skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of those eternal debates I think: on the one hand you have OOP and certain sorts of FP advocates advocating for extremely rich data models that eliminate certain classes of errors by design. On the other hand, you have the Unix notion of using a very generic data type (see also Perlis’s “rather 100 functions on one data structure than ten functions on ten data structures”) to maximize flexibility, at the cost of a certain amount of footguns.

Personally, I’m discovering more and more that CL’s REPL in SLIME is my preferred shell in part because the CL ecosystem has a rich array of operations on a small number of data-types (without forcing everything into binary streams), but also the ability to define ad-hoc datatypes as needed and a powerful system for manipulating them and integrating the custom data types into existing protocols.

Also, the claim that you need n^2 encoder/decoders isn’t actually true: conventions around data formats can reduce it to O(n) in the number of conventions.
A lot of FAANG engineers seem to report that the interview was the hardest thing that they've done, harder than anything they do as part of their actual job.

It's probably not that the leetcode problems are ultra hard to solve (though they can be). It's also the combination of the artificial time constraint and the high pressure interview setting - which is a very different kind of pressure than you typically experience on the job.
> So at that point I really did say fuck it and just left the country to 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.

The only interesting part of the article, and the author doesn't expand on it. "I was trying to get a desk job, but when that fell through I just decided to travel, work remote all the time, and work half as much." Um, what? I have so many questions.
> 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.

I like to see wrong “obvious” predictions to humble myself, even if not from me.
Are you suggesting a person’s attitude doesn’t matter at all for how they perform at work? Very few employees are hired and then don’t have to interact with anyone. If a person is a brilliant programmer, but pisses off everyone they work with and drives other employees to quit, they are going to be a net negative.
That's really nice. I never really got into perl but i was moved by some sysadmin friends back in the days playing crazy tricks right in front of my eyes... doing the same in bash would have taken me minutes or even hours, so i always felt like this was some kind of great wizardry.

But perl is not really the most user-friendly language to learn in my opinion. I think raku is much better in this regard, but unfortunately is not deployed widely (yet?).
I did it and it worked well. All I really had to do was respond to the LinkedIn recruiter spam and take some vacation days for interviews.
It seems completely wrong that they are trialling experimental vaccines on children, where the risk is almost certainly greater than from covid. Absolutely disgusting.
Search engines are generally considered fair use [0], at least in US. So up until HN doesn't send cease and desist, it's in the clear. Once it does, then it's all about what the claims are. Google litigated the crap out of this [1] over the years, so there is a positive precedent minefield all over the place.

[0] https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Text_and_data_mining
Absolute load of shit. What does memorizing data structure algorithms you'll never practically use have to do with navigating company politics?
The obvious difference is that the vaccine is being forced upon people. A woman can talk to her doctor, understand the risk, and decide to take birth control or not.

The vaccine was given to people, under threat of exclusion from society, without knowledge of the side effects. Not comparable.
> But one with extremely good ROI.

If, and only if, you're hired. Putting all of that time into studying for the interview is no guarantee of being hired.
At the very least if you don't have a CS degree, you should be able to demonstrate CS-knowledge by prepping for basic whiteboard interviews.

Imagine what this guy looks like from the hiring managers side. Would you take the risk of hiring him for a software engineering position? Do you have any confirmation whatsoever that he can even write a single line of code? Yeah sure, he founded a startup, but you literally have no idea who wrote the actual code there or even if anything functional was even produced. Maybe the reason the startup failed is because the software was incompetent.

I get it. We all hate reversing a binary tree, and most likely we'll never have to do it in day to day work. But here's the thing, almost anyone who can reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard has basic competence at writing code. The reverse isn't necessarily true. There are lots of great coders who aren't good at whiteboard interviews. But hiring managers don't care about false negatives. Bad hires cost a truly staggering amount of money, overlooked candidates cost virtually nothing.

When I hear or read about people who are failing to get SWE jobs, it's usually because they do not have any demonstrable credibility of basic competence at writing code. To get a seat at the table you must bring at least one of the following: a pedigree, a network of credible people who can vouch for you, your name publicly attached to a successful project or the ability to crush whiteboard interviews. A manager that hires somebody who meets none of those criteria is taking an enormous risk.
What are you talking about? I'm a totally average programmer, hell, maybe below average for my age and experience level, and I literally walked on a job that wanted to make me do uncompensated on-call at the end of 2019 for one that compensates me to be on call.

It doesn't have to be a bluff, programmers are still in high demand.

