skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah it sucks to have to study stuff that's mostly irrelevant to your job in order to get that job - it truly does, I despise the system! - but it is worthwhile to shift your perspective to considering the ROI of doing that study. The dirty secret is that CS-y interview questions are easy compared to the job. It's just much much harder to debug some novel bug that crops up in the cracks between the myriad components that uniquely make up the system you work on, or to figure out what your users want and how to build that, or to respond to having the good problem of scaling more quickly than expected, or tons of other things successful professionals in the field regularly do as part of their day to day work. It's deeply lame that experience with these much more difficult things is not expressed through the typical CS-y interview process, but if you can do those things, you can definitely learn to do the CS-y stuff. Reversing a binary tree is easy; look it up. Yes, you have to learn how to traverse a tree, and no, that's not likely to be very useful knowledge in your work, but it's not very hard to learn. You can spend 100 hours studying and nail pretty much all the CS-y questions, and that could literally have a return of a million dollars over five years; I don't know of many opportunities that offer such a good possibility of returning 100k per hour. It sucks, I hated studying elementary stuff after I was already a successful professional, and I was a nervous wreck during the interviews, but it is very hard to argue with it from a purely ROI standpoint.
The theory is that it is the same reaction that a tiny percentage of people have to heparin (AZ vaccine in this study but mechanism presumably the same) There is a treatment but imperative that doctor knows that this is the cause for appropriate response.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104840
Leetcode interviews are exactly how I, as someone from a non-traditional background, got a job at a tech company.

I didn’t need to know 4+ years of CS curriculum, which I never would have learned on my own. I just needed to spend some time learning algorithms and data structures, and practice using free resources on the Internet.

A pretty good deal for non-people who didn’t study CS in college.

In fact, someone who studied CS in college might be slightly miffed that they offered a job to an outsider like me just because I practiced data structures problems in my free time.
If I may ask, what resource(s) did you study from / use to help prepare you?
And how do you like FAANG? I'm in a similar situation, I'm 30, worked for different kinds of companies and now I'm thinking I'd like to try applying to FAANG companies (mainly because I hope it would be more interesting, challenging for at least a couple of years, and maybe even get to know some people that operate at a different level).
The Qt Company has acquired froglogic GmbH
I honestly didn’t really think it was all that interesting a read. Author burned out developing new products after an angel round “ruined” their company. Author wouldn't work at FAANG for “idealogical” reasons. Author doesn't know basic data structures and algorithms and applied to companies that index on that type of skillset. Author’s tool belt is Windows and they’re looking to join macOS shops.

It’s a string of poor decisions/planning followed by an unproductive rant. I don’t particularly like leet code style interview questions either, Author could take a few months and brush up if they’re a proficient engineer or if they’re really opposed then pre-filter companies based on their interview style. Author could find a corporation outside of FAANG that isn't idealogically abhorrent. Author could look for windows shops. Author could consult (sounds like they’ve been successful with this approach).

I suspect the author just isn’t that great of an entrepreneur and tried to pivot into a high paying engineering role they just aren't really qualified for either.

I agree about the SF observation at the end. If SF culture isn't working for you then explore elsewhere. I wish more people realized this before assuming they need to be in the bay area to be successful. It’s a pretty limiting and potentially damaging assumption and I’ve seen people get super distraught about the idea of being anywhere else because they drank all the VC urban tech hub cool-aid and are just starting to come down.
The BST doesn't correlate to doing well at the job. Being willing to teach yourself the BST because you want the job does correlate to doing well at it.
in python you would do a loop for a game, unless you're using an event driven framework that does the loop for you.
If you can't handle the level of theater that is reviewing basic CS concepts that we all could afford to be more aware of even if we don't need to remember them day to day, you're really not going to survive the level of theater that dealing with a large organization requires.
I learned CS fundamentals after graduating with a non-CS degree. It was hard, but I enrolled in a few classes through Harvard Extension School which provides access to Harvard classes to anyone and self-study.

CS fundamentals have a big impact on the kinds of programs that individuals can write. Asking questions to show that a candidate can write a DFS, leverage multiple data-structures, or do X helps ensure that the individual is capable in this regard. Even for experienced candidates with lengthy portfolios you may find that someone drifted into an operational, management, or product role and has forgotten how to effectively program.

However, the format of the whiteboard interview is awful and if one doesn't practice for it it won't turn out well. I'd love for there to be an alternative, but the other options all have their own cons.

1. Take home tests/projects

- Requires the candidate to invest time which they may not have.

- At scale this process is easily gamed.

2. Github projects/portfolio review

- Many candidates don't have time to work on open source

- The median github project has a low code standard, and is usually made for the purpose of learning something new.

