skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Editors are absolutely looking at page view metrics, “resulting in the creation and promotion of content that does little to augment informed discourse and is glaringly lacking in news value.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21670811.2018.1...
Knowing how the system works and how 5 stars are expected, the way I look at Uber rating is all drivers start with 5 stars. A good enough journey gets that. But stars will be taken off if things like the car is dirty or they drive dangerously etc. It starts at 5 starts, not has to earn them.
https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-15-list-of-feb-art...

Interestingly, i wrote a brief paragraph about this as well. Thought to share with the community. Long story short, just work at it. Be comfortable with you not knowing (:
I feel the need to nitpick your example.

> does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head

Piping together commands is undoubtedly programming, just in ancient shell script. So in a sense you're really testing for bash expertise. Which is maybe really relevant to you but I wouldn't say you're really "avoiding" coding by knowing to use those commands together, you just decided to code it with obscure shell commands. I might fail your test by choosing to write that sort of thing in python, because I could write it much more reliably in 10 minutes than deal with all the incredibly weird things that can happen in bash. I mean the final product in bash might be slightly more elegant, but your terminal history is probably littered with "man cut" and various attempts at it.

But for your example, my answer might be: if you're querying this file once, you may be querying it again, it's probably just way simpler to load the thing into sqlite instead of trying to imitate sql with some janky unix commands.

> everyone with real work experience has a story about sorting.

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.
Obfuscated code is not allowed on any of the browser extension stores. Mozilla requires the attachment of the original source code if you use a bundler such as webpack, or if the code is minified.

Only reviewers have access to the source code, unless you configure the listing to make the code public.
You missed AMP.
Twitter uses what they call top grading, but really isn't, it's just a 1 hour reverse chronological set of questions through the most relevant/recent of your work history, asking the same set of defined questions for each role you had. Really just a structured way to understand your history in a consistent way. It basically the same as asking someone about their work history, but in a structured way.

It is absolutely definitely not the actual top grading of multi hours of interviews , phoning references etc.
> "The system is currently capable of making two-centimeter structures with a precision of 80 micrometers, "

Ok, fine and dandy but then:

> "Interior design could be a potentially lucrative market for the new printer."

... I guess these people are really into the "tiny houses" thing.
What you're saying is that price isn't the problem, scarcity is the problem. Price is just an inevitable consequence of scarcity – the symptom, not the cause.
A few months ago I interviewed with Major CDN Company for a front-end dev position. They sent me a take-home React/NextJS project stub with dependencies and such already defined, and instructions to finish building out the full app. "Perfect!", I thought. No stage pressure, plenty of opportunities for going an extra mile. They encouraged me to get creative and I did; it met all the requirements and then some. I proudly submitted it.

A few days later I got an email saying, "Sorry, we're going to pass. The feedback from the person who reviewed it said that, 'It crashed with res.flat() is not defined when we tried to run it'".

"That's weird", I thought. I assumed they were running it in a different browser that lacked Array.flat(). Annoying, but maybe browser compatibility was part of the test (it hadn't been stated as such). So I did some digging just to be sure; I asked what version of NodeJS they were using. Version 10. Turns out that version of Node is somewhat old and doesn't have flat(). Huh. Dug some more.

.flat() wasn't even called in my code.

The stack trace went down into NextJS itself. They had given me a project with a particular dependency declared and then run it in an environment which was incompatible with that dependency, and then immediately punted it without any further debugging. I tried to engage my contact via email, presenting the proof that it wasn't my fault. I got an icy "Thanks for your feedback, we'll forward it to our hiring team", followed by silence.
One company said I had to make a video of myself..and then the final interview would be singing a song of my choice in front of the entire company through video conferencing.

This was for a software engineer position. I didn't even bother going on the interview. I feel like the purpose was to see what they could get you to do.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Warning Heavy Cynicism Ahead -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I've worked at my current job for a long, long time now. Every year or so I decide to peak my head out from it and test the job waters. I get nearly the same set of 4 outcomes each time. I have over 7 years of experience with everything from front-end development to sysops, devops, and management. I've built entire companies by myself in months. Albeit buggy ones.

I bloody hate interviewing.

Outcomes:

1. I get rejected for messing up a programming fundamentals question. Which, honestly stings because, yeah, I should probably be more informed. But, currently, I ain't got no time fo dat. I'm too busy solving a bombardment of problems like: "Hey, programmer X quit, I know you don't work with X language at all but we need this fixed, yesterday".

