skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to some acquaintances, heroin is apparently a really good drug for "crank through enormous backlog" type work.

The problems are 1) heroin is highly addictive and has an absolutely ferocious withdrawal and 2) heroin is really easy to overdose.

So, as long as you keep the heroin going, you're "good". The problems all start when the heroin stops.
> You can make 85-90% of a FANG salary

IME, it's more like a >50% pay cut. Plenty of reasons not to do FAANG, but when calculating trade-offs it's important to have an accurate view of the costs of each decision.
All of those could be applied to non-tech businesses with very minor modifications.
Do they get paid to host this? How much?
If you are troubleshooting software problems in any language (except, usually, Java), sooner or later you dig down and hit C or C++. In those cases knowing C means you can solve the problem.

There are a lot of libraries written in C, like, thousands in Debian alone. You can use them from any language, but sometimes you need to write a little bit of glue C to get that to work. Sometimes it's less painful to just write your program in C++ or Objective-C so you don't have to debug your glue C.

If you want to write a library that can be used from any language, basically your options are C, C++ (but realistically its C subset), and Rust. Getting things to work all the time is easier in Rust than in C or C++. Getting things to work some of the time is easier in C.

But for most of these things it's probably adequate to be a mediocre C programmer. Unless your mediocrity is manifested in spending a week on tracking down a bug that should have taken an hour, maybe.
I am not sure anyone mentioned it before, but in many occupations you are required to take standardized tests which you are required to renew each X years. This way if you hold the credentials than you don't have to actually demonstrate your technical skills when applying for jobs, since your certificate proves them.

And guess what?! Your diploma is actually such a certificate, at least something that's close enough. Still our industry largely ignores that for some reason.

To get to the point I wouldn't mind to renew my credentials with supplemental diplomas every X years on standardized tests facilitated by educational institutions to avoid the stupidity of the industry's current trends.
What you do sounds like a reasonable interpretation of top grading. It's also what I'm used to, largely.

Where it gets tricky is with people like who are older and have "done interesting things". I did short contracts for more then a decade and interspersed them with cycle touring. So my full work history is a thing of joy and beauty, but asking me to go through it and re-locate one person from each company, contact them, and get a reference... you've just asked me to do 100 hours work at the very least. Even leaving out the non-technical jobs only halves the number. When a major bank wanted a list of every place I've lived for the last ten years they eventually decided that "no fixed address" was acceptable.

But I expect that if I applied to you and said "here's the last ten" you would be happy with that. And FWIW I have a number of quite enthusiastic referees available on request.
> Unearned privilege?

I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code"

But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?
Do you feel that all the people who work at Facebook have the same integrity problem? Anyone who works for a company that either makes money from or provides services to companies who make money from advertising?
The Tata Nano Is One of the Cheapest Cars Ever Produced
> The second was to write a recursive permutation generator using dynamic programming which is no easy task. I got totally stumped in the moment by that one. At the end of the interview I asked the interviewer “This problem seems a little steep for a phone interview. Do you often write recursive algorithms at Payment Processing Company?” He replied “No, we don’t use recursion.” “How about permutations? When have you used those?” He answered “Our algorithms have no need for permutations. Most of the engineers here work on user interfaces and infrastructure.”

This is absolutely hilarious, and has happened to me a bunch of times interviewing at large corps. Although I wish I had the balls to do what Jared does here, which is ask the interviewer if they ever even _used_ dynamic programming on the job.

Like, I get that some jobs are algorithms intensive. I've worked in such jobs myself. On the job, I had a lot of resources to help me - access to textbooks like CLRS and Wikipedia, so that building an algorithm and coming up with it's big O was mostly straightforward. But we've never had the CEO come and say "I need a O(n) algorithm stat for this problem _text dump of hard DP problem_".
One of the best sales people i've ever worked with I found out two years in that he was a daily heroin user

Most people think of the homeless or bums when they think of heroin addiction but there are a lot of very functioning addicts out there in the corporate world
In the UK you have described Which. They've been around for years and getting a "best buy" rating is generally seen as a big deal (certainly it will get you sales).

Their website does have a lot of blogspam type content now, and whether you trust their "experts" is up to you. But for generic household goods, they're probably less biased than the average comparison site.

https://www.which.co.uk/
I can see it work for a delivery service type thing. For a few years, a large platform here just used "pizza.de".
>You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!).

...Yeah. From installing znc from your favourite package manager to having it set up and running in your client is all of ten minutes, with SSL, auto-joins, channel history and all. Is it a barrier? Yeah. Is it so much of a barrier that it would push someone concerned about centralized services and proprietary software to just give up and use Slack? I don't think so.
This book is fantastic to tackle for anyone comfortable with C at the level of K&R. A great second book on C.