3. Pair coding

- Many candidates hate pair coding, personally if a company mentions that they do this in day to day work I will not work for them.

- Difficult to calibrate.

The only alternative I've seen is a "functional interview". Where the candidate is given sample code reviews for standard applications or a broken program to debug.
How does seekstorm perform on large documents? Say documents 1MB-10MB in size, are you able to search entire docs or just paragraphs within the doc?
Isn't a better approach here to start taking some contract jobs to move away from the self-employment status? That way they can start getting closer to normal employment, build a more relevant network, get some money flowing in, possibly build some more relevant skills, etc.
> No, because there are other vaccines that don't give you blood clots at all.

Not enough to go around. Pfizer's goal is 2B doses (1B people) this year. Moderna's is even smaller. 8B people in the world.
I think you need to read what I wrote more carefully. I try to be precise with my language.

Simple exercise: The bill of materials for Arduino boards is publicly available. Pick a board. Now go source every single component on that board.

Create two spreadsheets. The first would have you source what you can from China. The second would source from any EU country and the US if you'd like and exclude any Chinese made component from the list.

My prediction: You can make 100% of an Arduino in China using Chinese components. You cannot make an Arduino in Europe or the US without Chinese components.

Let's add another layer to this.

Let's say you create a third spreadsheet where you source as many components (and services) as possible from the US and Europe and whatever you can't you get from China.

Now calculate the cost for each case: China only. US/EU only. US/EU + necessary Chinese components and services.

Prediction: The US/EU cost --if it is even possible to do it-- will easily double or triple the cost of that product. The US/EU + China cost won't be competitive at all because the vast majority of the items will have to come from China and you will incur additional costs for producing in the US/EU rather than just facing reality and having the product made entirely in China.

Please note that I am using an Arduino as a super-simple example for the sake of an illustration. It would be wrong to engage in dissecting this simple illustration tool in an attempt to invalidate my claim. This claim comes from decades in manufacturing, where I have faced this question of where I can buy components, assemblies and services. Twenty or thirty years ago sourcing from the US or Europe wasn't horribly difficult. Today, it is frustrating to see just how difficult this is. The problem is real.

Nobody is suggesting 100% repatriation of the supply chain. That is impossible. There is a number between 0% and 100% that would do both the US and Europe much good. I don't know what that number is.

Once you start looking at more "real world" products, the picture gets dark very quickly. Last year we designed a robotic system. Virtually every component that went into making this robot came from China. I think I can say that the aluminum, sheet metal and bearings did not. While I did not conduct a component-by-component survey, I think I can easily say that 95% of the electronic components, connectors, wires, cameras, displays, sensors, pneumatic valves, motors and even the wheels came from China. In other words, if you had to make this robot without China all you'd end-up with is an empty metal shell. That should make everyone take pause.
I'm not necessarily agreeing with FAANG hiring practices here, but your comment is a classic example of the "racism of low expectations". Arguing that candidates who are "diverse" can't pass the same tests as a "CS bro" is no different from arguing that voter registration laws are racist because black people can't afford the internet, phones or cars to get registered. You're revealing quite a lot about what you think about "diverse" people without intending to.
> But do the billionaires live there, or are they in multi-million dollar penthouses in Manhattan?

North Jersey (especially Bergen County), Long Island and Westchester mostly. I'm sure there is some overlap with penthouse owners too.
It says that I spend my time learning things that are actually useful, rather than trivia.

The best screening I ever went through was for a job where I'd be working on a Spring Boot app with a React frontend. For that screening, I was asked to add a simple feature to an example app.

It was clearly toy code, so I knew they weren't trying to get free work out of me. It was also representative of the kinds of tasks I would be doing, which let me know that I would enjoy the job, and let them know I would be good at it. I was hired on the spot.

I've written algorithms to reverse b-trees, and I could figure it out again if I had to. But I don't have to, because the standard library is a thing, and that task tells a potential employer nothing about my skill set.
You could consider the company is not hiring Mary-the-cleaner for $16.40 per hour, but is now asking to hire Mary-the-cleaner and her phone for $16.40 per hour.

That would put the responsibility on Mary to maintain the phone in working order, and the employer could refuse to pay unless both things they are paying for are present and correct.

It's a scummy practice, sure, but hiring two things as a package isn't illegal in itself.
> With two well-tolerated and safe mRNA vaccines in the market, we can afford — to a degree! — to put Ad-based vaccines through additional scrutiny

This assumes that we have enough safe vaccines, which we wildly don't.
Plus economically it is certifiably insane - destroying competitors and reducing the supply for a relatively fixed demand is subsidizing the same problem they are fighting against.

