skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People certainly don't "know better" when their only form of legal knowledge is finally scrutinizing the papers they allegedly agreed to. Most people don't even know the clerical machinery of looking up authoritative contacts for Corporations/LLCs in their state's databases, never mind having enough understanding of prevailing law to know something written on an official sounding paper is blatantly false. Knowingly drafting a contract with blatantly illegal causes should be prosecuted as giving improper legal advice.
At the same time, I have put a ton of thought and effort into my company's hiring process, and still I see people melt down from nervousness or just get into their own head during the pair-programming part interviews.

We do everything we can think of to make the process as close to working together on the kind of code that candidates would work on at our company, but ultimately you can't get rid of the fact that someone is being actively assessed as they're working.

When I see people are psyching themselves out sometimes I'll ask them if they want to take a little time to get their thoughts together, end the call and come back when they've got a groove going, or reschedule the call. Because people who are in their own heads trying to code while I'm watching them simply cannot put up a fair representation of their abilities.

As an interviewer there's only so much I can do to help people with that. I try to take what I perceive as nerves or difficulty when I make a hiring decision, but I've also observed that people who are really struggling in this way in an interview are often going through something in their own lives that ends up interfering with their ability to be effective at work. So it's hard to balance.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that therapy can be beneficial regardless of the brokenness of the hiring process.
> Note that the Substack owner (Gayle) has an incentive to convince you that tech hiring is broken; She is the author of a famous book about how to master tech interviews. (...) The implicit story is that you’re supposed to buy the Substack owner’s book about coding interviews to overcome this problem

One explanation is that she wants to convince you that interviews are broken and that you need to buy her book (or hire her as a consultant to improve your hiring process).

Another explanation is that thanks to her decades of experience in the field, she honestly believes that she can help you nail these interviews if you know what to learn, so she created the books to help you prepare for the interviews, and get well paid and (potentially) interesting jobs.

In the first, she makes up a problem only to sell you the solution. In the second, she identified the problem, and created products to help you overcome this problem. When both are reasonable explanations, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.
It sounds like the author enjoys programming in a vacuum, math, and theory. Those are basically useless for a software engineer. Being a subject expert and having the codebase and systems memorized are infinitely more valuable to a company than having general interest in programming.
And yet it’s by far the most popular, easiest to use, and solves the most number of problems for the most number of people. Millions of hours of saved dev time over the years. That’s well engineered to me - engineered for users, not purity.
> Unless they never used any alternative...

It's the product quality equivalent of the Overton Window. People are impressed by their appliances lasting 5 years, or other mediocre accomplishments, because that's increasingly the norm.
How is it hidden? Can't the inquiring mind simply examine the codebase to see it's a struct? And if they choose not to, isn't it on them if it turns out to be something other than what they assumed it was without looking?
Thank you for the reply.

When I was using pans with a non-sticking coating, I used very little oil.

Now switching to cast-iron or carbon-steel I noticed that the best point to cook the food is to add some oil to the pan, wait for the oil to be heated properly, and only then start adding the food. Of course, I still add very little oil (maybe 1-2 tablespoons) but compared with non-sticking pans it is yet a visible thin film.

I am currently using extra-virgin olive oil but I am not sure it is good. Now I understand that instead of focusing on "extra-virgin" label I should focus on the process used to produce the oil.

On the other hand, sharing here a bit of anxiety I am no sure what to eat:

- On one hand I could try to eat more non-processed, non-cooked food like salads, vegetables ... But the risk there is being contaminated with various pesticides. So I am a bit concerned to switch to a diet mostly based on this as it means to increase a lot the quantity of such food

- On the other hand, cooking using what people consider healthy cookware means (so far for me) using some oil which I now get should be limited

- There is also the idea of red meat being bad, but also fish having mercury or radioactive elements. Probably not all of them but after reading this kind of information, I am a bit more aware of buying fish as I don't know exactly which one can be contaminated and from what area.

- The chickens seem also be not be healthy (don't remember where I read this and I somehow suspect it is false).

So I am really a bit puzzled about what to eat.

I don't think there is an easy answer.

Probably the correct answer is to grow my own food. But that is another style of life.
Compare standard of living of free market capitalist counties with socialist / communist countries.

There are very good reasons you let markets choose with minimal government interference.

