skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my favorite interviews ever was squarely in-between whiteboarding and take-home. I was put in a room by myself with access to the internet and a computer and asked to write a specific game in any language I wanted. The rules of the game were given, but everything else was up to me. The main requirements were to be able to make a move, and to calculate the current score. For extra credit, make an AI player.

There were other phases of the interview, coding wasn’t the whole thing, but I really enjoyed it. I bombed the object modeling on a whiteboard part of the interview, but the company made a great offer anyway based on being able to code. I’m modeling my hiring now on this type of interview because it was both fun and effective.
There is [ImmersedVR](https://immersedvr.com/), but it's expensive and only compatible with the Oculus Go/Quest.

It can create extra displays, but you have to buy an Elite license for that.
What tripe this is - all verbiage and no content, and with a poor thesis to boot. Certainly not worth a read
> It may even be possible to cancel US treasury debt to China

Then the credibility of the United States would be forever harmed. If the U.S. can do this to China as retaliation, what guarantees that it won't do something similar to another country when the United States doesn't like that country? Plenty of countries aren't allies with the U.S., and they'd be dumping their treasuries like there's no tomorrow. The downward price pressure then wreaks havoc on investors in the U.S. and U.S. allies: treasuries are supposed to be the safest asset classes; when they crash, plenty of things will crash.

Credit ratings don't even matter; without a credit downgrade everyone would know these ratings aren't objective any more. Not to mention that would potentially trigger total chaos in the U.S. sovereign CDS market, and potentially bankrupt financial institutions that sold these CDSs.

I can't even imagine the scale of damage this would do.
Since it launched in 1979, have software updates improved the error correcting codes in Voyager's radio communications?
In college, we had a class called "Detection Theory", which handled this topic - and was required for people that studied signal processing / telecom / telemetry / remote sensing / etc.

Here's a quick wiki link for that topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detection_theory
Yes. Though in practice I'd give people some grace period after the three hours: the three hour time limit is to help the candidate not commit endless hours to the project, it's not meant as a punishment.
> And now our consumption will shrink. What's this do to king dollar?

Every time we consume we're exporting those little green pieces of paper, you know?

Shrinking consumption actually props up the dollar, because we're giving out less, and the rest of the world, with dollar denominated debt and liabilities, has bills to pay.
Things to Do While on Quarantine
The didn’t mention if they’re storm windows so I’m going to guess not. That won’t work in the region of the country that deals with hurricanes.
That top end MBP has four thunderbolt 3 ports; have you tried any of the egpu setups? (I haven't, but I've been thinking about it for my 5th gen x1 carbon with thunderbolt 3)
They're not the same. I've never used Dijkstra pathfinding at my work, but I and yet, I seem to asked questions about it in interviews pretty consistently.
> A lot of dangerous criminals are stupid.

The nice thing about stupid criminals is that they tend to be indiscriminately stupid. The ones who don't use encrypted messaging are the same ones who proceed to brag about their crimes in front of strangers, and have their phones turned on and with them during the commission of their crimes, and post incriminating pictures on Facebook, and choose equally stupid and unreliable criminal partners.

They are the low-hanging fruit, so you don't need powerful and invasive tools to catch them because they're practically self-incarcerating. When there are 100 other ways to catch them, there's no point in paying a high price just to have 101.

It's the non-stupid criminals that they have trouble catching, but those are the ones this won't catch either. So you're still paying a high price for really nothing in return.
Dude, it isn't just fudging their numbers on their site. I've heard pitches (mostly in pitch comps) where presenters outright lie about usage numbers, revenue, and partnerships. I'm still shocked with the ease some people do this.
I think in addition to all the other replies, a key in how this happens on more of a physics level is how spread spectrum communications work. In short, it’s a technique to ‘squish’ a high-amplitude, narrow bandwidth signal down to a low-amplitude, wide bandwidth signal. The resulting low-amplitude signal can be lower than the background noise. Look at Fig. 6 here: https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/design/technical-document...
Sure, but having good margins in the first place gives you more room - you might call it, "margin" - before any of that results in you actually losing any money.
Is it that hard to tile smaller displays together?
No. Because Bitcoin has no use in legal industries.
Ask HN: Why do registrars force you to use their nameservers first?
It seems like when I register a domain I have to go in and change the name-servers, then wait 48 hours for that to switch over, but why do they do this? Why can't they let me choose the name-servers prior to registering and start off with the right settings?
90k a year is totally doable for medium-experience software in principle, but in southeast Michigan I'm much less sure. The salaries are laid out differently.

