skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It does scare me when experienced developers can't write FizzBuzz though, in any language of their choosing, in a reasonable time frame. The thing I tell myself is that there are so many "gotcha" style programming interview questions that people might just be nervous that there's some trap waiting for them in the question.

A few years ago I instituted an "interviewing code of conduct" for my teams with a few tenants that we've refined over the years, but the first one was "We will treat every candidate with respect and empathy in our interview process". The team has adopted some attitudes and techniques to do so while also not compromising on the talent or skills we are looking for. We've gotten very positive feedback on our interviews, so we think it's working.
> Is that a trite point? Yes

The next question I would ask myself in this context is, "Should I have even raised the trite point in the first place?"
If I had $1 for every time I’ve heard “did you know git is a blockchain”...
Microsoft Releases Guidelines for “Acceptable Trash Talk”
I'm sure our betters will get right on that, right after they tighten up international money laundering from bad actors.

Sorry, I'll stop laughing eventually.
There is no need to obsess over anything when you better your habits. You will eat good, because that'll be your "standard", your habit, your go-to mode, your default.

If you only eat good/clean when you are pushing yourself to eat clean, you are doing it wrong and eventually you'll give up and gain back all the weight. Inevitable.

Also, as someone that has very low bodyfat (6/8 pack for years), there is absolutely no need to eat clean 100% of the time.

I'd say that if you eat 90% cleanly of the time, you are golden.

There are ways to make your food delicious without adding huge amounts of calories (think of spices, etc.)

All it takes is some common sense, and some (very little) knowledge of nutrition to eat healthy. I would say that anyone can learn this, in less than a month.

Also, I suggest anyone (that hasn't done this) to count their calories for a month, and be meticulous about it - you will learn a lot. Afterwards, you will not have to count calories - your estimation will be good enough.

About the habits and "converting" to a better lifestyle? That I don't know. I don't understand why is it so hard for people. It seems like it is, even for people that know everything about it. That I can't explain.
Indeed! Though time-sharing was more like a terminal server, or shared hosting, while OS/VM was more like a modern VM host.

It's interesting though why cross-process data exfiltration based on speculative execution was not tried with any success in the shared hosting environment of 1990s and early 2000s. I suppose it has something to do with the use of non-JIT-ted interpreted languages, like PHP, Perl, or SQL, on such hosting; you could not run an arbitrary native executable like you do in the cloud.

Another factor is that though speculative execution was first implemented in 1950s [1], it was either mainframes or RISC machines, and neither was used by the Intel-dominated shared-hosting environments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor#History
Under $100: Investing in bullet journaling. $20 for the book, $15-$20 for each journal I go through, and getting a little nerdy about pens, but still cheap. Bullet journaling changed my life. As a lifelong ADD sufferer and disorganized person, switching to a rich paper calendar system and note-taking system did something for
me no clever software ever did.

Over $100: 1985 Mossman acoustic guitar ($1600). I'm a serious, lifelong guitar player, and this guitar filled a need I had for a great-sounding, great-playing acoustic for gigging, jamming, and getting knocked around. I love the sound and feel, but it wouldn't cause a nervous breakdown if broken/stolen (unlike my best acoustic guitar).
I don't believe that quote is anything Aristotle said.
PHP frameworks crack me up. They so often claim they're "powerful." What does that mean exactly, who is that language aimed at?

Then there is Laravel, why "artisans?" The word generally means pre-industrial. In my mind, that evokes devs doing edits on live code. Also, "Laravel" sounds like something to do with larvae.

Then there's Drupal, which for the longest time was "community plumbing," which did match the experience of having to call someone in for mysterious specialist emergencies.
> what kind of (simplified) question would you ask in a 60 minute interview to gauge someone's ability to write, say, a distributed service?

I've used the last question from Stripe's last CTF for this. Roughly speaking: Given a 5 node SQL database cluster, how do I make it behave as a single server? I don't ask them to write code, I ask them them to walk me through how they would approach this problem and how they would deal with various failures (network interruptions mostly to keep it simple).
We need to take this to its logical conclusion. If the claim is that these kinds of interviews don't work, then what should we be seeing out there? Are companies that employ these techniques less successful, or less productive, or less something-else? Because its not easy to tell someone they're doing it wrong, when what they're doing is working for them and making money. Without actually showing how these kinds of interviews are detrimental to their bottom line, its only going to fall on deaf ears.
"Some people felt aggrieved that all the hard work they'd done to speed up their sites was for nothing."

This seems like a backwards way of saying that speed improves for most sites? Isn't that a goal?
> I'm always concerned with an app that routes all my traffic through a VPN.

