skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>xenophobia

I know at least 3 genius-level people from Europe that refuse to go to the US, because they are white, and every single moment they see these "whitey are racist by just being white" they simply descend even more into their beliefs. Also, their humour would get them fired within a minute in the USA.
Were I to ask these questions in interview, I think I'd be looking for the candidate to have a bash, do some napkin math, come up with some contraints/failure modes and to communicate their assumptions well.

> How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?

In this example, I'd be looking for you to have fun, ask a bunch of questions and to make some sensible decisions based on the information you have.

To be honest though, it does seem strange to ask for a "basic CRUD development role". Admittedly, if I had an experienced candidate apply for an entry level position, I would be a little leery. Why do you think you're entry level despite a few years experience?

I'd maybe take a break from interviewing, and use the time you're currently spending on interview prep on building something as a personal project. If you enjoy it, then hang in there. If not, maybe you should stay at your current gig (you don't mention anything about this) and figure out what you do enjoy.

P.S. I'd also stay of Hacker News for a while. While I love it, I will admit that there's a higher degree of obsession here than in wider industry.
Example of an associated bug: https://community.splunk.com/t5/Archive/Splunk-Y2K-type-bug-...
I am a believer in a form of panspsychism myself, but this article is baffling.

> But the problem for neo-Aristotelians, or indeed anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are necessarily true, which means that it’s impossible for them to be false.

The author completely fails to prove why that is the case, not to mention that this isn't even true for Mathematics either, depending on your starting axioms...
Me too. This is my desktop calculator of choice.
Every question beggs another. Münchhausen trilemma

All definitions are (meta)circular. Because language is recursive.
Sometimes, the interviewer will purposely give you a question beyond your reach. There are a few reasons.

- To zero in on what you already know.

- To see how you react in a situation where you don't have all the information.

What is your attitude when you are in this situation? Do you shut down? Walk out? Or are you able to form open ended questions to get the missing information?

In any type of job, you're always in situations where you don't have all the answers, and need to work with others with a positive attitude. I don't know how you are going to turn this around, but maybe looking at the situation from another point of view is the first step.

Just the fact that you are asking the questions tells me there is hope.
I think there are both nature and nurture aspects to why in general we dislike the thought of killing our own kind.

Physiologically we have brain mechanisms that activate when we see a stimulus to another person (yawning and phantom limb experiments being well known examples).

Hypothetically if we had evolved from mantises instead of primates, we might be physiologically conditioned to think eating our sexual partners was the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if our moral framework in that case lead to utterances such as "how dare you not sacrifice your life for your children!"

On the nurture side, the sentinelese are perfectly fine with killing foreigners violently on sight. There are also records in other tribal cultures of the belief that cannibalism was a way to inherit someone's desirable traits. So clearly culture plays a role as well.
Most interviews unfortunately have little to do with the actual work and require significant practice to do well.

> One question I was asked was "How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?". I had no idea, I have never handled that kinda scale.

If you're technically competent overall, you should be able to learn enough to make your way through this from a few hours of reading and watching youtube videos. That's what I did when I was in the same situation, and I passed the architecture interviews at multiple FANGs.

Same for the coding questions. You need to spend time reading interview books and doing leetcode.
Yeah, doesn't make sense.

I prefer a simpler argument for why there is a subset of morality that's universal for (vast majority of) humans: argument from shared brain architecture.

We're essentially running the same wetware under the hood, at least on the time scales of human civilization. So while the universe doesn't necessarily privilege a set of values, human brains are. And that's all that really matters (until we meet aliens or start building conscious AIs) - conscious experience is a feature of brains, not laws of physics in general.
That's tiny. There are around 390,000 plants in the world. That file contains more than just plants, and has less than 2,000 entries.

1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36230858
I'd like to give you a different view on the interview / question you mentioned. While it's certainly possible the interviewers are running the process badly (many are), pretend they have good intentions and answer to that. The tweet question is basically: can you think about performance.

Let's say you don't know anything about queues or distributed systems. You can say you never worked at that scale. You can also say what you think would be the number of followers (millions+), what would be the time needed for a write you a database (~millisecond each) and why that won't match 3 seconds, so you know how much time you have per follower. You can talk about the problems (disk persistence is slow, network is slow, keeping more in memory is better), that having many processes / machines working at the same time will likely be the way to go. You can try to pull the interviewer into discussion about it.

