skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?
I am a software engineer in my late 30s and I've been trying unsuccessfully to join faang for a year now. I am unable to pass any type of leetcode challenge. I can barely do leet code easy questions and it takes me ages to get it.

I have tried memorising solutions, patterns and grinding problems over and over. I have gone through a few algorithms books (CLRS) but i find the maths and proofs really hard.

Bitwise, Recurrence relations and DP give me nightmares so do maze traversal and flood filling problems, I am astonished people can actually get through these interviews the way FAANG demands nowadays (perfect solution to leetcode HARD on a whiteboard, while explaining your thought process outloud, hints given are counted against you).

This is pure insanity to me, i am slow, my iq is not that high, i have social anxiety and find it really hard to articulate my thought process as I solve problems in a more instinctual way (i.e does this feel right or not?) I need to look up stuff all the time as my memory is not very good as well.

Then there's the system design rounds where they expect you to come up with a quad tree and know every single cache hit, memory and cpu cost by heart.

I am considering joining a bootcamp for interviews but it is 6k and I am not sure if its worth it for me given my limitations.

I really need the money and security plus having faang in my resume opens doors, i have seen it in my current organisation where they hired ex faang tech leads and they are considered the best of the best by everyone. These are the only reasons I am willing to put up with this.

Is it a good idea for me to continue to put effort into this? I only have my full time job but have no friends or family so i have a lot of spare time to put into this.

Does anyone have any similar stories of old mediocre developers getting to faang? Is there a recommended pathway for people in this situation?

Thanks in advance.
Probably would have made a good top-level comment. My comment is about the poor taste of the word “performant”
I specifically didn't say fight and this wasn't a reference to someone's mental state having any affect on the user experience.

This was simply about the user experience itself. A dramatic way of saying that people grasp for hope, not that "beating cancer" requires glimmers of hope, only that the "user experience of cancer" involves the patient/host/victim grasping for them. I'm surprised you read it any other way, but I can see how, yeah this definitely wasn't one of those unquantifiable "beat cancer because they're a strong fighter [and everyone else that didn't was a useless weak wimp that gave up]" voodoo posts. His blog post was one of those glimmers of hope. It is predictable that people do that because they have nothing else. No more, no less.

The point is that deep down he still knew the odds and that his mortality was still in question.

Its "the last good day", a trope in cancer, where things seem normalizing and improving, but you don't know its the last good day.
Hi nice job, If you could integrate OAuth2 into it, it would be quite comfortable. I hate having to register manually.
Back then, I remember listening to people's analog cordless and cell phones with a scanner.
Not if power grabbing politicians and beaurocrats have anything to say about it.
There's a bumper-height bar on the trailer to prevent that.
Torch Metrics Library
A new library I'm working on. Please feel free to use it/ contribute :]
>his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s)

Are there links you can recommend?
Maybe the question is who it's safer for?
It does a lot more, now, too! We're even tracking all the community suggestions and ideas made in Discord in Airtable now.
Could someone link some good parts?
I have a whole rant about procurement -- don't get me started. The basic idea is that procurement should exist to enable mission performers to do their jobs with less friction, while ensuring legal compliance and minimizing cost to the company. But in fact procurement organizations often seem to think they exist solely to impede mission performers. This is not really their fault; it's just how their incentives are structured.
Take care Uberlord.

Thanks.
Sometimes people just pick the languages they're most proficent in so they can move fast

maybe that's the case here
In 50 years of programming I've never, ever seen a project that met estimates.

I did see a 5 month, 5 person, fixed cost contract take 18 months, 10 persons, and sank the company.

Never, ever, try to estimate software projects.
You may say that it has better visibility, but I’m not so sure. Large SUVs and trucks have terrible close-in visibility, and huge front blind spots. If what you’re looking for isn’t a car, but perhaps a child or a pedestrian, you stand a much better chance of seeing them in a civic or similar, and a much lower chance of killing them.
To give some context to the parent comment:

$ ls -lh $(which grep) $(which rg)

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 199K Nov 10 06:37 /usr/bin/grep

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.2M Jan 19 09:31 /usr/bin/rg

My very unscientific measurement of the startup time of grep vs ripgrep is 10ms when the cache is cold (ie, never run before) and 3ms when the cache is hot (ie, was run seconds prior). For grep even in the cold case libc will already be in memory, of course. The point I'm trying to make is even the worst case, 10ms, is irrelevant to a human using the thing.

However, speaking as a Debian Developer, it makes a huge difference to maintaining the two systems that use the two programs. If a security bug is found in libc, all Debian has to do is make the fixed version of libc as a security update. If a bug is found in the rust stdlib create Debian has to track down every ripgrep like program that statically includes it, recompile it. There are current 21,000 packages that link to libc6 right in Debian right now. If it was statically linked, Debian would have to rebuilt and distribute _all_ of them. (As a side note, Debian has a lot hardware resources donated to it but if libc wasn't dynamlic I wonder if it could get security updates to a series of bugs in libc6 out in a timely fashion.)

