skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that just makes it harder. Students have been cheating on in person exams since the dawn of time. You get people texting in the exam, people going to the bathroom and looking up answers, students paying other students to take the exam for them, and on and on and on. There is no exam that can't be cheated on. I'm sure that if I weren't so good at school and had significantly fewer morals, I would have been _great_ at cheating on exams
Looking back, I wish I'd cheated. College was fun for partying and living alone and having time to study, but coursework was a joke. I remember skipping my CS 101 class, coming in for the midterm, and finding it insane that they were still trying to get through pointers.

Glad that I at least dropped out when it stopped being fun. Highly recommend dropping out after ~2-3 years if you can get away with it.

You pay for school, do whatever you want with it.
Software isn't all that different. There are plenty of things that the government could mandate.

For example, there could be coverage requirements. Want to work on software that determines if a bridge will be safe or not? Then you need 100% branch coverage.

You gave as an example something from a building code. That's just a test case. There's no reason why for common types of software (CAD, fluid simulators) we could not have repositories of test cases that you must pass to within some tolerance. You could even make it adverserial and let people suggest new test cases.

Or we could decide on some reference implementation that you must either match, or exceed. So if you design CAD software, on any input that both your CAD software can handle that this reference implementation can too, you must match. That's more of a programmatic open ended test case.

If we're worried about discrimination, there's no reason why the the government couldn't publish a set of typical profiles (fake names, locations, credit scores, etc.) that your algorithm must treat equally to within some tolerance.

etc.

We can totally regulate software like we do other engineering disciplines. If we wanted to and thought that the resulting increase in cost and slowdown in development is important enough.
> approximately every C program would benefit from correct pointer analysis, yet this remains an open research question.

To me this falls under "you don't understand the code enough to want to use it". Which in case of unsafe pointers is a well established conclusion. In the C-land even well vetted security-related code keeps on delivering pointer bugs.
So, they're actually testing to see if you have commitments outside of work.

"Great" filtering for parents or people caring for ailing family or any other non-work commitment.

I guess it's not ageism at all, right?
Yes, leetcode skills don't help every day. But I definitely enjoy & respect more fellow coders who have computational thinking skills, who can break down problems, who understand costs.

That this isn't the bulk of what we do doesn't change the fact that these challenges do test computational thinking acuity. Having the ability to see & speak computationally is a good skill, one that connects our day-to-day abstract practice with actual real processes. Being able to break down problems & analyze how to tackle them shows an objective ability to assess & work through problems. I want to work with people who can be clear, who can model & explain & step through situations.

And these skills are, generally, learnable, and relatively quickly. I disagree that these abilities fade, but yes, some re-familiarizing & re-training is probably important, especially because, as you point out, the sample size is indeed often N=1, and that's pretty wild.
I have mentioned this before, but I have a rare metabolic disorder where the prescribed diet is very high in carbohydrates. A drop of as little as ten percent in caloric consumption can send me to the ER. And there's a lot of rolling the dice if I skip a meal (or don't eat enough, or sleep enough, or get a cold, or have alcohol, or ...): pain will come. I have a window where I have to make a decision: do I take medications, which work just fine but also leave me non-functional? Or do I just carb up? If I roll the dice and get too sick, it is off to the ER, where along with the industrial painkillers, they want to drop a full pound of sucrose (not a volume, a weight) into my IV over twenty-four hours. And exercise triggers the same metabolic pathways set off by dieting. Exercise is not a great way to lose weight, abs are made in the kitchen, but I had hoped that at least that was available.

Consequently, if I want to get my weight back down, I have to just keep at a minimal level of misery, keep the pills at hand, and hope my luck holds. Prior to all of this, I could just ... eat very little, or fast if I felt like it. Now, I am being trained via negative reinforcement to just ... chow down on the carbs.
Interview technical folks at a FAANG and I don't asking leetcode questions. It isn't a SWE role but people should be SWE material. I do ask them to

* read code
* extend some working code with a new feature
* parse some semi-structured text into a data structure

Programming interviews suck for everyone, even the interviewer. I feel absolutely horrible when someone locks up, or fails really hard. The questions I ask aren't hard but half don't pass.

What folks should do is practice coding in front of someone. Writing little exploratory snippets and understand the base library of the language they claim to know. I don't even ask people to vocalize while they are working on the problem. And I solve it at the same time they are and if they get stuck, I show them some of my code.

