skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Change the strategy. These days, HR people are hunting for deveopers of any kind. Make yourself a nice LinkedIn profile, put all the correct words there, DO NOT emphasise that you are currently unemployed...

... and when the inquiries will inevitably come, just politely reject doing interviews with code questions, etc., and turn on the offence! Ask them yourself about the task and if it might interest you enough, so you will be motivated to work on it. Your ideal interview should be more about THEM, not about YOU. It might take a while to master this skill, but used right you can totally dominate the interview process and hire yourself into almost any company which is desperate for developers.
AltStore lets you sign apps with a non-developer iCloud account.
Your brain responds to why you’re drinking, not just what you’re drinking
They come to the US because it continues to be the largest free market in the world with a stable jurisdiction. That's the reason for the success of the American economy: Being the largest free-market economy with a stable jurisdiction for the past ca. 200 years. That's why entrepreneurs come to the US. Nothing to do with taxes.
Well on an organizational level badly written code is imo tech debt. It's worse quality in exchange for paying less money (paying less capable / inexperienced devs).
Non-intuitive, but... expensive.
Unpopular opinion, maybe, but:

I don't really get why "reversing a binary tree" seem to be used as an example of what's wrong with hiring. I will say, though, that if someone said "how do you reverse a binary tree?" I would have asked the follow up question: "what do you mean by that?". If asking that would be used against me, sure, that's bad hiring.

But if the answer is: "swap all the left and right nodes in a binary tree", then... isn't that pretty basic programming?
A lot of US coastal people grew up in the non-coastal US. The cost savings are there (to some extent) but we left there for a reason.

Leaving the country isn't "drastic": 96% of humans live outside of America.
with a union, at best, you'll submit a ticket to your rep. Like most tickets, it will likely never see the light of day.

btw, would you be prepared to strike if negotiations don't go well? That's the only tool a union has to keep the other side at the bargaining table. heh I doubt you can charge PTO to a strike so i wouldn't expect a paycheck.
As the dude who built POIPAAS.com, it amuses me greatly to see it here.
I sympathize quite a bit as a fellow engineer from a non-trad background -- I solved this problem for myself by just biting the bullet and obsessing over getting good at the rote questions we're forced to answer. A nice side effect is that it has made me a better software engineer in some ways. I'm still working on it however, can't seem to shake the intra-interview jitters. I'd be interested in reading more about your swap to digital nomadism.
A failed self funded video game project is a microcosm of the pain felt by bootstrapped founders that don't make it against their competition (VC funded or otherwise).

Reminds me of this thread - https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1376985854229504007
> Or certain questions about complicated SQL queries (I use an ORM, rarely do I need to write a query by hand).

This doesn't really seem unfair as ORMs stop working at a certain level. He seemed to have been targeting companies doing more complex things than he was previously doing.
Crawling speed is between 100...1000 pages per second.
We crawled about 4 million linked unique web pages

The pricing for an Index like DeepHN would be $99/month: While we are indexing 30 million Hacker news posts, for DeepHN we are combining a single HN story with all its comments and its linked webpage into a single SeekSorm document. So that we index just 4 million SeekStorm documents.

Yes, it would be possible to expand index with embeddings (vectors) and perform semantic search. This would we an auxiliary step between crawling and indexing.
I don’t disagree. You can choose to interview at places that do not perform these types of interviews.
It's unfortunate that you included the sarcastic second paragraph, because the link you provided is quite good and provides important perspective. While I clicked it primarily because you were sarcastic, I would bet far more people will look past it because of the same reason. I could be wrong tho.
This isn't 2010. Unless, you're some legendary-tier coder (and I have my doubts these actually exist or are useful in a corporate environment), the company will most likely call your bluff. There are loads of coders willing to take the job.
What you may be overlooking is that this is a biology problem, not a physics problem, so you cannot assume a uniform population of spherical humans with identical characteristics. :-)

COVID risk goes up with age. In the other COVID vaccine with a clotting issue (the AZ vaccine) clotting risk goes down with age. If that turns out to also be the case with J&J, then for a lot of people in the US (up to 20% or so) at the current levels of COVID the vaccine has a good chance of being more of a danger to them than COVID.

A short pause to determine if they should add a minimum age (possibly a variable minimum age that depends on the overall COVID rates) for J&J is prudent.
> This is kneejerk statistics 101 reaction.

Sometimes the answer is easy.

> Hormonal birth control - years of research

This is kneejerk status quo bias.

> I'm fine with anyone to make a decision on them own to take these vaccinations.