I don't know rust well, but I thought it could dynamically link. The Debian rust packagers don't, for some reason. (As opposed 21,000 dependencies, libstd-rust has 1.) I guess there must be some kink in the rust tool chain that makes it easier not to. I imagine that would have to change if rust replaces C.
Lots of smart contracts haven't been hacked yet. We need smart contract insurance.
Oh the creation of modules has gotten much better with languages like SystemVerilog and SystemC :) . What I did was a very rudimentary effort in perl (later ported it to python). Kind of like people look like "excel gods" at some company when they take some mundane manual tasks and do some excel scripting and take a 3 day job down to 15 minutes. I just happened to be the only EE with the soul of a coder while I was there. I was under very heavy NDA at the time, I'm sure others were doing the same at their companies. tldr; it wasn't anything special and is much more common these days. Basically it eliminated a ton of copy-pasta and manual editing.
"Tesla’s mortality rate (41 deaths per million vehicle years) is so much higher than the average luxury car (13 deaths per million vehicle years) that when comparing the two, the difference is hugely statistically significant."

From the IIHS:

"The overall driver death rate for all 2017 and equivalent models during 2015-18 was 36 deaths per million registered vehicle years." (https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...)

Tesla's rate is the same as a Mazda 6 or Toyota Camry hybrid.
god shut up. it’s $64,000. he’ll take the time to claim it. can you please not post?
Oceanic pole of inaccessibility
>The biggest threat to Coinbase are decentralized exchanges like Uniswap & Sushiswap.

This is like saying the biggest threat to Microsoft is Linux.
Yep, and they appear to be doing it for less money than their competitors too.
Does this need to be in literally every thread about Tesla?

Is there any evidence at all that this is the impairment of safety opponents claim? Model 3s have been sold in large numbers since 2018. Are drivers crashing into other cars at higher rates? Or are we just going to keep beating this dead horse?
You can still be successful despite your attitude, but I can’t imagine it helps.
They wrote a commitment blog last year, then shortly after they re-did the entire AMP leadership board and with things gone quiet ever since - the GA4 not supporting analytics surely doesn't help.

I filed a bug and nothing much has happened...

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/24621

It appears that the current excuse is GA4 isn't ready for primetime? makes no sense...
I think self driving industry just doesn’t have enough real world data to prove or disprove that AI is better at driving cars than humans. The public doesn’t need to trust AI engineers any more so than it needs to trust airplane engineers. At the end of the day, data is what matters.
for this case where the thing is a cache and the description a headline, "more performant" seems perfectly cromulent. it says here's a cache that does all the stuff a cache is expected to do well but better
Read the Bitcoin Standard book, or Nick Szabo's Shelling Out blog entry to see how new money is usually adopted. Bitcoin has about 200%/year growth rate, right now at about 100M users (1% adoption, maybe somewhat less). In 10 years it has a good chance to be adopted by billions of people (there's no guarantee though of course).
As a Canadian, there's basically no fast and _safe_ way to turn _serious_ amounts CAD into BTC without using a large exchange.

Given the choice, I would immediately choose the option where I can pay in CAD and not BTC.
You're unlikely to get there in a leap. Most people make goals in increments and you self identify as unlikely to get the inferential leap outcome.

That said, I didn't make the bar either and I sought lower entry bar goals to achieve a state of reasonable contentment.

"Aim high" is great, but it has to be tempered with realism. Aim plausibly high. Aim plausible and then seek a goal just beyond.

I do not think you should sink $6k into a boot camp. I think you should seek coding clubs in a more social space and build a network. Find people who are interested in discussing some aspect of the problem surface, and avoid the unpleasant supercilious ones. Keep your job, try to improve in it, and find an increment role to move up in.

Also, IQ is mostly bunkum. Just ignore it. Being neurodiverse is not bunkum. Understanding your own personality is good.
I’m small’ish agency and we have clients with lots of stakeholders often that just need to be added to artifact systems like this for formal reasons but they aren't active enough to justify the costs.

I totally get that they need to make money to keep making a good product and stay alive. It’s a difficult problem.

One idea - If small clients are a pain (because of support) then support should be a specific thing that can dialed in a bit. AWS is fantastic here. Noisy people are gonna pay for it... but if I’m small, yet not noisy, then I don’t get hurt and can continue to drink the koolaid.
> No one has lost anything when a game is copied.

Suppose an indie developer working alone hires an intern. They release a game developed together for a console. Suddenly the console becomes possible to emulate, and most of the people who would have bought the game play a cracked and pirated version on an emulator instead. Because of the unexpected lack of sales, the developer has to fire the intern. The intern no longer has enough money to feed their family, and their children go hungry that month. The intern has lost something.

