skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are lots of un-googleable problems out there. These questions are meant to identify the people that will probably fail to solve any non-trivial programming challenge (and maybe even some of the trivial ones).

I'm not really opinionated about whether or not you should do algorithmic stuff in the interview, but I don't agree with your reasoning here.

I see chatter about how most problems can be solved with google and your CS teacher lied to you (usually on reddit, less so on HN). My experiences have not matched this. I'd estimate that a good 40-80% of my problems don't have a solution on google. It's pretty rarely an algorithmic problem though.

If you're playing that game, are there reasons that you'd ever be copy pasting sorting algorithms from the internet? Why bubble? Don't most programming languages have libraries available to help (especially python)? I work in an area with very little sorting, but I can't imagine myself doing that in a higher level language, or even in C.
Singapore does not stamp passports upon exit, for example [2]. Here's a list from 2017 of other countries that don't stamp passports upon entry [1].

[1] https://travelupdate.com/countries-do-not-issue-a-passport-s...

[2] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/passport-stamps-no-lo...
Copilot may be the unexpected solution to the holy grail of code reuse. :)
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Compared to the ultra-stupid "let's pump up global CO2 to levels not seen in 4 million years; we swear nothing bad will happen," doing nothing might be a good change of pace for global civilization.
This all started back in the 90´s with companies like Microsoft, but at that time the questions were somewhat reasonable, and just reading something like Programming Pearls was most of what you needed to know.

But I suspect what has happened, is that as those hired by this method got promoted, they started asking harder questions... and that has over time escalated into the current situation which has become somewhat ridiculous in terms of pre-study, etc.
Well, the company does have tens of thousands of employees. I'm not sure how anyone would determine if there are too many. Of course some of the salaried employees are the lifeguards at the pool, the rock climbing wall people, etc. You would probably consider those to be extra, unneeded jobs.
Exactly. I can answer every question on my list, and you'd think any interviewer could because we've all used our interview sheets again and again and seen every caliber of answer. If you waste my time by telling me up front you're going to ask your own questions back at me, I will end the interview and thank you for your time. Not because I can't answer your questions, but because that's not what I set aside this 90 minute block of time for and you know that.

I'm cringing just thinking what it would be like working with someone who had the gall to pull that kind of nonsense.
Listing who performed on the album would add so much more value to these services.

Like a song, why not show the performers so that users can what else they worked on. They'll probably like other projects the performer was involved in.

Apple does have little writeups about albums which I like. Nice to have context about what the album is and why it might be worth listening to.
Thanks for the open invite. I probably won't finish until February or so, but I'll cheer you on in the meantime!
> Of note is an abrupt excursion toward a wet climate between 4.3 and 4.0 ka B.P. followed by an abrupt dry event between 4.0 and 3.6 ka B.P., a wet period between 3.6 and 3.3 ka B.P., and another dry period between 3.3 and 3.0 ka B.P. (Fig. 3, E and F), which can be also observed in the Yangkou cave δ13C record (Fig. 3D) from the middle reaches of the YRV, indicating unstable climatic conditions between 4.3 and 3.0 ka B.P. in the region

That would be very frustrating having your ancestors complain of too much water and you’re living through a ‘mega drought’. Then repeated swings.
I've had a ton of bad interview experiences, but my worst was still Google. This was circa 2012 or so, was my 2nd session of an on-site day. I guess I didn't grow up around a lot of people with thick accents because I could literally not understand a single word this guy was saying, and he didn't seem to understand me. He wanted me to explain the solution before writing any code, but since we were having communication issues I asked if I could write pseudocode.

He slammed (SLAMMED) his fist onto the table and yelled, "NO CODE!"

-----

Other bad experiences included Palantir telling me my onsite went really well, and that they'd like me to come in again to meet the hiring manager. Expecting to talk business, I instead was presented with 2 more algorithm questions. Those apparently went OK, so the next discussion with the recruiter yielded another "informal" (his words) meeting with 2 engineers via VC. Both ended up being 2 more DS/Algo questions.