And I'm not even in Silicon Valley, and I have no degree. C'mon!
It's probably not compliant. As with all good things, if you're in the Land of the Free (TM), eventually people will hunt you down if you try to do good things.

Alternatively, base your site out of a country which gives you the freedom to do things like this. Build it in China and you'll be applauded instead of sued. Copyright suits for petty things like this would laughed off when it's something actually useful.
It is a crime against humanity if they don't have access to Cheesy Gordita Crunches.
I use Colemak and agree with the bias towards rolling on single hand (Colemak) vs alternating hands (Dvorak). Rolling doesn't feel natural to me.

However, Colemak was much easier for me to learn though (I tried Dvorak first), and the ZXVC in same spot without tweaking shortcuts is a plus.
Soft skills aren't a waste of time... and being good at interviews is a soft skill that lead to job offers - so far from useless if you can pull a six figure job.

This seems like a "why go to college" type of response where there is some truth to the fact that so much of college is a waste (I've never used statistics or economics in jobs)... yet it's more than just college or CS questions.
But the point is that sometimes it is easier to go after bankers than crooks. If the bankers know they are profiting off criminals why shouldn't they be responsible.

It sounds great to say, why not just go after the criminals? The practical reason why not is that people who launder money create an incentive for crime. Every thief knows how much they are likely to get from a fence. As an ethical matter, why shouldn't we punish people who knowingly profit from people committing crimes-- often horrible crimes?
I have never prepped for an interview in my life. If they're asking me questions or to solve problems related to my field, I don't really need to study. If they ask me things that are irrelevant, then that's another thing entirely.

In short, I am a specialist, and am hired accordingly.
Optimizing graphics when working with Joint JavaScript
> Not only were these programming word problems ridiculous, but it seemed like everyone I interviewed with was a caricature of narcissism and delusions of grandeur

Felt the same way during a recent spate of software interviews.

And I have the MIT CS education.

But I don't know all the latest lingo and CQRS or whatever is cool this week.

Thankfully, an old employer knew my value and brought me back to develop for and manage a large, cutting-edge project.
Unpopular opinion, but the skills learned in these exercises really can translate to improvements in real world projects. We can get very far with most modern programming projects through brute force alone or by using standard library containers and algorithms, but past a certain scale it really does pay off to have an intuitive understanding of how data structures and algorithms work from first-hand implementation experience.

Of course, if a company is just building the stereotypical basic CRUD app to serve a maximum of 10K users total and maybe 10 per minute at peak, this probably doesn’t matter much.

However, companies that pay top dollar expect candidates with top knowledge, and that’s fair IMO.
For what it's worth, I don't like the CS-y interview process, but I also struggle with that very technology specific process. I don't want a job that hired me just to be a Spring Boot + React monkey. I want a job that hired me because they think I'm smart and adaptable and can tackle any problem with any technology.
Perceiver, General Perception with Iterative Attention
There currently isn't enough vaccine to meet demand. Pausing J&J distribution will cause a larger gap between supply and demand. The 7 day average of deaths from Covid in the U.S. is 985. Even a week's delay in getting to full deployment of the vaccine thus means thousands of deaths.
A market working does not imply the creation of unlimited supply. Governments that restrict building are an external factor. Markets can only operate within those bounds. Since land for building is scarce, prices rise.

There are other factors, of course. Just speculation does not really seem to be a major one.
The collateral damage done by AML laws is absolutely massive:

https://www.coindesk.com/money-reimagined-ugly-side-kyc-aml-...

>>At a 2015 blockchain event, Nairobi-based bitcoin pioneer Elizabeth Rossiello answered an audience question about the impact on Somalians of a recent shutdown in remittance inflows after the U.S. government had labeled the country a “high-risk jurisdiction.” The AZA Group CEO’s answer was blunt: “They starve.”

Meanwhile, there are some analyses that suggest they have very little impact on crime:

https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les...
See this reply I wrote to another branch of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26793636
My suspicion is that whatever efficiency gains are possible are going to be wiped out by the difficulty of learning a new system and then also not being able to readily have your preferred layout everywhere.
I wrote about this earlier, I think tech debt is the negative suprise factor. https://remotemanager.substack.com/p/technical-debt-is-the-s...

