skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Low-censorship forums tend to be 90% idiocy, 10% really interesting and accurate takes on reality that are suppressed elsewhere. Often they also have a lot of brilliant humor. So I would not say that they are purely idiotic, just largely idiotic. To me it is often worth it to dig through the idiocy in search of the awesome content.
There is a little bit of a survivorship bias with regards to old tools. The crappy ones broke long ago but the quality ones survived. But also, there were not the modern manufacturing methods we have now back there. There was no hammer with a plastic integral handle, everything was wooden and cast iron or tool steel. You could easily buy or make a wooden replacement handle when the old one rotted away. There was no dirt cheap Chinese forged metals so everything was more expensive and you took better care of the metal parts. Dulled edges were sharpened, peened hammers would get grinded down, broken rivets could be replaced. The few electric tools were beefy, simple, and offered easy replacement of the brushes. You also may have just experienced what happens when poor people have little access to the latest and greatest cheap stuff at the store, they make do with what they have. Compare that to the numerous old cars still on the road in Cuba, parts are difficult to source so when something breaks you'd go to the mechanic with a rudimentary machine shop that could fabricate a replacement part.
Can I ask for a reality check, then?

I've broadly tech-savvy, and I can do some programming. I taught myself Lua for the sake of making game addons, I've dabbled in Java and Javascript (and tiny bits elsewhere). Most of my projects of note, outside of gaming, are simply little utility scripts for my own curiosities, nothing shared. My career thus far has been a decade of retail, but at least I'm currently in an entry-level management position.

Is there a core there worth trying to sell for a tech job?
> I have trouble imagining you can't figure that out on your own.

I'm not being coy, as if I really know what you think, but I'm asking anyway just to be frustrating. I mean, I have an idea, but I also didn't want to make assumptions about your intent, when it's just as easy to ask you to elaborate. After all, it's your point that it was incorrect, so I just wanted to know why.

Any way, you said there are "legitimate ways to suggest submitting a patch, but this isn't one" (I'm paraphrasing). To me that didn't really make sense, because that implies one of the wrong ways to suggest submitting a patch is to suggest submitting a patch.

> If that's really the case, then take a little time and explain exactly what impact you think that comment would have had on the person they were replying to

In my mind, it seems like the effect that it would have on them is to suggest to them to submit a patch. Alternatively, it might also have no effect, because they might not care enough to do anything about it, or just be busy, which is also ok. They don't have to listen to any advice, and it was given in good faith, without malice.

I can also imagine a situation where it is technically possible for someone to attribute all sort of weird malice to "so submit a patch" that wasn't actually there. After all, people can feel however they want. However, in my opinion it's quite rude to assume about someone without knowing them that they're such a fragile creature as to invent malcontent where there is, in my eyes, obviously none.

So going back to when I said "I have an idea", I meant that yeah I can imagine, after this back and fourth, that maybe you would assume something like this about someone else - that they can't hear "so submit a patch" without taking it en every wrong way possible - but I didn't want to make that assumption without at least giving you the opportunity to explain yourself.

Ok, on to exploring other ways to encourage them to submit a patch. You could say, "Do you know you can submit a patch?", "Feel free to submit a patch", "This looks like a documentation bug, would you submit a patch?". All of these also seem fine to me.

> If you do that work, I'm glad to try to help you see where their approach falls short in terms of sincerely encouraging contribution.

What I don't like about this, personally, is that you're convinced their suggestion wasn't sincere, as if there has to be an ulterior motive. As if believing that a programmer on a startup forum is capable of fixing a documentation bug is so crazy, there can be no other explanation than really they were trying to humiliate the other person.

Any way, I do believe that you're trying to be helpful and it's not really that big of a deal so no worries. Hope you can believe me when I say I'm being sincere as well. Basically, a lot of people have different ways of encouraging each other, and there are a lot of different styles of encouragement that people appreciate. It doesn't mean that one you don't agree with is wrong. When I read "so submit a patch", my mind didn't immediately go negative, and I hope the recipient of that didn't either.
> because that's the way things are these days

Why is nothing done about this? As turnover soars and tenure plummets, I am willing to buy that companies do not value codebase knowledge, domain knowledge, or believe that it takes time for an engineer to get going. I can buy them seeing us engineers as replaceable widgets.

But we are at the point where a lot of companies cannot replace us and yet nothing is done about the endless parade out the door. The focus is entirely on shovelling new people in.
I work at FAANG (not Amazon) and have worked for similar companies. I was rejected by multiple top tier hedge funds after 1-2 tech rounds, after getting a mid tier hedge fund a few years ago. I interviewed with multiple then pre-IPO companies that have since IPO'd. They all asked Leetcode Hard problems on the phone screen even. My original FAANG + hedge fund interviews from a few years ago were not even quite as difficult, just some dynamic programming questions and tricky recursion, mostly Leetcode medium with some hards thrown in occasionally.

