skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why bother giving a take-home test if you don't trust the results?

Why compare the results to work done in a completely different medium with no opportunity to iterate on the output, take a break or work comfortably?

If you assign a take-home test, make the interview focus on discussing the product.
Nvidia Q2 profit, revenue drop but beat estimates; stock gains
Maybe.

The so-called short-and-distort scheme may violate the Securities Exchange Act anti-fraud provisions, as well as SEC Rule 10b-5, just like the better known antithetical "pump-and-dump" scheme. It checks all the boxes: (1) misrepresentation to the market (through articles, blogs and social media); (2) materiality (often including false statements about a company's financial condition or viability); (3) an intent to deceive (manipulating the market to create downward pressure on the share price to make a profit); and (4) connection to the purchase or sale of securities (initiating a selloff of securities to allow the short seller turned analyst to cover their short position). Likewise, this scheme may violate state securities and consumer protection statutes and common law.

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2018/10...
This is essentially selection bias, it's the same thing as going to a high end gym and saying omg look at how fit everyone is.

When you get cancer you encounter cells that through natural selection developed to beat your immune system so they've already essentially discovered every trick in the book and when you attack them the cells that survive are those who wrote a new book to do so.

Things like tumor escape mechanisms aren't sentient they are just random things that cancer cells attempt and you only see the outcome of those that worked.
Async is about servicing thousands, or tens of thousands, of clients at once. Since everyone is convinced that their program will have tens of thousands of clients, they clamour for async.
It usually doesn't actually cost that much to fix SQL injections and they're really easy to find.

I've prioritised identifying and fixing these problems whenever I'm leading teams. It's an easy sell to management (spend a sprint to greatly lower risk) and a good training exercise for teams.
Thanks for these links. I read through the book's examples of Tech Debt.

The book enumerates some examples of failed software projects and calls their failures "Tech Debt".

I have two issues with this.

The first is how fuzzy this still is. This term is thrown over all of these various kinds of failure. And the examples are also quite varied - most are phrased as mere symptoms of failure not root causes, which gives us little insight.

The bigger problem I have is that these examples are retrospective.

If Tech Debt is simply a term for "mistakes I have made", then by all means use it -- obviously in this form it has no strategic/constructive value.

But the way I've seen it typically used is for people to act as if it is akin to real debt, consciously acquired.

"Oh I didn't make this transactional because Tech Debt."

Etc.

And indeed if Tech Debt as a concept is to have any value it should be able to be used this way.

But my objection is that there is no way it can be used as such, because it is far too nebulous a concept to have any navigational benefit.

It gives no helpful path forward. It is purely a euphemism for mistakes. That's how I've seen it used universally, at least.
There's more to it than that. In order to pay dividends, you have to pay corporate tax before you can pay out the dividends. And that is almost 40% on the top end. So the effective tax of qualified dividends is more like 60%.

Alternatively, if you can stash money overseas in tax free accounts or invest the money back into the business to avoid taxes, then you only have the long term capital gains tax.
I agree totally. But I hope you get the drift here. To get to a GAI system, it has to be something like the test provided. You have to go into detail, but it's not something that you'd have to hard code either.

If I wanted the GAI to take in .docx files, or just first names, or to hop over to another directory and find things there, it should be able to do those things too. Basically, think of a task that you would give to a not-too-bright nephew that is in the firm for a summer internship. You'd need to give very clear instructions, but you should be able to coax him into getting some of the busy work done for you.
No one wants to address the elephant in the room, and that's that "leetcode" or "codefight" tests have nothing to do with your ability to design and build complex systems of interacting parts.

Why anyone puts a high degree of credence into these tests and whether someone can solve one in a high-pressure interview is beyond me.

Give them a take-home assignment where they can develop something similar to what they would be at the company, and decide if they wrote efficient, elegant code that's easy to follow.

Also, if you're self-taught and applying to a team of CS majors, may the force be with you. No one's more insecure than a CS major interviewing a guy who might have more development experience than he does.
a few years back I showed a phylogeneticist friend an article on that. Halfway into the abstract, this guy - normally reserved and bookish type - practically did a spit take, blurting out "jesus this thing used to be a dog!"
Wow... it's good to be a CFO. $40k to relocate and a salary 62% higher than the CEO's.
Why Did Witch Hunts Go Viral?
Apple sued for not disclosing that 'iCloud storage' relies on third-party cloud
Ok, it's against the site guidelines to post that way, i.e. with such a high ratio of indignation to information. We can have different ideas about what's substantive but that comment was flamebait in the sense the guidelines ask people not to post to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition.

