn't be calling unless someone actually answered. This is a time sensitive matter and I do look forward to hearing from you. Once again congratulations my name is Carolyn.
I doubt it's actually unlimited behind-the-scenes and you'll hit a hidden quota for your account type or get throttled down to dozens of KB/s.
If this actually happens I will be thankful that at least he did something good during his tenure.

I suppose this will get through since it doesn’t hurt the profits of the telcos. In fact it will give them a new profit center! Because I’m sure that they won’t offer “block by default” for free.
WeWork to buy co-founder’s property stakes with new $2.9bn fund
It's funny, I give almost the exact opposite advice when I'm helping Rust newbies. My diktat is "clone is banned unless you can explain why you must have it", and then I teach people about what a move is and how to think about lifetimes.

w.r.t. Arc/Rc, I'd say that it might feel verbose at first, but it makes explicit what a GC does implicitly, and you can get all the benefits of Rust's ownership model at the same time. I can pick and choose when to rely on the GC and when to explicitly manage lifetimes myself. That's really cool! I maybe a bit weird in this, but I like complexity to get surfaced so I can't pretend it's not there.
>Large scale ramp-up of Model 3 has slowed down to crawl, and has not reached even 6000 cars per month.

Well this is a lie lol. They are doing at least 5k cars a week.
But if only 21 units were connected, doesn't that mean they failed to establish demand? Is there actually a waiting list miles long that they're just not filling?
Convolution is outer product [pdf]
The problem is there are a lot of people who are still good coders who suck at white-boarding for one reason or another. I became one of them due a combination of age, rustiness and an escalation of nervousness after failing a couple whiteboards out of the gate.

Of course once I did land a job it took about a week to shake off the rustiness, and the company that hired me is thrilled.

The point is that companies like Google and Facebook can afford to miss out on those devs. But smaller companies should be looking for diamonds in the rough, not trying to mimic the FAANGs and getting their leftovers.
I stand behind what I wrote, cause that's the truth. I can't understand anyone being offended by it.

Not a fan of the way we are blowing things out of proportion so much these days.

Eating right is not that difficult. It's not difficult AT ALL. The mere fact that we are discussing this is insane, to me.

There was a point of time in history where civilizations routinely starved to death - THAT was difficult.

Having the most abundant choice, and voluntarily picking the wrong one, all the time, all day every day - I just can't sympathize with that and call it "difficult".

Especially if you know what you are doing. And you must know, cause you'd figure it out by the results pretty quickly. (Not you in particular, it's a general statement)
I disagree with having the service providers block the calls. Shouldn't that be up to the consumer? Having your carrier block a call seems like an overreach. I feel this erodes trust in the phone system even more.
Reflections on the screen is a problem with the screen. Even when 95% of the screen is white background, things like lamps still reflect badly on a glossy screen and produce eyestrain.
There exist automated processes[0] that efficiently reject such candidates - no need to bother staff with doing the same manually.

[0] https://www.codility.com/
> the thrust of Marc's point is not that we should be "reinforcing public trust in standards"

It isn't?

https://twitter.com/realhashbreaker/status/11283305376455639...

https://twitter.com/realhashbreaker/status/11283322027758632...

https://twitter.com/realhashbreaker/status/11283784887324385...

"Marc Stevens wants to reinforce the public trust in standards, especially among non-experts" isn't an uncharitable summary of this conversation.

> That makes you seem disingenuous.

If I'm mistaken about the point he's defending, it's not an act of dishonesty.

Given that he at multiple points agreed with my arguments that standards bodies make dumb mistakes and yet continued to double down on "we should just follow standards anyway" without caveat, there aren't many alternative interpretations that I'm aware of.

If I still seem disingenuous, it might be that you want me to seem that way. In which case, there's no point in either of us continuing to participate because it has ceased to be about security and instead has become a discussion of ego, which I'm frankly uninterested in.
You make a sweeping statement about a bubble and then demonstrate the edge of yours:

> The business world runs on Java, and .NET to a lesser extent.

Flip those.

> I just don't see any recruiter activity around PHP at all.

This is probably true. My own anecdote: I'm at a primarily-PHP SaaS provider in a major tech hub, and for the couple hires we've made in the last year all of our applicants with extensive PHP experience said we were the only PHP shop they'd talked to, many of them over a year into their job search.
Often when there is a post about PHP I read over these treads sort of subtly trying to figure out how a language with such a large user base has remained basically invisible to me. And I don't think I live in the HN bubble, though I do use a lot of Python, in my consulting work I've also done plenty of work with .NET, JVM to a lesser extent and other "boring" tech.

But PHP has literally never come up, even as a suggestion or as a tool that is a small part of the company stack or whatever. It feels like I'm looking into a strange parallel universe of software development reading through these threads. PHP devs, where are you?
If you're in a senior role with your company, you should be helping in the hiring process. If you're helping with the hiring process, you should be familiar with and prepared for a coding interview.

The only real problem here is that some interviewers ask questions that are too difficult to be solved in 40 minutes unless you've already seen the question before.