skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, they were not wrong, like Newton was not wrong about gravity. Philosophers are still usable as a generators of novel wild ideas, which we can then check if they are real. But don't mistake "philosopher's idea" for reality.
> Then over time these grinders get high enough up they start becoming interviewers themselves and they don't understand that they're even supposed to screen for talent, they conduct the interview like a memory test since to them that's what it was.

They say As hire Bs and Bs hire Cs . . . and to combat that we've added more leetcode to the interview process.
>[T]he latest release of Notational Velocity was 13 years ago and still works like a charm after 11 major OS releases.

Jesus, that's impressive.
Well-developed social skills matter for kinds on STEM track as much. It is not just that you get more successful if you don't have them, it is that you become impossible to work with.
> This is ironic considering these companies have forced mandatory DEI seminars (which I have no problem with btw), inclusive language, #EveryoneCanCode, and so on.

I really do wonder what those sanctimonious sermons are meant to accomplish. People who are already ideologically aligned with them won't learn anything new and may just resent it, while people who aren't aligned won't become aligned as a result of that "training".

But you're talking about it as though you expect it to have a constructive impact, resulting in irony when it doesn't. I don't see the irony because I don't expect any benefit from those struggle sessions in the first place.
Can't upvote this enough. Such proposal is against the privacy and basic human rights or ordinary people (wveryone is guilty unless proved innocent). Big groups making and sharing such content won't be affected by this at all.
See: work sample test.

My best received interview question was for a bug/firefighting team. Based on a real bug we had, here is a sanitized repo (perl or python, our languages at the time) with some sql and data. We gave them three made up support tickets about some settings values being incorrect causing $issue. Dig into the utility script, find bugs, fix the data.

Even folks who didn't pass complemented the task
The point about having an economically viable use-case is very relevant in today's times. The Romans didn't need engines because they had slaves. I have a hunch that the abundance of "VC money" and high cost of living in rich Western countries actually stifles the demand for many types of inventions and services. There is simply no need for, and no ability to run, smaller, less profitable tools and services due to the demand and existence of massive amounts of financial capital.

One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Ukraine from North America, a country much poorer in comparison, is the existence of many types of shops and services that would simply be "not worth the money" in North America. The abundance of small artisan coffee shops, mom-and-pop tool stores, custom furniture manufacturers, metal workers, etc. I was shocked to find out, when I ordered an office table on Rozetka (Ukraine's version of Amazon), that the seller reached out to me and asked me what height I would like the metal legs to be, because these tables were built-on-order, not mass-produced and stored in inventory, and so it could be custom-built to specification. And then I found out custom-built furniture is totally a thing here. And the cost was peanuts. I have friends in Kharkiv that own small mom-and-pop metal fabs that could build anything you want with a CNC machine or lathe, and it is profitable to operate these types of factories because the cost of running the entire factory with labour and machines is under $10k / month.

Similarly, because of the low cost and high availability of software engineering talent, and the lack of VC money to drive up the cost of engineers, the average quality of software here in Ukraine is much higher. As a programmer, I immediately noticed that the quality and availability of small custom apps for all sorts of stores and services. Kyiv the municipality has a very well-built city-app that integrates with essential city services, including parking and traffic enforcement. If your car is towed by the city, or you get a ticket, you get a notification on your phone, and you can pay and pick up your car from the holding lot by showing a QR-code to police. The app is extremely well-built. Compare that level of technical integration and efficiency with most Western governments' apps, like the infamous CBSA scandal, or Obama's failed Healthcare.gov boondoggle. Software in Ukraine is really, really good, from my barbershop to the the bank. I have a startup in the fintech sector, and you cannot compare the quality and feature-richness of banking apps in Ukraine to Canada or the US.

Necessity is the mother of invention.
TSMC building Megafabs outside Taiwan would not reduce the strategic vulnerability much. There is so much other supply chain infrastructure and industry services in Taiwan that chip production would halt even in foreign TSMC fabs.

That said, Taiwan should do everything in it's power to keep Megafabs in Taiwan and raise stakes. As we have seen in Ukraine, economy is more important than protecting values. The US tells Ukraine that it can't attack Russian oil exports because global oil price would raise.
That’s not true. In any discipline when confronted with a test there are two strategies: brute memorization of the question/answers, or developing the skills to tackle the problem dynamically. You cannot categorically claim that LC tests are largely memorization tests rather than raw problem-solving skills. That is just the approach you are capable of taking. Not being able to see up the mountain doesn’t imply there are no climbers above you.
Go all the way down, grab an FPGA dev board and learn Verilog/VHDL!
And now any editors with LSP integration do the same.
Actually this is something everyone will want. Not by Microsoft, not built into Windows, but this is something that has to come in some form.
> The problem isn't standardized tests, it's that leetcode questions are about having the time to have learnt the answer beforehand, rather than raw ability for problem solving.

