skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And then goes on to say "any company wide illegal behavior", and states that even if they did not know about it, it was their responsibility to know, and they would still go to jail for it. Perhaps we're reading it differently, but to me that is the same as "nobody ever commits a crime".
The problem isn't technical interviews it's bad technical interviews. I think this is pretty "regional", with many people reporting big tech companies in e.g. the Bay Area doing things like have people code textbook algorithms on whiteboards.

Technical interviews where you look at some code and review it, or is asked to broadly describe how to design a system etc isn't unreasonable, and as you say it's better than judging only on poise...
Nix Chair
"Not only is the Singularity religion for atheists"

I also don't understand this statement. I asked the parent about why the singularity and AGI are "the apocalypse" for atheists, but I also don't follow the logic of this statement. Granted, I don't think there will ever be a "singularity", but I fail to see how it is in any way linked to atheism. Maybe a small subset of people, like you said, a "bizarre offshoot".
DDoS protection is something that small websites should not need.

Current circumstances are a sad and unfortunate state of the internet.
>Really? When has that happened?

If you're talking on the scale of a non-founder CEO who is making $15 million per year, it happens all the time. There just aren't that many public companies that pay that much. The headline in this story comes from an analysis of the 350 largest publicly traded companies. A fired CEO can't just go down the street and find another $15+ million dollar salary ruining another company. Two examples would be Melissa Meyer and Ellen Pao. Both of whom are basically unemployable outside of board memberships.
Businesses make dumb decisions all the time, it doesn’t mean their business model isn’t suitable, in some moral sense, for profit.

Unless I am misreading the comment?
"Engineering"
"- Credentials, including graduate degrees, are no guarantee that someone is a good engineer"

Too true, I've started to recruit non-CS people and teaching them how to code. The state of CS education in the US is insanely inconsistent. But I'm lucky, I have lots of time to train people; most companies can't handle months of startup time.
Gradjoy wants to help the 45M student debt borrowers in the U.S.
Ya, my point was more about "typical workers" than minimum wage ones.
You can't just setup a corp and get immunity - that's a popular myth. There's many ways you can "pierce the corporate veil". However, as long as the company has officers, has all their paperwork in order, etc, it's a legit corp (regardless of how many investors there are)
Coal is more efficient in our winters. You can load a stove with coal and it keeps you warm all night which is not as easy with wood.

It is acctually a paradox here in Poland. I live in suburbs outside of Warsaw, surounded by forrest and still sparsely populated. People are building new houses here to get out of the city and pollution. They build heatpumps (or somerhing else) but also a fireplace as a secondary heating source. Then they learn to discover that coal is cheap, accesible and more energy efficient (more convinient) in winter.

As a result in winter at evenings you get smog and filthy air in suburbs worse then in the city center.
For instance? (Honest question)
They're planning on tracking workers within their buildings.

>WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 employees. Euclid is a spatial analytics platform...Euclid's website says the company is "focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future." Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive. Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It's all done over Wi-Fi.

https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/wework-is-trying-a-creepy-ne...

I don't think this kind of tracking will have any positive impact on employee productivity, and it could have the opposite effect of being demoralizing. Unfortunately, I'm sure there's lots of unethical companies that would love to have this kind of data on their workers.
Well, at least prior to 2003 there was a strong incentive to prefer gains from stock sale since it could get long term capital gain tax rates (15% now, 20% at the time) vs. dividends which would be taxed as normal income. Since then however, qualified dividends are taxed the same as long term capital gains.
That's my point. The LLC owners / WeWork shareholders should have recused themselves due to conflict of interest and the board should have shot it down. This seems really sketchy to me, an end run to get money out of the company.
The Many Contradictions of Oliver Wendell Holmes
I'm OK with whiteboarding. I don't object to take-home assignments in principal, but I do object to them in practice -- they take up way too much time, and then part of the time you get ghosted after submitting them.

I think the right answer here, to the extent that there is a right answer, is to give applicants a choice.
> since it'd run afoul of many basic guaranteed rights

Such as the guaranteed right to be paid as CEO while not being responsible?

