skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FAANG-like companies don't usually interview bootcamp candidates. Most times, they're interviewing other ex-Fang-like or top university grads with a relevant CS degree.

Track record and conversational interviews are used for hiring lawyers, doctors, MBA and marketing professional.....why are programmers any different ?

Reality is, todays tech interview questions select for those without a life.

Great professionals solve hard problems. It drains you by night, leaving just enough time for some of workout, sleep, primary hobby, parenting and relationships. Even on a good week, you have to make compromises.

It's one thing to ask leetcode gotchas to fresh grads who've had 2 whole years to do leetcode. But conducting 10 rounds for a senior engineer with zero free time is torture.

Give take home projects. Do 2 hour long debugging sessions. Do system design. Just give me a work item. All good.

30 minute compile-or-die leetcode questions are not it. If you wanna test for IQ, make me rotate some shapes. None of this rote learned monkey business. It's not even that hard. But the prospect of giving up all my weekends for 3 months, just to get 12 days worth of time to be leetcode prim and proper..is untenable.
It looks to me like it was blurred, not pixelated.

Edit: Nvm, I guess they blurred text in some places, pixelated in others
Go by alphabetical order.
I learned that when they write “did not immediately respond to our request” in the newspaper it means that the journalist called and no one picked up, then went to print.

When they write “did not respond to our request” it means they called or emailed and waited a few hours, possibly the next day.

Not really the same as what happened here, but thought it would be interesting to mention it here.
Just curious as a non-US hner — what is the problem?
Sometimes "it's just reporting the facts" can be done with a lean in itself. You may disagree, that's fine too of course, but this isn't a plain jane "Rabbit did not immediately respond with comments" it has a timeline omitting some facts like like starting on a Friday and is intermixed with commentary on the reachout. Not anything that's false, just also not maybe as neutral as it set out to be. Also not the end of the world, it's still a good article overall.
How much are you paying? In other words: is your job attractive enough?
How do you know that's the ONLY thing? Such a dumb fallacy.

You know what else saves lives? Outlawing the use of cars entirely. Why aren't you arguing for that?
I think "figuring someone out" and "figuring out if someone can do a job that needs to be filled" are very different topics.
Fischer-Tropsch/Karrick process...margarine.

Oh, yeah...the ppl who are against transfats will totally go for this.

Extra points for using shale oil as a feedstock.
most of my undergrad was done on decstation 3100s running ultrix. i loved the huge mono monitors. so many xterms open at once! amazing.
No offense but are you confident you know what PPA is/does? "volunteer their data" doesn't seem a remotely fair characterization to me.

Ignore the CTO's hand-wavey justification and go look at what it actually does and tell me if you still hate it this much. I agree with you ideologically but I think you're engaging in friendly fire here.
Wrote my first hello world and http server to get the ticker starting on “Rye Lang X years of experience”

Can’t wait for the “10 yeass of experience in Rye Lang [in 2026]” job posts from clueless recruiters
I guess that depends on who's asking, and what kind of response they want.

At home, I don't use Apple Home or SmartThings. It is unlikely that I ever will.

I own an iPad that I use every day and my phone is a Samsung, but I already have already adopted enough ecosystems with Google Home, Alexa, and Home Assistant, and I'm working on minimizing or eliminating two of those because they're clown-based.

But I am a geek that likes to tinker with electronics and software. I recognize that I am an outlier.