It does. It is social ownership of the means of production. As a democratic socialist AOC believes in worker ownership and democratically controlled market entities. Accordingly, she is very pro-union and pro government jobs programs. The GND has many aspects of a socialist jobs program. Free trade and higher education is a socialist position as well as a welfare position. Medicare for all is socialized insurance. 70% marginal tax rate is a way to limit the concentration of individual wealth and market/political control and while it is not inherently socialist it is extremely consistent with socialist values.
Because it's a terrible user experience. They do want end users to easily find and select their preferences after all.
I've put a line in the sand that I won't do take-home projects anymore for anything short of a "dream job". They can be extremely time-consuming, and it's entirely possible that they'll decide that they don't like you anyway. If the project doesn't result in an offer, and if I don't really have a need for another "Roman Numeral to Arabic Number" converter, then the time is completely wasted.
> Do they know the difference between a unit test and an integration test?

Funny when you think of how many blog posts, flame wars, SO questions exist on the internet just to debate what is indeed a unit test, and what is an integration test :)

Who would have the legitimacy to design such an exam?
Would love to learn more, since it seems counter-intuitive — are there any studies / benchmarks on this for modern hardware? Why would a uniform mesh with, say, 10x more triangles perform better if it's not updated often (e.g. a few times a second)?
#MC is a colossal turd. Don’t go there.

source: I help keep Linux’s NMI and MCE entry asm working. NMI is also a turd, but it’s a turd that can work reliably. Not crashing due to MCE is strictly best-effort.
Sounds like a bit from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=379784
Total Annihilation for Supermassive Stars
both got tricked into thinking that their propositions somehow exist in the same domain when they do not.

This seems quite ahistorical and dismissive of a few hundred years of recent history. The domains overlap and this was a fight, both intellectual and sometimes literal that lasted centuries and for real stakes. It has now mostly settled into a sort of polite truce but calling this all a result of some sort of trick is reductive to the point of not-even-wrongness.
> The problem with take-home tests is you may have had help

I think we over focus on these scary edge cases where some trickster is trying to con their way into the job. The worst case is you just fire them when they are unable to do the work, and that's on them.

Besides, what environment discourages help? I ask friends for help with my job all the time.

The cost of over optimizing for avoiding those false positives (ie: bad candidate marked good) is a huge drop in true positives (ie: good candidate marked good). It's silly.
What do you mean by that? Ecs can work with clusters made out of ec2 instances. You need to give me more details on how are you running things now.
>> It is just people in the industry who do not know anything about AI and who recently jumped on the deep learning bandwagon, who think they are,

Yes, I suppose this is not the best way to say what I wanted to say without getting peoples' back up. I'm leaving it as it is since it's already been read a few times from what I can tell, but here's a less rash version.

What I mean is that, because of the tremendous recent success and public exposure of deep learning, many people have become interested in it who do not have a background in AI, or even in computer science, and who therefore enter the field with big gaps in their understanding of what "AI" means. That is my experience anyway.

Well, it's a shame to work in a field and not understand its history, not least the history of what has already been achieved and what has failed, and how, so that one does not have to repeat history. So it's in everyone's interest to avoid making statements with great certainty when this certainty is not backed up by long-term knowledge.

For the record, I'm a newcome to the field myself. But I have a background in classic AI, specifically logic programming, so I do know the long story.
I don’t feel that bad for the investors, or really even the employees. A lot of startup equity is worthless anyway.

But screwing over your cofounder and COO—your partner who’s been on the frontlines with you effectively running the company for eight years—that’s incredibly scummy. That’s a real psychopath move. How can someone be so greedy?
Business Debts Are Soaring Worldwide: Should You Be Concerned?
No it’s not. If you have a legit source of NMIs (e.g. if you’re running perf), it’s entirely possible for a magic diagnostic NMI to be ignored because it is I distinguishable from a perf NMI.
I'm pretty sure this is a bizarre twist where it's a founder getting screwed over with no stock, vs a "regular" non-executive.
The correct angle might be criminal negligence. It's not one or two actions of subordinates, but a trend that adds up over time or over individuals.

Actual, independent, whistle-blower programs with real protections (possibly including a backing employment guarantee at similar market rate for life as a government worker in the same / similar field) might also help for providing an independent check on the system.
It Sure Feels Like the Headphone Jack Is Dead
> assuming a huge number of perfect circumstances which is not how reality works.

I don't think there is actually an equilibrium price defined as some kind of compromise between supply and demand curves absent those circumstances, either; there's an actual price at any given time, but it's not an equilibrium (particularly, without rationality—which incorporates perfect information—you don't have any expectation of an equilibrium even if all the other factors are present, at any price.)

