skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Dynamic PDF API – Drag and drop designer or HTML conversion
Three hours? My own time was about 45 minutes (at MemSQL, did not get an offer), completely unprepared. It's not a complicated codebase to comprehend, and you can rely on the existing plumbing for other ops. The best candidate I've interviewed also implemented DTrace instrumentation support for this in the same amount of time. I do agree this is a great question, far better than irrelevant Leetcode bullshit that gets typically asked. At least it's far more predictive of the actual on-the-job performance, because this is what the candidate will be doing mostly, as their job.
Do you have any statistics on "there are tons of candidates willing to go through the process for free"?
Is there any other field that normalizes this type of insane interviews.
They are even applauded by the vast majority in this thread.

Do mathematiticans have to interiview like this? Medical doctors? Police officers?
Rocket scientists? Chemists?
Architects?
I cant think off a single profession apart from the IT domain that does this.

I dont think there is a single profession that gets mocked on their interviewing strategies as much as IT still I see senior devs defending this insanity.
Just give it a few years and besides pointed ears this will be doable. Anyways, I was thinking about whether our ancestors also wagged their tails, just like dogs and cats use them. And what were the triggers inside our nervous system.
And then never move to Japan (or any other country where names are expected not to have Latin letters in them)
Watch out for restore costs though.

It only costs $0.10 and $4/month to back up 1TiB, but $100-$350 to restore it, depending on how fast you want to restore. Still, $4/mo, or $88/month for 22TB is some peace of mind.

https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html
No. But I don't often work on databases so I don't find myself grasping for any commands in a cache. It's hard to imagine that if there's a use case for adding a delta there's not also a use case for multiply by constant. But I'm not familiar with the market so maybe I'm wrong.
One major problem with Longevity: Dictators living forever
Video games, 4K HDR BD rips of movies and RAW shots from a DSLR add up _very quickly_.
I find it so interesting how many of the symbol used are with objects that have or that will disappear from our lives.

A camcorder, a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, a film (for a camera), maybe even the fountain pen.

All of which I can recognise, but all of which will probably leave my daughters baffled if I were to ask them what it was...
The issue is without it how do weed out the bullshitters and frauds?

I've done loads of interviews of "engineers" who could barely program at all. A short test like this can remove them completely and then you just need one discussion interview for the handful of candidates that remain.
Well yes, he does not want to discuss the direction of developement. He decides that. If he thinks something is not helping, he won't do it.

So sure, taking part in the project would mean accepting his way of things.

So difficult to work with?
Depends on your expectations I guess.

And the comment above could have been maybe written nicer, but I see it as a defense of "no, I don't need to accept your PR just because you put work in it, you should have checked with me first, before doing it"

Because he had those discussions quite often I think (I follow decelopement from time to time since quite a while)
A fine is just a license fee to break the law. Shut down their business for X months/years, instead, require them to continue wages for their lower level employees and remove any management directly connected with the violation of privacy.

Unless we make the penalty extremely harsh, change will not happen in this instance. The selling of PID is far too profitable to be deterred by mere fine
Scientists call for protection of moon sites that could advance astronomy
With sufficient time and motivation, that's not really a barrier. ;)
> But programmers want threads conceptually, semantically. Write sequential logic and don't use strange annotations like "async". In other words, if async/await is so good, why not make all functions in the language implicitly async, and in stead of "await" just use normal function calls? Then you will suddenly be programming in threads.

Some programmers do, but many want exactly the opposite as well. Most of the time I don't care if it's an OS blocking syscall or a non-blocking one, but I do care about understanding the control flow of the program I'm reading and see where there's waiting time and how to make them run concurrently.

