skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first 3 courses of the Statistics with R specialization, taught by Dr. Mine.

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/statistics
Error correcting codes are certainly a part of it (from simply looking up the definition of FT8), but what can also help generally is knowing very specifically the frequency range of your signal so that you can filter out the out-of-band noise. A lock-in amplifier is one example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-in_amplifier
> You also don't get to retake those every couple years.

What? Yes you do.

https://barprephero.com/learn/how-many-times-take-bar-exam/
Facebook sues cloaking software maker for deceptive Covid-19 ads
Totally not my experience.

And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required.

And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say or do something so silly to be rejected; this happens very rarely.
We found a guy whose Github had solid Rust code and then he walked us through it and it was great how he could explain it. Maybe we were lucky there but he's turned out to also be generally awesome or perhaps that's a good sign.

It certainly looks to me like you have the pedigree to be able to select which employers you'd like anyway, so the loss of the whiteboard thing is probably not a big deal to you.
I believe the answer is yes. One example would be the use of the Karhunen–Loève transform [1] promoted by Claudio Maccone [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karhunen–Loève_theorem

[2] https://doi.org/10.22323/1.056.0034
I would really hope that any artist remotely close to pro has some understanding of composition!
You get to grind leetcode at your job?
You may be better at interviewing than some of us. Personally, I can't figure out how to tell if someone can actually write code in a conversation.
I doubt in practice it would be completely random. Most likely it would still need to be reviewed/verified by the App Store review board, and most likely it would still require asking for permissions just like any other app.
> There is no stress

There's always stress for an interviewee, assuming they care about whether they get an offer.
One thing I do is:

a) Open time. I give them a couple problems in the morning and they can take as long as they want to think about them before the interviews. This takes away the 'deer in headlights' situation that so often happens to people - all of us. I'm good on my feet, but 1 time out 3 'I just don't see it' immediately. But if I have some stress-free time, I usually do.

b) Don't test their knowledge of algorithms. Who cares if they've practiced certain things a lot? Doing homework is a small measure of what you want. I give them fairly basic problems that have nice side-show questions to ask and just have a discussion.

c) I try to test for knowledge where they should have it: if they've been on tools & build or dev ops they should have a good grasp of things there. Another way to say: you're looking for strengths not weaknesses. I keep an open mind and think 'how can we leverage this person's talent'? Maybe they're not good over here, but better over there.

d) Fairly simple code, idiomatic, etc. not rocket science.

e) Mature communicator and by that I almost literally mean not too crazy. I think most of us are 'abnormal' and that being a 'decent communicator' is a little bit rare. Companies are full of weird dynamics they have to be resilient a little bit.
> print money and then make the rest of the world pay the bill

It is true that it's a benefit of US hegemony. The rest of the world will pay a minority fraction of the direct monetary bill (they'll take a minority share of the debasement hit over time). The vast majority of the wealth and productivity held/represented in US dollars, is in the US economy.

The worst of what the rest of the world sees isn't actually a direct financial cost in the manner the US will see that bill. The worst part is the risk of commodity prices increasing in a disorderly manner, as they did when the Bush Administration tanked the US dollar with spending + deficits + tax cuts and the wars, along with the Fed's over aggressive actions to try to dodge a recession after 9/11 (which then helped to cause the housing bubble afterward). The world got food turmoil [1] out of that dollar-inspired commodity bubble, which caused vast civil unrest around the world, primarily in less stable and poorer nations.

The motions of the dollar cause wild effects all over the planet, from food to banking/finance to energy. That's a much worse risk than the world eating 15% of the bill for what the Fed does here. Granted, that is indeed a form of paying the bill (so to speak), it's a different kind of bill than the one the US will likely be paying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_pri...
At 40:00: Time-based data, horizontally scalable, dumb storage, replicas don't need to be synchronized, you can contact any replica. Sounds like the dream.

But that's a drastic over-simplification of time and consistent responses. Consistent responses in particular seems like a hard requirement given how much attention he's given to "why N+1 queries are wrong and you need to do them as a single operation" (which I totally agree with). And I don't think this is something that can be glossed over at all because the whole concept hinges on history being immutable... which means a major synchronization time bottleneck.

And while he does address this at 46:40, but he seems to treat inconsistent timestamps as "this is an interesting space, but if you have [inconsistent time in your db] you have a problem" as if it's a solved problem. Spanner has arguably the most sophisticated approach at scale right now, with atomic clocks all over the place, and it still uses MVCC to address the discrepancies because to do otherwise means major scaling problems.

