skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Half the engineers working for FB, Google etc would not get hired today.

I think this is actually getting at why people ignore work history and what projects a candidate was involved in.

When you get into these places you realize how little that name brand means. There are a lot of not particularly bright people at those places. Or more charitably, maybe bright people but not particularly skilled at software engineering, for some definition thereof. Sometimes those people can attach themselves to a well known project name. But what did they do for that project? Were they constructive or not? You can't really tell based on their word alone. Maybe they can charm their way out of that discussion. It's also not unheard of that they could be taking some credit from peers.

So people come up with the quizzes and IQ tests, however flawed, as a way to "verify".
+1, agreed. The industry needs to have a better process for it. Say first month is evaluation or something and if you have two job offers, you schedule it on your calendar sequentially.
The Official Supported languages, since 2005 are LabVIEW, Java, and C++. There are also unofficial languages available including Python, Go, Rust and I'm sure a couple more (generally these run on top of the JRE). This is mainly due to the current controller for the FRC Competition being a National Instruments RoboRIO controller.
It looks like it’s still close to that online at the large sellers, like apmex and Kitco.

For example, the spot price for silver is around $15, but the cheap, generic silver rounds are at $20 an ounce, 25% premium. American Eagles 40% premium.

Other places not in stock at all.
That and turning health insurance into, well, insurance.

You don't need insurance for small things you can pay out of pocket. (Or entirely predictable costs like a pregnancy without complications or getting glasses every year.)

You need insurance for catastrophic events that would wreck your finances.
Given the baffling array of pro-china behavior by the WHO lately, I'm not so sure that's a good idea.
I've heard that retail sellers deliberately milk the "it's the end of the world" narrative. They price gouge under the guise of "See! The price of physical gold is dislocating from paper money!"
I signed up for Lyn's newsletter March 25th! Looking forward to seeing more of her content here, I really like how in-depth and insightful it is!
Your parent is the founder of classcentral.com, not Coursera.
It's not really simple to do that sort of DB scaling on demand. You might want to look into a service like Amazon's Aurora which I believe has that capability.
I read this last week (forgot where I read it) and haven't been able to find data to support what I read so take the following with a grain of salt.

Many investors owned gold as a hedge. The market's downturn happened so rapidly and violently, their other positions took a massive beating. That divergence happened because big players needed to get out of their gold position to cover margin for their other positions.
I think plain text is OK. There is also Markdown, MediaWiki format, etc, although a simple readable format is best, so that includes plain text (and possibly Markdown too).

And even if another format is made, we should avoid the mistakes of HTML, such as scripting and styling and some other stuff.
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It doesn't seem like they're catching most of the stupid ones now. Companies report child pornography tens of millions of times a year: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/us/online-child-sexual-ab...

Most of which is Facebook posts, which is perhaps the worst platform to use if you wanted to keep your crime secret.
Now advertising businesses are moving to automated bidding with advertiser specified target performance, so you will likely spend less ad budgets on less sales. And I don't think so called "VC money" has ever been a big part of ad spending. Most of the online ad spending still comes from big established businesses.
> Apple can control the user experience on the device you bought without forcing a 30% surcharge against the competition.

I don't disagree with you.

My response was meant to be general, not a direct response to the article. I didn't mean to imply that Apple gets everything right. I just wanted to express how all the things that HN thinks Apple gets wrong, are exactly the things that I (and many others) value deeply and pay a premium for.
Even if you do - openly ask them for a feedback and keep improving it. Showing empathy & keeping your ears open always helps.
The Wait Two Weeks Rule
Welcome to 15. I hope you make it to sweet 16 without somebody gladly decking you back!
I use redux-sentry-middleware for that [1]

[1]: https://github.com/vidit-sh/redux-sentry-middleware
>In other words: people with 5 years of industry experience are playing in a completely different arena than more junior engineers, who are unfortunately in a more precarious situation.

The logic is sound, you have a point. But I think it doesn't play out this way in reality. Maybe it's like this for your current company, but is that the general trend?

I know that during the dot com bubble bursting many years ago what you said was not the case. Could be different now but do you have any other supporting evidence?
That's a reasonable sentiment, but it's not the world we are in, and we will be making economic and health decisions over the next 18 months which will force this tradeoff.

They need to be intentional choices, with an understanding of the costs, where the costs are often paid by people we don't see or frequently think about.
Isn't the real risk, in moving to a fringe frontend framework, not just that you can't hire, but that you run into some roadblock you just can't get around? That you have some abstraction leak or messy interactions with JS?
These things do exist (Sony DPT, Onyx Boox, ReMarkable) - they're just more expensive than you'd expect them to be considering what they can do.
Coding on a whiteboard is the worst. I’ve been in google interviews where I mention that the whiteboard format makes the process very difficult because of how much work it is to rework existing code.