As I understand OP there would still be a right to be heard, rule of law, court proceedings and everything. The only thing that shouldn't work anymore is claiming to be too stupid for the job the moment it becomes inconvenient to act out the responsibility that they're paid for so handsomely.
I would argue the opposite, to an extent. The denial of a natural teleology (i.e., denying that a purpose, goal, or reason underlies the universe and Nature) was a useful conceptual bridge when scientific materialism was founded and growing - it allowed the burden of highly-politicized organized religion to be shrugged off and for many previously-untouchable classes of questions to be explored in new (read: empirical) ways. However, the utter rejection of a telos during that transition period (by the engineering class in particular) was, I believe, too thorough; to this day, the default position of many working scientists and engineers is that Nature has no purpose, goal, or reason whatsoever. That seems a very extreme and austere perspective for an element of Nature (i.e., a being capable of forming your comment or my response) to subscribe to. In my own opinion, it is dangerously close to a form a nihilism and feels very much like a cognitive blind spot. It also fails to comport with the espoused perspectives of many of the people we would think of as great scientific thinkers - including those who gave us the constructs of formal logic that underpin our current technological age.
Is this your product? If so, how can I cash this out into tangible currency rather than an ERC token, and is it possible to select the amount of labeling (ex: users I identify as bad have to go through 10+ pages, users I identify as OK go through 1)?
s/acceptable/an enormous improvement

From the article, wihch presumably you read:

> Yes, we do have a FOFT, but we are getting text in front of the reader much, much sooner—this is an enormous improvement.

Emphasis mine.
Looks promising. The one thing I wish this had was some design files or something for the case, so that I could screw it in to a VESA mount.
Write, Share, and Wait...Magic
Hah. Point taken.
When will people wake up and realize that computers today are just capable of "fetch decode execute" in a loop?
Huh, you make some really great points. I didn't realize some of those products were based out of there.

> SV's tech industry is far from dominated by blockchain as it may be in other places, which may make blockchain seem relatively small there.

That is also a great point! I didn't even think about that, thanks for the eye opener.

With that said, it does seem like this place is extremely skeptical of blockchain. I figure its the SV legacy types that probably lurk around here still.

I actually did a blockchain at Berkeley online class. It was great, I think it was through Coursera iirc.
Unstriving
Yes, lobbying is a huge part of politics in the US. Also, don't underestimate US bureaucracy. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's less bad.
This might be solved by requiring the CEO to not have had any shares. The CEO would focus on continuity of the company, followed by profit of shareholders, both large and small, then.
OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (7th Gen)
Actually, not necessarily. Drawing font glyphs is certainly protected by copyright (even if not filed, an implicit one) as artwork. You probably wouldn't get prosecuted because they probably couldn't prove if you copy-pasted, but it's still the work of an artist.
Great story but a little anticlimactic.

It's like yadda-yadda-yadda, he gets arrested and goes to prison. That's it? The story is just an IT guy that tells US authorities before he takes on a job with scammers and is then a mole? It's neat and all, but not a totally captivating tale.

If you haven't heard it, this is a good one: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nh3wk
let _ = 5 + foo.iter().bar().quux().asdf();

The compiler will now tell you that <your type> cannot be added to an `i32`.
In many ways, banks were the original hybrid tech companies. VERY early adopters of software, mainframes, databases and so on. But because they were so early we don't call them tech companies, probably because there wasn't a concept of a 'software tech' company back then and they were evolutions of older companies that didn't use software to run their businesses.
I think it's a bit in between. FWIW, at 54 I've never failed a whiteboard interview, including at my current FAANG employer, so this is most certainly not sour grapes.

While not deliberately ageist, I think whiteboard interviews work out a bit that way. What can be tested in such an interview? Only a sampling of domain knowledge. It will tend to be a sample weighted toward the particular problems and algorithms that will be super-fresh in the minds of people still in or fresh out of school (usually because the interviewers themselves are). To someone older but still well versed in that domain, those particular details might have been crowded out by a thousand other things learned since. They might seem less familiar because of changes in language, notation, or idiom. Those same differences will also affect how the result is "graded" even if the candidate solves the problem quickly and well.

Whiteboard interviews also fail to measure other things such as ability to select algorithms or higher-level approaches, people or organizational skills, industry knowledge, or a developed "instinct" about what symptoms suggest what problems in the relevant kinds of code. As more weight is given to whiteboard skills, less weight is given to literally everything else.

As I said, I don't think any of this intentionally disadvantages older workers, but it can have that effect without intention. It has never hurt me personally, but I have plenty of peers who I know beyond doubt could code rings around the people who interviewed them. They just couldn't dance that particular dance well enough in that moment and got rejected. That's a loss for the (potential) employer as well as for them.
Is it that readable when the code is making heavy use of advanced features like decorators and magic functions, or the code is deep into the inheritance hierarchy?
Toptal suit against co-founder dismissed
In addition, enterprise WPA (802.1x) doesn't work like that. In WPA-Personal, if you have the password (PSK) and capture the handshake (easy), you have easy decryption of any other clients' traffic. In WPA-Enterprise, all the connections are segregated (because the handshake uses your certs and mutual auth).
Google Warns Developers That All New Android Apps Require 3 Days for Approval
Even if you do not expect them to solve it.

