skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Highschool dropout, have FAANG interview, don't know DS/algos
Title says most of it -- I have an interview at $BIGCO for Big Data team.

The hiring manager + technical recruiter told me the initial phone screen would be ~1 hour of primarily data structures and algorithm questions. Then a 5-hour virtual interview if I pass, which will focus on Systems Design + Integration and questions about concurrency/distributed systems.

I've been building software professionally for a bit under a decade. I am not nearly as concerned about the practical interview as I am the phone screen.

Never needed algorithms for the sorts of software I build (Microservices/API's, data tools).

How nervous should I be about these algorithm questions? Is it something anyone can pick up in ~1 month of leetcode, or am I screwed?
> More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades?

The use case is that there should be enough capacity under governmental control to ensure that even in a case of crisis (such as, say, an oil price hike, a war or import blockades) the base load of the citizenry is still accounted for - big industries might be temporarily restricted, but no citizen should freeze in winter because the forces of the market deem it more profitable to have some large company buy their way out.
Does HN use sexp serialized http messages too ? We'd call that being rethful
> Like I don't wanna reject them

You need to learn how to reject them

> if I can somewhow ask them to pay that would be great.

You need to learn how to state your fee.

The overall solution you're looking for is: how to be disagreeable.

It doesn't sound like you're stupid at all, it just sounds like you're a doormat and overly agreeable. There's nothing wrong with saying "sorry, I can't help you with that" or "I can do that for you if you pay me $X". It's literally that simple. The hard part is practicing it until it becomes easy.
This is crazy. I just gave a nearly identical presentation for a series of interviews. One at AKASA, one at Scribd, and one at Panorama. Like I gave this presentation, with the exact same title 2 weeks ago to a bunch of junior engineers at these various companies. It is super timely. I’m consistently surprised how multiple people can arrive to the same point, via the same inspirational sources at the same time and reach completely different conclusions. I’ll have to write up a blog response to this article.
First of all, I find it an impressive skill to be able to do this on a binary blob.

Secondly (optimistic version), it really shows that they (management) didn't care, that nobody ever made a ticket to fix loading times, since this would be trivial do find with a normal profiler on a debug build.

Secondly (pessimistic version), nobody at rockstar had enough skill and/or professional pride/sense of ownership to find this out themselves.
That doesn't stop someone from using your code to build a compelling competitor product. It just means you need to pay more lawyers to argue about whether the AGPL was violated or not and maybe win a lawsuit.
Yes. It's simply concludent. If you post on a public website you consent it can be crawled. Duh.
I think comparing it to the Bar exam for Law (and other field's equivalents) is a more apt comparison than the SAT.
Quite possibly, in that it is 'easier' (after all the risk entailed in the salvage of the wreck, ofc) to sell plain gold in some form rather than historical artifacts that are easier to track, more notable, have a smaller audience, etc etc. Its tragic, but sensible in a cold blooded, economical fashion.

E.g. Would the criminal enterprise that went to such great lengths to obtain the material rather sell a sizable quantity of unmarked gold ingots to WeDon'tCareWhereItCameFromJewelers LLC for a nice return, or go through an arduous process to sell coins in varied quantities to wealthy collectors.
I stacked a ceramic bowl into another one
I hadn't heard that before, it's great.

I like how he states that simpler software doesn't necessarily mean fewer components (roughly quoting). Where the article argues for fewer boxes and arrows. It's hard to argue specifics, because the article isn't getting into them, but sometimes more boxes and arrows makes things simpler. If you don't have multiple boxes, what do you have? One box of spaghetti?

I also disagree with the article that engineers like complexity. I've maybe known a couple, but usually they are really junior, or really unpopular.
Based on the max OS it looks like you must have a iPad mini (gen 1), iPad (gen 3), or iPad 2. All of those are 9-10 years old and got between 4-5 years of OS updates (unheard of at that time). Currently Apple is supporting iPads that are over 7 years old with the newest OS. You will not find a better option in the tablet space (or phone space for that matter).

It would be nice if Apple released one last security update for those iPads that included the newer root certificates so you could use the browser, or at least try since that version of Safari is old.

The bottom line is there isn't a company out there that supports hardware (of this class) that old. Linux or jailbreak are your best options if you want to keep using it for something but that hardware is pretty dated and I'd be surprised if you found a use (other than near-static display) that wasn't painful to use. Those early iPads weren't super powerful (as shown in how later iPads had a longer OS support window).

