skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unless the job is mostly giving presentations, it seems like its optimizing for the wrong thing.

Technically speaking, if we're in an interview to "optimize for the right thing", then we would just have them come in and type.

But we all know that's also optimizing for "the wrong thing" despite it being what we do physically day in and day out.

This is because you _CAN'T_ "optimize for the right thing" in an interview. It's not possible and this needs to be acknowledged.

Therefore you go for something else. Anyone who is a software developer can listen to a 5-10 minute presentation from another developer and start forming general, broad opinions. They can then start asking questions afterwards to help clarify those opinions.

But the Q&A also has another purpose. Way too often interviewers will come to conclusions that don't follow (non-sequitur). I once had someone tell me they didn't feel I would be a team player because I told them as long as I had headphones, open office would be ok. The main difference I've found between business people and technical people is that business people will ask clarifying questions. The Q&A sets the expectation for the _INTERVIEWER_ to ask clarifying questions.
CRISPR isn't quite enough. That's just patching. Direct synthesis of a human sized genome will probably be available at some point. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs. Largest synthesis so far is 580,000 base pairs.

Then we'll need CAD tools. Really good CAD tools.
Opening it up makes it available to people who might look at it and get an idea. Sometimes the thing has to be available before someone figures out what to do with it.
What company gives you the full list of questions, and the acceptable answers? Which companies use only the results of these tests?

leetcode is an open-ended ocean of knowledge you have study, it's not a test.
Thoughts on Switching to Mouse and Keyboard in Call of Duty Warzone
>>Record your calls and self-assess<<

I'm assuming that the other party was informed the call was being recorded. I'm not sure I'd be too comfortable dealing with an entity which recorded my calls without my consent, an act which in certain jurisdictions may not even be legal.
Are 99.99% convinced that normal voting is secure?
I would call it new physics. Getting a relativistic electron bunch to coherently radiate is pretty novel.
I have always thought, and still think that Dyson Spheres are an absurd idea.
So one thought I had just now: If an asexual organism has both a good and a bad mutation they are intrinsically tied together forever. But with sexual reproduction, chromosome crossover can produce offspring having the good mutation that are also free of the bad one.

Maybe we could clean up the off-target mutations using that.

Edit: To clarify, I mean somehow inducing crossover in a petri-dish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film) ?
1. I do wonder why in the US we permit discrimination based on place of residence and place of birth. You can legally discriminate based on accent or other indicators of your place of birth or development, but not legally discriminate for race, gender, sexual orientation. And similarly we are also permitting employers to discriminate based on where you choose, or life exigencies compel you, to live, modulo objective work-related collocation requirements. Maybe a pivot by SJWs is in order.

2. The very largest US companies learned long ago about the importance of a significant geographic economic presence all over this great country aka USA. Alternatively 90+ Members of Congress explained the virtue via anti-trust actions and other targeted legislation. With telework, FANG and the like get the political benefit of constituencies across Congressional districts and States without the overhead of managing a lot of real estate for offices.

3. There are a lot of edge cases being thrown around in this thread. It’s good to hear those voices, but it can make it hard to gain a sense of how many people actually now experience telework as a good thing or a bad thing, especially if/when some fraction of infrastructure cost savings are directly shared with the employees.

4. To the question of the original post, businesses dependent on commuters (including those who own real estate in the commercial area) call up the Mayor, and the Mayor calls CEOs and begs/threatens/pleads/flatters/seduces/cajoles and it is easier to send the droids back to the grind than to hear the Mayor’s minions whine and complain, unless the droids push back hard. [Purely personal guess]
Doesn't matter. The people who do well will spend 5+ hours on it since that is how long it takes to put together a talk, refine it, go through it a couple times, get feedback, adjust based on feedback and so on.
MMORPG today in general is more polite than its heyday too, since the players are older and more relaxed (younger generations don't play MMORPG as much anymore).
I believe my site fixes that problem but Mods here keep removing the link. Lets see if they remove it like this: AudioBookReviews . com
Cliché: Security through obscurity (yet again)
I would argue that it is inaccurate to summarize Freeman Dyson’s work as “some cool thought experiments that only showed up in scifi”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
Not just the city, Germany made the decision to shut down ALL of the nuclear power plants when Fukushima happened.

Now they found they're dependent on Russian gas.
> It is hard to believe how entrenched locality and realism are in physics

Not really, since every valid theory must be testable and falsifiable. The idea that all of reality has been a fleeting random agglomeration of particles that experienced this exact moment, of you reading my sentence here, before dispersing and taking all of suggested reality with it - in other words, a Boltzmann brain - well, it's a cool idea, but where does it get you? It's not falsifiable, ever, so it's not science. It's philosophy, and as such it's not something that a scientist, let alone a whole field of scientists, should be spending their time on. Instead, they should be doing actual science, grounded in realism.

