skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowledge well enough to answer a new question)

Leetcode questions can by definition never come close to real life problems - they are simply out of context. Working on a project even a few weeks will grant a smart person any insights he might actually need. The kind of out of the blue puzzle problem a leetcode presents is more akin to crosswords in old leisure magazines.
Another interesting point about Leetcode-style interviews I've not seen raised: it's a form of intellectual hazing.

It's been proven many times that the severity of an initiation ceremony significantly boosts the commitment of those admitted to the group.
I hear you!

I quit doing engineering work for companies, but back when I did, I'd take some complex code I'd written to interviews. I tell the interviewers that I'm happy to step through my code and explain it during the interview, but that I wasn't interested in wasting hours of my weekend writing a werpderzle or answering gotcha questions.

Some companies agreed and I ended up working for them and some companies didn't, so I'd end the interview. In my experience, companies that over-complicate the interview process also over-complicate their day-to-day work, and I don't have any interest in working in that sort of environment.
> Clearly steam engines require good metallurgy

If we ignore the ‘minor’ issues of efficiency and longevity which would ‘only’ affect how practical the device would be I am not sure about that ‘clearly’.

So, let’s ignore all practical issues, and just try and build a steam engine that would provide some power for a decent period, ignoring efficiency.

Tensile strength to prevent pipes and the boiler getting torn apart by the steam pressure would be a main problem, I think.

There’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_cannon: “Wooden cannons have been manufactured and used in wars in many countries. The wooden parts were invariably strengthened with metal fittings or even rope.”, and (from World War One) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_mortar#Design: “The Albrecht mortars […] consisted of a muzzle loaded smooth bore barrel built from wooden staves and wound with galvanized wire for reinforcement”

Those likely didn’t work for long periods, but they did withstand fairly high pressures repeatedly.

So maybe, a boiler and pipes built with wood or bamboo, strengthened by rope could be made to ‘work’ at relatively low pressure for a while.

I would try to line the piping on the inside with clay to prevent steam from weakening the wood.

Next major problem: wood catches fire relatively easily. That’s at about 250°C, though, so there’s a range (about 520K vs 370K or 40% of room) at which steam can be created, but wood doesn’t burn yet.

Water boils at higher temperatures at higher pressure (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/boiling-point-water-d_926...), but that need not be a showstopper. The Newcomen engine doesn’t run on high pressure.

It also provides a ‘solution’ for another major problem, that of sealing the cylinder to prevent steam from getting out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine#Te...: “The piston was surrounded by a seal in the form of a leather ring, but as the cylinder bore was finished by hand and not absolutely true, a layer of water had to be constantly maintained on top of the piston.”

So, I suspect you could build a steam engine without metals. It wouldn’t be efficient and would be prone to catching fire, though.
Herb Sutter: Safety, Security, Safety[sic] and C/C++[sic] [video]
+ Chinese polygamy, as Marco Polo observed, allowing well-off men to parallelize reproduction
Fun fact: Quality of Google translate and Google search in Simplified Chinese and Google maps in mainland China has plummeted over the past decade. Barely usable if at all. I would suggest avoid them at all cost for your peace of mind
Is it, though? The world needs quality work, not vast amounts of mediocrity.
This is great, thanks! I had researched extra F keys when I was making my keyboard (exactly to use as macros) but I hadn't discovered F13 to F22, thank you! That's exactly what I needed.
A friend once in the middle of a technical interview stopped speaking, stood up and went out. They ran after him, "what's wrong, you're doing fine!" and he told them it depresses him too much and he's not interested anymore. Sad, given that this is a fun profession for most of us (I assume)
Testing Raspberry Pi's AI Kit – 13 Tops for $70
Hot take: I like leetcode-style interviews and I've spent a lot of time in them on both sides of the fence (tens of hours as a candidate, hundreds as an interviewer).

> But yet, these interviews quiz me on things that I can easily Google that I may not know off the top of my head. It’s absurd.

I don't work at Google so I'm lucky to have freedom in the way I interview engineers and usually I try to squeeze out the quiz aspect as much as possible.

If a candidate doesn't know the algorithm for a given problem and can't quickly come up with one, I usually proceed to give a detailed explanation for it. In the end the task is reduced to "write between 6 and 10 lines of code that do X in your favorite language" and yet a majority (80-90%) of inbound candidates for software engineering fail at it (for non-inbound sources a picture can be very different of course).

Contrary to a common view, I believe that this approach actually imitates my daily interactions with a developer quite well and the correlation between interview performance and job performance is very strong in my experience.

