skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this situation is unpleasant and there are losers with no winners. That being said, I can see the perspective of the licensing board.

Presumably the point of the PE title is a reliable stamp that means "this person is a solid, educated, experienced and politically neutral individual who will keep your buildings standing". It isn't appropriate for engineers to weigh in on political questions about how people should live their lives in their professional capacity.

This is a lesson I suspect the software semi-engineering profession will learn when the cost of the political battles Silicon Valley is engaged in start to come due. Much like in religious contexts "be good" somehow morphs into "spill blood" when people try to control what others can and cannot do. Engineers should not go anywhere close to even the outskirts of that fight. Whoever wins it deserves a functioning, well engineered society.

Strong Towns is cool with me, but it is a political project trying to do good. That sits in tension with professional engineering. Engineers do good, but not with activism.
There are lots of different perspectives on education in this thread, yours included, and I respect that. It's a complicated issue, and no two people have the same experience. This is why I always tell people not to just blindly follow my path because it worked for me, that's the same as just taking the path your parents want or worse.

I still want the main takeaway to be that we shouldn't necessarily always be pushing teenagers straight into College, and that something clearly needs to change.
> You can prove programs are correct. The only possible flaw they can have is the specification is wrong.

So specifications are kind of like programs?

Have you heard of logical positivism?

> That's very much not what I said. There may be many reasons.

My point was that it always seems to be some external factor. That strikes me as being very convenient.

> Assuming some conclusion without actual research is braindead.

I didn't think I assumed anything. Like anybody else, I have many things that I need to assess in my day to day life, and often deal with considerable uncertainty.
"Small enough to fit in your bedroom."
Ferrari backed it up by winning Grand Prix races year after year. I don't know much about the ones since Enzo died, but the older ones were frequently race cars that were softened up a bit so they could be driven on the street.

It also showed in that Enzo didn't give much of a crap about interior quality or amenities. He had to be forced into adding A/C. All he cared about was the performance of the cars. He also was (in)famous for refusing to sell Ferraris to people he thought were not appropriate. Ferrari will never sell one to Justin Bieber again :-)
It's not just Ontario. It's pretty much all of Canada. Everyone should be careful about this.

Quebec's equivalent of PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario) is the OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec). People in Ontario and Quebec have gotten nasty letters threatening legal action even for saying they're software engineers on Linkedin. Microsoft fought the law in Quebec and lost.

Alberta, BC, and even New Brunswick have similar laws. Other provinces might too.
Ya know, I've heard this repeatedly over the past 15 years, but I've never actually encountered this mythical "senior programmer who can't code." Never worked with one. Never interviewed one. Never met one at a meetup. I think it's just a boogeyman used to frighten hiring managers.
At my college there was a class where one of the teacher assistants got ahold of the answer key and handed it out to class mates. The memorized the key, not the answers, but the actual “A,B,A,C,C…” of the key. We told the professor, so he just rearranged the answers. So every student that cheated got a perfect 0. This had the effect of them failing the assignment on their own, and also telling you who the cheaters were.
The bulk of a modern video driver on linux (and most operating systems) is not in the kernel. The kernel module just facilitates communication between the user space drivers in mesa and the hardware.
Quebec also, as well as Texas for a couple of years.
Perhaps that shows that these students figured out they're not so great at computer science, but ended up knowing a lot of people who were - and how to use their skills to make a small fortune.
You are talking about aniti-zionism, that is different from antisemitism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Zionism
Sure. My most vivid memory of the 2003 protests was all the Bush fans in the crowd.
I used to hate leetcode-style coding interviews, but now I don't. The reason for this is a comment from a Google engineer. That comment changed my mind. In that comment they explained the motivation behind asking these type of questions and it all finally clicked for me.

Corporations are not testing your knowledge of algorithms per se. While that knowledge is obviously important, what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. Essentially, they are testing your will power. You know the rules. Can you achieve success and not give up in the middle of the road by skipping, say, Dynamic Programming? They could've tested your level of dedication by asking to bake some fancy cake, but throwing CS-related questions just makes much more sense.

That reasoning completely changed my perspective about algo-heavy coding interviews.
In North America, earthworms are an invasive species...
> 30 software developers

- iOS rider app

- android rider app

- iOS driver app

- android driver app

- ride/driver matching

- routing/supply

- security/compliance

- fraud detection/prevention

- backend rides services

- backend user services

^ 10 teams of at least 10 people off the top of my head. Amazing how underestimated engineering resourcing needs are.
There were pools of gasoline (or at least light sweet crude) you could roll up to, at one time.