I also got an offer from a crypto exchange which is a household name, but they claimed they switched to non-negotiable offers and wouldn't even match my current TC. I had to walk.

Now wondering if this is just some game that companies are playing to either make themselves seem more selective or show "growth" through hiring / headcount to make investors happy. The interviewers also seem less enthusiastic about selling their companies to me, and more like they already made up their minds that they do not like me. One kept asking me more and more questions to cause us to run out of time so that I wouldn't be able to code.

The questions I'm being thrown at all are ridiculous in difficulty now, and the interviews feel like they are designed for me to fail. Who can code a segment tree in 20 minutes? I ended up completing this one, and it wasn't even the hardest question I was asked. I even had a recruiter ask me to prepare for their company's interview by doing TopCoder Div 1 500 problems. That's absurd (IOI difficulty level). There are people in Eastern European countries who do nothing but train for these competitive programming problems with coaches and all since secondary school.

I suppose I will just remain in my relatively cushy FAANG job. Despite having very little time to prepare, being employed while interviewing can be a good thing, after all.
They least they could do is let you know up front what the interview process is going to be like. From what I've seen the candidate often has no idea if the second interview is the final interview or just the next in a long series. And I've even seen employers wait weeks befor calling back to inform the candidate they qualify for a third interview.

And if you have a revolving door of workers, that suggests something else is wrong. Maybe you should focus on retaining existing workers rather than acquiring new ones.
You're answering a statement no one made.

They asked "what does it cost vs just ignoring it". The point is just ignoring it (in other words assigning it 0 value) shouldn't be on the table.

I'm also giving this person the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're not asking if accessibility costs infinity dollars.
Jack is banking on the low-wages and IQ of the majority of CashApp users
If someone is new to the interviewing process, then they shouldn't be doing interviews alone. If they don't know how to gather information from a resume, then they shouldn't be reading resumes alone.

You say that a bad hire is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but if that's the case, then most of what you said is irrelevant because a company that is smart enough to recognize this would be smart enough to never put a junior manager in a situation to make a terrible decision.
oh absolutely and it is all most economically optimal and rational thing to do for everyone involved. It is just soulless and dismal. each step of the way is rational in isolation, its when it all together that it becomes an awful abomination .
Your response is the voice of the company. The person you're responding to, and lots of candidates, don't really care about the voice of the company. From a company's perspective, sure waste all the time you want, you want to be _sure_. But to candidates, getting dragged around sucks, and is usually a waste
> I've speculated that one of the justifications for the ancient Egyptians to build pyramids was as a combination of a skills-development, skills-retention, skills-demonstration, and brain-drain-mitigation programme. From what I've read there's at least some independent informed speculation along similar lines.

Brain drain mitigation? Brain drain just wasn't a possibility 4400 years ago.
To Fight Vaccine Lies, Authorities Recruit an ‘Influencer Army’
Ha yes, the internet would be secure if powered off. But apart from that the most secure is only sending pixels ..
or drawing instructions.
This is from April 2020.

You can find a few implementations (1, 2) to play with now if you’re interested…

I found the video series [3] in the latter particularly interesting in trying to understand it, if you’re game to sit through a few hours of live stream.

[1] - (rust) https://github.com/dkellner/chronofold

[2] - (js) https://github.com/jmatsushita/purescript-chronofold

[3] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gg5q_V7tBjE&pp=sAQA
Afterpay has been a godsend for my girlfriend's (brick-and-mortar) business, which is in niche luxury items (keeping it vague).

Customers love using Afterpay, they search on Afterpay for products they want, and are redirected to her store. Online sales went from being essentially no part of her business to being 75% of her sales, and are probably the only reason her business survived the pandemic.

She has no problem with the fact that she needs to pay commission fees to Afterpay - it's a tiny fraction of the (unprofitable) amount that she would have to spend on advertising to achieve the same amount of sales.
Well it's certainly widely established that "noob" is more derogatory [1] [2]. Take that for what you will when you choose to use it.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/noob

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbie#Connotations_of_variant...
I'm Canadian but worked briefly in a call centre during university. We were contracted out by different organizations -- the Veterans of Massachusetts, the Alaska State Troopers, the Hero Fund for Florida, etc., -- and we solicited donations for these organizations. What I learned through the process was that all the organizations were bullshit fronts and the donations flowed to different P.O boxes around the country. Most of the contributors were clueless patriots or dutiful elders. Most of the best callers simply made their own scripts and said whatever they wanted to close the deal. Anyway I left obviously but I think about it now and again.
I also work at Shopify, though I only joined recently.

