skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We had one candidate who insisted that parsing a string and returning an integer was an unreasonable question because there was already a library function for it. “But what if you have an embedded system and no library?” (an actual situation for us, for part of our system). He was adamant — honestly that was a failure of the phone screen: had it been caught it would have saved us, and him, from wasting time.

Trying to debate the interview format or reject interview questions is one of my hard-stop rejection triggers in interviews now.

The couple times I’ve been part of hiring pipelines where candidates argued about the interview itself and then got hired anyway, they became extremely difficult employees within the company. Arguing about interview questions turned into arguing about every other ticket, code reviews, and every architecture choice.

I’ve had the same experience where we take an actual problem we solved in our codebase and turned it into a small interview problem. Same thing: Some candidates will try to debate the relevance or try to wriggle out of it.
Block this: https://cursor-party.labs.partykit.dev/cursors.js

Unlike the recently frontpaged page, this one loads the annoying effects as 3rd party JS, so uMatrix automatically blocked it for me.
Just use mDNS then. But as others have said, there are other options that are almost as good.
so funny. I look below my monitor, and there rests a hard disk with "MUST WIPE" post-it on it. Thanks for the reminder.
TechSmith Transition to Annual Subscription Pricing Model in Fall 2024
I've only heard of this crazy stuff with weeks of unpaid interviews and tests for programming jobs. Is this common in any other fields?
That's a bit rude, especially since you're wrong.

Prior to Ian Hathaway's takeover a few months ago Sam Altman owned over 75% of the fund, according to their Form ADV filings with the SEC.

I get why you're confused, though, given their use of fake filing names I think the ownership and structure of the OpenAI fund has been so opaque from the start it's actually hard to know who has what.
All of these venture-capital-backed companies trying to pretend that they are insuring vast amounts of customer money by making random deposits in other banks are just committing fraud. FDIC insurance specifically isn't for this use case (and doesn't insure against the VC-backed company failing or stealing your money in any case!).
Replying for a reminder to check later.

Might enjoy this video, though it's a bit basic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
Hybrids have some real advantages in motorsports, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_P1

where the hybrid propulsion system makes up for turbo lag and I believe was the first boosted car McLaren made because McLaren's brand promise is responsiveness. Even people who aren't bothered by the fuel consumption of their hobby might be influenced by the tax the EU puts on high-displacement engines. I think nobody is going to disrespect the P1 as a sports car though.
This is great, however the phrasing of the question might lead to a "Tyranny of Structurelessness" [0] issue where they're not asking for a diversity statement, but are expecting the answer to contain a diversity statement.

Time will tell.

0: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
It sounds like it is in addition to full-disk encryption, not instead of it.

Encrypting each field with a distinct key that an attacker cannot glean by simply exfiltrating all the data on disk and/or all the data in RAM protects against online attacks in a way that full-disk encryption cannot.

The real question is: does Salesforce do this properly?
> The strong consensus was that software is an engineering discipline

I see it as a difference in time and stakes.

We’ve built bridges and boats for thousands of years, where the outcome of failure is people die.

This has a lot to do with why it’s easy to estimate the time and cost to build a house, but it’s a rare shaman who can consistently estimate software projects well.

Once we’ve built software for even a few hundred years, we’ll probably have it pretty dialed in, too.
“Simple problems” often aren’t as “simple” as the retrospectively sound if you consider everything like stress level, mixed mindset of the interviewee (they’re not just thinking about a programming problem, they’re also thinking about social queues, mixing conversing in, peer judgement, and loads of other anxiety inducing factors), etc.

The software industry is notorious for underestimating overall complexity factors, understanding uncertainty, and time to manage them and interviews seem to be no different. So “simple” problems are often good (I agree with you) because they’re actually not so simple for most people when you factor everything in, they’re often reasonably challenging under the set of circumstances.

Meanwhile genuinely difficult problems (in any arbitrary setting and longer timelines) require a whole lot of rote training and reusing little clever idiosyncratic techniques that may or may not be generally useful, so you very often end up with a question lottery on whether you already know how to address the problem in question or not correctly vs having some problem where a reasonable solution and expectations around that can be derived in the time (and environment) it’s taking place. Lots of nonsense.
It really isn’t anthropomorphizing at all. If I treat it like a black box it really is quite simple. I gave it an input in the form of English text, there is an objectively correct and incorrect form of English text that responds to the input, it gave me the incorrect one.

Literally no one here disputes that the it’s a glorified autocomplete, but that is completely irrelevant to if it correctly answered a question.

