skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, these were pretty rare and l33t ;-)

There were a couple, a university AIX, a CDC NOS/VE with IP connectivity, etc...

Basically, free international comms back in the 90s!
I agree. We recently got rid of our more traditional "tech screen" and replaced it with a 90 minute realistic programming interview.

We have 3 tests we give depending on the role (game dev, backend, or SRE). The tests replicate typical work the engineer would be doing, such as adding functionality to a 2D game, developing out a web service for a given API, or debugging and optimizing a linux server. We provide a development environment remotely, or the engineer can use their own. They code/work on their own, without needing to share their screen, though we're on the line if they have questions or just want to chat. The interview itself takes about an hour and we schedule in buffer time before/after to setup and to debrief.

We've designed the problems to be (a) relative, (b) scalable and (c) fun. By scalable, I mean that the problem should have a simple, naive solution that most engineers who work in that space should be able to solve quickly and easily, while also having enough space for more advanced engineers to extend the problem and show off a bit.

So far we've gotten good feedback from this approach, even for candidates who haven't passed. I know 90 minutes is a long time, we but feel that with this test, we get a good, realistic work sample, and we can forgo a lot of the other less effective interviews.

(plug: we're still hiring [1])

[1] https://www.singularity6.com/careers
They advertise a whole product which draws all this tracking data as nice graphs to developers: https://developer.apple.com/app-store-connect/analytics/

It's essentially Google Analytics, just for apps on iOS.

Where do you think those "Daily active devices" data comes from?
The important part of that statement is "lives".

According to the IPCC, humans have transformed _more than 70%_ of all ice-free land if you take stuff like agriculture into account.

Edit: It'd seem that I've had remembered outdated figures.
I don't think I've ever done more than 5 interviews plus a phone screen in a single loop. Who tried to put you through 8 hours of on-site interviews?
You can have automated builds and manual testing and deploy. It goes a long long way, especially in a small team that's still prototyping rapidly.
Still, even sparsely populated rural humans have a pretty big effect on the natural habitat. We've pretty significantly displaced wild animals with humans/livestock/pets everywhere: https://xkcd.com/1338/
And what about land we use for food. And for watersheds. And for lumber and metal. And for electricity.

The amount of land we live on is tiny compared to the amount of land we use.
Feels in line with GDPR
Checked exceptions are far from fine, and this has nothing to do with IDE code generation.

Monads are highly cumbersome, unwieldy, and difficult to use, but Haskell programmers put up with them anyways because they get specific value from them, being able to say things like:

* effect tracking
* continuations
* tracking which methods perform I/O
* tracking errors

Java checked exceptions are like monads, but worse: they are even more unwieldy and interact poorly with the rest of the language. And yet, unlike monads in a language like Haskell, they provide practically zero value for their cost.

There is a reason no language since Java has copied checked exceptions as a feature, including C# which started as a direct rip-off of Java. There are better ways to encode errors into a method signature to try to force the caller to consider them than checked exceptions.
> Both cases force the user to consider failure cases

But only one allows you to pass back information about the source of the failure rather than just the existence of the failure.
Certain developers (ahem... Facebook) love to cry about Apple’s walled garden, without acknowledging that the reason that iOS and its walled garden is so popular is precisely because these large developers have proven to users that they are completely untrustworthy. If they conducted their business more responsibly, and if users could trust that these developers wouldn’t abuse their privacy and security, perhaps the mobile software ecosystem would be more open in nature.
Sounds like my Google interview. By the end I had absolutely no interest in working there. Such a toxic environment. The guy they had take me to lunch also seemed completely miserable.

Dunno if that was representative of Google or big companies in general but it turned me off forever.
> let's say I'm writing a kleenex program to explore some feature. Not nice if you make me feel all kind of boilerplate.

Use Groovy. Seriously, you can code it up with zero boilerplate, use the REPL, notebooks, etc to get your idea into shape, all with 100% interop with your Java libraries.

When you are done, if parts of it should graduate to "real code", you can pretty easily port it over or keep parts of it in Groovy and just take the elements over that need to be Java for robustness, etc.

This is actually my standard workflow in development now.
In their civilian lives I would bet most if not all government employees, including CIA, do rely on all the same scatterbrained work foisted upon us by tech company "engineers". SSL/TLS, not to mention cookies, came from Netscape, a.k.a., Netscum.
Fragile species will continue to be in decline. Long term, large species will remain in protected environments like national parks. The idea that humans are incapable of protecting larger species is belied by a visit to Yellowstone.

Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted species to flourish. This will certainly shift the makeup of our planet's biodiversity.

