skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I regularly do technical phone screens at my company and it is amazing the number of people with masters degrees or very pedigreed backgrounds who are unable to solve a relatively simple problem. I think part of it is performance anxiety being put on the spot, but I have noticed that asking anyone to write java or c++ without an IDE is very akin to taking a fish out of the water.
> Some of the violations pointed out here are pretty dumb. How much does not labeling balloons as choking hazards actually threaten safety? Of course, that reflects a tolerance of rule-breaking and law-breaking that reflects poorly on Amazon.

I was surprised to see the WSJ go into detail about balloons above the toys with 400x allowed lead and motorcycle helmets falsely stamped "DOT Approved" that crack open on contact.

From an engineering perspective, however, it shows that Amazon isn't even willing to devote a minimum of resources (or is actively avoiding its duty to check). How hard would it be to query for any product with "balloon" in its title that lacks "choking hazard" in its description?
What does "mofo" mean here. Can you give us a rough estimate on the transaction rate you achieved with this setup? My own experience and all independent benchmarks I can find seem to indicate a limit of 100-1000TPS on reasonable hardware.

Note that you can "batch" up many inserts into a transaction, which gives you a high "nominal" insert rate but still only ~100 actual transactions or so per second. To see why this is not the most useful number when comparing to a database like Postgres, consider that the limiting factor in a SQLite/Posgres design are cache flushes which outweight the costs of actually writing the data, so the number of rows per batch is mostly arbitrary; using this metric you can always claim a huge insert performance by choosing a suitable N. Also, if you do the batching, you of course loose some of SQLite's consistency/durability guarantees for your writes, which is probably fine if you didn't need them in the first place, but begets the question if an embedded ACID database is the best tool for the job at hand.
Engineers themselves (in America) tend to be extremely conservative and pro-business, so they're definitely part of the problem.
Which users?
> from a privacy perspective I have no reason to be made aware of the fact that one of my old bosses who's number is in my phone is on Signal and neither should they know that I am on Signal for the same reasons (or lack thereof).

Your goal is to set up little fun secret decoder ring groups each silo'd with a handful of people so you can pretend to be spies or whatever. For this goal it's important that each silo you set up doesn't know about the others. Signal just wants to end-to-end encrypt all the messages sent between all phones. These goals conflict, and, frankly I think your goal is stupid and should lose.
For the record: I'm a husband and father of two college age daughters. My daughters game casually.

I think you misunderstood the 'timebox baby' comment. I was simply suggesting timeboxing the gaming time. And clearly communicating that with the wife (at the very least). I wasn't suggesting timeboxing baby / children / family time.

To my ear, the statement 'Everything I absolutely loved about WoW is inaccessible to me 15 years later now that I have kids and a job.' sounds like whining: No indication of any failed effort -- just lamenting.
I don't know if this is helpful, but for the introductory course in programming at University we followed an earlier edition of this free book: https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/
USPS loses about $1800 of packages from store.rossmanngroup.com:[video]
Yeah, that's the crux -- two different real words storing the same variant but having omitted different letters.
This sort of finding always makes me wonder if the issue is that there are somehow loads of programmers who have apparently had long careers who can’t program or if there is something wrong with the method of determining it?

With quotes like:

> So, as someone who spends maybe 20% of their time hiring, it’s still a very effective screen. You wouldn’t believe how many people can’t do it. People at big companies, respected places. It’s surprising.

Shouldn’t people start questioning the validity of their method?
As a software developer, I spend much, much more time reading code, trying to understand code, looking for bugs in code, and tweaking existing code, than I do writing totally new software applications. Although I agree it is surprising that many people can't reason through fizzbuzz, it is very possible to make valuable contribution to a code base in a language that you don't have the syntax for the "main" function memorized.
Author here. Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
"In 1524, Henry VIII received a box of “marmaladoo” as a gift from a Mr. Hull of Exeter. Although the name of the treat was glaringly and oddly misspelled on the box..."

Was the concept of 'misspelling' a thing in 1524? The first dictionary hadn't been published yet!
For me, personally, the way Amazon has captured me is more in the cart than in the fulfillment. Yes, it is nice to get things to my door practically overnight, but the fact that I can make that happen without typing my personal and financial information into a skeevy website that could be anywhere is the real value to me.
PayPal (...and Apple Pay and Google Wallet and Samsung Something and Venmo an Beanz and and and...) is the technology that should be making this friction go away, but it appears to be difficult to provide this without turning evil.