It seems like he works on a different part of Shopify, which might explain our difference in opinion. The Ruby code I write has to be typed: true at minimum, usually typed: strict.
I don't mind going through a single day with many rounds, but when it's spread out it's super frustrating. It feels really disrespectful of my time. I interviewed at Apple and had like 3 onsites with different teams all in one week and got the results quite quickly. It was such a good experience compared to some companies where it's such a chore.

I also think the attitude of companies during interviews really sucks. Many feel like they're doing you a favor or you're wasting their time. That was a distinct feeling I got when interviewing at Google, but not at Apple and I really think it's why I passed those and not google. They were collaborative and fun at Apple. I put a lot of effort into making candidates at my company feel welcomed and like they are already part of the team and IMO it really helps them succeed.
Aren't FAANG companies doing at least 4-5 interviews now?

More and more companies are doing this now in tech space (AU) as well. My last 4-5 job app contains 5 interviews, even the medium sized one.

It is super annoying for me, but I'm not sure what to do about it, some of my dream big tech companies are like that so I have to go through that. I'm pretty sure a lot of people go through with that because that's their dream job too, not because they liked it
The guy's an asshole, but people spending months studying in the (mostly vain) hope that they'll get a job at FB kind of have it coming (myself included). If anything, it's a good lesson for them to learn the value of their time, and whether they want to dedicate so much of it to then be subject to people's whims.

Have realistic goals, and know yourself well. If dedicating months for an interview and getting rejected on a whim is going to affect your mental health, don't do it. You can make a pretty good living without working at a FAANG.

> and hurting careers as a protest.

Sorry - but being rejected at one company won't hurt your career. If it does, you have bigger problems.

(Non-disclaimer: I'm not at FAANG, but I don't approve of their interviewing styles).
I am actually going through the hiring process now. I was a hiring manager at my last shop and I tried to be very respectful of the candidates time.

The process was first interview was 30 mins and basically a getting to know you and us session. Second interview was a two hour technical interview with debugging/fix this function type question and a single from scratch example question in the candidates language of choice. The final round was purely optional if the CTO or CEO wanted to meet the candidate (they rarely did).

If you made it through all that you got an offer. Of all the candidates I hired only 1 didn't work out long term.

Now that I am on the other end, I don't understand the need for this overly complex and generally noncommittal (on the employer side) process. If it's FAANG I am lucky if I can even get a fucking job description these days. They want to interview me for jobs I can't know about and best fit me for their needs. What about my needs? What about my time? If I can't even get a job description, why do you think I want to waste 3 hours doing "homework" before I can even talk to anyone for more than 10 minutes about what possible job I could be actually doing for you?

Hiring in Tech is broken and I don't know what we can do to fix it.
neocities.org
I learned a new word

https://wor.do/Zoombombing
Actually, I forgot to pay homage to LightTable. It had a fantastic vision, a compelling initial demo, and showed it was possible to radically innovate in the editor landscape. IIUC, it played a role in inspiring Atom.

Pity things turned out the way they did. I sometimes feel that if the project had stuck it out for a decade with a slightly less ambitious goal, it could have really moved the computing experience forward — even if only for developers / power users.
I use Todoist as well and like it, but I'm not sure I'd say it "works really well with recurring tasks".

If you schedule a task as "every Wednesday" then a few weeks later reschedule the task to Friday it doesn't ask "this instance or all of them?" or something. That entire task series is now scheduled for that particular Friday, and once you've ticked it off you won't get any more reminders ever.

If I'm doing something wrong, please let me know. :)
I tend to use my memory for my todo list, which accomplishes this quite naturally.

The key is to really address your feelings of guilt over the whole process of just forgetting about shit that was never that important to begin with.

Which I think is probably the biggest inherent problem with TODO apps (and Jira backlogs).
Glad to continue seeing regular reminders of what failed economic and legal systems look like in my very own backyard.
Did he call you by your username "artificialLimbs", or your real name?
Actually the fee is not far higher than Amex. Depends on the business, it can be a blessing or a curse.
I was about to make precisely the same comment. I would add that it’s trivially easy to make your own site superior in every way to these centralized sites, by applying basic principles of web design and simply not tracking your readers.
In some cases, I think using a heap storage mechanism plus tags is a much better solution. Then things like tags for date and tags for location can become at least partly automatic.

Coming up with a single canonical naming system where each thing can live in one and only one place is not a good solution in many cases, like photographs.

In general, naming of things is the only universal “hard” problem that I know of. Each subject area has their own hard problems to deal with, but all subject areas have to deal with naming.