---

There's a lot to unpack in here, delivered rapidly and concisely (yay!), and some good detailed chunks of info, but also what feels like a lot of "these are wrong and/or difficult for specific and largely-correct reasons" -> "this could be great because [hands waving furiously] it has none of those problems!".

Values are great, documents are terrible, programmability is king, I completely agree. But none of this sounds like it leads to a solution, just a "these are the tradeoffs we're making, how about we stop trading them off?". As a thought-provoker it's interesting, but it doesn't seem to directly lead to anything.
We have a take-home and a whiteboarding bit. No tricks to the whiteboarding. Very straightforward brute-force solution that you can improve. Take-home doesn't have code. It's a technical design question that you then discuss with an engineer on an on-site.

So far so good. I sometimes attempt to requalify by adding a second step where I try an alternative mechanism of testing, just to see if someone who did poorly on the whiteboard (which is a coderpad-style thing) would do better in a different mechanism. So far very high correlation. Pity, I'm very social so I'd prefer a conversation and walking through code at a higher level.
Half the leetcode becomes obvious when you actually solve engineering problems as a part of the job.
> Does that list include stock buybacks?

The omission is deliberate.

When money is being returned to shareholders I greatly prefer dividends. It puts pressure on management to manage for sustainable long-term cashflow and removes the temptation to pump up the stock for a quick personal profit. Unfortunately the tax treatment in the US is very unfavourable. By contrast, Australia gives franking credits for dividends and more companies there pay shareholders with dividends instead.
Or...oh nevermind. You must be a joy at parties.
Why do those 2 things need to be bundled?

If you want a Blockbuster Video store with no porn for your VHS player you can go to Blockbuster Video and I can go down the street to my local Video store. We can both have a VHS machine by Sony.

There's no reason your phone has to be locked by Apple for you to continue to only get apps from Apple's porn free app store.

Why does your desire to have Apple curate your apps mean that I have to put with it as well? Can't you just choose to only get apps curated by Apple and I can choose to get my apps curated by someone else on the same device?
I would say the kalman filter is quite appropriate where the state is our model of the world, the 'page flip' as a state update based on observation. Also the same as a Bayesian model update:

> state = kalman(state, observation)
For those you get credentialed once and you're done. Not the same thing at all.
Open Mainframe Project Helps Fill the Need for COBOL Resources
> They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else.

Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.
Lack of Retail Items at University
Hey what's up,

I'm a sophomore in college. I along with some international students are still at our dorms.

I found out my school is running out of my school's running low on retail items (snacks and such) at the dining hall and vending machine, aside from setting up a Shopify website and printing out flyers how else would you suggest capitalizing on this?
Can anyone comment on the difficulty (for a hacker) of using Remarkable with Kindle books? I have a Kindle already, if that makes a difference in generating DRM-free files of content I already purchased reading rights to.
Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this
DuckDuckGo vs. Google Search Results
You are 100% right. It looks like people from this thread never ever left their own apartments and don't know anything about real projects.
Maybe that's just a software developer thing? When we hire technical but not primarily software-developer roles, we focus on the particular role's requirements, and the skillset and experience the candidate is bringing. If this is a product support role, have you done product support? If this is an ops role, have you fielded random "urgent" requests from development teams and recovered bad production deploys? Do we need someone who can get something done ASAP, and as such do they have all the needed skills now, or can we wait while they familiarize themselves with a bunch of new stuff?

I generally ask few technical questions because I'm mostly interested in everything other than your technical knowledge. I can find 50 people who have taken a coding bootcamp and memorized an entire language's inner workings. And I can usually quickly determine how deep your technical knowledge is by throwing stupidly specific questions at you. But I won't know whether you can apply that knowledge in a way that will gel with the team and the requirements of the role.

Which is why most quality candidates come from personal referrals. If you want to get a good job, develop good working relationships.
In higher level education they also use the familiar chalkboard rather than electronics. I use this not to say the merits of their children's occupations (regression to the mean is common in families of great achievements) but as a warning of what people in tech see as a threat to their own children's well being. Electronics are wonderful but not for everything. If screens work better for you, perfect! They have been a hindrance to me, addiction to screens is very common today and I am weak enough to fall into they category.
So many obvious examples, but since up thread people are using the "teach a man to fish" idea, let's go with that... you are now the captain of a fishing boat!