My comment isn't intended to be positive or negative on the whole towards piracy (I do sometimes pirate things). What's it's critical of is the blithe way in which people dismiss concerns with statements like "no one has lost anything". Sure, maybe the developer doesn't have an abstract right against copying the game, and it is true that they have not lost copies of the game when it is copied. But people do lose things.

If you oppose intellectual property rights, it's important to work productively towards creating a world without it in which developers can work on a piece of software as their job and still have a livelihood, not joke about them not standing to lose anything through piracy. I'm not saying you don't do this, I'm well aware of your contributions to open source, for example.
As someone who uses yuzu to play games at 4k, I have bought 2 switches and purchased the grand majority of the games that I have played on emulator. While I think it's true that devs lose some customers this way, most people who are playing BOTW on their pc (requiring a pretty good computer) pay more money into the nintendo ecosystem than many people imagine.

If anything the way nintendo treats it's competitive communities makes me feel bad for giving them too much money. But on the other hand they are one of the only devs who consistently ships quality finished games, so that should be rewarded.
Distribution by compound keys and rebalancing when configuration changes (e.g. a new node is added) are features I would consider essential in the core product. Long-standing commercial competitors are doing this and it's really only the last small gap I can see to Citus superseding them.
Interestingly, the only hosted option was originally on AWS. The company was purchased by MS and it was deprecated.
Not sure. High truck could roll over completely where civic might smash. Just sayin’
Sometimes you can say a lot more with fewer words. It's the title he used to make the announcement.
I'm reminded of Jonathan Blow's rant about open source software at the beginning of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLVjSeusPYg
I take a lot of pictures of mountain scenery. I blew up one of these that had an interesting composition consisting of rocks/fields/mountain peaks. On inspection the resulting image had substantially changed the composition by increasing the size of a field relative to all other objects.

It’s much easier for the model to blow up uninteresting pieces of the photograph than interesting pieces.
I think it's less about libraries and more about the general approach to programming.

In the HPC world, software is usually doing one thing at a time. Most of the time it's either single-threaded, or there are multiple threads doing the same thing for independent chunks of data. There may be shared immutable data and private mutable data but very little shared mutable data. You avoid situations where the behavior of a thread depends on what the other threads are doing. Ideally, there is a single critical section doing simple things in a single place, which should make thread-safety immediately obvious.

You try to avoid being clever. You avoid complex control flows. You avoid the weird middle ground where things are not obviously thread-safe and not obviously unsafe. If you are unsure about an external library, you spend more time familiarizing yourself with it or you only use it in single-threaded contexts. Or you throw it away and reinvent the wheel.
And at the end, their own lives can be sold back to them. It's such a cynical and disgusting sleight of hand. I think it's unethical.
He can't explain that any more than the OP can explain why having the speedometer slightly to the right is more distracting than hidden behind the steering wheel.
A Simple Personal Data Backup Setup
I am so excited for this software. I have used Airtable extensively, and it's a pile of garbage. Here are just a FEW of the "features" Airtable charges $24/user/mo for:

- Reliable 1-5 hours a month of downtime. There are months where it's literally 1 nine of uptime. Their status page was actually down for a while (I think they forgot to renew it?)

- Simple and obvious bugs in the official API clients have not been fixed for years (for example, Promises in the official JS library throw the string `[object Object]` for all exceptions.)

- The API has no way to query the structure of a table, you have to infer it from the first few records. (The auto-generated API documentation is actually wrong if you don't have a fully-filled-in row somewhere in the first few rows.)

- You can't modify a table configuration by API... except you can _sometimes_ by adding a parameter which is documented to try to convert dates, but actually modifies field definitions for a number of fields. Documentation for which fields is entirely in scattered forum posts from users.

- Booleans in the API are `true` or `undefined`. Seriously.

This is all /barely/ worth it because Google Docs doesn't work when you need a large structured database with many collaborators. But man is it bad software.
Yep, it's a centralized crypto bank. They welcome regulation, so their product can show its strengths.
Having followed this DeepSpeed stuff for a little while, the ZeRO paper is probably as close as you can get to an ELI5 because there's no singular brilliant idea behind this. Most of the ideas have been explored already (see e.g. the PyTorch DDP paper), but ZeRO takes them to their logical conclusion by throwing a TON of engineering work into the equation. For example, they implement custom fused kernels on CPU/GPU and a hand-vectorized Adam implementation.

I found that this earlier blog post [2] has a much better deep dive (with decent animations and more) into the underlying architecture. The ZeRO-Offload paper [3] also has far more detail about that part of the pipeline.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15704
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/deepspeed-extr...
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06840
> "messaging" is an abstract concept. It doesn't have rights

We agree. No idea how I screwed up that sentence. The intent was "that messaging is the right core of OOP because", but it was awkward, and I spliced something together.

