mdcds

I see people report learning stuff, working on side projects, etc etc on HN. How?

1. people on the internet are full of shit

2. Demis Hassabis (DeepMind) takes a 3 hour break from work to, quote: "have dinner and spend time with family". Then has another work/thinking session. Give it a try. That's what I'm trying to do

It is possible to disagree without being disagreeable,

-1 for strawman

disagreeing with someone and raking high on Disagreeableness BigFive trait are two different things

data is just that, not an argument in itself. how you use it to disprove something is up to you.

I don't trust numbers on Blind.

But I do look at averages for a specific role at a specific company on Levels

People and jobs are non-fungible: no two candidates are identical, no two jobs are the same.

Bid/ask spreads make sense to me only in situations when fungible units of A are traded for fungible units of B.

a side, but a sincere question: what do Data Scientists do and what can I expect one to produce as productive output?

I've worked as an SDE on data engineering projects myself (Spark / Hadoop stuff) and have friends who are ML researches and develop things like better recommendation results. Never met a data scientist.

To be fair though, two of the most brilliant devs I've ever meet in my career had master's degrees

From what era / decade? World isn't static. MS is CS earned in 80s means a different thing than the one earned today

#2 links to atomic-energy.ru

So it's probably nuclear plant control console and I'm guessing nuclear fuel rods are represented by a dot inside the "sun" and rods themselves are suspended in some sort of a circular enclosure

Is it illegal you use fake name and fake age on the internet? asking for a friend :)

Actually, the relationship with 6-month treasury is even stronger:

https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=%24UST6M&p=W&b=1&g=0&id=p1...

Just something to think about: Fed Funds rate follows the 2-year treasury with a lag.

What BlackRock calls "deliberately causing recession", I would call "following the signal from the bond market"

Chart: https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=%24UST2Y&p=W&b=1&g=0&id=p4...

I've been using ChatGPT to summarize text and as a replacement for a search engine to look up concepts.

  Examples:
  - "what is the difference between Semigroup and Monoid"
  - "summarize following text: <paste something convoluted, like the transcript of a speech by Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Chair >"

I'm heavily involved in interviewing at my current org and have been pondering same questions.

Some ideas:

  1. use ChatGPT (or similar) to test your questions. I read that GPT-like models cannot do abstract manipulation. Perhaps there is a way to phrase follow up questions such that the model cannot relate to the earlier question. 
  
  2. in system design session, focus on detail instead of high level. Also, you can draw a diagram of a design and ask the candidate to point out deficiencies.

  3. what if we could use GPT-like system to generate new programming questions of equal difficulty for each new interview candidate? this would solve the problem of questions leaking and making it to sites like LeetCode.

Since said person doesn't want to listen you and you don't have the direct authority over that person, I think it's reasonable to ask the team manager to deal with it.

Say something like the following. Just remember to include specific pieces of evidence that support your claim.

"Person X doesn't seem to care about company policies regarding the code quality. On following occasions: <list of offenses by person X> he/she did something sloppy that was against the policy A and refused to even acknowledge it during the review. Can you explain him/her why following these policies is important"

I asked ChatGPT the opposite quesiton (why becoming cheaper) :D

  Streaming services such as Netflix, Disney Plus, and HBO Max are becoming cheaper for a few reasons. First, the streaming market has become more competitive in recent years, with many new players entering the market. This has increased the pressure on existing streaming companies to offer lower prices in order to remain competitive.

  Second, streaming companies are able to offer lower prices because they have become more efficient at delivering content to users. With advances in technology and the growth of high-speed internet access, streaming companies are able to deliver more content at a lower cost.

  Finally, streaming companies are also able to offer lower prices because they have become more successful at monetizing their content through advertising and other means. This allows them to generate revenue from their content without needing to rely as much on subscription fees.

  Overall, the combination of increased competition, improved efficiency, and alternative revenue streams has led to lower prices for streaming services like Netflix, Disney Plus, and HBO Max.

“The price of streaming services is reflective of the economic realities and costs that it takes to produce and distribute the content,” Schmitt says.

Lies. Things are priced to maximize the amount of profit, which is Quantity * Price - Cost.

If you hike prices by 10% and lose 5% of customers - that's good business. $100 * 100 is less than $110 * 95

Someone who knows microeconomics better can correct me, but looks like companies can raise price and make more money as long as the demand continues to be inelastic

Consider this angle: what if it's your intuition telling you that whatever you are doing isn't important and you should be focusing your efforts on something else?

The belief is that the climate is not static

It's a justified belief. Climate isn't static. For example, Sahara desert used to be an oasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

My Slack notifications are on only for DMs and mentions, and only during office hours. If there is a crisis afterhours, my teammates/manager have my phone number.

Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs?

no. layoff from the bottom first. then push out more people as needed. bottom performers have fewer options and, on average, will be willing to put up with more than top performers

well then, I'm going to not subscribe even harder

The interviewers expressed a wish to see me go more in depth on technologies, but I simply don't have much experience in any of them

I conduct system design interview sessions for my org. My advice is to find opportunities to work on new architectures that use pieces of infrastructure that you aren't familiar with yet. You need to know the moving parts before you can start thinking about how you'd approach designing Twitter. Theoretical knowledge can be sufficient some times, but nothing beats hands-on experience.

How to get opportunities for hands-on experience in your case?! Idk, depends on your circumstances. Maybe go for an internal transfer to work on something different. Maybe go for a less senior role and but be picky about the new tech stack. Maybe go to a less prestigious company that pays less, but offers opportunities to build new skills.

Are you trying to go for ML Engineer or SDE positions?

I've been using Return Youtube Dislike addon for Firefox.

Idk how accurate it is, but you can gauge the sentiment (mostly positive, mixed, mostly negative)

I switch between Scala and Python all the time.

My trick is to use different editors with different color schemes. IntelliJ for Scala, VSCode for Python. My brain switches immediately.

Which people?

Def not mom-and-pop investors who use pension funds and wealth managers/advisors to keep their investments in (usually) diversified portfolios.

I had the same question!

The mechanism of higher rates reducing inflation isn't clear to me.

Does it go down because people with cash choose to park it and earn interest instead of buying goods and services? Or does it go down because higher interest rates make the cost of doing business more expensive which leads to reduction in overall business activity?

If it's by reducing business activity, then seems like the "breaking point" can be at any arbitrary interest rate for a given country in a given year.

Also, if inflation is caused by the lack of supply (like the supply chain issues / chip shortage and such), then I think reducing business activity will only exacerbate the problem by reducing the supply further (and I don't hear anyone explore this angle).

First you have Price's Law - half the people actually doing work rises with the square root of the total employee count. It's a variant of Pareto law. So as you grown bigger, the critical path of viable operation depends on fewer and fewer people per capita.

Huh, interesting point. Natural conclusion is that as companies grow, they become more and more fragile to core people leaving.

Where does superior performance come from? SSDs optimizations, multi-threading, and O(1) mem allocator?

There is no evidence of fraud since then

absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence ~ NNT

Just because no one found fraud, doesn't mean it isn't there.

I'm optimistic about Charles Hoskinson's project to develop a secure voting system for a country in Africa (Ethiopia?) that is based on Cardano (crypto). But I'll wait for the final product to make the judgement.

did the company survive?