Those turned out to be scarce and limited, and were used up quickly.
I live in the PNW and it's astounding how many people here aren't prepared at all. And I don't mean "aren't prepared" as in "aren't Preppers", I mean they don't even have a basic emergency kit.

I don't consider myself a prepper at all, and I have dried food (beans, rice, etc.), water, space blankets, and a few other things all tucked into a rubbermaid next to my camping gear. By contrast, I know people with young kids that pretty much don't do any prep at all beyond having a first aid kit in the house.

I suppose the difference is that we had an "atmospheric river event" back in November and for me, it demonstrated just how poorly prepared the government is for dealing with this stuff, and how fragile/tenuous our link with the rest of the country is (I live on Vancouver Island).
And what exactly does that have to to with an intro OO class? Is this a "if it's lower level it must be harder" kind of thing?
Nobody trains for it and everyone thinks it's easy.
These companies were always net value destroyers. Consumers being subsidized from the pockets of investors was nice while it lasted, but it doesn't make for a sustainable business. Once they go to zero we'll wonder how it ever even appeared to make sense.
3 problems I can see with this

a) Its like saying a Tobacco company has a paper saying smoking is healthy

b) Google measures things that matter to them. The operate on a scale that 99% of companies aren't. Their predictor of success only applies to companies of their scale.

c) What is their definition of success? And how does it apply to smaller companies less than 1000 employees?
> Math cannot modify the value of a variable--either global or local. It cannot mutate an element in an array.

Computer scientists do this all the time. You most definitely can model state, side effects, non-determinism, IO, random acts of God etc. using pure math. TLA+, Coq, Isabell/HOL, LEAN etc. are proof assistants that are routinely used to do exactly that.
Location: Austin, TX

Carrier: AT&T

Technology: VHDSL

Theoretical Speed: 70mbps down, 10mbps up
Practical speeds: 25-40mbps down most of the time, sometimes as much as 7mpbs up

Cost: not sure. I haven't looked at a bill recently, but I think it's like $100

Other: Note that there is just one gigabit-class carrier in this neighborhood -- Spectrum. We used them years ago, but found they were too unreliable, so switched to AT&T. It's a lot slower, but more reliable than Spectrum. AT&T has tried to sell me GigaPower on several occasions, but then they tuck their tail between their legs and run, once I point out to them on their own site that they can't actually deliver GigaPower in this neighborhood. Go two miles in any direction from this neighborhood, and GigaPower is actually available, as is another gigabit-class carrier, like Grande. Funny that.
IIRC, most Helvetica fonts on Windows computers were installed by Adobe applications, which might explain why the fonts were designed for print instead of screen rendering.
"Put a shoe on your head"
What bothers me in this story is that it makes it sound as if it's easy to spot from the whatsapp chat who cheated. That doesn't make sense to me. Surely the students who cheated the worst were the ones who used the shared answers from the chat. But how do you monitor that? Those who shared the answers obviously got them by other means, so did they really cheat or just be too helpful by academic standards?
> I've had plenty of people crush the theory portion of the interview and be poor performers on the job (slow coding, low volume output)

I think the reason for that observation relates to why these interview tests are generally a waste of time.

Based on the tests that I've seen, they are 'recall lots of useless information' tests. That means it's actually possible to study for these interview tests (if you have the desire) and if you can ace the test by just spending time memorizing answers.

However, 'slow coding' has very little to do with coding and everything to do with problem solving. You only learn how to problem solve through lived experience and many people never learn that skill.

These interview tests generally fail only because they're not actually testing for the skills needed to do the job.
From everything I've seen in having spent about as many years out of school as in it, it's way more likely that you make it a few years in and then burn out without fully paying off the debts. Is your plan really to spend the next 30+ years hating your workday, then bringing the bad mood to the dinner table?

I say that having also been the cheater who hated the material and got the grade. Why did I do that? Parents wanted me in a "good career," same as everyone else. They saw a script and they kept pushing in that direction. So I convinced myself into it, at least for a while. It was phony baloney given that in my actual career the majority of my money has been made by crypto speculation and miscellaneous random opportunities, not anything that ever needed a credential. Fortunately I pushed myself onto a path that actually worked for me along the way and graduated right when I was actually starting to appreciate the coursework. Some people make it all the way through medical or law school and then immediately quit the field.

My advice is this, basically - don't try to win at your career, just try to survive; winning is a temporary thing that you can get by pushing harder for a short period, but surviving is a matter of doing everything at a viable level, forever. If you really think this is the best shot you have under the circumstances to achieve a decent life for everyone concerned, then sure, by all means. But aim to exit towards something that actually fits you as soon as possible, even if it's a "simple" move like going from IC into management.
Isn't that the whole thing about the fact that when we look at any patch of sky, we don't see it just lit up with stars filling all of it ? Like if it was infinite and we had infinite stars randomly distributed, there's be a patch of sky where we'd have an infinite amount of stars in front of eachother. The fact that we do see darkness between stars indicates that there is some portion of the universe that has an edge.