People are going to be greedy in either scenario. But one is government officials having power. The other is regular people.
CS 17-670: Virtual Machines and Managed Runtimes
My instinct says the IoT things are mostly fine. Might be some weirdness right around the overflow that makes things segfault (especially a time range crossing the event), but they'll probably just reboot.

Banking and government/military do seem like the main pain point. Military specifically seems like it needs the most care because of the potential damage of something going wrong.
> I still draw a blank when asked what the magnitude of complexity is for the guests function I just wrote (damnit, of course calculating the permutations of a list is n-squared, but this is an interrogation of the random trivia I can manage to recall and I feel like a deer in the headlights).

Is this not n-factorial ?
Assange is being held without bail during pre-trial motions in the UK because he jumped bail the last time he had bail. If they are making an example of him it’s “if you jump bail you won’t get it again”.
>>I would love to see some EU legislation

Why does the EU believe every facet of life needs to be ordered and control by government regulation, is there any area of life at all in the EU that should be free from government interference? That is an honest question because every time anything comes up the first response from citizens of the EU is to declare government should be the right and proper resolution to the problem
I have a friend who, fortunately, escaped the drug world and is happily recovered now. One of the many interesting things I learned through talking to him and his friends is the pervasive idea among addicted that street drugs were always better in the past. Everyone vividly remembers their drug being much better when they first got into drugs, with steadily declining effects over the years.

Many of them had elaborate theories about changing synthesis or chirality or cutting agents or active impurities. They would even have theories about modern prescription Adderall or prescription opioids being 1/4 as powerful as in the past due to conspiracies by manufacturers.

The drugs may have changed slightly over the years, but the sad reality is that the real change was their accumulated tolerance and long term damage from drug abuse had blunted their response so much that they could barely feel the drugs any more. For some, this blunted reward response carried over to daily life, with depression and a hedonic being pervasive among the long term users.

A sobering reminder that the negative effects of recreational drugs last long after the hangover. I’m seeing an alarming trend of young people reading “harm reduction” material online and assuming they know the full picture of the risks of drug use. Seeing addicts (most of whom assumed they were using intelligently and practicing “harm reduction”) discuss their long term effects is a sad look into the realities of drug use. There is no free lunch.
the "what do you want to be when you grow up" question kids get asked usually involves something involving labor (unless astronauts, firefighters, teachers, and police work for free!)
> I can do coding interview style questions forward and back but I struggle with actual work as a programmer.

You might find a mathematical career more fruitful. (I don't know enough about you to know.) Alternatively, you might find something like backend Haskell, or applications Rust, more fun.
When it comes time to renew, or god forbid do anything else, you'll still have to deal with GoDaddy the company.
Malicious compliance maybe but compliance nonetheless - I’m not necessarily defending them here for the record but GDPR has been cited for a lot of inactive account removals recently - meta is already feeling heat from EU regulators - they may not want to take chances.
>Money is the goal, code is a tool to get the money. You work in a capitalistic business, whether you like it or not. Pu

Capitalism and money are actually only the means to an end, to achieve the best possible for society. But as is so often the case, at some point the means becomes the end.
People hiring as well as applicants need to start rejecting these hiring strategies. Noone can determine whether or not someone will be a good member of their team by their answer to the Skyline problem.
Agreed and in fact this is what is in our code even before I made the post. My main problem is that we have to invent this idSource string for all registries we support.
You are missing something but not what you think
The science of having ideas in the shower
Warrant canaries are a response to government orders that prevent transparent compliance reporting.

In the US at least the government can order you to not reveal the existence of a warrant. They cannot (in theory) compel you to state that you have not received any such warrants. Thus the canary.

I agree that being able to report on these activities transparently, even if it is done with a delay, would be preferable. But my understanding is that to accomplish that would require legislative changes to the current system.
That just means your resume has an issue.
I suppose that this sort of article is useful, but seriously, doesn’t just about everyone know how unhealthy seed oils are? I have a few friends who have unhealthy eating habits, they know about seed oils and don’t care.

One reason people don’t care about consuming unhealthy seed oils is the simplicity of eating packaged foods - cheap and convenient.