The unstated implication in most cases is that you damn sure are supposed to solve it - or get "flushed".

As to "seeing how the candidate behaves in front of a difficult and concrete problem" - I'm sure this is what a lot people who ask questions like these think they're achieving by asking them. But again, you have to ask yourself if that's what the questions actually do permit you to assess.

My sense is that it's not - and that questions of this sort are mostly, well - cheap gimmicks, basically.
I'm not sure how that comment holds given what they've outlined. For the 6 month ending in 2019 they had roughly 75k paying customers. Now the interesting part, to me, is that only 408 of them are spending over $100k in annualized billings. Given that they have some runway to expand into organizations who are down a path of transition to cloud. In the S-1 they reference a lot of "band-aid" box vendors (Juniper, Checkpoint, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Fireeye, etc) and so they seem to be positioning themselves squarely in the security space in competition for those budgetary dollars. I think this is the right play for them, especially because as cloud offerings continue to blur lines into hybrid architectures Cloudflare sits in a very nice position with CDN, security, VPN, services (DNS), etc. And security budgets are still flush.

But back to your comment... Given 408 customers probably generated the majority of the $100M GP over the first six months of the CY and they have another 74k and change customers they've landed and have potential expand opportunities with, I'm not so sure there's no revenue there to be had.

Now that being said I think the stock will likely float to ridiculous overvaluation at IPO and all the talking heads will argue how those "band-aid" vendors have staying power through brand loyalty and proven models... But, I personally, think CloudFlare will be around as a leader in this space for a long time, especially if they continue to keep playing their cards as they have.
This usually works, but type inference in RLS (or Rust-Analyzer) breaks often enough that it's not a complete solution.
I've had a few projects from them, one very large with a Bay Area client spanning a year. In the early days they would suggest a lower rate but now they change it to whatever I ask. I'm not sure what your rate is, but mine is competitive with Bay Area agency rates. Definitely better than Upwork (Elance) since I wouldn't be able to find the type of enterprisey clients I find on Toptal.
Increase playback speed. You'd be surprised how your hearing can adjust. Just work your way up in small increments. Just be prepared that if you ever go back to 1x speed, it sounds really weird.
I would agree with your style, unless all monitors and our vision were built to be more ultrawide-aware than “ultrahigh”. Irregardless of resolution, we can have at most 50-70 lines per eyesight and I doubt that constraint cannot be left unconsidered without losing readability. But it is just my guess from observations, not a real science.

Did you compare writing in different ways and reading it later? This specific style confuses me the most, because I have to mentally connect an assignment with a flow control, because there is no guarantee that a following if() will not use a different variable or it was not shadowed, misnamed, etc. And given that, at once I see x2-3 lines less than usual.
> And then goes on to say "any company wide illegal behavior", and states that even if they did not know about it, it was their responsibility to know, and they would still go to jail for it. Perhaps we're reading it differently, but to me that is the same as "nobody ever commits a crime".

If it's happening company wide that points to an incentive structure (created by internal policy) that may be misaligned. The operative phrase is company wide which indicates a systemic issue.
Technology advising as a value-add for less technical buyers definitely sounds like a great opportunity, but it isn't on our roadmap yet. Government contracting and procurement (especially at the federal level) is very complicated, so we've focused initially on high-growth private sector companies.

Thanks a lot for bringing this up! We'll reply back to your comment if our strategy evolves to include this.
Compensated quite generously in an absolute sense, but relative to other early employees, who worked just as hard, at companies with similar current valuations and who did get equity? That seems unlikely.

Also, if I were an early employee at a startup, yes, I would expect equity.
> The words OP used are not precise, but they aren't wrong either - they communicate how he feels about the incident in question.

I think that is actually a great summary, thx.

I guess my long conversation here is just an expression of my underlying impression that political discourse should in general focus more on facts than on feelings.

People seem to be more focused on how they feel about an issue than its actual contents. But this is getting of topic.
We actually have to write boolean checks like that in Kotlin nowadays in modern Android development. If your variable type is Boolean? instead of Boolean, it is needed to both check if it is non-null and true.
Ask HN: What are the greatest ideas in computer science?
What do you think are the the most powerful ideas in computer science, and why do you think they are so important or have had so much impact?

Links to papers and/or talks appreciated.
I don't buy that at all.

Think about the potential hidden states (already knows the answer vs blank) vs the evidence you could get from the person answering right or wrong. What should your prior be? Surely that there's a very large chance this person is not a genius. Now how much is that going to move, given that by far most people are not geniuses?

To put it another way, what would you do to impress someone following your reasoning? I would pretend like I didn't know it, and then act out the miraculous direct line to the answer.

