skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Inc. is cutting jobs? Is this actually a move by automation’s machinic desire to displace human laborers or human capital? Pieter Levels, an expert in startups, said that “Netflix wants to have less employees, but each one now paid higher. For example, they'll pay one million dollars per year for one engineer instead of paying $300,000 per year for three engineers each.” This is actually making me anxious to the point where I’m trying to pick a skill to appease a machinic desire’s new and progressive, if a little anti-anthropocentric, labor production power and capital market demands so that I can satisfy a certain power-law probability distribution function’s optimization.
Maybe some people do that - I didn't do a single interview question prepping for a Google interview; just read through the topics they suggested reviewing, looked up the concepts I hadn't seen before, and did the interviews.
> In the Downtown Brooklyn area, the argument for the BQX is a strong one.

Downtown Brooklyn ("DoBro" if you're a millennial real estate agent) is already the most well-connected neighborhood in Brooklyn by a huge margin.

Also how can you write an article like this and not include a map?
Knowledge is a prerequisite for wisdom. Wisdom is up next.
I think FAANG has too much money, so they try to solve all problems with money, which could otherwise be solved with better planning, allocating more time, changing the mindset and/or better understanding the problem at hand. That might explain why they pay hire salaries than the rest of the industry.

I don't think that there is necessarily a causal relationship between the salaries and the competence, but that line of thinking is common in those companies.
Isn’t it up to the interviewer to ask a useful question? This is exactly how I would find the kth item of a search tree. I don’t feel like that is refusal to engage. Is the question is more like “describe various approaches to the designs of search trees and their iterators, and discuss the time/space complexity of a few examples” then that’s a different question.
Was it general and polished enough to get traction though? What’s its name?
Don't sell search results?
I find that one dubious. I experienced an ad labelled link in the middle of the actual search results. I wanted to screenshot it bad but it was in incognito. Weirdly, bing also does this on incognito, they apply different styles at least on mobile. It might be an A/B test but I have my doubts.
Cynically: it means that there are a bunch of jobs that people want and that are hard to get, and the people who didn't get them don't like the process that rejected them.

There's no world in which there is an elite (e.g. FAANG) tier of employers who reject most applicants and one in which no one complains about their hiring.

That doesn't say anything about whether the hiring process is good or bad, obviously. But that is what it says about the industry.
I don't think people understand that when you work at scale, efficient data structures and algorithms actually matter. I doubt there are many positions in Google that don't fundamentally require the ability to understand both.
I definitely agree with all your criticisms of the memory semantics in C, and I would love a language that fixed these flaws, but the "ideal" low-level language is still a lot closer to C than it is to anything else. I also think that C, being low-level, is much better poised to deal with experimental ISA designs than higher-level languages. For instance, one mechanism of manual cache control could be that you set bit 63 in a pointer to indicate that loads/stores from should place the corresponding cacheline in a high-priority. That's pretty trivial with a pointer in C, but a lot harder with say a C++ reference.
If you're looking for rooms with high activity, I put together a list of the top 30
busiest IRC channels I'm in by sorting my logs by size (descending) [0].

The command that generated the list:

grep -v -c '(\-\->.*has joined|<--.*has left).*#' $WEECHAT_HOME/logs/irc.*.[#]*.weechatlog \
| tr ':' ' ' \
| sort -n -k 2 -r \
| sed -e 's#.*irc\.##' -e 's#\.weechatlog##' \
| grep -v "#channel-i'd-rather-not-show" \
| sed 30q \
| curl -F 'clbin=<-' https://clbin.com

[0]: https://clbin.com/9fcdI

Archived paste: https://archive.li/4OMf3 and
https://web.archive.org/web/20200215033709/https://clbin.com...
Been through that one time, I should do more of those and just sing Merry Christmas for fun, ideal for wasting time and potentially lighten up the day of the other person who had to watch/listen to these nonsense.
It is absurd to think that any more than a small fraction of the 20+ thousand engineers at Google are "exceptional". When you get to those numbers you are just seeking warm bodies to push buttons.
It is nuts that two 100 year old billionaires are trying to become president by out-meming each other. Can’t wait to wake up from this alternate reality
Very interesting feedback. I appreciate your time detailing the answer.

I really like what you have done, it's a beautiful project from a mathematical perspective and the crypto code your team has wrote with GooSig is impressive.

I enjoyed reading what you wrote and this made me think a lot about integer factorization, prime numbers discovery, etc, and even found cute comments in the past commits
(that one made me smile: https://github.com/kwantam/GooSig/blob/dc9a197c3574127aa37e8... fortunately it's not there anymore).