If they want to put on a philosopher hat after work and talk about Boltzmann brains, on the other hand, that's great. I, for one, will lap up the crazy philosophies generated by the mind of a physicist, with gusto. But I'd rather they (or so least, most physicists) stick with actual science, aka, their job, most of the time.
It does sound glib, but I agree, I really think this is the way to go.
The fact is, people tend to over-emphasize their area of competence and de-emphasize areas outside of it. It was probably the case that the architectural problems you solved were above their paygrade, so they ignored that and over-emphasized what they knew. The fact that you didn't share their enthusiasm for unit tests just shows you weren't a top notch developer (which always happens to be a mirror image of the interviewer).
To me the mental cost matters. For me, I'm mentally better off when I hang out with people physically than when I sit at home isolated chatting on slack. For you that might be different.

So I'd happily pay the commute cost if I have to for my mental well being. If you don't need that that's fine. You can stay home.

I have a gut feeling (so no data) that for many projects a core group of physically together people will out perform a group of remote workers of the same size "All other things being equal" (which they never are).

I come from games, having designers/artists/programmers able to look over each others shoulders and "riff" off each other's ideas is invaluable. But I know there are other kinds of work that don't need as much interaction so YMMV
> because new technology will magically solve all our problems.

Well, if you call putting 10 million tons of diffractive moondust into orbit at L1 “magical”, then he’ll probably turn out to be right.
You're not wrong, I forget the Gov calls 100Mbps broadband (thankfully up from 10Mbps). I wasn't specific enough. I personally, and I do move every few years to new States/Cities (and recently trying to move to smaller mountain/woodsy towns) and wfh and have to actually have 100Mbps+ internet or I think I'll melt. Most of the towns I looked were vdsl/DSL only except for a few who had gone the muni route or had an executive from Xfinity living there.

300mb+ is still pretty hard to get outside of cities.

I've actually spent ~$20k before to get Spectrum to cable an old house in the middle of a huge city.
I'm not sure how Jonathan is defining "enough" developers. It's very easy to come up with a definition that says Debian doesn't have enough developers: just say Debian should package every piece of software out there.

But that makes no sense. In reality, there has to be some sort of decision mechanism over what packages are included and what aren't. If that decision isn't made pro-actively, it will be forced upon you - via the man power problem. Debian is at its heart a do-ocracy, which boils down to something happens only if some individual can raise the energy to make it happen. So a package dies when no Debian member can make (unpaid) time to save it. It's not like there is someone who can order someone else to save it - Debian is a purely volunteer organisation.

It's easy to paint that as having a man power problem, but curating the packages is essential task that must be undertaken. Doing it isn't "a problem", it's essential to survival.

It's also easy to criticise the way this decision is made. Just leaving it to the individual decision making of 1k volunteers sounds so unorganised. But the flip side is if you have paid engineers you are doing the reverse, you are giving someone the power to order other developers around. In an organisation like Debian that attracts membership through it strong egalitarian principles, that's going to be an anathema to most of it's members.

As an side, despite all the whinging here while it's difficult to introduce a new package to Debian, it is not difficult to step up to support an existing package. You don't have to be a developer or a maintainer, and there are any number of existing developers and maintainers who will upload your work if you do it. So if a package dies, it's not too far from a stretch to say it was because no-one on the planet with the skills was that interested in doing the work.
So, wait, do you think Twitter is in on it? (They generate the IDs, not Donald). Like, what do you think is going on here? If not a coincidence, how do you think the ID got like that?
Show HN: Programmatic Blog Generation
I didn't move to Tokyo to live outside of Tokyo.
We have a small network of librarians on a slack channel who have merged more than 10,000 duplicate works.

Librarians (which is a permission role) also have the ability to merge Authors, so data improves over time.

Furthermore, members of our community coordinate with Wikidata, VIAF, etc -- we match up identifiers and sync data (and in this way, bots are able to make meaningful changes in bulk on a rolling basis).

See:
http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-bots (most of which are built using the OL client:
http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client)

e.g. https://github.com/cdrini/openlibrary-wikidata-bot
Most every coding question asked to me by FAANG was on leetcode (I think 1 out of 10+ wasn't but maybe I just missed it). Had I gone through all of leetcode I'd have covered almost every question asked of me. The behavioral questions asked were basically told to me by the recruiter verbatim ahead of time so were not a surprise in any way. The system design is broader but most cover a few common areas that you can google to find.

So it's all standard questions that have answers you can study for ahead of time.
I've read a pile of these articles and it always seems to be one or the other as though they are mutually exclusive.

