skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Home assignments are a great way to evaluate a candidate. A "one hour" project would not be sufficient for that, the problem would be too easy.

I find it weird that you guys don't want to spend some time to show your skills to the employer, without getting paid. These are not real projects. You're not benefiting the employer when you finish them. They also spend some time evaluating your project submission.

(I'm not talking about the companies trying to make people work free by giving them parts of the real projects in disguise)
I doubt any company wil accept that, and suddenly owning a new house with no data on where that money might have come from will raise so many red flags, you'll be able too start a new flag company.
First, Ghosting is a shit move. No reason HR can't send a standard lawyer approved boiler plate rejection mail.

2nd aspect is unpaid take homes. It's complicated. Companies do pay a lot to fly candidates, put them in hotels and feed them for onsite interview. So financially company can afford to pay something. But it adds a moral hazard as you are paying cash irrespective of any expected quality or commitment.

Other thing I would like to highlight is that unlike any other industry, tech. allows people to enter at ease irrespective of the pedigree and credentials. No hospital would hire a physician who has read a lot on the Internet and did some pro-bono help to the neighbourhood kids. So what is the best way to hire isn't very well defined. It could be Leetcode, puzzle problems, take home tests or something else.
This is not a criminal hiring a contractor to work on Tornado Cash. It is an open source project on GitHub that many developers and researchers contributed to, in the interest of privacy.

To use an analogy, see the open Matrix protocol, a tool for privacy that can facilitate encrypted communication between criminals.
“Of course, some offenders may have to stay locked up for life because they remain dangerous. How to assess and manage their sentences is an important question I will ignore here.”

Great idea, just ignore considering the violent people for whom a life sentence make most sense and then claim for the rest it make no sense.
Must be scientists out of school in the past 15 years with the remark about C and C++ being scary, since engineering and science curriculums in the 80s taught Fortran, C, and C++. 'Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Programming', and books like it, were books I turned to do science or engineering. But, I guess you're right, since I learned to program in 1978 on a Commodore PET 2001, computer science and web development have made pushed friendlier languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and so C, C++, and now Rust (I prefer SPARK2014 or Zig), are considered 'scary' for scientists. BLAS (Fortran) and CBLAS (C) are under the hood of all the dressed up Python code up front (Numpy -> CBLAS).

Real Scientists use assembler, C, and Frink! ;)

Sad to say the engineering firm I worked at for 6 years was filled with 20-something and 30-something engineers with only one of 15 of them able to code. Excel use, sure. Coding, no. It wasn't that way 25 years ago.
I have 25+ years of open source software and contributions. If that isn't enough to convince them that I know how to design and write software, then homework won't be enough.
> “…software development seems to be the only area where the candidates get bent out of shape being expected to prove they know what they're doing.”

FYI—Graphic Designers have been “bent out of shape” over spec work in hiring for ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_work
A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness
EVMs in India did reduce many of the previous issues with the paper ballot.

Some of the few security measures include:

- EVMs have no network connections. The EVMs are standalone and are connected to a control unit managed by the polling officials. They are sealed and secured after the polling is complete and unsealed only on counting day in the presence of election commission officials and authorized party observers who monitor the counting.
- EVMs use a VVPAT (voter verified paper audit trail) where the EVM prints a log that your vote has been cast with the candidate name and party symbol. It shows the printed output in a glass window for 7 seconds and then cuts that and drops it into a sealed box automatically. This box is sealed and secured at the end of polling.

VVPAT is used for secondary auditing if any instance of EVM tampering or other malpractice is alleged at the polling station.

It is still not perfect. There are some residual risks. But far better than the earlier system.
Their spam filtering took a nosedive in quality earlier this year. How hard is it to filter emails that include “McAfee”?

There’s also an ongoing problem with logins that their tech support people deal with by asking you to reset your password every few weeks.

Gmail is looking better and better to me right now.
I've been using docsify in this manner for a while and it's worked well for me
6 hours of work is too much and ghosting is never acceptable, but I'd much rather do a take home assignment that takes a few hours than any sort of in person whiteboard or a screen share coding session. I struggle with where the line is drawn here. If throughout the interview process you spend over an hour talking to various individuals at the company should you also be compensated for that time?

That being said, I've seen cases where the take home assignment is actual company work, in which case I 100% agree you should be paid.
I see it like Internet Explorer in the 00's.

Did my friends and family hate IE enough to switch away themselves? Nope.

Did I care enough to find out about Firefox? Yup. Did my friends and family hate IE enough to switch to Firefox when I suggested it? Yup.