Great, but the FDA is not. That's the issue here.
I don't know what the right action would be, but the action taken -- essentially do nothing -- was clearly the wrong move and led to Germany taking over Western Europe for several years.
> What matters is the outcome compared to the thing birth controls prevent - pregnancy.

Same with the vaccine.

> Do you get more blood clots from being pregnant or from being on the pill?

Again, same with the vaccine. COVID itself causes clots, in a very substantial percentage of hospitalized patients.

"The benefits of this medical intervention are worthwhile, despite the risks, given the alternative" is precisely the point being made.
Exactly. Does anyone think that even "non-self-taught" programmers may remember off-hand "how to reverse a binary tree" ? Interviews require preparation. They may be terrible selecting interview questions, but neither that nor being "self-taught" are valid reasons to claim "you can avoid preparing this interview".
Bitcoin hits new all-time high above $63,000 ahead of Coinbase debut
China’s navy has more ships than the US. Does that matter?
I think it's more an application of the principle of non-maleficence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere) Consider this a temporary pause while they make sure they understand the relative risk factors.

Cigarettes and raw milk are, regrettably, a specious comparison. In the USA, the rules concerning both are handled by different governing bodies. For the longest time, cigarettes had been explicitly excluded from the FDA's jurisdiction, according to a law passed by Congress, and confirmed by a Supreme Court decision. And rules concerning raw milk vary from state to state, but are generally also set by legislatures. In both cases, what you see there is political interests come into conflict with, and perhaps override, the more level-headed, science-driven, technocratic approach that the FDA is theoretically expected to take.
I think he was applying for the wrong roles. He needed to move to some form of management it looked like.
True, that does give direction but not context. LAT/LONG gives no opinion on traffic speed and how to overtake when to switch lanes. My idea is that the pings are the other cars saying "I'm here, I'm here..." and the car can compute it's position relative to the other cars without having to see them. This is obviously not the main system, and more of an auxillary measure so the car can function in any condition.
But this region seemed to be majority Russian speaking, ethnically/culturally Russian. So there might be grassroots support in these regions to be a part of Russia.
I think the point was that secular wars are generally for resources. Nuclear war practically eliminates the possibility of gaining resources, because you're likely to lose more than you gain as your cities get vaporized. So the drive to start one is significantly lessened. Religious wars on the other hand, all bets are off. You're doing it for salvation, so even if the victor ends up poorer for it materially, it's still worthwhile to start.
And those certification requirements are written by whom?
That's what I wondered about too.. OP knew about HN but hadn't picked up about how interviews apparently work at a lot of companies nowadays - the whole 'leetcode' stuff. Never had to deal with that, but heard plenty about it after just couple of weeks lurking on HN.

Ah well, probably goes to show that everybody picks different threads/posts to read
Just putting it out there. Windows is a bad dev environment. Learning basic sql and basic coding tests is sort of expected. Honestly I'm not sure if it was the interviewers that were being narcissistic given the broad brush strokes you paint with. What do you think they're perspective actually was?
Fortnite/Epic did. Didn’t work out for them.
If they treat their employees well they have nothing to fear.
Or just leave it on her desk at work. She could be working 24x7! If anything, this makes work hours fraud even easier.
Understanding ViewModels in PHP
There's no "high standard" to begin with.

J&J is paused because there are alternatives that don't have clotting to the same degree.

A comparison with birth control makes no sense. Is there some magical birth control that's used orders of magnitude more (Pfizer) and orders of magnitude safer with respect to blood clotting and also prevents pregnancy?

No? Then the comparison is stupid.
Up until this point in history, the stock market has never been negative over the course of a ten-year timespan. Even if you invested at the height of the market in 1929, the day before the crash, it would have taken you less than ten years to get your money back [1].

If we are ever in a period when the stock market has been flat or negative for ten years or more, I'm sure such a wealth tax can be rescinded.

But if we are ever in such a period, the bottom four-fifths of Americans are going to be in much, much more catastrophic shape, and the small tear we shed for the super-rich that the government is still nibbling away at a fraction of their treasure during that time (presumably to spend on the massive bread lines that would exist) will be fairly irrelevant.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/your-money/stocks-and-bon...
Why does that matter? If you don't like your current job, start looking around until you have a new offer in hand. That new offer in hand is now your leverage ("bargaining power") if you really like your current company. Otherwise if they "call your bluff" you still have a job.
Paying 50% of your salary can be "ok" for a rich person, tough on middle class families with children, and impossible for a poor person (difference between making and not making rent).

This is why tax rates aren't constant for all incomes, they depend on income, costs (family, children, etc.), etc.