Thanks for sharing zkSNARKs too!
There are a lot of HN appropriate lessons in his CED series. Especially the one about being on time to market: if the CED hit the market before the VCR or laserdisc did, it might have survived, or even possibly kept RCA alive. Or the stuff about using tried and true methods instead of the fancy new tech of the day.

My parents recently moved into a smaller home, and ... deacquired a bunch of their furniture by way of my house. In the shuffle I ended up with a bunch of my parents' old records. Being susceptible to impulse buys, I bought a record player. I actually really enjoy the experience of playing records. There's something about the physicality of it. I can't just press a button on my phone and ignore it. I have to choose what to listen to next. I have to physically flip the record twenty minutes in. It's not purely a background thing, it's a physical process and experience. Music has gone from something I ignore to something I participate in.

I'm not actually sure that's in any way relevant to the conversation at hand, but when I started ranting, I felt it was.
etcd didn’t work initially; I wouldn’t call it polished.

https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul
> but they run a lot of my code in production :P.

We run your code in production too! Thanks!
Nice work, I learned just from your post.
NRAO, SETI Institute Agree on New Research Programs
True, but if it is still possible to be a C programmer who can more or less imagine what assembly will be generated (at lower levels of optimization at least) by their C code, then isn't the real issue that x86 assembly abstracts away a lot of hardware info about caches, pipelines, microcodes etc? In that case how can a low level exist on x86?
So the existing homeowners on retirement income/stuck in a job that pays a certain rate who can't afford the raised tax rates get kicked out to the street?
"nation state" in the infosec industry means "sovereign government". Yes, it's wrong and it's very unfortunate, but it seems it's too late to change, though Maciej Cegłowski has been trying for about a year [1].

1 - https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1121893376557633537
You mean there is any other reason to work at FAANG other than compensation? I find that hard to believe except for truly exceptional outlier cases.
It depends both on your current background and your goals.

What's the highest level of math that you know so well you could walk into any classroom and teach it? For many, it's been so many years since they've had to use anything from even middle school algebra that they might have to start there.

Make sure you're building on a strong foundation if you wish to build something grand that persists.

You want to find the highest level that feels too easy, and then gradually increase difficulty from there.

You can use sites like Khan Academy to find that point. Alternatively, you can just embrace the fact that you may be overconfident and work through books that seem "below your level" just to verify that you really have mastery over the subject matter.

You could spend a year or two going through the Art of Problem Solving books which cover pre-collegiate math at a deeper level and use SRS like Anki to schedule review of concepts and problems you've understood and solved.

At the college level, assuming you're a programmer, the first subjects to master are probably how to write proofs well, calculus in single and many variables (e.g., Spivak followed by Hubbard and Hubbard), discrete mathematics (e.g., Rosen or Epps), linear algebra (e.g., Strang, Axler, Shilov, etc.), and statistics and probability.

Hang out on math forums like the math subreddit and you'll see many books recommended over and over again.

Be sure to examine the preface and introduction of any book you're thinking about buying. They usually include a section on the intended audience and what their background should be to productively engage with the text.

The most important thing is that you solve or attempt to solve many problems, and avoid looking at the solution until you've really spent a good deal of time banging your head against the wall trying to figure it out. How much time you should wait scales with the difficulty of the subject (e.g., less than an hour for high school level material, a week or more for advanced undergraduate level material, etc.).
My company does a takehome project, but are completely understanding if dependencies don't work on different systems.

Basically, if the code looks right and you can show it working on your system, we're pretty understanding. The goal of a takehome isn't perfection - it's to demonstrate underlying abilities.
How about putting a small tariff on every phone call originating from countries that do not shut down these fraudulent call centers? The tariff perhaps could be as small as 2 or 10 cents per call to make these operations unprofitable. I'm sure that the telecom operators in the foreign country could easily track down (or already know precisely where to find) the call centers. Once the fraud falls below a threshold the tariff can be removed.

Punitive tariffs, quotas, bans get applied to every kind of product -- counterfeits, contaminated foods, polluting vehicles. I never heard any government agency suggest applying it to countries that are the overwhelming source of scam calls.
Lol doctors change jobs and get jobs with relative ease compared to us software engineers. They go work part time at this clinic or that clinic quite frequently.
Your points a) b) c) is good (and so is the part at the beginning about server vs client, which is what I mentioned too in my other comment here), but I may also add: d) do not make too many extra requests or large requests.

(It is also my opinion that client side code should mostly be avoided, or sometimes optional. There are cases where it is needed, but for ordinary documents it isn't needed.)
> It is traditional to write down four Maxwell equations. However, by using Clifford algebra, we can express the same meaning in just one very compact, elegant equation:

> ∇ F = J/(c є₀)

Holy. Shit. Is this for real?
The kind of stories that makes into HN Front page these days is deplorable. High time to write a filter of my own.
What qualifies as a 'colleague grade' peer? Do they need to know your specific set of technology choices and be able to solve problems specific to your business during an interview that has essentially developed as a skill by those working with your group for a long period?