You don't need to know the answer (let's be honest, the interviewer didn't know it in details either) to actually talk about why the problem exists and what you understand about it.
How the hell do regexes like these find their way into production …
https://www.unixtimestamp.com/
The Current Unix Timestamp
1600001210 seconds since Jan 01 1970. (UTC)
You should have trained yourself in school etc... these folks aren’t cheaper.
I build an app only with SwiftUI from the start. Throughout the year the API changed and some features stopped working (contextMenu on some elements didn’t highlight correctly the element pressed) and after a lot of debugging I concluded that it came from SwiftUI itself. Which was the case, a year after some things have been fixed themselves. Some APIs have been deprecated since last year as well.
Personally I never liked building the interface with interface builder and autolayout.
Creating everything straight in code is really powerful and it’s easier to compare differences with git.
It would’ve been better to release it this year though, more mature with major bugs fixed.
Something old featurephones also had was tactile buttons. Can be controlled without looking. I miss that.
Among unicorns are:

- Uber, whose only innovation is price dumping using infinite investor cache on losing billions of dollars yearly

- Facebook, whose only innovation is creating festering echo chambers, siphoning private data wholesale and dodging laws

- JUUL, whose only innovation is selling electronic cigarettes

- Coinbase, whose only innovation is to be a middleman in bitcoin scams

- Magic Leap, whose only innovation is siphoning off investors' money and finally producing a subpar gadget

- Pinterest whose only innovation is spam Google search results with stolen pictures

etc.

There are very few actual innovators among these "unicorns".
Huh? That sounds exactly the thing that a ML system would learn quickly from the data. You probably don't even need shiny deep learning (though it helps).

Just like with the Netflix Prize stuff, where the conclusion was very similar, ie. just dump in as much data as you can, crank up the ML machinery, and it'll discover the features (better than you can engineer them) and learn what to use for recommendation ranking. And that's basically what we see with GPT-3 too. If you have some useful labels in the data it'll learn them even without supervision, because it has so many parameters, it basically sticks.

Get some papers run it through a supervised training phase where you give it a set with every paper scored based on how retracted/bad/unreplicating it is and you'll get a great predictor. Then run it to find papers that stick out, and then have a human look at them, and try to replicate some of them to fine-tune the predictor. Plus continue to feed it with new replication results.

That said, using an ML system as the gatekeeper as OP suggested is a bad idea, as it'll quickly result in the loss of proxy variables' predictive power.

Though ultimately a GPT-like system has the capacity to encode "common sense".
>You literally misunderstand fundamentally what I wrote. Unsafe workplaces would not be able to get insurance, therefore wouldn’t exist, hence very safe workplaces.

That is just not true. I think it's convenient how everyone forgets the kinds of calculations US corporations make: breaking the law/killing people/not having insurance is cheaper and more profitable than the alternative. Remember the Ford Pinto? Ok, that was probably too long ago. How about Firestone?

Firestone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...
I was thinking someone should write a story on the premise that we are living in a simulation, where 'glitches in the matrix' like déjà vu, coincidences, freak accidents, etc., are due to accidental arrangements of people corrupting the program... but then I realised someone already had. In El ángel exterminador (1962) a group of people are trapped in a single room (level) due to their accidental seating arrangement. They are freed when they unlock the same sequence. In Groundhog Day a similar thing happens where the protagonist is trapped replaying the same level, until he figures out the correct sequence of actions to pass it. I am sure there are others.
Woohoo!

Next one (1700M) will be on 2023-11-14 22:13:20 +0000 UTC.
Isn't what you're describing autonomy of team members?

Some team members go on their own path-finding journey and can make the decisions on their own on where to take it.

I believe a team effort also involves a transfer of knowledge. I know some companies are disfunctional regarding this. Some companies aren't and while you are working on something, you can invite others to comment and give suggestions while you present your current progress.

I would present during team meetings what I was doing and why and sometimes got great feedback which helped me. If what I was working on affected many teams or wasn't interesting to my own team, I would send an optional meeting invite. Two kinds of people accepted it. The ones who were interested and the ones who had experience in that particular sub-topic.

Generally, the ones with experience asked questions during the meeting and the ones without sometimes asked questions afterwards. Both were helpful. Those with experience sometimes made me pivot. And those without, I flagged as someone I would like to include now or at some point in the project.

I don't think what I said was contradicting what you said.
I share your disdain.

Half the people talking about panpsychism are just bloviating in-between hits on DMT and are hoping to achieve Nirvana and merge with some Jungian collective unconscious, but are usually completely ignorant of that entire concept.