Many of these use the VPN subsystem of Android, but are not actually VPNs -- that is, they aren't routing anything off of your device. Using the VPN subsystem is just a way to be able to filter network traffic without having to have rooted your device.

The only downside is that you can't use such an app and a real VPN at the same time.
Not to mention that Fox News frequently is the subject of news itself.

E.g., this event got a fair amount of coverage the Netherlands:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/tucker-carlson-i...

But the general role and influence of Fox News in US politics and society is a frequent topic in journalism outside of the US as well of course.
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make.
No. Your point was that low population growth produces a drag on productivity growth because of an aging population. This is wrong; to reiterate, advanced economies have low population growth because they have undergone a demographic transition - i.e., they have gone from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates. This is a result of a number of factors, mostly relating to the increasing rights of women. The effect of this is a higher fraction of elderly in the population. However, growth (per capita) is exponential; the fraction of elderly is fixed. Therefore the fraction of elderly cannot be a drag on growth.

The demographic transition is the result of development, which usually brings with it increasing mobility for women and depresses birth rates. Another, independent, effect of development is low growth rates, because a developed economy has less room for productivity growth (i.e., when you give an uneducated person an education and some technology, you can increase their productivity - it's hard to do the same with an educated, tech-savvy person).

To sum up: development causes demographic transition causes aging. Development also causes low growth rates. Aging does not cause low growth rates.
I completely agree but the consideration is your phone is dead and you need to get ahold of someone. You should be able to easily memorize some way to contact emergency contacts IMO.
I develop on PHP from 2 decades. I loved PHP. I took 2 Zend cerfications as PHP engineer. After working in Javascript projects for some time on client and node.js, and after learning basics of functional programming I think PHP is really horrible as language. The only thing that I think make it still unique, is the REST nature of the web server integration. Every request is world apart. The script starts and end with the HTTP request(exceptions here). This make it really easy to understand and scale.
These "extra-curricular" activities of Israeli govt's involvement with rogue entities cast a bad shadow on the tech culture of Israel. Something not good for brooding startups coming out of Tel Aviv.
I think it's a character and pride issue.

You know you can solve such problems (sometimes even enjoy them) but the conditions you're solving them under aren't at all remotely reasonable. Giving up admits defeat and what makes you a skilled engineer, part of your identity/character, is that you rarely, if ever, give up on a problem and love a challenge.

I think we should view this as a different challenge all together instead of the one presented. Let's understand the presented challenge is silly and look at the problem as a need to change the presented challenge to something all together different utilizing our skills.
FCC Announces Rules and Legal Framework to Combat Robocalls
Regular Show
Being different is more profitable. Sameness is commercial suicide
> by simply discarding all the known theories about how physics worked

But he wasn't ignorant of them. He knew the existing work. He was extremely well read in physics and maths. He wasn't a generalist!

If you get a group of random generalists to build your compiler, or your graphics engine, or your cryptography stack, they aren't going to know what they don't know, and it'd take them decades to come up to speed.
Show HN: Klokki – Rule-based automatic time-tracking for Mac
I've been employed since the 1990s, and I've seen the world pre-Internet. I'm exactly one of the people that have seen the changes in the industry, including in hiring practices and have been forced to adapt.

I've interviewed at Microsoft when they asked me how to find the fake coin based on N number of weighings. I've gone to Silicon Valley Brass Ring job fairs during the Dotcom Boom where they interviewed onsite and I was asked to code on the spot. During that era, various companies asked me things like what the largest number was for a 2^64 number or what the current Linux kernel version was, or what the default TCP timeout was.

And since Google came on the scene with their focus on algos, the entire industry has changed again. Every year the interview process in Silicon Valley has gotten harder and harder. That's the reality. Crying about it won't change it.

If I had the power to change it, I would hire fast and fire fast, like Netflix. But that comes with its own problems as well, so there is no best solution. All you can do is adapt and change with the industry. I know I'm not smart or ambitious enough to ever make it to the highest echelons of a company to affect culture so I'm happy getting paid as much as I can until I retire.

Some of my former co-workers are STILL stuck in the same company 16 years later. I still have lunch with them at least once a year, and they are petrified to change companies even though this current company keeps laying people off and replacing them with offshore workers. They don't have the guts to buckle down and study and adapt, so they're waiting to get laid off, which is sad to me.
Just that I get it. Instead of investing into new rockets and stuff like that SpaceX is funding a residential roof top solar company, which needed to be saved by Tesla, and a company that is drilling pneumatic tubes for cars (Teslas again) as a solution for traffic jams (like a good subway network wouldn't move more people). Nice move. Sounds almost like a snowball scheme to me.
If you're dealing with decade old code that uses no framework, you certainly do. PHP is, by default, a primitive templating language...
Think about the incredible amount engineering involved to design and manufacture this new card - millions of lines of code when you consider all the design and validation tools used. What a great time to be alive!
I take a completely different approach to hiring, and I've gotten fantastic results.