Social media could be the same situation.
Those aren't "counterpoints", they're assumptions.
Can't let that happen! The anti-money laundering excuse got old, which excuse will they use next? Anti-terrorism?
We put a shibboleth in our test for this reason, there's ~20 solutions up on GitHub and 80% of them are wrong. Feel free to copy them, it makes it so much easier for me to grade.
The most expensive iPhone variant (Pro Max) has the best camera, but the bulk of the social value is having a contemporary iPhone, which is an iPhone with a notch, X and newer. Social value hinges on obvious differences. Cameras are used for selfies and art. As long as there are no obvious differences a better camera wouldn't trigger our fear of being ostracised. A new kind of camera, like everyone suddenly using front-facing cameras, or everyone suddenly taking 3D selfies with a new camera would. It's a two-way street though, if most people think that 3D selfies are not it your new camera is now a source of embarrassment.
People aren’t domesticated rabbits.
It turns out that there are three dimensions. Arctic sea ice volume keeps dropping, faster and faster.

http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volum...

> Arctic Ice Shelf now at largest coverage, NEXT!

Funny definition of "now". Your linked article was from 8 months ago, you know, when it was winter.

As for the real "now", if you care to look at a graph of the last few years and as well as inter-decile and median from 1981-2020, it's blatantly obvious that both volume and extent are well below average, and on a long, steady, downward trend.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Should linked lists also be renamed to blockchains?
If that was the case, why didn’t the railway concede the case and move on.
US sanctions on mixers in the past have been associated with an individual, not a piece of code. This is the first sanction to target an open source and non-custodial mixer.
> software development seems to be the only area where the candidates get bent out of shape being expected to prove they know what they're doing

At least in my experience, people in most fields aren't expected to do free work to show they know what they're doing. In general, past jobs, references, and portfolios tend to be used.
Isn’t the root of this need to make developers code stuff to prove their skills because we don’t have an accredited body giving people meaningful certification?

A dr would not do a quick surgery and a power plant engineer won’t build “just a quick test reactor” because they have credentials and the hiring bodies trust those creds.

In software is the problem that we don’t trust what the resume implies? Where does the deep distrust come from? Why don’t we have an equivalent to a medical, legal, or engineering accreditation?

(I’ll state the obvious ghosting was wrong)
An unintended consequence of these coding assignments is that it creates a pervasive labor market that optimizes for finding candidates that already know things. Historically, joining the labor force, and a company, required training. Letting this behavior continue permeates the expectation that corporations can shirk on their duty to train and build employees. Instead, they have the luxury of finding cogs ready to go, out of the box.

I think we need to stand up and advocate for the expectation that corporations should provide more value to society than just print money. They should be held accountable to creating a strong, and healthy labor force.
When I was a child we had pigs and chickens next to each other. The chickens started sleeping atop the resting pig since it was warm. It was cute until the pig started devouring the chickens!
For countries like Russia and to lesser extend Canada the models show that they will benefit from the global warming. Basically they will get more agricultural land and ice-free Arctic will open more transportation routes. Plus they will need to use less energy for heating in winter.

On the other hand as the article shows the models can be wrong and even very wrong. For example, it can be that the ricing temperature in fact triggers the new ice age and that can arrive in matter of decades. Of cause, this is very speculative, but since we cannot reliably predict consequences of raising CO2 levels, that can not be excluded.
In cash? Anonymously? Probably not, even without regulation.
Are they building the domestic IRS combat breaching simulator yet?
This is the correct answer, assuming you didn’t sign anything that gave them the rights to what you produced.
I am using C++ for sioyek which is a PDF reader designed for reading research papers and textbooks: https://sioyek.info/

Other libraries used:

* MuPDF for PDF rendering

* Qt5 for UI

* sqlite for database

I also recently added a plugin system which is language neutral, but I wrote a python wrapper around it (see and example here: https://sioyek.info/#extensible).
Preparation for live-coding, leetcode style interviews takes way longer than any take home.

Kids on Blind are doing 200+ leetcode problems before starting their interview loops. How many hours is that?

You’re basically just choosing to forget about all the prep needed to ace a DP problem on the spot.
I am confused, I live in Florida and I have a big central AC system but it is also capable of heating. Is this not the same thing as a heat pump?
Thats up to you. For technical jobs its much easier to judge a candidate with home assignments than just bullshit trick questions in interviews.
According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complaint would smoothly shift to it not being enough money and still being too much work), and you shouldn't just hire people with the intention of rapidly firing them if they don't work out because that's cruel to uproot them like that if you're just going to fire them. Recruiters are also out because they suck and also drain money out of the transaction for no gain since they bring no value to the process.

Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Or something like that.

Setting limits on what you will do is good, and ghosting is bad, certainly.