For those coming into the industry from outside, the real questions may be less about what you're capable of programming, and more about your wisdom in producing code that works well with other code and with the realities of failure. It's hard enough to get a good sense of how much of that wisdom you have even when you are a software engineer...
I'd rather take on the commanding force [guard] of a US state than the federal government of the US. Again, it was designed this way intentionally.
There are some studies that seem to indicate decision making is inhibited when emotions are inhibited. That is, you can ask someone to explain what the rational choice is, and justify it, but they will not actually make that choice until an emotional prompt spurs them on. They can be very, very good at planning extensively but won't take action. The study I'm thinking of was on brain-damaged patients without emotion but perfectly intact reasoning.

So I wonder how that fits in with what you've experienced. Is analysis through CBT in fact opening up new information to change how you feel about certain things (rationality induced emotion, spurring change)? Or perhaps I am misunderstanding the conclusion (I've seen it presented as such elsewhere so I'm not the only one).

> His insight, dating back to the early 1990s, stemmed from the clinical study of brain lesions in patients unable to make good decisions because their emotions were impaired, but whose reason was otherwise unaffected

https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/06/17/172310/the-impor...
I had to Google bsab to come up with "both sides are bad".

Can't agree the NYT even approaches Fox though.

This seems like a simple case of libel. The headline invokes a mob who will likely not even read the article which has more nuance. Just a mercenary approach to get more eyeballs aka micropennies.
I actually enjoy take-home exams more, because a good whiteboard interview absolutely relies on having a good / competent interviewer.

Take-home exams obviously also need competent people to analyze the results, and also have their pitfalls - especially if they're just being used as free labor.
I only tend to treat double quotes with authority.
Writing is editing. I have a site (thepeel.news) and am also writing a novel, and I see it every time - quality comes out with editing and reditting.
Thanks for the explanation Big Oil, your value is still worthless.
> So does this mean that programming education is broken? That companies should invest more in training? That bootcamps should revamp what they teach? That there should be industry standards for what programmers at different levels should be expected to know?

Programming education is broken. I did one year of computer science at one of the top universities in the world (switched into mathematics after that), and I'd see that course as useless if not actively negative. The only way of learning that I've seen really work for anyone (myself included) is more like a craft apprenticeship, working closely with someone more experienced. We shouldn't be surprised that that produces widely different approaches.

Frankly the field isn't mature enough to have standards. If you tried to set a professional exam based on today's best practices, in five or ten years the answers would mostly be wrong. We still don't know the right way to write software. Million-dollar systems still come with laughably simple bugs.

What does the interview process look like for a craftsperson? That's probably the best we can expect from a field as unsystematic as ours. The one thing that strikes me is that in creative fields it's normal for people to show a portfolio of past (client) projects, whereas in software past employers usually keep all copies of your code. I have no idea how we'd go about changing that norm though.
You might enjoy the book (or Audiobook) of Michael Pollan’s “A Place of My Own”, wherein he builds a writing shed with the help of a handyman and some plans from an architect. It was really enjoyable — one of those stories you can sink into and not want it to end.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13838.A_Place_of_My_Own
Do you give this advice for long, literary pieces as well, such as a novel? Also, would be wonderful if you could share some examples.
I think it's because anyone qualified to interview is probably qualified to do valuable work.

And so companies turn that around and say "Let's take our best and brightest, and have them interview candidates! Then we'll select the best candidates!"

But it's the same research / teaching faculty problem, where one skillset does not imply the other.
The market is based on information known by people playing it. That information can be wrong, or at least very inaccurate, meaning the market will be in an incorrect position that will have to be corrected when better information is available.

Of course, our information is always imperfect, especially about the future but even about the present, so it is constantly being corrected. So maybe being right or wrong is the wrong way to put it.
I don't know! Is it their job?

The attention of senior engineers is the single most valuable, expensive and scarce commodity of a modern software company. The incentives are absolutely not aligned for most companies to make it worth their time to hire junior engineers.

But obviously thats a problem - because as you say, where else will senior engineers come from? And I don't think we have a good answer here. The old school answer was apprenticeship - a company trains you up, and in exchange you work for them for a time. But most companies are loathe to do that because you're likely to quit and go somewhere else for a pay bump as soon as you have enough skills and experience that you're worth hiring.

For my money this, right here, is the real problem with modern programming / career development. Whiteboard interviews are the least of our problems.
What a great idea. Does Microsoft have something like this?
Some process should have figured out that that guy was poison.

But putting that function in the interviewing process seems awkward...
I hesitate to call this nightmare fuel...
They don't. Good ones let you choose at registration time. Mine lets you pick a default in the first place of your own..
It's a failure of our eduction system, but it's also a complete failure of traditional media.

My guess is that it is because most major traditional media outlets are national entities. It's easier for those national media entities to talk about a government that appears relevant to their entire audience (the federal government), instead of 50+ articles each scoped at the state level.