Technology is so diverse anymore and so dependent on specific sets of technologies a business chose mixed with internal work tailored around a specific business and its processes/problems that I think it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to walk in and solve the specific types of problems under the specific constraints any arbitrary group is faced with--especially in the span of an interview.

All these factors mix to make very unique problem spaces. Factor in that positions evolve by folks who formerly filled a role and that their specific set of skills are likely unique. You should be expecting to train people from the start to some reasonable degree unless the role is doing incredibly vanilla work (in which case I find it hard to believe there aren't qualified candidates).
It is actually pretty well known that the second way into FAANGs is through acquisition.
I have to upvote this with the hope that better educated and more eloquent persons calmly and rationally shred this argument. I'm just going on a feeling that mutation makes the idea silly; but i feel there's also a "contempt for life" counterargument to be made.
Free speech in Canada - like most other fundamental rights - is gutted by the "notwithstanding clause" in the Charter.
I am just saying that input should be taken from a population that represents the city by moving away from a process that biases input
> I'm going to work somewhere, it's going to be because I want to be with those people, working on those problems, and having a big impact.

There are teams in FAANG that are like that. And I'm going to say mine, as we're a new team building a top level public service for a very large cloud company. It does mean sometimes there's lots of work though.
Ask HN: What are some similar to Hacker News websites?
Hello HN community, what are some similar to HackerNews websites? Obviously, no website can ever replace HN - but its useful to know more good websites. Please post any website similar to HackerNews (HN) only please. Name/Link/Description. Thank you for your help!
What? Startups are the worst at cargo cult interviews, they think they need to copy the big ones when they often don’t.
What you want is Google Hangouts but, unfortunately, nobody uses that.
More feedback, if I understood it right: if you extract the findNonces function, dump the 1500 files of 512 bytes, transfer them to a machine that has the ssh private key, then you should be able to sign without risking anything (encryption is RSA-OAEP), because your private key wouldn't touch the software.
What worked for me, after my boss just put up a stock ad and got hundreds of replies then decided that they couldn't cope and handed the problem to me. First spam all the applicants and say terribly sorry there's been a transition in the team and now I am in charge. Enclose copy of new ad, in email emphasise that I have tier CV and want ~100 words explaining what they understand about the job:

- ask for a very specific thing in the cover letter. In our case, which version of the specific IDE they were familiar with.
- specify that we care about relevant skills, and having the legal right to work here. nothing else.

Of the 50-odd responses who survived a 10 seconds each filter (ie, did you answer the question), I skimmed the CVs and picked 10 I liked and 10 more I thought would be ok. I did this via a 5-bucket sort - as I read each email I dragged it into a numbered folder. Then I created folder 1a,1b and put 10 in each. Sure, that's about an hours work but it's easier than doing an online test and trying to make it non-gameable.

Interviews were a five minute chat then we dumped them in front of a computer with our development setup on it, and a series of programming tasks. Starting from "this button. Make it so when the user clicks it a dialog pops up saying 'click'" and going up to "there is a memory leak in this ~100 line command line program. Find it and fix it". They were asked to talk me though what they were doing, and while most problems followed each other from the same based, they started with a "perfect" solution to the previous ones at each step so that we didn't deviate too far.

I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the "brown M&Ms" question was, and how predictive the series of programming tasks was.

https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9
The phone system seems pretty absurd. Just the fact that we can't trust originating phone numbers seems odd. There's lots of good ideas to go around, and there's so much in internet technology that could be applied to the phone system, but I'd love to read an article on why its hard to update the phone system.
This was definitely true at a past job which happened to be a fantastic place to work. The HR recruiting team was well-liked by the executives and run by a founding member of the company (so had a lot of power and autonomy). But they absolutely tormented us with things like not telling us a candidate had canceled until right before the scheduled time (we could find their emails in the recruiting software from hours or days earlier), scheduling individuals for multiple interviews simultaneously because they didn't care about our time so put it on us to find someone else to help, and occasionally forgetting to book a conference room forcing us to scramble and generally look bad.

The only satisfaction we got from the whole situation was reading the furious reviews the candidates would write on glassdoor.
Lol that’s amazing, you should write an article on this
As the GP says :
> The archetypal software engineer is socially disengaged, anti-structure, and highly idealistic.