But in the end, you're going to have to do something unfun to get hired. There's no way around it. I know we'd all love to live in a world where Google one day just logs on to LinkedIn and is so impressed by the sheer brilliance of our awesomeness which just somehow oozes through our listing despite the fact we didn't have to do anything to demonstrate it, as it's also unrealistic to expect programmers to have a lot of publicly-available demonstrations of their skill such as open source projects (forgot to mention that one!), that instead of hitting you with a job interview they just lead with a job offer for their best position, but that's just not going to happen.
> Companies do pay a lot to fly candidates, put them in hotels and feed them for onsite interview.

I tend to see 1) quick phone call with recruiter 2) please make assignment

in Europe at least
I feel like he should also get lawyers fees
I'm not sure that an 10 x 8 hour job interviews every 2-5 years when you want to leave your old company and get a new one is particularly onerous.

My wife is a lawyer, she had to spend 2 years (in the US it's like 4 years at $80k+) and another 40 hours a year for life to maintain the qualifications that allow her to skip the equivalent of coding interviews.

I'd rather live in the world of none credentialed programmers to be honest.
They're returning the rabbits to the previous owners. There's no further expectation of duty to either party.
And there is a clear cost to society, as 100 hearings isn't exactly cheap.
Google fined $60M for misleading Australian mobile users about location data
Counterpoint: as a self-taught SWE with only a degree in economics, I wouldn't have been able to get my first job in the industry without a take-home assignment. It was the only possible way to demonstrate that I was qualified to take the job.
> If they expected you to spent 1.5-2 hours on it - a reasonable amount of time IMO - but when got it back you clearly spent an entire day working on it, that's enough to fail because you didn't follow the directions.

Yeah, let's fail someone who cares about showing their best self for an interview and takes pride in the craftsmanship of their code because we asked them to spend no time on it and probably get something that doesn't even work.

Not to mention there are probably other candidates that are taking just as long but not mentioning how long it takes them when turning it in, so the employer might start having an unreasonable expectation of the quality of work that can be done in 1.5-2 hours based on other applicants, and if you actually do follow instructions and only put that time in, you're likely going to be compared unfavorably against those other applicants.

Only way to properly enforce that limited time is to bring someone in to take a test in person, which is what my last company did (I barely passed and watched hundreds of people get brought in and not pass in the years since...in fact I saw only a handful of people pass that stupid test, part of the reason we never hired anyone, even though we needed to).
Something i noticed is windows users definitely love bloating everything, from their tech stack to their workstation

The platform must be the problem if one has to go through all of that hasle

What ever works for you i guess
Unpaid home assignments are fine, if:

- The work produced is not used in any way by the company other than to assess the candidate.

- The project has a time limit to prevent those with more time to dedicate to it being able to do better (reduces bias).

- The company puts time into reviewing the code that is commensurate with the time spent on it (a 3 hour test warrants at least 45 mins of thorough code review and feedback writing across a couple of engineers).

- The company provides options to take the test at a convenient time, or even on-site but unsupervised if desired by the candidate.

Asking for payment to take part in an interview isn't a great approach assuming the above are true (which they are often not). Companies don't pay for interviews as general rule, but conversely should be clear about the full time commitment so that candidates can make informed decisions about taking part.
Possession is 9/10th of the law.
For personal project there will not be a TDD so coder not willing to share their existing codes. I rather showcase my skills in a new development than say already done one.
> It's only fair that a company asking you to do this should pay you

I don't think it's a question of fairness at all. It's certainly inconvenient and the longer the test the more likely I am to dismiss it off hand but a couple hours is ok, more than that needs good justification. If a company is offering me a salary thats 90th percentile or above then I don't see the problem with having to jump through some (reasonable) hoops.

The ghosting part is unquestionably rude though and any such company should be named and shamed so that people can avoid them if they want.
The human of the future will likely be a computer.
Perhaps you forgot what you asked? You said:

> How did this person become the sole shareholder of a 100 person game company producing wildly successful game without any work in your story?

Steve Jobs somewhat famously never wrote any code for Apple. So the answer to how a person becomes the sole shareholder without doing any work is that they focus on things like bank loans, which enable the hiring of people to do the "work" that leads to the company's success. Same as any company.

Many, many, many companies are headed by people who have never engaged in the low-level work done by that companies. Many of them are there because they deal with finance.
I have been playing games on native glibc/linux for a decade, and unfortunately I have to agree. But the main culprits are not who we think they are. With my system development skills, I did peak deep into this issue.

There is no ABI stability, except linux kernel syscalls and the alsa-lib (for how long?), on glibc/linux based OS.