Instead of throwing tricky algorithm questions at a candidates, I scour their detailed employment records for the most relevant experience for the first project. In other words, I'm looking for relevant experience rather than top-of-the-head algorithmic brilliance. In the interview, I pose our project problem, and the candidate who gives me the most impressive proposal to get that done gets a chance to solve it.

I hire from an international pool, often on Upwork, so I can start developers on a project basis.

If the developer does a great job, we hire him/her for another project, and so on. At some point, this becomes a full-time relationship, with stock options and other perks.

Using this approach, we value experience over "raw intelligence," per se, and we end up with a team of self-directed developers who are fabulous at delivering great finished products.

It's amazing how well this has worked out for us. I think there's an arbitrage opportunity to avoid coding tests and hire on this basis.
Never gonna happen. The bulk of their business comes from the "good" guys
I've been on both sides of this. As an applicant, sometimes it's a crapshoot in terms of getting lucky that they asked me the right question. On the other hand, as a hiring manager or interviewer, I see lots and lots of candidates who can't write out a fizzbuzz solution, and it wastes a lot of my time (I'm a sucker and will take a lot of time guiding interviewees to the right solution, even on a simple problem when I know the interview is over, but I don't want to bruise their ego too much).

I don't have a silver bullet solution to this, but I think a few things go in the right direction:

1) Candidates should have to write code in interviews. But they shouldn't have to solve puzzle problems with "gotcha" solutions. If there's a specific trick that requires an "aha" moment, you are really testing how well a candidate solves puzzles under pressure, not how they code.

2) Test candidates on what they are best at. If someone has been working in C# for the last 5 years, don't ask them to whiteboard in Python, which they used in college. Picking up new languages/frameworks is quick for someone who knows what they are doing [0].

3) Offer candidates a choice between an in person interview or a take home coding test, the latter of which would take more time. Some candidates don't want to deal with doing a 6 hour take-home coding problem [1]. Other candidates suck at whiteboarding under pressure. So more options seems better.

[0] There are exceptions to this. You might have a unique problem and the budget/resources to hire a rockstar for a specific role. Desirable companies willing to dole out big salaries do this all the time. But much more often, I see companies offering average salaries for very very specific roles. One company near me told me that I was one of the best candidates they've seen, but they are looking specifically for someone with 1+ years of Java experience. I could have picked up the basics of Java in a month, and been fairly proficient in 2-4 months. Meanwhile, they are still looking to fill that role and it's been over 2 years.

[1] I've had a few companies that insist on this, but I haven't had a period of unemployment where I have the time for this. Good developers tend to be/stay employed, so if you are looking to hire senior devs, you probably need to consider their schedules. Unless I'm desperate to leave a job, I can only make so much time for interviews.
Multicore OCaml is actually making promising progress, but I agree that the standard library situation is a little bit unfortunate.
Conclusion: use C instead
What is your carbon footprint?
It is in the DC area.
FCC Chairman Proposes Robocall Blocking by Default
I think my team has gotten pretty good at this. We address the "flood of applicants" by tossing out any resumes that don't have some sort of CS or programming on them (about 25%), and favoring, in order, people who have held a programming job, people who have done programming internships, and people who have taken CS classes. A decent GitHub profile will bump you up in the two later categories.

Next is a five minute phone screen. We're a Java shop, so I ask them something dumb, like "what's the difference between public, private, and protected?" Something any Java dev would know; I'm just trying to find out if they have ever actually used the language.[1]

People that pass the phone screen get a Skype interview, where they write code in an IDE. The first half hour or so is chat and trivial problems like "sort this array" or "return true of this String starts with a letter between A-Z, inclusive." They're allowed to Google and use the standard libraries.

Finally, we have a "close to real world" problem for them to work on. It's a standalone, mostly-toy CRUD application, and we'll ask them to add a feature that represents the kind of work they'd be doing. Again, they have their IDE of choice, Stack Overflow, etc.

I don't think we've had a bad hire since we started using this process. Have we turned aside some all-stars that interview poorly? Maybe, but the team we've built is really good at what they do, so I'm pretty happy with the results.

[1] We have hired Senior devs that don't know Java. One of our team leads was a C# guy for a decade or so, but he was smart and available, so we scooped him up. Java is easy to learn. Programming well isn't.
Google left China nearly a decade ago in part because it suspected Chinese government operatives of hacking their systems to target human rights activists. If they double down on their commitment and re-enter China I can only see it as an inevitability that the same thing will happen again.
Am I the only one that fantasizes going back in time and bragging about such things like having a consumer-affordable 1TB removable storage device the size of a thumbnail in my personal and cheap super-powerful computer that's comfortably in my pocket? How much would people in the past pay to even glance at or gasp touch such a marvelous thing?
Ha, I have not had the same experience as you on senior programmers at FANG companies.
> Is it really too much to ask to spend a few days solving some programming puzzles on a whiteboard?