In fact, I'd kill to have a blocking/block keyword pair whenever I'm working with blocking functions, because they can surreptitiously slow down everything without you paying attention (I can't count how many pieces of software I've seen with blocking syscalls in the UI thread, leading to frustratingly slow apps!).
I feel like that could very quickly devolve into a Hacktoberfest spam situation where the memcached maintainers keep having to close unsolicited "add a multiply command" PRs. The feature used in the question was designed to be easy to understand and implement, not actually useful to anyone.
Tcl/Tk 9.0
If you're the computer nerd for your extended family, both biological and chosen, that's a lot of photos and videos of birthdays and weddings and funerals, but most likely it's for a private Netflix-like service that never (unless the drives get killed) removes videos.
If it didn't fulfil a function, then random mutations and deletions during Meiosis would quite quickly get rid of it. Even if it only serves to support the structure of chromosomes or some similarly arcane purpose that we will only discover in a decade or so, it still has a function.
For near-circular orbits like this, speed controls altitude [0] [1]. 600,000km/hr is way faster than Earth escape velocity, so anything that fast won't be orbiting Earth.

[0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/satellite6.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed#Tangential_veloc...
The point is: it isn't exactly short.

I do agree that this probably has no value for the company. They could implement this easily themselves. Now, if they would give a different arithmetic operation to each applicant...
You missed the widgets: chatbots, mini-apps, browser extensions, add-ons, etc.

Today lots of major successful products have an ecosystem for extensions/add-ons.

You can find a missing feature in such a product and implement a paid extension for it.

Pros:

- easier to build

- can be promoted via platform stores/markets/directories

Cons:

- limited

- 3rd-party platform risk

It's best to use a widget to validate the idea, and then rewrite it either as a mobile or web app (when it makes sense, or possible at all).
Bro. Most interview panels are more than 3 hours. If you're getting a multihour test, it's literally the only interview in the day.
This can be optimised why only use problems that the team already solved? Just give the candidate access to the current JIRA tickets and let them choose one to tackle. Think about all the value that you could be extracting /s
This was a one-hour interview when I faced it.
Pyenv – lets you easily switch between multiple versions of Python
what is the point of this drivel?

The number of working-age adults economically inactive due to ill health rose from 2.1 million in July 2019 to a peak of 2.8 million by October 2023, before falling slightly to 2.7 million in December 2023, the foundation reported.

so a rise of 600,000 people too ill to work. maybe covid has something to do with that figure.

The real reason for the scary "WARNINGS".

Labour and the Conservatives have promised a tough stance on benefit claimants. Earlier this month the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, said there would be “no option of a life on benefits” under a future Labour government as she outlined plans to support young people to find work or training.

according to the ONS. The Office Of National Statistics.

Economic inactivity is:

People not in employment who have not been seeking work within the last 4 weeks and/or are unable to start work within the next 2 weeks.

nothing new here:
Same old bullying of the ill and the unemployed.
Such an effective design. I immediately recognize even subtle difference between icons at the lowest sizes. Meanwhile, today I get lost on my Android phone and in most desktop applications with low-contrast and monochrome icons.
Portugals Portuguese please (no Brazil, almost all the apps that teach Portuguese, teach the Brazil version, which makes you sound like a joke here; thanks Duolingo!).
As a Spaniard who has lived ten years in Scandinavia and is back to Spain, I couldn't agree more. There are so many everyday examples!
Seems weird, but i saw something similar happen.

We were fixing old QNAP server, and it used normal PSU keying. The thing is - it blew PSU capacitors(with a nice small explosion) after being turned on.

we suspected that the old QNAP model had proprietary pin layout for the PSU. No labels of course.
Thank you for shot-scraper! I've tested it in the past, but something severely missing from all screenshot tools, shot-scraper included, is a way to avoid screenshoting popups. For instance, newsletter or login popups, GDPR popups, etc. If shot-scraper has a reliable way of screenshoting websites while avoiding these popups, I would love to know.

I'm on mobile so don't have access to my notes, but I'm pretty sure that a year ago when I tried there was no reliable way to screenshot e.g. the BBC news website without getting the popups.

