fpig

Why is there so much complaining online about algorithmic questions? It’s really weird.

Surely there are way worse questions that companies ask.

Also, I stopped reading after his first argument which is incredibly stupid. He thinks the fact that he found inefficiencies in code at companies asking such questions proves something. The company I work for asks questions about testing yet we still have untested code. This is not strange, because outcomes depend on many things, not solely interview questions. It’s such an idiotic argument.

It's much simpler to provide public services to everyone and handle economic inequality through taxation.

Means-tested benefits result in bureaucracy that sometimes costs more than the increase in cost from giving the benefit to everyone would be, they create poverty traps, and they screw over people in atypical situations (i.e. a kid whose parents care so little they can't even be bothered to get the paperwork done that proves their low income status).

You want to attract candidates that have a high probability of being hired.

If vJ is the perceived value of getting the job, pJ the perceived probability of getting the job, vI the value of the literal payment for going through the interview process, and vT the perceived value of one's time (and any other cost if it exists, such as travel) required to go through the process, we can represent the expected value of going through the interview process as:

  EV = pJ * vJ + vI - vT

I also assume that the candidate would choose where and whether to apply based on EV for their various options.

One one end, if your pJ is close to 1 (you're highly qualified for the job and will likely get it), the result is dominated by pJ * vJ which is ~= vJ; vI and vT matter little. This means that if you will probably get the job, it doesn't really matter much whether the interview is paid (and it also doesn't matter as much how much time it takes). For top candidates, the difference in pJ * vJ for different companies should be the dominant factor, i.e. they will apply for the best jobs.

On the other end, if your pJ is close to 0 (you're applying on a long shot), then vI and vT become much more significant factors. If your chance to get the job is really low, then the interview being paid makes it significantly more attractive, and it also matters more how much time it takes. The companies that pay for interviews, and companies that are easy to apply and interview for are likely the ones with the highest EV for the poorer candidates.

Basically the worse of a candidate you are for the job, the more important it is for the interview to be paid, because with a low enough probability of getting the job, this payment becomes a big factor in the expected value of doing the interview.

Of course it's not as simple as that, because people are not machines chasing pure financial interest and have feelings about how you treat them. Also, a highly qualified candidate is more likely to have a job that is closer to the one they're applying for, while an unqualified candidate might have a much worse job, making vJ higher for the less qualified candidate. But it is likely that the relative difference in pJ is much greater between a qualified and unqualified candidate than the relative difference in vJ. The candidate's own perception of the probability of being hired (pJ) might also be unrealistic in either direction, and I'm assuming it is a good predictor of the true probability of being hired. But I think in general the rule should hold, paid interviews would decrease the quality of the candidate pool.

Usually they're trying to profit by being the last holdouts, hoping they will be able to get more money this way. It may not be worth paying everyone 3X, but if everyone except one person agreed to X, then paying the last holdout 3X is not a huge expense and gets the project going. At least that's what they're hoping for.

There was a case in my city where they wanted to build a shopping mall and offered the people who owned homes on the plot a deal. Only 1 person refused and asked for much more money (in his words "Who accepts the first offer??"), and since this plot wasn't critical for the project, they never even contacted him after that and just built it without his plot: https://www.vecernji.hr/media/img/38/97/a9f29b9fca44602d5b41... (the lone house in the "corner"). He got mad, sued them, etc.

This was a private company; I'm not sure why the government would have this problem, since they can exercise eminent domain for stuff like infrastructure, it's literally why it exists.

Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem.

This sounds like a lack of technical leadership. If the junior's boss is an engineer, and they do their job, then this won't happen. The story reminds me of my first job, which wasn't even remote, where my boss was a non-technical person and I was going down "dark paths" constantly because he couldn't recognize it as he lacked the expertise.

I think your case is a bit different because you don't actually want to live in the city. Obviously both city and country living have their advantages and disadvantages, and it would likely benefit most developed countries greatly if more people were willing to live outside the major cities.

The issue is mainly people wanting to live in a large city, but also wanting to live in a single family home (and most of them, although maybe not on HN, seem to favor residential zoning instead of mixed) which results in really shitty cities that are environmental disasters with endless sprawl, long commutes in city traffic, having to drive even for basic things like going to a grocery store, etc. And you don't have a "prairie preserve without having to drive" in that case, in fact you more likely than not have a longer drive to get out of the city than a person living in a denser city. Check out Perth, it's probably the best example in the world of this being taken to the extreme, with almost the entire city being just endless rows of houses.

Microsoft's UI story is a non-starter until they get back to the point that a user can:

Why do you care about this stuff? I don't understand. Surely most developers can build a simple app with a few buttons easily in whichever framework they're using. This stuff doesn't really matter for I'd dare to say 90% of developers. What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff. And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.

Not sure why you think how difficult it is to put a couple buttons on a page and make them do something would have any effect on the success of a UI framework. That's literally not even a consideration when we make decisions on what to use for a project.

If WPF ran on other platforms, we would use it for everything. We use Avalonia instead, and it's pretty great.

But there are 2 basic types of multiplatform UI frameworks - the ones that wrap native controls and look like most other apps on the platform, and the ones that do their own rendering and look the same on every platform. Avalonia is in the second group, so if the former is a hard requirement then it is not a good choice.