My iPad Mini 2 is just 1-2 years newer that what you have and I use it as a dedicated Paprika (recipe app) machine in my kitchen and it's so sluggish that I'll probably replace it in the next few years. Tech marches on and I find that most people that talk about wanting to use something like linux on an old device to be disingenuous, it's a painful experience to use hardware that old once you've used something newer. Even you seem to have not had a use for this for some years and now are angry that a piece of hardware you've not cared about for years doesn't do what you want?

> is Apple really doing their darndest to get me to buy a new iPad

The more I think about it, the only alternative would be linux. iOS developers have moved on and have no interest in supporting devices that old other than for maybe a hobby project. There isn't any money in it, it's painful to develop for, and the hardware is underpowered by today's standards.
> However what the parent is claiming, as far as the effects of the leetcode interview process is certainly true

And once you hit LeetCode employee critical mass your culture becomes LeetCode employees. Management may have started it, but employees amplify and make it ubiquitous (especially engineers promoted to management/hire/fire).
This is probably the best /advertisement/ of a product. If a 10yo can do things in it - then (at least) it has the UI what is understandable even to 10yo, for a pretty convoluted process of a non-linear editing.
I was really desperate to contribute to an open-source project in high school, specifically an iOS or frontend web one, and it was hard to find projects that I could make a substantial contribution to. Many with `good first issue` tags were not very active, and the ones that were active were hard to get my foot in the door.

I was able to do a variety of "good first" things: readme updates, typo fixes, adding small features -- but it was hard to feel really _validated_ that my work was valuable, or that contributing to open-source was an impressive thing to do, because I (felt like I was) was surrounded by engineers, and nobody ever told me that OSS was "cool", until I met a company 3 years into college who valued OSS (more than just "wow, great job, you fixed a typo!")
a web interface to a fully-non-browser implemented system is not in my opinion evidence that "all software is web software now".
> Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load.

That's not exactly true, you can build nuclear plants for load following which provides some amount of flexibility, at the cost of some efficiency (about 1% I think).

IIRC French plants can operate between 30 and 100% rated power, and ramp rates can reach 5% per minute (though normal rates are 1 to 3). French nukes regularly have to ramp up and down quickly to compensate for wind variation and monday pickup (electricity consumptions goes way down over the weekend, especially nice spring weekends, then back way up on week start).
Hey. Come to the automotive industry, where your code will live for whooping twenty years! =;-D
Yeah Photos app doesn’t do well with keyboard operation either. If you are in full screen mode, and you have gone from the grid to view a single photo, you might expect that the Esc key will take you back to the grid view, but no, it just exits full screen mode.

Same in the App Store app. There is no keyboard short cut to go back to the main list.
> There is also the solution that you set up your own company, or convince your manager your time is best spent on this.

This is the definition of a flippant comment. Why should society require we become the lord of our own domain or a political chameleon just so that we can advocate for decent standards? Should people who live on flood plains "just move" when the tide comes in? Ridiculous.

Understanding the bigger picture includes understanding the developer's point of view.

> I’ve worked around too many startups ruled by developers. They’re being run into the ground because those developers think technical NFRs as defined by them are the be all and end all. They’re not. Those same developers will happily spend months fiddling with the system without making any actual improvements and call it “paying down technical debt”.

Sounds like those super-clever managers didn't understand what the hell was going on to me. Perhaps they should've held their nose and tried to learn about their product so they can understand and communicate that bigger picture they speak of instead of abdicating their adversarial role and leaving dev teams rudderless.
IDRA unveils its 9000-ton Tesla Cybertruck Giga Casting machine
It's funny I don't use Discord much and consider it more of a pain in the a** than doing a quick forum signup (but I use a password manager so less friction than the average user).
You're right about "C-A-R", although I find it jarring and difficult to think directly in those terms. It can be too daunting, much like in a game of billiards when someone announces what their shot is going to do in advance and then takes the shot and expects everything to unfold as it was pre-declared. It's wonderful when it works, but it can be really hard to recover from if things go sideways.

Many of us achieve the same end in an easier way by putting our experiences into a narrative-- like telling a story in a way that's relatable to the audience. That way it's possible to discuss problems both technical and non-technical, how they were solved, and how the project succeeded. Along the way it's totally OK to digress into interesting aspects of the story. Someone who is skilled enough can then even plant breadcrumbs that stimulate questions for which they've thought through a carefully considered answer.
On a lot of distros, many DEs or WMs do have worse defaults or weird glitches that other, blessed ones do not. The dice may come up in your favor more often than not, but you're still definitely rolling them when you move away from a distro's favored set-up. There's a reason alternate "spins" (distro derivates, whatever you want to call them, I think that's the Ubuntu term) exist, with different default DEs or WMs—just installing those packages on the base distro may not provide a great out-of-the-box experience.