I try to almost 100% avoid packaged foods and this system of eating is a HUGE hassle and time sink. I will compromise and for example use a Falafel mix instead of grinding fava beans and chickpeas, but otherwise buy whole grains in bulk, fresh vegetables, meat, and fruit. I only bake bread a few times a month so I also buy bread from a local bakery. This takes a lot of effort so I would not necessarily recommend this system to other people.
Very cool hack, thanks for sharing
I'm a good-enough software developer. I've worked with folks who are better, but I deliver working code that follows best practices and have been very useful in dealing with a lot of very difficult technical problems including dealing with reading and fixing kernel panics in network device drivers (early in my career) and also working with big data scale backends. Everyone who's worked with me has positive things to say about my professionalism, abilities, teamwork, etc., including a director of engineering I reported to for one job. I'm working for a FAANG now and my manager's manager is checking in to make sure I'm happy.

I interview terribly and can go for long streaks of interview flare outs, and hit the same thing she described - I'll blank on things that I would be able to say effortlessly in a non-interview context, even when I'm fairly relaxed. Being good at software engineering isn't the same thing as being good at interviewing.
The letter "B" is usually a euphemism. Like real world dictators, those who let themselves be called "benevolent" by their followers are the worst politicians.
I came here to say exactly the same. Usually I can enjoy idiosyncratic fonts, but it's driving me crazy trying to read this.

It's the form of "f" used in italics, only un-italicized.

I think part of my brain keeps thinking it's the italic "f" in math notation "f(x)" and then gets confused to find it as part of a regular non-italic word.

Or it might be the fact that our brain relies heavily on word shape for fast reading, which is heavily dependent on the presence or absence of ascenders and descenders in lowercase, so adding a descender on a letter than shouldn't have one totally breaks our natural pattern recognition.

In any case, I've never come across it in any typeface before in my whole life. Now I'm starting to see why. :)
> Zero external configuration, other than telling your webserver to enable CGI on your file

This is only true if you've done it before, and know what you're doing. In reality, it looks like a mess of `mod_cgi` configuration, trying different combinations of file permissions, finding the magic `cgi_bin` directory, finding the right obscure log files when there are inevitably errors, wrestling with CORS and other subtleties of HTTP headers, and other complexities that are only easy to navigate if you're already an experienced CGI user.

That being said, I love the philosophy of using CGI for scripts. Instead of using CGI itself, though, I wrote a (single-file, statically-linked) web server called "QuickServ" to bring this philosophy into the twenty-first century. It has all of the upside of CGI, but is much easier to set up and run, especially for beginners.

One of its benefits is that it automatically parses submitted HTTP forms, and converts the form fields to command line arguments. That means it's extremely easy to put existing CLIs on the web with minimal changes other than writing an HTML form front-end.

If you like CGI, I will (shamelessly) ask that you check it out!

https://github.com/jstrieb/quickserv

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29002694
I really don’t understand eating vegetarian, presumably for well-being, and then making fake “meat” food science experiments a major part of your diet.

I have nothing against people choosing to eat vegetarian either. I’m not vegetarian, but I abstain from meat from time to time so sometimes I eat vegetarian. And when I do I’d much rather have something like delicious traditionally vegetarian Indian food than the output of some novel process chemistry reactor.
The only way we could rail against shitty hiring practices is to basically enact large scale societal reforms. At the moment, corporations are just doing their prerogative and causing massive psychic harm, but that's simply par for the course. It's simply better to cope with how fucked things are then to imagine shit posting on Twitter could change anything (or you can go read socialist theory, but we all get paid huge salaries, so no one really wants to bother with that)
rsync.net works well with borg, fwiw.
> They absolutely make finding your way around [...] safer

How so? Not disputing, just curious what you mean.
I don't have any personal experience with amphetamines, or any of the stimulants other than caffeine. But plenty of my passengers were struggling with substance addictions. I had a passenger who was whacked out on something. He disappeared real quick - I couldn't figure out how he got over that wall...

One of my passengers, whom I helped get off alcohol, said her downward spiral started with stimulants. Her husband had brought cocaine home from 'work' in California. He had emotional problems related to childhood. When cocaine got expensive they switched to meth amphetamine. She realized it was causing problems for her when she realized she'd been short with her youngest child.