Panpsychism doesn't mean everything and everywhere is tripping on acid having a great time. Panpsychism is actually kind of terrifying; just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion trillion hydrogen atoms suddenly recruited into a massive supernova and then drifting alone for 5 billion years and being washed through the entirety of life's evolution on Earth, taking part in a trillion different DNA molecules and cell walls; not having any clue about what you've been a part of or why. Being a horrible-looking blood-sucking mosquito downed by a bug-eyed frog, munched on by a croc, farted out a horse...or frozen into a granite hunk in the dark bowels of the Earth for eternity. No, panpsychism doesn't mean your preference for the Yankees over the Mets are somehow the moral code of the universe, or that damn squirrel with a twinkle in its eye is the manifestation of the all-knowing god, you fool (author).
It's a good idea overall.

My suggestion is to absolutely under no circumstances attempt to cover all (or a large number) possible medical codes in the first few years. Do not spend any mental energy on that, it will bury you, it will rob your motivation, it will waste your time and make you wish you never considered the service.

Do the opposite, start very stupid simple, knock down one bowling pin. Pick a small selection of the most common medical codes or those most in need of this service (the treatments that can benefit most from this). Roll the complexity gradually from there. You will be aided by resources as you scale, in many ways, which you will lack in the beginning. Your expanding userbase can also assist you immensely as you go along (in the beginning they won't exist); but you first need to have a very useful service to get those users, and to do that you have to be good at something; narrow, narrow, narrow; you'll expand outward later.

And frankly if you can't make it work for a small group of medical codes, you are not going to make it work for a much larger & complex context.

Again, whatever you do, do not attempt to run before you crawl with this. You don't need to do that. Just offering this for small selection of medical codes could be hugely valuable, then slowly expand it. Make it work super well for that small group first.

Make it clear what your service focuses on, and keep that list short. Reject any attempts by users to expand the system to cover all medical codes in the beginning.

It's no different than going from Harvard.edu, to Stanford.edu as in the Facebook bowling pin strategy, and then building up some demand from users to see you add more medical codes (the userbase will help inform you which to do next). Do not try to go wide in the beginning, it's a guaranteed path to failure.

Plus, if you start with a small selection of medical codes, you can better focus on your outreach / marketing to just those people and their circumstances. It will drastically simplify your attempts to find the first 100 / 1000 / 10000 users, and those early users will all be able to coordinate on the same narrow medical code/s, which will build the initial community foundation you require. If you try to go wide initially, covering a lot of medical codes, you'll get stray users that won't be able to coordinate with the other users who all have different medical codes (ie it's better to have 1,000 users with the same single medical code, than 1,000 medical codes each with one user).
The "stressed" angle is interesting, and I appreciate it since these are experts discussing the matter.

I wonder, however, if there is something more sinister at play. Orcas are very intelligent animals. Is there a chance that they knocked a lone sailor off of a boat once and found a new food source? What if they're trying to replicate previous success? The entire pod could have learned this behavior.

Orcas are known to eat large terrestrial mammals. The fact that we don't have a documented case of them eating humans doesn't mean it can't or hasn't happened.

These are the bears and lions of the sea. Except they're even smarter.

I wouldn't want to be in a small boat or kayak near orcas.
> Xenophobia and nationalism sure don't help.

But somehow China a country with even more Xenophobia and nationalism is catching up to us. And the U.S. used to have more Xenophobia and nationalism in the past and was also substantially more innovative.

Maybe the real problem is that the U.S. (all the way up to the top) has become anti-intellectual. We have completely dumbed down our culture so that children today want to be basketball players instead of astronauts. Our schools and government explicitly oppose meritocracy. There is just too much money in junk media and junk education that its never going to be fixed and instead we have to bring in more immigrants.
You can't compare those numbers without also comparing the cost of rent/groceries/services/healthcare. The bare number is ~meaningless.
Taskord helps you stay social with your todolist, so you can get things done together.

I don't know what this means, exactly. Part of what is confusing is some of it seems to be about idividuals ("you") and part of it is about other people ("social" and "together"). If "you" is the collective "you" it's probably better to use "team" or something like that for the first one.

Overall it's not something I am likely to use because it does not solve a problem I am currently having. Good luck.
I am based in the North East, also over 40, and my experience both of you are correct. Agism is absolutely real, but opportunities still exist.
Because not everyone think the same. We are not machine where everyone run the same software. Some people like chocolate, some people hate chocolate. Likewise some people think murder is good, some people think its bad.
It’s wavering in the us because Trump wants to get re-elected and immigrants are an easy target because they can’t vote! Otherwise I don’t think he cares. He married an immigrant! He could’ve picked a nice American woman..
If I were looking for information about this school, a war hero alum with a local monument would definitely be of interest.
What you saw is true, but this law isn’t that. The plain language of the law banned most contractors. You can find some stuff in my comment history where I talked about this months before it was enacted.