And yeah, the way settings work on Desktop Linux can lead to all kinds of weird stuff if you start actively using multiple environments. Should changing your keyboard layout in one DE affect all the others? Well, wait, which of multiple ways did you accomplish that change in keyboard layout? Should it affect bare terminals, outside the window server? Should some of those methods affect all of them, but other methods not? Which one "wins"? Was this other thing a DE setting, or an X-Window setting? Or neither? Or was it Wayland—wait a minute, some of these DEs run under Wayland and some under X-Window! Gee, surely that won't cause any settings conflicts or surprises.
I used to use Linux desktop exclusively but mental and time cost of maintaining it just was just too high and eventually gave up.

It actually works great when it does, but more often than not something fails after updates. So I felt like a rolling a dice everytime I have to go though this.

There were problems with update process itself -- they tend to wait for users to confirm configuration overwrite/update/patch so when I attempted to perform update overnight, I often find it waiting for my input in the morning 30 percent into update process.

Ultimately I had enough of the frustration that I've stopped using it.

Where I actually need Linux, I can just use WSL. Windows has its fair share of the problems but I'm definitely not spending as much as time just to keep things running even through major updates.
Unusual Startup Vanta Valued at 1.3B
they can appeal for grants and funds as a non-profit to keep it running. why does such a website need to make a profit?
This has already been explained elsewhere in this thread, but here it goes. The original problem formulation in Parade magazine is as follows:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Assumptions about the strategy or decision rule of the host are not irrelevant, but crucial. Suppose the hosts' decision rule (unknown to the candidate) is

IF (candidate's initial choice is correct):
open one of the remaining goat doors
ELSE:
don't open anything

then it's of course not advantagous to switch. The problem with the original Parade formulation is that it only describes what the candidate sees and what the host actually did in one particular scenario, not what rules the hosts must obay. So you don't know if the hosts is playing adversarial games, but you can't rule it out either.

That's why (as per linked article) in later formulations the "standard assumptions" (that the hosts will always open a door with a goat) are usually given explicitly (in which case the solution is also a lot more obvious).
they don’t make enough off ads anyway
Exactly. It's all about signaling [1]:

"... However, employers do refer to the educational background to differentiate between high-quality workers and low-quality workers (Kasika, 2015). Consequently, individuals with higher-ability use their educational background to gain the "education signals" that allow them to move into high level and high wage positions"

In this case, the "educational background" is shown by solving leetcode-style algos.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299509496_Signaling...
NASA to Set Up Independent Study on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
"... for Dungeons and Dragons" ah yes, I use a D16 all the time when playing D&D /s
I'm quite conflicted with this; while I agree that it's a smart move in terms of forcing user engagement, I think it sucks that Github is and seemingly will continue to be THE Git platform. I'd argue that other platforms such as Gitlab and even Azure DevOps provide a better overall experience, especially when it comes to CI/CD, so it's a little sad that the battle for users seems to be going into the 'social features' territory rather than improved user experience.
Are workshop manuals limited to authorized service dealers somehow? I'm curious how difficult they are to find
"outputting JSON" does not in my opinion make something "web software".

In these very comment threads, we've seen proposals for stuff like

df -h --json

making it abundantly clear that JSON is a data format, not a technology inevitably associated with browsers or even just HTTP.
Procedural Tree Generator
> but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand

To be precise, it cannot stop consuming fuel quick enough that there's any important savings, and so nuclear power plants always want to run at full capacity because otherwise they are wasting fuel.

But more than that, fuel consumption is simply not a very big part of the running cost of a nuclear power plant, most is fixed cost so that even if they could change the fuel consumption quickly there's just not enough savings to really bother with it.
Building a more helpful browser with machine learning
I have to admit, you have a point :)
That's not my agenda.
> In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on.

The most awesome thing you get from Solar is that it's going to move forward no matter what. It's just something you can do to lower your bill, or even disconnect from the grid altogether. Personally I am off grid with no propane. Almost unheard of in CA. Solar is now THAT cheap if you are willing to put the up-front investment instead of paying PGE $600 a month. And if you don't have the space - buy a solar panel on a business from that other company they are starting - it was on here a week or so ago.
Looks like I have some research to do, thank you!
I've only been directly involved in hiring five people and it worked out well for all of those
>I don't see how this is any better than opening a browser tab with a mail client in it? But putting that aside here were a few problems with Vivaldi and their Mail client the last time I tried it...

