skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of a recent take home test for a SRE role I completed recently.

Normally when it comes to take-home tests I set a hard limit on actual working time to 3hrs. This doesn't include any research or reading I will do ahead of time.

The test itself was:

> We have 3 services that we want to have running in a kubernetes cluster.

> The first service is a software application called JIRA which will be used internally for the company, so we only want to be accessed by specific IP’s.

> The service needs to be highly available, have failover tolerance and able to restore from backup.

> The other services are a golang application and a python application which we provide the code.

> Inside the go-service folder we will find the golang application which exposes 2 HTTP endpoints, one of those endpoints, talks to the python microservice through GRPC protocol.

> It has 4 environment variables:

> - PORT (the port on which the http server will run)

> - SERVICE_ENDPOINT (endpoint to the python service)

> - REQUEST_TIMEOUT (request timeout in seconds)

> - IDLE_TIMEOUT (idle timeout for requests in seconds)

>

> Inside the python-service folder there is a python microservice, which only supports GRPC Protocol. This service does not have to be exposed to the outside world, and it can only be contacted by the go lang service.

> The python microservice supports a single environment variable:
> - PORT (the port on where is going to be running)

>

> These services also require high availability, failover tolerance, and also they need to scale according to the load they receive, as our external clients consume them.

> Deliverables:

> - Dockerfiles for the 3 services

> - Full yaml configuration for the services to be deployed in a k8s, taking into
consideration the remarks above.

> - A diagram explaining the whole infrastructure and how it is connected with each other.

> - Paper with ideas on:

> - Monitoring

> - Instrumentation

> - Security

Now, to be perfectly fair, I knew much more about how kubernetes works than how to deploy services on it, so it might have taken me a little longer to create the deployments. However, there's no way that I can make that all work in 3 hours. Not to mention that the backend code I was given wouldn't compile so I had to fix bugs.

Additionally; if I spend more than 3hours on a test, I might as well spend 6 hours, or 12 hours, or a week... At some point it becomes impossible for you to interview at multiple places. The idea of spending 9hrs of my day at work, then coming home and spending another 3hrs+ every night because I want the opportunity to keep spending 9hrs at work is insane, I'm physically unable to do that. When I get home I'm usually burned out, so these kinds of tests are done on the weekend.

Anyway. Where I work, we also give a take home test, and I apply the same principles:

If one of our team can't do it inside of an hour, we don't send it. We expect a candidate to be able to do it within 3hrs. The point of the take home test is that it's something we can discuss later, too. It's really obvious if someone struggles hard or finds it too easy.
Lol, we are going to spend billions to possibly send down the power of a few litres of fuel to a drone a day?

Maybe targeted at someones head it might pay for itself, but still pretty sci-fi if it was possible.

Just send from a blimp.

Or send the power up to the satellite to power them, it's good as free from the ground, if this stuff is possible.

[edit] I would have ruled out this being a ruse to confuse people from the military's side, since it's so crazy no one would believe solar panels in space transmitting energy to earth was possible. But maybe not it seems..... I assume IRL it's for communications, or jamming, shooting a missile out of the air?
Did they not like that it wasn't wholly your project?
The James Damore affair made me realize that women and defenders of women are highly bad faithed, and I hadn’t noticed before how much women were incompetent.

Before that I used to believe we were on a level playing field. After that I noticed that women are aggressively defended and despite that, it has been a century that they didn’t succeed.

I clearly don’t want to work with women anymore, and since I’ve started only working in all-male companies, my pay has doubled, because we don’t have dead weight on board.

I couldn’t care less what Damore said scientifically. I just know it hasn’t been discussed.
Slack is incredibly slow by any metric.

Startup takes tens of seconds.

Typing messages with formatting is visibly sluggish.

And in common cases it just crash's and restarts.

Memory usage is also an issue if you compare it to the usefulness of Slack.

Just communicating with my team shouldn't take 1/5th of my laptop's resources.
Python library for rendering rich text and beautiful formatting to the terminal
Would it be too much to ask that we collectively say "The Damore thing is obviously a [scissor statement](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/), on which otherwise-reasonable people bafflingly manage to hold different views very strongly, and we should stop talking about it forthwith because no good can come of it"? Nothing new can be said on the subject, vanishingly few people can be persuaded one way or the other, and "news site primarily populated by shortform comments" is hardly the appropriate place to hold a protracted argument.
20s Are Hard and Lonely
Why do you feel like it's less glamorous/whatever to be an SRE?
No legal requirements, hence burners. But as a rule carriers enforce it.
Seems great technology. Hope they also address any impact on ecosystem.
But don't you think that the fairer the selection (blind to things such as gender, race or politics) the more confidence you'd have that you deserve to be in the position you are? How does a woman engineer should feel, knowing she was given a boost in the selection process by some kind of affirmative action? Isn't that in itself a source of uncertainty?
>These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance, have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours’ duration (fig. S2). They are concentrated in South Asia, the coastal Middle East, and coastal southwest North America, in close proximity to extraordinarily high SSTs and intense continental heat that together favor the occurrence of extreme humid heat (2, 14).