2. I spend a bunch of my precious time writing a fully functional code test, to be inexplicably rejected. Maybe because I didn't write unit tests? Maybe because I didn't use doc blocks. Maybe I didn't make the code reusable enough given their imaginary scope. Who knows.

3. They're super excited to hire me for a position I am not at all qualified for. Usually for a ridiculously minuscule salary. I had a company ask me, after spending 2 hours on a phone interview, to build and run their development shop. They wanted to on board 50 employees by my 6 month mark, and completely dismantle their overseas workforce.

4. I'm just plain ghosted.

I'm absolutely sick of potential employers asking me why I am excited to work with them. Well sir, to be honest, appearances and mission statements are superficial. I am excited to experience something new. I really hope that your shop lives up to the hype. I am excited to learn.

Take note employers. Saying pretty much anything else is either ignorance or a lie carefully concocted over the countless hours you require of potential employees, just to get in the door. Your interview question responses are almost never genuine talent. They are hours of memorization. I know, because I've asked, and answered them.

Why even require a resume? I've spent hours cultivating a bomb resume and 19 out of 20 employers, have literally no idea what it says.

Employer: "So what languages are you familiar with?"
They're literally listed on the resume that you required I send you, with demonstrations. The one I customized to your company and needs.

A different employer: "So, you don't actively work on any opensource projects, we can review"?
No, I try to have a life when I am not working, and go outside. I know, hiss...

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Right now 7:23 PM on Valentines day, I am trying to speed up a program, an MVP, that I rebuilt in a week. One that I acquired after the prior developer got fired. One of my many, many projects. This one is particularly pesky as I am also trying to build out another app that is due, about 23 days from now.

Send help.
Yeah I do. I feel like the communities were a lot more engaging than most discord communities I come across. All the places I used to go are ghost towns now.
I've been writing about privacy, anonymity, etc for many years, as Mirimir. And I can't write honestly unless I test stuff.

I don't do anything iffier than many who write using their meatspace identity. But for many years, I wanted to keep that segregated from my professional life. That doesn't matter so much now, but it's Mirimir who I am. So hey.
The original article was about kissing not being a general thing in lots of cultures. If a minority of people in those cultures still engage in kissing that hardly disproves the point of the article.
Ooh yes. Can’t change it now but there’s a discussion on Twitter on sharing tech salaries.
.mixtape – DIY music and house shows (iOS)
Scandinavia has gotten awful.
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of “we’ve been building a ton and prices are still high” comments on Nextdoor and heard the same in person. Not sure if it’s all in good faith, but some people at least seem to be persuaded by what you’re talking about.
> While the US's hands are quite dirty here as well,

Acknowledged this already.

The policies the US is trying to enforce with these measures are less bad for most of the Western world than those that China is. That's it.

While the US has taken quite a slide on freedoms over the past couple decades, they're still nowhere near China's level and I find it pretty laughable to even try and put them on the same playing field in that regard.
When I worked for a NASA contractor doing sounding rocket telemetry, the main telemetry stack programming software was a Turbo C program from 1987-1990 (TDP502.exe on the odd chance that the maybe 50 other people on the planet who have ever used it sees this). Works just fine in DOSBox, at least to create files. Still needed an actual older PC with an ISA slot to handle the hardware that TDP knew how to control. But for configuration tasks, Windows + DOSBox + a USB 3.5" floppy drive = I could do things on an actual modern system.

So yeah, you're right, emulation saves the day in many cases. And I felt like a programmer-archaeologist using DOS to launch something into space in the 2010s...
I don't think the filter is literally random. It's a poor predictor of success, applied inconsistently.

Just from what I've heard and experienced, I'd guess that if N = Q (percentage of qualified workers), everyone in N would find some job as you describe. Alice gets Apple and Google but not Netflix, Bob gets Netflix but not Apple.

Could Alice do Bob's job at Netflix, or vice-versa? Absolutely. Does Apple care they could have had Bob? Does Netflix care they could have had both? Not really.

Everyone in N lands somewhere, eventually, enough though a better process could have had a better outcome overall. Maybe Alice really wanted Netflix; maybe she picks Netflix-like projects at Apple that aren't Apple's best use of her skills. Maybe that rejection shook her confidence or maybe she's distracted getting ready for another Netflix interview next year. (She's learned she has to study really hard at who-knows-what to prove she's capable of doing a job she's already doing.)