My tax rate would be slightly over 40% if I were single, but my partner's income isn't as high (still over >35% taxes), and we have two children. We get taxed as a family, so our incomes kind of get added and divided by four, and then our "family" tax rate is ~30%.

If you earn a lot of money and have no family / children to care for, then you get taxed with the highest rate which is slightly less than 50%.

If that's not your situation, your tax rate will be lower.

Also, there are some ways to delay paying at least a portion of your taxes (e.g. by getting stock compensation, and paying the taxes on the original price of the stock much later when you sell, etc.), which are often used for high paying jobs (somebody working on a dinner doesn't get "stock").

Having said all this, I've payed almost 50% taxes before, and it was ok. My net salary was still way above the median, and the cost of living here is relatively cheap.

The only real difference of this tax systems are (1) all the benefits that you get, and (2) the variable tax-rate widens the middle class significantly: it is harder to become "poorer" if your salary decrease because the tax rate decreases with it, and it is harder to double your net salary because the tax rate grows with salary increases, at least up to the almost 50% limit.

Many of the benefits are just the outcome of having a large number of people that live with 1 job, working 35h/week, and that don't have to look at their bank account ever to see if they'll make it to the end of the month.
What about people who went to college for something else but have been programming for many years professionally and have absorbed vast skill-set?

If the degree on the resume puts those people into the "pass" bucket automatically, that is the wrong approach.
For 40 years, they've been telling me that a rising tide lifts all boats. As it turns out, that's false.

So what PG's saying now is "a rising tide doesn't really lift all boats, but the important thing is that the boats it does lift really deserve it!"

Paul, that's you and all your buddies' boats. Why does society need people who get insanely wealthy if no one else benefits? That seems like a bad deal for society. Society is waking up, and it's not listening to horseshit self-justifications from rich people anymore.
>I went on HN Who's Hiring

And that's exactly why your experience was the way it was. HN is a self-selected crowd with a very specific mentality. Unsolicited advice: try a traditional job search website and look for companies outside of California and NYC. Your experience will be drastically different. I'm not saying it will be awesome every single time, but there will be more diversity in approaches to interviewing and in personalities.
Brain drain and creeping authoritarianism in Russia’s techno-utopian village
Nothing is stopping people from diverse and non-traditional backgrounds from learning DS&A, and spending a few weeks practicing Leetcode.

It’s not some arcade high art, it’s quite accessible with lots of great learning guides.

If you choose not to play the game, your pool of potential companies will be quite limited.
Hmmmm. The article drips with anger and cynicism, and hints at a few bitter opinions like "...companies I had ideological issues around..." It's hard to judge someone from an article, but if 5% of this sentiment bled through in an interview, I'd take a hard pass too. I just don't want to work with difficult, unhappy people.

It's a strange tone to take? The buried lede is: "[I] travel around and work as a digital nomad. I've been doing that for a couple of years now and I work an average of 2.5 days per week on machine learning or web projects and have rebuilt my savings and my whole life."

That sounds incredible! Like, the article should be titled "I'm winning at life".
My understanding is the that AstraZeneca and J&J are also new tech. Vector-based and mRNA are different than attenuated (weakened) form of the virus which is used in most vaccines.

(I'd be good if someone with more knowledge could comment)
> not even preparing for them as they’re the predominant format, is just showing a lack of preparation.

Why would you spend six months preparing for them when you could build and launch an entirely new product in the same amount of time, which has a much higher expected value?
> Being a self taught software developer who has been programming since I was 12, I had no idea how to reverse a binary tree.

It can be done. As a self-taught developer, and after years of startups and consulting, I got my first FAANG job at age 40. I hadn't done any real kind of interview in 15 years. I spent 90% of my time preparing for CS questions, and struggled at the first one, but ended up at FB, and Google a few years later.

My mindset wasn't that they really cared that I could do these obscure programming exercises that I hadn't used once in 20+ years of real-world programming, but rather that I could prove that I could learn and adapt.
> Same with the vaccine.

No, because there are other vaccines that don't give you blood clots at all. Your entire point is moot. Pausing temporarily to investigate is hardly controversial. The comparison with birth control is nonsensical.

A vaccination for COVID is not the same as getting birth control. Even if it was, why would you get J&J if you could get Pfizer that doesn't have the same issue?

If all vaccinations had the same blood clotting issue then perhaps you and the original poster would have a point. Given a huge disparity between them with regards to blood clotting taking a moment to investigate this is simply prudent. Making nonsensical comparisons to birth control, well, is not.
"How do we then get support" is a general conspiracy i've seen thrown around.
One friend of mine was extolling unions after we discussed some pattern of microaggressions that ruined his latest job. He also hated HR which did nothing. A union, he claimed, would have saved him.

