skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great article this is exactly where I am at in my life. I have almost 20 years spent at a company doing all kinds of different projects, working on many different systems, and continuing to teach myself new skills all the time on my own time. I'm currently converting a huge legacy Weblogic Java J2EE project to TomEE. I want to leave so I am now studying algorithms. I had an interview at a job I really wanted and blew one part of the technical part because I was a little unprepared. It sucks because I know I could have added value to the company because I'm a grinder and love what I do. They have a killer product that would have been awesome to work on and the people seemed great. I know algorithms are important so I will study on but it sucks in an interview one stupid question you haven't worked on will cost the job.
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" then. That's one my mother used to use a lot.

Obviously a lot of products are built by people who never ask anyone what their requirements are. Often those are the most successful products. Steve Jobs being the apogee of that approach to product design.
Show HN: Jargonaut - Project glossaries for your dev team
If you build a culture where you expect no loyalty, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly this culture now no longer applies to specific companies, but the industry- and perhaps the economy- as a whole.
LOVED Meccano - so cool to be able to build real machines and the screws and parts got a little rusty / rough if you weren't careful with them but damn I loved my Erector sets
How would a junior no what to refactor and not make it worse? In my experience it’s harder to refactor existing code than to start with green field development.
Kuksu (Religion)
I think that the idea that people who see development as safe career are the most incapable is just wrong. Someone stable that does what needs to be done even when it is not fun sounds good to me. Large parts of projects are not fun nor challenging - they are work that needs to be done with good quality.

People who see their jobs as safe careers are routinely good at those jobs.

And conversely, I have met people who talked about passion and seemed passionate and had all the right opinions. And they were not good simply because they would loose interest when it stopped to be fun or somehow never finished anything that was medium sized, were disorganized or demotivated easily.
Researchers develop high-capacity EV battery materials that double driving range
It's absolutely shady. Lambda doesn't want students/customers to sue because they know they have committed fraud, and would lose in the courts.

Austen's lying again. Students fought hard to get the ISAs cancelled. They should have been working towards learning and job searching instead, not fighting a pathological liar and terrible organization.
This article conflates personality traits and attitudes towards problem solving with seniority.

It also speaks of overengineering, which is a highly ambiguous and subjective term that rarely leads to constructive feedback. It translates to "you are overdoing your job", rather than how you are overdoing your work. It is not actionable feedback.

Asking for help is not a trait of junior engineers. Asking for help in a non-structured way, without providing useful context or asking for help without making a reasonable attempt to understand the problem first is something that you would expect of a junior person. Not asking for help while being blocked for a long period of time is also a trait of a junior person. Being able to leverage expertise from team members is a trait of a senior person.

Now, about this:

> They have respect for the code that was written before them. They are generous when passing judgment on the architecture or the design decisions made in the codebase. They approach inheriting legacy code with an "opportunity mindset" rather than a complaining one.

No. Here the author is conflating seniority with blind personality cult loyalty. If something is suboptimal or wrong in a problematic way, then just go ahead and say it when the opportunity arises in the best way you can.

Even in the early days of software, people realized the importance of good engineering practices. If your legacy code doesn't reflect that mindset, it is not worth praising. The article author himself recognizes that dumping work on other people is a trait of junior engineers, but applies it inconsistently in this case. Senior maintainers may be able to identify legitimate tradeoffs, but when a code base is consistently bad, especially when it was already bad in its historical context, don't expect a lot of praise for the code or the authors.
well, 40 is a hard cut off into gr(a|e)ybeard society. So, at the moment you are a "wannabe" ;)

I think anyone who is pushing 2 decades ish or more of writing quite diverse software is likely a gr(e|a)ybeard. I started programming when I was 8, I'm now 48 and literally have a mostly a gr(a|e)y beard :)
The technical interviews I've had are decidedly not fizzbuzz level problems. They're "implement new features in an unfamiliar codebase in 10 minutes while we watch closely and tell you that every line of code you start to write is the wrong approach."-problems.
How do you design your coding challenges? Can you give examples?
QE had a huge effect on our economy and the wealth distribution in our county and was a disastrous policy.

Edit: to be clear, we essentially bailed out the banks with absolutely no repercussions except to the working class through deflated bonds and interest rates.
As far as governments are concerned, yes, as they will never get tax revenues from companies if they are allowed to fully expense large purchases.
Sounds like one to me.
It’s strange. Part of me thinks this is a great idea, but some of the websites are also the worst offenders of what the site is trying to combat. Looking at Gizmodo and the verge, the crazy amount of 3rd party cookies, unable to really opt out at all. While writing pieces about how horrible google and Facebook are for all the privacy evasive stuff they are doing. I’d rather support content that aim for quality and differ it kind of business model then rewarding some of these sites for being so horrible that this service is even needed. Like https://decorrespondent.nl/ or specific patreons
I don't really have a term for this, but I kind of prefer the 'webtender' model of project management. It shows up in volunteer work quite a bit, but sadly not often in software.