This damages peoples' ability to do correct sensemaking because they overweighting entertainment sources as if they were data sources.
The curated model stops working the moment that there's any way to get around it, because enough developers will do what they think is in their best interest rather than the customer's. Anyway, the option for customers to "make that decision" exists and comes in the form of Android.
I mean the tracing operation that produces a structure appropriate for AD computation. I agree with you that there's work needed to specify the node derivatives.

Although, honestly, I misspoke. The difference between AD and symbolic differentiation is more subtle. Really AD is profiting because it uses AST representations to keep a graph of intermediate values while symbolic methods can blow up exponentially (or require clever, difficult to generalize tricks to reconstruct that graph).
For those not in the know, the NI roboRIO is a Xilinx Z-7020 (ARM Cortex-A9 SoC with FPGA) and runs GNU/Linux. As long as your language can target ARMv7 Linux and can call into C libraries, it'll run on the roboRIO.
Can you use Bitcoin to buy a few billion dollars in really safe and liquid treasuries when you need to park a trade surplus somewhere? If not, it isn't really useful in the oil trade.
You can keep your Google job for 20+ years if you want.
> working at a company in the hiring space. I've done over 400 technical interviews

TripleByte ?
Dil mil (indian dating app) exposes exact user geolocation
Yes, I think.
I made a nicer website for Jack Dorsey's $1B fund instead of the spreadsheet
Seems like the US should have UBI at this point. How can the purchasing of junk bonds be justified but not a UBI? Give every citizen a fed bank account, type in some numbers and poof! 2k/month.
Sharing a recent blog on this huge privacy exposure
As someone who dropped out of the process 1/4 of the way through you're not really in a good position to comment on the effectiveness of completing it.
So cool website and interface LOL, really like it!

Someone posted https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/openOfficeNoiseGenerator.p...

days ago, I found its very funny when open both on different tabs hahaha.

Btw, this website lack repetitive settings? Why noise stop after seconds?
But e-ink technology isn’t ready to go out of the gate - the refresh rate is still a significant issue that makes it virtually purposeless for much beyond reading. If it is at this point, it just didn’t happen quickly enough.
For a smaller size, apparently the displays made by Dasung are pretty nice.
No but I absolutely would have them audition.
You should be looking at one woman over those five years.

For companies, you are probably looking at multiple developers and if you do only have one opening then even if more than one is good there is going to be a best.
Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don't
I think you've got a great idea here.

Why?

To explain why, let's have a look at another recent post to HN: "First 100 Days Of Dio" (Programming Language): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828111

What's the deal with that post?

Well, as is all too common these days(!), someone wrote another programming language and posted a link to their site on HN...

But but!

Hear me out...

You see, YC (or any other large, or even small investor) won't touch such a new language inventor with a 10-foot pole.

But that doesn't mean that I (and other) HN users might not be interested in contributing a small amount of money to them, maybe $5-$100.

Now, what would sweeten that deal on the other side -- would be to get stock, even if the shares are unofficial or even virtual, even if the company hasn't been formed yet. If you can't call that "stock" for legal reasons, then call it "an agreement which will result in the actual awarding of actual shares when/if a company is formed in the future".

Now you've got a platform for microtransactions.

Oh sure, perhaps nothing ever happens with the language, perhaps the guy quits or goes under, but you are completely up-front and transparent with your users, informing them that precisely that sort of thing could happen...

Even better would be to take 100 such fledgling companies that only need $5-$100 from a small amount of investors, and put them into a "bucket". That way, if 98 of them fail, 1 of them stalls, but 1 of them goes on to form a sucessful company, then everybody wins.

That's the way large institutionalized VC's invest. They're always making 12 bets, knowing that 11 will fail, 1 will break even, and 1 will succeed and make them their money back...

Why not bring those same ideas to a smaller market of "untouchables"?

?
It seems like every economic argument for US strength relies exclusively on "we have the global reserve currency". How long will this remain the case? No country can survive solely on this without underlying economic strength. Ray Dalio's analysis on the topic last week clearly showed how the reserve status lags behind most other indicators of a country's global status.
Came here for the Ronnie James Dio reference. I was not disappointed.
> And a few angry senior engineers out there saying "Why do I have to keep writing fizzbuzz? Its like I have to prove over and over again that I can program at all!".

You didn't address this part of the problem. This friction is one of the reasons the job market is so distorted.
There's a terrific debate to be had about the role of the federal government in a national emergency. Is it the air support for state led initiatives, or should it be more of a quarterback coordinating action across all state lines?
On the positive side:

As business gets more intertwined with tech, workers need more technical competency - in parallel with automation of traditional jobs.