Once you are discussing equilibrium—as the post the grandparent addressed did—you are implicitly discussing at least some of the ideal circumstances you’d like to negate.
Well, to the extent that all rentierism is the great grandfather of pyramid schemes.
It seems you’re deliberately not trying to understand.
Haskell would beg to differ.

Arguably, all dynamically typed languages are also more complex because there are huge classes of programs that are incorrect which simply would not even compile as valid programs in C++.

If complexity is based on how likely a syntactically correct program is also logically correct, then type systems remove a lot of complexity.
Insert a line of code before that statement which validates that the variable is an integer and you're sorted. As an added bonus, check that it's in range.
UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months
This is something which is discussed in Guy Ritchie's _Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels_ anyway.
Why not just allow the configuration of your particular application against a set of alternate AWS endpoints that act like a failing instance/AZ/region?
It's interesting to contrast Vivino's strategy of breaking into crowded markets by doing "a competitive landscape analysis" versus Inkdrop's advise of getting their first 500 paid users by "Ignoring All Competitors" as discussed in a previous HN post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18216783
Sure. Up to the point where the big guys are stifling progress. I was around when the PC industry wasn’t dominated by MS and Apple and I much preferred having a lot of smaller companies producing innovative stuff. It was more chaotic and less
Convenient but much more interesting and fun.
this was on nt3.5 (or maybe nt4) but we had some smb shares that were simply public with r/w. i created a folder that i hid deep in there and in my typing class me and my friends would do 1/5 the assignment and merge them all together on this share. one time someone made a mistake and obviously we all had the same mistake and we were suspended for "hacking" even though we showed them it was just a friggin directory. they also gave us all F's for the typing class, my gpa thanked them for that....

after that i think either the CDC or l0phtcrack or one of those groups posted a way you can get to the user/groups window with admin privledges. i did that on one of the library computers which was logged in with the library account and deleted the admin group. what a shit storm that was. i was never caught for that one thank goodness.

i was a terrible script kiddie!
I had heard/read horror stories of Apple's approval process, so I was expecting a terrible experience. I had exactly the opposite; it was very smooth and much faster than I expected. (I don't recall the exact latency, but I seem to recall it was the next day.)
Because you can eliminate most applicants that way by cutting no/poor submissions
I'm really not. The price closed down quite a bit. It recovered only a little bit of its loss by the end of the day. Which means the algorithms that traded quickly are in agreement with the humans who traded slowly.
What I'm getting tired of is Hollywood films, documentaries, awards, etc. preaching to me.

Specifically nature documentaries, when I watch recent productions I get the feeling that they aren't trying to show the results of studying nature, to educate about this or that: I get the feeling that they are packaged environmentalist manifestos (look at all these cute little animals that are going to die because you don't recycle) either made to shame/enlighten people who don't do the right thing or to boost the egos of people who do good.

It bothers me because it so often feels shoehorned in and off topic. I wouldn't mind at all if it were the topic, but injecting it into every topic is the problem.

Using art as a tool is complicated. When overdone it is unambiguously wrong, when done correctly it can be a powerful good force, and somewhere in the middle is a wide grey area which is difficult to navigate.
2-Column PDFs: Writing is broken.
You can't be so wedged that you can't respond to an NMI; an NMI is the CPU stealing execution from the kernel and giving it to the configured interrupt handler. The interrupt handler is usually coded entirely independently of any state in the kernel itself, so—for any reasonable production kernel—there's nothing the kernel can do that would make the NMI interrupt handler fail to function.
Started dipping my feet in app development recently. To get an app onto an Internal track for testing purposes..you still need to get 'reviewed'. literally a hello world app needs human review that takes 3 days. That blows my brain. Not open to the web. just testers. 3 days. painful. and imo. broken.
At my school we had "net send shutdown" fights, which escalated, so you had to write defensive .bat scripts aborting the shutdown in a loop on your own PC.
I don't know if that was a real scam. It was a bit of a throw away joke from the movie, 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels'.

The guys need to raise money to repay a debt, and one of them presents this idea, which gets tossed out because it's gonna take too long for them to receive the checks.
"Do not unlock my account unless I say exactly this" literally.

The bank person was really weirded out when I said it back.
Many great engineers get pretty stuck when I ask this question; they try to do dynamic programming and unless they get lucky they get a little lost.

If I ask them to draw a picture, they get your solution pretty much immediately.

So I put this problem in the “gotcha” drawer, because it basically depends on having a eureka moment to get the easy solution.

