skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. We start by noting in our job description that there will be a coding challenge -- on a laptop, not a whiteboard.

Most of our work is on web applications, primarily Rails. So, for that role, the challenge is to fix an issue in an implementation of Fizzbuzz on our sandbox Rails app. We give the candidate about an hour to work on it. It's not as trivial as the common Fizzbuzz exercise but it's a pretty representative sample of the kind of work we do.

As part of the phone screening, we check to make sure the candidate understands there will be a code challenge involving Rails and that they're cool with that.

There's a handout we present before we turn over the laptop that explains the issue and clearly defines requirements (e.g. create a branch with this name). We read a brief intro section then give the candidate time to review the requirements on their own and ask them if there are any questions. Candidates are reminded to read the README included with the project and encouraged to use the browser to Google stuff.

One tweak we made was to add check-in stages to the challenge to make sure candidate doesn't get stuck for a half-hour trying to open up the text editor or something. Every 15-20 minutes, a team member will check in with candidate and if they haven't hit a certain milestone (e.g. has started local server or had reproduced issue), we'll assist them in getting to it. At the second or third check-in, it usually turns into more of a pair programming exercise and at the end we'll review the solution with candidate so they understand why the problem is relevant to the job.

There's not a definitive pass or fail for the challenge. The candidate's performance gets scored on a simple 1-5 scale alongside the other competencies we're evaluating as part of the interview. We're pretty thorough about preparing the code challenge and consider it a good example of our "onboarding begins with hiring" principle.
I have the same feeling about prices, but I also remember the excavator as a big set. It’s only about 350 pieces. Even with the pneumatics, I can’t imagine a price above $100.

What changed since then is that the new Liebherr excavator has more than 4000 pieces.
If the people responsible had to pay with their own money, they would have thought twice about that. It's so much easier to burn taxpayer's money.
At a certain scale, intent stops mattering. You need to take responsibility for the incentives in the systems you create. To do otherwise is just negligence.

Families are kind of important. They're usually a large part of the reason people have a job to begin with. To callously disregard the impact of a system on families is exceptionally appalling. You should not do that.
I’d love to try this and give you more feedback but I’m getting 404 trying to install the GitHub app.
Streaming Data Changes to a Data Lake with Debezium and Delta Lake Pipeline
Does it have a context-free syntax? Because this is basically the only problem with TeX: You cannot parse it.
This, yes exactly this is the reason I am preparing. I hate it but whats the alternative?
I once worked on an application which if failed even once meant considerable loss for the company including possible closure.

By design, there was no memory management. The memory was only ever allocated at the start and never de-allocated. All algorithms were implemented around the concept of everything being a static buffer of infinite lifetime.

It was not possible to spring a memory leak.
I was kindly giving you the benefit of the doubt that your activism extends beyond internet flamewars, and presumably the occasional Democratic vote. I mean, if I'd boasted allegiance to a jihad against a Great Satan, I think I'd jump at any chance to boast about my accomplishments.
One of these questions I never dared to ask; What does formal mean in the area of mathematics? Is it like finalizing a formula / proof?
Moratorium (entertainment)
The observation of lots of light pairs was from directionally focused visible light telescopes, which is a very heavily biased estimator.

LIGO has flipped a weighted coin twice. It came up heads once, tails once. That suggests that the weighting is probably not 999999 to 1 (or whatever 5 sigma works out to) in favor of heads, as the current models (based on visible light observations) predict.
10 years ago they were avoiding tech stocks, and I think they mostly still do.

Perhaps matching S&P without investing in some of the biggest gains is quite a notable outcome?
I remember signing up to this when it was posted before [1]. Still enjoy reading the interesting ideas in an email every week.

Thanks guys!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17248008
Bryan Ropar on YouTube is a dedicated collector of many examples and extensions of the design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UvVoTS460
bad metrics ? maybe according to you but I doubt it according to the person who do the hiring.

The people who do the hiring get to the decide what the metrics is and what they considered good/qualified.
Is it really true though? FAANG seem to be doing just fine and innovating new products year after year. Obviously the developers are performing amazingly.
Phabricator works great at the scale you are talking about. With a single monotonic issue number for your company (like Apple's Radar). You have to ditch GitHub totally though, and use Phabricator for code review or the wiki too to get the benefit. Avoid it's repo hosting and CI component (harbormaster). The thing you will miss most is the web based file editing.

My advise would be to deploy: Phabricator (issues, code review, wiki), Buildkite (CI - with your own AWS runners), gitolite (repo hosting).
> There's significant ladder pulling. Tons of engineers work at places with interview processes they could never pass.

One person's "ladder pulling" is another person's "raising the bar".

