skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Waymo and Tesla have both solved the problem, in different ways, by gating the feature.

Why would they need to force Level 5? They can operate with the promise of L5 in the future, until the moment the statistics show it’s safe to turn it on.

Between now and then they can provide a steadily increasing supply of value to their customers. And steadily ramp the data they have to improve the system.

I have no idea if it will be 2 years or 10 years or 100 years before they can turn on Level 5 without a geofence.... but what difference does that number make? It’s academic. It’s not an existential question for either company’s self driving value prop.

And consider that different jurisdictions will set different dates. All it takes is one government to OK L5 in some area, and Tesla’s ass is covered. And every jurisdiction that signs on will put more pressure on other jurisdictions to follow suit.

To me, that’s the brilliance of Tesla’s strategy. They have decoupled their forcing functions from the L4/L5 legislative question. Governments can drag their feet as long as they want but it won’t hurt Tesla’s ability to sell the tech or collect the data they need to improve the tech. They are already selling autonomy features, and they can make that value prop incrementally better year over year for as long as it takes.
I realise this is tangential to the original topic, but this notion that the UK is not a part of Europe (and therefore mentioned separately) seems really weird to me. They can leave the EU as much as they want, but it doesn't change the fact that physically they're still in Europe.

Is this because of some perceived notion of cultural differences? Because if we're starting to draw lines based on that we probably need to divide mainland Europe into a bunch of separate parts as well.
Every time this discussion pops up, there's this naive idiot who thinks that because he's good at these types of interviews, anyone who isn't must be incompetent. They always without fail mention "high-pressure" situations and ignorantly assume that people with performance anxiety can't handle a completely different type of pressure. They also make the ridiculous assumption that pressure is objective. This time, that idiot is you.
Yes, that's exactly the point of pipelining.
For cities like NYC and SF I think it’s clear there is a ton of induced demand.

If housing prices were cut in half in SF you’d see WAY more people moving here.
The market will eventually shift and they will not see it as they are not in touch of reality and everyone there are in the same bubble. It will be something you can not fix with money.
Actually, a lot of values can be obtained from other, more general, values. Not everything of course or we'd all agree on everything! But I wish people would do this more often when they make arguments about rights and wrongs. Something like "I agree with X because it's a special case of Y which I hold as an axiomatic value". Instead, they just seemingly randomly decide which side their opinion falls on then try to make up random pot-shots of excuses to defend it.
False; Google wants everyone like them to keep them away from the competition.

Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.
You need to follow a pretty similar path to get good at competitive programming, which seems to be what that type of interview optimizes for. Know lots of optimal approaches to a large class of problems, and be able to very quickly identify and classify the problem you are given and apply those approaches to solve the specific problem. I agree this isn't really a good match for real-life work. I'm pretty happy with my non MFAANG job but I took up competitive programming as a hobby just so I can have options next time I want to change jobs.
A month is 8% of a year, so it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff to spend a month learning to interview instead of being paid 10-15% less.
Unfortunately Zurich may also compare on cost of living. Maybe that's all there is to it, but I somehow doubt that.
if you're having sex without kissing something IS wrong with you. ;)
... which includes gsuite, which will be most of it
Just remember that Herbert Hoover was a terrible test taker. His colleagues vouched for his brilliance because they read his previous work and thought he was a genius. It turned out he was the type to spend a lot of time revising his answers until they were perfect, so under any sort of timed test he would fail, including his entrance exam into Stanford.

I'm only sharing that factoid because I find it interesting. Maybe Herbert was a terrible engineer by today's standards. He almost certainly wouldn't be president today for completely different reasons, but would he be have been accepted into Stanford? Would he even make it as an engineer? I don't know--certainly not if we put as much weight as we do on tests.
Cleaned up my Rack and “Server Room”
It does increase the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, because for a given level of government spending, if the government gets less tax revenue from long-term owners they have to get more from newer owners.

It also increases the minimum price the seller is willing to accept for the property, because they won't sell unless the buyer offers enough to compensate them for the higher tax rate they'll have to pay on the new property. It increases the bid/ask spread on long-held properties, so that more often no transaction takes place at all until e.g. the owner dies and the property is sold in an estate sale for less than the owner would have been willing to accept if they were still alive.
The problem for a guy like Yang is that Albany is such a cesspool, it’s hard for an outsider to know what levers to pull to get anything done. But electing insiders just perpetuates the cesspool-ness, and around we go. I’ve been out of the state for 10+ years so maybe things have changed, but I’m not optimistic.
Agreed. I'm hoping the article is correct and they're working on a method to handle login/registration that doesn't require registration/linking via phone, and doesn't leave a "bricked" account.
Archiving pictures to 1000 year M-DISC
Many WordPress exploits are in plug-ins but there's still plenty in the base install (over multiple versions).