But I will cheerfully pay extra for stuff that Just Works with Home Assistant without using the clown, and that would probably apply to cameras as well.
or at least in c++, c#, or java, sure, smalltalk being the main exception

but the layers are somewhat orthogonal. at the verilog level you can't really tell if your hardware is built out of luts, cmos standard cells, hand-laid-out nmos, ttl, or vacuum tubes; at the operating system level you can't really tell if your cpu was designed in vhdl, verilog, chisel, or hand-drawn schematics; at the interpreter level you can't really tell if your operating system was written in c, pl/x, assembly, or lisp; and at the python level you can't really tell if you're running on cpython (which is written in c) or pypy (which is written in python)

i mean there are small clues that make it hard to completely hide, but they're subtle

so, to my way of thinking, saying 'c has had far more of an influence on computing than awk', on the basis that awk was written in c, is similar to saying 'transistors have had far more of an influence on computing than c'. it's sort of true, but it's also sort of false
Salesforce, SAP, it's all the same sort of
> Feeling "I solved the world, everybody listen to me" is... not.

Does this apply to the preceding paragraph in your comment?

How about to science, and various other The Way's currently popular bordering on mandatory (if you want to be respected at least) in this era, culture, geographical region?
Presumably GP meant Mozilla agitated for a Document/KV-store, yet for some inexlicable reason, in their own browser, they chose to implement IndexedDB with SQLite.

They could have used an actual KV store behind it, like chromium did (levelDB IIRC).
Wait until you discover sl
A/B test or not, 9mg is impossible. That would be half the mass on a grain of salt.

At those length scales the interesting forces at play are not fluid mechanics, but capillary forces and surface tension. It also trivially easy to make - just rip a piece of gold foil weighing 9mg
i'll try to help if i notice incoming email from you but i'm pretty terrible at noticing incoming email even when i manage to not accidentally delete it
It was called WinRed, not ActRed. ActBlue and WinRed were the DNC and RNCs respective PACs.

The Lincoln Project was incredible, especially once you take events like January 6th in context. The kind of Republicans that made The Lincoln Project and investigated the actors behind January 6th are what our political system needs more of.
I mean I've personally given our Nvidia rep some light hearted shit for it. Told him I'd appreciate if he passed the feedback up the chain. Can't hurt to provide feedback!
> our Product Manager SQL interview

Your what now? (Well, unless you're a database company.)

In all my time as a PM I've never had to know, let alone prove competence in, my SQL knowledge.

In all my time as a PM, the vast majority of my "SQL" usage is crafting slightly more advanced filters and queries in Jira or similar.

There are analytics platforms, telemetry, metrics, you name it.

I've worked as a PM on fairly complex products (integrating and manipulating healthcare data, managed platforms atop Kubernetes, etc.) and never needed SQL knowledge.

As a general rule in terms of how I allocate my PMs and their efforts now? "PMs have far more valuable things to be doing than lovingly crafting handwritten SQL for god-knows-what reasons."
Good work by well-known reputable authors.

The gains in training efficiency and compute cost versus widely used text-encoding models like RoBERTa and XLNet are significant.

Thank you for sharing this on HN!
Why is that? Gives you the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect without the hassle of rocketry and weightlessness. Slow and smooth. Good!
It's an important point when the discussion revolves around "reactions aren't part of email culture" etc. Sorry for the "power users" but... email culture includes HTML, reactions and so on, today, in 2024.

And part of what irritates me shows up in your answer. This feeling of superiority of being in the "in-group" that seeps out.
> 01983

> 01979

thats not how you write years, or even numbers really.
Agreed. In one sense it's trivial - just publish a spec of dust.

On the other, any non trivial mechanical system at those lengths scales is dominated by surface forces and they hardly care to discuss "easy" problems like voltage converters.
Do you think it would be as good of a delivery channel if browsers focus more on features needed to build applications rather than to view documents?

In my experience, application-specific features are really what made the modern web complex and bloated. Building applicstion frameworks and operating systems is insanely difficult, much more so than building a standard document format and rendering protocol.

Can the web be used for applications? Absolutely. But my argument would be that it almost never should be. Native applications will always handle that better, and though there isn't a great cross platform solution for applications today we'd be better off building that than shoehorning that usecase into the web.
> Just on resume? Are you aware how easy and common it is for candidates to lie on the resume?

If you can't figure out a candidate lied on their resume in a half hour conversation, you aren't going to figure it out in a four hour conversation either
OPFS is only available in Web Workers.