Future Indian geopolitics is certainly going to be interesting. Would like to see these hotspots mapped for the next 20-30 years to highlight the scope of the situation. Will certain areas become perennially uninhabitable? Is it a matter of having AC / low humidity shelters that people flock to a couple hours a day during seasonal peaks? Estimates on climate refugees and migration patterns etc. I suspect it's going to be onerous but workable. There's low energy dehumidifying HVAC solutions that might be attainable even in poorer communities. Ultimately, petro rich countries like middle East and North America is going to be fine and AC through the solution if they have to, aggravating the problem for everyone else. Regardless, it's a problem worth mitigating and acclimatizing to, 85% of the world is seeking to develop and will do so via the most cost-efficient (currently dirty) methods possible. IMO, accommodating for this is a greater moral imperative that's ultimately incompatible with aggregate reduction in emissions - that was never workable. Developed countries should still strive to improve efficient and innovate to flatten the environmental cost curve per unit of quality of improvement, and modify their life styles so that rampant consumptive culture is not the aspired endpoint. But that's even harder said then done because capitalism.
I wonder how they don't fall afoul of Tesla's patents?

https://www.damninteresting.com/teslas-tower-of-power/
I'd really like to know how you use tig for that. I am overwhelmed with the options and keystrokes that I can't remember.
Marc is amazing. Can't wait for his masterpiece game to be finally completed! http://miegakure.com

If you really want to enjoy 4D Toys in the meantime download his tablet game: http://4dtoys.com
State enforced private land ownership is one of the key economic fundamentals of a prosperous society.

Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all land).

Do you have any grounds why you would want it abolished?
> having worked for the last 12+ years as a developer to be told that there were "concerns about your technical competency"

Oh yeah I've had a couple of those as well.

Usually because you can't remember one detail that can be googled or is opinionated about one specific aspect.

At the end I guess in some companies it's more of "who can jump through the hoops like a nice circus animal" more than anything.

(On the opposite side, if you throw me fizzbuzz I'll just make it harder on purpose)
Is there any evidence that would convince you that interests can diverge, independent of society (nurture)? Your argument relies on the assumption (yes, an assumption, not evidence) that society exclusively determines our interests. You do not admit a role for biology. There is little scientific evidence that supports this view.
The most common zodiac sign among the world's richest billionaires
That's not a terrible place to start. "Under most definitions the radii of isolated neutral atoms range between 30 and 300 pm (trillionths of a meter), or between 0.3 and 3 ångströms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_radius
anyone know what the conversion and transmission power loss is?
> Clock hand question is painfully obvious once you look at actual analog clock face.

You see, intuitively I thought this would involve some kind of radian maths (just because it's about angles and a circle) and I don't remember any of that - never had any use for it.

But yes, it is a lot more easy than that. Not sure I would have discovered the trivial approach in an interview situation when it didn't even occur to me at home on the couch.
I think you missed the part where i was being positive to new ideas and not just being a pointless debbie downer.
Downvoting is a strange thing. If we're trying to understand the article, this is one of the better comments here.
Possibly something to do with his having been dead for nearly 80 years?
This is the current model. In many places the violence may be out of living memory, but it's generally all very recent.
What kind of systems are you developping with rust? Especially if you also do javascript? Genuinely curious as I also want to start working with some lower level languages.
UCL Press: The first fully open access university press in the UK
Acquihire? Or else seek work in the industry as a contractor, not an employee.
I don't think shutting down discourse is a positive thing.
> These mutual arms restriction treaties are only followed by the major power as long as they see a mutual interest in doing so.

Sorry, but this really rubs me the wrong way. The whole reason we have these kind of treaties is to protect nations which don't have the power to defend their interests should a conflict arise.

Saying that it is normal for a nation to just ignore a treaty they have ratified IMHO instills a very wrong mindset. If a nation ignores a treaty, the reaction should not be "Oh, that was to be expected".
Right ... except that if I want to put more electrons in the same space I'm going to have to confine them more tightly. That prediction works.
Ask HN: What % of your work communication is written/asnyc vs. verbal?
Wondering what your written vs verbal communication breakdown is while working. Also which do you prefer?
This is the problem, though. That discourse is not productive, when held here - witness the dumpster fire of downvotes all over the place.