-----

Another bad one I remember is a request to do a take-home coding test from Docusign (also circa 2012). They wanted me to program a "fully tested" elevator simulation using Stylus, Coffeescript, and Jade. I had never used any of these technologies, so I asked if I could write it in what I was familiar with (jQuery, Backbone, SCSS, ES5), which was denied. It would have taken me a full week to get up to speed on all of those technologies enough to submit a solution worthy of review. Absolutely ridiculous to ask a candidate to learn new frameworks just to complete the interview.
I was expecting a horror story about some leet code problem. It's been 5 years since I last interviewed, but I always memorized how to write the common sort algorithms ahead of time first. Having to write merge sort in C doesn't really feel like a big ask. I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned. Even if we pretend people don't spend months training on leetcode before interviews nowadays, surely sorting algorithms are still taught in basic data structures classes, right?
SEO tools for startups (backlink checkers, site audits, keyword plans)
What's so interesting about this experience it hits so many of the points I've been complaining about in my writing about hiring in the tech industry[0]:

- Giving trick questions that have an "insight" moment, instead of one that has multiple answers, even partial answers to build off of.

- Not letting the candidate pick the language they're comfortable with. The candidate may even know the language they're asked to code in, but if they haven't been working with it recently, an interview is not the right time to pick it up again.

- Making the candidate nervous, both by not being helpful and by watching over them with unnecessary scrutiny.

- Looking for flaws instead of strengths.

People, myself included, are always talking about these problems, but companies have so much inertia, they are not evolving fast enough to solve these problems. No wonder tech companies are filled with people who, while capable, often fit a particular mold, and why we end up in situations where products don't reflect the needs of the market (because the people working on those products aren't representative of the market).

[0] https://hiringfor.tech/archive.html
See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Q7L0TNGtk and hear the new signals here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=UVIGS1XvQAY&...
Show HN: RGBD Video (With Audio) Player Running on WebAssembly
That would be extremely interesting. Would be great to put a dummy where he was squatting in the crank position while you did it too.
Humans do this with pretty much everything where there's a manager to please and bonuses to justify. Compare McDonalds with In-n-Out (which presumably at one time in the past made similar quality burgers).
That actually sounds pretty par for the course in many big tech companies.
He spent all that time engineering the speed, he forgot to engineer the base.
> I will never interview for Google or any other company that
> asks questions like "How many jelly beans fit in a school bus?"

I conducted more than 100 interviews at Google and saw the questions the other interviewers on each panel asked. Google does not ask questions like that.
You can make an ar-15 receiver (legally the gun) out of plate steel from Home Depot and some spacers. The build is from the glory early years of the internet (90s?), so instructions are kinda hard to find. Why bother? CAD drawings for a $800 mill machine are available everywhere. Really, if you've ever held a receiver you'd realize how... primitive it is.

Europeans don't DIY guns because you're next to enough failed states to easily get fully automatic rifles. Why trouble your self with a building a semi-automatic when you can buy the full auto version? Except for Sweden and the UK. They prefer hand grenades and knives respectively.
This is correct, and the hiring process is broken at Apple in myriad ways, some of which you would not imagine would be allowed, let alone encouraged.
Exactly - and they are talking / working with at least some boring accountants in all of this who don't care if things are curated by Jay-Z in their point of sale and merchant clearing systems.
More fatalities happen off highways, where roads are in unusual condition and there are more edge cases.

1. Wouldn’t a 30min commute be 1/3 as worse there’s a 20-25min section you can disengage?

2. It can force reengagement via the same mechanism for L2 highway driving, but there is a period where one need not pay attention. There are also existing car lots on the sides of highways for maintenance, and they could be added and expanded. At worst, the shoulder provides space for hundreds of cars per km.

3. greifers are a problem for any self-driving system

7. The remote drivers need engage only in exceptional circumstances, as the driver would.

9-11. apply to existing geofences, but with far more added complication, including pedestrians and cyclists.
In retrospect I probably will, definitely better to do that than waste a whole day due to one distracted interviewer
> My impression of the facebook interview experience was that it is specifically selecting people that were calm under pressure and well rehearsed.

Yes, the more stressed / slow thinker you are, and the more work you need to put to prepare these interviews. It's not uncommon for people to practice for years.

I don't think these companies exactly want this type of profile, but when you interview 10000s of people, you need some consistent criteria so that all candidates are treated equally. With that constraint, I don't think you can find a better interviewing system.
While I agree four minutes is very quick, if you take into account that no side fits with more than one other side, and that the sides (#, .) may just as well be interpreted as binary numbers, it becomes an issue of parsing, mostly, and then matching numbers.

I remember being flabbergasted at first, and then realizing the above. My solution is here:

https://github.com/linus/aoc/blob/main/2020/js/day-20/app.js
Why bubble sort? Why?!?!?
Both sites serve the same content to their customers. We're not their customers.
> Ideal for hypertrophy? Strength? Power? Fat loss? Probably not endurance...

