skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did a home assignment that required far more than 6h. The feedback was atrocious, as they just said "not fit". Not a single comment on what they disliked or how could I improve.

Actually, the assignment was "take this shitty service and make it production-ready". It had some pitfalls that I avoided, and I introduced monitoring, automated deployment, API documentation, etc.

There was a bug - a minor misunderstanding that was simple to fix if they gave the feedback and allowed to do a quick fix - but the rest was production-ready.

I had fun doing it, that's why I didn't mind taking time. What I didn't expect was the poor binary feedback with zero content.

From now on, I'm only taking these assignments if they agree to have a feedback session. If not, I won't do anything. I'm close to 20 years of experience and it feels like they treat me like an undergrad (although I have a full Github profile).
> Gojira is the original name of Godzilla and the name of a heavy metal band so I always have to include "github" when I search for it.

Which is also where Jira's name originates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jira_(software)#Naming
I still think that home assignments can be a good recruiting tool when you are trying to recruit junior, since they can have a very different skill range. For senior it really seems unnecessary.

In both case, if you are going to do home assignment, my question to you is: How good is your offer ? I refused several HA when interviewing with companies because their offers was just not good enough for me to take several hours, on top of the regular interview, to do it. If you do HA, make sure your candidate have a reason to want to take several hours for you.
Tesla‘s Autopilot Scam
There is a strong argument in favor of this, which is engineers spend more time reading code than writing it. It's a very important skill that whiteboard coding doesn't assess at all.
Any interviews or talks you can recommend where she covers the important points of her work?
> There's no way around it.

I never had to
You get a lot of signals with the approach described below that are highly indicative of how the candidate is going to perform on the job. With a take-home assignment, you get no signals that can predict their on the job performance.

-----

For engineering roles where the person is expected to write copious amounts of code to ship functional features everyday, a 2.5-hour machine coding round to assess coding competency (as part of an interview loop that also has other rounds for problem-solving, data-structures/algorithms, high-level systems design and low-level design) is standard in multiple companies I have seen (and advocated for). While coding round is a strong filter, it is important to assess the interaction of the candidate in these other rounds that are non-coding but designing/problem-solving rounds, especially in high functional domain complexity industry like e-commerce or payments etc.

In the machine coding round, the candidate should be given a well-defined written problem statement (from an internal question bank of well-calibrated problem statements) along with test inputs and a few test outputs, and in the first 5 minutes ask them to read the problem and ask any clarifying questions. Then leave them be with a dev machine for next hour. If they choose to, 10 minutes in, they can discuss the approach they are going to take with you. Then after an hour, you can discuss if they have a working code that passes the test inputs. If yes, you can give them an enhancement/modification to make. and leave them be for another 45 minutes. Then, take the last 30 minutes to discuss the solution they have come up with and understand their thinking style w.r.t coding conventions, style etc. If they couldn't complete the enhancement, discuss a potential solution (give a hint) with them and see if they can tackle it. Write calibrated/standardized evaluation notes for your interaction so that others (hiring panel) can understand and decide. Existing engineers inside the company should have tried the problem statements themselves and calibrated to see if the problem is meaningfully solvable in the allotted time.
My dad hired goats to mow down his entire lot in the Hell's Canyon area of Eastern Washington. Saved his cabin from a wildfire, and got the dang thistles reduced to nothing. It was a bargain too, $400.
> I've worked on a couple of teams that hired solely on the "strength of the résumé,"

> We realized they were just good interviewers

It sounds like they didn't hire solely on the strength of the résumé, because then wouldn't interview performance be irrelevant? In contrast, there are people with strong résumés who don't interview well, regardless of the interviewing method.

> The two people I know we hired on that basis quickly cycled out (one fired, one quit) because they were pretty terrible.

This is how it should work, I think. Hiring is extremely difficult. Mistakes will be made. The key is to quickly correct those mistakes and move on.
Oh good, let’s encourage an incurious government because it might be misinterpreted.
Yes, that’s a heat pump!
> instead it's a good sounding board to see what different things I could try to do differently.

> The fact that so many comments here are evidence of a "problem" thus is a great opportunity in disguise.

This is the kind of self-reflection and maturity which makes the comments about you actually not able to admit when your wrong so much more absurd

> A trait I have heard about often in autistic communities is how hard it is to let go of something if you can't explain it. That is definitely very true of myself.

Seems to track with my experience as my wife is on the spectrum. She can find it hard to have someone not understand her or some truth about reality and she feels a strong desire to keep engaging until they do. Can be both a blessing or a curse - the latter moreso when she doesn't realize she is dealing with someone who is bad faith - but she is getting better at recognizing that.
Arms races are a negative sum game.
I've started using C++ for the REST backend for a mobile app recently.

