skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assembler is very simple as a language family. It is not simple to use.

The real challenge is combining the two.

I also think focusing on different compilers misses the point, which would perhaps be better expressed by to what extent a naive compiler implementation for the language would be likely to be fast or not.

E.g. Wirth's languages can be compiled single pass, and are fairly easy to compile without even building an AST. Some other languages can fit that too, but for many it's not that you need an AST and multiples passes just to generate good code, but that in some cases it gets increasingly impractical or impossible to compile them at all without much more machinery than Pascal or Oberon needs.
> Actually Russia and Ukraine were about to sign a peace deal in exchange for neutrality in April 2022. This was torpedoed by the UK and the US.

That's a well-known lie. Why do you keep repeating it?
Just discovered this amazing work inspired by old classics such as Total Annihilation.

tl;dr: Open source modern 3D RTS. Source appears to be located at [1].

[1] - https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason
If you'd like an article giving an explanation for this that doesn't require upgrading to a paid Medium subscription, try this one I wrote a few years ago:

https://blog.plan99.net/in-defence-of-the-technical-intervie...

It is, natch, hosted on Medium, so you will see a banner, but unlike this paywalled article it's dismissable. Just click the X to make it go away and then you can read the whole thing for free.

The summary is that many interviewers ask "unrealistic" algorithmic questions because:

1. They fit in the short amount of time available.

2. They get people writing programs that cover all the basic features of the language.

3. They don't ask people to do excessive amounts of work (e.g. takehome assignments)

4. They wash out people who lack basic skills you'd expect programmers to have, like actually starting a new project and being able to compile/run it in their self-chosen editor.

5. They are general and don't tend to require knowledge of specific frameworks or even specific languages.

The questions are unrealistic because they're designed to be fast ways to extract information in an interview setting, not to actually be an accurate sample of the daily work (which in the time available may only cover a fraction of the skills required of a working programmer).
Sorry to hijack your hijack, but I was/am in a similar position with my French/Italian/Portuguese/Dutch and more. I learned them to a high B low C level, but they've since faded from memory.

Trying to learn from language resources is painfully slow. Trying to watch TV or listens to podcasts is ineffectively difficult.

I'm building Phrasing[1] to tackle just this problem. We've just launched with all of the base functionality[2], including automatic analysis of native material to surface the most important words, phrases, and quotes specific to that material. We then make it dead simple to create flashcards-on-steroids which will automatically be applicable as flip cards, cloze cards, audio cards, and more.

When it comes to SRS, we:

- use our own fork of FSRS coincidentally (that's why I'm here hey )

- do away with scheduled due dates and actually try to keep the user engaged at a specific difficulty (you'll only see hard cards if you're doing well and 'can afford' it, you'll see easier cards if you're not doing well)

- dose out new reviews constantly, as it's better to make forward progress then to bang your head against all those challenging reviews

We just onboarded our second cohort of users, but we're planning to onboard another cohort at the end of this month. If you're interested you can fill out the beta application

[1] https://phrasing.app/

[2] https://blog.phrasing.app/phrasing-first-look
I have been running own mail server for over 10 years already, if you follow the standards (proper SPF/DKIM/DMARC records) - it rarely becomes a problem, rarely corp domains hosted on gmail push emails to spam, but overall 99.9% of emails are delivered correctly.
> Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement.

I don't know much about the RISC-V ecosystem at the moment, but what do you consider an "unbelievably low price"?

They SoC appears to be £5 to pre-order (EDIT: £5 is for a 20% off coupon), but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200. Is this considered a good deal for RISC-V right now?
Why Ilograph Added Contexts
I half agree. I know people who have a natural curiosity of algos & DS - most predictably, people who did algo/ds competitions/competitive programming. To them, leetcode is easy shit, and just naturally so. E.g. I had a group of friends who would ace Advent of Code every year while I muddled through (and always get stuck on day 7 or 10).

So I think leetcode interviews get both those groups - the ones you mentioned, who work hard and study (and thus demonstrate good qualities of being employees), _or_ those who are so good at this stuff that leetcode won't even make them sweat.
> nobody has found a more reliable proxy yet.

Companies have not found a process at scale where they can train their employees to systematically gauge candidates.

Small and startup companies where leadership is still involved in the interview process can gauge candidates based on their own technical intuition. So it's false to say NOBODY has a proxy for good software engineering skills. The founders can also look at the candidate's public code contributions.

The problem is that this method does not scale. If you trusted employees to hire based on feel and intuition, you open up the door for people to bring in incompetent friends.

The real problem here is incentives. Founders have a financial incentive to not hire bad candidates. Employees don't, and that's why a standardized process is needed.
ReRead.news – Save your links to ReRead later
> if I had to chose between those 2 jobs I would rather not chat with you. That's putting it politely...