And interestingly I've seen many people who shine in oral interviews (tell me about your experience) and then fail to produce any code at all, both during the interview and at work. So even if I wanted a good alternative approach to hiring of engineers I haven't seen it so far.
> Romans clearly had access to metalworking capabilities sophisticated enough for clock making. Engines wouldn't be a huge stretch.

You're vastly underestimating the complexity of making pressure vessels.
I'm early 30s actually. I think I would probably take the money myself, not 100% sure though.

Your sentiment seems common in this thread, but it doesn't square well with how worked up people seem to get with online beefs in practice, and how hard people seem to work in order to avoid getting downvoted (cc subreddit echochambers on reddit). I suspect in theory people don't care what others think, in practice things are a little different.
I agree it's not a great way but a good compromise. When you think of Leetcode you can be thinking of hard questions. But this is not the case for many of us.

Not all of us get a chance to work with a great candidate pool. So, whenever someone fails to provide a solution given an integer list, find the pairs that sum is equal to N, I don't care how many technologies they have worked with or how well they can talk about it, I don't feel comfortable working with them.
> 1. Do you work hard (i.e a person who studies many problems, memorizes solutions, and regurgitates then)

This isn't working hard. And you are competing with the people that are working smart. Such as people having a separate computer/screen to either look up the answer to a problem or ask an LLM to regurgitate some code you can transcribe. It selects for people that are dishonest.

> 2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowledge well enough to answer a new question)

See above. A lot of the problems have nothing to do with real world coding scenarios. Do I need to pull out memoization and know how to work with grammar rules off the top of my head? Or the functionality of quad trees and how it applies to partitioning? No; I've literally never used them in my career and likely never will. What I do need as a software engineer is understanding the high level concepts and when to apply them and refresh myself on the use case when and if appropriate.
macOS PackageKit Privilege Escalation
Here on Airstrip One you can put your postcode into the police website and get a list of crimes in your area.

Great you say. I dont want to move to a criminal neighbourhood.

However. The databases seem to be selective and intentionally scary depending on what neighbourhood you live in.

When i put my mum's postcode in it shows up one sexual crime, a spate of car break-ins some domestic violence incidents.

No mention of whether the crimes were solved or ended in a prosecution.

The sex crime report is from 16 years ago. It was in the local press.

A rapist on every street corner.

I'm not moving there!
Atash Behram – Types of Fire
Oof, testosterone comes with a ton of downsides (your body will stop making its own). We are really careful about people who start on testosterone replacement therapy, as it's a lifelong thing.
Flagged in 1,2,3...
Show HN: Block Social Media
I frequent websites like hn a lot and I came up with this simple bash script which edits /etc/hosts and maps the domains to localhost.

The file is ~60 loc with the domains included so feel free to inspect and modify it.
AnyNode: LLM-programming ComfyUI node to do anything
> I don’t need to install their root CA unless I specifically want to access any LAN services.

s/unless/even if/
Already taken of the frontpage, nice, really just took seconds.

Great job HN "Moderation" Team, dont waste any time.
It's skills that a 4-year college student learns at approximately 19 and then promptly does not use for their next 50 years of actually building things.

It leaves out looking at the engineering skills it takes to put something past the finish line on budget.

It's at best, an adjacent sideshow and at worse a proxy for ageism to preference people closer to 19 and less capable at getting quality software out the door.

And maybe that's why the industry has such a damn hard time getting quality software out the door.

Maybe.

Here's a far better idea. Give them a broken build or crashed code or some other failure and ask them to fix it. If they can navigate around a system, diagnose a defect, find the cause, offer a patch, and match the coding/commenting style etc, that's an actual player you need, not someone who can still solve an algo question from their CS101B midterm exam at 37.

This version can go deep as well. You can have separate branches and an issue tracker, maybe with the conversation of the bug already going. Maybe the comments have a patchfile that needs to be manually applied. Maybe the patch has a new bug in it ... Perhaps it's a red herring and addressing a similar but unrelated issue. Maybe it's a closed bug and a regression and nobody wrote a unit test for it. Maybe the unit test is there and it's up to the candidate to discover it or the unit test is out of date, buggy and useless.

This is the real stuff.

Get them to communicate after. Saying something like "the unit tests were broken" versus "I was unable to understand how to get them to work right so I moved on" ... That's a huge difference in attitude - only one of them is a team player.
and what about at night? or all the nordic datacenters, where polar nights happen?
I'm not sure, but I don't think this is the case. https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/design-notes/state-of-...

> Tearing

> For the primitive types longer than 32 bits (long and double), it is not guaranteed that reads and writes from different threads (without suitable coordination) are atomic with respect to each other. The result is that, if accessed under data race, a long or double field or array component can be seen to “tear”, where a read might see the low 32 bits of one write, and the high 32 bits of another. (Declaring the containing field volatile is sufficient to restore atomicity, as is properly coordinating with locks or other concurrency control.)