> It's the kind of thing that two-bit politicians like to dig up on each other, to nobody's edification.

This is a discussion of what a word means, not an attack on someone's character.
>We are speaking about languages, not which implementations are available.

We are speaking about the adoption of languages, though ("Sadly it never got a big name sponsor to push it."), not languages in abstracto, and for that available implementations matter.

>Are there are free tools for becoming a mechanic? No, they got to be paid, either new or used in some form

Which is neither here, nor there. Things are different for programmers, where there are free and/or libre tools, and people have come to expect them and even prefer them.
Goodhart's law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
I think it's a valid criticism.

Ownership, mutability, and thread-safety are not easy to abstract over and hide as implementation details in Rust.

It's a side effect of the fact that Rust actually cares about these and checks them strictly, but for users coming from eg Java that's a bit of a shock.
1.25x is perfectly okay IMO. I think it helps to push yourself a little to understand that age changes things but it doesn't make them inferior and it's good to be reminded of such things and learn to tolerate it if it perturbs you. We all get older.
What is the relationship of this change with mm/workingset.c? [1]

That implements a custom algorithm, Double Clock, which is inspired by LIRS. This patch touches related code, but not that file where the core algorithm is described. I tried to reimplement it in a simulator for analysis and found its hit rate varied significantly on workloads due to the percent given to LRU/LFU regions being based on machine's total memory capacity [2]. That caused it to do better in MRU/LFU workloads on high memory systems and better at LRU workloads on low-memory systems [3]. Talking to the author and there were other details not documented that might make those regions adaptive. In the end, I gave up trying to understand the page cache and if there was a benefit of switching to an alternative eviction policy. It is well written but very confusing code that seems scattered if not a kernel developer.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/mm/workingset....

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/1590a2e1c681b0991bd42...

[3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16wEq5QBzqOtownEtZvZe...
In case you didn't know this: autism diagnosis is heavily biased towards how autism typically expresses in males. Autism expresses differently in females, causing to a very high number of women on the spectrum being misdiagnosed as having disorders such as anorexia, OCD or anxiety.
You know I feel that way about the Linux kernel. Everything is done by the Linux kernel developers and it’s shipped as one monolithic thing. Wouldn’t it be better to get drivers for networks cards from other places? Or have to pick from a list of memory management packages that get downloaded from GitHub on every reboot? And why do they include things like spin lock implementations? Should that be an NPM package? /s
Here's a nice example video

https://vimeo.com/240786024
Responsive text based on image size
And would just add complexity for people using a screen reader.
You’d probably train that ML model on complete strands of DNA (including, say, frog DNA).
To be fair, bringing the Lucid Air into this is like bringing the Tesla Roadster or Tri-Motor Cybertruck into it. They don't exist yet except as prototypes.
If you’re going to handle errors like Go:

> Go and Rust provide two alternate approaches to error handling. Both treat errors as values, but Go uses multiple return values to return error states, while Rust uses a Result monad.

Then they should consider fixing Go’s greatest oversight: the ability to make exceptions hard and crash your program. I don’t care if the error variable gets set, but I really care if it gets set again before I’ve reset it. That means an error has passed on unnoticed. If “—-hard-errors” could be a compiler flag, that would be perfect.
"Word's automated numbering system can burn in eternal damnation"

Haha.... I was thinking exactly this while reading the article.

When adding or removing a template clauses in legal documents, it can trigger a reflow of the entire bulleting and indentation structure.
Technically they don't mean the same thing, but in practical reality, they almost always display the same way, which is what matters to most people.
Are you telling me it's a coincidence or are you doing a bit?

If you're making fun of the idea, I still don't get it, because it's not like subway was trying to make them not be 12 inches.
In other words, there are a lot of people you don't get to know as individuals really.

You don't have to understand how something helps other people to understand they find it helpful. Any tool can be misused of course.

You seem more interested in belittling other points of view than understanding. I'm done.
If your not going to read the links nothing more I can do.

How is MMSATS-1 going to magically give you better than "Google maps images typically only update every 2 to 3 years" ?

What orbit do you think MMSATS-1 would be in?

You have yet to show it has a HPT. Can you link with the specs?

> to track agriculture patters

I've given you a link showing it can't.

You seem like you just don't want Burma to have satellites. That's fine, but just say it. It's just a shitty cube sat to give it's youth something to be proud of and to train it's current scientists. The end plan is to have many of them in the consortium to help the region. Obviously this one will fall out of orbit before then, it's just a step.

It's up to you but I suggest you go on a holiday to Thailand for a few weeks, it's easy for tourists, cheap and it's a culture change. Next holiday spend a few weeks in Myanmar. I don't think you have to know a culture personally to be a Hawk on them, but why not. If nothing else it makes you a better Hawk.