Yes.

It's not a matter of capability - in over 20 professional years I've yet to run into a problem I couldn't solve when I was motivated to do so - either because my job required it, or just because it was interesting.

It's a matter of valuing my time. I do. Companies that want to put me through 12+ hours of interviews and exercises do not. And if they can't value it for interviewing purposes, chances seem very low that they'll value it when I'm an employee.
Soft8Soft joins Khronos Group 3D e-commerce initiative
>When I take a job that's described as "back end" it usually will involve every once in a while doing a bit of js, html, or css, but not much, and it's understood that it is not what I am going to be doing most of the time.

Do you feel that 'reporting' (of the SSRS variety)falls under the backend umbrella?
D is a weird one, because it has been lurking around for at least a decade and a half without really picking up the kind of steam and hype that later entrants have. I remember dabbling with D for game development way back in high school, as a friendlier alternative to C++.
Ah, yeah. Big fan of GraphQL.
Rise of smaller rivals throws up fresh challenge to Bitcoin
Quicktest: Wrap *Testing.T for Fun and Profit
TaiChi: Open-source computer graphics library
Oh, that's interesting! I've read it somewhere attributed to Aristotle for sure!

Anyways, the point stands - should we tolerate everything, at all cases, always? Doesn't sound right to me
Rotation, etc. of images is known more generally as data augmentation and you're correct in that it's a way to reduce amount of training data to cold start a data product.

For "synthetic data", my understanding is that it's referring to use of ML to generate brand new training samples (e.g. through GANs, though there are limitations [1]).

1 - https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJMw747l_4
Data point: A friend of mine with 20+ years of experience in programming and security (she's been a code-level security analyst for the past decade plus) was asked in an interview the other day to implement a binary tree.

Why the fuck is someone asking a lead-level expert with over two decades of experience a first-year CS question? Because that's the process? It's a total failure. Asking senior people to do basic things like that is insulting. Don't you have anything better to ask?
Ah, I see. So you've got the format (and style, and to some degree content) fixed for you by experiment.com? That ties your hands pretty hard.

I'd do this (if you can within their rules): Very early on the page, I'd put a link that says "For the technical details, go here." Link to a page that is not on experiment.com. Go deeper there.

As I said, if they let you...
There is a reason they don't mention the retention spec.
Thank you for this delightful new term-- Overton Window.
Is there a market for a licensing body for this stuff? If you believe what you read on Blind, the top companies all test the same material: leetcode, CTCI, design system primer, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc.

Why can't I prove that I passed this screen once, then take a piece of paper to each of my FANG interviews and skip the technical part. Then maybe retake it every 5 years if I'm interviewing.
If this is even possible they would do this to trade for the Huwei exec. Also Ethiopia gets a ton of US aid and military support so it wouldn’t be in their interest.
No, he’s not expressing that “people jumping on bandwagon” because he literally opens his comment with “I have a problem with designers” specifically.

And it’s a strange ignorance to only attribute trendiness to a single discipline.
‘Alternative Living’ Youtubers Are Living the Dream from Their Concrete Domes
The answer 10 minutes ago was I can't invert a binary tree - I didn't know what that meant. I just did a google, and now I can. How did I become more valuable of a hire?
It's sad how many people think I'm crazy when I say this. No other language feels as good as writing JS with ES6+ features.
It's not easy to see in the moment, and sometimes an individual's options are limited (though this seems rare for senior devs), but why would anyone want to continue to create value for someone who holds biases against them that are hidden as not being a 'cultural fit'?
Fee range?
This happened to me recently.

I have over 8 years experience as a developer and applied for a Senior .Net Developer role. I have plenty of experience in the technology stack and worked as lead developer on some high profile projects in my current role which have been successful. I'm no rock star but I get stuff done and I work well with others.

The company liked my CV and cover letter and send out a HackerRank link for me to work on. My first thought was "sh*t" as I struggle with these things but also how impersonal it was. The everything was weighted on the HackerRack test. At least speak with the candidate and get a feel for them. Even a phone call.

Hiring as they say is one of the hardest things you can do. It's time consuming and costly so I think they have these tests as away to cull the herd so to speak but it's obviously not ideal. Basecamp have a podcast called rework and one of their episodes called "Hazing not Hiring" deals with this. It's really interesting.

For me, I'm going to try to work on a side project and use this as another part of my application. Almost like a portfolio. Hopefully this will be enough going forward.