Why not? I think I'm missing the insinuation there...
This is a good point. I imagine in a more cross-functional team this would become more important.

My current team is essentially front-end only and it's rare that we divide work up such that one person is waiting on another in the same team. If that's a possibility, we tend to pair instead.
That's true, but these practices date from back when Google was a search company. My point being there existed a time when Google asking these questions made a lot of sense.
Well.. it's perfectly obvious but I can spell it out:

Deflation significantly inhibits economic growth, making borrowing much more risky and would result in significantly more wealth inequality than we even have now.

Why invest into anything when you can just hoard money and get richer by not risking anything?
Sympathy for the spammer. The desperate and credulous by Cory Doctorow
Medium started out better, it's gone downhill.
Exactly. And go take a swim in a river if you want to experience actual consequences of the mismanagement of our water infrastructure.

There is still hope for Grenfell prosecutions after the inquest, but justice repeatedly delayed for no good reason is justice denied, obviously.
A network where all nodes are fully connected to every other node and data can be routed through secondary indirect paths if the primary direct path fails is absolutely a mesh network.

And a 3 node ring is absolutely still a ring network.
Benefits such as lifetime free or discounted access are not enough to convince me to share my email.

I would be convinced by something more specific: a roadmap with milestones, a clear mapping between the amount of help and received benefits, etc.
> There is a bigger reason why the end of open source AI might be close: as soon as training data becomes licensed, that’s it for open source AI. Poof.

In the West, maybe. I doubt it'll slow down open source AI development pace in places like China.
It wouldn't run in separate cores but single-threaded can also get some measure of instruction-level parallelism.

A CPU can do more than one thing at once by computing the next instruction while it's still writing the result of the previous one. However, the CPU can only do that if it's 100% sure that the next instruction does not depend on the previous instruction. This optimization sometimes can't trigger in an interpreter, because of highly mutable variables such as the program counter or the top of the interpreter stack. Fun illustration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMMAGIefZuM&t=288s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States
I think this "senior developer in his 40s" vs " fresh school graduate in his/her twenties" is more like your personal rendition of the story.
I couldn’t read the entire article due to Medium, but this author sounds like the kind of guy who’d invent a jump to conclusions mat
I use multipass to run Ubuntu VMs on macos (m1). It works flawlessly. Zero issues so far (I keep around 3 or 4 VMs running in the bg and they still work after days/weeks with no issues regarding the network or whatever)
Yup, can sign that. Never had a coding interview so far... It is all about sympathy and being knowledgable. Had the most success by being brutaly honest about not knowing certain technologies. But I also show a lot of interest once I do not know something.
I hold a very controvertial take on the dentist question: this and similar questions select candidates who can come up with convincing lines that lack any basis in facts (i.e. bullshit). This seems to be a good foundation for a terrible engineering/company culture.
Couldn't read the article due to pay/registration wall.

If this is about screening potential software engineers with programming questions during an interview, hasn't this always been a thing even before Google popularised it?

I started my career after the dot-com era but it was in Systems Administration, so I didn't get to experience any programming style interviews until I changed careers and attempted an interview in 2008 with Google.

But hasn't this been the standard modus operandi for big tech companies like Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM, etc. even in the 90s? I recall reading this [1] article from Casey Muratori about programming questions for a Software Engineering intern at Microsoft.

I'm not against this style of interviewing, but I do also think that some questions can be absurd or unnecessarily tricky. I've had my fair share of programming interview questions, and I found my solve rate to be around 3/7 for my last interview with Google back in 2015. Some of the questions posed were really tricky, and I just don't have the ability to solve in a timely manner without properly experimenting with the problem. From my impression and perspective, interviewers would sometimes choose questions with high coolness/leetness factor instead of choosing something more practical for a 30-50 minute session.

[1]: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/the-four-programming-quest...
Also true, though I was responding to gp’s comment about pronunciation flattening.

However now you mention it I wonder if automatic translation might also cramp or otherwise affect minority languages spoken by a small population.

Also I wonder if multi-step automatic translation will cause weirdness in spoken languages (again, mainly in minority languages)
You're thinking of FÖLGARP
Does a system which discourages any investment and makes borrowing extremely expensive benefit or harm society?
There's a plugin for that called which-keys
Hey, that was not me. :)

I'm saying the person you were responding to has added to this thread, at least for me. You were questioning the value of their comment, and I'm saying this is it.
Usually the issues companies throw at their applicants aren't that difficult to solve. Every dev should know how to split data into structures you can work with.
For me, the perfect thing would be something that aggregates links from all these sources, because there is useful stuff there sometimes.

The discussion tends to be worse than useless.