Then again, there's the matter of looking so far back that you can't see stars because it's so old and thus it's not that there is an edge but just that we can't observe one.
One reason I'm self-employed now is to avoid this whole flaming hoop audition game. Thankfully my customers don't want to test me. At this point I'm tired of arguing against coding interviews, because the same arguments have already been repeated ad nauseam, and the linked article doesn't seem to me to add anything new. I just don't want to hear about any "talent shortage", because too many programmers are being systematically excluded out of fear of the dreaded "false positive".
HN is a bubble of negativity. I see juniors light up when seeing react and trying it out for the first time. And I don’t know anyone irl who dreads react.
Absolutely. State Machines are easily modelled in pure math. TLA+ is but one example of this.
I was confused about the winking he did concerning the violation of Lucas (or Disney whichever) copyright. He'd probably throw a fit and a lawyer if someone decided to sell SAVAGE t-shirts or his very nice messenger bags.

I'm not a fan of hypocrisy nor a fan of corporate bludgeoning of people doing small projects for profit. I'm kind of confused now - any insight on this for me?
> when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.

I've never heard of this interpretation before, it seems this is a difference in whether the GPA should represent a student's actual grade on assignments, or the student's overall achievement relative to their piers. It seems the curve exists for the latter ideology - you can't expect every FAANG recruiter to say "well they got 2.9 from Georgia Tech, that's better than this 3.4 from Duke", if they did, you'd probably have pretty arbitrary hirings (although, if it became policy, I can see some Googler making an internal tool to 'normalize' school GPAs); although it seems MIT has a "no curves" policy and graduates still manage top-tier GPAs.
Maybe I’d prefer to not dance like a monkey for employment.
You can buy problem sets and answers online and I suspect that's one way people might cheat especially on homework. A lot of schools just reuse textbook problem sets or have a bank of questions they use for problem sets and exams, especially for larger classes, and people can buy all the answers online and find the ones they need. I think during the Covid pandemic when things moved online that really accelerated but previously it was a grey area since it could be just a form of studying.

It's sad because I think a lot of those classes are curved and people who don't cheat probably have a disadvantage. Despite putting more effort in and maybe even knowing more than other students, people who don't cheat could end up at the bottom of the curve but might have actually fared better under different conditions.
Interesting that they both founded cryptocurrencies. It’s not surprising that academic success is uncorrelated with being able to run a good Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff was extremely successful in his time, but he wasn’t a prodigy either.
From my understanding of cryptocurrency and the people in it, I don't have the premise that founding a billion dollar (or 10 billion dollar) cryptocurrency is laudable.

It strikes me that your comment would read by crypto fanbase as a success story, and yet as crypto detractors like myself as even further reason to regard them as terrible... you may have just invented the "completely unintentional if-by-whiskey argument[1]"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey
I don't think you understand the problem.

Here, try to align these without changing individual p's CSS:

https://jsfiddle.net/a3q87ucs/

You see how the second text is lower. That has to do with internal font settings that CSS has no control of. Not yet at least.
> Mathematics is the science of describing patterns ...

Ah, but mathematics doesn't require the scientific method.
Come on now, if you're sharing screenshots of the test and asking other students for answers, you know, they know, everyone knows: you're cheating.
You're trapping yourself into a 30-40 year career that you clearly can't make yourself care before you've even started. What exactly do you think is going to happen to you 10-20 years into your career? Growth and advancement are continually expected for an engineer over the course of their career. And the engineering professions aren't large communities; get a reputation as "that mediocre guy that doesn't care about his profession" and it's game over.

And the worst part is that you're doing this to yourself. You won't have anyone else to blame for it.
It's one of the many horrible ideas which ruined google search. There was time when Image search was very useful, then Pinterest came along and made google image search unusable. If you did see an interesting image it prevented you going to the original page unless you log in. Luckily we found a number of ways to block Pinterest so we never see it these days.
Ans SUPER expensive ones that appear to make a 3D hologram in the air.

However, wouldnt it make sense to change the shape from a square to a wedge/arc that more accurately follows the arc of its orbit and resulting in a tighter pitch between scan line?
… pretty sure OP is sarcasm.
I used to be an infra engineer. Can’t code (just never made the time to buckle down and grind leetcode or Project Euler out, bit of personal development regret on my part), can glue components together with code (have open source projects I maintain that reflect this), but not an SWE, and the expectation seemed to be you’re either a SWE or an SRE (which is just an SWE in an on call rotation). It taught me to leave for infosec/risk/compliance (more comp, no code or on call expectation).

