skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A technique that I learned from casting actors is: you don't have to be the candidates enemy to find out if they fit. If you ever find yourself trying to actively make the candidates life harder for no reason, you are doing it wrong (e.g. asking trick questions, expecting weirdly specific answers, etc)

Instead give them multiple different hard (but realistic for the position) problems and be on their side every time to guide them. Try to get them to do the best they can and observe them all the time.

This way you can get good feeling for how they are as a person, how they react to guidance and teamwork, and false negatives where a simple miscommunication leads to wrong solutions and a bad result, despite the candidate actually beeing good, are reduced.

If they constantly and heavily rely on your guidance that is a bad sign. If they actively fight against your guidance, this is bad as well. But in the end you are ”casting” them for a certain position within an existing "cast", and sometimes a person who initially needs more guidance will do great after a while if they are in an environment where they can receive it, while people who actively avoid guidance could work just fine in a position where they don't get too much anyways etc.

The opposite of this approach would be to ask an actor which pieces of [insert obscure european postramatic theatre director here] they know and if they know none assuming they can't act. Bonus points if the project doesn't have any connection to the topic asked at all. If anybody ever does this, it says more about the person asking, than the person answering. No — try really hard to get the best out of the candidates in the most accurate emulation of the job you want to give to them, and have a grasp of what they will get up to speed with in no time and what actually will get worse (e.g. personality traits). And if you areninsecure about someone give it another shot in a second round.
I am not spreading FUD and I am not dissing the license. FFmeg is great software. My only point is the standard build process for JavaScript versions will go against the license.

If you just do the equivalent of

npm install --save ffmpeg.js
webpack

You've may have just built something that must be LGPLed. That's a good thing to know so you can take steps to honor the license and either LGPL your stuff or keep ffmeg out of your build process and just link it at runtime as the license requires
Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
When government agencies want to do something bad they always bring in child exploitation, terrorism or war against drugs.

Government agencies should be able to fight crime without massively spying and monitoring their citizens.
People are dying because of China, not America.
The "Tap below to copy your invite link:" on your invite page does not appear to work? (Google Chrome on macOS)
Do you realize that a tax-free 2k/month is way above the income of 95% of the worlds population? This might work in a tiny high-price region with very little illegal migration and restrictive legal migration like e.g. Switzerland. Not for a country the size of the US tho with a entire continent south of the border looking to migrate there no matter what it takes.
Interviewing is a skill, and some of the very productive can be very bad at it.
See my comments just below. There is a link with a timeline, and it's very likely this started in November.
Both hazing and cheerleading are bad.

The value of a sunk cost is zero. Who cares what you invested into the process so far? It's time to make the best judgment you can for the benefit of your organization. If you learn that the previous investment was misspent, great. Refine the process for next time.

You should also be providing a positive candidate experience if possible. They may be a customer, have friends you want to hire, or be in an anti-loop and actually good (but you can't tell, and that's okay, because, well, it happens).

You're there to (in order):
1) make the best judgment for the organization
2) represent the company well for the candidate (hopefully this is a faithful representation, since you can't work long term for the company if you're tricking the candidate)

It sounds like you do this already, since your interviews are challenging and friendly. Hopefully they're discriminating at and below job level to allow you to inform a hiring decision. Friendly almost always makes sense (excepting for threatening, dangerous, illegal, or otherwise red flag interviews).

Some houses cut bad interviews short at a halfway point. We don't. The candidate might show you something later in the day that points to another position or area of strength, and, either way, they should feel like they got a fair shake. It also helps with cross-calibration. I've had two candidates that I would have walked out at other companies (less than 1%) at the halfway point. 2-3 incremental person-hours is almost always worth it, though. I'm glad we put in the effort.
Also, technically the only form of correct.
Only if there's a good reason for doing that.
Science is a set of evolving traditions about how to fix errors and it relies on the consciousness/perception of individual scientists. Consciousness/perception is error-prone but it does seem intimately connected with the correction of error, too, as we strive towards better understanding. Aren't we compelled to trust it in this regard? That things will seem to be more like they really are, including consciousness itself?
Mixing Samples to Speed Up Covid-19 Detection
System Programming wiki (UIUC)
Do states have the power to riot and say “we’re not going to pay federal taxes, because well ... the federal government did fuck all and gave us the middle finger when we most needed them”

The pandemic from the start when Trump saying “its only one person, we totally have it in control” to the change of opinions on masks, to the lies really feels like a shit show.

Yet he has massive support. It baffles my mind.
> There are not enough masks or tests

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/22/21189881/apple-donating-m...

Maybe Tim Cook should run for Governor. Cook knows how to get stuff done, and he has no legal powers whatsoever compared to the Governor.
> Government agencies should be able to fight crime without massively spying and monitoring their citizens.