And one of the few examples of literate programming one might come across!
The only true Unix column format is ascii delimited text.

Oddly no one has heard of that, the only reason why I found out about it is because I had to read in punched tapes with 7 character ascii from an experiment done in the 80s during my undergrad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter#ASCII_delimited_text
I miss the kind strangers who genuinely cared about helping others without being abrasive jerks. I learned a lot on IRC; made many new friends. This was back in 1994–98 when I was growing up in Turkey. The scene was rather small yet still full of kind enthusiasts. Sure there was some passingly “oh you’re a n00b” messing but it wasn’t toxic. EFNet and DalNet were a bit more different. Maybe less kind but still full of helpful people. If you weren’t grossly stepping out of boundaries of netiquette, you’d get treated with reciprocal dignity.
Totally depends. My team has specific domain expertise requirements so I interview transfer candidates in addition to speaking to their manager, reading their prior performance reviews, and speaking to them more casually.

There are other teams where there is little need for more formal process.
> I am 34 and an experienced coder and I literally have no stories about sorting, and I've never once wanted to sort a CSV file on the terminal.

I'm a bit younger, but have done this dozens and dozens of times.

----

A lot of one off processes are way easier to handle with a bunch of terminal commands and pipes.
You're confusing the object for the verb. The sex habit is "jerking off" not "to internet porn", and all it takes is a simple youtube search for "bonobos jerking off" to see that you're wrong.
Ha, I don't come to a complete stop, but I'm guilty of slowing down at the intersections without stop signs because I've experienced enough instances of cross traffic blowing through their stop signs. In the city I think it would probably be better if all intersections were four-ways.
An update on this after 6 hours of code reading:
I'm quite sure the code doesn't leak components of the private key when using --base parameter.
So this may be safe.

The part of the code running without --base is very complex and it would be difficult to share an opinion and I'm not sure that I understand all the sorcery (for sure the crypto people behind are very very smart)
Dear God, I wish companies were run like this. Everyone refers to these faceless "companies"...no, you are being hired by employees just like you who almost always overpay for staff. They overestimate their ability to assess talent, HR usually link their own salaries to the people they hire...it is a shitshow.

Look at CEO pay, most CEOs are clueless. They are way overpaid. Google is a perfect example, that business is a cash machine, it could be run by a ham sandwich, and they are paying people $100m+ to run it...lul. Jokes.

Btw, this also shouldn't matter. If your business relies on hiring these 1 in 1000, super-smart individuals (ignoring the fact that it is statistically impossible to actually do this if you are hiring thousands of programmers), you will fail. Every time. You get into a bidding war, and your budget depends on the intelligence of others to not overpay. If you can work out how to turn average employees into good ones, you will print money because no-one wants average employees...supply is infinite, you will never overpay (I know companies that have done this...they usually end up acquiring the companies that hire the "boffins" and fire everyone on day one).

In tech, the opportunities for this are basically limitless. It is pretty easy to teach someone how to code, the main challenge is really all the stuff you learn "on the job"...and guess what? You have a job to teach them. Why doesn't this happen? Try telling a coder he has to help a junior guy out one day a week and stop fucking about with Haskell/burning cash. Try telling HR that you want to hire unremarkable people. Try finding an executive who wants to work somewhere where they hit singles...he has an MBA you know, he swings for the fences every time. You are vastly overestimating, ironically, the intelligence of most people who work in companies (I worked in equity research for a while...Buffett's dictum of a company that could be run by a ham sandwich has much wisdom).
In Canada, campaign finance rules put limits on how much one can spend on their own campaign. The limit is higher than the limit for donating to other people's campaigns, but at 25k CAD, it is nowhere near enough to enable billionaires to buy elections or have unfair advantage. When a Canadian multi-millionaire reality TV star ran for conservative party leadership position, this happened:

https://globalnews.ca/news/3984252/kevin-oleary-conservative...

One would assume that any comprehensive campaign finance rule would have similar provisions.
Go removes so much of the expressive power that writing it after Python is a bit of a pain.

OTOH I realize that many people don't use that expressive power and are happy with copy-pasting stuff.
As someone with background in Mechanical Engineering, software interview questions as above seem so wild and absurd to me. Why would you care about someone knowing the intricacies of CSV or bash? I would expect a good engineer to provide best possible solution to your problem within an hour of googling / research. I really don’t see the point of asking such specific questions on interviews as it has no correlation with finding a good engineer. I wish software field would move closer to interview process of other engineering disciplines but it seems to be getting wilder each year.
I had to read a few times to figure out what “column-oriented” meant before figuring it out. May have not have been able to do it under pressure in an interview. If you’d said “ordered by column” I’d have understood much more quickly.

i.e. Be careful with your phrasing. That is a bias in itself.
Please do not post about outages on HN.
It is. And yet people are already doing this to themselves.