Also suggesting that "most of the web" runs on WordPress is a bit absurd. WordPress accounts for a huge portion of spam-y SEO blogs and other outright noise on the web. It's popular no doubt but definitely not most of the web.

It's popularity and porous security is a big problem as it's such a huge malware delivery vector. Everything from worm payloads to JavaScript crypto miners is served up from millions of exploited WordPress installs.
It's funny for me to see some people are still advocating Slack's "convenience". I mean I get it, Internet Chat because accessible without actually learning what a client or server is. And I'm myself in at least 3 slack groups professionally out of a total of 20...

But I just know nobody, from a variety of OSes, who doesn't experience the "bug where slack completely looses where you are in time" and then you have to scroll for a while because the "Jump to new messages" doesn't work well. I came to the point where I wonder if anybody here doesn't have that bug at all ...

A bug that kills UX like that and that we can do nothing about, not even contribute a fix, and still it seems Slack is the best product people can find, meh, I run Mattermost in my company and we're all very happy with it and don't experience as much problems as we do with Slack.

Never really been anywhere but in tech channels on IRC,
I had a few years without going back but I'm back and I love it.
The bigger point is that today allowing housing construction is a burden for cities. You hint that it would be good if all cities shared that burden.

This is especially true in California, due to Prop 13.

If we reformed the relevant rules, so cities profited from allowing new housing, I think a lot would change in this area!
Yes I realize that but having revenue without profit is kind of meaningless.
> So if Apple kept “25 years” of backwards compatibility, should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K emulator?

I don't think it's unreasonable that Apple hasn't done so, but neither do I think doing so would be unreasonable. Archive.org can emulate Apple II's in your browser, I'm sure Apple could add an equivalent feature to MacOS if that were something they cared to do. They obviously don't, and that's their prerogative.
Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.
Dan Abramov makes £100K/year base at Facebook London
Finding a job can itself be a full time job though
Interesting how negative your reaction is. Also how far off target all that anger is.

I am not selecting for a tribe, I am selecting for a job. The questions are loaded, of course. Among the many duties, the jobs do require processing large files, sometimes with cut, Python or C. I want the candidate to use the most appropriate tool as needed. I'd rather not have people implement functionality that already exists in the 'comm' command.

Of course, I want the candidate to ask me what the column separator is. That's why the question is formulated that way.

The right answer will depend on the column separator. Proposing the UNIX cut if the file is CSV is not such a good answer, but for tab-separated files, it is just fine. If the file is CSV and they tell me about cut, my next question would be if that is a good universal solution for CSV files in general.

When someone that knows about the pitfalls of using cut when parsing CSV it shows me they have indeed had experience with that.

Do you see why this question is the best... the possibilities are endless, and the rabbit hole much deeper than it may seem
On healthcare, this isn't true simply because of how drastically different approaches are across Europe. There are countries there that have something a lot like ACA, just better implemented (Switzerland). There are countries with true single payer nationalized systems (UK). There are countries where healthcare is run by a bunch of private non-profit coops for most people, but those who want to can opt out into a fully private system (Germany). These all work much better than what US has, but not all of them are paid entirely or even mostly by taxes.
There is something ironic about not being able to use Google when interviewing with Giant Search and Advertising Company...
Less is more: Bogbook and how it changes social networks
It's a distraction in that it may lead to bad intuitions about what to do, like trying to "punish" landlords in some way will somehow make up for something.
How about allowing private bus operations and privatize the MTA's?
And then, the system will adapt. There is never any problem.
Your correspondent said that I was part of "the creation of Firefox" and that's true. Twisting his words to advance a straw man you knock down does nothing to erase my role in the creation of Firefox.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1210621157201727489?s...
The common criticim against Signal is that they constantly add features that 'everyone' wants but they don't fix the problem the 'tech-savvy' people want. Signup without phone-numbers and so on.
>And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well.

I think this is a really important point.

What does it mean to be a good developer? How do we know?
>> As for someone like Mattis

But the book in question _wasn't by Mattis_. :-)

>> expressed animosity towards Amazon & Jeff Bezos

And Bezos "expressed animosity" towards Trump. Are you suggesting that WaPo doesn't have editorial independence now? Which I'm pretty sure it does not, but it might be news to you if you follow your own logic where "expressing animosity" equates to "interference".
Why ceiling is sow low in US/Canada homes?
https://zulipchat.com/

MIT Zephyr inspired. Bought by Dropbox then divested.
The simple explanation makes sense, but I'm realizing there's a subtle point here that I should been more clear on.