Webtender tells you what you can make with the stuff you've already got. It tells you what you can make with just a few more easily acquired ingredients.

A lot of companies seem to get invested in the Realm of the Possible. Somewhere out there, all of the problems we want to solve have been solved, and we want to combine them together to solve all of our problems at once.

It's kind of cruel, if you think about it. You're asking your people to exhibit all of the absolute best qualities of the industry at the same time, and you often see bad managers ride their people into the ground if they don't manage it.

I've had a few rather memorable disagreements with people over the years about who we should fire and who we should keep. I don't care if you're the best programmer out there. I care if, within the tasks that need to get done, that there are enough tasks that I can trust you will do well and a few you can almost do well (growth opportunity) without monopolizing the work I want to assign to others.

I would much rather get rid of the people who are pretty good on the median, but when they fuck up, they aim for the stars. The former group knows their own strengths (or at least can be convinced of them, sometimes). They're a known quantity. No I won't promote them, but when they walk into my office looking like they're frustrated, my first thought isn't, "Oh shit, what did you do now?"
While I think detailed balance is typically how we explain why Metropolis Hastings works at all. It's actually not quite what matters. What matters is ergodicity and detailed balance is a proxy for checking for that. That's helpful since ergodicity does have an easier intuition behind it as well.
There's significant ladder pulling. Tons of engineers work at places with interview processes they could never pass.
I agree with you, but from what I've seen there's been a steady and increasing stream of pressure from the capital side of things.

Wisdom shall lead again at some point, but I don't clearly see when. Threads like this one though are a promising sign.
I like writing code structure down on a piece of paper before actually coding.
RSS Became a Thing (Again)
I agree, it probably wouldn't work for the FAANG companies...

I posted what I said as a note to my future self, if/when I run a software engineering company... if/when that happens, then that's how I'm going to handle hiring...
Isn't this standard practice for all brain surgery? Patient kept awake and active for feedback.
New graduates don't get hired? That's the first I hear about this (recently) anywhere in the world. What's changed?
Whenever I've interviewed people I've always made sure to them feel comfortable, so any anxiety does not get in their way.

Then, we talk and I look for all the qualities they /do/ have.

Sadly, lots of interviewers get a kick out of finding out what the interviewee does not know, so they can feel superior.

Coding challenges should be:
-1. take-home
-2. concise
-3. relevant to the job
-4. take no more than 4 hours

One example of such a decent test that I came across involved having to read a file, parsing it and turning its contents into some basic HTML. During the interview we talked about things like "what if the file were really big", e.g. let the candidate reflect on the limitations of their implementation.
This was enough to suss out where somebody is, professionally.
And nobody had to have a bad day.
I don't know, but do you have a blog? I struggle from this too. Right now my solution is side projects, but I can only do this because I have very low expenses.
Hubbard was a true pioneer, known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. He would go around just giving it away to people, trying to get them to open their minds and improve their lives. He was also a trickster in his youth and a true man of adventure - he sold the IP for a new type of battery he built as a teenager (which was never used), and was involved in gun/liquor running during the prohibition.

Leary was clearly on some kind of power trip and was much more selfish/egotistical with his research into acid and its potential.

Hubbard disliked Leary because Hubbard viewed acid as a way to dissolve the ego, a selfless endeavor of healing that he wanted to spread to his friends and influential individuals in the US.

Leary jeopardized this amazing potential medicine with his attention-seeking, selfish, and flamboyant behavior, which was definitely a major factor in it getting outlawed

This is what I gleaned from "How to Change Your Mind" by Pollan, at least.
That’s a good question.

According to their public documents, they plan to source shrimp larve from Sea Products Development, LLC, which is also located in Texas.

Nothing on the SPD site contains any direct information on this issue, other than generic SPG-speak.
Facebook blocks valuable ad data in privacy update to marketing partner program
spotify without the free tier.
I was really excited about Scroll when I first heard about it, but after I looked into it more I lost almost all interest. I was looking at it almost a month ago, so it may have changed a bit since then, but at the time, the main things were that:

1. Even though almost all of the material about Scroll says "300+ sites supported", it's actually about 30 sites, mostly from the same few networks, and 304 "SBNation blogs". This was the list of domains initially supported: https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2... (and I broke down that list by owner here, if anyone's interested in that: https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7)

2. Scroll does not get you past paywalls: https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344875-does-scroll...