This sounds like you want to penalize students who studied for the exams. Or at least not reward them.

Like all interview formats, it’s a proxy for understanding if the prospect would be able to get the work done and be a good fit with the rest of the team. I’d say it’s a pretty good proxy for work ethic at crunch time as well.

If your complaint is that a normal person wouldn’t have the time to study these things in detail, why would a company want to hire someone who has external obligations?
I believe this is a common myth. I've spend around seven years teaching programming and people who can go from zero to decent problem solving in just six weeks are virtually non-existent.

Either it wasn't a true "zero" but rather they were really good e.g. at advanced math or physics and managed to see some parallels, or it has to be a genius. I'd be very interested in hiring such a person.
> They're not great at that purpose, but they're good enough and they generally produce false negatives (smart people fail) rather than false positives (you hire an idiot).

I've seen this reasoning, but I'm wondering if this is actually true, especially if you also believe the other myth in hiring: most people applying are not qualified for the job. Since most hiring actually requires you to fill the position in the end (in other words, you can't leave it open indefinitely if no one qualifies as eventually the pressure to hire mount up), every false negatives does increase the odd of you hiring a false positives as well. Just take the example at the extreme, if there is only ever one person on Earth qualified for your job and you got a false negatives on him, there is no other way but getting an idiot in the job.
me interviewing at big 6 accountancy firm as a software developer:

hr: you have do the same tests as the accountants

me: ok, hit me

.....scribble scribble

hr: you have simultaneously managed to get the lowest ever score on the arithmetic tests and 100% on the visual/spacial IQ tests, which no-one has ever done.

says something about me i suppose! and they hired me.
> GDP per manhour would make much more sense

And is why labor productivity is used as a comparator.

The question, still completely applicable today, is the trade off between cost of capital and cost of labor. Will your cap ex ultimately cuts your op ex?

Another key invention there is the joint stock limited corporation, developed for shipping voyages but allowing a new mechanism for financing cap ex.
Ping-eon would be very high.
Fortunately I never had a leetcode style interview. But I once interviewed at a place a friend worked at and they needed someone to bring their development up to speed (re-architecture, establishing processes, technical lead) and he recommended me for that. The interview partner was their new CTO (joined the company 2 months prior). From the start of the talk he was acting almighty and acted like I should be thankful for the opportunity I have been given. He was asking misleading technical questions. I was super confused first because I assumed malice first ("He is trying to trick me!") but as the interview continued I figured out that he really had no clue what he was taking about. Later during the interview I should describe my experience and I told him about the retail app suite I was the lead dev of for about 2y (POS software + back office + SAP interfaces). He proceeded to tell me that sounds quite nice, but the previous company he worked at did one million transactions per month - hah, eat that stupid peon! I was confused yet again, because that is really tiny? I told him that the project I led did that in a day. He accused me of lying. At that point I politely pointed out that we are not a good fit and wished him the best. 30 mins later my friend called me to ask what happened. The CTO apparently told everyone how poorly I behaved and how measly my skills are. When I told him about what really happened he was quite shocked. He talked to the CEO who did call me next day. I told him a sugarcoated version of what happened. A week later the new CTO was gone. According to my friend he also behaved to other employees in a similar way. The whole story is bizarre.
To pee or not to pee? That is a question for the bladder–and the brain
This really what "mutually intelligible" means, I'd say: that the languages are so close you can sort of work it out without explicit instruction. You still need some experience with the other language - and quite often there'll be a geographical and cultural proximity that means almost all speakers have that.

I grew up in a Scandinavian country and visited the others a lot when I was young, and I find I understand most of what I hear in the other languages, but it's quite common for my peers who don't have that experience to understand nothing.
What you're basically after is some "Tooling and Methodology" studies for embedded. You've got the basics, but now you need to learn some more tools and the methods that make those tools really useful to the embedded/low-level context.

Some simple things you can do:

* Get yourself a suitable embedded development system - I would recommend anything ESP32'ish that suits your fancy such as a Liligo or Watchy ESP32-based watch, or PineTime if thats more up your alley - and then write some little apps for it.

* Get to know Godbolt with a great deal of intimacy, just as a general approach to understanding what is going on:

https://godbolt.org/

* Invest a little workbench time in some of the various embedded frameworks out there - platformio, FreeRTOS, etc. and, very important: learn the Tooling And Methodology techniques that these frameworks manifest.