If stability was the number one priority the proper thing would be to have the government provide the supply for too cheap to compete with. Fill the power vacuum to prevent the reincarnation of organized crime. It turns out economic fungibility also includes criminals.
You are right, and that is why niche, tightly coupled communities will always remain superior in UX and content over the "mainstream/lowest-common-denominator" ones.

Unfortunately, these smaller communities have more churn to them as the bedrock contributors fall out for various reasons, and then its on to next. But at least we now know the cycle of life, and more importantly, what to stay away from.
I didn't say it was ok to drive drunk. Were your questions rhetorical? I asked a question, and don't understand your answer. I didn't say anything about an anti-masker berating someone not wearing a mask. I don't think it's right to berate other people, or tell other people what to do.

You said earlier that "Anti-maskers are awful" ... "they are killing people". So I wondered if I should consider anyone who hasn't been wearing a mask during every flu season an awful killer, also. The flu kills millions of people every decade. People spread it, sometimes not knowing that they are contagious.

My question again: Do you consider people who don't wear a mask during flu seasons to be killers?

I ask because it's not often I hear someone call people "killers" over not wearing a mask, and thought to explore the topic more, if you're up for it. If not, that's ok.

Some of my thoughts below:

It seems that the number of victims has something to do with this. Perhaps we are used to the flu killing a half million people per year, but covid killing a few million is different? The flu sometimes kills that many people, like in 1968. Perhaps more people wore masks then? I wonder if the numbers matter more, or the fact that we are not used to the numbers?

Or maybe it depends on how one looks at the numbers. Every death is an individual tragedy. It would save lives if we all wore masks all of the time. I guess we don't because it is dehumanizing not to be able to see each other smile? I guess as a society we do have some thresholds to judge these risks. Perhaps we don't all judge these risks the same.

Like I said, I was curious about your thoughts, if you care to share.
I routinely make a fuss about truck drivers. Dispatch will schedule them for back to back driving shifts and then call the cops on them if they decide they cannot drive safely and need to sleep. The cops are there to do a welfare check (harass them) to get them going again.
> What long term effects would you anticipate from this?

Maybe you are responding to the wrong person? I never made any claims regarding what long term effects to anticipate. I asked how the person I responded to know there are no serious side effects on time scales longer than we have tested things on.

> There is a good chance for long term effects from covid. Completely the opposite for the vaccine.

Yes. I know.
Let's say a company would pay you $250k base with an additional $100k in stock and bonuses. This comp puts you in the top 5% of earners in the world. The catch is that you need to learn to do a stupid dance where you wear huge feathers and do this dance in front of a panel of reviewers. Not only that they will insist the dance correlates with productivity and you have to nod and agree with them. The question is, do you spend the time to learn the dance?

That's pretty much it, it's just a stupid dance. You can get angry and say "No no no, this dance is stupid!" Or you can learn the dance, do the dance, then be richer than 95% of people in the world.
This is a very naive viewpoint. People's wants, needs and desires will expand to fill up all of space-time if you let them. A lot of people (in general) have a huge sense of entitlement these days when its often not justified.
yes, it's the same reason your Netflix catalog will change when you're travelling.
Goldman Sachs is large enough and ubiquitous enough that it should be assumed that they are, to some extent, on both sides of every trade they recommend (or discourage).

Just because Goldman is telling their pension fund clients to avoid crypto doesn't mean that they don't have teams trading billions of it daily.
Linus is an ethnic Swede, can't have that
If you have trouble with a "probability word problem" how much success are you going to have in any data science role?
Fwiw, it's not tracking location

> The app, called Blip, generates a geofence — a virtual boundary, created by the employer using GPS — that detects when an employee enters or leaves.
> I think the future of sysadmin will be more explicitly procedural.

I think that's true for the lower levels of abstraction because sysadmin is a finite list of steps. Being able to program your infrastructure in a type-safe, fail-safe way is very important. In the grandparent comment, i was arguing for building higher-level abstractions (semantic sysadmin) on top of that to make it easier to understand how your infrastructure is configured, and make it reproducible/forkable.

Think of it like there's two kinds of state stored on your system: useful state (eg user data) and infrastructure byproducts (eg TLS certificates). The former must be included in backups, the latter can be regenerated on the go from server config. The kind of declarativeness i'm interested in is that which enables any member/customer to fork the entire infrastructure by editing a single config file if they're not happy with provided services, and from there they can import their own useful state (eg a website/mailbox backup). Hypothetically, the scenario would be like "is Google Reader closing down? Let's just fork their infra, edit the config file, and import our our feeds and all we have to do is use a different URL to access the very same services".
Same fam. Skipping AZ/JJ till I can get mRNA. 3 years since my last ride on the DVT rollercoaster. 0/10 - would not recommend.
Unemployable does not mean "can't get the job I want", it means "can't get a job". It's when your useless ten year old degree in education stops you from getting a job as a waitress so once again you're having sleep for dinner.
Are you referring to the Foreign Legion?
Now you have the logistical challenges of shipping 2 vaccines to some small town. One for the men, another for the women. Additionally, that town needs the not insubstantial refrigeration capabilities anyway.