I had one person start crying they put so much pressure on themselves, I had to take a two week break from interviewing after that.
The "right" choices? For who? It seems like engineering culture has suddenly become rife with this exploitative mindset with zero regard for honor.

When you're faced with a public scandal at your hands as CEO after you've cheated your way up the ladder, are you going to admit fault and take a loss for the sake of society or are you going to make "the right choice" for the business and double down on your deception?
i did that a few times at DFW. times were not reliable. sometimes you'd get a ride right away; others, you're waiting a while for no reason. also depended on how well the driver knew how to use square...which you definitely couldn't rely on. also, didn't feel like i'd have much recourse if they did something crazy.
Sorry it took me a while to respond.

I will try not to get too philosophical by first getting “work productivity” out of the equation. You must have tools for work productivity and maybe that’s the focus of OP.

There is the concept of “life productivity” which involves your personal projects, hobbies, your life plans, family, etc.

These are goals and aspirations which are deeply connected to your fulfillment. You can’t really put these in buckets of tasks. In fact, the mere notion of doing so sets you up for failure in many cases.

Imagine getting out of work where you look at a wall of todos to complete just to look at another. It’s exhausting and uninspiring.

By rejecting that concept and instead focusing on inspiration, curation with some level of organization and mapping you are building something something that more closely resembles your priorities and that continues to make you feel proud and happy about your past, present, and future accomplishments.

Happy to chat more about this if you’d like.
> I can guarantee you that "We have to add a bureaucracy to fix all of this" won't actually fix anything.

Is that based on some expertise? Many, many other professions - almost all, I think - have professional licensing bodies and they function well. I think we can figure it out too.
It’s pretty well established that it was more due to Russian social media engineering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...
I agree that if the organization is applying rules unfairly or disproportionately then we need to fix it, but I don't see how privatizing it will do anything but push the problem around. Human organizations have a natural tendency towards politicization because humans are inherently political creatures, orgs should be designed to resist abuse regardless of where their roots are planted.
It's the anti-reuse/anti-recycling approach advanced by Microsoft through software alone, but in co-operation with their earliest hardware partners who wanted to sell more gear in the future before then-current models had finally failed to operate electronically.

Took a while but Apple eventually caught up as a hardware/software company itself.
Africa’s virtual designers are already preparing for metaverse fashion
The justification here, is that focusing on individuals does not solve the problem, and instead only helps you feel better about yourself by how evil you think other people are.

Instead of focusing on why you think other people are more evil than you are, instead people should focus on ways to actually solve the problem, instead of satisfying their internal need for moralization.
I am away from home atm but very interested in making this happen. I'll look into it a bit and get in touch by week's end!
Thanks for the links.
Have a look at this if you’re interested. There are more examples but these are some of the better known ones.

https://www.huggystudio.com/blog-article/the-10-most-impress...
> Tests always get leaked somehow.

Tangentially, it seems incredibly unfair that self-plagarism is a thing because "if you're not coming up with new material then you're not engaging with the course" and yet professors aren't even taking the incredibly simple step of changing a few numbers between repeats of an exam. It's basically self-plagarism from the professor, the professor isn't engaging with the course in the same way that a self-plagarizing student is not.

The dead-simple answer to students who are looking at test banks is to produce semi-novel material for each course, in the same fashion that students are expected to produce semi-novel material for each course. In both cases, yeah, it's kinda trite, there's only so many novel takes you can have on the best way to factor an integer or the implications of shakespeare on russian 20th century literature, but that's the system we've agreed upon.

It should cut both ways and the fact that professors suffer consequences and difficulty from not producing novel material is not really the student's problem. The solutions of forcing syllabus-level contracts-of-adhesion above and beyond the school academic policies is not a fair solution either.

I realize there's usually a "and whatever the syllabus says goes" clause but that's shitty, a lazy professor should not be able to exempt themselves from academic diligence by adding a "and it's OK for this professor to be lazy" clause in a contract of adhesion.
This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there's just a lot of arguments to cheat. I think making the best of that situation would be to participate in the cheating but also make the best effort to understand the material as opposed to leveraging cheating to min-max on effort-grade.

On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the ethical implications.

Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.
pip-compile [0] is the best tool I've found for streamlining dependency resolution, but it may not provide any benefit for one-shot installs.