I find this kind of pedantry extremely annoying because it sounds insightful without actually saying anything. Like, no shit, it’s just doing what its algorithm dictates, no one, and I mean no one disputed that. The question of correctness and incorrectness falls into “how accurately did it respond to my query?”
One thing to keep in mind is the difference between voluntary preference and necessity. Many Americans choose to gift thousands of dollars to car companies and dealers to buy high-margin SUVs and trucks, but anyone who couldn’t afford or didn’t want an expensive lifestyle accessory has cheap ICE options below anything in the EV space.

I’m really hoping that a return to historically normal loan rates leads more manufacturers to compete in that lower end space because there are a ton of people who live in car-dependent areas which are also often less healthy due to pollution. EVs still have tire particulate problems but losing the tailpipe and ground pollution from gas is a very nice immediate win to pair with the long-term benefits of warming the planet less.
As a fan, I’d say these guys are doing some incredible things. If you have a fit here, I encourage you to apply.
What do you mean? The client knows when the websocket connection goes down and just reconnects. How is this polling?
Ok to be honest I didn't expect such an onslaught of nerdiness in the first paragraph.

I love it.
Is a drop in trust only the result of panic though? It seems reasonable for someone who generally trusts Microsoft's privacy protections to lose trust when Microsoft is seriously considering products that are already showing serious privacy concerns.
Can it do sub-gerne of rap?
For anyone else wanting to now how this turned out: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Schiedsverfahren-gewonnen-Domai...
The old business model of being able to withdraw funds has been disrupted.
Oh good, another toolkit that won't have usable bindings for less popular languages, meaning another toolkit that I won't be able/willing to use.
Breakthrough discovery identifies first step in allergic reactions
IIUC, in your view using standard tests is a damned if you do, damn't if you don't scenario.

Is there a solution that you'd recommend?
Markov Chain Monte Carlo for program synthesis isn't exactly novel. The most immediate reference I thought of is Josh Tenenbaum's [1].

There's also a lot of demos in WebPPL (web probabilistic programming language)[2] like [3] for the synthesis of 3D space-ships. I highly recommend their associated books on The Design and Implementation of Probabilistic Programming Languages [4] and Probabilistic Models of Cognition [5].

I also highly recommend taking a look at the publications of the MIT Probabilistic Computing Project [6].

[1] Human-level concept learning through probabilistic program induction. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rsalakhu/papers/LakeEtAl2015Science....

[2] http://webppl.org/

[3] https://dritchie.github.io/web-procmod/

[4] https://dippl.org/

[5] http://probmods.org/

[6] http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/
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Here's what's been key for me:

Absolutely separate -- in your mind -- NixOS from Nix.

The latter I've seen be a very useful tool that does what people here talk about: cleans up dependency and build and installation management in a reasonably nice way.

The former is a religion/world-view that requires a complete mindset change, accepting a whole dogma, and differs entirely from how you're used to using Linux. I gave up and switched back to Debian after I couldn't get a decent answer on how to set it up easily with my github keys to easily, y'know, check projects out. The mental gymnastics required wer silly.

Nix the language seems obscure at first but it's not so bad after a while. It's sort of got a bit of syntax tossed in from the ML-ish programming languages so there's some familiarity there, for me, maybe.

Where it falls down is like anything else like this: it basically requires that all the things you dep on also adhere to this philosophy and have nix setups already or you'll be in a world of pain rolling your own. I gave up on converting our $work stuff when it became clear that the versions of flatbuffers and a few other deps we depend on just weren't out there in the nix ecosystem and I wasn't going to volunteer to make them.

Anyways, I've seen it be very useful. A former employer used it to set up their whole Julia environment such that custom patches and configuration would all be nicely applied. And this was for both developer workstations and CI and production environments. It's a nice step below docker for doing that kind of thing, and is far less intrusive than docker in many ways.
Australian army to allow recruits from foreign nations
I don’t really understand the theory behind lane splitting.

Legally and practically, cars are allowed to drive to the very edge of their lane. If both cars in adjacent lanes do this, there is no room for a motorcycle. If there is no room for a motorcycle and a motorcycle is there, there will be a collision.

It seems like lane splitting practically forces everyone to drive in the middle of the lane (which again is not legally required anywhere AFAIK), or to watch constantly for motorcycles behind them, or it accepts a certain rate of motorcycle on car collisions even when everyone is following the rules perfectly.

If there is a collision whose fault is it? The motorcyclist for not reading the mind of the driver? The driver for not shoulder checking before they move within the lane?

It doesn’t seem scalable for this reason, and it just drops a useful property of driving seemingly without giving it much thought (i.e. that no one else will be in your lane unless they are violating a rule).
How deep is your Nix dependency graph?
> Then, if your server’s hard drive grows legs and walks out of the data center, your users’ most sensitive data will remain confidential.