If the topic needs discussion, it needs long and nuanced discussion where each party is trying hard to understand the other - not rapid-fire three-line comments on a news site.
Totally off-topic, but how viable would be to build a slim circle-shaped ship? Is it absurd, could it be submarine-like in case of bad sea weather and go underwater to avoid high waves impacting on it?
I found the blog post to be just another take on the micro-services vs monolithic application debate. Where micro-services = library and monolithic = framework. As a full-time coder I take a different approach - documentation is everything.

I could care less if a piece of code is a library, a framework, is made up of micro-services, or is monolithic. It all means diddly-squat if the documentation sucks and you can't figure out how to use the damn thing. It really doesn't matter if a big company sponsors the code either, because they usually have the worse documentation. Take the Mongoose Application Framework by Infor (https://mongoose.infor.com) which is supposed to be designed to help developers quickly build applications. The API has virtually no documentation. It has tons of libraries but you don't know what they do or what they are capable of unless you dig into the code to see what it does. They re-implement tons of standard .NET API with their own twist on it.

That experience changes the way I develop for fun. I have taken to do a lot my free-time coding with Python because the documentation, for the most part, is very well done. Most of the Python developers seem to take a documentation-first approach to their code which makes it easy to take on new concepts and branch out into different areas such as IoT or AI.
The voluntary reduction in economic activity is far less disruptive, and extreme, than the mandatory reduction caused by indiscriminate lockdowns.

When voluntary, each individual can judge whether a particular activity should be continued based on their own circumstances and the particularities of that activity, and give up those activities that provide the least economic return relative to risk incurred.

A cookie-cutter rule OTOH has no such intelligence, and leads to a massive amount of waste, from critical activity being prevented that would have provided a large risk-adjusted social benefit.
I have a great video of my kids trying to figure out what a pay phone is back in ~2014. Not rotary, but a similar sort of "wow, I'm old" sort of experience.
They are working on things that interest them. What is wrong with that? That is also a little insulting to the researchers that are actually studying how to cure cancer.
> He calls women neurotic.

Neurotic, as he uses it, is not the same way it is used in everyday parlance.

Neurotic is part of the Big 5 personality traits, for which there is substantial academic evidence. The traits are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.
I'm going to copy my response from a related thread 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22405372

---

I interviewed at Google for an SRE:Systems role around a month ago; I can share my anecdotes.

The first interview put me in contact with a recruiter who would basically be my guide throughout the process, at first he asked me some basic questions to feel out where I was weak and then told me to prepare those weaknesses for the next round.

The next round was 2 phone interviews, lasting about an hour each and over different days, one focused on my programming skills (of which, I have little because sysadmins don't typically do anything relating to data structures) and the second one was surrounding linux internals and debugging (which I was very strong on).

I spent roughly 2 working days worth of time preparing for them.

Preparing for the on-site was pleasant, I was put in touch with another google recruiter who ensured I knew where I was going and what I was doing, they told me that I'd be there the whole day and while they couldn't tell me what I would be asked/who I would meet/what to prepare; they gave me an approximation of the _kind_ of questions, very broadly.

I spent roughly 18 working days preparing in my weak areas, including leetcode/data structures and reading comp-sci papers (paxos and ilk).

On the day, I went through about 5, 1-hour long interviews that focused on various aspects of SRE (one of them being 'googliness'), some were about distributed systems (where the interviewer got hung up on the fact that I said I would use postgres instead of making my own database) and others were heavily programmer focused (linux internals was more about knowing the implementation of 'ls', scripting was all about the kinds of questions you get on leetcode).

I'm not going to lie, it was gruelling, and I'm typically pretty comfortable interviewing;

I thought I'd be fine with these interviews because I'm considered to be "shit hot" in sysadmin/writing glue by my peers, but I guess not, as I'm not a Google-SRE. :)

(sidenote: everything in TFA rings true, including the tips, google recruiters are quite transparent about your process. But they also said that the last stage is not the interview, it's roughly 5 hiring committees that are looking at your application "package" through different lenses)
I doubt they do the eight-separate-interviewer hazing to people with public achievements. Who would stand for it?

"Go calculate the angle, Linus."
They should never come back.
> when you need a browser client lib for it anyway?

You don't need a browser client library to execute GraphQL queries on the frontend, it's just a POST request with a query string and a parameter for variables.
I visit https://www.itswinwinboardgames.com daily in search of board games at a discount. (I built it for that purpose) + https://www.boardgamegeek.com + r/boardgames
I went to HS with James for a few years and have spoken to him on this topic a few times.