Over time, companies should continue to raise the bar for both candidates and existing employees. As your company grows, you can and should become better at attracting more talented and ambitious employees. You tend to have more resources to compensate new hires better, allowing for more selective hiring practices. Growth means you've learned how to more effectively identify the best candidates.

Companies aren't being vindictive or selfish. If they can't hire enough people, they'll dwindle and die. The bar should be set just low enough to keep enough talent coming in the door, but no lower.

Companies aren't obligated to hire talent at the same levels they did in the past. It's not ladder pulling, it's just business.
That's fair, in the meantime this post gives some more examples:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht...

as well as other posts tagged #oil-language:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=oil-language#oil-...
Just what do you think the word “worth” means?
This sounds fascinating, could you elaborate any on why a single failure of this application would be so catastrophic?
One of the 3D metal printing companies made a titanium version of this chair and had it out at Westec or one of the tradeshows. It gave me really mixed emotions, do I want it because its frickin' titanium or am I just impressed you can print something like that? I expect that chair to outlive the company and possibly humans on the planet :-)
It's not unreasonable... it's slowly becoming necessary. Someone will have to eat the bill and it's probably a distributed cost that we have to spread across everyone.

It's not just tech-driven...housing is expensive across the nation and taxing RSUs may help in SF, but doesn't really get to the root of the problem which is zoning restriction, high development costs, increased homeowner rights enabling NIMBYism
No, but they do point to each other. For example, each node can have an array of all the edges, and each edge has two pointers to each node it connects. Via this you can walk around cycles for example. And typically these can change when nodes are inserted or removed.
I am dubious that the "AS IS" warrenty clause can be enforced, as providing any kind of support or claim implies that you expect the product to function as advertised.

Arbitration agreements trouble me, even though they are pervasive. In particular for a product that is trying to offer a better alternative to opaque tracking and advertising techniques it appears to be another way to hide wrongdoing.

Hope this helps.
Are you saying it wouldn't get accepted during the review unless it had that in the description?

That seems like a dangerous rule to live by if an extension is allowed to collect all of that information and it's auto-opt-in based on it existing somewhere buried in a privacy policy or long description.

We really only ever notice the permission setting because the browser puts that in front of us before agreeing to install it and it's usually a 1 liner like "hey, this extension can access everything about your browsing history".
I use scroll as a way to read USA Today ad-free. Their content is pretty good. I also read Vox, The Atlantic, and Verge sometimes. It's nice to not have ads on these sites.
Many years ago I interviewed at a FAANG and the VP who interviewed me over a (fairly crappy, 30-minute) lunch was really a pain, enough so I didn't want to work for him. The feeling was mutual.

Turned out he did 500 interviews a year. Five hundred. Unless that's your entire job, I don't see how you could come out of that without becoming an asshole.
> Not a single person out of several thousand emails and messages came out in defense of the current state of interviewing processes

I agree that this was a cheap shot from the author.

The current zeitgeist of hiring practices is that we're all obligated to chant "interviews are broken" without ever suggesting alternatives. Suggesting alternatives is dangerous because someone, somewhere will come up with a reason why your suggested practice is bad. Even the author of the article avoids suggesting any alternatives.

It's the equivalent of politicians saying that they're "deeply troubled" by something, and then proceeding to do nothing because they are secretly okay with the status quo.

No one is dumb enough to go out of their way to publicly argue in favor of the current hiring practices in this atmosphere. Yet when we're put in the hot seat on a hiring committee, we all fall back on the tried and true methods of interviewing for a reason.
Weren't most of the buyers of the TON/Gram pre-ICO VCs? They're not cut out at all.

More generally, there's no reason why entrepreneurs would refuse investment from good VCs. I can imagine scammers would want to lock out VCs to avoid scrutiny, but real businesses shouldn't.
s/know/think

See also yagni, premature optimization, etc, etc
Hey, those people still exist. Myself and a few other people I know got their start making terrible games in python.

Heck I was too young when I started learning lisp (clojure). Took a long time to get used to non-functional constructs.

Things definitely changed once I got to university though. Competition for internships meant I had to get good at interviewing. The CS program I am in encourages the career focused so grinding leetcode is popular. One of my interviewers asked me a number, and used that to retrieve the n'th leetcode question from memory.

There does exist a small cadre of people, myself included, who find leetcode and similar interview grinds unethical. I'd rather spend my time having a life or learning/building interesting tech. Interviews are then less of a performance art and instead a genuine 1-1 to work through a problem.
Refactoring is (as Uncle Bob puts it) an implementation detail. That means management doesn't understand its value, so they should not be expected to take ownership over it.

As engineers we need to just do it, and build it into our tasks.