So, to your idea, I also appreciate the idea of one, trustworthy, site that would do all of that for me. The thing is, Amazon is that site, for the most part.
This sounds familiar. I don’t remember if my friends/colleagues didn’t want to join or what. So it might have been my fault. Still, the system seemed useless as single user.
Kind of off topic, but do you have a recommendation on a good HDMI switch? I have struggled with the crappy ones from amazon many times. The most frustrating part is that their "remotes" all seem to overlap with regular tv remote frequencies or something, such that changing the volume on the tv ends up triggering an input switch.
When I was running hiring at a previous startup, we ran into this issue often. When I proposed adding FizzBuzz to our screening process, I got a fair amount of pushback from the team that it was a waste of the candidates' time.

Once we'd actually started using it, though, we found it filtered between 20-30% of our applicant pool, even when we let them use literally any language they desired, presumably their strongest.

However, it usually only filtered fresh grads (CS students from top-10 schools). Those with previous work experience almost never had a problem.
The strangest thing about this event is how nobody can agree on what has already happened. US consumers are being hurt, US consumers are doing fine, the US economy is teetering on the brink of recession and China is steady, China is teetering on the brink of total collapse and the US doesn't feel a thing... all of these contradictory claims have been made to me by internet commenters and media outlets. Shouldn't the effects of the trade war be objective and easy to measure with typical macroeconomic indicators? It beats me as to why there are so many contradictory claims.
China's been conducting a trade war for several years. US finally woke up and now China's trying to nip any resistance in the bud. I guess they couldn't buy off the current president like they have others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_fi...
> I now consider myself one of these people.

Please don't. Do enough interview situations at companies you don't care much about to numb you down (I did); this helps with nervousness. And sometimes you find out that you don't actually mind working there, and end up being hired (I did).
As usual no one can agree what agile actually is. Is what you are doing agile? Some would say no. Some would say yes.

Someone will likely says agile is a lot of shit and someone will reply saying "you are doing it wrong" without giving any indication of how to do it right.
Agreed. I lived in the southeast valley for 16 years. At the start of it, we were fairly near the edge of the sprawl, and now you have to drive another 20+ miles to get out of suburbia. It's definitely had an effect on temperature, particularly overnight.
If mod isn't something needed for whatever their normal work is, is it a valid test? Or are you potentially throwing away otherwise good candidates because of it?
If I opened a Vim cheatsheet in a browser tab would you write me off? I do know :wq.
11 year, self taught programmer here. Chem engineer by degree.

I had to program for eng 101, engineering 280 mechatronics, and our senior design.

I'm not a programmer by degree, but I was often the only one in group projects that understood what needed to get done.

I don't know what I missed out on. I've wrote AI since college and created embedded systems.

Programming feels unlimited.

But what don't I know? Security? Faster algorithms? I don't know what I don't know.
What precious metal in a BEV?
#ruby

1.upto(100) do |i|

if i % 5 == 0 and i % 3 == 0

puts "FizzBuzz"

elsif i % 5 == 0

puts "Buzz"

elsif i % 3 == 0

puts "Fizz"

else

puts i

end

end
Using Google to deliver notifications to Android phones achieves Do Not Stand Out, an important property that it would be an "epic fail" not to offer.

If you insist, you can install a version of Signal that doesn't use this service, whereupon you will stand out, or more specifically your notifications will stand out from everything else.
Sending lots of doctors out into the world doesn't mean that they're any good.

Working for a good healthcare system doesn't imply good pay.

Getting tips in dollars instead of castro monopoly money really helps your salary in Cuba.
Not everybody is good at performing under pressure on problems that come with ambiguous artificially imposed rules that you have to guess. I remember solving a problem that involved manipulating a list. There was an improvement to my algorithm that involved calling list.sort() before performing a slightly more efficient version of what I was doing. I didn't think calling built-in sorting algorithms was allowed. That's typically one of the implicit rules, until it's not, and you just have to figure out when it is and when it's not a rule.
My last house didn't have AC but did have a basement (like many homes in Canada, although less common in the States I understand). I would just run the furnace fan which circulates the cooler air in the basement throughout the house.
I was just thinking about programming and how to get better at it today.

I think a huge crutch for a lot of people is the immediate feedback loop execution gives you. Rather than truly understand the api we’re using, I think there’s sometimes a tendency for programmers to just skim, try a function call, and see what the repl/executable or w/e does, and to roll with that. While this works for getting things done it doesn’t really improve your understanding. I think practicing programming without the feedback loops the computer provides, e.g. based on documentation and reasoning alone, is a great way to become better and more disciplined. You can do this with pseudocode, whiteboards, or even with actual languages, forcing yourself to write complete programs/features before turning to the repl instead of a piecemeal write then verify approach.
Yep. My amazon purchases are getting tougher and tougher to complete. And they are getting less transparent about who is delivering and who is responsible for defective shit from a return perspective.
I'd say it's a combination of both some unwillingness and some inability. I think the unwillingness would come more from a desire to avoid a murky, difficult to execute & resource intensive process, and not from a purely mercenary desire to sell more product. Because it would be a better shopping experience and spur more activity if there was greater trust in the 3rd party marketplace.