I'm using restinio for the REST layer (sadly deprecated a couple of months ago, but it still seemed like the best option in terms of clean interface) and sqlite for the DB layer.

I've architected it all so I have a purely insert-only and order-independent DB on the write-side, so litestream was seeming like a good fit for single-writer, multiple readers, but now that's been abandoned, I'll wait until litefs stabilises, or roll my own to do what I need.

I originally started the REST side in dart so I could share code with the flutter client app, but I soon realised that performance wasn't where I wanted it to be and that the backend queries were all very different to client side anyway, so it seemed easier just to create the REST side in C++. I should add that my normal work has been predominantly C++ for many years so it's more familiar to me than learning something else and also being able to hit the sqlite layer directly without another abstraction layer seems beneficial.

I was planning to use litestream to distribute the sqlite DB to multiple readers, but now that's deprecated, I'll probably look into doing my own in C++ later on if his new focus on litefs doesn't work out for me.
Just wanna say thanks! This was a really educational thread for me!
I on the other hand would love, LOVE, a take home, I ask for them every time and companies won’t offer them. I don’t excel under the pressure of a 1hr interview and at the staff+ level they expect you to display all sorts of architectural skills that I fin much easier to display not under pressure and not in under 1hr. I wish somebody would compile a list of companies that offer take home even!
Nothing but lots of small (~100b) pipelined SETs and a small number of GETs here and there. Only 10MB/s but at 100k SETs/sec redis’s CPU core sits at 60-70%. Active defrag can easily send it into a death spiral.
I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make. "I haven't it" and "I don't have it" are essentially the same: the clitic "n't" applied to a verb to negate it. In one case you use an auxiliary verb and in another you don't, but the method of negation is the same.
Can you say a little more about what you don’t like?
What if we have NFT ownership not stored on blockchain?
Lawyers need to have passed the bar. Accountants need their CPA. Doctors their MD. Pharmacists their Pharm.D. Finance professionals their CFA. And so on.

Software engineers making 150K with only a four year degree and some leetcode have nothing to complain about. Take homes? Whiteboards? Cry me a river. Try to pass the bar or get through residency instead.
I'll counter your straw man with a bit of another... the rest of the white collar world largely gets by without take-home assignments or similar.

For example, my wife is an organization development consultant, she's changed jobs a few times over the last 12 years, and never has she had a take-home test. Instead, she has a few rounds of interviews, typically starting with a hiring VP, followed by an SVP or executive, and possibly a panel interview with possible peers. They talk about her previous work in detail, digging into frameworks she's used, papers she's read, etc. And then relate that work to the open position.

Personally, I've had reasonable success talking through a basic system design problem. Depending on the candidate's experience level, I can focus on different aspects of the problem... overall design, performance & algorithms, eventual layout of services/components in AWS, etc.
I feel similar about the direction Go (the game, not the language) has gone ever since AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. Suddenly the top players are looking to AI to teach them the most optimal way to play even though the plays are far more alien than if you watch games from the ancient masters, where intuition still informs most of the moves.

Sedol commented at the time that although he appreciated AlphaGo's strength, he never wanted to play it again and I agree. It's not even really that it sucks the fun out of it, it's that the decisions the AI makes are often inscrutable and counterintuitive. It removes the traditional feel of Go being a negotiation.
If you can negate a verb regarding action, what about a presumed statement of fact. Are there still equivalents of 'true' and 'false'?
I wonder if you’d have a small claims court case?

It seems like it was implied that you were a serious candidate if they asked you to do this. And the implied understanding is that they would at least review your work and provide feedback.

Send them an invoice!
I developed a game to fix my burnout. It sucks
I appreciate you looking this up.

There are lots and lots of laws, though, that are either unenforceable because they're badly written or just not enforced. The sibling comment pointing out the part you left out is on point, and I would be surprised if any sort of prosecution would ever happen. I'm paying my phone bill and I want to change my IMEI, so what? I'm not defrauding anyone. I am inclined to believe two things:

1) Nobody would ever bother me about this, and

2) Courts would agree with me if push came to shove
What are some examples of occupation you have in mind?
The real issue here that nobody talks about: there are just too many people wanting to become programmers. And I mean this in the most sincere way: we need to understand most developers aren't seeking to do programming for intrinsic fun or to create something that helps other people, they do them to earn a livable wage. Programming jobs are the only type of technical job left that actually pays shit (well enough to buy a house and start a family), so each year more and more are trying to hack interviews applying for 6-figure jobs that provide at least a reasonable middle-class life nowadays. So here goes accelerated hyper-competition... Obviously the real solution for this is to abolish wage work (so people actually only do programming that is useful or fun), but many here on HN would think of this as unrealistic, so there's that.
No longer common since the ubiquity of mobile phones. You usually still can't bring any cameras with interchangeable lenses (e.g. a DSLR), or a high quality audio recorder°, but IME the only shows that do anything to prevent all recording are stand-up comedy acts.