You mention all of this in passing, but I think these effects make the prognosis on biodiversity somewhat less than "very grim".
I had the strangest technical interview recently. I didn't get an offer, but in every case where that's happened before it's been obvious to me where my deficiencies lie (which I then use to improve in that area). This time I learnt nothing.

It was six individual one-to-one interviews, back to back. The first five were an ego trip for me. I was able to do everything perfectly it seems: read code, write code, talk about code. Then the sixth was this synthetic problem involving nested boxes. I figured out it was a tree problem and started writing code to build the tree. I had an approach in mind and asked the interviewer if he thought that was a good approach (given that there was only enough time for one attempt). He said no, he didn't think it would work. That completely threw me off. Later I realised me approach would have worked anyway.

I didn't get an offer, but what in the ever-loving fuck was the point of putting me through 5 technical interviews only to fail the sixth? It really felt like they were looking for that ego boost but didn't get it from me. It's hard not to sound arrogant in this situation, but I've been humbled in the past. This time I was just confused.
Sorry about that bad experience. It sounds like the interviewer wasn't good at communicating.

To be fair, it also sounds like you were conflating popular hash functions like md5 with the general concept of a hashing data structure and underlying function. Knowing that modulus operation is one approach and knowing common approaches for dealing with collisions are part of that. See: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/hashing-data-structure/
Do you think the marginal cost of distributing software for Apple even begins to approach the cost of housing it in a retail store?
The water thing (particularly cold to the face) is probably the mammalian diving reflex. Your heartbeat (and other factors relating to stress level) drop to maximize your time under water.
Yes, this will work with 99% proba
crates.io is package repository, cargo is a build tool, rustc is the compiler, and they all three are separate entities. rustc as far as I know operates solely on local files, and has no built-in logic or knowledge about crates.io. And cargo can be configured to use different repository than crates.io, which can have different naming policy
The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clean stuff" to "we don't want certain materials at all". Unfortunately, since they were such a reliable vendor for so long, many of the local recycling plants shut down, here and elsewhere in the world, and a lot of stuff we used to recycle ends up in the landfill, but there's also a lot of stuff that's right on the edge, so some recycling centers store it for a period hoping the economics make sense in the near future as markets fluctuate.

Now, global shipping is cheap, but I'm sure for large portions of the country there's also a portion of the cost which is even getting the goods to a large port, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Localized recycling helps not only with the the global shipping, but also a portion of the local shipping, as well as likely bringing back capacity to recycle goods that we just can't feasibly do economically right now. Some of that is shipping cost, some of it is just rectifying the mistakes of depending almost wholly on an outside vendor that then cut off service.
Ken Robinson, Who Preached Creativity in Teaching, Dies at 70
I don't support either person or party.

Europe isn't more left wing than the United States. This is just a popular myth Americans tell themselves. It's just more - of everything because of a longer history. There's nothing happening in America that didn't have an earlier cycle in Europe. You'll evolve the same policy solutions to the same social problems by convergence.
Thanks for pointing to that - I don't think I remember that specific reference, but there may have been some commentary to or about it when I was reading 'Meditations' (Marcus Aurelius) or one of the books on Stoicism where I picked it up from.
DJI in fact advertises the fact that they'll happily broadcast your information to law enforcement in realtime - https://www.dji.com/aeroscope

It's a little scary.
The word I think you’re looking for is “hazing”
That's all well and good, but that's not the point I was trying to make. Companies aren't having a hard time finding talent because developers are so annoyed by coding interviews, they're having a hard time finding talent because they can't/don't want to pay high salaries.

So developers go to work on finance and ad-tech, and not on normal, boring, only-making-three-times-the-national-average-salary stuff. And those companies then complain that they can't find developers. Because whether they have a coding challenge or not, they can't find developers because money.
And each individual song on Spotify should be submitted as in dividual app for review. Same with Youtube videos or Netflix.
Yes, clearly. In what way is a forest road not a road?

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7775746,-122.9327754,2401a,3...
2.1 - What does "rehab" constitute? Crimes of need are not likely to go away unless people's situation improves.

2.2 - We punish more people for longer than anywhere else in the world. Our prison population backs that up. (https://www.apa.org/images/2014-10-incarceration-chart2_tcm7...). Its absolutely not the case that we get better outcomes. There's no evidence to support that longer sentences will solve anything.

2.3 - Has its own problems - a nontrivial amount of people are put to death who are later exonerated. Its costly. Its also not an effective deterrent

Further reading: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration
Yes but this is deadlier
Does this mean it's also time for another "you don't have to program as a hobby" post again?
Well, sure, there are loads that died out before humans showed up. But of those that existed when we showed up, we have exterminated almost all of them.