> This was a pragmatic tradeoff given the hardware of the time; the cost of atomicity on 1995 hardware would have been prohibitive, and problems only arise when the program already has data races — and most numeric code deals with thread-local data. Just like with the tradeoff of nulls vs. zeros, the design of primitives permits tearing as part of a tradeoff between performance and correctness, where primitives chose “as fast as possible” and objects chose more safety.

> Today’s JVMs give us atomic loads and stores of 64-bit primitives, because the hardware makes them cheap enough. But primitive classes bring us back to 1995; atomic loads and stores of larger-than-64-bit values are still expensive, leaving us with a choice of “make operations on primitives slower” or permitting tearing when accessed under race. For the new primitive types, we choose to mirror the behavior of the existing primitives.

> Just as with null vs. zero, this choice has to be made by the author of a class. For classes like Complex, all of whose bit patterns are valid, this is very much like the choice around long in 1995. For other classes that might have nontrivial representational invariants, the author may be better off declaring a value class, which offers tear-free access because loads and stores of references are atomic.

The key here is the last phrase: "For other classes that might have nontrivial representational invariants, the author may be better off declaring a value class, which offers tear-free access because loads and stores of references are atomic.". This implies that to avoid tearing you would need to introduce a runtime cost to every access, which is unacceptable for a language aiming to replace C++.

And you can assume that a low level language like Carbon has a lot of types with nontrivial invariants. Just like in Java, data races WILL make one thread observe a partially written value in another thread.

In the presence of data races, you can only avoid tearing when writing to fields whose size is smaller or equal than word length (typically, 64 bits). If all you have are small primitives or pointers, then it might work. But Carbon can't abide by this restriction either.
I really think Anglo Saxonic insults are a notch below the ones from Latin languages. An Italian or Spanish person insulting another is almost like a song because the words are often intoned as part of a sentence of insults and thus sound poetic. In”casa del papel” it is possible to hear it[1]. Also notice the insult is almost like a small story and told with lots of energy. I think Dr Cox from the series scrubs touches a bit what I mean but he is bounded by the family rating of the show. I am confident that character going all in would be hilarious.

One thing I miss while in Poland is Insulting and being insulted freely and humorously for the laughs and filling awkward moments. In Portugal you only get insulted by friends and it is a sign of friendship. Very Cordial conversations make the opposite very clear.

In my previous work in Poland people learned to enjoy releasing a “puta que te pariu” because you could vocalize it mostly with consonants that released air in bursts and left you out of air and thus expelled the anger.

My favourite insult for something fancy is that something is made of “pele de cona de Andorinha”, or “skin from the pussy of a swallow bird”. Many of these are remnants of colonial war era bravado, but the imagination is incredible.

Hope the comment does not offend anyone, but if it does, think of all the things in the world that do more harm than words and enjoy the human experience for all its planes.

https://youtu.be/KnYTEk-YGNo?si=YYf9lJZdLqaa5rB_
Meta: there's a tiny typo in the title, "marked" should be "market" (as in flea market). I would suggest simplifying it to "Ligra: open source image projector from flea market parts", or something.
In my experience, there is a strong correlation between good programmers and the people who can solve these types of problems.

It's a kind of audition.
>The original post didn't specify direct messages or other mechanisms that you would be notified about the messages. Just that people are talking about you on the internet.

It didn't specify a lack of DMs either. What sort of things do haters typically like to do? Note that I wrote the original comment. I was thinking along the lines of people writing hateful replies to your social media content and @mentioning you.
I used to (still kind of) hate Leetcode-style interviews. But now I see it as a lesser evil, like Churchill's description of democracy.

A while ago I posted a Ask HN question about the usage of Pseudo-IQ test which is very common in Swedish interview process. Pseudo-IQ test in the sense that it is almost always just Raven Matrix test + maybe math or personality test. I tend to score pretty well on those tests and it takes maybe 1h tops, but it's annoying and stressful either way, especially knowing what ideological foundation it comes from....

Seems like the answer from the Ask HN point towards that those tests used to be common in US/SV/Software position interviews too, but it then got kinda replaced by Leetcode-style interview.

And sure, having a person staring at you commanding you to only use your brain to solve a toy problem is definitely not how you work. But it in combination of a bit of back-n-fort traditional interviewing is definitely more informative to the employee (and fair) than some pseudo-IQ test.

I just hate when Leetcode is used as *the first screening* it's such an asshole move that show high level of disrespect towards the applicants time. Maybe you can get away with as FAANG, but small companies that do this to me just signal extreme arrogant (or delusional/dysfunctional) HR or C-suite.