The interview replied “well wouldn’t you have to do the same on a computer?” chuckles to himself at how clever he is that he realized that

No numb-nuts, on a computer I can move lines around by pressing Alt+Down. Here I need to erase the entire thing and re-write it, which wastes precious time, so instead I spend way more time pre-planning the exact layout of the code, which wastes more precious time.

And in the end you take a picture of it to transcribe into the computer to send to the hiring overlords. Just let us use our tooling to begin with.

Ugh.
Writing presentations or articles really helps. You can used spaced repetition to check your ability to explain something.
If you enjoyed this, I recommend Lyn's more recent article, post-covid: https://www.lynalden.com/great-depression/
You should absolutely see how they code - I've interviewed so many people on the phone who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, but they could speak to it enough to fool you.
Agreed - architectures are perfect for whiteboards - code is not.
There are strong cultural ties to seeking precious metal as a hedge by individuals. Indians and the Chinese are used to huge ornate weddings and have a strong sense the jewelry bears a dual purpose. It's possible the last fifteen years of the diaspora has acculturated the precious metals practices of their cultures into America.

Real hedge doesn't go to jewelry. But the lower grade gold and silver has to come from the same feedstock. So the localised effect would be felt in the investment community because some of the bars are going out the door to metalworking not to another vault.

I'm less sure its indicative overall of risk these days. Real LME type trade is online. There is no shortage of metal worldwide is there? I thought most central banks de-gilded over the last decades anyway.
Haha did you hack my computer? I was just looking at that :-)
You should perhaps explain what you mean by "ICOs", rather than only using the abbreviation.
Privilege and Anxiety Clash, Then Make-Up, in My Covid Brain
Absolutely the results are biased. If you bring this up though, you get publicly shamed and called a conspiracy theorist. When covid 19 was spreading in China, fringe information about the virus that implied it would be a world wide pandemic was suppressed and removed from search results as well as reddit. All major conduits of information, google search, reddit front page, youtube, facebook, etc are heavily moderated. Information that is raw still sits in the long tails and corners of these websites, but the majority of what you see is hand curated.
> 486/ISA-based solutions still running in production in the wild

I shudder to confirm that you are correct.

And the day one of mine truly breaks down is probably going to be the day I go looking for a new job. >D
> how would the structure of the house or senate stop that kind of thing?

All states have equal power in the Senate regardless of their population size.
There is a need gap for 'Affordable E-Ink large external displays'[1].

Dasung, Onyx have been market leaders in this category and they are expensive. There are E-ink tablets from several other manufacturers as mentioned in other comments, but they rarely are external displays.

Then there are reliability issues with cheap DIY E-Ink displays, they don't last long and especially when displaying low refresh rate data like Weather, todo list; there will be ghosting issues quite soon.

I'm not exactly sure on whether manufacturing large E-ink external displays is just an unit-economics problem which will get resolved with improvement in technology or there is some underlying Intellectual Property issues from the likes of Amazon,Dasung,Onyx etc.

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter...
As someone currently interviewing, with 10ys exp scaling multiple successful companies, I couldn't agree more. Some of the tech questions I've been asked are so useless in practice it's unnerving.
Out of curiosity, where in the Midwest?
I'm assuming it was for other reasons, but it is possible they did see you put all that extra effort into it and figured that's not the sort of person they want. At least at my job, balancing the time spent on various issues is very important.
Looks fantastic and I hope this does well. Congratulations. And thank you.

Suggestion: Maybe move the pricing filters on the left side to the bottom of the filtering choices, just as a way to emphasize the works over the dollars.

Bug?: No matter which filters I select, or how many (even none), I'm shown there are 92 pages of results.

Best wishes with this.
You've got to know if the other person can code. Lots of people can talk a mean game and make nothing and few people can spot them.

That's the thing, though. If you make a reputation as the kind of guy who can near 100% spot the good engineers, you will make boatloads of money. An employer will pay you more than $30k if you only do great hires. You do 10 of them with your conversation out to lunch and you've made $300k. That's the low-end.

But no one can do that and the few with high hit-rates act as executive-search agencies where they make a lot more.

But I think I would never interview anyone I've worked with. That just seems like a waste. I already either know that they can or can't do things.
Maybe due to the importance of soft skills ? or maybe a shift into the belief that they are important ?

How was it in the 80s or 90s ? could you be hired just because you can fix or implement something even if you don't fit that well with a group ?
It’s largely still that way - you need to know someone to get the referral to get the whiteboard interview (after two phone screens).