So what happens when, in order to cover expenses while you're quarantined for a few months, you've sold your fishing boat, fishing poles, life vests, etc.? Your fishing boat might have been turned into scrap metal by the time you can resume working, and you've already spent all the money in the interim (you sold it for cheap because at the time everyone else was selling their fishing boats for the same reason). That's why life won't necessarily return to normal when this is over.
No individual currency, greater regionalization of each currency.

As regards the EUR, I wouldn't say the UK leaving is sufficient to claim "the EU is already actually starting to break up." I don't think there's serious existential threat to the EUR long term, and there are plans to move away from the dollar.

Those factors don't matter much for CNY if China can exert sufficient political pressure on its economic dependents, which it will likely attempt given the long term geopolitical payoff.

I see those as the 2 main regionalizing forces, although as they wean their populations off the dollar, other smaller currencies may follow as it loses benefits of being global reserve.
Apple TV+ offering free programs without subscription on its app for limited run
Nobody should be either afraid or unwilling to do 'whiteboarding', rather, it should be an opportunity. It's not perfect, but reasonably structured it's a good thing.

Academic credentials are not necessarily conducive to great dev talent ... OSS with lots of stars is a much better measure, but even then, it's not a guarantee of anything.

Companies have to be responsible about their due diligence.
Would you hire a doctor by insisting they perform surgery in front of you? Would you hire a lawyer by demanding they filling out legal paperwork in front of you?
My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having statement and that I needed to go back and study sql. I sat there awkwardly [I have been writing sql since I was 14 - I was 25]. Welp, he then rolled his eyes and left. Four hours of an interview ruined. Oh well. Yep. That is how tech interviews go. He went on to ruin digg.com (the rewrite everything guy) and I promised myself to never be a dick to people I interview.
> [...] serves less time than people convicted of selling small amounts of drugs.

Did you mean to compare this to racial biased drug sentencing?
> Didn't the whole generations fight for something more complex than "the right to be not told to social distance during a pandemic"?

Read the parent comment to which I responded. Particularly the "There are videos of people being forcefully dragged home " part.

> but there's any infinite list of right wing provocateurs bemoaning the orders

Like there is an infinite list of left wing provocateurs who can't wait for full martial law.

> a higher R0 doesn't mean a smaller death rate directly

I may not be a virologist but:

higher R0 => more cases not counted (especially at the begining without lockdown) => lower CFR. I don't see how that cannot be true, but please, I'm open to any explanation if my logic is flawed.

> I would put up w/ some social distancing to prevent more pain to that many more people - absolutely.

Yes and it's exacly what most americans are doing right now. And yes, it's worth doing if the mortality rate is 1%, not if it's 0.1%, or in this case we'll have to close the country every year for influenza.
> In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice

South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway and Malaysia all look to have handled the crisis very well. India is as well - as far as their figures are to be believed. We'll also find out if Japan's handling of the crisis has been effective in the coming weeks.

I'm not really seeing a pattern in democracies handling this badly. Meanwhile while the Chinese figures probably aren't completely made up, it's also extremely doubtful how reliable they are.
Without a lockdown, I imagine asthmatics and the like would be dying A LOT more
My experience as a hiring manager disagrees with yours. Large system design interviews are par for the course - everyone knows how to do them and everyone has lots of experience. They don’t tell you really anything about a candidate, to the point that we should stop using them.
I Hate Marketing
I forgot to reply to the previous post on topic but is there someone looking for a single purpose typewriter laptop?

One that I know is Kingjim Pomera line. They have a few reflexive LCD models based on some rare Toshiba uC, an E Ink model that runs on good old ARM926EJ-S, IIRC, and a color backlit LCD model that just runs Android Linux stripped bare(no Android GUI at all). Some people are running X on the last one.

Those are only available in Japan with JP106 keyboard(think of ANSI with ISO return, ISO symbols and two extra keys next to spacebar) and I can’t assure hackability, but as an input...
I don't think every system needs to be large or distributed. 90% of engineers aren't going to need to go beyond the basics of load balancing.
The EU is a deeply corrupt elitist institution designed to take control over Europe. But there are a few good things like this, food regulation ... that come from it.
>Also iOS apps are so large this won't be practical at all on cellular data.