They might not be filtering out the bad at the expense of the good. But filtering out some of the good in the name of saving the money it would cost to develop / administer more general assessments.

That's the p(interview_capable) piece whereas the trade-off you mention is the conditional probability (also important!).
ARM, for example?

But let's assume for a second that the only relevant companies are US-based. A lot of them also hire in other countries and it is my understanding that compensation isn't what it is in the US either.
Yeah, but it's better than say London which compares on cost of living but pays abysmally.
If your textual copy past includes some requirements of conforming to a contract, or simply actual copy past of "knowledge" (which can very well also be a under the form of a big textual pattern), the mere form of "primitive copy-paste code that never calls functions and intoduces unique variables for each section" does not actually reduces coupling (except MAYBE if it is expanded down to the metal, including expansion of syscall and/or low level libraries, but you won't do that).

Also what have globals anything to do with that, and why do you put them in the supposedly factorized code. You are mistaking it with a bad mess you once saw, maybe? On the other hand, code bases obtained through copy paste based programming can not be considered anything else than a bad mess.

But yes, factorizing can be done badly, even to the point of being counterproductive. Like anything.
This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing.

Before joining, I had endless enthusiasm for computer science and programming. Now I feel so unenthusiastic that I question my future in this industry.
This is anecdotal, but most of the people I know at Google and other FAANGs did not spend that much time preparing for their interviews, if they even bothered to prepare at all...
> ate jelly beans off someone's desk.

Bush might have been President but this was Reagan-era stuff.
Yeah, once you're in, it's cushy, for sure. But that's not the full story. You're likely going to have to move to the bay area to make $400k kind of money. Are you willing to forego living near family, friends? Plenty of people do, but time gets more valuable when you have less of it left.
Yeah. Every one of my past employers has been acquired and my old organizations picked apart and my old managers ended up who knows where.
I only said it that way in an attempt to be clear because they left the EU (and I’ve heard people use Europe to mean EU).
Having employees doing the bulk of the work helps, I'm sure.
New supply in housing shortage area is expensive, for the same reason old housing is expensive there: THERE IS A HOUSING SHORTAGE!

Therefore, if you say it's bad to build new housing if it will end up being expensive, you're really saying there should be no new housing built during a housing shortage...

I find it's often better to think it terms of number of homes and housed people than in prices. If 100 new apartments are built, it's hard to say what will happen to prices exactly. But it's undeniable that there will be 100 more homes, and 200-300 more people can live indoors in that city, than without the project.
Really makes me sad to see startups trying to compete with the same talent profile as google: as a small company you need every edge and chasing after the same candidates receiving fat offers from FAANG is not the way.
In regards to the Tosh quote, how many people at FAANG companies are using most of these tested skills in their day-to-day jobs, ever? This isn't about testing useful domain knowledge (except for the handful of people working on core algorithmic problems).

To a point these questions are an intelligence test but I see them mostly as a form of gatekeeping, seeing how many hoops people will jump through to land a job there. Most decent coders COULD pick up the knowledge to pass but not all of them want to, need to or are willing to grind through the test prep stuff just for the chance. And filtering for THAT has value because people won't grind through the process are less likely to hack it being smaller cogs in these behomoths.

I think the biggest value of the leetcode process is to rub off competent programmers who need to feel like their code is meaningful. Obviously many people produce meaningful code at FAANG corps, but working at a huge company means your code has a decent chance of never see the light of day or get chopped after 2 years, or be thrown out in some new broad initiative...

It is an effective filter for finding people who don't need external motivation to keep plugging on ahead. It is an important distinction because those types will likely flame out or start to wilt after a few projects of coding into the void.
> simply because the person receiving them believes it will

Perhaps somewhat bizarrely, maybe even if they know it's only placebo:

> In these four studies patients were randomised to receive open label placebo (pills described as "inert placebos containing no medication") plus usual treatment or usual treatment[...]

> The consistency and magnitude of symptomatic relief across these studies—performed in hospitals on two continents—suggest that open label placebo may have a real therapeutic benefit.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889847/
Its so funny, but I was with a good friend of mine who I've worked with on private projects, and we were just talking about this.

We spent a good lot of the night interviewing eachother in our own respective questions and judging eachother.

I'm a bit more senior that I like to admit, and I loved his questions. His approach was more simple questions, then go and follow up on them. This was evident when he mentioned 1 hour was not enough time for him.