Why isn't this a hybrid solution?
And if not, certainly seems to value quantity over quality.

That's pre-apocalyptic thinking.
I found it interesting that an article on a city is chock full of photos but only one has an easily discernible person, and they are a bike rider in the distance with their face blurred. In the photography architecture is preeminent over people.
The non grim it didn't happen would be the obvious. They all slowly moved away as mentioned.

But sex/slavery would be a grim working theory. Sold by their parents, who then wouldn't rush to dispel rumours.
Many insurance providers actually have a portal where you can search for a procedure and they will list the providers and their prices.
>And how would you prevent future civilizations from opening nuclear waste deposits that should not be opened?

A depot where the waste is beats the heck out what we're doing now, which is spewing waste directly into the atmosphere, which effects everywhere.
Honestly, have neither of you heard of coderpad? My screens are like the GGP's question, except both I am the candidate are on the phone and on coderpad. Coderpad even had voice and video calls now. The candidate is free to Google, to use the repl, to use any language, etc. If the candidates wants, they can just share their screen in their own environment.

But asking a candidate for 30-50 lines of code is completely normal.
All modern software jobs are mostly about explaining your solution to others (stakeholders, reviewers, senior/staff engineers, managers, executives).

If you can’t boil your work down into accessible presentations and adapt them for technical or non-technical audiences, you won’t get anywhere.

Nobody will agree to help you, allow your team to grow, give you budget for tools you need, make compromises with you around integration requirements or shared design patterns, unless you can frequently convert your software work into highly professional presentations.

I’d argue that competent presenting and writing skills are of equal, or even greater, importance than software skills or expert knowledge, whether for a research software job, software contractor job, SWE within tech / ecommerce / banking etc industries - across the board there are pretty much zero types of software engineering jobs in which software skills are actually the most important thing. Presenting and writing are frequently much more important.
That’s the best part! You get to see how well they are able to articulate what, how and why they’re building. That’s such a huge part of working with someone, which you don’t get if you tell them exactly what to do.
I was involved in building a system using 32-bit ints as timestamps ten years ago. They are still sold, and since it's industrial equipment running on 16 bit microcontrollers I have every reason to believe most of them will still be around in 2038.

I don't think I was at the only company doing this. Few people seem to care about issues that will happen after their retirement. Expect lots of industrial stuff to work just a bit worse around 2038 (and 2036, PIC microcontrollers fail a bit sooner)
depends on how apocalyptic Y2038 is :)
Looks like they can't predict the age though? Eg. first two examples are way off and say "Age: unknown".

I thought we might be able to do it with the telomeres or something?
My interpretation was similar, but slightly different.

The company itself wasn't actually solving complex problems and therefore the developers involved couldn't actually understand the level of complexity I was able to deal with.

I get the feeling a lot of developers believe dealing with state in a react app is a complex problem, but I've been doing this stuff for 25+ years and left that behind as complex long ago. I know that's probably going to come across as arrogant, but it's how I feel about the entire thing. I see people all the time squabbling online over very specific source code related things as if they're important.
even more annoyingly, you can define a function that returns it but not a function that accepts it, so you often have to jump through a lot of hoops to combine higher order functions with multiple return values.
i agree with you but it look like Softbank want money more than ARM. it doesn't matter what you and i think. its whatever Softbank CEO think.
protip: many SF residents can completely afford homes far outside urban areas.

They simply moved money from their brokerage account into the home.

The mortgage, if any, was small to them and is completely serviceable as they were saving for a mere downpayment on a SF or peninsula home, minimum downpayments are often 20% of the home value which would be close to $400,000 of $2,000,000. You typically want to reduce interest payments by putting larger percentages down.

They can sell the houses whenever they want and not lose anything or much. Its a store of value that also puts a roof over their head without having to pay someone else every month.
When I was single, I always rented an apartment in a walking distance from my office, no matter how much it cost, 2-3 hours of my time daily are priceless.