Does Apple care? Not really. Her manager might, but not Apple. Inefficient allocation is death by a thousand cuts.

The greater problem is when Q > N and the difference keeps growing. If you take the Googler joke of PhDs as protobuf jockeys at face value, that's where we've been for a while. But I don't know if we are.
The term in English is "mid-level" though most find it somewhat derogatory.
Yeah. It's definitely true people misjudge risk but it works both ways. Airliners - people worry because the see a scary crash but run the numbers and it's pretty safe. Cornoavirus people think it's not a big deal because it's like flu but run the numbers and there's some potentially scary shit eg. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8005931/British-sci...

I mean on the pessimistic side 50% global infection with 1% mortality, while not probable is a possibility to watch for, which would be like 35 million deaths and about 300 million critical overloading the hospitals.

And while I guess those sort of numbers die through old age anyway, the situation in Wuhan is not pretty and worth trying to avoid.
So... are you hiring right now?
DRYing the code is just an entry level form of simplifying the code. It's a good starting point, but its value quickly taps out once junior devs start writing incrementByOneFromZeroToNLoop(n) functions.

Code is closer to a craft like carpentry than a pure knowledge job. There aren't any rules, only heuristics, and it takes time to hone your skills (not "learn" them).

The biggest limiter in this is the excessive tendency for flat hierarchies in dev. It flies in the face of the apprentice - journeyman - master system that has always naturally structured the delivery and learning of craftsmanship.
The “fallacy” is offering evidence of success by just bringing up revenue. I made no claims on whether GCP is profitable or not.
I don't think the number of days (less or more) is what will make the different. As humans we are almost always going to complain about wanting more or less of something.

I know that for me the things that make me happier are:

- more efficient use of time
- more effective processes (very much tied to the above)
- percentage of time dedicated within the workweek to personal projects that might be far removed from the actual job or have a very long-term upside
- more focus on the output rather than how/when the job got done. Note: I'm absolutely not saying here that all means justify the end.
On the one hand, it's definitely possible for news media of any ideological bent to be biased and terrible.

On the other hand if you listen to them, there are large quality differences between average reporting quality of different news sources, and painting them with a broad brush and treating them like they are all equivalent I don't think is helpful.

While the GP post picked left-leaning/right-leaning examples, it's still probably not an accident that they left out MSNBC/CNN from their "good" examples and the WSJ from their "bad" ones.

I find the better reporting, like a good documentary, tends to focus on getting access to highly knowledgeable original sources from a variety of perspectives (ideally including people directly involved), letting them speak to the audience directly without filtering much (except to condense down the length and provide background), and is comfortable with presenting conflicting narratives.

Low quality reporting, which seems to be most of it, is often a non-expert providing their own interpretation of the facts (with their chosen emphasis) in a way that matches their target audience's desired ideological bias (and maybe with some extra sensationalism to get clicks).

I think low quality is more common because that's what most people want (at least, as determined by their purchasing behavior). It's also probably much quicker and easier to produce. But IMO there is definitely a quality axis in addition to a right/left bias axis, and I'd rather read high quality stuff that leans away from my own ideological viewpoint than low quality stuff (which I don't think is helpful much for being informed, although maybe it is delivering entertainment value).
> I'm always amazed by articles like this one that just take for granted that the author knows the people better than they know themselves, and that people like them are naturally the ones who should be vested with decision making power

The article says nothing of the sort. There are very concrete suggestions provided at the end - suggestions which do not require any centralized decision makers or authorities.
Mexico Hosting Raffle to Win Presidential Boeing Jet
Sure, you can modify your model to better account for bad training data. But you could also fix the training data. The previous comment pointed out that fixing the training data (to a high degree at least, using the predictions of an intermediate version) is significantly faster than the initial labeling.
Because Google has historically been a shining example of a company that could create profitable lines of business outside of advertising....
Every time I read one of these articles, I'm surprised at the complexity of the coding questions the candidates had to solve. When I interviewed for my jobs, the questions were much simpler, and as an interviewer myself, I (a) pick much simpler questions and (b) even so, the candidates tend to have plenty of struggles solving them.