Again, thank you.
There's also writing your code with poll() and select(), which is its own thing.
Yes, well, $120/TB/decade if we convert it to HDD relevant units for cost comparison. About 12x the cost.

Regardless, it has good reliability properties.
OpenCog an open-source software project for AGI challenge
To achieve realtime speed, you need to at least convert it to ONNX or similar, applying quantization for 30fps mode.
It seems quite plausible that "boredom" is a mechanism that is required (or at least useful) for building high cognitive capabilities.
Transitioning Discord's Engineering Team to Cloud Development Environments
For OP he said it was three hours after the context was given. I guess it depends, this is personal to me but I'm bowing out of most processes that I deem to be meaningless/a waste of everyones time.
Would you happily live your life in a simulation?
And that’s your choice.

However, as technical assessments go this is very reasonable.

It’s not them getting work done for free.

It’s only very minimally contrived.

It’s not “leet”, as in it’s straight forward (you’d essentially copy and alter an existing feature) and absolutely the kind the task you could encounter during a day job there.

If I were interviewing you and you were not referred (referrals might be able forego assessments) and if you refused to do this, I would feel that your attitude was a bit unreasonable and it would make me think less of you as a candidate.

But really it’s a willing buyer willing seller scenario, so you do what you feel is important to you, and I would do the same, but don’t be surprised if it counts against you.
Minimalist news
'We' as an industry also seem to be very allergic to any sort of formal certification process, so this is where we end up. On the positive side that means that in theory anyone can show up with no formal training, pass the interview, and get a job (as I'm sure many of us here have). That is literally impossible for all the other jobs you mentioned.

We either have to start requiring the same level of formal certification we require of other engineering professions or we have to deal with these types of interviews.
This could be why programming is seen as arts. Artists have to show a portfolio or a reel, that takes hundreds of hours to create. And then great style, a good story and crisp explanations on top of that.

The awful thing though is that you’re not allowed to show your old employers’ code. And most of it is teamwork.
Passwords are great, stop tinkering with stuff that isn't broken.
It's implied by the existence of these tests. If companies thought they were missing out on too many good people they wouldn't do it.
On the other hand, this design decision was so stupid that they're likely to kill the hardware of a lot of other people too, so obviously the lawyers would want to... uh... help destroy the company's reputation.

Here's a question: If you're going to change the pinout of the connector, which is proprietary anyway, why is the connector not keyed for the pinout it's supposed to use so you can't plug in the wrong cable?
I never looked at the memcached source, and I'm not even an especially experienced C programmer, but I'm pretty sure I can do it in well under 3 hours.

1. grep -r '"append"' to find where it does "switch (cmd) { .. }" – append seems reasonably unique, but maybe there's a better command.

2. Modify switch to recognize "mult" command.

3. Find "append" function that does the work; copy/paste, modify to do multiplication.

4. Converting two strings to a number, multiplying the result, and returning the result as a string is a fairly trivial function.

Unless the memcached source code is hugely surprising, I might be able to get a first working version in 15 minutes or so on a good day if I don't mess up, maybe double on an average day. Add 15 more minutes to build memcached and read the question, and maybe a further 15 minutes of making it nicer/leeway.

A 3 hour limit is long enough so that no one reasonable will stress about running out of time, affecting the performance, and short enough that bozos can't easily trial/error it, ask on Stack Overflow, or whatnot.

Other than that, the stage matters a lot as well – is this the first interview question shotgunned to everyone who applies, the final one and you're hired if you pass, or something in between?
>Fibers and async/await are backed by the same OS APIs, they can achieve more or less the same latency.

