skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry for all the people who downvoted you, but this is just a practical fact. You may think the CS degree is utterly useless, that they teach you extremely outdated stuff that you will never use in practice, that it's just elitism in all but name, a way to filter people with economic resources, etc. etc.

And I agree with almost every opinion you may have on this; but the thing is, it is just harder to come by a decent opportunity without it. Nice that you try to set your foot in the door here politically, but the cost for that is being on a crappier job.

I was an idealist too, 20 years ago...
No, they are not. The whole reason there is a perception of a lack of developers is the screwy criteria and process applied to applicants.

I'm a developer with more than 30 years experience including some well known products from big companies. The same is true of my circle of friends but only two still have traditional tech jobs. The rest have gone independent out of necessity.
I felt the same for a long time till i started solving leetcode problems, what he really needs is to solve a lot of problems on leetcode instead of writing this blog.
If you can’t reverse a binary tree, or don’t even know how to approach the problem, you can’t do most of programming. Fixing this should be a high priority, but the author seems to have no awareness of this.

Programming is hard. It takes a lot of skill to do it well. If the author seemed interested in acknowledging this and developing skill, the article would not come off as whiny and pointless. But it does, because he’s not interested in identifying and fixing the problem, which resides in his own house.
Not necessarily a spam link. Linked pages from older post have sometimes updated their content.

Sometimes this is legitimate, sometimes spam.
About 75% of English speakers live outside of the USA.
To piggyback on this solid comment, a lot of times it’s us engineers who can fix this. I sat on L5 hiring committee at Google for a while and I really believe what diverse-background candidates need is more support at HC. I could sell these candidates to the committee often, with minimal effort all they needed was a champion at committee. That can be you, dear reader, at many of the big tech companies.

Mostly HC is a ton of work (eg read 8 full interview packets a week) so if you express an interest and are a decent interviewer you’re likely to get shot at it and you can make a real difference.
Wouldn't that just be interviewing a candidate based on their capability to prepare for interviews and not actually interviewing for candidates who would be effective at their jobs once hired? Could this be a false assumption that these are correlated, or a decent indicator of one over the other?
I wouldn't say all Poles are keen for-your-country-diers, but there's a sense that it's foolish to count on any system (political etc.) going on indefinitely. Everywhere you go, people were being rounded up and killed during WW2. Property you may have owned, often evaporated. Or, as there's a growing awareness, grabbed by other people. Such things are possible.

Aside from obvious nationalism that plays a role with some folks, I'd say total defiance may be a sound strategy for dealing with sociopathic bad actors (international or otherwise): better than going down a slippery slope to complete submission everywhere. This is the kind of situation that people tend to think of when talking about "dying for the country" in Poland.
'When is the housing market going to crash?' is a top search on Google
It's a bluff only if you don't mean it. If you are willing to fight for what's fair according to yourself, then it is one of the expected results.
This is the point that seems so often missed. I was union before I joined tech, and unions are poison to somebody who wants to represent themselves. They completely remove the option. It often forces people into either management or just learn to be happy inside the system.
It's also similarly absolutely disingenuous to use any other number that's not based on measured (or measurable) facts. CFR is the only one we have right now, what else do you suggest?
I am combining symmetric deletes with a trie for fuzzy autocompletion and it is working pretty well.
Okay so I want to make something very clear here. The rule is to put it very very simply, is you can ship any drug that is approved but you have to list the side effects. This drug was approved under an emergency order and this side effect was not listed. This will get paused long enough for the side effects to be updated and then used again. The arguments about “well the birth control pill has a higher risk” are using a fact that while it is true, is not relevant as that data has no relationship to the rules that have to be followed. The valid argument would be, those that issue the emergence order for use to should amend the order to acknowledge the issue but not block use immediately.
It was a very fun game that required knowing the capacity of each supplier and their suppliers as well. The sales orders had to get matched up with airplanes and sometimes the planes would have shortages that would then instantly changes years' worth of scheduling.

Overall I felt like there were a number of good strategies but that sometimes the strategizing interfered with the execution. Peoples tenure and the projects they went through often influenced their notion of ideal. By the time I started getting comfortable understanding these things, it was time to get a new job.
In my opinion his startup career and failures have nothing to do with the fact that (he thinks) he is unemployable.

He (like many others) just doesn't want to play the "leet code white board" interview game, nor wants to play along and pretend to be super excited about some foolish cult-like startup only to receive less money.