"A system has technical debt when the effort needed to keep it fit for purpose is surprisingly high. Zero technical debt means that according to our current knowledge, cost of foreseeable future work and maintenance is the lowest possible."
This topic has come up a few times on hn, and I always find myself in the minority. At my previous job, I never considered likability, and ALWAYS considered what contributions someone had to offer. Whenever I bring that frame of mind here, I always get a lot of push back. "People just want to work with people they like." It's clear I'm the outlier in this opinion, but if you're just working with people you like, you're not really a business, at least not fully. You're at a social club, too.
An example from the article:

> Winnow ants disperse so many herbaceous seeds in North America, Dr. Rice notes, that “removing them causes wildflower abundance to drop by 50 percent.”
Long COVID, that vaccines seem to help with (but still need more study) disagrees with you.
Interesting data. I’ll just mention that if you are looking at changing layouts and are concerned about cut, copy, paste and undo, don’t be. Within a year it won’t bother you to be typing X, C and V with different fingers.
npm has only 1.5 million packages. With max 1000 deps per package limit you only need barely over 2 levels deep to really depend on them all.
Xah first wrote this over a decade ago.

He’s had some RSI issues, and the real problem is simply typing in any form.

I remember reading several of his articles thinking that surely within a decade, we’d have better voice assist for programming.

Tavis Rudd’s demo looked promising in 2013:

https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI

I’m not sure what’s the best solution. Here are a few that I known of:

https://serenade.ai/

https://talonvoice.com/

https://voxhub.io/silvius
Appreciate the feedback! Maybe I will take another go at it.
I read there is a bias in the data due to young women being the moat common demographic for nursing jobs.
New study shows how the brain retrieves facts and personal experiences
Seems like a pretty good analysis. I've been using Dvorak for 20+ years also. The keyboard shortcuts thing is annoying, though I hadn't heard about the wrist strain they cause. I didn't see this discussed, but I actually find the fact that Colemak shares more keys with QWERTY to be a problem for learning if you already know QWERTY (even though that might be the biggest strength). Dvorak only shares the "A" and "M" with QWERTY, but typing those letters always confused my brain the most when learning, and sometimes I'd fall right back into QWERTY in a really frustrating way.

I switched to Dvorak because of wrist strain/RSI issues. I was in pretty serious wrist pain and now I rarely have any. It probably wouldn't have been worth it otherwise, but that was a huge benefit to me. I'm not sure if other things would've helped since I didn't try a lot of other approaches first.
> But the pre-installed Safari is okay? All browsers on iOS are just Safari skins, so why isn't iOS as a whole rated 17+?

Wow. That's an excellent and very telling point.

What is the point of IOS's endless restrictions and censorship of free speech?

Is the point really to protect users from exercising their own intelligence or guarding their own kids, or is it to protect users from alternatives to Apple's own products?

It's kinda like Gatekeeper on Mac OS; you cannot (easily) install apps that aren't from the App Store. Was this only to protect you from malware? Really?

It's like all of these restrictions have a dual purpose on Mac OS: the stated reason, and an unstated reason: to increase Apple's control over you.

I'm actually surprised that Apple even allows web browsers at all, or third party mail apps, or anything that lets people access things outside their walled garden.
YAGNI, YAGNI, YAGNI

Is the battle cry of losers

Who say “don’t bring that gun to the knife fight”

And ignore their opponents’ bazookas.
The author has absolutely 0 control over that.

Directions on analytics come from the "serious, business-minded" end of the company. That is true for every [major] journalism outlet. It's always been true.

Don't put that on the writers to resolve. Unless they have the resources to found their own competitor, they're as much at the mercy of the whims of the company heads as the readers are.

Even the development staff have little to no say about it. Inclusions of those kinds of things are at the behest of sales/marketing and management/executive. There is less crossover between those groups and the editorial staff than many people have decided to believe, no matter how often they're reminded.

If you ask me, the writer is doing plenty and they're doing exactly what is in their power to do: write about it.

Frankly, it seems like a modern miracle that a publication will produce editorial pieces that are so self-critical. I think it speaks to a healthy journalistic environment in general, even if the business practices need an overhaul.
It signals your willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops.
If your fetus could spread to other people while you're pregnant, those would all be great points.
There's nothing wrong with technical debt, per se. Every non-trivial body of code has it, and like real debt, it's an instrument that can be useful. The important thing is for all stake holder to be aware and comfortable with the inherent trade offs. At least the ones that are known.
If you read between the lines this is an indicator that a buyout might be coming really soon.
Debunking Myths About China's Economy
I live in one the similar shithole countries and money laundering services are a necessity no matter how legit my business is.
> Additionally, all users on the iOS platform (including those aged 18+) will be blocked from joining and accessing NSFW servers. iOS users aged 18+ will still be able to join and access NSFW communities on the desktop and web versions of Discord.