Nor the rest of the world's citizens.
>historically priced in dollars for two reasons

I think you've missed the most obvious one in that you have to price in something and the US$ is the best known to use. I'm about to buy some petrol and it really doesn't make a difference to me if the price is £1 or $1.23 or 41 baht or whatever.

Same reason the contract will be in English - you have to use something and that's the best known.
Ask HN: Why is instant messaging over email not a thing?
I mean it seems like the perfect replacement for WhatsApp and all the centralized messaging services.
And everybody has an E-Mail address.

So why is there no widely adopted app that fakes the overlay from an instant messaging service with the email back-end?
This idea is obviously not new, i have found 4 companies that tried it [0] [1], one of these companies is Microsoft [2].

Is there a problem i don't see?
Is mail to slow? - i have tried it between Gmail and some other service and it seems fast enough.

There is even Push-IMAP (P-IMAP) for the push notification.

So is there a technical problem?
Why is the instant messaging over email not a thing?

[0] https://www.spikenow.com/de/

[1] Hop and MailTime

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/microsoft-introduces-send-a-short-form-email-app-that-works-more-like-instant-messaging/
You can figure out whether they actually understand what they’ve done by asking the right questions. E.g. not “how did you do that” but “why did you do it this way and not that way?”
I never had the opportunity to compete in FRC, the schools I attended were never willing to back a team or let a team try to fundraise. But I volunteered every year as a kid. Great memories.
I liked most interviews, but the one that irks me are when the interviewer asks very specific questions that are specific to the particular domain the company is in.

But one of the biggest reason to apply somewhere as a developer is precisely to get to know a problem domain. Money is not the only incentive, by far.
Sorry, bad memory. Still that's beside the point. The point is Apple so far is neither game nor VR friendly. I hope they change that stance. I'd prefer to be on Mac 100% of the time but I have a Windows machine as well because that's basically where all VR is happening.
You say the article is terrible but your problems deal just with the title. The article acknowledges the things you say it doesn’t.
I couldn't read past the repeated "wolkswagon"
It should be left up to the nations that the loot was plundered from. After going to the Cairo museum it's a painful experience going to an Egyptian exhibit in the US. But going with people who have never been to Egypt or even the African continent there is definitely a real appreciation of what is in the American Museum. The best of the best should go back to Africa but there should be thought put into things left behind to inspire people to goto the source.
I will send turteCore, but you have to ask for it. Ribbit.
Wouldn't this be fixed by presenting a on-site assignments? For example a small project, with test suites, where a feature or two needs to be completed and tests updated?

(Disclosure: We did this at a company I worked at).
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1247938861184909312 Their tweet on Twitter.
In fairness, assuming the earth is a sphere is rarely a problem. A typical “closest to me” algo is will have a ton more UX error due to differences between travel time and as the crow flies travel time. Frankly I agree with the article in the sense I have implemented decent solutions with MySQL just using a bit of math to filter to a reasonable lat,long span and then ordering with the haversine formula.

You don’t need PostGis to find the nearest McDonald’s closest to an IP address of every visitor. A degree of lat is 69 miles, and a degree of long is easy to calculate based on the lat, but you may need an extra case if you want to be correct for the tiny number of people that live near the antimeredian line.

I wonder if people run toward PostGis just because they don’t know to google haversine or the spherical law of cosines.

That being said, I have often come up with decent hacks that solve a customer problems but biting the bullet and adopting Postgres may have been ultimately better. I wish PostGis was a skill I have, but in a pinch the law of cosines is quite passable.
> (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can.)

It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is.

But what if I am still looking for work and companies literally don't reply to my applying to them? I might be the next John Carmack but if nobody gives me a chance (for reasons outside of my control and unrelated to my proficiency) then according to you I suck. :(

It's very broken to assume that skilled people get snapped up immediately so whoever is available must be mediocre (or bad).

It is an awfully imprecise assumption!
TeX Live 2020 is available for download now
It would be interesting if renowned museums could be mobilized as stewards of antiquities. Not only do they take on a new mandate: returning cultural artifacts, but also share the skills developed over generations for how to care for and curate these artifacts.

The idea of going places and shipping findings back home to be stuffed in a museum seems dated and very "colonial" to me. Maybe the future of museums is as described above.
and official course notes from CS241 at University of Illinois: http://cs241.cs.illinois.edu/coursebook/index.html
How is this even a question? Of COURSE they should.

The fact this is even up for debate is preposterous.

Africa should have its artefacts, Greece should get its marbles back and Western museums should be emptied of ALL war treasure and imperialist spoil.