[0] https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools
Precisely. Especially with (b) and (c)

What works for Google does not mean it will also work for the 99% of companies that are NOT Google or any other FAANMG company.

This only shows that we have an incessant coding interview cargo-cult around how FAANMG companies interview candidates and several startups taking that to the extreme and thinking they are working on complex Google scale problems.

To these interviewers at these startups still under this delusion and for the 900th time as many have previously said for years as a wake up call:

You are NOT Google.
> I'm not going to tell my employer I'm not implementing the design, when I can solve the problem, though in an ugly way.

Though you might make the site pixel-perfect on _your_ device with _your_ fonts (all the combinatorics you can think of to test), you are likely breaking something for a screen reader, or user with 200% zoom, or a braille user, or a user with hardcoded fonts for disability reasons, or a user using a Windows phone browser, or a user on IE 8, or a user viewing the site through a corporate proxy that blocks some requests, or a user with CSS styles disabled, or a user who hasn't updated his Mac in six years, or a miriad of other cases.

When you're reimplementing basing browser functionality, you're breaking your site for a lot of users.
> a Global, free, meritocracy where everyone can compete on an equal playing field

I don't see the Internet this way at all. While the above was a dream of Internet pioneers, now it's mostly fraud, mis- and disinformation campaigns, and parties using their power to dominate the marketplace.

> Every one of them arrogantly thinks their way is the superior way to do things (Across all sides of the political spectrum), despite the existence of contradictory governments with perfectly functioning, and sometimes better functioning societies.

That's ironcially similar to the parent comment, and a good example of what is on the Internet. Instead of facts, serious questions and analysis, it relies on trying to create a tide of emotion.
For both academics and the olympics though, this ends up being an arms race that ends up just hurting those who participate. You wouldn't want an all natural, 90th percentile athlete to feel like the only way they can get ahead (or, worse, even just stay where they are) is by taking drugs with dangerous side effects. Similarly, we surely don't want students who are already doing just alright to feel like they need to get an off-script bottle of adderall in order to not fall behind their peers.
If you want to see it as a keyfabe then fine, but from my perspective the ones that want to sell you an idea by only saying feel-good things, are marketing departments. I've experienced first hand[1] how shitty is the relationship between big tech and open source is, and I hold the FSF partially responsible for it. Had it done a better job at its stated mission[2], maybe things would be better today.

[1] https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/

[2] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom.
Yes, if you exclude ethics - issues of right and wrong - there's little reason not to cheat. But excluding ethics from the picture is more than just "look at it this way", but being amoral. You know, like a psychopath. I hear that's also rewarded in the business world, but doesn't mean you personally have to like it or be that way yourself.

Well, also I would strongly prefer my doctor, pilot, surgeon etc not to be there just because they cheated in exams, but because they know what they're doing.
I dunno, it's pretty clear from the examples that the vector files were created with the intention of being displayed at low resolution and the high-res versions are mutilating some of the effects. For example, the skeleton's teeth and the curve on the satellite dish look right at low res but look like they were drawn by an incompetent at high res.
Yes, a regular for loop is a bit faster at iterating over a large list of elements than foreach in Javascript, but why on earth would you care about that kind of optimization minutia in a coding interview?

The question you're asking involves 10k * 3 * 30 = 900,000 data points. If a candidate wants to simply loop over all of them multiple times a second, I'd say that's a much bigger problem.
Not that this would apply in your case (I don't know you), but in general there are plenty of well-credentialed people that are poor engineers (imo), or who are a good engineer but a poor fit for that company/team/position. And there are people that simply lie on their resume.

If it is standard at the company to give all candidates that same question, this is actually a good way to reduce bias in hiring decisions. Otherwise, you might bias toward hiring, say, people with college degrees or people who worked at large corporations, for example. And this might unintentionally bias against certain demographics that obtain college degrees at lower rates (for example).
That was my first post in this thread.

I think computational thinking is a good objective measure, and is learnable. That comes first to me. I also think acquiring & practicing computational thinking demonstrates will power, a willingness & capacity to tackle something, and that that something is valuable. And it's an objective, common, topical, & agreed upon/expectable test, one that doesn't rely on socially convincing someone in 5 minutes you indeed have willpower.