Still fun to pull it out, but more as extra credit than as a useful interview question.
I think it also pertains to how individual deals sometimes include additional investors or other parties to the deal/transaction, e.g. the parent company partners with another local company for a specific deal and thus creates a separate LLC/LP for just that deal.
It's possible that that was part of it. But the market closed with GE's price barely recovering. Which means people who analyzed it more slowly agreed with the initial movement. Which means there is no evidence for the view that the initial movement was spurious or unvetted.
GE was founded 130 years ago, they've been through some shit and one of the most stable and well-known brands in the history of America if not the world. We're not talking about Uber here.
Sent from our WePhone
Read my comment again. White boarding increases friction in the wrong direction. Companies make decisions to benefit themselves, not the industry as a whole.

Also hiring people who are willing to work for less money is not age discrimination.
The share of global population living in extreme poverty excluding China dropped from 29% to 12% from 1981 to 2013.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-decline-without-c...

World population excluding China was about 5.8 billion in 2013 so that 17% change represents right around a billion people outside of China.
Curious to know if anyone has had any remarkably good interviews? So good that you'd actually use the approach with candidates you're interviewing?
I like whiteboarding too. It's stupid to expect people to write syntactically correct code on a whiteboard, but totally reasonably to use it to discuss a problem. I mean, that's why we have whiteboards in our offices in the first place, right?
Another data point: but I checked my LeetCode history and I actually solved this problem[1] a year ago. It's flagged as "easy" on LeetCode and I have one submission (which was accepted) but I don't even remember solving it, indicating it was probably routine. The problem also has 4809 "thumbs up" vs 177 "thumbs down" which is a strong indicator that others didn't find the problem too hard either; problems that don't match their stated difficultly get downvoted hard.

[1]: https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-subarray/
Analyzing Nutritional Buzzwords on Reddit
Ooooops I guess we're fullstack developers now
>I think we over focus on these scary edge cases where some trickster is trying to con their way into the job. The worst case is you just fire them when they are unable to do the work, and that's on them.

The whole reason for the long hiring process is that firing is hard (legally, financially, emotionally). If you're willing to dismiss this difficulty, you're assuming away the core problem.
I mean that's a fair take, and one I've tried really hard to examine, but I feel as though the questions have a very obvious answer and you either get it or don't. And to reply to that, no one actually gives feedback so you'll never actually know.

Looking at your profile, you seem well suited to be able to evaluate this, so let me give an example from an interview I just had.

Here's a problem and solution from the last interview I had:
https://pastebin.com/LyVYqLv4
That would be fair enough if there wasn't a link (Google account) that connects me as an Android user with me as a Google search user. They even could be separate companies, but they would be still tracking me as one person and selling my data together. Please correct me if that would be legally impossible.
Curious to know if anyone has had a "good" interview? So good that you'd actually apply that approach to candidates you're interviewing?
I think you can do better than the public review systems that exist today: you can authenticate the buyers, which improves the usefulness of the reviews. Your reviews cannot be stuffed by hyper aggressive sales members posing as fake customers.

And, a step above: you can show how ratings from the same buyer change over time as their price point, scale, and features evolved. (Solve for: would you rather buy a piece of software that makes you happy as hell on day 1 but miserable on day 366, or one that makes you modestly happy on day 1 but blissfully happy on day 366?)
Why is the working class responsible for fighting climate change? Why must Hollywood "challenge audiences to change their ways"? Especially when China is building 300-500 new coal plants?[0][1]

Actually, as individual consumers, the best way one can lower one's carbon footprint is to not spend money. Don't buy the brand new cars product placed in films. Don't drive to the theater, wait until the movie can be streamed. And don't buy candy or soda or beer in theaters. Use as little resources as possible.

[0] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-p...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china-placin...
> for someone who doesn't develop software at home.

Are you saying in general - or just for Windows-based software (since you mentioned needing to set up Visual Studio)?

The latter I can understand; but the former makes me want to ask, "Who applies for an SWE position who doesn't write code at home?"

I've been an SWE professionally since 1991 when I was 18; I got my first computer in 1984, and have been "coding at home" ever since. I'm not saying "to be an SWE you need a similar experience" (I know that's untrue) - I'm just relating that I've been coding for a long time, and "at home" is very much a part of it.

Then again, I've heard of people who absolutely hated coding, but were extremely good at it (and I assume made good money doing it), but when they went home, they didn't even want to think about such a thing. Maybe you are similar in that regard?

I guess I am just curious and a bit fascinated by your comment...
I just found that this scam even has an entry on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassing_cheque
It depends how much your school throwing the book at you derails your life. I agree that white-hack vulnerability discovery should be celebrated, but right now even ethical hacking can have severe penalties on opportunities available and your mental state.

This even extends into victimless[1] hacktivism. (@see Aaron Swartz)

1. This is my opinion, not a declaration of fact.