dnackoul

We use a tool called Weave (I believe YC 25?) that analyzes PRs for "expert units of work" and shows lift from AI tools. My understanding is they have their own proprietary model that assesses the difficulty of each PR. I find the organization level view and pivots useful and aligned with intuitive expectations.

I've generally observed latency of 500ms to 1s with modern LLM-based voice agents making real calls. That's good enough to have real conversations.

I attended VAPI Con earlier this year, and a lot of the discussion centered on how interruptions and turn detection are the next frontier in making voice agents smoother conversationalists. Knowing when to speak is a hard problem even for humans, but when you listen to a lot of voice agent calls, the friction point right now tends to be either interrupting too often or waiting too long to respond.

The major players are clearly working on this. Deepgram announced a new SOTA (Flux) for turn detection at the conference. Feels like an area where we'll see even more progress in the next year.

During my time there (late 2000s) there was a Software Lab (6.170) that focused on programming fundamentals and culminated in a four-person, month-or-so long project. At least at the time, it was one of the more notorious courses in terms of time investment. It was common for people to live like monks during project time.

Unfortunately I heard that class was retired and there was no direct replacement, which is a shame. It was an excellent crash course in shipping.

I also took Professor Winston's seminar in college and have similar feelings about it. It was far and away my favorite class and the wisdom in his advice has only become more apparent over time. At its heart, it was really about how to understand and communicate ideas.

One of the things I treasured the most was that Professor Winston overtly subscribed to the "make topics crystal clear and broadly accessible" school of technical communication. He would contrast this against the "make things incomprehensible so everyone thinks you're brilliant" school of thought. I am eternally grateful someone biased me early in life towards the former, not just when I'm speaking but when I'm choosing what to read and who to listen to.

I've also wondered lately what he would think about the current LLM wave. I'm sure he would have had a characteristically clear and profound take. I feel the world is losing out not having his voice during the current moment.

I grew up in the Pittsburgh area so I'm definitely biased, but I think Pittsburgh has a higher general sports literacy (especially for football) than other places I lived. Football is huge from peewee to the NFL and high school games receive significant coverage. The sportswriters seem to have more leeway to talk X and O's without losing their audience.

As an aside, some of the highest quality stuff I see is from bloggers/amateurs who follow sports and write about it as a hobby. There are people who write a dozen or two articles a year with incredible breakdowns containing numbers, vidoes, strategy, etc and it is incredible.

I agree with this. There's some really good stuff out there. I also think it's worth mentioning Jon Gruden. He does a great job of breaking down game tape while still reaching a wide audience. I'd love to see more like him. My ultimate hope is that Peyton Manning gets his own show breaking down film (of both NFL games and his commercials).

Because muscles take energy to power and fat is storage. In the non-modern world where food was scarcer it wasn't always advantageous to increase in muscle size and therefore caloric needs. Better to carry some fat around in case you don't find food for a while.

Usually these are people who are coming from companies with similar interview styles and are passively prepped by being an interviewer (for algos/coding) and designing web-scale systems (for system design).

1. No, you don't need to know everything... It takes maybe a week for a smart developer without a CS degree to learn what they need to know for interviews.

I just went through a job search and I didn't find this true. I think the bar on algorithms has raised significantly with all of the prep material (your book included) out there. I also found a few companies sent over "things to study" lists that were quite comprehensive and included topics that you might not even see in undergrad.

I'm not sure what you expect here. Do you want companies to hire based on how smoothly you're able to bullshit about what you can claim to have done in the past?

I think this is a false dichotomy. I had two friends that just interviewed at Stripe and loved their process: https://stripe.com/jobs/engineering-onsite.pdf

Its not good for a professional to play a game he thinks he will lose.

That's interesting, any ideas where this attitude comes from? I feel like that's the opposite of a lot of other sports and games, where the ability to take a bad loss and come back improved is seen as an important skill.

Thanks!