> Unfortunately, for the server-side encryption at rest use case, that’s basically all that Disk Encryption protects against.

If you aren't able to self host, then encryption at rest is a real use case and the next best thing to actually controlling your data. That being said, obviously self hosting with FDE@Rest is the best.

Or you can end up like the people who lost their data [1][2].

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/thousands-of-bitcoins-stolen-in-a-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JyDvBbZ6Q
>>— the setting depicted looks like a commuter rail setup where I would imagine it's fairly lengthy runs of powered vs unpowered.

It says in the article - only 20-30% of the route needs to be electrified for these to work. And the batteries can be recharged at stations in 20 minutes.

"It shows that Siemens Mobility’s battery bi-mode trains would only require 20 – 30% of a line to be electrified. These trains, utilising Lithium Titanate Oxide battery chemistry, can charge their batteries to full capacity in 20 minutes whilst moving along the electrified sections or charging whilst stopped at stations."
Why AI Search Blew Up in Google's Face
The only value in leetcode is you should be able to solve a couple in a short time and thus prove you are least know something about writing code. We use them as an interview prescreen because once in a while someone seems like a good person we would like to work with, but we have no clue after the interview if they can really code.

We had one person who worked on [censored] 20 years ago, then was manager of [non-programmers, rest censored] - now wants to get back into coding - can this person still code? If so I want them, but if they have forgotten everything... I of course censored details for privacy reasons.
in all fairness, Java.util isn't some esoteric namespace. But the fact that you can do years of Java without touching core Java libraries (e.g. maybe you're highly reliant on DI, or have a proprietary library at work) does make it hard to properly gauge with.

I'd say it's a fine question if interviewers stopped treating their technical tests like trade secrets and just said "okay, interview is next week, make sure you know the some the basic built-in Java namespaces and yadda yadda". I can understand wanting to avoid googling, but consider the situations:

- someone truly out of their element won't pass, study or not

- someone who knows the stuff after a quick refresher is a perfectly functioning programmer, it's something all programmers do on the job.

- someone who truly knew nothing but could pass a test in a week is clearly a fast learner, the perfect candidate for many roles with changing demands

- and ofc the best interviewers aren't impacted. Simply more confident.

unless you truly need an expert/principle level engineer in a domain to solve problems (and let's be real: few companies do), I don't see many downsides to this approach.
Wow. I had no idea that the uncountable number of tents blocking my commute to work were in fact “the rich”! I wonder which one Bezos is in?
THough I agree there's no need for any of this to be plausible or realistic I di think that at lest for me, a reader brought up in the british isles in the later half ofthe 20th century those assumptions absolutely do hold. There's not muchI found surprising about the political economic settlement that the author describes in the article, it's more or less what I assumed whilst reading the book.
Guix is the main competitor but it's also focused on free software so mainly excludes things that don't fit that licensing philosophy. Yes there are I believe repositories that maintain non-free things but ... Nix already doesn't have declarations for a lot of things. Guix even less so.
I also spend more in a bar in one night than on charging my phone for whole year. If the cost to charge it went up by 10x I would still be displeased though.
Richard I: An English King or a Crusader King?
This article is just a verbatim marketing piece from Siemens.
Great read, and fantastic investigation. Also nice to see a story of some big corp not going nuclear on a security researcher.

I can't say for certain, and the OP if they're here I'd love for you to validate this - but I'm not convinced requests to the local admin interface on these Nokia routers is properly authenticated. I know this because I recently was provisioned with one and found there were certain settings I could not change as a regular admin, and I was refused the super admin account by the ISP. turns out you could just inspector hack the page to undisable the fields and change the fields yourself, and the API would happily accept them.

if this is the case, and an application can be running inside your network, it wouldn't be hard to compromise the router that way, but seems awfully specific!
Couldn't this be used to do HTML generation from designs? Especially when combined with multiple viewport sizes at the same time, generating a fluid HTML layout would be pretty awesome.
I was responding to the assertion that writing Chinese using an alphabet would render the text incomprehensible, not arguing that China or Japan should switch over.
I probably agree with you politically but I think there's no value in "keeping this in context". This is a specific policy in a specific institution which had specific consequences on hiring specific staff.