That said it’s at least a partially objective skill check and I don’t know a better way.
Lifetrack Covid-19 Global Repository, free crowd-sourced chest CT images
From previous discussions, I remember it being a company sitting on the tech.
Tolkien was right: giant trees have towering role in protecting forests
This is anything but stupid. Live motion tracking, ffmpeg browser encoding, plus it's open source - so a great resource to learn!

What more can you ask for? It's incredible work. Keep it up!
Everything is not a graph problem
Premiums on physical silver are always pretty ridiculous, even in non-pandemic times. I've always preferred gold because the margins are a lot more reasonable.
well I guess they switched drivers at some point?
How do you guys ensure that the art is not a copy of another popular art work? Could customers flag an artwork saying it is pirated with information about original?
There's still latency getting data DMAed through buffers from Host to slave no matter how fast the link is. It's also non-deterministic.
> a fairly traditional hiring process that's the same for hiring a programmer or a machinist: Resume screen, phone screen, on-site, offer.

Some years ago, I was looking for a job, and an employed friend of mine sent me a problem and said "this is our hiring challenge. Try it out".

I completed it, and she asked for my resume, and turned in both to whoever the relevant person was at her company.

She then reported back to me "he said this is the best response he's ever seen to the challenge, but we're looking for someone with more experience". I was not contacted by anyone else.

And years later, when I ribbed her about this, she told me "he regretted that, later".

I note that by putting the resumé screen first, you're committing yourself to the idea that whatever you're looking for in the resumé screen is more important than anything you might learn in the phone screen or the on-site. Do you believe that? Are the phases looking for the same things? If not, is that intentional?
Sharp’s Memory LCD, I think. Combination of SRAM cells to hold state in each pixel and improved reflexive backing, otherwise normal LCD, so data input can be stopped without losing contents.

Also to parent comment: backlit LCD without backlight looks like brownish tinted frosted glass. Transreflexives look like calculators and never like a paper. There were high contrast monochrome variant in those Memory LCD products and it looked like half silvered mirror, respectively.
Flattening the curve provides valuable time to figure out the best strategies. Like the ones you mention and more.
It's interesting that there isn't a no FEC or a reduced FEC (for reduced latency) anymore in this latest standard.

Thanks for the citation!
Many people are infectious without symptoms, others have yet to show significant symptoms. So to actually stop the spread you need to discover these people and quarantine them. South Korea very effectively used this policy and they turned a significant outbreak to near total containment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...

Going from a peak of 1,062 cases per day to 27 yesterday is huge.
ah man, I proposed a 5min flash version of that. Take me to your war room, I'll show you if I can contribute or not in 30 seconds. I won't resent you, and you won't waste time :)

I'm quite happy knowing people tried this.
Explore Handshake Domains Today
Tracking stock trades by US Senators
Cloudflare replaced reCAPTCHA with hCaptcha. I followed their example in 18 min
I think Schneier is speaking about our memories of events in retrospect, however. Spectacular, strange and rare events are more punctuated in our memories, and therefore take up more of our mind share when reflecting on the past.

What's going on now, in the moment, seems to be something different. I keep hearing people taking minor news stories and blowing them up into apocalyptic scenarios like they WANT them to be true. As an example, there was a story a few days ago about how some tigers at the Bronx Zoo were infected. The next day, I overheard some people talking about how Covid19 is now infecting pets and there are animals spreading it in the streets of NY. Nearly every day I'm hearing things like this. Go look at the trending movies on Netflix - every one of them has to do with pandemics or the world ending. People want to fantasize about these realities. Why is that? It has to be some kind of coping mechanism. Is this an expression of society's deep discontent with the way things are and a desire to see it all come down? Whatever it is, for some reason, imagining the worst case scenario decreases pain/increases pleasure for a lot of people. It's fascinating.

Here's a great article on the subject: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/psychology...
ABOUT HANDSHAKE. Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities and naming systems.

After less than two month of launching you can no only buy domains but now you can explore site that use Handshake to resolve their DNS.
80s: we need to hire somebody who can code

90s: we need to hire everybody who can code
Ask HN: What are some good non-fiction books on politics
As a longtime participant in this program, I'd say this take is pretty spot on.

Woodie wasn't just the star of FIRST; competitive robotics based STEM education was basically his brainchild, building out from his work on the MIT 2.007 course. He really was the true ethos of the organization.
He's quite charming in person, FWIW, and he has great language design sensibility.
Not related, but what if I wanted is "projection-less" 3d spatial data, then does PostGIS support it.
You're probably locking out a lot of foreigners that way, but if you find that your top-of-funnel has enough people, this will work really well.