Only then would so-called Western moral authority actually have some basis.
There are at least 96 oil producing countries in the world ([1]). It makes sense to trade oil with USD across the board instead of fragmenting the oil market into 96 different sub-markets (oil to each country's local currency).

Now, the buyer and seller can of course convert USD from/to their desired currency on FX markets. Oil trades tend to be big, so that would cause demand for USD liquidity. That demand, and the fact that these dollars are effectively "locked" inside the FX markets (reducing supply), would make the dollar price go up (everything else being equal), hence strengthening the dollar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
100% agreed. Privatization of profits, socialization of losses needs to stop.
A (possible) solution to Covid-19
As a former digg user, I gotta say you got the last laugh on that one.

Checking his LinkedIn it seems he works for what amounts to a modern payday loan (now the users pay with privacy loss and a monthly subscription instead of high interest) website now.
If you have a tactic that catches 30% of the stupidest terrorists you have multiple tactics that catch 30% of the stupidest terrorists, because they are the stupidest.

The actual problem is not being able to catch the smart ones who every now and then do something stupid or lazy or expedient (since even the smartest of humans have moments where they are not at their best).
The 501 Developer Manifesto
I know many neighbors who were double income families and now none have jobs. I am unemployed and it’s truly a tragedy. I haven’t witnessed anything like this in my lifetime.

If people don’t get back to work soon, it’s going to be disastrous.
> So does this mean that programming education is broken?

Of course it is broken, it rarely mention naming, debugging, and never emphasize reading code. The real fundamentals are not there and you learn them on the job.
I have posted this again as dang asked me to put it up again.

Happy to answer questions about the idea, but I am most interested in find collaborators to make it happen ASAP.
I really enjoyed this article. It's probably one of the most fair, unbiased, and insightful articles written on tech interviews and may be the best one I've read.

Over the past 15 years, I have interviewed with many different companies. I once read that when you're a good fit for the company, the interview will feel suspiciously easy. This has been the case for all the times I've gotten offers.

Reading this article, a lot of the good points remind me of a particular interview I had though. It was at relatively large tier-2 tech firm a few years ago (not the FAANG tier); one where I didn't get an offer, but the interview process and experience was memorably good. I remember specifically telling the recruiter even after the rejection that I really enjoyed the interview there.

One of the rounds was with the principal engineer at the company, who was the most senior engineer at the company at the time if I recall correctly. It was the system architecture interview. I was asked to prepare by thinking of a system I had designed and architected in my past experience, and present it as if the principal engineer was my coworker and we would hold tech discussions. It's the closest thing I've ever gotten to the "Present code they wrote" idea that Andrew mentions here.

For the coding round of this interview, I was asked to bring my own laptop (another point that Andrew mentioned here; this was also the only company of all the interviews I've had in 15 years that asked me to do this.). I was then given a problem at the beginning of that interview, and given 45 minutes or so to write code on my own (the interviewer actually walked out of the room and left me alone while I did). It was a reasonable problem to code for the allotted time, and had reasonable complexity but not overly difficult. When time's up, the interview came back and we discussed my code.

Both of those rounds were something that was so well done that I think it was the most fair way a company could have assessed me correctly. I did well on the coding round, but my experience in system architecture was not a good match for the type of work they did, and in retrospect I could tell. Since I was interviewing at the Staff Engineer level, I think they correctly evaluated me and turned me down for the role. (Although I would point out that after that day of interview, they ended up being undecided, and asked me to come back one more time to have one more interview round, with one of the first engineers of the company there. I did poorly in that round for a variety of reasons, and that was ultimately what got me the rejection.)
On 3, I don't know about pedophiles but terrorists do indeed use consumer apps; they're 'good enough' and the traffic doesn't stand out. Many (most?) cases are broken open because law enforcement turns a human source or manages to place someone undercover.

Of course, those apps are not all that they use. There are definite advantages to things like encrypted digital radio vs IP communications, and concomitant downsides such as standing out like a sore thumb in the RF spectrum or being more vulnerable to zero-days against niche platforms.
Maybe there's a debate to be had about how the Federal Government should act but there shouldn't be a debate whether it should act and the article gives a good description of the Federal Government simply failing to act and even sabotaging action. The unconscionable and rather unbelievable.
Make Linux Fast Again (2019)
A tiger in a New York zoo has been found to have Covid-19
Whiteboard interviews all the way. They are interactive. And they can be two-way interviews. All participants of the interview are interviewing each other.

Take homes are basically free labor.
The Feynman Technique of Learning
It also assesses how good someone is at preparing to solve specific kinds of problems.

Which is fine. If you're naturally talented at whiteboarding, great. If not, but you've prepared months ahead of time, great also.