My take is that the more traditional companies will have to compete with tech firms on attracting talent, which in turn means that they'll have to change their ways when it comes to hiring, on how they do their hiring.

I think the old days of "We only hire Harvard / Yale / Princeton / Stanford grads with 3.5+ GPA and top internships" are starting to die out. Yes - some of the most competitive jobs will probably continue to use proxies like that, but even firms with the worst gatekeepers are starting to see that there's talent everywhere, and that modern tools can help identifying them. (Remember, one major reason that prestigious firms only hire candidates from top schools and programs, is that they only do their campus recruitment at those schools, because it's a pretty labor and resource costly activity - you can't visit every school in the country, and check out the top students there)
I’ve done over a hundred technical interviews in the past 5 years. You can tell a lot about someone by quickly glancing over a project source code, comments, documentation, automation, etc vs talking to them for an hour or two. (to be clear I’m not talking about live coding or take-home problems)

There are bunch of people who can sound smart by just referencing stuff they read online or in the books.

I don’t focus on specific technologies or frameworks because everyone has different backgrounds. However I do focus on CS fundamentals and software engineering practices. These don’t say much about actual coding skills.
See, this assumes that free trade is the norm and autarky isn’t. We are all supposedly interdependent it is said, but it could very easily become a scenario where everyone closes their economies.

Heck, they’re already doing that now with COVID-19. Then there’s no need for the dollar as a reserve currency. Not saying this will happen but it is a possibility. The real test is if Trump will impose tariffs on foreign oil. Other countries may retaliate on other goods and it quickly spirals from free trade to autarky.
Not sure where you interviewed maybe it's not relevant, but a lot of jobs you will not always be in a position to do the work 100% isolated and by yourself and sometimes there will be other people in the room.
Large organizations, especially if they are swimming in effortless money, will always be very political.

Go to small startups if you want it to be about competence and teamwork.
I opted for an easy take home from Twitter recently when applying for a job there. However, the problem was so horribly written and vague that I couldn't figure out what they really wanted, even after asking questions. Honestly, I would have been better doing a problem with time constraints interactively, at least I could get some decent feedback about what was expected.

Flubbing the Twitter take home worked out for the best, Google was a much better fit for me anyways. Their interview process was great also, and doing whiteboarding over VC affords certain advantages (getting to type in code, if only into Google docs, is a huge win for me, Jamboard + an iPad Pro worked out great as well).
Well then it's a good thing that we aren't governed by people who just spend 5 seconds misinterpreting tweets.
I personally feel largely the same. We need measurement to do science, and if the best we have is the Turing Test that's not good enough.
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)
The document states:

>"In order to reduce the complexity a bit, all the decoding of the operand fields is done first and then the instruction is executed by one of many hundred small methods that don't have to care(much) about their operands."

I'm confused by this, the operands are decoded first and then the op code is decoded? Or am I reading this incorrectly?
For all you know they might have just followed some online tutorial.
How much faith do you really have in these questions?

This could be your entire 45 minute interview:

Where there any performance considerations: Yes, the spaceship was extremely slow at first. After reverse engineering the launch protocol, we discovered that we could increase speeds by 5x simply by limiting the fuel cell usage. "Oh tell me about your rocket fuel cell usage"- Well, we have this thing called a fuel cell. It takes 5 batteries. 10 minutes of business logic later...

* Now let's spend 25 minutes talking about infrastructure and team dynamic *
Concurrency: None needed here.
What did they do for testing: We used Jest.
Was it automated: Yes.
How was it deployed: Github / Heroku / AWS
Do you maintain it: Yes, we maintain it with my little green friends. We each take turns writing code and maintaining the rocket protocols. It's actually quite nice.

* Oh, well I guess we're out of time. *

Congrats, you just hired a guy who read a few blogs and made up a few stories.
I love the added hologram effect! That is a very creative addition.
One problem is reluctance to buy closed-source from a one man business, it could even be regarded as negligent. Actually, having said that, Delphi had a thriving third party component ecosystem where developers commonly purchased the source code for an additional fee.
I was under the impression that we can propagate across the entire globe such healing vibrations.
I've been a vegetarian for about six years now. I'm not a great cook; I'm not into experimenting very often.

When I experiment in the kitchen the "veggie X" groups really mess with me. I end up googling for ages to determine which ingredients are and aren't suitable substitutes. Naming a "veggie" product something it is not is a problem for me.

Outside ingredients, I avoid "veggie" ready meals. A rule of thumb for vegetarian food - if they make a big deal about it being the vegetarian version of X, then its terrible.

Do not mistake me, there is plenty of delicious vegetarian food. They just aren't variants of meat-dishes, they are meals of their own.

Apart from vegetable lasagna; thats almost always a winner.