I don’t agree with how he went about pursuing the issue but your assessment does not comport with the views he’s shared with me or our contemporaries who stay in touch with him.
Sometimes the fault is in our stars, but not in ourselves.
I personally found the courses from Pluralsight to be really useful. The instructors are really thorough with their explanations. I managed to learn design patterns with Javascript as well. I think these are underrated knowledge of coding that will set you up for success when you are able to master them. I managed to write a simple post about 3 key types of design patterns for javascript code. Hope you find it useful to kick start your learning journey! Cheers for your friendly engineer (:

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-04-11-second-four-des...
I would like to see source for your statements. I don't know much about Damore. I did glance through the manifesto and found it alright back then but I still don't understand why anyone needed to bring politics into question or write a manifesto.

You vote with your job. If you don't like things, quit. Either the people working at the company are discriminatory and don't care or you are the problematic one. If you think you are right that a big company discriminates openly, then wouldn't you have to admit that most people at your company don't care about discrimination as much as their paycheck or they are discriminatory themselves. If a company can easily replace employees, then the society doesn't value equality. We should fix that foremost.

If we had UBI, wouldn't discrimination of any kind be detrimental given that workers wouldn't be forced to work for low wages and companies which discriminate based on pseudoscience be at a disadvantage because they won't get talent that other companies can. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? Why are people not pursuing UBI for gender equality?

As for an opposing view point, check this - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... which says fewer women take stem in developed countries than under developed countries. There will always be more differences. We shouldn't do a shut down case for either. It's not yet clear what percentage are affected by it. If it is, mention the source.
> but I'm not sure you can say it 'collapsed' (what does that even mean anyway).

If there was any doubt that you're being disingenuous and purposely deceitful, the fact that you've decided to resort to petty arguments on semantics to desperately avoid facing the facts is enough to clear up that doubt.
Three Utilities Problem
There already is a DNT (Do not track) HTTP Header, but advertisers ignore it.
That's not the case at Google. The call schedule for SREs is pretty nice.
I think it's most useful for powering drones. Microwaves can go through clouds too.
Recenty my browser's home page is a real-time stream of randomly clipped newspaper articles going back to the 1600s: https://newspaperarchive.com/clippings/

It's fun to see what people are digging into the newspaper archives for, and to speculate how it may relate to present or future events.

Note: paid subscribers see more (which I am for family history purposes).
For the most part I agree with you, but it got to the point at work where I could regularly type faster than eclipse (usually some shitty background tasks messing things up but still) this actually slowed me down as well as making me angry, which is probably the way to make me least productive and ranty. Like, how can this be the case that in 2020 I can type faster than a computer displays text in a professional IDE. Jesus christ. Oooo calm. Using sublime text now and just using eclipse for the debugger. Calm. Calm.
I don't have any beef in this discussion, and am not educated in this field, but out of curiosity I had a quick look at what Wikipedia says, and it seems to at least somewhat agree with this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
> In it, he calls women neurotic.

No, he says that on average they score higher on "neuroticism", one of the Big Five personality traits. [1] And it is an empirical fact. [2]

If you say "he said women are neurotics" it means you didn't understand neither the language nor the logic of what you were reading, something that should give you pause.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....
Hey! What do you think of my WritingOutliner (http://writingoutliner.com) then? Basically it turns Microsoft Word into a powerful outliner.
May I suggest you read the IPCC report? 2100 with business as usual scenarios looks like at least one billion humans with an urgent need to relocate. If you have a better model please show your work.
> Just send from a blimp.

Drone Mothership
Somebody owns those patents...
I’ve been working in some largish Rails codebases lately and this is exactly the problem I have. When I’m looking at a screenful of code I have no idea who is calling what, what’s in scope and from where, and what the shape of any of my data is.

In my opinion the productivity benefits of these kinds of frameworks evaporate and go negative pretty quickly once you move very far beyond what they provide out of the box.
How big was it, and did you write it?
Not just women but anyone. For any social group,the share of that group may never be at or close to their make up of the population. People come from an insanely diverse set of upbringing and social expectations.

If they think 50% of engineers should be women, I would like to hold them to an even higher standard by requiring that out if that 50% of women,each national origin,ethnicity,political/ideological upbringing and social status (mother,single,divorced,etc...) is also proportionally represented. If this is about making up for historical prejudice then let every women of a wronged group be equally represented. You will soon see the silliness of the pursuit.

It is the cause that needs policing and adjustment (upstream) not the effect.