A car mechanic doesn't ask the customer if its ok if he calibrates his widgetometer -- he just does it as part of the job. The customer has no idea what a "widgetometer" is (neither do I), so of course they will push back on paying for it to be fiddled with.
> On the rust side, it's that, plus the pointer must point to a valid region of memory (non-null) even if the slice is empty.

Do you have a citation for that, because it seems obviously wrong[0] (since the slice points to zero bytes of memory) and I'm having trouble coming up with any situation that would justify it (except possibly using a NULL pointer to indicate the Nothing case of a Maybe<Slice> datum)?

0: by which I mean that Rust is wrong to require that, not that you're wrong about what Rust requires.
> Not a single person out of several thousand emails and messages came out in defense of the current state of interviewing processes

I thought I was defending it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332336
Not according to me, according to many in this thread, in dozens of articles posted on this site, and many more across the industry. There are all sorts of management principles and truisms people take for granted, and this is one of them that’s being called into question.
Malware Analysis Course Material
It's not just mobile homes. All homes are horrible investments. It's just that mobile homes don't come with Real Property (in other words land), and Real Property goes up in value.

You will see people who do some renovations and kid themselves that this is an "investment" in their home - in practice the increase in market value of the home will typically be negligible, sometimes negative and only in some very unusual cases would it meet or exceed their costs in doing the work. This doesn't make renovating your house a bad idea, but you should have your eyes open that it's only an "investment" the way a nice meal or holiday trip is an "investment".

The reason Real Property (usually) goes up in value is that it's in some sense scarce. If I need fifty square metres of Manhattan Island, no amount of Ohio, whether fifty square metres or fifty square miles is a valid substitute.

The hmme can seem like it adds value because an equivalent amount of land nearby with no house on it is often worth much less - except if that equivalent amount of land comes with legal authority to put a house on it you'll find suddenly it is worth almost as much as the land with an actual house on it. That permission (where required) is very valuable, the timber and paint and so on not so much.
I've edited that part of my comment to clarify.

Who is "a mathematician"? I definitely don't mean "someone with academic credentials or other official recognition"; surely Erdős was a mathematician when he was a teenager, Ramanujan was a mathematician before he wrote to Hardy, and Lagrange was a mathematician when he discovered the variational calculus with Euler; I think it's even reasonable to assert that Socrates was a mathematician when he taught Menon how to draw a line of length √½, because he demonstrated the correctness of the construction mathematically rather than just asserting it, even though he surely did not discover it at that moment. I think it's sufficient to be doing mathematics as an end in itself.

But that doesn't help much; what does it mean to be "doing mathematics"? Is it sufficient to read a proof? How about reconstructing a proof you vaguely remember? How about working some exercises in a textbook? Does it matter if the exercises are arithmetic or differential equations? What about when Martin Gardner rediscovered some well-known theorem or other? Might it even be sufficient to be doing mathematics for some other purpose, such as predicting the motions of the planets or the flight of an artillery shell, rather than an end in itself?

It seems that there's unavoidably a gray area; the toddler who counts "one, two, three, seven, ten" is definitely not "doing mathematics", while Scholze was surely "doing mathematics" when he discovered perfectoid spaces. Somewhere in between, there are cases where you can plausibly make an argument either way. (I don't think Ramanujan before his contact with Hardy is one of them, but perhaps that's self-serving bias on my part — I have no academic credentials of any kind, other than publications.)

But that's okay. Language isn't math, so we can't expect people to come to a perfect consensus about what it means, although we can of course attempt to clarify our thinking, however much the non-mathematicians may detest and attempt to sabotage such activity.

So, what do you think is a good definition of "a mathematician"?
I can't discuss this particular application.

But there are whole classes of applications that are also mission critical -- an example might be software driving your car or operating dangerous chemical processes.

For automotive industry there are MISRA standards which we used to guide our development process amongst other ideas from NASA and Boeing (yeah, I know... it was some time ago)
Being a black person in the Bronx doesn't have anything to do with not having a lot of options. Being a poor person - anywhere - regardless of skin color, usually does that.
According to the CEO's twitter account [0] they are release better support for dependent PRs this year, track progress of that feature here [1].

The crucial problem with code review on GitHub is that it's 100% dependent on Git to store the history of a PR. This too closely couples what a developer does locally on their machine to the code review process. This in turn means that force pushing drops the history of their "Checks" system, which annotate the PR with CI job an lint/test results. It also means junk commits on PRs make the whole review process more difficult. The app Reviewable [2] works with GitHub and fixes some of these issues if you want to give it a try.