Lots of the consultant gigs that people do actually end up with being hired at the company they consulted for.
The problem I keep running into is that the more room for nuance and fit and holistic evaluation that you inject into a hiring process, the more room there is for interviewers to fill that space with their own biases toward hiring people like themselves. In that sense, the white board problems are pretty fair, even if they're (very) imperfect.
Zoom Background for Founders This Week
Plenty of people freely offer referrals, since they get referral bonuses (or feel like they wanna help people out).
Tell HN: YC company Instavest had my money, help recover please
Hello everyone,

Long ago I invested using this a YC company Instavest, it looks like they are no longer active.

Can someone please help recover the funds?
People who hire developers wouldn't be as focused on the candidates' experience with the technology in the job ad if developers were typically more open for new tech that would be learnt at the job. Try to teach a 40+ Perl developer a new language if you want to see what I mean...

When you compare IT with other industries like the author did, this is what makes hiring so different. Other industries are fine with hiring graduates with no specific experience and the candidates are eager to learn on the job. Whereas in IT, half the people will tell you "can't do this", "don't like that", "won't learn Java" ...
This perfectly describe the situation. While it is possible to do it yourself in Elm without the update, it is quite hard and cumbersome to do so. It is much easier to make a PR, but Elm core team is purposely relationship and personal-trust based, any random PRs will not get accepted in foreseeable future.
> The dollar’s claim to fame is that almost all oil is priced in dollars, globally

This is the petrodollar hypothesis, a debunked theory of global trade.

Oil is globally traded. It can be and is priced in many currencies. Most international trade was historically priced in dollars for two reasons. The second was, until recently, the unique speed and breadth of the Fedwire system.

The first is the American consumer. When Americans buy, we spend dollars. This puts dollars in vendors’ hands. Those dollars can be reused for trade or invested, the latter supporting dollar financial markets. Both support dollar hegemony, which in turn drives its dominance in global trade and finance.

Oil is priced in dollars, and countries borrow in dollars, because dollars reign supreme. Not the other way.

> In 2018, the strong dollar broke Argentina and Turkey’s currencies and drove the countries into recession

Argentina and Turkey’s currencies devalued relative to their trade-weighted baskets of currencies. The dollar was not a driver of their problems.

> foreign dollar-denominated debt means there is a ton of demand for dollars

Domestic demand for cash eclipses foreign demand. The Fed and Congress have printed trillions, yet we’re still on the precipice of deflation.

> the United States government is heavily reliant on foreigners lending it money by buying its Treasuries. Foreigners currently hold $6.7 trillion in U.S. government debt.

Out of $25 trillion [1]. Also, $7 trillion is comparable to the amount Congress and the Fed just created.

Currency crises are broadly studied. They are also complex. This analysis is overly reductive.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_...
Hi, I would like to use my free to time learning some history and politics. Let me know your favorites
Post is flagged. What was it?
No matter what they say, handing in a half done coding test because you ran out of time is a fail. IMO anyway.

Probably it was virus related but I’m not very enthused about doing coding tests any more.
Ask HN: iOS app using WP as back end. Doable?
I have a small niche marketplace online business , its one man shop. It's running on WP. I want to build an iOS native app(SWIFT) while still using a WP Backend. I can't afford a custom backend. I have a buddy who is a SWIFT dev with a day gig, he will give me a reduced rate. Im comfortable with WP. To avoid the 30% apple fee. I want to charge customer for their product listing inside the APP in WEB via email after they upload images + summary of product listing (pending approval) I get a notification ( via email) of new Listing and email customer a STRIPE payment link, they pay and THEN I make the listing live in the APP. I would LOVE some feedback from the community on if something like this doable , someone who has used WP as CMS for an iOS app and charged in WEB. Thank you.
It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large.

Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., and those same credentials / connections are what get you hired over everyone else who completed the technical assessments just as well as you did.

The tech screens exist as a political gatekeeper filter. It allows people who are fighting over petty authority among codemonkeys way down the food chain to enforce arbitrary and capricious standards, especially on cultural capitulation, to ensure they are hiring people that meet a good mix of (a) competent, (b) don’t know what they are worth, and (c) can’t quickly politically outrank you because you forced them to comply with your tribal pecking order bullshit on the way in the door.

That’s all it has ever been about. It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy.
The current IHME best estimates are well within the uncertainty regions of the earlier predictions.

Especially given all the modeling challenges, you cannot simply take the peak of the posterior as "the truth."
Last time I interviewed with Google (in 2018) they had me code on a Chromebook. Still just dumb algo questions but much better than a whiteboard.