You can argue that the interview questions don't make sense, but in the end, if you decide you don't want to play the game and master the tech interview, then you will have less options.
Hey Dave!

I've recently started a podcast where I talk to developers about their experiences in programming, career advice, their thoughts, hopes and visions for the future of technology.

I wonder if you'd be interested in telling your story in a more long-form interview format (that gets recorded and posted online).

You can get a sense of the format by looking through the work I've already done: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1SKRYr2Emfbas-8ZA9GYng

I think your story is pretty compelling and I'd love to help share it with a wider audience.

Though in all fairness, I'm sitting at 41 subscribers as of this moment, so reasonably speaking I should say "share with an audience which is expected to grow wider in the future"

If you're interested, feel free to reach out on any of the contact channels listed here: https://github.com/AlexChesser/lgtm-shipit or even just open an issue directly in the repo and we can coordinate!
This has been a huge worry for me if I ever went out on my own, failed, and wanted to get back in to the warm blanket of security of a corporation, I would need to explain that failure of independence. My gut tells me it will not go over well with employers, for example, they may think that I'll jump as soon as I get a new idea, or maybe I'm not a good success candidate.
I don't think I was very clear, this was not two guys level-headedly stating their intentions to defend their countrymen from a very real and imminent threat. It was a couple of guys who had a bit too much to drink who would - out of the blue - repeatedly bring this up to out-bro the guys at the table.

In the case of a conflict we'll all see what where we stand, but I think drunken, grandiose declarations of loyalty made during peacetime should be taken with a pinch of salt. Hopefully we never need to find out how sincere anyone was.
which sounds similar to working on a large system, doesn't it?
Show HN: My wife built a gorgeous indoor plant site with no-code
While I can appreciate where you are coming from, countering a terrorist attack typically has something that we don't have with COVID and that is information. The world was introduced and expected to react to this disease without any sort of "tactical" knowledge. Even if you include the other four variants of coronavirus, the availability of information can still be considered sorely lacking. Discounting government-provided information, even medical sources had a harder time providing a consensus on how the disease was transmitted during the first few months. That the larger questions like why we have such a large population that appears to be asymptomatic remains unanswered while we are still being pushed to "one-size-fits-all" remedy (and a remedy that appears to only be there to debase the severity of symptoms) doesn't help. Unfortunately, we need information, and information is going to take time. The long term arguments for health side effects are on both sides of the coin here.
Exactly. And, just like unpaid internships, being able to invest a many hours every day into "preparing for an interview" is something that many people can't afford to do.
> No, it's okay to subscribe to something, stop using it and stop paying it. When your access is cutoff due to non-payment, what's the problem?

Let's look at it from a different perspective. If a coworker and I build a service in my garage from the ground up where I let users pay $100/mo month-to-month, $75/mo for a six month agreement, or $50/mo for a twelve month agreement, you're saying it's fine to agree to the twelve month term, get the 50% discount for a few months, and then cancel your card even though the only reason I offered such a steep discount in the first place is because you promised you'd pay me for twelve months?
>> Hormonal birth control - years of research

> This is kneejerk status quo bias.

mind expanding why years of research is a 'bias'?
Using a machete when you should be using a scalpel (though to be fair at the time it looked like a filet knife was the tool for the job) has been more or less how this pandemic has been handled since day 1. Why would that change now?
People need to remember that we're not taking the vaccine for fun, we're taking it because COVID is out there and we know for certain that it has some lethal side effects as well as non-lethal side effects and possibly other long-term side effects that we don't yet know about. We weigh that risk against the risk that there might be some long-term side effects of the vaccine. To the best of our knowledge, the risks posed by COVID are more dire than those posed by the vaccines and we basically have to choose one.
> "is just showing a lack of preparation."

I think that puts a negative tone on people with other degrees than CS, even if they have good software experience, or are older with life commitments. Jobs and interviews in past did not ask this stuff, yet it's now implicitly considered prep. It's biased towards new CS grads and young folks.

Many/most? companies needing devs do not use/need these CS "fundamentals", which do not automatically correspond with tech skills needed to do product development, at least in SaaS world.
There’s no real correlation here.
Same I was 32 self-taught with 14 years of experience. After a few failures at these types of interviews I just studied and spent some time learning how to solve the problems companies were asking. I did better and got offers at 2 of the FAANGs and I've been at one for almost 8 years. So it's possible to be a self taught or have spent your entire life at small companies before that but studying is required for the coding part. I think behavioral and architecture are easier for those that have built a lot of things before, but they won't make up for a couple bad coding interviews.
People love to pick out the comments of the past that seem most wrong now, because—let's be honest—it makes us feel superior. But if you go back and look at that original 3-comment Bitcoin thread, what you find is that those 3 comments span an entire spectrum: elated, skeptical, and bewildered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852.