They don't have to be. For example Tweetbot, which is a fully functional app, is only about 7MB. It's not hard to imagine that a single screen of an iOS app specifically optimized for space could be only a fraction as large – considerably smaller than the average site these days (10MB+).
Loved Model Thinking, taught by Scott Page at UM. Good for the current model dependent times as well.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking

We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it? Models. Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don't. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one. Why do models make us better thinkers? Models help us to better organize information - to make sense of that fire hose or hairball of data (choose your metaphor) available on the Internet. Models improve our abilities to make accurate forecasts. They help us make better decisions and adopt more effective strategies. They even can improve our ability to design institutions and procedures. In this class, I present a starter kit of models: I start with models of tipping points. I move on to cover models explain the wisdom of crowds, models that show why some countries are rich and some are poor, and models that help unpack the strategic decisions of firm and politicians.

The models covered in this class provide a foundation for future social science classes, whether they be in economics, political science, business, or sociology. Mastering this material will give you a huge leg up in advanced courses. They also help you in life. Here's how the course will work. For each model, I present a short, easily digestible overview lecture. Then, I'll dig deeper. I'll go into the technical details of the model. Those technical lectures won't require calculus but be prepared for some algebra. For all the lectures, I'll offer some questions and we'll have quizzes and even a final exam. If you decide to do the deep dive, and take all the quizzes and the exam, you'll receive a Course Certificate. If you just decide to follow along for the introductory lectures to gain some exposure that's fine too. It's all free. And it's all here to help make you a better thinker!
400 actions is actually not that much at all... I would even say, quite a small app.
The software industry's greatest blog post sin: "Hiring in tech is broken"

This topic is trite. Furthermore no one seems to be able to offer up actual tangible suggestions as to how to fix this, or some objective 'better way'.

Disclaimer I work at a FAANG etc company:
Also this has been distinctly "not" my experience at many FAANG type companies. Usually these interviews, even the one's I haven't done well in, have been highly conversational, and all contain a fairly in depth 'soft skills' interview as well.

Yes, your technical knowledge has to be good, but a good interview will keep pressing at the edge of your knowledge (not to make you 'fail'), but to see how you handle the unknown.

In fact for one of the companies I ended up working at I was called in for a second soft skills interview just to dig even deeper on the dimension the author claims is 'never tested for'.

Much like these authors I don't have a perfect solution to this, however I will say one of the most rewarding interviews I've ever done (at a well funded startup where I did NOT get the offer was comprised of):

- 1 Algo question (standard fare)

- 1 Architecture question (standard fare)

- 1 'find a bug in this mock part of the codebase / pair program with me' question. Implementation didn't necessarily have to be perfect, mostly was interested in diagnosing the actual problem and talking about 'how' we might solve it (very fun)

- 1 Product Sense (!) question with actual PMs (very fun)

- 1 General culture fit / experience interview
What a fantastic read; thank you for sharing!
You don't need a unique product idea to succeed Kinda
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much data around hiring outcomes because companies really don’t have a reason to share that information. For a lot of people, it comes down to personal experiences.

I’ve definitely interviewed with companies where I was put in really unnatural situations that I struggled to shine in. For example, I bombed an interview in which I had to do a live coding challenge where I had to talk through what I was thinking while coding, which the interviewer insisted on so they could understand “how I think”.

I thought it was an incredibly cumbersome and useless request because I never talk when I code, and coding in front of others in an interview is tough enough as it is. I asked if we could discuss the solution once I completed the problem, but they declined that idea.

Needless to say, I didn’t get the job and the assessment felt like a huge waste of time. I think a lot of people see companies doing stupid stuff like this and get frustrated because candidates are often capable while being placed in high-pressure situations that don’t enable abstract creative thinking, which programming requires.
But once you pass it and are admitted to the bar, you're set (assuming you renew your membership, don't change states, etc).
Why are the most recent commits about implementing an endpoint to receive donations for his foundation? Why would you want that in a compiler?
At a wavelength of 70 centimeters (432 MHz). All via the magic of extremely effective error correcting codes (and fairly rare atmospheric conditions).

Related, I'm amazed that my little $70 WSPR transmitter can push a 20m/14MHz signal from San Francisco to Georgia using only 0.2W, transmitting on a pretty lousy backyard dipole only 10 feet off the ground. True, it's only a beacon ("call sign Kxxxxx transmitting from SF at 200mW"), but still...

WSPR being another Joe Taylor invention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
So tell me again why I would want a slower, less feature fill web app? Also, what makes you think I would put my credit card info on a random website?