I'll implement this "some day"
I default to scribe.rip for Medium stuff

https://scribe.rip/why-do-big-companies-ask-unrealistic-soft...

Edit: just saw that it won't load the entire article, sad.
Same reason the NFL combine has athletes do the bench press and the 40 yard dash. They aren’t going to do a bench press in an NFL game. Neither are they going to a straight 40 yard dash.

However, those activities tend to reveal information about their abilities that are useful in an actual game.

Similarly, while you may not be doing those coding problems in day to day development, those coding problems can (ideally) reveal information about your knowledge and abilities in hat does apply to daily coding.
Aaaaaah… so it’s basically Rickrolling someone. Got it!
Sorry, I was a bit vague. Chemo and cannabis arent the cure.
> trying to find out your (software engineer) unconscious mind reveals during the process.

For many decades, Floyd's Cycle Detection algorithm was unknown in academic circles as the most efficient method of cycle detection.

It is not uncommon to encounter this problem in an interview. There's nothing revealing about the unconscious mind and process, other than that the candidate remembered the solution to this problem.

If it was so readily obvious to derive and arrive at a solution, you would have expected the army of PhDs and academics to have done so.
Good to see actual stats on this to confirm the qualitative headlines we've been seeing for the past few years.

The big media brands keep making new subscription services and consumers simply don't have the disposable income to subscribe to so many, so obviously people will turn to piracy. I would think most are feeling ethically okay doing so too as they will be paying for 1-2 services and then pirating the rest.

Add to that the stupidity of adding ads to these services as many are doing and it'll only make the situation worse.

Ad-supported packages that are cheaper are fine, but Amazon's decision to add ads to their regular package and then charge extra to remove ads is just beyond stupid. They should have just added a cheaper ad-supported version and then hiked prices at a later date like the others have.
I'm working on Phrasing.app that does just this. We originally used ebisu, but ended up (heavily) modifying our own fork of FSRS.

We don't use due dates really (except for some analytics by request), but instead try to keep a user at various difficulty levels.

We care more about forward progress then making sure you're always 100% caught up (if a words really that important, you can either favorite it or you'll see it again).

It's not an open flashcard app, we're really also heavily focused on automatic sentence mining for foreign languages, but I'd be happy to answer any questions about my experience adapting FSRS.

You can see more about the product at https://blog.phrasing.app/phrasing-first-look/
> The key issue seemed to be in the Post Office internal “Justice” system, which is opaque, biased and refused to consider evidence.

No doubt pushed forwards by the racists believing in their heart that some of these sub postmasters HAD to be guilty because of their ethnicity.
And MacBooks.
browser replacements
What exactly do you think wealthy people do with their money? Buy a big vault and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck? They invest in new businesses, donate to charities. Heck, Bill Gates’ foundation is curing malaria in Africa. What makes you think the government getting the money is going to be more effective? I think it will largely just swell the bureaucracy and lead to more waste, not less.
Interactive map of all foreign entities holding English/Welsh real estate
> Because AI safety people are not the strawmen you are hypothesizing. They're arguing against taking existential risks.

The AI safety strawman is "existential risk from magical super-God AI". That is what the unserious "AI safety" grifters or sci-fi enthusiasts are discussing.

The real AI safety risks are the ones that actually exist today: training-set biases extended to decision-making biases, deeply personalized propaganda, plagiarism white-washing, creative works bankrupting, power imbalances from control of working AI tech etc.
> > large life decisions like joining gangs

Have you ever lived in bad neighborhoods? There is no interview process to join a gang, a person starts with something mundane like moving drugs for some very low ranking affiliate from some area of the city to another. Literally just driving, nothing life changing.

You could rebut, why not become an Uber driver, to which I reply: same amount of money that Uber driver makes in a whole day in about 1-2 hours tops.

When you hear news reports saying "X or Y joined Z gang in 2016 and climbed within the criminal organization" , you can be sure that the first mundane task he made for some low ranking affiliate back in 2010 perhaps even earlier.
Interesting difference but why is querySelector(`#${CSS.escape(id)}`) better?

I would prefer to use valid id's but also, when selecting by id I just use getElementByID?

You could also use querySelectorAll(id) and have more than one element with the same id. It doesn't seem like a good idea.
These tests and questions are often in place so people feel they can manage the risk/uncertainty of hiring. Some studies show that previous performance is the key indicator of future performance. Interviewing and testing in the hiring process are negligible at best.
> then maybe it's not important

The main point of stand-up/daily scrum is to set up collaborations and coordination. It's where you invite pairs, inform POs of blockers and discoveries that will lead to longer timelines etc.

If you're doing all that anyway, keep going and don't worry about stand-up.
Only if you have a static or economic in permanent recession then yes.