I don't think this is correct:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
Something similar but with a different angle - Urban DJ https://urbanpoll.com/dj

Every day people order the top 5 songs and nominate one another song and a new topic. That way, we always have songs on the same topic. When there are more than 5 songs nominated on the same topic - people filter them out with one extra step.

It's fun, and it's been running since Nov 2022 https://urbanpoll.com/dj/rounds. I'd be happy if more people joined. I'm the "founder" of this little side project.
In my life I met two people who survived botched suicide attempts without using firearms. When someone decides to do it, they will try, and there are things worse than dying.
I would put it more charitably as "Java Virtual Threads are new and have not seen massive use and optimization yet".

This is crucial, because Java wouldn't necessarily require the same optimizations Go needed.

Making Virtual Threads fully preemptive could be useful, but it's probably not as crucial as it was for Go.

Go does not have a native mechanism to spawn OS threads that are separate from the scheduler pool, so if you want to run a long CPU-heavy task, you can only run it on the same pool as you run your I/O-bound Goroutines. This could lead to starvation, and adding partial preemption and later full preemption was a neat way to solve that issue.

On the other hand, Java still has OS threads, so you can put those long-running CPU-bound tasks on a separate thread-pool. Yes, it means programmers need to be extra careful with the type of code they run on Virtual Threads, but it's not the same situation as Go faced: in Java they DO have a native escape hatch.

I'm not saying a preemptive scheduler won't be helpful at Java, but it just isn't as direly needed as it was with Go. One of the most painful issues with Java Virtual Threads right now is thread pinning when a synchronized method call is executed. Unfortunately, a lot of existing Java code is heavily using synchronized methods[1], so it's very easy to unknowingly introduce a method call that pins an OS thread. Preemeptive could solve this issue, but it's not the only way to solve it.

---

[1] One of my pet peeves with the Java standard library is that almost any class or method that was added before Java 5 is using synchronized methods excessively. One of the best examples is StringBuffer, the precursor of StringBuilder, where all mutating methods are synchronized, as if it was a common use case to build a string across multiple threads. I'm still running into StringBuffers today in legacy codebases, but even newer codebases tend to use synchronized methods over ReentrantLocks or atomic operations, since they're just so easy to use.
Not sure what this means. Obviously we're comparing apples and oranges between different projects, but it's weird to suggest that foreign contractors aren't doing the same work as domestic employees. I'm pretty sure FAANG does use foreign contractors too, so they are often doing literally the same work.
When someone responds to "email culture has embraced reactions" with "look at me, I'm special, I use a text-only email client," yes, it's appropriate to remind them that indeed, it's not at all the norm and in the end they're just complaining about a niche pet peeve.
the vast majority of people who work in offices just push papers, go to meetings and other mindless bs. the people who build brands are higher level managers/ivy-league over-achievers. sales people are hired or retained based on talent, getting a very low base salary and high commission. writing code is way more than reading and implementing syntax, it's actually making the design work or solving very tricky bugs. People with bare-minimum degrees and no demonstrable acumen are useless. take any given tech idea you want, it doesn't "just work", the devil is in the details.
Show HN: Wordle for Music
Mario Kart 64: The Quest for World Record Perfection [video]
> Edu software can't provide the social benefits of exclusive schools (whether they are private or public). Parents know that which is why if they can afford to, they avoid underperforming schools.

Well, the underperforming schools also have worse teachers, and can be dangerous. It's not like the reason people avoid bad schools is because of the software. A parent recently told me he's sending his son to a private middle school because he's worried about gangs and bullying at the public school. An AI chatbot wouldn't bring those risks (though it also wouldn't deliver benefits of social interaction with well-behaved, bright children, either).
I am in the same boat. Btw, what are you working on?
What if they can't do it from first principles but you tell them the trick, and they bang out the code in 5 minutes? Does that count? They've shown they can code, right?