* Invest some workbench time in the RETRO Computing Scene. Seriously, you can still learn extremely valuable principles of tooling and methodology from an 8-bit retro system from the 80's. Get your favourite platform, get all its tools onboard, engage with its community - you will learn a lot of things that are still entirely relevant, in spite of the changes over the decades.

* Get into the F/OSS tooling/methdology flow - find software projects that are interesting to you, find their repositories, learn to clone and build and test locally, and so on. There are so many fantastic projects out there for which low-level skills can be developed/fostered. Get onboard with something that interests you.

Good luck!
I have a desktop with similar specifications.
I used to build yoctoLinux at my company, but they didn't buy me a build pc, so I bought it with my own money and used it for my work. my efficiency has increased a lot.
However, after changing jobs, I didn't have anything to use, so I'm playing now. I think I should have sold it secondhand, but I'm just using it as a personal Linux server at home.
As an interviewer, what you do seems to make sense and I do similar interviews. Removing the pressure of memorizing leetcode question algorithms (yes almost everyone has to memorize for leetcode hard to solve <1hr, most will need to memorize for medium) puts both sides in a better mood.

I also observed starting a process with easier questions still filters out the bad candidates (80%+). Once a candidate 3-4 rounds more open ended questions seem to be much more discriminative anyway.
That actually kind of exists currently via "MDCUtil", which should work on both macOS and Linux:

https://github.com/toasterllc/MDCCode/blob/rev10/Tools/MDCUt...

For example:

$ MDCUtil ImgReadFull <image number> output.cfa

That outputs the raw data stored on the SD card though, so I need to implement converting that to a standard format like DNG.
Yes: +1, this.

Learning Lua is a great way to get introduced to a lot of low-level concepts, from bytecode to VM's to language design and beyond.
TLC;DR

Too low contrast; didn't read
What about a type of blind interview where neither of the two know the problem or solution in advance. After, their solution is blindly reviewed/graded by a third party.

- Input from the interviewer reflects communication ability, cultural fit, and so on of the candidate.

- Input from the blind grader reflects ability of them as a team.

- Low grades count against the interviewer as well.

Bingo; now both are stakeholders in success.
> There's so much research that shows the opposite.

Care to link it? It should be easy to do, if there's so much of it.
Just about everyone who seems to know what they're talking about says the ISA doesn't matter, that in order for ARM to compete with x86's IPC and for x86 to become more efficient, both architectures have landed in the same middle ground and that the differences we see between the architectures in products are down to choices made outside of the instruction set, like process node or choice of IP blocks.

I recall an interview where Jim Keller said that it would be possible to take Zen and replace the x86 instruction decode block with an ARM one, with little in the way of change to the rest of the design. If Intel really start feeling the pressure, they could transition to a licensing model for x86 rather than the weird legacy contract thing going on with AMD. That could make things more interesting.

I wouldn't count it out just yet.
Well said, like IQ tests, if you train for it you're better at it, but it the meaning of the results is dubious.

Recently I failed the first round of a fintech analyst position because I didn't complete the 9 undergrad (or high-school, in certain talented schools) math problems (I have a math PhD) in the 1 hour time frame. In retrospect, I should've cheated using computer/online assistance, and my true failure was my unwillingness to cheat. Not because fintech analysts are cheaters, but because the testing process is nonsense, so recognizing that, one should cheat it (indeed, an analyst mindset!) I'd rather be jobless than to adopt that mentality though. (and in fact I am, the only job I was able to find was a minimum wage service-type job, it can't even pay for daycare, I'd rather raise my child on my own while wife works thank God.)

We have high-interest rates and global crises resulting in companies not hiring while simultaneously governments give orders to news media to tout the strong economy. Ineffective hiring practices will always exist, but people don't complain when jobs are available; you only see this type of discussion online when things have gone sideways.
Cox has a vulnerability disclosure program. https://www.cox.com/aboutus/policies/cox-security-responsibl...
A breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis
Some people can't do it whether they had the time to study, which the point of the test.
You are confusing cause and effect. The revolution (upturning of a system) refers to the cause of the increase of the exponential growth, not the consequence.

There is a very sharp bend in the growth rate in the 19th century. Even more interestingly, it produced a sharp uptick in global wealth even though industrialization itself did not immediately diffuse uniformly and completely around the globe.
It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here

https://www.amazon.com/Would-Nice-You-Werent-Here/dp/0688088...
It rivals images from spacecraft in Earth orbit - as in Hubble or Webb. It won’t rival images from cameras sent to the near vicinity of the targets, but those can take decades from the moment you decide to take a picture to the time you take it, unless you already decided you’d take some pictures from that general location decades prior.
My point was: It really depends on how you give them the rope. Is it a selection of ropes next to a cliff and 95% of the ropes will kill you without warning if you use it to go down it?