Am I really missing an army of engineers who can write an involved image filter in 45 minutes without that actually being their specialization?
If all you care about is money, go bust your butt on leetcode and ace a FAANG interview. If you care about a work-life balance, and having a big impact on a small team, work for a medium-small startup and negotiate a flexible schedule.

Personally I get a huge kick out of making massive improvements to a small business's tech and infrastructure. The lack of bureaucracy is a freedom that is often taken for granted. If you have the vision and drive, you can improve the business's processes and product offerings by leaps and bounds...something I would argue is not readily available at a big company. Smaller companies are also much more willing and able to negotiate with you to help balance your life. A 4-day work week for example.

Again speaking anecdotally, I don't need that much money. I certainly don't need FAANG-level compensation. If 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. Not because of the fat paycheck.
As an outsider, a non-Ruby-user, I find it strange that Ruby users seem to be migrating to languages that are similar only in syntax but vastly different in nearly every other imaginable way.

Do Ruby users care only about syntax?

Maybe I'm not so different? Maybe my preference for ALGOL syntax just gives me more language options?
unlucky! The buddha said we are promised two certain things in life: suffering and death. Everything else is a bonus.
It especially doesn't work in a team, because under maintenance + employee turnover, these little single-purpose functions start growing hairs, and they end up doing more than they're advertised to by name. Next thing you know, you're fetching the same thing from the database in three different functions, or recalculating the same value repeatedly.

Overly granular functions constructed to name blocks of code are a firm anti-pattern in my book.
Git Temporal on vs Code
So there are no variable costs in servers?
I think you misunderstood the definition of ‘human universal’. Steven pinker’s Blank Slate has a list of human universals that are hard wired human habits irrespective of culture/age/gender/geography etc
Any such incentive by itself be prone to abuse.
You can see a concrete example of API for KYC here:
https://developers.veriff.com/#sessions-sessionid

or specific to Jumio:

https://github.com/Jumio/implementation-guides/blob/master/n...

Essentially all personal data.
Generally for these, the name is also sent to other processors, to check against OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals (to see if you are under sanctions in the US).

So if you are in North Korea for example, you may not have access to your funds in practice with the current situation.

It's a rather normal process though.
At the end is no point about the GitHub anonymity thing because all users (even European or people from Zimbabwe) have to do the KYC anyway.
TypeScript: Exhaustiveness Checks via Exceptions
High pressure coding is a completely different skill that most engineers aren’t going for.

Unless you’re hiring for a detective that has to write code to stop crimes in progress why are companies so focused on testing coding under pressure.
I don't find that surprising at all. When I looked through Upwork job postings during a period of unemployment, I saw a post from a restaurant asking for a coder. The job was to create a script to cheat in an online poll from a local magazine. The poll would be used to determine which restaurant would get an award and be highlighted by the magazine, so the restaurant had an incentive to cheat. Naturally, Upwork refused to remove the post.
> Cynical answer though

Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job.

And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).
Ask HN : Can any company/app legally listen to our conversations?
Can Google or any other company/app legally listen to our conversations if we use their product without explicit consent?
I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, but I must have hit a nerve if people are going through the effort of looking at my LinkedIn profile and looking at more than the first page of my comments.

Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well. I've written and graded many exams, but only ever received complaints from students with C- grades or lower. Funny how that works.

And it's not like software engineering is some magical pony that is different from other white collar jobs. To get into my current PhD program I had to interview with multiple people, take a 4-hour written exam, do a week-long exam at home, and I wasn't compensated for my time. So I'm not that sympathetic to people that complain about tech job interviews.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but perhaps this 'leak' to WSJ was calculated to remind some folks thinking of unionizing that layoffs are a real thing in this world.
Emotet Evolves with New Wi-Fi Spreader
Depending on what country (they think) you're in, and whether you accepted the user agreement, yes absolutely.

Anyone using Google voice commands has agreed to let Google listen constantly for instance. In the EU there are restrictions on what they can do with the data, but the collection itself is perfectly legal and happening now. How else does your phone/nest know you said "OK Google"?
A large influx of units devalues similar homes in the same general location. People don't want their home price to drop. They may not have bought it specifically as an investment, but if you buy something for $500k and 10 years later it is worth $400k, you're not going to be happy. You might even go underwater on a mortgage because you only put 3% down for your first home.

I'm not saying it's right, but I do understand why NIMBY syndrome exists. People would be fine with more housing, more skyscrapers, or whatever if their home price wasn't directly affected.