California’s behaviour is More equivalent to wanting to kill a fly on someone using a hammer. I wouldn’t call it a typical unintended consequences situation.
Sweet 16 seems fitting here, considering that Unix/Linux systems have gained so much momentum over the past decade (even Lenovo started shipping Fedora on laptops this month).
> They paid big money for it, and the universities were happy to grab the money fast

And how. International students in the US pay outrageous tuition fees.

> Some of this people were forced to go after their student visa expired.

That's what happened to my wife.

By comparison, my visa in Japan was dead simple. No lawyers required.

The message that the US sends to international students is something like: "Thank you for ponying up all that money, for spending a year learning the language well enough to go to school, and for spending four years integrating into our language and culture. Now get the fuck out."

> How to blame them for using their degree or creating a company in their own country later?

Um... who is blaming who for what? I don't follow.

> They shouldn't be seen as neither serfs nor slaves; technically they don't owe anything to US.

Why would anybody think that international students owe anything to the country where they studied?
Brexit isn't the thing that might collapse the whole thing so much as economic stresses brought on by adoption of the Euro.
If those countries are small, you're not at their mercy, they are at yours. See Germany - Eastern Europe ;-)

If you rely on a superpower, then that's your own damn fault :-))
Grail Announces Filing of Registration Statement for Proposed IPO
I do tend to agree with this idea. People constantly make such arguments talking about Android being free hence "you're the product". But people actually paid hundreds of dollars to get that Android phone, so it's not unreasonable at all to be irritated that your OS is trying to monetize you.
Thought the same. He probably saw those JOIN vs Queue vs Hybrid designs and thought that he understood the entire system. Probably never even touched a system of that scale.
"I am thinking of ending things." :D

You shouldn't rely on capitalist strangers's thoughts about your situation... (It's terrible what some ppl are doing... wake up...)

Find a normal job to survive... while you try to make something cool in other side with your hacking skill...
There is a lot more to GDPR than cookie warnings. It ensures among other things that random companies won't get access to your data because of a purchase you made or a toll bridge you've crossed.

I go to the US every 2 or 3 years for a few days, and that's enough to end up on a bunch of American marketing lists. GDPR is here to prevent things like that.

It also prevents companies from holding my data hostage, and gives me a way to delete it.

There are other privacy-related laws that prevent companies from publishing a mugshot of me and extorting money from me to remove it.

There's more, but I think you get the point.
>> On the other hand, the Ottomans failed to take Corfu in 1537 in no small part because of the new fortifications, and several attempts spanning almost two centuries (another major one was in 1716) also failed.[6][7]

The bastion fortifications of Corfu were established shortly before the last Ottoman invasion of 1716, by Count von der Schulenburg, appointed to the Job by Venice. They were destroyed later when Corfu joined the newly freed Greek nation with the treaty of 1864. The destruction of the Corfu fortifications was an actual clause of the treaty. Today, only the (Venetian) Old Fort remains and some few parts of the star-shaped walls. Allegedly, the fortifications were so renowned that the British wanted them destroyed in case they ended up being used against them. A bit of a shame, too, since they were really impressive and they would have made a spectacular historical site today. What remains is already interesting enough.

Sources: a bit of wikipedia to remind me of the dates and primarily local lore (I spend a lot of time in Corfu) and also maps depicting the Ottoman siege in 1716, showing e.g. fortified positions of the defenders and the invaders with detailed descriptions of the forces deployed, illustrations of gun emplacements and even the trajectories of enfilading fire etc. Such maps are often exhibited in Corfu, and I must surely look a huge nerd the way I spend hours poring over them every bloody time :)
Google X: Makani
I would agree with you if we were talking about leetcode style data structure/algorithm questions, but system design is almost always relevant. I found 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications' to be a useful book beyond interviewing.

Even if you are not working on a product that requires supporting millions or billions of reads / writes, knowing what is overkill and what isn't, for your project's use case is still useful
I can recommend Karl Jobst as well.
So your first mistake I believe is to think the interviewer is just testing you on a narrow exercise.

Approach it differently: most of the time they are rooting for you! Hey you might be their future colleague. That in mind, focus on tackling the exercise showing how you think about it. That's mainly what they want to see and if you are transparent with them about the fact you don't know well this layer so it might be a little bit handwavy it is fine, manage expectations and when you guessed or rebuilt something existing right it might even play in your advantage.

On the passion side of it, I have to be blunt, it is a self fulfilling prophecy here. If you are not interested by the field and related fields, the lack of curiosity will impede your growth. You won't get the next interesting wave, you'll stay on mainly boring things and this will reinforce your feeling that the field is boring. Computer engineering is a non stop learning endeavor.