If you have a growing economy (of course not a concern it bitcoin would replace Fiat currencies) it's extremely deflationary. The supply of money has to grow at least at the same pace as the demand for it, otherwise bad things happen...
A fizzbuzz question would sufficiently address points 1 thru 5.

The issue at hand is that the "unrealistic" algorithm questions aren't fizzbuzz.
I think what is meant is "hypothetical" in the sense of making assumptions about how AI systems would behave under certain circumstances. If an argument relies on a chain of assumptions like that (such as "instrumental convergence" and "reflective stability" to take some Lesswrong classics), it might look superficially like a good argument for taking drastic action, but if the whole argument falls down when any of the assumptions turn out the other way, it can be fairly dismissed as "too hypothetical" until each assumption has strong argumentation behind it.

edit: also I think just in general "show me the arguments" is always a good response to a bare claim that good arguments exist.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, because you're right.

To back up parent's point, if you compile the code and the resulting assembly is a direct translation, renaming will break the dependency and the CPU will execute the instructions in parallel. Write after read hazard is the applicable section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_renaming
Why is your default assumption that Apple is more trustworthy? It certainly isn’t my default assumption.
Worth pointing out that this is actually what Knuth meant by premature optimisation. Nothing to do with optimising too early in a project or some sense of YAGNI, but rather optimising before you know where the actual time is spent.
How to Express Correlations in TypeScript
Wow, what an incredibly low quality article (TL;DR the questions are hard because the interviewer wants to lord it over the candidate) for something behind a paywall. And he ends with a call to upvote and follow, classy.
Ha! Good one!

Let's just roll back all our healthcare research, logistics, environmental advancements etc. because some boogey man tech might do something bad perhaps at sometime in the future maybe!
Nothing yet. Just studying things that interest me.

But I have to figure out something in the near future. It just can't be software development.
So the problems in article are: Apple doesn't support Vulkan, Apple chips were incompatible with Docker, Apple deprecated OpenGL support, Apple don't make their Metal multiplatform. I think I see a pattern here, hehe
The expert : seven perpendicular red lines
https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg?si=dzXY9hRaVkoU3p7z
Actually, anyone who knows what they're talking about will tell you the ban makes heroin a much worse problem, not better.

Ban leads to a black market, leads to lousy purity, which leads to fluctuations in purity and switches to potent alternatives, leads to waves of overdose deaths.
I can precondition my Tesla. The car is scheduled to be fully defrosted, cabin preheated and battery preconditioned for 8.30 every weekday.

If you navigate to a supercharger it will precondition the battery as you approach.
Why a trackpoint without the middle click? How do you scroll?
Claims 2 and 4 don't apply to the way these algorithmic questions are usually administered at large companies, which is pure whiteboard coding where you can't run any of the code you're expected to write.
Medium started expressly for the money. How to let authors monetize.

To criticize it for doing what it was created to do, seems odd.

Sure, there are a lot of software packages out there so any dev can create a new Medium. Who cares? The point was to pull a lot of people to one site to monetize it. They would browse around and find other authors, which is not possible if every dev out there creates their own site.

Just like Twitch isn't it?

Are you saying it is being censored? To what end? What ideology cares about programming. "Those Democrats and their Objects are using the wrong patterns again". "Republicans and their Emacs, holding on to the past".
Austerity's cloud

Hope distant hung low for long

Rot ruin awake
Obviously, C and C++ have characteristics driving people to desperately try Twitter pro-tips. To stuff something like this under the door, I believe your PR better mention Jenkins.
Fingerprints aren't equivalent to security.

They are at best a quick convenience for perhaps a time logging machine? Where security really isn't a factor.
I stand by my point. There's a great stack overflow question [0] that shows a big pitfall of reserve.

IO buffering is also not as clear cut. If you're running on a terminal, sure. But if you're outputting to a log file, or running in a CI environment where your stdout is being captured and redirected to a parent process, moving to buffered IO changes the semantics significantly. Imagine this code:

log("dangerous precondition hit, logging some state:" + state);
function_crashes_here()

With buffered IO, you very likely lose your log line.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48535727/why-are-c-stl-v...
I've asked non-leet code questions that aren't directly related to the work the candidate would be doing. It's usually a smallish self-contained problem, solvable in less than a dozen lines, in about 5 to 20 minutes. What I like about it, is that it's novel enough, that I get to see the candidate think through the problem. I get a glimpse into their problem solving capability.

It's not a perfect proxy for how well they'd solve real user facing problems, but so far it has given me a decent indicator of their motivation/passion and apetite for problem solving. There's a dozen other, mostly non-coding questions in the interview, but this one has been the best predicator for me.

(The problem is closer to a more elaborate fizzbuzz with some math parts, than it is to a memorizable b-tree or other leet-code algorithm question)
Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers? (2004) [pdf]