People out there who can’t code interviewing for SWE roles, I can’t speak to, but there are definitely folks being asked to be fluent in code for non SWE roles who aren’t SWEs, so it makes sense everyone gets put through the leetcode grinder rubric to calibrate their level. I don’t think this is about misrepresentation, but expectation misalignment and a crude tool being necessary to evaluate human skills against a baseline.

(nearing 40, 22 years in tech, getting out asap, ymmv)
Not having to deal with external state was one of the foundational design goals of octoDNS. The other being specifying a record once and pushing it to multiple providers. Those two in combination were the main reasons we didn't end up using Terraform to manage DNS and started octoDNS.

That did require making the initial decision that octoDNS would own the zone completely so that it could know it's safe to remove records that aren't configured, but later work with filters and processors does allow softening that requirement.

I've always had similar feelings about Terraform's state, in fact I started in on a prototype of an IaC system specifically to see if it was workable to avoid external state. The answer as far as that POC made it was yes. I was able to create VPCs, subnets, instances, to the point I stopped working on it. It was generally straightforward, but there was a hiccup for things that don't have a place to store metadata of some sort and the biggest issue was knowing when they were "owned" by the IaC.

I think some of the other issues that things would eventually run into would be around finding out what exists (again to be able to delete things.) The system would essentially have to list/iterate every object of every possible type in order to decide whether or not to delete them. Similar to octoDNS this could be simplified by making the assumption that anything that exists is managed, but that's not workable unless you're starting greenfield and it would still require calling every possible API to list things.

Anyway, I see why Terraform went the way it did, but I still wish it wasn't so. Thinking about it now makes me want to pick the POC back up...

(maintainer of octoDNS)
Your second point is noted in the https://google.aip.dev/158 guidance.

> Request messages for collections should define a string page_token field, allowing users to advance to the next page in the collection.

> * If the user changes the page_size in a request for subsequent pages, the service must honor the new page size.

> * The user is expected to keep all other arguments to the RPC the same; if any arguments are different, the API should send an INVALID_ARGUMENT error.
>People in Ontario and Quebec have gotten nasty letters threatening legal action even for saying they're software engineers on Linkedin.

Seriously? Are the engineering licensing organizations really scouring linkedin for people calling themselves "engineers, and sending threatening letters to anyone who's not on their list?
Ah. I'm painfully familiar with Open Simulator / Second Life clients, which really do extrapolate (although it's called "interpolation" in the code), and not all that well. There's frequent "rubber banding", where the extrapolation guessed wrong and positions snap back on the next update. My contribution to this was a sanity check against a low pass filtered value to put a ceiling on the error.
This is an article from 2005, so I would temper your expectations.

Totally agreed about it being fantastic work though.
This is a poor analogy. It doesn’t take any effort to drink a bottle of Gatorade, and it tastes good too.

On the other hand, attending a semester’s worth of lectures and engaging with assignments takes a lot of time and effort.
As an undergrad I was heavily involved in the student-led academic integrity organization. This story reads so true to my experiences (from the last millenium, mind you - there was no whatsapp, etc.). My largest cases came from the computer sciences departments. Students thought nothing of copying programs and submitting them as their own.

It turned out, of course, that structural similarities are so obvious. My worst case had 23 students accused of submitting the same program for a lower-level course. I held an event where all (or most) of them attended. Somehow they tried to explain how their use of not-just-similar-but-exactly-the-same variable names, structure and comments in a C or C++ (it's been a while) program. I mean, exactly the same. One spent an hour berating me on the phone (well before I figured out that I could just politely end the conversation and hang up) explaining that it was his work. It was not.

I was disappointed over and over seeing how blatantly and cavalierly my fellow students would break the rules. It was unpleasant for everyone involved, despite a reasonably lenient punishment process - students, faculty and us alike. I didn't like lording over my fellow students, but felt it was important to hold a line of sorts. I wish very much that there was no need for this function but time and again students turned in work that was not theirs. I strongly suspected at the time that most professors only turned in the most blatant open-and-shut cases. It was particularly sad considering how very much money each class cost.
> Since housing has historically beat the market

this is not true unless you only start counting from the past 10-20 years, and only include regions that _did_ beat the market, rather than globally.

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rvY2rIxdsA
Not everyone is paying a lot for courses.

My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state scholarship program.

Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat.
Most of my friends lost their scholarships due to GPA.

(For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice, for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)
I don't think you need a statistics class to do performance testing.
A perfect zero seems unlikely, unless the answers were changed to 'anything other than the original letter'?