At one point her other boy was prescribed Adderall (amphetamine) for ADD. That experiment only lasted for two weeks. She kept these Adderall pills on reserve, and used them to wean herself off the methamphetamine. That's when her anxiety started. After a few months of medical treatment, she found the 'anxiety' was perfectly relieved with alcohol. Whoops. [She ran back to the bottle every time she got a little stressed. I eventually encouraged her to use cannabis to mellow out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21889546 ]

Our dear leaders should come out of their ivory towers and figure out what actually happens on the streets. The War on Drugs has been ongoing for over a hundred years. People cycle in and out of jail/prison, but they don't get better from being mickeyed up (incarcerated).

From my perspective as a simple former taxi driver, the drug war is just a make-work program for public defenders: the bad chemicals get confiscated and the bad people get locked up, but people still have the same amount of unaddressed distress. People are usually worse off after getting corrected than they were before.

Two of my passengers informed me that cocaine is a much more pleasant drug than meth amphetamine. I don't have any reports about heroin vs. fentanyl. [Someone on twitter pointed out the drug cartels transitioned to Fentanyl when it became apparent that Afghanistan's heroin production was going to go offline.]

Bringing back cheap plant-based drugs (cocaine, heroin, etc) is an important step of harm reduction while society figures out how to effectively address the reasons behind our suffering.
1. Create unreasonably high standards for engineers.

2. Work your entire life to make those standards the criteria used for hiring at thousands of companies.

3. Make millions of dollars in products and services aimed to enforce those standards.

4. Feel sad and anxious due to being a bad developer with respect to the standards you created yourself.

5. Make a dumb post nobody empatizes with. (see 1-4)
Business context is not the whole reality, only a part of it and it's losing it's purpose.
Do you give people the formula and just have them implement it? That seems just like a weird test to see if you have the stdlib of your language memorized or not. And if you don't give them the formula it seems like you're just testing their memory of 8th grade [pre?] algebra.

Regardless that sounds like a question I would probably get right (maybe not to your bar though) and then remove myself from consideration based on inane interviewing.

The best interview loop I was ever on was for my current job. 45-ish minutes in coderpad with a staff engineer going over actual data and writing a few actually-used methods doing specific things. A 90-ish minute system design session with a few senior SREs designing a feature that already existed but had a lot of interesting edge cases. And a 60 minute behavioral interview with a couple managers. On the longer side but all on different days and all using real-world things from that job. Google whatever you want to google. Ask whatever questions you want to ask. Nothing remotely approaching a quiz, gotcha questions, inane trivia or unrelated math.
Because leaving it "to the market" is always a race to the bottom, and there ends up being no choice on voting with your wallet.
Is coconut oil a seed oil?
> Often not knowing something is fine during an interview

No it's not, from my experience. I've had Google jackasses push away from the desk during interviews chuckling "how much do you program?" when you don't know their pet quiz.

(The answer to the last question "is more than you", but ashamed I've never said that)
I have a car with many buttons[0] and a car with few buttons[1]. I'd take the few button one every time.

While my few button car doesn't have many buttons, all to the critical to driving inputs have physical controls. Lights, wipers, defrosters, volume, etc is all on or immediately around the wheel.

Meanwhile, on my many button car, sure there's a button for most things this car can do. But almost all those buttons in the middle never get pressed. They're essentially a waste of space. And most of them, even if I were to press them I wouldn't be doing so while the car is in motion. I shouldn't be messing with the navigation system while the car is in motion. I shouldn't be flipping through folders on the mp3 CD or flash drive. I shouldn't be messing with the phone functions, I shouldn't be messing with the Blue link stuff, etc.

Having all those buttons aren't a positive while driving, they're a negative. They make the map I do use while driving much smaller. And when stopped, they make the Android Auto interface I interact with much smaller and overall worse.

Don't get me wrong, some manufacturers have gone way overboard and put things like glove compartments and AC vents and shifters on a screen or eliminated the stalks. There should be a balance for sure, but having a screen in a car is nice.

[0] https://www.autoguide.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/20...

[1] https://www.macheforum.com/site/attachments/screen-shot-2021...
"They are making bad choices."

This sort of reductionist, simplistic "reasoning" is going to be the death of us all.

Trying to find a moral failing in every human weakness, every human ignorance, every human desperation? It's just disgusting.
> you are not a creator

You are creating content to drive traffic to a service or product. Are influencers not creators? Is making an ad not creation?

Interested in your definition of creator. Thanks!
Those documents are discussing warrants which don't have a gag order (I strongly believe, IANAL)