So what’s the point if you’re a public health admin? Just get the moderna or Pfizer and save yourself and your staff a lot of headache.

The logistical benefits of J&J mean that it’s only logistically beneficial if it can be used for everyone.
Historically your stock incentives have done a lot worse outside of those areas though.
The folks behind Brave Browser slam Google for its new tracking policy
Biotechnology like Elysium Basis and Matter. Healthy aging longer makes a big difference for things like investments and working longer while healthy.
I too, would like to be working on a real project. But most if not all companies that I'd be thrilled to work for are gatekeeped by these leetcode style interviews.

I don't like that that's how it is, but that's what the game is, and most people are in no position to change the rules of the game.

I also acknowledge that despite all its flaws, the SWE interview landscape is still better than say, that for lawyers, where if you didn't graduate from a top law school some doors are immediately and permanently shut for you.

You can still get into a top tech company without an outstanding pedigree. The closest analogue to the lawyer situation is that if you have a top tech company on your resume, I'd say many doors are opened (or opened much more easily) to you than someone without such name brand companies on their resume.
Top Inkit Integrations for Your Business
The usage of 'open' in the name is misguided.
Yep. Software and products at these companies are often a horrific mess. Leaving one and taking a big pay cut just so I can go work with a small team of people who give a shit about software and products again.
You previously asked about Google and Facebook employees.

If you connect your Android phone to your corporate Google account, you will be required to install the corp monitoring software suite, which (among other things) includes both location tracking and nuke-from-orbit features. The company does encourage you to configure your phone properly to keep your private info in a separate non-corp account to minimize undesired data leakage, since the corp side of things is assumed to be observable for security and corporate policy reasons (I can't remember right now if the nuke-from-orbit would wipe the private side of the phone's install also).

You can choose not to do this, though it will probably limit your career prospects in the long run (especially if you're SRE and need a convenient notification solution for when you're on-call). Although, honestly, if one doesn't trust Google's handling of private information, one should probably re-think one's employment relationship with them.

Anecdotally from my own observation, plenty of employees comply because they trust Google's handling of everyone's private info, including their own (and that's even given the understanding that Google's access to one's "private" info when one is working as an employee on corporate tasks can be more open... They won't snoop your personal Gmail account, but they absolutely reserve the right to investigate your corporate one, for example).
I don't know where you live, but I know people who've gotten court summons due to non-payment of subscription services. In this case a travel ticket subscription and not Adobe's cloud stuff, but the escalation method is there and used in any case.
"Can't reverse a binary tree" is different from "Can't do it flawlessly enough in an interview setting". It also isn't necessary to provide business value. The things I spend 98% of my time on at work are not raw data structures, but leveraging those data structures.

The fact many companies interview for something that is mostly unpracticed by candidates in the field (only those practicing it at home), and won't actually be done on the job if hired, is a very strange place our industry finds itself in.
I started software development in startups/innovation teams and this is the reason I am telling younger friends who have yet to graduate to go for the big companies.

Startups are fun. I work at one now. 3/4 software engineering roles I have had have been startups. But all the work I am doing is also very shallow because everything is a fail fast timeboxed sort of thing where you work across a large spectrum of stuff and I will eventually need to change that.
America's cultural dominance means on many issues, you can criticise America from either side.

Pornography? America. Religious conservatism? Also America. Unrealistic body image, photoshop and actors on steroids? America. Highest obesity rates? Also America. Nazi flags as a constitutional right? America. Safe spaces and twitter mobs? Also America. Most powerful copyright lobby? America. Piracy software and the copyleft movement? Also America.
I see a lot of arguments that are basically "people are too stupid to understand risk". That, in turn, comes from the fact that the FDA/CDC/NIH has not covered itself in Glory the last many years. Covid just uncovered the rot, while Trump danced around it, and poured gasoline on the fire.

The best thing to get people to understand risk is to actually follow the process in the EUA. Pause, evaluate the outcomes, change the labels and dosing. Which this does.

At the same time, the FDA/CDC need to start taking other countries data into account. At this point, there is no excuse not to be using a UK style "first dose first" strategy, especially if mRNA is all we have for a while.
I had the same experience with TMT and I think everybody should read their book.

On top of TMT, the Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) [0] is another theory with TMT could explain 99% of human behavior.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_1
Behold, the vaccine experts of Hacker News!