Look at the number of "Plug this in so we can track your driving continuously and we'll give you an insurance discount" apps that now exist.

People will be even happier to tattle on others.
I didn't read it as such. The point behind what I and the parent are saying is, the programmer is going to do much better at optimal memory layout than an optimizer can, and C allows manual control while languages which can mess with memory layout necessarily cannot.
Thank you for posting. I've been thinking about this lately and had trouble articulating it. I knew that there had to be some established thinking out there around this approach to design, and now I've found it!
Cops can seize Oregon woman’s $354k home following meth dealing conviction
Now this takes me back. Stories like this were relatively common back in the 90s.

Congrats!
These days, we are surrounded by so much complexity that I'm getting quite often the experience of having to delve for a week into a subject so that I can start to appreciate which solutions are the most appropriate ones for the problem at hand.
(And then a few years later I realize that quite a lot of that was still wrong, but at least I picked among the best solutions rather than the worst - see also the "getting on the latest fad" kind of mistakes...)
It doesn't have battle-tested everything and the kitchen sink like Rails. It has plenty of frameworks though. They just happen to be far more like ExpressJS for node, or Sinatra for Ruby. In this day of microservice/thin JSON API-style apps, Rails might be overkill. I'm not saying it's bad, it just might be a little much.
I left Sunnyvale (and the bay area) never looking back. I worked on Castro in MV and it was a 30 min drive 9 years ago.

For me the quality of life is so much better outside of SV.
It includes Gsuit though, I can't exactly see how that is tied to the cloud.

In fact nobody other than AWS mention pure cloud revenue.
Windows 10x runs Win32 applications
That's not a good rule of thumb since often the unique identifier you're interested in is a query arg, so if you strip of everything after the ?, you're left with nothing. like the URL above, all you'll have left is:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search
From what I've read, Google is a much more humane and pleasant environment to develop software in.
The incredibly secure would tell you to take your process and shove it. I'm not sure to what degree "bright" and "secure" correlate. I suspect that they may do so eventually, but I think many bright young people are still insecure with respect to jobs and employment.
Not quite. The first transatlantic cable was in 1858, but it could send only Morse code, and just barely. The first transatlantic telephone cable wasn't installed until 1956. Until then, transatlantic calls went over short-wave radio. The holdup was developing tubes with a long enough lifespan to be used in an underwater cable.

The first transatlantic dirigible flight was in 1919. The first transatlantic aircraft flight (Lindburgh) was in 1927.

Steel at low cost was an amazingly late invention. The Romans could have built a Bessemer converter. Now that would have changed history.
I have thought of this kind of things, but for a different reason, which is hardware and software design to prevent the detection of VM and sandboxing (and stealth debugging) (if these options are enabled and configured by the end user). This also has the advantage to ensure that if something changes in a newer version which the software does not expect, it can be configured to emulate the older version perfectly, too.
I called BS with a recruiter on an interviewer who was being a dick. But that was the one who made the offer :)
Why? It probably has to do with the two most recent acquisitions, Looker and Appsheet. They both go into GCP and I bet there's a bunch of folks there working on Data Studio and whatever equivalent of Appsheet they had before that need to find themselves a new job. I don't understand the negativity about this non-news.
I agree. Me too. Robin Hanson, the author..agrees that it is controversial. And he certainly has some appalling viewpoints : https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Robin_Hanson

Parallel discussions in his twitter account going on now. I too would like to see arguments against his proposition.
> If you have set-based lists, you don't need "fall through" behavior because you can have more than one item per matching expression.

This is not entirely true. Ranges and sets allow you to run the same code for different inputs. Fallthrough allows you to run partially the same code for different inputs.

It's a rare case, so I don't think its utility warrants making fallthrough behavior the default. But it's nice to have it explicitly, like "goto case" in C#.

Anyway, the reason why it is the way it is in C, is because case labels are literally labels, and the switch statement itself is just a branched goto - which is why e.g. Duff's Device is a thing. And that, in turn, is probably because it's a descendant of "switch" in Algol-60, which was basically an array of labels.
Power laws are brutal. In every codebase there's always ~1 person who actually does all the work. Imagine if everybody you hire/retain is that 1 person. For as woke as they are, big tech corps are still very competitive. Almost Randian. This is why I laugh whenever I hear about unionizing.
The beginning of the trial was 2010 or so, so if Android earned Google 23B in 5 years, I imagine it's earned multiples of that in the 10 years since.
Or simply: Self-driving cars turned out to be just as hard as we thought they would be
It weighs several megabytes and downloads and runs scripts from multiple domains. All to serve a text page.