Perhaps, I said, but private sector unions can't handle workplace friction as easily. Often the other side of the complaint is also in the union and the union is just like a shadow HR. It has to choose winners and losers.

Of course collective bargaining is another thing. It can be useful, especially when the jobs are pretty standardized.
I've been subject to KYC checks, and the bank very much probed into intimate financial details for weeks, with its employees gaining proprietary knowledge of things like investment strategies. If I hadn't complied, I would have not received banking services, and would have been unable to do things like pay taxes.

Anti-money laundering laws 100% turn the presumption of innocence on its head. You are presumed guilty, and forced to surrender your privacy, until you prove yourself innocent.
I agree, but I don't think this is a place where it is fair to expect developers to "vote with their feet" and not participate in these interviews. The companies who do data structures and algorithms interviews seem to pay the highest in the industry
Arguably you have a chance to change things from the inside once you’re in.

I know it’s not a good advice in general, but regarding recruiting in particular, it’s a more realistic proposition.
Isn't doing it cheaper, faster, and better how most countries have risen to success since the industrial revolution? Regulations are a barrier to entry. Just because a government makes a regulation doesn't mean the reason behind is done with the best motives or outcomes in mind.
Couldn’t agree more. Better spend resources on things that actually matter. Pros of a free global banking system heavily outweigh the cons of money-laundering. Plus, nowadays there’s no real barrier stopping banks/financial institutions to verify international clients (Mercury, TransferWise are good examples).
I've always wondered if these companies have data to support their hiring routine or if it's just a filter to convert an overwhelming number of applicants into a pool that's manageable?

On the other hand, reversing a tree and problems like fizz buzz are pretty low bars...
It's already difficult enough on the Wii!
I think ramp up is more the issue. The cost of idling plants and ceding market share outweighs any added component cost (within reason).
Shared as URL, will not use <A> tag for the redirect, but "<meta>" tag, which isn't that well supported.
Wasn't Torvalds already working abroad by the time Linux became a major phenomenon (as opposed to a hacker's curiosity)?
I have some experience with this. My advice: pick the skill that you are absolutely strongest at from a specialist's viewpoint and interview for that role. Once you are in, you will find your generalist skills help you excel quickly. It is annoying that interviews can't capture broad skill sets, but it is also widely known. It means you have to prep! Dive deep and practice the well known interview questions for the specialty you pick.
Americans fixate on our civil war, not on our international wars.

"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."

~ An American president who was shot by an American citizen on 1865-04-14
Also at the end of coldwar, there was a certain promise of not expanding Nato eastwards and letting Russia continue to have a sphere of influence, which the West has not been adhering to.
That is fascinating. Growing up we called these sugar ants or kitchen ants. I can't read the article but I assume this is similar.

Do you know why they are averse to diatomaceous earth? They are so small I would not have thought they would experience a tactile aversion to a material. Nature is so neat.

Edit: I see now. It's not an aversion. It sticks to them and get into their joints. Interesting.
The issue is that it's "shouting into the void". Nobody who can do anything about it is here to read it and heed the feedback, so it's just rage in the HN thread, making it a less pleasant place for everyone here, but without any benefit.

The whole reason for having the exception to that rule, being that the author is active in the thread, is that you can address the feedback to them and they can possibly do something about it.

Outside of that, you're better off sending an email or tweet to the company, rather than venting here.
An acquaintance of mine was working on an accounting PhD on basically this subject (trying to quantify CEO contribution to revenues and profits, all else held equal). He said that after years studying it, he thought it's too noisy with too little data over too long a timeframe to do a good quantitative analysis.

He also pointed out there is a big "apples to oranges" problem even with the limited data available. In sports (but not business) you have lots of reliably tracked micro metrics in addition to final metrics (wins/revenue). The micro metrics are generated regularly (stats for each player for each game) and those metrics are portable across players (everyone is going for points, runs, blocks, whatever). In comparison, for CEOs you mainly have quarterly reporting of coarse financials (but nothing like employee morale, number of offices opened, etc.).
Oh My Git: An open-soutce game about learning Git
I’m a reasonably successful entrepreneur, but I’ve been fired or quit every FT position I’ve had. FTE is just a total different experience from running a company and being good at one is different from being good at the other. The only middle ground I’ve found that has worked for me has been consulting where I’m still my own boss and can pick up small projects here and there.

Being an entrepreneur is a high risk / high reward venture though and we’re not entitled to an easy, well paid salary if we fail.

Great read though and glad the author found their groove eventually. A salaried position doesn’t have to be the default fall back.