I have quick fire nonsense questions that are just an entrance fee, What is SOLID, how can you prepare a unit test. Then important things (IMO) Patterns, identifying refactoring needs.

As for the questions themeself they're actually not that important and both of us tonight realised..

The questions you ask should reflect the work you EXPECT(if a senior/mid) the person to be able to do.

If you're hiring a JUNIOR I will say... The most important thing is to make sure they actually have an interest. I have been burnt hard on this.

Forget about language specifics also.. They can be learned, and as for Patterns, I am taking a step back on them because a lot of people use them without knowing it.

Our world comes from experience.. If you're willing and able to teach, hire like that, if you need some core team member quickly, hire for that.

It was easily the best chat I had with him in a long time and I hate interviewing!
I’ve got pretty much all my important friends and family on Signal now and it is great feeling private and secure.
How Covid-19 kills: the new coronavirus disease can take a deadly turn
If NPR and the BBC are just as bad as Fox News, and “fact checking organisations” (what, like Snopes?) are even worse, how exactly do you suggest that we “seek out facts”? All news sources are limited and flawed, but some really are worse than others. Dismissing them all as “bullshit” is not critical thinking, it’s whataboutism.
I think American companies generally do have a lot better comp in places like London compared to the non American software companies there.

I’m not 100% sure - I have less insight into this.
I think that makes a lot of sense, until you look at the rest of the market and that Windows 10 was a one off purchase in 2015 and still supports apps from the early 90s, with a selection of apps tens, maybe hundreds? of times more than OS X. Not to mention Apple specifically chose that business model themselves for business reasons, they get the cost benefit of not having to support older versions which must outweigh 32bit support. We can't retroactively claim that business choice is not a bad thing just because it supports their bad actions today.

Been a fan of Macs for 20 years but becoming more jaded with Apples approach to the platform.
I think you should have to physically own all the surrounding land if you directly don't want it to develop. You weren't promised anything, beyond the agency of your own plot: that's what ownership means, right? The choice do decide its destiny. If you wanted that choice for a full square mile around you, should've bought the land to ensure it never, ever was developed.

> Why should anyone who has no rights to an asset have a say in how it should be treated?

That's my point: you have no rights to your neighbors land. You property rights begin and end at the physical demarcation of your parcel. You never paid for the promise of immutable zoning laws (I would be shocked if your deed made such claims).

I may not agree with your position, but I do definitely understand the thought processes regarding it, which I did not before, and for that I am appreciative.
I use it too. It's almost always the no-brand import products that add fake reviews/solicit phony glowing reviews. Most big brands have too much to lose to add fake reviews because it would be PR-damaging news.

Even so, you have to consider real reviews to be only partially-reliable because a lot of people use their products incorrectly and give excessively glowing (or negative) reviews while ignoring reality because they may feel socially-obligated to not say something negative. And then there are hundreds of millions of specialized SKUs without any reviews at all.
I use Python and I just don't like 1-based indexed languages. I would say that a better replacement for Python(at least for backend) is Go.
This exists; invoice factoring companies make this process relatively straightforward.
I recently flagged myself as "back on the market" on sites like StackOverflow and LinkedIn.

What a nightmare process this whole thing is.

I end up with a slammed inbox, constant cold-calls from head hunters that are all dead ends, and in between all of the noise are some real opportunities where I get moved from the tech screen to the final round quickly due to my seniority.

It's like most jobs except there is a strange dichotomy between the technical screens, and the on-prem final rounds, which become more of a culture-fit type interview.

I feel like I am up against the Bob's from Office Space a lot of the time.

If anyone needs a 30+ year software engineer currently working with .Net Core 3.1 on Azure Linux and Angular 9, please hit me up.
Except for housing costs, I think it’d be a great place to raise kids.
There's a difference between selling something with a fixed cost (and a fixed value) for a fixed price and selling something which has unknown (and variable) value for a fixed price.
I don’t think those products failed due to poor engineering, google just hasn’t been great at social (if you don’t count YouTube). Other companies which use the same interview techniques are winning in those exact product spaces.
It’s $36/year. When I buy one cup of coffee I don’t automatically get another one every month if I forget to unsubscribe.

What’s hard to understand about liking something and finding it too expensive? I drove my fathers Mercedes, I loved it, but it’s too expensive.

Rationalizing everything by comparing it to coffee and thinking in payments instead of total price is how Apple is able to convince people to buy another $1000 iPhone every year.
This is just a no true scotsman fallacy. You have defined away the feeling because you deride all modern technology as derivative, even if in fact it is extremely innovative.