XAML is the only thing I was ever able to write a complex layout in, run the app, and see it look exactly as what I intended on the first attempt. That would meet my definition of productivity.

For example, my experience with CSS has been the opposite of that. F5 a million times before the layout works the way I want it to. Sometimes even googling how to do create some type of layout because I can't think of it on my own.

So while having too many "elites" (by which I assume "wealthy people" is meant), we have a storm brewing.

It doesn't mean wealthy people. It means people who feel they deserve to be a part of the elite, usually by virtue of their formal education. If we're "overproducing" such people, a large part of them cannot actually achieve this, because there's a lot more such people than available positions in the "true" elite (ie people having real wealth/power), which causes discontent.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

This however is also not a uniquely American problem.

I've probably spent ~1000 hours writing C++ in my life (admittedly, years ago) and objectively speaking I wouldn't hire myself even as a junior C++ dev.

This pretty much exactly matches my own experience (100+ interviews, not as a professional interviewer but as an engineer who does interviews).

I think that's the wrong question. If a court can decide (and enforce) what a smart contract "really means", then smart contracts don't really bring much to the table. It doesn't matter what the court would actually decide.

The main thing smart contracts bring to the table is a mechanism of enforcing contracts without government involvement or control. The contract gets enforced, period. The parties can be anonymous, it doesn't matter which country they're from, and so on.

It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.

Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.

I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me

That's a ridiculous statement.

When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance.

Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide".

That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context.

Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.

How is such a definition more useful? It's certainly not more useful to me. If someone tried to sell me such a quantity of land, the first thing I'd ask would be what the actual size is in standard units. A universal, precisely defined system of units is superior because it works in any context, you just need to know the system.

Expressing distance by travel time is a similarly stupid concept. I can tell someone something is 15 minutes by car, but here I'm expressing time, not distance. If I tell someone something is 15 meters away I'm expressing distance. The separate concepts of time and distance allow me to precisely express whatever I need to.

The study also damns itself because they chose the absolute worst possible timing for their “research” and measuring wfh productivity. It’s like they don’t understand how much the pandemic changes everything.

If you see someone write "reed" instead of "read" or "rite" instead of "write", that's likely a native speaker.

I don't disagree, but not sure why you associate poor spelling with non-native speakers.

Yep it does! Had no idea.

This looks like a great service!

Edit: crap, looks like it's US-only :/

The worst one is probably trying to make it hard for users to stop paying for a service, like cancelling a subscription. That shit should be punishable by literal prison time.

I agree that this practice should go away - if you believe that, then the goal should be to eliminate this shady practice entirely, not try to make it more prevalent like you were suggesting before editing your comment.

What is good about web sites trying to force users to use their app instead? That itself one of the worst dark patterns out there.

Edit: If my comment looks confusing, the comment I replied to has been edited. "compelling first class experience" is really a more vague term for "web sites being able to push their app on users"

I'm just going to respond to this comment since all are saying the same thing basically - the comment I replied to was implying something else, that Australians are working in India and weren't able to return when the government demanded it because they would have lost their jobs in India, which sounds like a legitimate reason to refuse to return, but also sounds like a group of people that's likely mostly imaginary.

I'm sure there's a bunch of Australians going to India for all kinds of reasons, I didn't mean to imply people from Australia never travel to India in general, but people who were visiting India could have returned when the government warned them to do so, and I assume the vast majority did, apart from covid-denying "you can't tell me what to do" types which I have little sympathy for.

I mean, reading this:

https://janeyang.org/2021/04/27/an-open-letter-to-jason-and-...

It does seem like it may have been a case of some politically motivated employees being disruptive. The part that is just irredeemable is:

I thought about it through COVID-19, as HEY launched in the midst of a civil rights uprising and we toiled over the customer support cases of people who could afford to pay $99/year for personal email.

This sounds like the person is complaining that their supposedly privileged customers distracted her from activism. If she has a problem working for "people who could afford to pay $99/year for personal email" then she should probably find a different job where she will serve a demographic that is more palatable to her.

How is this even an issue? I just can’t imagine many Australians going to India to work since it’s a much poorer country. Like, it’s hard for me to believe there’s more than 100 Australians who did that. And they can easily quarantine that many people. The article makes it sound like it’s a huge number of people they’d need to build facilities for which seems super strange.

I agree; even before the internet, I rented movies, I didn't buy them. The movie/tv industry has always been massively overcharging for the privilege of owning the content, which is why the business of selling them never even really took off the way it did for music and video games where the value of ownership is much higher.

When I was around 14, some time in the 90s, I contacted a guy whose ad I had read in a paper magazine by calling him over the landline phone and I asked him to burn Slackware on CDs for me. I sent him something like ~$60 over the mail and a few weeks later I got a package with the CDs. He even printed the covers for them. Today I get mad when a web site says my free download will start in 10 seconds.

Why are you trolling on HN?

Edit: yes, Walmart's revenue is 500+ billion. What does that have to do with anything discussed here? temp667's comment is correct.

Edit 2: first you didn't understand what "revenue" is, now you don't understand what "gross profit" is.

No he isn't.