What?! Is this an accurate interpretation of Apple’s policy? I know you cant have specifically NSFW apps but I didn't think their policy applied to user generated content. It’s certainly not the status quo to ban all NSFW user content on iOS on other platforms.
I know you said "can't" but just to confirm, is there no iOS API to get parental control info to block stuff like this? If not, I wonder why Apple doesn't provide that option.

o/w, "Safari supports parental controls" argument is BS.
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This is something I've seen at places like Whole Foods. In the bathroom they have a digital card scanner. One day I saw an employee scan their ID, they said that they have to check on certain things every hour and scanning a badge in the bathroom tells their minders that "Hey, the bathroom was checked in on by an employee and thus should be in of good condition".

I think something like that is fine and reasonable if your job is to move about a building.
Just because they're democratically elected does not mean they will act on the the best for each individual employee.
"Slavery with extra steps" often comes to mind.
I agree - you really should sink time into preparing if you can. We prepare for all kinds of other things, but a surprising number of people won't prepare for interviews that are massively affecting the trajectory of their lives.

Leil Lowndes writes books on improving as a communicator, not about tech, but one of her pieces of advice for interviews is to interview at places you don't want to work first, and treat it as practice. In her case the recommendation is meant for people who struggle with being comfortable presenting themselves and talking, but it applies just as well in other contexts.

E.g. find some jobs you're clearly qualified for where you're likely to get an interview relatively easily. Drop your standards - your goal is not to get hired. See what questions you're asked. Use the experience to improve. Amp up the "difficulty" if you get offers.

See how the questions differ, and how the process differs if you try for more challenging positions.

Then go for the job you want.

Figuring out how to pass the interviews in "low risk" situations (because you don't really want the job) is both good practice, good calibration of expectations of what kind of job you can get, and a good way to relax more when you apply for the dream job.
Feel free to quote the area where the GP said competency is irrelevant.

There are tens or hundreds of thousands of skilled developers in the world, there's no reason to work with bitter, angry people.
Better to write the town off to the pandemic. I mean, we’re in the middle of a fourth surge, so realistically, double digit percentages of the town are likely to get covid if we delay even a few weeks, but 10% of 0.5% the population dying from covid and increased spreading of the new variants are reasonable prices to pay to avoid 1 in a million side effects.

We can make a statue for the people that die in the following weeks protecting the rest of us from the J&J vaccine. They’ll be heroes.

Sorry. Really pissed off about this.
> Most people's income increases as their wealth increases. That's part of the problem.

But that's already solved by taxing income.
I am a guy, so maybe I don't know what I am talking about. But I have a strong suspicion that the consequences for young women that chose not to take birth control pills can be felt as well and that they often feel quite a pressure from friends, boyfriends, parents, etc. to take the pill.
Truck driving is an interesting case because there are laws restricting when and how long a driver is allowed to operate, and those hours must be logged. At the same time, that logging is done on a company-owned device (or, less and less often now, a paper log booklet), and only when the employee is using the work vehicle.

It's completely unreasonable to expect employees to consent to location tracking when they aren't at work. But if the employer is requiring use of a smartphone app as condition of employment, they need to provide and pay for the device and service, period.
FAANG has a system for firing people who can't cope with the complexity of the job. There is a huge survivors bios. To be a FAANG engineer you need to be able to pass the interview and have the skills (mostly people skills) to navigate a large system.
This isn't upvoted enough, дорогой коллега.
FAANG jobs are one thing: they are so big they have to have filters, even if those filters lose good people.

Small companies cargo-culting FAANG interview processes on the other hand...
Umm maybe because the blood clot issue is being underreported because no one is looking for it? We’re essentially doing mass experimentation with gene-based vaccines on the US population, all the vaccines use either mRNA or DNA insertion. Caution here is the logical and ethical thing.

Also: the side effect profile for the moderna and pfizer vaccines in the clinical trials was far WORSE than the jnj vaccine.

Edit: gene-based not gene-therapy
Whether or not this is true, that is not what the messaging is.
I think the Cyclically Adjusted PE ratio is more useful in this regard. It does seem to point to overinflated prices compared to earnings. The current PE ratios are only surpassed by those during the dot-com boom when people found it difficult to create valuations grounded in reality. One theory is this is due to access to cheap capital in the last decade +

https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
How big is the US economy compared to South Korea? Better yet, California alone vs South Korea?
Are we sure that's all it's doing, or is geofencing just the primary function of the app? Does the app have no ability to save/track coordinates, and do the terms of service/privacy policy reflect that?