The inability stems mainly from the same problem large content aggregators always have. Like Youtube's filter generating false positives or false negatives for blocking content or flagging IP issues, or the filter for Youtube Kids letting through inappropriate content. It's all too much to adequately police without unreasonably high (from their perspective) resources.
I feel like I am similar. I have been reading A Mind for Numbers- How to Excel at Maths and Science by Barbara Oakley and it goes in to how to develop focus and how to learn. I find it pretty applicable to software development. It has been pretty good and something I am trying to apply. I would recommend it. Good luck to you.
If so many well paid people at big companies can't do it, maybe that's an indicator that it's absolutely not a good screen at all, that there are far better screens that can be used to weigh developer worth, and you're just so far down the rabbit hole that you can't see what's clearly obvious: once you get past the arbitrary tech hoops most developers only need about 30% of their entire skillset to be programming skill to be of great value to a business.

No one screens for understanding complex business domains, breaking risky big scope tasks down into iterative low risk steps, leading meetings / conversations where you have to rethink complex tech requirements into non-technical speak.
Outlook for Masks, Materials and Wafers
> I now consider myself one of these people. I've written and shipped a number of business applications, but have little understanding of CS concepts and was unable to complete some leetcode problems I tried a while back.

I don't think fizzbuzz == leetcode? I thought fizzbuzz was like super basic can you write a for loop type question.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

I think it's pretty common for people to not be able to do leetcode. I learned the concepts in college and usually did very well in class. I didn't even bother preparing for interviews and could still pass.

However, after working for a while I don't think I'd be able to do them anymore, or at least not at the speed which is expected.
"I’ve been working since the 90s and I never attempted to do FizzBuzz. Is it really relevant?"

So, when stating "can't do FizzBuzz in interview" I think there are two meanings: (1) Candidate attempts to do it, writes some code in language X with some (many) syntax errors and some logic errors and (2) Cannot do anything at all, i.e. candidate there's no response and the onscreen cursor does not move (usually this is a phone interview). My experience with candidates I've seen is that the ratio of (1) to (2) is about equal!

Depending on the number and the of errors, (1) could be worrisome but the issue that people generally bring up in discussions on FizzBuzz is the utter incredulity of (2).

I'm mechanically challenged and have never changed a tire, yet , if asked to do so, will make some movements that are roughly aligned with the goal, albeit may be laughable to more knowledgeable people. Ditto for cooking a simple dish, e.g. spaghetti. I think this residual knowledge is acquired by osmosis through being around people (or watching TV) doing the task.

So, the most unnerving aspect of (2) to me is that it shows that the candidate does not even has this residual knowledge about programming.
That's exactly how I felt about it. They undermined themselves rhetorically by using the number of balloon listings to increase the count of dangerous products. However, the fact that Amazon hasn't fixed even that well-defined a problem is concerning.
There is only one significant figure, saying $1M would be enough. It is an editorial decision anyway.
Unit Testing in Coders at Work (2009)
Noob question: I have some 1D conv net for financial time series prediction. Could a transformer architecture be better for this task, is it worth a try?
You shouldn't feel so bad. Leetcode problems are tough, even the easier ones, and I have 10 years experience. When I was looking for a new job last year, I could barely finish one or two of them and felt pretty discouraged. But with practice, they become a lot easier and I was knocking them out. The problems are hard because they cover an area of programming that most developers don't work with everyday. It's a separate skill set.

I highly recommend Georgia Tech's online master's program. It's ranked in the top 10 of all CS programs worldwide. The total cost of the program is under $10,000, and you can take a class part time while you're working full time. I'm halfway through the program myself, and it's definitely helped me keep my skills relevant especially since certain technologies didn't exist when I got my Bachelor's in 2008.
How many mathematicians can do long division? Perhaps we are crippled by our tools and the high level of abstraction from the basics we work at.
Read Matt Lewis and his writings on insider trading. As he would say: Insider trading is about theft. If you pickup a dollar bill on the ground, could you be accused of theft? Probably not...

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_(investments). So you can get an edge by sourcing information from various places and piecing it together better than anyone else... that's fine as well.
I thought hydrogen was mostly safe, as it inherently floats up and away.
Do you also have trouble keeping focus through the free Udacity or open courseware classes? If so, paying for classes seems like it would be a waste of money. It would probably be better to spend some time understanding why you can’t focus (lack of interest, no motivation, condition, etc.).
Everybody knows how to program!
Yes, the syntax is a problem. I'm working on it, but I have not yet found a consistent and ergonomic design of the structure editor that covers the infix notation.