The best coding interview I've had is just the format "You've received a PR from a junior dev. The code compiles without error and pass the unit test. Would you pass/reject this PR and motivate why" and it often requires a better understanding of the language (such as difference between modern C++ and C++12)
It’s a big organization, which means there will be areas full of great people and areas full of less-than great people. To discount all work from a group that large is just silly.
How the Master Clock Sets Time for the World (2014)
How much solar electricity is generated at night?

During cloudy winters in higher latitudes? During rainy season in lower latitudes?

Do you know that wind often goes to zero across Europe for days at end in Europe in Winter? Last winter that was the case for nearly 2 weeks. How much would battery storage cost to cover for that?

The solution is here, thankfully: nuclear.
> It’s human nature to find fault and we all have our faults. My concern with making this the hill to die on in critiquing Sam & OpenAI is we feed a narrative that has little explanatory power and perpetuates unrealistic expectations on how life in a position of power works.

Isn't then the criticism about the acceptance that "life in a position of power works" this way and is essentially morally corrupt? Couldn't it be better? Greed is among the chief reasons for such conflicts of interest to arise, shouldn't we criticise such aspect and expect better from the "elites" in positions of power? Since greed will eventually corrupt we could probably want to expect better from the ones taking positions of power, I personally wouldn't like to accept that this is the best system we can live under, and for it to change we need to criticise it for the optics to change over time.

It was once accepted to own slaves, eventually we all landed on the same page: it is morally corrupt to do it, it's unethical. More modern examples like insider trading, stock fraud, were once accepted until we didn't accept it anymore as "it's the way it is".

I don't see a reason to not strive making other morally corrupt aspects of our systems (such as conflicts of interest) also unethical and frowned upon. People are people and shared ethics is how we level ourselves against each other.
Context:

Anonymous Source Shared Leaked Google Search API Documents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40496967) - May 2024 (147 comments)

Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40518016) - May 2024 (74 comments)

Google Search document leak reveals inner workings of ranking algorithm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40510125) - May 2024 (133 comments)

Google Search's Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40498076) - May 2024 (16 comments)
This is so true. You see it when you are on the hiring end. There are all kinds of people out there. I fully expect every hireable programmer to be able to set up a class, instantiate it, and use types. A lot of people are not even at that level. They know just enough to be dangerous.
The problem you are describing is interview variance and hiring bias, not leetcode. This happens irrespective of interview style.

Many companies have question banks that are specially designed to be fair/have some contextual relevance (ideally) to some "realistic" problem. Or at least, many of the companies I've interviewed at follow this model. I consider these coding questions to be "leetcode" style because at the end of the day they are an isolated coding problem, even though they may not be a problem from leetcode verbatim.

Companies that execute on that style of interview well are generally fairly pleasant interviews, at least in my experience. Good companies/interviewers will gauge more than just the final code to determine a hire or no hire. And a large portion of companies also have hiring ratings on a scale to make it less binary.
It's easy to hate on big companies. But can we just applaud Cox for having patched this within a day? That's incredible.
Lovable (https://lovable.dev), creators of GPT Engineer (https://gptengineer.app) | ONSITE+HYBRID | London / Stockholm | Full-Time | Founding Engineers

We're a small team of serial (ex-YC) founders, CTOs, designers & IOI gold medalists set on being the first to make autonomous code generation work.

Our CLI tool has 50k GitHub stars (https://github.com/gpt-engineer-org/gpt-engineer) and our SaaS product is in closed beta with 25k on the waitlist. You'd be one of the first employees and have a big impact in shaping our product and company.

Building an AI Software Engineer is a hard problem. We believe that hiring the brightest and most ambitious minds in Europe is the way we make this work. We care deeply about building a great product. We want to work with people who are as ambitious and motivated about shipping fast as we are.

In particular, we're looking for:

- Product engineers: Product-minded full stack engineers to work on our core product.

- Generalists: Creative/algorithmic minds with a track record of solving difficult problems (in physics, computer science, mathematics).

- Technical ex-founders: To own large sets of problems, and push product engineering forward.

Our stack: FastAPI backend, Next.js (subscribed to edit events in application DB), Cloud Run, Fly.io, Supabase.

Read more & apply at: https://lovable.dev/careers
So are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? The examples mentioned in this comment section are all blatantly intentional biases that people are choosing to use. The amazing part is that all the “standard test eliminates bias” people seem to the most ignorant to where bias helps THEM. Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. While “this white straight guy might explicitly choose to give the other white straight guy an easy question,” is very subjective and intentional on the individual level. Like, employees can always choose to do bad things, in any situation. That’s why we have at-will employment…

Is the culture just so broken at these companies that it’s hopeless to expect people NOT to blatantly exploit the system for their friends? Why don’t people get fired for doing that?