God's sake it even has its own reimplemented loading bar...
Yes, I unironically want 4 million new homes in San Francisco.

The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.
> Getting things to work all the time is easier in Rust than in C or C++. Getting things to work some of the time is easier in C.

I think this is a good generalization of the learning curves of the languages, but not necessarily productivity for an experienced developer. Rust has modern amenities like pattern matching, generics and a package manager.
I did that for an interview for what is now my employer. It was via Skype with a shared code editor. The interviewer asked me to implement a data structure that I had not used (directly—I'm sure plenty of libraries I use utilize it) since college, and I said as much. I told him I was quickly looking it up on Wikipedia, skimmed the article (mumbling to myself, I'm sure), and then proceeded to implement it. My candor and ability to quickly synthesize information on the fly must have reflected well on me, because I ended up getting an offer.

This wasn't at a big name tech company, though. From the sounds of it, most of those places don't give interviewers nearly as much leeway as mine had.
So there are companies corresponding to that "tech bro" cliché ?
I took that part out. I don’t really know what is in other people’s minds.
That's not induced demand, that's a standard demand curve. The price drops and more people buy it.

Induced demand is "adding supply increased the price"
I'm not sure that $5000 would count as significant revenue (I'd prefer an extra zero on that) but I suppose it's reasonable that if you earn enough from Delphi to pay for it, you should.

I can't find the new pricing on the website (everything is free trial / request a quote) but I remember the last time I saw pricing it was so much that I opted to kill the one Delphi-made product I had rather than upgrade. I'm using Xojo instead for my cross-platform RAD development now.
>If you care about these issues there's a lot of rules lawyering you have to do to be sure your code isn't going to break if the compiler is cleverer than you are.

>A modern take on C should be much more explicit about semantically meaningful memory access.

If you are working on concurrent code close to the hardware you’re going to either have to accept a less efficient language or engage in rule lawyering. Unfortunately, granting the compiler license to perform the most mundane optimizations interferes with concurrent structures. Fortunately, with C there are rules to lawyer with, and they actually are simple. No matter what, rules will always need learned.
Angular 9: Top New Features and How to Upgrade
Okay thanks, Thatcher.
> and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

Eh, there's a lot of us who haven't done great financially but who have written a lot of open source code being run at bigcos. Being an entrepreneur requires another skill set altogether. One that I seem to lack, although I finally have come up with a solid idea in the last year that might get me somewhere whenever I'm ready to make the move.

I'm sure if I spent significant time preparing, I could do well at Google's interview process, and other FAANG companies have tried multiple times to get me to interview (oddly, never Google), but I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me. I've been much happier working for smaller companies. The one time I worked for a large corporation years ago, I was miserable. People say Google is different, but I'm not convinced.

I would like that sweet compensation, though.
Yep it is no measure of success. I look at what people have done, that should tell you more than anything
I suck at those interviews but here's a few real life job situations I've been in:

- sitting at my desk with the board of directors on speakerphone. They asked questions, I wrote SQL to find answers, while they tried to come up with a way to stop the company going bankrupt. Small company, I was basically the one guy who knew how the database linked together.

- sitting across the hall from a room full of support people while they went completely insane trying to answer the phones, and I tried to stay cool and calm while peer-coding with two others trying to get the system back up and running.

- having literal truckloads of garbage sitting in a queue while I debugged software that linked number plate recognition systems to a weighbridge and boom gate.

- being "that guy" who kept pushing for an early performance test. Eventually we did one. It went spectacularly badly. Some people wanted to blame me, because I was the one responsible (for the test).

In other words, being able to cope with "completely unexpected interview questions" and being able to cope with "code I wrote has gone wrong" are different skills.
The sensory shock of frigid rivers and (gasp) nature and dirt to teenager or adult addled and pampered by modern life will impart at least some powerful impression.

At the least this won't do harm, at best it provides visceral context above what a boring textbook could provide
I was getting two calls every day from a number without any name. Every single day morning and evening even on weekends.

After months I answered and it was obviously a call center but it was from my bank. I'm in Canada and TD spammed me with phone calls for months every day just to ask if I wanted a travel credit card.

Even supposedly legitimate calls can be annoying and stupid.
Actually, he was trying to get me past thinking that way. It all got started when I was trying to figure out RGB colors for some computer display.
https://xkcd.com/32/
I really, really want to see Crystal succeed. I've been playing with it over the past few weeks. Since it is so Ruby-like, it's the first language I sat down and pretty much immediately knew how to achieve most of my goals. And having Spec (RSpec-like testing framework) made me nostalgic. I hope to see a critical mass grow behind this one.