So if it's a site that's supported by Scroll that also has a paywall (like The Atlantic), you're expected to both subscribe to the site and Scroll to get a "clean" experience. It's also notable that even though the New York Times is one of the main investors in Scroll, they apparently don't currently intend to support it themselves (mentioned here: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/revolutionary-a-h...).
Here you have the specifics: https://m3db.github.io/m3/m3db/architecture/engine/

I admit I’ve exaggerated a bit as Prometheus doesn’t support downsampling, in m3db I only keep 2 weeks of data at full resolution, 2 months at lower, and 5 years at even lower.
One issue is presenting this as "the right thing to do." At minimum, there's a quid pro quo.
Tips for Managing Your Personal Brand
The article to which this is a follow-up answered your questions fairly comprehensively. Among other concerns: no, it's actually not that easy to predict what questions you'll get.
I notice that you mention "computer scientists," "programmers," and "hackers" in your comment. Those are all different types of people, and generally not the kind companies are looking to hire. Most companies are hiring "software engineers." That is, they want people to build stuff in a team with other software engineers, things that are well designed and stand up to the various forces that software systems are subject to.

Ultimately, though, you're right. The problem is that software engineering interviews aren't actually about software engineering. And, that's what really needs to change.
You don't need a shell script to initialise an application with specific environmental variables. systemd and docker will both do this (and both supports the same env file too). AWS lambda supports environmental variables, so does most CI/CD solutions. It's a pretty standard way to do things in UNIX/Linux. In fact if you're having to resort to "hacks" to get environmental variables loaded then that might be a symptom of a bigger problem with your orchestration rather than an issue with Bash / Python.

Also that was just one of three options I listed; and there will be a plethora of other alternatives I've not mentioned too.
As Mark Twain once said: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
Sour grapes, more like. If simply asking how they'd work with people from diverse backgrounds was triggering enough for this person, the process worked perfectly in rejecting them.
> Of course this isn't popular, instead people up-vote anecdotes from people who say that they once had an algorithm wiz who performed badly, or how some stellar performers were rejected by this kind of interview.

That's kind of reductionist. I upvote answers that at least attempt to propose alternatives to the current status quo. The employer side isn't the only relevant one, which is likely a stronger reason why a lot of current hiring practices aren't popular. Some only work at FAANG scale with a large enough pool of applicants, some seem optimized to hire people that waste time on code puzzles (that doesn't make them an "algorithm wiz") and others generally put applicants in a position resembling begging for a job, especially for junior roles.

Just because something works well on some quantitative metric does neither imply that it is the only, nor the optimal solution, especially in two player games like hiring.
I've been wanting someone to do this idea (spotify for news) for years. But they really need to get one of the heavy hitters with paywalls (NY Times, The Economist, Financial Times, WaPo, or WSJ).

But maybe it's worth paying just to show publishers that it's viable. It's a rough chicken/egg problem.
There's another problem not really addressed here; when the requirements you get from the customer are wrong/make no sense/could be done better another way/are for things they won't actually use/are a part of some internal political struggle.

This is something that crops up quite frequently in my work. We'll get a requirement like this: "the app should use HTTP like a web browser, not a different protocol". On inquiry as to why it's so important for something that's not a web browser to so strongly resemble a browser, the answer will be something like, "so we don't have to ask IT to open a firewall port". The person deploying the software could just fill out the paperwork, but they find it easier to "require" that the software sneak past their own corporate security controls. This is the sort of requirement that is real in some sense and not in another sense, depending on whether you define the customer as whoever you're talking to on the phone right now or the business as a whole.
> It would be way more time intensive for the interviewee to be asked to code up some fullstack project for every interview.

Assuming the role is a fullstack developer, memorizing basic algorithms doesn’t show one is fit for the purpose.

Providing a simple skeleton of a fullstack project—in the chosen tech stack of either the candidate or the company—and then verifying a candidate can add a simple feature, or something similarly fullstack, would accomplish that far faster than algorithm answers.