Those consequences were largely negative even if you are a great advocate of diversifying our great institutions because they hamper academic freedom, period. The great Universities of America had (till recently) a reputation of being a place where tenure was so strong faculty members could think and state opinions most normal people could never try to articulate. Forcing all faculty to accept a certain ideological position in the manner of the diversity statement really hinders that ability, that academic freedom, which incubates so much intellectual work.
This strategy provides only obfuscation, not encryption. If the same plaintext always "encrypts" to the same ciphertext, it becomes possible (sometimes even trivial) for an attacker with access to large amounts of related information (such as the entire database) to use correlations and inference to effectively decipher it.
My thought here is that not all of the data in the database is being accessed at the same time, so the un-accessed data is "at rest". Is that correct, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Nice, I hadn't heard of that but yeah I think that's a much better system than employer group plans. If more of the market went that way, insurers would have to actually compete at a consumer level and not just offer "go away" pricing when you try to get insurance outside of a group plan.
Professor by Day. Porn Star by Night. Can He Be Both?
If a load is intrinsically pointer chasing (as it is the case for a lot of non-compute software), there isn't much an optimizer can do. That's true even for native code.
You better get the booster soon, don't let the immunity lapse.
Research as leisure activity
I would expect that the James Webb telescope could create even better images of Io if they pointed it there? As long as it could focus range to look at nearby objects...
Yeah, I'm sure it does, too. Endless, spy vs spy.

I just think that in today's world, surely there's an easier way to gather just as good intelligence about what a country is doing than by running human sources.
> Where it falls down is like anything else like this: it basically requires that all the things you dep on also adhere to this philosophy and have nix setups already or you'll be in a world of pain rolling your own. I gave up on converting our $work stuff when it became clear that the versions of flatbuffers and a few other deps we depend on just weren't out there in the nix ecosystem and I wasn't going to volunteer to make them.

Maybe I'm a bad NixOS user, but I tend to run most of my development work through steam-run, unless the necessary default.nix is really simple. It works fine, and having the rest of the system be immutable is still an advantage.
When you perform a medical intervention that is effective beyond placebo, you are also inducing placebo. Drug research is just trying to find the most effective treatments, not trying to get rid of the placebo effect. Also, I think most doctors are happy to let patients have their placebos of choice (crystals or herbs or what have you), as long as it doesn't interfere with the rest of their treatment.
How to Launch Your Startup in Just 20 Days
I'm still angry at them (and Google) for that
Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I). The original paper on Lisp. It’s a joy to read. 'pg wrote a very good companion: The Roots of Lisp.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html

https://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html
I don't know you or the people you've met, but if you can do this without studying the questions before and the solutions are performant, then I would put you in the "very smart" category
Social media with people showing off how they landed a $350k job after graduating. Really common for the last few years if you're in the target demographic to get videos like "How I spent my $20k monthly salary as a 22 year old in FANG" or whatever. It was inbound marketing to leetcode courses (like neetcode) whose owner did just this, but I think it also caused a huge expectation that if you go to university and learn some puzzles you'll also earn a million before 30.

Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7s1IYVfvSA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4h0A9mr6r4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnmM-0E2bx0

etc...
He's right to be sick of it. There's no sense in them.

How often do you find an employee who if you'd just asked them an LC, they would not have gotten the job that they have proven themselves incapable of?

The times I've met a programmer that we shouldn't have hired, it could not have been detected by LC. This has tended to be things like "guy does not want to work on this problem" or "this guy is suggesting things that are obviously bad designs, and doing it with an aggressive style". Rather than "if only we'd asked him to implement Dijkstra we would have found out and not hired him".

LC also doesn't ask what you want to know. I don't need to know whether you can solve the Towers of Hanoi. I need to know that if there's a problem we need to solve, and it is a disguised ToH problem, you will recognize that there's an algo to be found, you will eventually find it's this one, and you will eventually find the solution and code it up in a sensible way that helps the team in the future.

LC problems tend to be too short to decide whether someone actually has the skill that I really value, which I guess is gumption. We have a codebase that's become crusty over time, will you take the initiative to clean it up, or will you just solve the little LCs that present themselves and add that to the spaghetti?

The interview form that's worked for me over the last 20 years is simply to have a long technical discussion, meandering across a bunch of technologies and problems. You can't prepare for it, and you can't waste your time preparing for it. Even if you say you touched a bunch of stuff, when you run out of opinions, I will know the depth of your experience. If you have an opinion, you will also know what the orthodoxy is on that area, and you can explain why you agree or disagree. If you are disinterested, it will be clear.

Now of course this isn't going to satisfy people who want something they can call standardized. Maybe a pair of twins will walk in with the same skillset, and one of them veers down one path and the other down another, so that the conversations have different questions. But I would wager that I'd find the same result.
Interesting, not a coffee drinker but energy drinks don’t do much for me other than keep me awake.