This kind of person would probably refuse a FAANG / GAFAM job, even if asked for it!
>what is not well received is the judgmental tone, passing judgment about me for things you cannot possibly know

But this is the irony---a job interview is a judgment. Why do you think feelings on this run so high?
There are two aspects: balance sheet and status.

Felix Dennis, an actual billionaire, called it the "point at the sky" theory of wealth creation. It's really a form of cargo culting.

On the other aspect, there are a number of what Thomas J. Stanley call "gold collar" workers: young, singles who often live at home but make relatively good money and so tend to buy things they cannot afford like used Lexuses, BMWs, Mercedes, etc. He even wrote a book about it "Stop Acting Rich."
An O ring, just took a few minutes from your life when it malfunctioned. It took a few more mins when you had to search and place the order.

It took some more when you received it and fitted in your blender.

If it did not do its job well enough then you will have to go through this cycle all over again.
I have gone through that hassle enough times to hate it, even though amazon tries to be as helpful as possible.

That there itself is worth 5 stars or atleast 4.

Beyond that not all manufacturers care about our satisfaction. If some one does and wants to improve, it should be appreciated
I feel like you can get a descent amount of wisdom with the right youtube playlist

But an interactive tutorial would be better!
HQ was a daily part of my life for a few months in my last year of college. It was pretty cool way to get a large group of friends together twice a day.

Building software to assist in answering questions and win was fun too ;)
Open Datasets for Data Science Projects
That’s irrelevant though. I run OS X on kvm, people run hackintoshes. There’s no technical limitation here, never has been, it’s a business decision.

Apple obviously isn’t beholden to the licensing terms that they release OS X to their consumers under.

If they want to run OS X on commodity hardware they can, and moreover it doesn’t change their positioning to the outside at all.
Massively parallel Baby Processing Units (BPUs)
What if one of your ancestors cheated on their spouse? Isn't that possible?
The C ABI is still king.
We have been bootstrapped and funded by institutional investors that allows us to function freely from being in the "unnamed but big review website starting with Y" business model. Ethically speaking, I personally would never support that as it goes against our mission as a company and what we are aiming to build here.

We actually get consistent DDoS attacks which are coming from angry e-Commerce sellers that have dismal grades on Fakespot, and that is occurring ever more frequently.
Like some other posters, you're thinking speed where responsiveness is more about latency.

Even an ancient pre-electronic planetary automatic can be built to shift faster than a human can row gears. Drag racing guys have been doing it forever, to the point that most performance car communities will have a "fastest <x>" and a "fastest manual <x>" if their vehicles were offered with both. Due to shift speed and a few other reasons it's just assumed that a properly set up automatic is going to be faster on the drag strip as long as the vehicle has enough power that the parasitic loss is negligible.

The responsiveness problem comes when you want a downshift and the transmission wasn't expecting it. It takes time to respond, even a DCT has delay in some cases, where a manual transmission is mechanically connected to the driver and thus has effectively zero lag other than whatever tolerances may exist in the various linkages.
https://outline.com/38xHGT
They definitely did you a favor.

You have demonstrated solid debugging skills and stated your case. That's usually harder to find than someone who can churn out code based on simple and well-defined specs. Because that's the easy part.
I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all.

Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image.

Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?

Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.

I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.
The problem with trying to cure this security model is that once an extension can rewrite page HTML, it can inject transmission of your data to a third-party, and so any addon that affects pages (such as this one) is correctly labeled as "can access your data", because it absolutely can.

To make any headway on this, you would need to start considering how to prohibit JavaScript from transmitting page content to remote servers if it's been modified by an addon, but that would then break all JavaScript modified by adblockers, and so there's not any easy solution there either.

If you can think of a valid security model here that isn't vulnerable to today's arbitrary JavaScript execution issues, I think you'd find a willing audience. Chrome tried to solve this by nailing down what extensions can do, and the adblockers all flipped out because they won't be able to run arbitrary JavaScript in-page anymore. It remains unclear how this can ever be solved.
well done! I didn't know you could do that.
This site is top notch, thumbs up
"Startup" and startup are two very different things. If the office has a ping pong table, run the fuck away.
Hands, lips, tip of tongue. "Mouthfeel" is as important to taste as flavor. Lips aren't for tasting either, why so many nerves? https://www.quora.com/Which-is-most-sensitive-part-of-the-hu...
I also need a TL;DR version of this story, is there anyone evil? The Dr.? Or all are innocent?
I wonder how long until Windows switches to the Linux kernel.
Sounds like poor internal communication structure to me then.

If the recruiter is from a third party it's a bit more forgivable (though I have gripes about this approach in general). I'd contact the company directly if I was working through a third party that stonewalled me. It's usually pretty easy to find recruiters public facing profiles to figure out how closely (if at all) they're connected to a given business.