° jam bands still tend to allow these
Because they don't cause that dopamine hit that something nice and fancy does give. I think that's a good point that the gp made.
Here’s when it make sense: someone is a danger to society and there is no known way to rehabilitate them, but you find the death penalty morally a bit icky.
IKEA is disposable based on price, but I'd definitely not say they're low quality. IKEA is damn durable for what it is.
"Vaccinated English adults under 60 are dying at twice the rate of unvaccinated people the same age"

"I don't know how to explain this other than..."

Here's an idea maybe since people's activity levels increased they started having more bad outcomes.
You are overestimating the odds of that happening.

Vitalik Buterin is widely known, travels all the time to many countries, and although he might not be as rich as satoshi, still owns like a billion in crypto.

Yet he hasn't been kidnapped.
Apologies. I'm aware of the issues with code blocks on mobile, and I myself even call people out who used them instead of quotes. Here though, I used text alignment to aid in showing which words in Irish correspond to their translation in English, so a monospaced font was necessary as HN doesn't provide any other means of alignment.

EDIT: I viewed my comment on mobile, and I don't think it's completely gibberish as the commenter suggested. I use a relatively small phone (an iPhone SE 2020), and found it readable. That said, I've added '-' to the beginning of each line to aid in legibility for anybody experiencing issues.
There are enough lemons on the job market that this barely even bears examination. Anyone who's ever looked at a pile of incoming resumes can see at a glance that selecting at random from them is going to get a viable employee with vanishingly small probability. Anyone's who's tried to interview from even a selected pool of those can assume that the actual pool of candidates is overall even worse than it looks on paper.

Actual hiring results look a lot in abstract like dartboarding after trying to filter out the obviously unfit applicants, and while people can reasonably disagree on how hard to filter, not at all seems like a good way to put yourself out of business.
I've been using Depfu for a while and I think it handles some of the biggest pain points with Dependency spam.

- Package releases don't get PRs in their first 24 hours unless they are for security issues, so you don't get noise if there's a yank or a quick patch for a bug in the latest release

- You can set development (or production!) packages to only update once a week

- Packages that are known to have a very frequent release cadence (AWS SDK subcomponents, looking at you)_get pushed to a much slower PR pace so that you only update them 2x/month, etc.

- This might be fixed now, but it had much nicer auto-merge behavior for releases that passed CI.

- With Yarn, it can run `yarn-deduplicate` after updates to trim down shared dependency bloat.

FWIW we still use Dependabot for security patches only because they seem to get picked up a few hours earlier. We also have much tighter lock rules on some JS packages which seem to make breaking changes on patch/minor releases.
Did you look it up or are you just spouting what ever you can dream up to fit your argument? Lots of people all over the world have been arrested based on the panama papers.
I love this bit of code. It saved my butt in '99 when I had to implement searches for potential "Y2K" coding issues. Some where, collecting dust in CVS repository, probably saved on tape is some storage bunker, is a modified version of this that searched millions of lines of code for various potential "double digit year" issues.

And this also taught me an elegant way to implement recursion in C, that I shamelessly used in interviews to look way smarter than I actually am.
Yeah, you don't need to explain it to me, and especially not incorrectly.
Source - ChrisLemont

get off your high horse, use of tornado cash is quite common among crypto natives, otherwise it's like broadcasting your pepsi purchases on instagram
I'd be okay with "homework" if either 1) it's truly time bounded via programmatic cutoffs or 2) it's paid.

For time bounding, I love the time estimates they give you for a decent sized problem. A major company told me that a feature extraction problem + report should only take 4 hours. They provided me with some large CSVs representing DB tables (which contained some malformed data) and wanted a brief report back.

That's unrealistic in 4 hours even for a great performer. Then you spend the weekend on it and they won't give you feedback on it because of the suits in legal.

It's disrespectful.
That sounds incorrect to me. I'd like to know how they arrived at that number.
This is a little toy project (an animated 3D wind map), but I started it a couple of days ago so I guess it qualifies as "new":

https://github.com/0xf00ff00f/windmap

Uses CMake, Qt6, CUDA and OpenGL. Here's a short video showing how it currently looks like:

https://twitter.com/0xf00ff00f/status/1557920480564334594
The posturing is uncalled for. We have Jonathan Swift style hoops to jump through because hiring managers do not trust any claims of experience made by candidates. That is the crux of the problem.

Perhaps the reason why things are so is that a good chunk of tech revolves around advertising, and it’s easy to think of resumes as ads if you work in that space day in and day out.
Those jobs are a minority of white collar office jobs.
At least in the US, house purchases are by default anonymous. The only reason I know the sellers of my house is because they put in their trust name their full legal names.