> Of course if they had survived to even antiquity, yes, we’d probably have hunted them to extinction.

Often it wasn't even hunting. New Zealand's various giant ground parrots weren't THAT delicious. We introduced invasive species which did the extermination for us, in that case (and many/most bird-y cases, at least).
Encrypted email is almost a marginal usage scenario for GPG compared to other uses. It does everything. It is everywhere.Yes it is big, nobody has to use all of it. Just like C++... oh wait it is unpopular on hacker news bubble too despite being a juggernaut of a language. It will still be relevant long after hacker news will be no more.
For better or worse, nearly everyone uses github, which also provides second level name spacing.
So I've always wondered about these leetcode interviews, having never suffered one myself, if you're given one you've seen before, are you still supposed to pretend you're working it out from first principles?
> It used to be that engineering/design led the company. Now it's marketing and legal.

Isn't that what people make fun or Oracle for?
I had a similar experience with Amazon many years ago but my takeaway was "don't work at Amazon" not "don't do technical interviews". I've had great technical interviews (Google, Square) and terrible ones (Amazon, Stripe). Companies you want to work for are cognizant of this and spend time developing their process and training their interviewers to make sure their experience is one of the good ones.
I don't take crap like this from interviewers.

One time an interviewer asked me "how would you go about counting the ridges of a US quarter?"

I rattled off some ideas about counting the ridges in an arc and then multiplying to get total ridges but the interviewer kept prodding and eventually ended the question and said he was looking for me to say "google it" (I didn't realize it was a known, fixed number).

I just rolled my eyes and laughed and said "Huh, good one, but how would you go about counting the ridges of a foreign coin assuming it's freshly minted and the number of ridges is unknown?" The interviewer shifted uncomfortably and just said "yeah, I'd probably do something like what you said - count the ridges in an arc and multiply..."

(i.e. "if you are going to give me bogus lateral thinking puzzles to test my competence I'm going to fire them back to see how you handle them")
Universal Pringles Cans!

(A play on Universal Paperclips [1], which was featured on here earlier this week)

[1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
> Java the language does not provide any facilities for abstracting over checked exceptions

Can you explain what you mean by this?
Following the other comments, I gave GPT-3 the prompt:

A post titled "The Technical Interview Is an Ego Trip" was submitted to tech forum Hacker News.

Here are the comments on that submission:

Here are the unedited/uncurated results:

---

"The interview process is really more of an ego trip for the interviewer, and the interviewee is just the means of satisfying that need."

"The most common reason I see people getting technical interviews is to satisfy the ego of the interviewer."

"I have been on both sides of the table and I can honestly say that the interview process is mostly about the ego of the interviewer. And that is a shame."

"I have done many interviews, and can say that, with a few exceptions, the vast majority of them are ego trips."

"The technical interview is a big ego trip for the interviewer."

"I am not sure how many times I have heard a manager say that he likes the technical interview process because it gives him a chance to meet technical people."

"While the 'ego trip' comment might be a bit of an overstatement, interviewing is a skill and a process that, like any other, should be improved over time."

"I have never really gotten the feeling that a technical interview is done for the benefit of the candidate."

"Once you realize that you're not actually interviewing for a job, you'll find the process a lot less stressful."

"I don't think the 'ego trip' term is a fair description. First of all, I am not interviewing for my ego."

---
> most progressives

You're casting a pretty wide net there.

Data is data, feel free to present it. And if there is a demonstrable statistical correlation, great. People should still have the freedom to marry someone of the same gender. Single parents should still be allowed to stay single.
These post can rub people the wrong way, but personally I love seeing these data points and would like to see more.

We often talk about engineers that were high performers in the right startup, the right place at the right time and got massive exits. But we don't hear a lot about it from established tech companies. There's very little data about the range of rewards we see for high performers at different companies and the difference can be very large.

I was a good performer at my old job and the most I ever got was a $5,000 bonus for exceptional performance and I though that was the norm. The rest of my story is very similar to the OP. I was looking at glassdoor and I though the recruiter had over leveled me. I joined FB making nearly 3x my old salary. My year 1-4 is almost identical to the OP. 4 years ago I didn't know this was possible for high performing engineering ICs.