Why is the former so much more important than the latter, for 99.9% of programmer interviews?

(protip: it isn't, but I guarantee you will get a "no hire" far more often if you need a hint. It's just nerd in-group hazing, coupled with a big helping of cargo culting Google.)
This is like saying Apple and Alphabet are the same. SAP is a 52 year old company and is the largest non-American software company in revenue, and has never been part of Salesforce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP
Guessing it’s from following the style of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
EDIT: Fixed now, as told in the replies.

I only see:

> Space is unavailable offline.

> Only spaces that you're a member of, and have visited recently, are available offline

and I can play and add card and move them. What am I supposed to see?
The reported bugs have all been patched, and presumably the compromised secrets have been rotated. The blurring/pixelation is arguably unnecessary, regardless of its effectiveness. The censored data looks like local host names and some image hashes.
People will hate me for saying this, but I bet there are many many repos on github written by programmers that are better than all these coding legends. Back then, it was a much smaller pool.
Easier and better really need context. For me, styling a UI in CSS is easier than manually coding a UI for an iOS app. The visual UI builder in VS Code is pretty damn nice though, and I find that easier than CSS for complex UI.

If I need to do anything related to complex state changes, animations, page navigations, etc I'd also much rather use a native applications built with that scenario in mind. There are a ton of things we simply can't do with CSS - we're starting to see experimental features for simple page animations but they're very limited and manual. I worked on the Windows Phone UI framework back in the day, that was over a decade ago now and the kinds of navigation animations you could do with a few properties and flags was light years ahead of web page transitions today.
Those numbers seem awfully low; even going via the relatively slow kernel/kernel stack, you can comfortably achieve around 2Mpps (64B) tx, per core (single flow), on ~2010 commodity hardware via standard Linux userspace APIs.

For reference, bypassing the kernel you can saturate a 10G link for ~14Mpps on a single downclocked 500MHz core with same class of hardware.

Stuck on phone at the moment; will check out the code later.
Yep agreed, there are always outliers. Some extroverts are very skilled and can switch to first principles thinking (or at least the appearance of it) when they need to. They may have a really strong sense of their audience and adapt well to their context/environment.
> its a test of EQ, if a simple question about past conflicts makes you this defensive then its exactly the type of thing it was meant to screen for.

You see, to do the behavioral interview properly the interviewer must have a psychological degree and a special training relating to these interviews. The hiring interview is a special situation for an interviewee, they act not like they do in a normal working circumstances. For example they tend to overthink questions, searching for the best answer that will be marked by the interviewer as a good answer. They incentivized to lie, because it is easy to find these questions in advance and to invent the best answers out, and no one ever will find out that it was a lie. So, the interviewer asked some questions and got some learned answers, how can they now interpret these answers and say something about the personality traits of the interviewee?

> I’d encourage OP to put some thought into this part for their own sake. You don’t need to make everyone feel better but if you show up with the attitude that you’re never wrong, then nobody will want to work with you. I know I don’t.

You advice is probably misplaced. The article is not a part of a job interview. So their EQ didn't show any failures, they wanted to rant and they had chosen the right place to do it. If he ranted at the interview, I'd agree that he needs to work on their EQ or self-control or something.

The comments here is full of diagnoses for the author, but I'm really reluctant to form any opinions about the author mind. It is just one article, that was probably written in a single take. What you see may be not the persistent personal traits, but situational and temporary state of mind. The article has a theme and the author provides examples to his points, and do you think he should provide examples against his points? Again: if they were writing a scientific paper, I would expect them to go through all the evidence, and to do it much more rigorous, but it is just the fucking blog post. Yes a long one, but still the blog post.

And on this basis I'd encourage the most commenters in the thread to work on their EQ. More specifically to read about Fundamental Attribution Error. People are largely driven by the situation they are in, but observers interpret behavior mainly in terms of enduring personal traits.
> An interesting thing to observe is that while everyone uses tech ever day the "mass" is getting further away from having a good understanding of it instead of having a better understanding.