Also, how does Spanner get around the CAP theorem and similar distributed systems results? It seems like the only tradeoff is monetary at the moment.

I like to think about this question in three parts: scope, depth, and originality.

The scope of the project is the size and ambiguity level. Ideally as you get more experience your scope grows. Whenever you're coming out of school, your answer to this question might be a tricky bug fix but after a few years it might be something like "we needed to build a system to flag and filter fraudulent users based on their site activity."

Depth is about how much detail you can talk about the project in. If you choose a project with a big scope, can you drill down and talk about the implementation details of each component? If you chose a bug fix, can you describe exactly what triggered the bug as opposed to just knowing what fixed it?

For originality, what about the problem made it non-trivial to solve with out of the box tools? For the fraud case above, maybe the data was stored in a format that was hard to analyze. Or maybe for people at the bigger companies there were scaling issues that requipped unique solutions. For bug fixing, maybe it was a bug that was really hard to reproduce and you had to do a lot of memory dumps and code analysis to pinpoint it.

When I finish something I like to think about it along those three axes for a little bit in case I need to recall details later.

There needs to be parity within the matchups and across the season.

I'm not sure how widely known this is, but the actual matchups, not order and dates, are completely deterministic.

Teams play their division twice for six games. They play the other three teams in their conference with the same division standing last season (e.g. division champs will play each other). They play four teams from a rotating division in the other conference. And finally they play the remaining three teams from a rotating division in their conference.

I've always been a football fan but it took me a while to realize the NFL doesn't actually schedule rivalries like Brady/Manning every year, they just happen because those teams consistently win their division.

It's definitely worth it. The longer and more specific the list of requirements gets, the less likely it is that any one person meets all of them. Recruiters actually have a funny term for such a person, a Purple Squirrel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_squirrel)

But if you don't pass because you're not a "culture fit", it means you probably came off as a difficult person to work with. And this article shows why.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. A lot of companies have very strong cultures tailored to certain personality types. Company A may encourage bluntness and risk taking where Company B may encourage more tactful feedback and careful planning of any task. It depends on the market the company operates in and the ingrained culture.

I wish I would have seen this thread yesterday!

My advice to almost everyone is to prioritize consistency and enjoyment over perfect planning. For almost all working professionals, their plans fail on consistency instead of selecting optimal exercises. If you like bouldering, give it a shot. Jiu-jitsu / wrestling is another good activity that'll keep you strong. You'll be better off with either of those than a lifting regiment where you miss days often.

As for weightlifting, the problem people have with handling heavier weight isn't necessarily knowing the form, but being able to keep form as their numbers go up. Core strength is one of the most obvious problems, but you can also have other muscles that aren't quite as strong and those deficiencies become problems when you're doing heavy compound lifts. A good coach won't just teach you form, but identify the areas you need to improve in order to safely handle heavier weight.

If you want to pursue weightlifting / powerlifting, my best advice is to find a gym with a lot of lifters you can make friends with and elite level lifter or two. You'll pick up a lot from observation (in addition to the coaching you get) and the social aspect will make it easier to keep coming back.

I used to watch Sports Center for highlights (now the internet makes sure I don't miss anything noteworthy) and occasionally the talk shows (which now rarely cover inside the lines topics). I think without reliable non-event programming it's hard to justify an entire channel.

Thanks for the recommendations. Any experience with how these hold up as they scale up?

Does anyone have experience building mobile backends in Lambda? I was looking at an API Gateway / Lambda / Amazon RDS stack for building a central data store and was wondering what people's experience with that setup is?

Finally, my first Hacker News comment!

In addition to equipment and rules changes, training and nutritional techniques have evolved quite a bit over the last century. NFL players, for example, used to smoke cigarettes at half time. All things equal, the modern athletes probably are better.

This is a really great topic and we have some relevant experience on our team. I'll see if I can rope one of them into giving a deeper answer or putting up a blog post.