Small (3-8) sets for strength, bit longer ones for hypertrophy (10-12), but outside of specific extreme endurance training (e.g. long runners), training strength is often better than training endurance regarding to endurance tasks. You'll eventually do more regular PU if you train harder variations than if you simply increase PU volume. Strength work is also amazing for fat loss. Amongst other benefits, training for strength is much faster, and (in my very subjective experience) more psychologically rewarding.

Sources on this matter hard indeed scarce. I'm not saying those are just common knowledge, there are studies pointing toward what I said. I had access to those mostly during my biomechanics classes at University. But it's not amazing meta-analysis with double blind methodology and 3000 subject. Far from that. I'm open to change my mind when new (and better) studies will be released, but as the time of my studies, that's what you learn in universities
Better spell it as bloc to manage local susceptibilities.
Amen.

It's so annoying how people don't realize how manipulated the word "mass shooter" is.
On the very easy end of tech interview style problems, requiring almost no computer science theory yet having concrete solutions, but there's a split between part 1 and part 2 of each challenge, and one of the most interesting parts is having to abstract the first solution to accomodate the second (which might e.g. introduce a new constraint or scale up the problem).
OMFG, they weren't even able to get @block username on twitter. This is so pitiful.
Is it a verb?
Pink mist with subsonic bone shrapnel would still be a terrifying siege weapon.
Of course it's not necessarily easy. But you might as well make the request. If you are in that situation and you're concerned about sensitive data being leaked, then it is an option.
Location: Phoenix/Los Angeles

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Fractional COO/CTO, Architect, Strategic Consulting. Extensive experience in Healthcare in both technology and clinical operations. Created the open source HealthCloud/ClearHealth electronic medical record system.

Notes: I'm author of "Hacking Healthcare" for O'Reilly. Helmed ClearHealth for 15+ years to a successful 2017 acquisition. Completed a two year project for SUBWAY leading the team modernizing their payments infrastructure.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duff-david-uhlman-281741/

Email: du@50km.com
Not everyone will respond the same to every drug, but the question of whether drug A is one I should take is not -- or at least shouldn't be -- simply a matter of whether the drug is going to hurt me. The big questions in life aren't ones the scientists can answer for us.
LinkedIn has the same "engagement-driven" toxicity that Facebook and Instagram suffer from. That's because "a network for professionals talking about careers" and content limited to work and employment doesn't drive engagement. Squid Game probably does.
Per [0], US firearm deaths (per 100K people per year) minus suicides would put them between Nicaragua and Paraguay, and about double the next country in the developed world. That's still a lot of firearm deaths.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
As a counter-point, IG recently made it much easier to upload content directly from a desktop operating system. It finally added a button for users upload posts from a web browser from a desktop OS (before, you had to switch the browser's user agent to identify as a mobile device, then refresh).

But separately, if professional brands really do take over IG over user-generated content between friends, the runner-up is Pinterest. A February 2021 study of social media usage shows that Instagram usage among US adults is 40% [0], with Pinterest at 31% usage. Beyond Pinterest, the runner-ups for (high-quality, artistic) creative content are platforms like Adobe's Behance or Dribbble, but the users for these are primarily creative professionals.

For user-generated content between friends (day-to-day stuff), Snapchat isn't a bad replacement (25% usage, according to the same survey). I would guess that most content remains user-generated (via photos that delete themselves sent to other friends). I would also guess it's less less harmful to mental health for certain groups, as it doesn't feature Likes or Comments.

To be totally honest, though, I wouldn't regret the loss of user-generated social media content. Exchanging messages, having video calls, and seeing people in-person feels a lot more enjoyable and helpful for strengthening relationships.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...
Adult Free IPTV Channels M3U M3U8 Playlist Daily 2-12-2021
I wonder if their lawyers are type type typing away at this moment...
Hi, Uno Platform dev here. We're not fine with the current payload size of the application, really.

It's definitely too large, and that is the current state of .NET running on WebAssembly, where missing WebAssembly features (like exception handling) are forcing the compiler to generate a lot of code to compensate.

Still, we have one issue in this build where the PWA webworker doubles parts the payload, but even at ~25MB, it is still too big even if it is downloaded once and cached. For reference, the original windows version is around 13MB on disk for x86.