Edit: I realize this risks sounding like stupid take-home interview homework. I personally oppose that crap. However, I recognize why some companies take that route, as I don’t think I’d feel confident that a candidate could work in my company’s stack by asking silly algorithm questions. I’d probably feel more confident watching the candidate do a remote screen share, git clone a starter app, and do some simple to moderately complex fullstack tasks. Of course, the tasks should fit the role, I think—e.g., I wouldn’t ask a candidate who’s being hired to tune DB queries a bunch of fullstack questions. And if I was hiring a backend dev to build out APIs, I wouldn’t bother with a bunch of frontend tasks and questions. The hiring processes I’ve seen and managed always had better results when more time was invested in prepping specific, job-focused interview processes, rather than offloading that time onto candidates because recruiting teams can’t actually do more than ask shallow questions or follow checklists.
I’m self taught, and have kicked ass at every position I’ve ever had, and rise quickly. Alg interviews suck the very life out of me - nothing is ever relevant to to actually building working software in 2020.
Without necessarily accepting the premise of "legitimate and realistic", yes, in some markets it's very rare. I've personally never had an interview without a whiteboard problem.
Do you have a shortage of good candidates or not, wrt your company's staffing requirements ?
Are there any concretely troubling parts to the terms that you saw?
seL4 isn't really written in C, AFAIK it's written in Haskell then translated in C.
Because C is one of the few language to have a formally verified compiler CompCert.

Now does seL4 support properly modern CPUs: multiple cores, with different power settings?
This I don't know.

And what about Spectre?
Thanks for clarifying.

I think we're just using different definitions. The only real definition of an array I've encountered in work and school is that it's just a one dimensional collection of elements, usually of static size. A vector depending on context is usually the same thing as an array but you conveniently change the size dynamically. Lists can whatever you need it to be given the context, just needs to be sequential.

Of course you can represent higher dimension structures by linearizing indices (x + row_size * y, etc).

I think people are getting confused as most don't consider arrays to be arbitrarily dimensional without some scheme.

Completely off topic but you've reminded me of this great article: https://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector...
Trezor has a separate screen... that screen has your numbers, your computer screen has a blank grid of 3x3. You look at the Trezor and press the correct number in the blank grid.
He isn't talking to the people who already use encrypted email. He's talking to those who haven't made up their mind, yet, and since his goal is not to help anyone, but to increase adoption of his favorite solution, portraying the "competition" as hopeless nerds who lost contact with reality, might be an effective strategy.

> personally attacking your audience is not an effective writing technique

Absolutely true. So whenever a writer appears to be attacking their audience, you may have misidentified the audience.
Or cheaply produced in the US... Most tech I've bought from Shenzhen recently has been of better quality than domestically produced equivalents
I'm ok with that reasoning if you do something like a vesting period with a cliff at IPO. Make it clear tot he employee that the deal is... the employee only gets something if they stick it out. The thing with clawbacks is it's 100% deception. The 1 year cliff and vesting are all deliberate lies and manipulation.
I mentioned this in my separate top-level reply, but Scroll doesn't include getting you past paywalls: https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344875-does-scroll...
I don't like the navigation feature in most Apps because I like to know my next couple moves. Google Maps has a tendency to tell you "turn now" or "turn back there".

I have discovered by driving with others as navigators, that a lot of people cannot read a map and are literally just doing what the App says.

If you miss a turn, people are incapable of looking at the map and saying "go one more block and take a left to get back on course". They have to wait for a reroute.
But FreeRTOS has been around for quite some time with wide support among HW manufacturers, so why not include that?
"Sanders won a plurality, but tellingly he did terribly in second alignments." <-- This is a lie, by the way. Second alignments benefited Sanders more than almost any other candidate: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/803953713/graphics-how-iowas-...

The poster I'm replying to often sneaks lies into his wall-of-text posts when he thinks no one will notice or call him on it.
Also the closely related phenomenon of holding candidates unfamiliar with the codebase to the same standards as the interviewer, who wrote half of it.

Yea, if I had also been working on this particular code for the past two years I'd be able to breeze through these problems too.
I like the idea, but if this is crowdsourced how can we trust that the reviews will be unbiased? Amazon reviews are supposedly crowdsourced, and we know what a shit show those are.
Yes. PentiumII was basically the Pentium pro with the MMX extensions and some minor improvements for desktop computers.
Second that.

Pain is constructive in the right dose, and it's also risky since you can lose trust if delivered incorrectly. It requires maturity to give honest feedback and recognize that it might be biased since we have a lot of limitations on how we perceive others.
Right, if you pay significantly less than top companies you probably don't want to filter using their metrics since then you will just get their leftovers. Instead you should try to find the good candidates they miss. However there is really no reason for top companies to change their interviews.
Number 2 has existed for decades and it failed, or at least everywhere I’ve worked that tried it has since abandoned the concept. Have a look at IBM’s Rational Software Architect for an example.
Most jurisdictions count spoiled ballots. Doing this is a much clearer signal of your opinion than not voting.
> Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on.

You’re clearly not working on their military-contract Terminator-drone program…

…Unless “better” means “stone cold dead”.
The line has long since been co-opted for that usage.
I’d like to introduce you to the open market. Weekdays 9-4. Buy and sell any shares you’d like.