0 - https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1170804894241972224

1 - https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/959

2 - https://reviewable.io
A lot of them are used outdoors in harsh climates where they’re exposed to the elements, making the plastic brittle. Used as intended, they should be indestructible.
What is good, Wolff, and what is not good? How do we know these things?
AFAIR, it is the same for Safari on iOS.
As a biracial black and asian man living in Hanoi, I really wonder why you put a space before your question mark?
"Bigness often cuts against innovation."

The term the author needs is "diseconomies of scale." Economies of scale is unquestionably important for increasing value production and economic growth. However, if economies of scale is a positive feedback signal, it is diseconomies of scale that acts as a negative feedback signal, keeping the economy in equilibrium by recycling the old companies that fail to innovate and adapt back into the market, and providing opportunities for smaller, more innovative companies to gain a foothold before they achieve economies of scale. You see diseconomies of scale in companies that have multiple groups working on the same product, lack of oversight and skewed incentives, and overall organizational incompetence that often stems from complacency in a once innovative company.

This is where rent-seeking and regulations come into play. Having legal scale enables less innovative companies to get into the business of lobbying and regulating themselves. Most companies that are not completely dominant in the absence of government want to be regulated in certain ways, because it helps entrench them, such as Telcos, defense contractors, "software" consultancies like PwC, etc.

I've observed that your average Joe will immediately think a regulation is good for "the people" and bad for "the company" without context. In reality, it's important to determine if it's a good regulation: i.e., one that charges a proportional cost or mandates an antidote to an externality on society.

If the regulation instead creates occupational or corporate licensing requirements, or really is doing anything besides addressing the externality, you will most likely entrench the bad actors, add some inefficiencies for paperwork, possibly create other unintended consequences, and accomplish nothing.
Beginner's rite of passage:

1. fmt.Sprintf("Why doesn't %s have %s?\n", language, feature)

2. fmt.Sprintf("Builds %s in %s\n", feature, language)

3. fmt.Sprintf("Realizes %s actually sucks in %s and there are some good reasons nobody built it in the first place\n", feature, language)

Generally I think it's awesome people go down this path because sometimes really cool things are built as a result, but when the project in question overlaps with on-boarding from another tool, its is rife for another beginner to adopt it and get it stuck in production just because they wanted a slightly quicker transition from their former toolchain.
The free-spirited women who tangled with Orwell and other literary lions
I didn't say families are not important, to some people they are important but you can't use that as an excuse.
Don't aerospace companies take pains to prevent debris in their structures? I took a tour of McDonnel Douglas' aircraft assembly building in St Louis in the mid-80s. They were building AV-8B wings, and taking particular care not to get x-acto knife blades or candy wrappers in the layers of composite material. They did ultrasonic scans of the wing skins to ensure no "de-bonds" or inclusions occurred.

What can we deduce from finding debris in the majority of these jets' fuel tanks? Sloppy manufacturing, followed by lax or non-existent QA? Sabotage? Fuel with crud in it?
> I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works."

I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and structured your interview process, the more likely it is to produce vaguely biased results.

Whether that's true or not, it would be a tough sell to implement a "just use your gut" style hiring process at a major company in 2020. There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions.
In one of the issues, you can get a sense of the motivation behind the project:

> Fiber started as a personal project to be able to rewrite all my node apps into Go.
I tried to stick to the same workflow as Express by using interfaces, this is indeed not the Go standard.

But yeah, unless you want to do the same, I agree this project can definitely do more harm than good to new Gophers. It's awesome to do it as a personal experimentation and see if it can be done, but it's another thing to attempt to sell it to others as a good idea.
Interesting, I always thought if the role as collecting and cleaning data for data scientists. Are you suggesting the DS does this part, or is the DE responsible for both and the DS ‘purely’ looks for the appropriate algorithm or model?
The answer is simple: these systems aren't mature enough to formalize the modern fashionable math. They need better ergonomics and perhaps better underlying theory before we attempt that.
Seems like this could be handled with a wrapper type with runtime checks during debug?

Like make any pointer to the per frame allocation be a TempPointer or something and then assert they're all gone with a static count variable of them? Then you just have to be cautious whenever you pass a reference to one or convert to a raw pointer.

I don't think this would be too awful for performance in debug builds.
The Case Against AI, UX, and Coding Bootcamps
What would the better ergonomics look like? Do you have an idea what might be wrong with the theory?
Those polls show that 75% of Biden supporters would prefer someone other than Sanders for their second choice: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voters-second-choice-ca...

For the majority of the party, Sanders is neither their first or second choice: https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-passes-joe-biden-top... (22% support him as the first choice, another 10% say he’s their second choice).

This isn’t rocket science. It’s literally why ranked choice voting was invented.