As for looking at how people behave in front of a hard problem, what on earth do you know about that? Do you have evidence connecting people's behaviour to subsequent on-the-job performance, both for people you hired and those you didn't?
I was going to say something similar. If whiteboard coding is a skill distinct from any you'd use after hiring, how useful is it as a filter? To a certain extent it's a sucker filter, selecting for people who are willing to invest time in learning a skill they know is just for show. Older workers tend to resist such things, because they've seen where it leads in other more important circumstances. That itself is valuable knowledge, and whiteboard interviewing selects against it.
Desalination plants should be fairly cheap in Iceland. You can distill seawater using geothermal energy.
Top US long term capital gain tax rate is 20% and there is a 3.8% tax on that
Everyone needs to exercise.

WeWork appeals to a tiny fraction of the workforce.
I like the rule I read somewhere called Rule of 3. Goes something like, don't bother to write a shared version of some piece of code until you've already written it in at least 3 different places. This simultaneously ensures that

1. There is actually a need to use this code in multiple places

2. You know where the places that need this code actually are, and what they need, so what you write will actually be practical for all of them to use

3. Or maybe you can tell that, despite the seeming similarity, the different places are too far apart or too different for sharing code to actually make sense
The Coworking Visa already allows this: http://coworking.com/visa

As an added benefit, it's run by some of the people who were originally behind coworking, before WeWork came onto the scene.
H.264 is not a wavelet-based video codec.
Contractual assurances aren’t going to help you when a company is insolvent.
I just went through the interview process with multiple Bay Area startups. Competency and experience don't really account for much and it is much more about the companies internal politics. People are thrown in a room without any evidence based HR training to wing it. The processes are ridiculously bureaucratic, in most scenarios you need approval from 5 different people who at any time can decide they don't like you for their own personal reasons. Given a 50/50 chance with each person, that is a 3% chance of getting an offer. People have no idea what they are doing.
Don't forget throwing yourself a little "shareholders meeting" every year!
So how should a CEO be compensated then, if you're so sure the answer here is no instead of yes?
> Nobody likes whiteboarding

That's why companies should allow laptops.

> Take-home assignments are unpaid work

True, they could be optional. You may not get the job if you don't do it. Honestly, if you can't spend one or two hours on a take home assignment during a 7 day period, you certainly have different problems than applying at this company.

> Pair programming during interviews makes people uncomfortable

I agree, pair programming during an interview is mostly a no go. Not because of the issues you mentioned but because most interviewers are totally unqualified to do this properly (unfortunately, most interviewers are also unqualified in general to conduct interviews). It takes a lot of skill to conduct pair programming interviews and draw the correct conclusions.

> People who currently have good jobs are unwilling to consider contract-to-hire

In US, there is practically no difference between those three. You can be fired any day anyway. But yes, if you have a secure job that is good, the bar for switching is high, but so what? Why even switch? It's your choice then... Luxury problem!

> Credentials, including graduate degrees, are no guarantee that someone is a good engineer

I would go as far as saying your credentials and degrees are horrendously irrelevant in predicting your skills as an engineer. The only thing you might be able to conclude is that a GPA 4 M.I.T. graduate probably can pick up missing knowledge quickly, as opposed to a no degree dish washer who learned "how to code" in a 6 week bootcamp.

On that note I have experienced first hand, Berkeley and Georgia Tech CS majors, who were absolutely incompetent on the job and just had no idea what the hell they were doing, with little improvement in sight...
The trial period is not without its flaws but I’ve always preferred that over take home tests and puzzles because it gives both parties time to truly assess one another. I’ve done it twice in my career and I appreciated getting paid like a contractor and giving more time to understand whether or not I really fit at the company I was joining. Likewise, the company’s weren’t 100% assured that I was good but I was able to prove my value both times.
Its one checkbox to turn on device isolation. It's not perfect, but suddenly no device can see any other device.
> Nothing is more demoralizing than being able to reply in your head the point in the interview where you got 'dinged' for something ridiculous due to a quirk of the process like marker-based-programming and feeling that sent you on the trajectory for a rejection.

Honestly, I'm so desensitized to that so I don't feel that way. I go in expecting a random brain teaser that I BS my way through.

I actually land most jobs by recycling interview questions and answers from prior interviews.

"Let me know if you've seen this question before" NOPE

But more companies have also done more core competency related exercises with IDE's set up or take home exercises. Haven't been paid for a take home exercise yet, but I'm hearing thats happening a little more too. I think a lot of startups in the bay area are content that their employees will stay for around 18 months, so they dont need the brainteaser rationale that they need to interview an engineer on the idea that they change teams.
I've noticed this is one of the internet's new favorite words. Following behind "slams", "narcissist", and "gaslighting"