The key requirement for ultra-low-latency software is minimising/eliminating dynamic memory allocation, and stackless coroutines allow avoiding memory allocation. For managed coroutines on the other hand (e.g. goroutines, Java coroutines) as far as I'm aware it's impossible to have an implementation that doesn't do any dynamic memory allocation, or at least there aren't any such implementations in practice.
I can't believe how good it feels to navigate this UI.
I'm not even sure if it's just nostalgic. The UX was damn good.
Totally agree on OpenCV's Python API being hard to use. If your goals are to build something as foundational as OpenCV, but with a Python-native interface I'd be excited about that.

I hope I don't come off as critical, I appreciate the work you're doing. I'd really like to see this take off. My only point is that tasks like annotating a video with tracking are things I've only seen in demos. If I could custom-order the reusable parts I want, it would include geometry, camera transforms, lens distortion, etc. Your polygon zone filtering looks imminently useful. Maybe I should shut up and just contribute something.

I remember meeting you! Maybe I'll see you in Seattle this year.
Curious that CDI and other dependency injection frameworks are not discussed here, I would have imagined them to be relevant. But otherwise, I think the article does highlight a real problem and I would hope that future PLs improve on this front, allowing for even more "pure" functions in some sense.

The section on exceptions got me thinking of CL condition system. Idk if it somehow meshes in here, I suspect it might provide some mechanism to inject context somehow... but I never have programmed a single line of CL so idk.
Pretty sure memcached don't want dozens of rushed implementations of a multiply command
Exactly, it's a forum not Twitter/reddit. Without references and citations this is no better than a bunch of random words, and it's hard to make any argument of substance.

The person asked for citations, leave it be, stop dudexplaining how Internet works for you please.

I call bs on your 2 comments.
Then of course, the natural conclusion is that some portion of potential candidates would always be dissatisfied with the interview process and question set, which maybe explains the persistence of Leetcode-style interviews with all that entails.
If you login on some services on your phone, you have the same problem.

2FA protects you mainly from password leaks, not from people phisically accessing your devices.
> why is the connector not keyed for the pinout it's supposed to use

Because it's cheaper to reuse the connectors they already have rather than to make a new one. /s

EDIT: Added a /s just to be on the safe side.
I think for these use case a SSH server in Go would be way simpler such as https://github.com/gliderlabs/ssh
Interesting to see the correlation between size of a company and their fine.
ORANGE spain for instance got a 200,000 EUR fine, but some local physician only got 1,500.
GDPR fines grow to up to 4% of global revenue if a company keeps infringing on it, and they are applied over and over again if the behaviour doesn't stop. Taking a 4% global revenue fine is not something a company can do many times, it doesn't become just a cost of business, it has material impact.
That's just a myth. ReactOS routinely uses IDA to inspect actual Windows binary logic.
I’d say if it takes you three hours you’ve already failed.

I’ve fixed a bug in memcached (improperly cleared buffer, null GETs resulting in zero prepend on next GET under high stress) during a five alarm fire and deployed it across a cluster in less than 30 minutes - and I would consider myself a mediocre devops hire.
not as dramatically as mult can.

and besides, if addition overflows, then it behooves you to ensure your next implementation doesn't, otherwise you are just adding technical debt.
Particularly given that the satellites are absolutely minuscule compared to the distances between them. People are bad at conceptualising tiny fractions.
There is an issue between WSL/Hyper-V and the cache system on linux, WSL2 might LOOK like it needs 8GB but in reality if you check under it most of it is used by cache, if you lower the amount of ram dedicated it will do just fine.

WSL1 was great and I loved it better on many aspect, until you needed to touch the filesystem.
To Live Past 100, Mangia a Lot Less: Italian Expert's Ideas on Aging
> make sure you are paying your candidates market wage for the interview

I always wondered how workable that could be at any scale. We sometimes hear about company straight contracting small fixes to a candidate and use that experience to decide on hiring.

But most job interviews I've ever received where while being in a full time exclusive contract with my actual employer, and I wouldn't quit before getting the next job. Doing some coding interview on the side is of course fine, but the moment money gets into the mix, I feel it becomes a weird line to walk on whether I'm breaking my exclusive contract or not.