Last time I sold a house, the only reason I met with the buyer directly was because I didn't use an agent for the sale.
TIL tire pressure sensors are wireless. I always wondered how they were "wired"
Thanks for the link to the news by Arctic scientists.

In this article [1] they wrote that the shift to more rainfall than snow in the Arctic is now predicted to occur between 2050 to 2080 (whereas the old models predicted this to occur between 2070 to 2090).

Interesting but alarming.

[1] https://nsidc.org/news-analyses/news-stories/rainfall-arctic...
It's more about resolving the ambiguity of a negative question. Taking GP's example:

You don’t like me, do you?

If you just answer "yes", it's unclear if you mean "logical yes" = "It's true, I don't like you" or "semantical yes" = "Why would you say that, I do like you".

French resolves that ambiguity with "si" to mean the latter. In languages like English that don't have the same concept, you would repeat a bit of the question to clarify.
I think modeling a goat as a rational agent is also pretty bold :-)
I'm not sure I follow. Is this not an arrest for violation of laws in place in Netherlands? Their criminal investigation started two months ago, not because of the US sanctions. How is this the EU bowing down to the US financial system?

The timing of the arrest could be a reaction, if they thought it might spook the suspect into fleeing or something along those lines. But that doesn't equate to bowing down either.
Australia has a population of 25 million, so it's very unlikely that they have 60 million users.

The product in question is Android, 15 million is probably a reasonable guesstimate and nicely divides to $4 per user. Still not a ton, but not quite as low as you're suggesting.
Yeah I haven't done this enough to be confident to stop after an hour. Usually there is a lot of experimenting with different designs, adding tests, refactoring, tidying up - I'd think a day for a "1 hour" exercise is normal.
First actual case of bug being found
What’s “fast fashion” and what class do I belong to when I don’t know?

Edit: yes I’m aware the article attempts to explain it and Google offers the same but I still don’t get how a fashion trend can change in a matter of days.
Governments started the offensive. Now decentralization actually starts to matter.

Ethereum is switching to PoS at the last minute, PoW miners are very easily forced to enforce sanctions because they can't hide due to enormous physical and legal presence. Home stakers can easily hide and break the law.
Screens in Screens in Screens
A video about an engine that simulates the 'droste effect' and hand-made fractals.
This is the "narcissism" snake. That is expected behavior.
I haven't met many people that think they shouldn't do anything, what I see more commonly, is people assuming the way they personally prefer getting evaluated is the way it should be for everyone.
There is still no legal precedent around a case like this as it relates to DAOs and autonomous smart contracts, so a law firm could not have told you anything except "we can neither confirm nor deny." If there is another US sanction that targets a non-custodial smart contract and open source project, please do share.

Devastating that it has come to "do not code an E2EE privacy tool because you might find yourself in jail one day."
> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts.

I think it has to do with people the weird phenomenon of people that are working as "programmers" that don't know how to program. I've seen a few. I've seen people write C on their resume and I gave them an hour for an easy assignment with the language of their choice, and they couldn't even get anything to compile. The guy probably read a book on C a decade ago or took a C class in college. Me on the other hand, I had python on my resume although I never worked in python or any programming language, but I studied the hell out of it in my free time. It was difficult for me to get my first programming job, so I like this model more. Trust but verify

Another reason is that there is a lot of variability in programming jobs. A programmer or developer in one company may consist of changing a few lines of code in a project they don't understand all the way to architecting the infrastructure the whole organization relies on. It's difficult to parse out the two from just an interview.

If you're hiring an actuary, and they had worked as an actuary before, you're probably pretty certain the work is similar enough, and if they hadn't been fired then they're at least somewhat competent.

I like simple programming problems, something slightly harder than foobar, ideally industry specific. Show them you know how to get a programming environment setup, know how to create functions, for loops, classes if appropriate and basic control flow. With the technical stuff out of the way you can review the candidates work experience
It's not contradictory in the slightest, the odds of a domesticated and domestic rabbit surviving predation are effectively nil.

The odds that it manages a litter first are higher, especially if it escapes pregnant, which rabbits generally are if they're able to be. Those pups are feral, not domestic, and have moderately better odds. Given enough generations, the domesticated neoteny is selected out by predation and now you have an invasive population of feral rabbits which can survive in the wild.
Maintaining a standing army is just sensible, from a game theoretic perspective. And it (for better or worse) has positive industrial/academic/technological feedback loops -- Unity being paid lots of money being just one example.

I would like to live in a peaceful country and world. A peaceful country is one that chooses not to fight. If you cannot fight, you are not peaceful, you are helpless.
The map on this page has some sort of CSS issue in Firefox. It constantly resizes and shakes. Using the page zoom function is enough to get it to eventually stop.