If you only think of this as trying to get good at Leetcode, I think you risk ignoring the actual lessons. Leetcode is an ok practicing grounds, but what's being tested relies on a mix of computer science and problem solving, and just going to leetcode & trying to get good there will probably eventually work out, but you'll miss the computer science that would actually be helping you.
Worth pointing out that Bell's Theorem and experiment have ruled out hidden variable explanations, leaving only instant "communication"
Philosophy’s Gentle Giant
It makes me sad that so many engineers seem to think cheating is a just and or good solution. Cheating is objectively bad system design (for society, we're designing our society with daily actions every day), as it rewards people without integrity who want the easy way out. Sure, you can blame the system for encouraging incentives that reward cheating, and there are benefits to thinking like a cheater to identify gaps and problems in design, but we only have one life, and one go at growing the society we want to live in.

By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations.
That's not reality. Societies and people often cooperate for the greater good, often through government.
I was referring to SWE roles, as is this article I believe.
https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php might be of interest.
> If a candidate want to simply loop over all of them multiple times a second, I'd say that's a much bigger problem.

unless the task is to animate them in a rAF loop (which runs at ~60Hz), right? the task matters. in some cases the question is stupid & irrelevant, and in the other case it means getting the job done, or not.

the difference between the brain-dead way and the fast way is literally 30x (53ms vs 1.8ms on my machine): https://jsfiddle.net/3ho6f5k1/
I graduated with a poor GPA. The only place that gave me an offer did so because they forgot to ask me for my GPA. I got dozens of rejections purely for my GPA. Not all of them were from large employers.

[Edit]

To state something more on topic, I never once even considered cheating in school. I don't think it ever entered my mind, even when I was in danger of flunking out.
That collaboration and cooperation often counts as cheating in our education system is a stupid relic from some hundred years ago.

If you want to mould a Taylorist's dream of obedient, quiet factory workers who spend their lives making the left side of the head of a pin then yeah, go ahead and discourage cooperation.

For anything else? Especially the creative work that will be expected of current students in the future? Cooperation should be a major goal of education.
They aren't technically SWEs but they would be at any other company. I have been a SWE at three other FAANGs
I mean that's what we do, right?
The results of checking against existing and other test takers solutions must be taken with a strong human judgment. Programming problems such as would be asked in tests are essentially like mathematical formulas/algorithms, and there isn't much variation in how a given formula or algorithm can be implemented.
1) entangled particles are collapsed “instantaneously”. But it’s not really instantaneous because those particles can’t reach the initial observer/measurement until the speed of light.

2) Superpositions are collapsed which apparently causes different behavior than if they’re collapsed later. e.g. the double slit experiment, where measuring the electrons before the slit causes the interference pattern to disappear. This and Bell’s theorem are very unintuitive but they don’t necessarily break the speed of light.

What if electrons are shot through a very long double slit, where they may or may not be measured early on but the observers at the end don’t know this? This still doesn’t break the speed of light because once the electrons create the interference pattern which the observers can measure to determine if they are entangled, the electrons are already local to the observers.

Bell’s theorem just shows there is no one “hidden state” in entangled electrons before they are measured. The entanglement seems to create the relation “chargeA = !chargeB” without setting “A” or “B”, but when A is finally resolved, it still takes the speed of light for this information to reach B.
Never mind less slow, how about making it work first?

I'm in a disprivileged location, and it seems pip can only download from pythonhosted.org at a rate of 10-20 kB/s. Worse still, pip downloads timeout and fail extremely quickly.

If I rerun the pip install, instead of resuming the download, it will download the file from the beginning, then timeout and fail again somewhere in the middle.

I tried going through a private VPN hosted on Linode, with similar results.

For the official Python package manager, this is simply unreliable and unacceptable behavior.
And MS Notepad is servicing billions of people with one engineer.

Do you think complexity of Uber is comparable to that of Whatsapp?
Algorithmic interviews are huge equalizers. Anyone regardless of their social skills or technical background can show their talent.

I’m not talking about people who know technology generally. I’m talking about people who know different technology. The process you’ve proposed, if implemented at, say, PHP shop, will rule out plenty of great .NET developers since the interviewer won’t have the context.
Body composition has a rather large effect on BMR (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3661116).
Software development is really weirdly unique in the way we interview candidates. In no other profession does a job candidate with work experience have to “study” or “practice” for an interview other than reading up about the company. Unless they’re interviewing for their first job, talk to candidates about their experience and dig in to what they actually accomplished.
If it's not inappropriate to ask, has there been an update on his progress since the book was written?
Probably one of these blog posts:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...