The point of the Calculator exercise is to show the ability to port the Windows calculator as-is (though translated from C++ to C#) to multiple non-Windows platforms. We continue working on that to improve the payload size and performance further, following WebAssembly, browsers and the .NET runtime advances.
Amazon -> Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
You don't need to search for "compelling evidence", it's not like they're hiding it from you.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
This is a great example of intent vs. impact. Regardless of the intent, the impact was negative. Recognizing how their actions impact the candidate is a huge part of interviewing, and the interviewer should have seen the candidate get nervous and adjusted.

That said, given that candidates are generally nervous to some extent anyway, and semi-colons shouldn't matter in a whiteboard interview, that joke seemed like in poor taste to me. That underscores why we need better training and mentorship for interviewers.
> the pilots were not aware this thing was turned on and was steering the plane.

But they were aware of how to deal with runaway stabilizer trim, which is supposed to be a memory item (i.e. don't need to consult the checklist). After the first crash, Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots with instructions on how to regain control. The EA crew did not follow those directions.
Netflix has started to hide away "continue watching" for their algo feed crap for me.
Coming from Israel, where everything is looked at through a military/security/strategic lens, this seems a strategic nightmare, but also wonderful.

Danish people know that neighboring nations won't wage war in the near future and can afford to be several steps removed from survival considerations.

I don't think, however, that Denmark is irresilient. The same supply chain you are worried to be too dependent from has to be quite robust for the country to rely on that. Apart from sudden and rapid events I bet that same supply chain will handle well medium/slow changes like climate change.
Incrementing an atomic counter every time a reference is copied is a significant amount of overhead, which is why most runtimes prefer garbage collection to reference counting (that, and the inability of referencing counting to handle cycles elegantly).

Rust doesn't rely on reference counting unless explicitly used by the program, and even then you can choose between atomically-reference-counted pointers (Arc) vs non-atomic-reference-counted pointers (Rc) that the type system prevents from being shared between threads.
Renders just fine on my Intel MacBook Pro.
This is something that's hard to appreciate with any energy-transfer mechanism: If you reach energies that exceed the capacity to transfer energy, you're just wasting effort.

For kinetic systems, the projectile-target interaction is critical. A flimsier target actually needs an impact to be spread over a larger area. Think of a pellet shot through tissue as opposed to, say, a blast of sand or salt.

There are some analogues with subatomic particles and fast/slow neutrons (slow neutrons are far more effective at sustaining nuclear reactions, as they effectively "stick around" where they're more likely to interact with other nuclei for a longer period of time, and the apparent cross-section of the target nuclei appear larger).

https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Slow_Fast_Neutro...
Not everyone became a developer through CS classes. I'm self-learned, mostly learned what I needed at the job to do that job. I don't think in 10 years I've ever needed to write a sorting algorithm since, well, that's built into the language, so why would I? I've had many jobs, learned many programming languages, and haven't seen one without a sort functionality built-in, or for trickier things where a more advanced library would not be available.

Now maybe this is the whole point, to filter out those who never went to university, but I'd say it's still pretty dumb to test people on things that most likely have nothing to do with the job or just aren't realistic.
I had seen some benchmarks several years ago around the time when the significant GC optimizations had been made, and I could've sworn they were on the order of single-digit microseconds; however, I can't find any of those benchmarks today and indeed any benchmarks are hard to come by except for some pathological cases with enormous heaps. Maybe that single-digit 
µs values was a misremembering on my part. Even if it's sub-millisecond that's plenty for a high 60Hz video game.
Want to put all of the crypto BS under another brand name for when it blows up
Note though, the goal isn't quite to keep you interacting with the app as possible. The goal is to get the most people interacting with the app to get the most revenue.

Probably why a lot of these changes make apps less engaging for people like the author and commenters here. That random boomer photo is probably popular among the average person even though it doesn't fit into your feed. Facebook/Instagram don't care about your interaction and revenue in particular, they care about getting the most interaction and revenue in general.
It's typical for very large C projects to have perhaps 2-5 dependencies that aren't libc, often something very basic such as zlib, curl or openssl. A rust CSV parser has 8 dependencies?
I am no AI scientist, but as a humble software engineer it seems to me that machine consciousness is not viable within a binary computer paradigm. However, if quantum computing, which much more closely resembles the analog nature of neurons firing in the human brain, becomes commercially viable, then, yes, the singularity just might be achieved.
Get some WD40 on that & it'll be as good as new.
Rotten cows have limited perceptions.
I also check out how other people did it on GitHub. But only after I've taken a crack at it myself first.