If you're not naturally talented, and haven't prepared because of naivety or due to some principle, well, that's not exactly a great signal to an employer.
What do the threat models usually look like?
Two things that have never happened in more than 200 interviews:

1) Anyone with >0 years of experience outperforms a Waterloo internship candidate on the coding or algorithms round.

2) Anyone interviewing for a senior position performs well on the other rounds and fails only system design.

I'm pretty sure it's large companies that can afford to play long-term big-picture strategies with talent, and small ones that have such low-rent concerns as which languages and frameworks you know.
I'll be the asshole here: this is crap. They took some weak correlations (anti-correlations whatever) between conscious brains and 'unconscious' brains induced via Ketamine. The rest of the paper is just creating new jargon for large vague regions of the brain, and tons of jump-the-shark assumptions about how they work together.

Most notably, there's no mention of STDP, nor the cingulate gyrus, or any reference to the fine-structure internals of the brain.
I wonder if it was ever considered to pay companies / individuals according to their relative tax rate. So an employee would get 30-40% of the baseline, while international companies using offshore trickery get almost nothing.

Otherwise, like the article says, a large part of US stimulus packages will ultimately end up with foreigners or in Panama or other offshore tax havens. And that wouldn't help the US economy much.
> How is this even a question?

Let me try.

These artefacts could be considered common human heritage. Mesopotamian artefacts are no more the property of the British than the government in present-day Baghdad. In many cases, the local governments are unstable or extremist, which has lead to priceless treasures being destroyed, defaced, lost or stolen.

Anyone claiming this is a simple issue is oversimplifying. Putting aside recent imperialism, should Republican Roman artefacts plundered from Gaul or Syria be returned to Paris or Damascus?
"He developed a philosophy that assumed that the sun was the venerable source of all life, and since the coconut was the fruit that grows nearest the sun, it must be the most perfect food for people."

That may sound comical, but I think the reasoning behind some modern diets (e.g. Paleo Diet) isn't too different.
This is a great platform for IOT!
Whiteboarding sucks. I was asked to do this once or twice, I can't think while others watch because I am focusing on what they are seeing, and my penmanship sucks. It's not for anyone that gets nervous easy. I just don't get it, why not put up a text editor on a wall screen and ask people to write the same code there?
The fact that cryptocurrency is prone to such fluctuations is a significant part of the reason it's a bad currency. Nobody wants to have a bank account that can halve or double in a few months.
Korea's ecommerce market is still dominated by local players
You didn’t answer the clear and direct question I asked.
Should art be tied to the people, the land, the culture, or any and all?

If art belongs at least in part to people or culture... there are a lot of Africans in the US. Should they have the right to learn about the culture of their ancestors in a US museum? Why or why not?

Cultures and people change. Obviously none of the individuals from the 1600s are alive today, but many of the cultures don't either, and peoples migrate. Tracking down every individual ancestor (by culture? by genes?) and allocating them their proportional art seems... challenging.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't "repatriate" some art. But I don't think it's as simple as "yes, wholeheartedly". There are fractals of complexity to untangle, and it's unclear at what point we cease to be better for trying.
To us it is just a job, but we still do it well.

THANK you. I’m feeling the same moment of “I’m not alone!” reading this manifesto that I did when someone here on HN pointed me to nohello
As Jakarta sinks, what does the future hold for the city’s poor?
It would depend on each individual item's provenance would it not? If it was seized during a war or under Colonial rule certainly it should be returned. If it was found by a private citizen during a legally sanctioned dig or purchased from the legal owner, then no.
which can lead to hyper inflation as well
ClickHouse is a common replacements for ElasticSearch in cases where data consists of structured records. ContentSquare publicly reported 11x decrease in cost and 10x faster 99th percentile queries after migration. [1] Others have seen similar results.

[1] https://github.com/ClickHouse/clickhouse-presentations/blob/...

Disclaimer: some of the "others" are customers of my employer Altinity, which offers support for ClickHouse.
Work at a Startup has 100s of well-funded YC startups actively hiring engineers
It's hard to collect metadata if the traffic is inside Tor, I2P or behind some clever tunneling.

But government programs have other means of collecting data: OS level backdoors, flawed random number generators like DUAL_EC_DRBG, "unintended hardware bugs" in Intel's CPUs.

I guess they mostly rely on these alternative means. These "let's forbid strong encryption" might be just dust in the eyes to make their targets feel secure if they use apps with "strong encryption".
> and make a turn while doing so.

This is called settlement overhead, and is the reason you're incorrect. Every time you change one currency for another on any meaningful scale, it eats into your profit margin..

Tl;Dr - there's no such thing as "no foreign transaction fee!!!1!" in oil baron sized transactions.