And sometimes the best solution is to tag and not name at all.
Because selecting candidates based on tech stack is almost universally the sign of incompetent tech management. Anybody who understands software, knows that intelligence and master of fundamentals trumps tech stack experience without exception. Linus Torvalds would unquestionably become a better Ruby on Rails developer within four weeks than 90% of people with 10 YoE in it.

Good organizations hire talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE fundamentals. Bad organizations think "oh we use Java, better hire Java programmers". Really bad organizations think "oh we use JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ, better hire people with experience in JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ"

One of the strongest signals of how good an engineering organization or a tech team is how few specific technologies they list in their job ads.
> The size of a union is sufficient to contain the largest of its members.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no part of the C spec that says this:

When initializing a union member that is smaller than the largest member, the remaining bytes will always automatically be initialized to zero.

If I'm right then the following caveat must be added to your statement:

> A pointer to the union points to each of its members, and can be dereferenced to access it.

... if and only if the member which was originally initialized is at least as large as the other member being accessed.

In other words, if you write your program in a way that ensures it will only compile when all union members are exactly the same size, and you have mandatory tooling to make sure that any changes to said union follow the same rule by force of compilation errors, then and only then can you claim what you claimed without the threat of undefined behavior.
So I’ve seen levels.fyi before, but it’s hard to tell how close they correlate to offers (due to appreciation and/or location based pay).

I also feel like companies paying more than Google (3/4 you listed) probably have a decently rigorous interview (I don’t have much spare time for prep, sadly).
Running a 51% attack is not rocket science. It doesn't involve inventing anything new. When they can print the money to fund it it doesn't even require a business plan. All they need to do is buy up enough hash power and they win. Come on now, if there's anything we can learn from 2020, it's that the Fed is extremely efficient at printing money to buy things to shore up their fiat monetary regime.
Finda – Search everything in less than 16ms
> If it's FAANG I am lucky if I can even get a fucking job description these days. They want to interview me for jobs and best fit me for their needs. What about my needs? What about my time? If I can't even get a job description, why do you think I want to waste 3 hours doing "homework" before I can even talk to anyone for more than 10 minutes?

Why don't you find people working on a problem you like, then ask them if they have open positions?

Working though engineers is almost always better than filtering though company recruiters. You'll wind up with a role you like rather than being stuffed into open head count.

I've done this. It works.
Does this also apply to Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay? Giving out a loan is by itself not predatory. It's the interest rate and other collection practices which make it so. Afterpay looks to have basically the most consumer friendly terms in the industry right now, so I'm not sure what exactly classifies them as predatory?
That doesn’t make any sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
That works when you're employing a bunch of Wordpress monkeys who do nothing all day but mess with CSS and install plugins. Not so much when you've got a mature SAAS product, parts of the system are tricky to work with, and stakeholders are breathing down your neck to implement new features so you don't have time to cross-train your teams.

Losing people who are experts within the domain of the software they're maintaining because you refuse to invest in them is going to cost you thousands of dollars... the only question is whether that's tens or hundreds times that amount... and in some cases it can cause you to lose your entire business.
Perhaps the tens of millions of dollars in annual income driven by television broadcasting and advertising sales is also a large part of their reality and motivation, no?
Didn’t see it mentioned yet, so I’m going to drop the link. Joel Spolsky did a very good writeup in 2007 (back when Apple released Safari for Windows) on the different font rendering strategies Mac and Windows take. MacType is, fundamentally, an attempt to implement Mac’s font rendering algorithm on Windows.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-ant...
At this point any highway expansion is climate arson.
Almost all Todo apps have the problem of showing you stuff that you are incapable of just seeing things you _can accomplish right now_.

I think people underestimate the amount of pain that comes from, over and over again, looking at a list of things you can't do anything about at a moment X.

The only TODO app that I've found get this at least 95% right is Omnifocus with its billions of settings. Though there's still sometimes a wish to have a "this part of the todo tree is still under construction" node.

I think that this absolutely fundamental failing has soured everyone on almost all of these kinds of apps. Which is a shame, because _if you put in the work to actually write out stuff_, it becomes much easier to get stuff done, and not feel bad about stuff.

People drag on GTD but David Allen is basically right (at least if you are living in the mindset of wanting to really work yourself hard). It's the task management equivalent of doing your budgetting seriously. Yeah, sometimes the problem is just that you need to make more money, but when you have your budget under control a lot of stress just disappears.
We need to tie all governmental fee/fines (muni, civil, criminal, even patent/trademark) to 1040 income level.

A wealthy man get's a $625 red light violation, and it's dinner conversation.

A poor man get the same punishment, and it could be the last straw.
You made the mistake to assume that we are idiotic enough to be emotional for job interviews.

It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.