It's not. it's much much worse. I've just spent about an hour of my life i'll never get back, trying to setup some of my throwaway email accounts in Vivaldi to save opening WebMail when I want to check them. A couple of the accounts threw up server errors requiring me to visit a URL to authorise the client [ie. Vivaldi] to access the accounts via IMAP.

Vivaldi showed the server message but made it so that the message text [including the URL I was supposed to visit, which ended with a long alphanumeric string] was not selectable.

Nor could I 'view source' to copy/paste it that way

Nor could I print the page to PDF to try and retrieve it from there.

Nor could I save the data I'd entered for that account, so I could come back to it later.

So I was left with the choice of painfully transcribing about 100 char alphanumeric string by hand [for 2 separate accounts!] to go to the required authorisation URL, or throw Vivaldi in the bin. Guess which option I chose?

Incidentally. There's a special place in hell reserved for developers who make text on error messages and alerts non-selectable!
Sorry, no part of your comment is true. This is easily the best option for slow connection/device users, and it comes at the expense of the design.

> The page takes an extra 100ms to load

Nope. Slow connections' floor for first paint is 100ms when using `font-display: optional` – not an additional 100ms. The page is still loading like normal in this period. (If you're already under a 100ms FCP for 3G users, you know all of this already)

> the content will jump by some large amount

`font-display: optional` is literally designed to prevent this from ever occurring. Either the font is ready for first paint in 100ms, or another font is used.
Everything you may not need to know about Nginx error logs – complete guide
This looks identical to Kdenlive, how is this different from kdenlive? https://docs.kdenlive.org/en/user_interface.html#user-interf...
The solution to that was a perl script called (I think) aub (Assemble USENET binaries). I remember back in the 90s, some friends and I in college would run that as a cron job to accumulate files over time. This was long enough ago that the version we ran was Perl 4.
Owning crypto != actually using it.

Exchanges run private order books like any other investment org. People trading (gambling?) one ticker symbol (crypto or not) vs another (crypto or not) has absolutely nothing to do with real world use or utility. I can watch the Euro move up and down on forex and buy/sell to make money in my currency of choice while never touching a Euro, using it for anything, or having any real long term confidence, understanding, or belief in anything Euro or European related. I just know it made me X in USD this day/week/month and that's all I care about. Fill in EUR with BTC, ETH, etc. No one on exchanges cares about anything other than what it means for them in their local currency.

The use of exchanges is a get rich quick scheme not unlike penny stocks in the late 80s/early 90s or dot coms in the late 90s. In the late 90s very few in the general population jumping on dot com stocks had any idea what the hell any of it meant. They just heard a story about someone making $100k in a day and wanted in.

Look at the FOMO ads during the SuperBowl... There was zero value or utility demonstrated and 100% of the messaging was "everyone else is getting rich quick at crypto.com so don't miss out". Their fees (in real money) are absolutely bonkers so of course they're doing everything they can to bring people in.

Have you seen Wolf of Wall Street? There's a scene where the main character gets taken to lunch by an experienced broker. Long story short the lesson was this:

"Fuck the clients. Best case scenario let them think they're getting rich on paper while meanwhile we take home cold hard cash every time they trade via commission."

Be careful with surveys you "read somewhere"... The often cited "300 million crypto users worldwide" stat[0] (for example) comes from a blockchain payments company (surely they're unbiased, right?) that for some reason estimated this number from a Central Bank of Canada phone survey extrapolated to the worldwide population...

It's really interesting that whenever I bring up blockchain explorers and the fact that blockchain has the most transparent and reliable adoption metrics ever no one takes me up on an analysis of the data and deflects to virtually anything else instead.

Adoption and use data is there without bias. It requires some interpretation to determine something more akin to MAU/DAU but even very generous measure will show that 13 years after the launch of bitcoin blockchain is the most poorly adopted technology platform in recent history[1].

0 - https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership/

1 - https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...
Ask HN: Where do you get your investment advice from?
Hi all,

For the high salary tech employees that want to retire early, where do you get your advice/tips on what to do with your money?

Curious what everyone says..
Speech and conversation are not the same skill.
I'm curious how big of a factor a consistent core team is to having long-term sustainable and stable software. When companies have people rotating on projects constantly and the original vision and design principles of the product are lost or changed, I can only imagine that contributes to the problem.