Or it could be rope that prevents you from accidentally walking down the cliff, if you don't know it was there.

Having a table saw that doesn't stop when it cuts wet material can be beneficial, but it is better to have one that stops when it hits your finger and where you can specifically deactivate the stopping-mechanism for the usecase of cutting slightly wet materials.
Oh, you can have multiple layers of error correcting coding.

Eg Google stores data internally with something like Reed-Solomon error correction, but they typically have two independent copies.

So they have repetition code at the classical nano-scale, then Reed-Solomon error correction at the next level, and at the highest level they apply repetition again.

There's nothing confusing about this, as long as you are careful to make sure that your listener knows which level you are talking about.

> Repetition codes have a very clearly defined meaning in communication theory, using them to mean something else is very confusing.

OP used them exactly with the orthodox meaning as far as I can tell.
The fact that in 99% of cases "software engineer" is just an aggrandizing title given by management to any and every programmer at their company should put a bullet in the head of the pretentions of this being an engineering field.
> The differences between DuckDB and SQLite are just always so large that plotting them together completely hides all other detail.

(From your blog post). When values span orders of magnitude, that’s when log plots are useful.
but that's the whole point - the democracy has to consider interests of various group and - ironically - it only somehow works when you have a single unified group. When you have diverse groups - there interests do not align and it becomes a clownshow
> To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process.

If you want to earn top money, you gotta play the game. This is true in every profession, you think lawyers that want to work at top law firms have it any easier?

There's a lot of valid criticism with respect to today's tech hiring practices (especially because it doesn't only affect top paying companies), but I don't feel like "I can't get ridiculously wealthy without selling my soul" is a particularly compelling one.
More like every larger corporation...

If you have non factory assembly line[1] personnel above 1000 chances you have that

[1] physical and direct nature of work sometimes countermands weird multiple solutions
Naive questions ahead, if hires weren’t made scarce by some absurd filter, why would they pay $200-300k extra? Feels like the whole idea of stellar salaries must be based on something stellar. Afair, before Google(?) made it normal, developers were sort of dirt cheap. Weren’t developers in abundance at all times?
Solar/wind/natural gas combination is there.

That's what is happening. People are jumping into conclusions that there is not enough energy to run those data centers. There absolutely is. It has been planned.
And then, the French governement has released an official and mandatory Systeme de Design [0], to have an unique visual identity across all official websites.

[0] https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/
Yes, a study a few weeks ago when the H5N1 was found in cattle in Texas showed a third of the virus had potentially survived the pasturisation process.

This studies method is different because in the USA study they tested the milk out of the industrial process where here they are mimicing it in the lab. Really what this UK study tells us is principally pasteurisation works, it does not however say the industrial process as practiced works which is what the USA study was looking at.
Applied Cryptography by University of Tartu
Give Performance-Aware Programming series by Casey Muratori a try!

https://www.computerenhance.com/p/table-of-contents
It’s a common turn of phrase which I’ve always taken to mean “limited in its expansion due to being an island”, said island being small in comparison to other powers, notably France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, and later Germany and Russia
FritzBox are also very famous for getting service on lines where other vendors will just crap out. Their chipsets and tunings are top-notch.

In addition, the backwards compatibility is amazing. It's 2024, and to my knowledge most of their models still support pulse dialling on the analog telephone frontend.
That market already exists, for example I got a simple camera from kidamento.com for my kids.

I hope OP doesn’t increase the cost of the product and decrease the battery life by adding edge case features like this.
Congratulations, you've memorized leetcode patterns. Proves nothing beyond that (except that you've also had the time recently to practice leetcode).
You were on to something with the GP's unprovable assertion.

Then you provided your own false dichotomy and the argument went all wrong.
There is an absolutely vast array of stuff you need to know to write software including networking, hardware, software, database, operating system, multiple languages, mutiple tools, standards, testing, processes, and on and on and on and on. It goes on forever.

BUT one of the things I've pretty much never needed is leetcode.

That says something about recruiting processes that evaluate you on your leetcode.

If you can't come up with an interview proecss that evaluates a developer against the bajllion things that developers have to do, then it says YOU the interviewer don't know what you are doing.

I think leetcode interviews are lack of imagination on the part of the interviewer.

Being good at programming does not make you good at assessing the capabilities of other programmers.
> "they don’t reflect the actual responsibilities of a software engineering of a job."

Exactly. I refuse to do them. Oh, your business is solving basic problems in computer science? I though you were an e-commerce platform that needed cleaning up your APIs and moving to a more efficient DB?