Thank you for sharing!
It is utterly shocking how many bullshitters show up for interviews. I'm sure it varies by company and industry, but a fair chunk of interviewing is weeding out bullshitters.
that just sounds like imposter syndrome with a different face on it.
Does that mean no discount for buying off-App Store?
Rust on the Moon. How is that possible without oxygen and liquid water?
The problem with this line of thinking is that Apple doesn't take a 30% cut to be your payment processor but to sell on the iPhone at all. Being the sole payment processor just happens to be convenient collection mechanism. Would you still migrate to a 3rd-party payment processor if you still had to pay the 30% fee to apple and pay the 3rd party payment processing fees?
I only started with Elixir in recent months and it's the first language that has ever made me comfortable about writing concurrent code. I didn't spend a lot of time with Go, but the idea of just calling a function that is now running in parallel but was always disconcerting to me. Of course, I could have spent more time with it and gotten more comfortable learning the ins-and-outs, but Erlang/Elixir's addressable processes running with their own stack/heap/gc and passing messages between each other is something that clicked very quickly with me. It's such an incredibly simple idea. For being a "weird" language, I think there is a lot of power the simplicity of its design, especially around learning. You just have to get over the weird syntax (which is a hot topic).

For transparency, I've never written any production code in either Elixir or Go.
Conversation on this website is full of people who can't see a mixed bag and acknowledge the bad parts are bad.

People who know better tend to have the self control not to engage. I often get baited into engaging.
> “Often, I will give them a scenario where the processes are failing the team to find what they would do to tackle inefficiencies and if they would be willing to speak up.“

While the intention here is good you are unlikely to get an accurate answer from the candidate using this method because the candidate “should” tell you what you want to hear rather than what they would do in reality. You basically want to find out how the developer delivers criticism. Do they bruise egos or are they tactful or do they simply stay silent.

A better approach is allowing a candidate to demonstrate how they offer criticism. Give them a codebase to read and make sense of and ask them to explain it to you. Ask them to to point out parts that could be better designed. You can gather a lot of information this way.
1. Can the candidate read a foreign codebase and make sense of it.
2. Can the candidate pick up business logic from the code.
3. Does the candidate offer criticism that is likely to make another developer defensive or are they more guarded with their communication and offer higher level design alternatives.
I wouldn’t say it’s entirely unconcerning. Especially if reinfected patients can still spread the virus. This could really prolong the whole mess until full deployment of a vaccine.
The whole "Continuity" section seems completely red herring and orthogonal to the namespace issue.
I think the syntactic awkwardness in general in Java have been a huge issue and it's a shame because people hold it against checked exceptions rather than the language.

For example, it took forever to be able to handle two unrelated exceptions with the same catch block, and incredibly common things like closing file handles would require nested try / catch blocks in all the primary catch clauses (and now every utility library ends up with "closeQuietly" or similar ...).

I think if Java had done it much better there would be a massively different opinion of CE.
> it's not their job to make sure you can do your job

If they're on the network team, it's literally their job description to make sure everybody has the network access they need.
If Chevy made something better than a Tesla for a similar price or cheaper then people would buy it. But they can't.
I think it is similar for managers and developers. There are 10x managers and 10x developers, but both are very rare. The are also net-negative managers and net-negative developers, both are a minority but sufficiently large that most people already met a few of them.

That is, a manager can "create more than any individual contributor", but most of them don't.
Apple controls the browser and cripples it for app use, like no multitouch in fullscreen pages.
You forget; users are not Facebook customers. The advertisers are Facebook customers. Facebook may not be selling ads targeted to users in China, but it's sure as heck selling ads to Chinese companies.

Facebook: you're not the customer, you're the product.
If the whole thing was coordinated, that’s messed up; I wonder if it was a coincidence and #6 was testing your mettle, or even just genuinely disagreed.

What did you do when he said no?
I don't know what the interviewers expect, but, generally, your "reward" for admitting you've seen the problem before is a harder question to answer. It seems more in the candidate's interest to pretend to work out the solution than to be honest.
You can ... ?

Handle some, declare the method throws the others?
Hey, everyone's different. Works for me.
That's fair, it very well could be that.
I'd have no issue about dating a women who owned a cat but I'd have reservations about dating a women holding her cat in her dating profile picture.

Maybe it's less about cat, more about context.
In case anyone else is wondering what's doing the templating in this project, it's Scriban.

https://github.com/lunet-io/scriban
The richest 10% of the world also come from regions with stable-to-negative population growth. Those regions are our only hope for moving to a sustainable technological platform while maintaining a high quality of life; we're talking about the people who buy solar panels, windmills, and electric cars, who at least can build nuclear plants, if they get over their political reservations.

The poorest 50% of the world would absolutely love to emit more CO2, and will do so just as fast as they can acquire the resources.

I don't think any steps to limit population growth really need to be taken, however, other than two things which are good in and of themselves: women's education, and improving access to birth control.

But concerns about Earth's carrying capacity need to be taken seriously. Malthus is wrong right up until he isn't, and we should strive to avoid hitting that limit.