All function parameter usages in function bodies are just "ordinary" links to their corresponding declarations, and it just happens that links are rendered as "-->" followed by the name of the cell pointed to by the link. Instead of the arrow symbol I could render the link with some distinct background pattern or color. I might also make the arrow shorter, I guess.
I don't believe that you are considering that President Trump is a master negotiator. It's what he's known for in the business world.

His hard-nosed deals bring profits for his investors, and massive revenue streams.

Call him whatever you will, and demean him to the world, it still won't change facts; he's an extraordinarily profitable businessman, with extreme revenue returns.

::shrug:: The proof is in the pudding so to speak. Our President's actions will prove themselves, one way or another.
I haven't seen any seen any sort of programs in my state, but it might be and issue that I'm not exactly a "non-traditional" student. I'm actually college aged,I just skipped college to jump into the workforce
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20774712
How will the Japan-Korea trade war play out?
> (...) is at least beautiful as modern WebApps.

What? In my dictionary, screenshots of "modern webapps" appear when I search the definition of the word "ugly".
What it shifts is advertising from expensive media markets with small geographical boundaries (NY, LA) to less expensive ones that have large boundaries (Kansas City, Raleigh.) It works out that, because of the large boundaries, the cost to reach each consumer is far lower.

Moreover, I'd wager that the stumps that stump speeches occur on will go to more places with more concentrated populations - there are more butts within n square miles to put in seats, as well as the most-watched news media.

My opinion is that both outcomes are preferable to stumps AND media going to half a dozen battleground states.
Agreed. It's why I think we (and I'm slowly working towards some ideas there personally) need to prioritize (micro) information sharing, sourcing, referencing, and etc.

I feel like there is too much misinformation out there for any person to be informed these days. Any effort to wade through that should be a currency worth more than gold in my mind, and easily sharable, reference-able, tamper-proof (immutable/signed/etc), and easily remembered.

Information is tough these days. We need to find ways to adapt, because misinformation seems to be winning by leagues.
This is basically just a hacker news comment, but instead on someone's blog.
My biggest problems with Amazon:

1. Sellers pretending to be legitimate brands. I’ve bought things thinking I’m buying from this brand I know, turns out it’s just a copycat.

2. Accidentally buying used products which seem to be old models. I’ve made the mistake on a few occasions buying used when I specifically wanted a new item.

Amazon has plummeted in quality but I get a feeling they don’t care. Their ultimate goal is most likely to flush out the top sellers and replace their goods with amazons own brand.
They have these issues due to corruption, greed and negligence. With recycling as with other stuff, China cheats and poisons people to make a quick dollar, decades go by and nothing changes and nobody goes to prison. Think of how many people use Chinese made pots and pans, or knives, and have no clue they’re poisoning themselves and their families just to save a few bucks by buying the cheap Chinese version.
> I only use air conditioning once or twice a year (in DC). This article was very interesting, but if you can't rebuild your home you have fewer options. Here's how I deal with it to make it not miserable.

Note that even if you can't rebuild the house, there are still steps which can be taken like interior wall insulation, replacing windows, …
Who Owns Corporations?
A lot of devs are surprised you are asking then questions. I've had architects shake and not even write a for loop on an amature level whiteboard question. It's not a computer I think is the issue. It's also sloppy and they didn't get a job.
A fizzbuzz is something in could easily write. I think I was working on some binary tree problems at the time
This also fails to point out the surprising number of developers who know their algorithms, know every "coding question" for whiteboard interviews, can copy and paste a ton of code off of StackOverflow to create a quick mockup but also still don't know how to code.

I've known some very talented developers who could never pass a standard software engineering interview but if you give them a week to create a project they'll have something to you that works.

I've also known some very talented interviewers who have never completed a project from start to finish.

I think we just need to all agree that interviewing is hard for Software Engineering and no one has a good solution for it yet. I am constantly on the lookout for someone who finds something that is both effective and doesn't waste a ton of time for both the interviewer and interviewee.
I don't think school is an especially good or efficient way to learn to program. The only way we actually have to learn how to program, is to try to do it. There are online tutorials, which can help some, but classroom instruction is not especially well suited to teaching it (it's more of an apprenticeship-style skill), and empirically they do not succeed at teaching it. The graduates with CS degrees who are able to program, mostly taught themselves how by doing it, and the concepts they learned in college are as often an obstacle that they need to unlearn in the "real world" as they are useful.
If it reduces the export of Australian coal to China, not a bad thing.
Oops, you are correct. I mis-read the spec sheet.
Also, if you don't give a shit about your customers, lead paint often dries faster, is more durable, and is cheaper than alternatives. I suspect this is a more common reason.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/worldbusiness/10...
Reading this article and these comments made my imposter syndrome just fade away! I can't imagine how a student could make it through a CS program and not be able to fizzbuzz.