IMO that's mostly because earlier technology required a greater degree of dedication and study and troubleshooting. Back In My Day when I wanted to play computer games I had to check my IRQs and configure Sound Blaster.
the same amazon - that can't sync where the video last played ?

up until those same companies start to make userland software that actually works. interviews are or will remain just a hazing ceremony.
If a CS grad can't write a 'for' loop you should write to the CS department chair or dean and the career services office at the department and let them know that you're disappointed in the quality of graduate that they are turning out and that you'll be thinking twice before hiring their graduates in the future.

Colleges and universities are lowering standards and accepting anyone with a pulse to get their tuition dollars.
We have a hour total per interviewer. The basic FizzBuzz is intentionally incredibly simple, no reason anyone qualified to be a full time software engineer should take more than 10 minutes to build it in a pre-set-up environment in their language of choice.
I believe one only ever finds such objects by tripping over them... allegedly...
In both cases, yes and there are multiple projects able to reverse it for both the pixelation case [1]

Blurring is like a hashing algorithm. If you know the font, size and placement that was used, you can try out reblurring and Thus brute forcing characters

[1] https://github.com/spipm/Depix
Anyone in particular you would you consider great? Always neat to follow the careers or happenings of the new blood.
JD Vance Wants to Make Silicon Valley Great Again
Apologies for the following assumption: You must be based in Europe.

I assumed that because in certain countries in the EU, such as Germany, Belgium, Poland, Ireland, companies are quite used to working with independent contractors. I am not sure that’s the case in the US.
> "The longer we treat our field as sterilized objective truth, we lose more students to the alt-right"

Shockingly bad article. Objectivity is an ideal. It's impossible to reach, but the point is to try. As soon as historians give up trying to be objective, they start producing garbage.
I don't really count the recruiter call. This is basically just "tell me about yourself" and "can we align on compensation/localtion"? Not much to study for outside of remembering your resume. I don't count the offer stage with HR for similar reasons (though these days, even the offer stage doesn't guarantee an offer, even if you don't negotiate).

So maybe it's a misalignment. that's a 2-3 hour interview gauntlet in my eyes.

>I agree with the parent, people’s expectations have been warped recently.

I've done much much worse in my experience. Doesn't mean I think it's okay, productive, nor respectful. Recruiter -> manager -> Team is a fine 3 step process process (with a potential take home test. so 4 stages) I agree with responses questining the marginal value of the 5th stage with another team member, the 6th stage with some C class you'll never directly talk to, and beyond. Very few people are are applying for director roles, which is the only place I can see such stages needed.
> It was simply a universally known language to assess one's skills. So it is today with Python.

I've had... several... interviews over the years. Zero of them used Python. Might be that you're just in a corner of the industry that loves Python for some reason.

> ...most people I know aren't a fan, but editors take care of it...

I've had editors totally screw up indentation of copied and pasted Python code many, many times. Editors might get it right much of the time, but they absolutely do not (and provably cannot) get it right all of the time. On top of that, visually finding whitespace errors is far, far harder than visually finding enclosing-scope-signifier errors.

> ... and it's rarely an issue.

All sorts of things are rarely an issue until they're an issue. And then when they're an issue, they're often a big fucking deal. [0]

Don't you agree that we (as an industry) should be working to reduce the number of footguns in the world?

[0] Ferinstance, if everyone used an editor that treated YAML as a tree of nodes and used a strict schema [1] to control what nodes you could add where, then that customer havoc I mentioned wouldn't have happened. But, when Corporate Security only gives you SSH access to the restricted-access system that you're currently repairing, running such a tool is simply out of the question. So, one uses a text editor to make one's changes. In situations like this, removing every footgun possible from the work area is very, very important.

[1] Schemas? For YAML? I wish. I really, really do.