This line being iffier if I'm getting paid by a competitor in the field for the interview.
This looks really cool! Too bad you don’t have Korean though. But I’m already a LingQ user, how is Glossarie different?
Meme, Myself, I (1999)
https://archive.md/qOVbx#selection-4313.0-4313.68
We'll see about that after the lawyers get through with them.
And let's not pretend there aren't plenty of bozos who don't really know what they're doing in other fields. It's entirely unclear to me whether certification helps.

Previous comment on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37989386
It's been more than 10 years.

if they are still using the exact same question, that's on them.
The water usually isn't below 0 in those cases.
Which is actually insane.
Three things:

① I believe this only affects macOS, and has no effect on any other platform.

② There’s no such property as font-smoothing. Only -webkit-font-smoothing and -moz-osx-font-smoothing, with their different values.

③ Attempting to control this is highly controversial. You may prefer it one way, but others may prefer it otherwise. See, for example, https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smooth.... (Note that discussion of these things tends to be from 7–15 years ago. I have no idea what the present situation is; I know macOS largely eschews subpixel antialiasing these days, so maybe the effect of this property has changed now, or maybe it literally does nothing, I don’t use macOS.) As a generalisation, you should not do things like this, but leave it to the platform or the user to decide. Features like this don’t tend to end up part of the standardised web platform, because you normally shouldn’t be able to control them, and when people control them, they’re normally doing so in order to work around platform-specific issues, or just because they’re copying and pasting what someone else did without understanding.
I know an organisation that was hiring shipwrights. The interview was to make a wooden box.
My favorite example is telling it to reverse some longer text character-by-character. Trivial for any human to perform perfectly, but all models I've tested struggle with it and make mistakes all over. It's really hard for them because they lack hidden state to perform algorithms - or what you would call thought in a human. Instead (essentially) for each step they have to re-consider the entire thing and their past output, figure out what they already did, and what they have to do next.

On the other hand they'll spit out python code that'll get you the reversed text just fine.

It's also one of their greatest shortcomings when it comes to coding: They lack the ability to do any meaningful symbolical execution.

https://chat.openai.com/share/9faaae97-e20f-454e-b245-3e4c19...
> for most potential employers

I would hope Bobs Burgers aren't asking you to add a new feature to memcached in their interview process.
Tangentially related... My pet theory is that it was total eclipses that motivated ancient civilizations' evident fascination with astronomy and (by extension!) mathematics.
Yes, the genome-layer is nondeterministic. But there are also more layers that are probably just as nondeterministic, adding more complexity to your view.

Other layers include: epigenome-layer, transcriptome-layer, proteome-layer

Each layer can compensate for deficiencies in another layer.

So lets say you knock out a gene in utero and it has a phenotype. But when you do the same procedure in an adult organism, there is no phenotype, although the gene should be important in an adult. It's like phenotype and genotype are two states whose correlation is dependent on many variables. In this example at least time.
I use Unhook Browser extension. There you can configure to hide shorts, home feed, comments etc.
We might not be that far away already. There is this issue[1] on Github, where Microsoft and the community discuss some significant changes.

There is still a lot of questions unanswered, but initial tests look promising.

Ref: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/94620
THAT telephone modem icon!
My guess is that your original SYN did not go to the target, but was redirected somewhere close by. I'd look at the TTL value in the IP header of your first SYN-ACK, and play with such things as traceroute.

Such redirection is often done on a specific port basis, so that trying to access different ports might produce a different result, such as a RST packet coming back from port 1234 with a different TTL than port 443.

There is so much cheating going with Internet routing that the TTL is usually the first thing I check, to make sure things are what they claim.
Oh my, if you'd like to contribute lens distortion removal... That would make me super happy!

I'm 95% sure I'll be in Seattle this year.
Don't forget to add a test (written in Perl). It's not required by the actual task description but it might give you an edge over the other applicants.