The first cryptocurrency thread on HN—about 9 months earlier—was even more interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253963. It contains another skeptical comment: "The bigger problem is that everyone has a incentive to run their computers day and night cranking out solutions, which burns up lots of natural resources and processor time for a zero-sum result." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999), which seems astonishingly prescient now, even though the objection is still hotly (no pun intended) debated.

Cherry-picking the wrongest-seeming skeptical comment from that collection of data points is a case study in survivorship bias. (I don't mean to pick on you personally! This is common of course.) The infamous Dropbox comment from 2008 is similar in that it has gotten repeated out of context in a way that is unfair to the original commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275). When we repeat these things, it says more about us than it does about the thing we're repeating.
That's really part of the problem of doing a bootstrapped or early angel type startup, and I definitely feel this guys pain. You spend years doing very shallow work because you simply do not have the time or money to dig deep into any given issue until it actually crops up, at which point you do the bare minimum to fix it and move on. Repeat this process until you fail to find a viable business model, or find a viable business model at which point if you're really lucky you can start slowly rewriting your app piece by piece, but more realistically you just accept that it was good enough and keep doing more new things.

This skillset just isn't that useful to a large software shop.
Or maybe one person/immediate family shouldn't be allowed to hoard such vast resources? Perhaps he should've been taxed more so that it can be disbursed by the usual means.
I'm not endorsing censorship in any way, but I think a lot of people in these comments fail to understand what an average teen's discord experience is like:

- Join tons of servers, where the friends/lolz are

- Many run popular bots

- Many popular bots have porn commands, for example the popular Dank Memer, which is a general utility/games bot

-- /black posts BBC content

-- /group posts group sex pics

-- /xmas posts christmas themed porn?!

- Its not uncommon for people to post nudes of themselves or friends

Sometimes the content stays inside of channels labeled NSFW, but often it pops up elsewhere. If you're hanging out in many discord servers, it can be pretty difficult to fully avoid porn in your feeds, or its always 1 click away.

Its mostly left to server admins and mods to enforce those rules.

Do with that what you will, but its based on that basic set of information that Apple and Discord are approaching these issues.
QWIIC is pretty nice to use from the wiring perspective. Not just for the plug and play nature but also the fine gauge of the wire in the cables. It makes it a lot easier to create little one off devices without going the printed circuit board route.

And with Adafruit also adopting the standard there are more options for devices.
If having an unrelated degree on the resume puts those people into the "consider" bucket automatically, that is also the wrong approach.

To be honest, I can see requiring a degree for certain positions. But given the work most software devs are doing, I'd be happy to consider 4 years work experience. The number of times I need someone to invert a binary tree so far is 0, but the number of times I've needed someone to build some basic CRUD functionality following a UX spec is too numerous to mention. I don't need my degree to do the latter; I don't need to hire a degreed person to do it either. And even things that a degree might help with (recognizing an O(n^2) implementation when an O(n) is available) are lessons you can learn pragmatically by doing (i.e., having senior engineers point out issues in code review).
That you don't focus on things unrelated to the job at hand?
> Because the binary is mostly self-contained, it's far easier to install, can work in more environments and less likely to break as time passes and the systems around it change.

That can't be the whole story, otherwise we would not have operating systems, or at least, we would not have anything more than a kernel with nothing on top. There are good reasons for software to be a part of a common system, for example when you want components of the software to integrate and communicate with each other. For example, you probably do not want to log-in to each app again with the same user name.

This is different from a web browser, which, in a way, is an operating system and a platform, and requires relatively little integration with the surrounding system (in these times, often not even a PDF reader). But as a consequence, you have something which is called "inner platform effect", and I think there are few places where this term is more appropriate than in web browsers..
Interesting article. I have difficult time grasping how the US government would every implement this with any real effect - even with their demanding reporting requirements. It looks like a colossal effort to gather that information and tax it appropriately. I don't see the IRS staffing up entire high specified units to go after and audit the super rich for wealth tax... the implementation of this would be painful and probably more money would go dark (my glass half full take).