And we are talking really short time frames. For instance with glibc gnu symbol versioning, game binaries compiled on a recent glibc will break all distros older than 1 year and a half. Game devs must be careful to compile against a VERY old glibc (like a decade?), what a pain. It is not that dark: cross-platform 3D engine devs are aware about this and are carefull about this (usually).

Game binaries are also destroyed by the accutely toxic c++/libgcc_s ABIs (did happen again very recently). Hopefully, compilers have -static-libgcc and -static-libstdc++ options, but it does solve only partially the issue. Many games are using c++ (I have an extremely negative opinion about this language), and the static libstdc++ is not libdl-ing any of its dependencies from the system, then those dependencies end up in the static loading list of the ELF binaries... often with nasty gnu symbol versions. To fix properly this, it would require a fork of gcc(clang?) static libstdc++ which does have a libdl mode, namely does libdl everything from the system.

To say the least, the main culprits are... gcc and glibc devs (IBM? MIT?). It is so accute, I started to think conspiracy: microsoft pulling the strings in the shadows, or those devs trying to blackmail valve/game studios with planned obsolescence (are laws already setup against this type of accutely toxic scam?).

Since the game binaries should libdl everything from the system, they must be simple and pure ELF64 binaries. Namely, using a minimal set of relocation types, no c/c++ main(), and have to manage system TLS variables (for instance errno) with the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr() (this may require a bit of ELF header parsing... if there is an clean ABI way to reach the ones from the libdl-ed ones).

Game binaries would statically load only libdl (not even libc) to dynamically load the video game core libs: xcb libs, libxkbcommon(wayland/x11), wayland code is static into the binaries, libasound (pulseaudio/pipewire/jack/etc are hidden behind the alsa-lib API), libgl, vulkan, and even the libc if requiring anything from it (name resolution?).

About 3D programing, vulkan would have to be used very conservatively, nothing fancy.

proton is a massive amount of literaly and fairly, garbage, software, microsoft grade. It is a money sink hole for valve, not to mention if I recall properly, it does include straight copies of closed source windoz components, that to make things even worse. I manage to build a lean wine win64/vulkan/dx12->vulkan(at least avoid that thing which is dxvk) with a C compiler, but I know that nearly no doz game will content themselve from that to actually run.
No. This is what integration tests are for.

These kinds of failures are super annoying, but it’s the sort of thing that e2e and canary releases should help you get some coverage on.

Despite the marketing, unit tests are pretty fragile, especially in code with lots of deps (another good reason to limit deps)
I've always wished microwaves had a "repeat last instruction" button.
For Russia it's not that simple. The melting permafrost in Siberia will destroy a lot of infrastructure built into it, and the wildfires there from the last couple of summers have been devastating.
I’ll try that one next time, thanks :)
Its hugely asymmetrical in terms of amount of time spent in a setting where there is already a large amount of asymmetry.
Why is a month and a half old article trending on HN?
Their H-11B reactor was the concept proposed by Rostoker, Binderbauer and Monkhorst back in the late 90s, right? That dog won't hunt, and they were told that then by multiple people.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235032059_Comments_...
I refuse to do take homes. You don’t ask doctors to treat patients before hiring them. You don’t have a carpenter build a house before you hire them. Insert mechanic, architect, author, etc..

Why should we be any different?
So can you post the company name?
This is largely true, except...

what about Wikipedia? Maybe it's the exception that proves the rule. But as far as I can tell, no online knowledge store has come close to the comprehensiveness and cultural cache of Wikipedia. And it's not showing ads constantly, it relies on donations entirely.

I remain hopeful that a federated social media service that offloads the hosting costs to passionate individuals (with modest ad support to keep the lights on) could survive just fine without venture capital or advertising creep. Think: WoW servers, AKA "blessed" federation.

Venture capital-driven business models will never align with my interest of keeping in touch with friends and family. The desire for profit and revenue growth (what us filthy plebeians call "greed") is simply too strong.
What about pseudo-regular expressions?
Minority Rule
Edit: Just wanted to add that I wholeheartedly agree with your take on legal protection for consumer ownership rights.

The analogy isn't about backing up and exporting games you already own, it's about continuing the use of hardware you own beyond the vendor's support.

Sideloading APKs allows management of software independent of a vendor app store. Do USB drives for game archival allow you to install any game, whether or not you bought it from the console store?
Ghosting really sucks.

I don't understand the practice. Maybe someone here can fill me in on why it is considered OK from the recruiter perspective. Too many folks asking for feedback post-rejection? If that is the case - automate the message with a generic rejection.
do you feel the same way about employees not providing a two weeks notice?