Now when I have a family, remote work is a real money-saving solution, but gosh, how I miss the office and how I'm tired of my home turned into an office. My wife also works here, we have two workspaces, 3 printers, but no space anymore for "switching context" from work to home, and no private time, work may find you at 11 pm, and you can't stop thinking of doing more today to do less tomorrow. I read everything about WFH planning and self-discipline, but this is how it works for us at the moment.
I miss being in the office so that I can go for coffees with people at morning tea, lunch and beers after work, I miss the human connection that cannot truely occur via via conferencing software, I miss walking around the city at lunch and even the 30-40 minute community to/from work (about half the time). I miss having a lunch room to sit and spitball ideas in that people truly, naturally walk in and out of, I miss meeting rooms not for bad meetings but for good hands on sessions with physical post-it notes, whiteboards, I miss being about to seperate work and home life, I miss the daily change of scenery. I miss having a work life.
Your candidate-focused interview process is very inspiring! I really like the "bring your own project" idea and it also looks like you've cleverly integrated your product into the interview experience (I'm assuming that is what powers the personalised interview website). I also think the general tone and styling of your content is very considered and engaging. My honest first impression is surprise that I haven't come across your brand yet, but I'm definitely going to learn more.
These companies certainly can try and great for them if they can make it work. If it was easy though it would have already happened to a greater extent.
That’s now. Like all technology give it time and it’ll be more real than a photograph.
Biking in Tokyo is less freeing than public transportation because of the added time finding a place to lock up the bike. I bought a bike thinking I'd use it but it turns out it's actually much less free since if I take it I'm stuck with it the entire day where as without it I can easily visit the other side of the city on a whim via public transportation. The same would be true in Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, many other places with good public transportation.
I will never use software that's been Rusted
The problem is not everyone clicks on the right link. Non-sophisticated users looking for Fortnite don't even know what Epic is or whether or not they're the official place to get it.

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2018/06/fake-fortni...

> There are a hundred ways to prevent the spread of malware without prohibiting multiple app stores. Allow third party apps but scan them for malware first. Get your apps from another app store, but that store checks it for malware.

The App Store review process checks for more than just malware. It also enforces privacy restrictions and ensures that developers aren't abusing legitimate APIs for malicious purposes. Malware scanning isn't going to prevent third-party apps from slurping all your friends phone numbers and selling that data to advertisers.

> People are increasingly getting their software from stores like Steam and EGS

Which is why we now have malware floating around masquerading as the Epic Games Store.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-lokibot-trojan-malware-cam...

I think you're making the same fallacy as the person I originally replied to, which is taking the experience of a highly technical user and assuming everyone else knows how to do the same things you do. I use all four platforms (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows) regularly. I've personally never had problems with viruses/malware on Windows, even back in the XP days before Windows Defender was a built-in thing. But simultaneously I don't believe my experience is typical of the majority of users on those platforms.
Government != currency. In the most general sense it’s just the system that defines, interprets, and enforces property rights. That can be a tribal chief or the US government or the WTO.

> That is the crux of the criticism you say you find silly. How exactly? Please show your work, because I am curious how we can subsidize China or India's emissions resulting from their domestic economy

Writing them a check would be the most obvious way.

> Again please pay attention to domestic vs imported carbon. Most of the claims of approximating carbon neutrality is much smaller than in reality, because of the increasing consumption of carbon positive goods from developing countries.

I agree, there needs to be a border adjustment, and claims of carbon neutrality need to be similarly adjusted for imported carbon. I don’t see how that materially changes the calculus. Maybe the argument is that wide-scale border adjustments haven’t been proven out, and fair enough, but let’s maintain perspective: we’re speeding toward a cliff and we can’t be too concerned about bumps off to the left or the right.
At the 1000ft view RedHat and Debian perform much the same function.

Debian has $900k in the bank. IBM purchased RedHat for $34B. The number's aren't directly comparable, but methinks a factor of 100 understates it.
Not standard questions. Companies switch away from a problem as soon a it becomes known they use it. They want a problem the applicant has never seen before. And I'm saying, it's not because they are testing for intelligence -- they will help you through it if they like you -- it's because they want you to struggle with it. Which gives them the right to use their gut to decide.
Not being in the office exposes a lot of the workplace theater we participate in, in order to put on a facade that we are working or being productive. Now, you can truly just not work on some days when you aren't feeling it. You can actually embrace the lulls and highs that ebbs and flows through the very nature of work.
Except when it is original work. (Which it apparently is.)
Many in our community are intimately familiar with and sensitive to the challenges of FRBR (e.g. serials, etc) as it pertains to maintaining a system of Works and Editions.

This is an active conversation on our slack. Send me an email and I'll be happy to invite you to join the discussion.

Honestly, a lot of our Librarian bottlenecks aren't engineering, they're documentation and organization related.

Since Aaron Swartz started Open Library ~2007, there have been scores of trailblazing Librarians (like Karen Coyle and Jessamyn West) who have nudged us in the right direction and documented their opinions.

I've done by best to organize these learnings here:
https://openlibrary.org/librarians

We could really use help here if you or anyone else is interested in doing some digital archaeology and helping us better organize (so we can make good schema decisions to move forward).

Thanks for bringing this up.

Fun fact, by the way: Nearly every page on Open Library is a json API of itself if you add `.json` to the end.

e.g. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M/Fantastic_Mr._Fox & https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M.json
NaNs are a big gap and one that constantly worries me.
I will be your online personal trainer