Simple example that I use to wrap my head around:
What are the implications on equities? If you hold a lot of stock in a hot market you have to pay taxs on that stock this year (?) What would happen if next year the stock went to half of that? Imagine there was a wealth tax during the dot com era. Maybe it would curb speculative markets?

I also think your point on first order and second order effects is also interesting. The ramifications of something like this, while appearing to be quite fair and simple is likely to be anything but once implemented.

Also - I don't disagree with fixing wealth inequality - but a wealth tax is a fundamental shift in how everyone thinks the government derives money from the population.
Clients are human too, let's not forget that
As an honest question, why do you want to work for places who interview and hire so pedantically?

As a person with a diverse background and even more diverse interests, who likes to use jobs to learn things I don't know rather than simply apply things I do know, I use interviews as a natural filter. It can be rather unpleasant and frustrating at times, but in the end, it's better I don't work for some place that interviews like they got their process out of some Silicon Valley playbook.
If hiring is so broken, then some company could succeed by hiring all the non-traditional applicants. Has nobody tried this? "We hire weirdos" might attract a lot of high-quality applicants. There is a market failure here or there isn't.
Steve Mould – The cheap Chinese bulb that won't turn off
Yes, if you are into cash intensive business or from a country with a lot of mafia/armed conflicts you might be put through some checks if you want to do business in a place that is actively hostile to the stuff going on in that region.

The western world is a bureaucratic hell for people from Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Irak etc.

If you are from country A that doesn't share data with country B and you want to live/work/do business in country B, the bureaucracy can also be heavier since it's going to be harder asses your situation. You might be asked to explain what you do, why do you want to use their services and even prove your claims if you want to be accepted as a customer.

That's something that no one likes. Banks like making money and yo don't make money by refusing work, so they will do the bare minimum to cover their asses but sometimes the cover needed can be quite large.
yeah it's much much less about being an entrepreneur and much much more about not having professional software engineering experience / work etiquette.

Most scale up / startups would love ex founders to help them.
The biggest mistake people make when I give a coding question is not asking for help, even though I always tell them to treat the question as collaborative and use me as a resource. While I’ve been on interviews where the company expected me to code with no help, usually the culture at those places wasn’t a good fit anyway.

All that to say I’d suggest candidates be more willing to ask for help. Interviewers are people too and if you can code a solution easily after getting unblocked they might forget you ever asked for help, or respect you more for it.
Here’s the thing: that’s your opinion. I happen to feel differently.

However, you said that vented cans don’t exist. It’s not true. They do exist. I proved it. This can is vented.

What is true is that the vents require some kind of activation at the time of pour. This model relies on a button, which means two hands. I’ve personally found that using two hands is kind of a requirement for this size of gas can. That’s my personal experience, so I like this model for the speed of its pour. There exist other designs where you activate the vent by pushing on the nozzle and a lip or catch hooks the opening and a sleeve pulls back exposing the vent. I personally have found that design to be problematic because the springs are often faulty or too strong. You could use those one handed if you want, I guess, but I don’t prefer to do that, so, all in, I do t prefer those models.

Regardless, they exist, you can buy them. One handers, two handers, fortunately I’m unaware of any three or more handers.

But this nonsense about gurgling and splashing because “vents are illegal” is a lie and is gaslighting, especially when you can order pallets of evidence to the contrary.
So what's the alternative? You can talk about work history but now you're locked out of the FAANG track if you don't start with an internship there because very few jobs are going to work at the same scale. Of course you could go learn about systems design at scale but now you're back to preparing for interviews.

You can just sit and chat like you're friends but that's going to bias the interview process to "people who I like" which is just "people who are like me".

I'm sure there are LeetCode questions that are more & less predictive of success but it does have the benefit of removing much of the bias in the hiring process, at the expense of requiring candidates to do some prep work. If you don't want to do the prep work then there are plenty of other places you can work.

I think one challenge in these conversations is that people talk about what the interview process should or shouldn't look like without talking about what the interview process is trying to optimize for. And each person is going to have different ideas of what they should be optimizing for in an interview so they'll have different interview solutions. Then you argue about the solutions but the reason you disagree is because you're starting with different goals.
Of course they have data, but there are an infinite number of possible interview strategies and the current approach is at best a local maximum.
This is what I would assume too. I remember sitting next to a manager's cubicle at GE and hearing him discuss candidates. He would say things like, "Wow, this guy applying for this entry position has a PhD, he definitely would get bored and leave quickly." These places just want to fill seats at max capacity and turn over just means more work.
Why you should stay away from non-governed DeFi projects?