adamzerner

Ah, you are right. I didn't realize this when I wrote it. Thanks for pointing it out.

> In 2015-2016 the site underwent a steady decline of activity leading some to declare the site dead. In 2017, a team led by Oliver Habryka took over the administration and development of the site, relaunching it on an entirely new codebase later that year.

> The new project, dubbed LessWrong 2.0, was the first time LessWrong had a full-time dedicated development team behind it instead of only volunteer hours. Site activity recovered from the 2015-2016 decline and has remained at steady levels since the launch.

- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S69ogAGXcc9EQjpcZ/a-brief-hi...

That sounds like freelance work, not product development. Am I mistaken?

> I could go on: the point is, there are many situations where an estimate is required.

Please do! I'd find it really valuable. (Not necessarily OP. I'm happy to hear from others as well.)

Eric Normand has a great podcast episode where he talks through the paper, summarizing and commenting on it in a way that targets a more general audience.

https://lispcast.com/can-programming-be-liberated-from-the-v...

I'm currently going through Haskell Programming From First Principles (https://haskellbook.com/) and am liking it a lot. It's only been a few weeks so I can't say for sure, but it seems like it's comprehensive enough (1200+ pages) where you'd pick up what you need for real world stuff. To some extent at least; in practice there's probably no substitute for just getting real world experience.

PS: Hi Christian! You were a TA when I was a student at Fullstack :)

That is only true if you know you're going to be working on something for a long time. But if you're taking the lean/fail fast approach, it isn't something you can know ahead of time.

Yeah, I have learned a few things from the comments here and my understanding isn't perfect. Previously I thought of `n` as arbitrary; that it can be whatever you define it to be. I see now that you're right that technically it has a more precise definition: it refers to the input size.

However, I also think that in _practice_, as Znafon [says](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661411), the meaning of `n` is clear and it makes sense to stretch the technical definition a bit. In my experience, people often do. Imagine if there were one trillion vowels. It wouldn't be practical to describe it as an O(1) algorithm, despite what the answers to exam questions might say.

That said, I think that it is worth understanding the distinction between what `n` means in theory vs practice, so I was going to add a note to the blog post in order to avoid confusing readers, like you recommend. However, as I tried to do so, things got too side-tracked. Too many tangents, especially ones that aren't the easiest to understand, makes the post harder to follow. So I decided on linking to this thread parenthetically. That seems to my eye to strike the right balance.

Usually N has to be really, really big before it matters, right? If so, it seems easy enough to tell when it won't reach that point.

I'm not sure what you mean, how can it be constant? You have to check each element in the array and there are n elements in the array.

Author here. Ah, that makes sense. I always took it for granted that such a scenario of everything hashing to the same bucket wouldn't happen, but I understand now that in such a scenario it would take linear time, which means that technically the _worst_ case is O(n).

However, I don't see that this influences the main point of the post. In practice, hash collisions are extremely rare, which means that the linked list inside the array slot is going to have few elements, and so we shouldn't be looking at the worst case time complexity of that linked list.

Author here. Yeah that makes sense. I didn't realize it at the time.

However, I think the example still demonstrates the larger point that I was making. `.includes` takes linear time proportional to the array that calls it, but the fact that it's linear time isn't a bad thing because the size of the array is five.

Check out https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-li....

https://nomadlist.com/ is a good resource.

I've been working on Premium Poker Tools (https://premiumpokertools.com/) for the past two years, which I built with Vue, Node, Express and Mongo.

Location: Las Vegas, NV

Remote: Yes (Remote only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Vue, React, Node

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zerner-55564490/

Email: azerner3@gmail.com

Awesome! Hit me up at contact@premiumpokertools.com if you want to chat and/or study hands.

Playing poker!

My winrate online is only a couple dollars an hour. I don't play live very often so I don't have the sample size to say what my winrate would be, but I'd guess $10-20/hr. So, ultimately, not too much money. But if I keep improving, my winrate should keep going up.

It also makes a lot of sense because I'm developing a poker app - https://premiumpokertools.com/. So I guess it is sort of tied into programming/CS for me in a way.

I worked for a company where we were told to post good reviews on Glassdoor. The engineering team was small, there was about six people in the room. The CTO called for our attention. He told us to go on Glassdoor and leave a good review. He explained that they are trying to hire more people and that good Glassdoor reviews really help. He also ended by telling us that management will be checking in to make sure that we all actually did leave reviews.

I felt really upset at the fact that we were _told_ to do this, and basically threatened that if we didn't, management would know, and presumably there would be some sort of consequences. When the CTO left the room we all kinda mumbled something along the lines of "um, that was kinda screwed up", but no one really voiced that opinion loudly or strongly. Probably due to the fear of getting punished for it.

This whole situation is really sad. It's probably in the companies best interest financially to do this. It forces employees to respond, because employees don't want to be punished. And there isn't a way to punish employers for this. I doubt that it is illegal. I doubt that Glassdoor would care if you went to them. If you publish a public review, you'll almost certainly lose your job, and even so, the company can just claim that you are lying, and probably pay to get the review removed.

On the other side of the coin, there is Glassdoor. They exist to make money, so if a company wants to pay them to remove bad reviews or something, why wouldn't they say yes. There is no third party monitoring them, making sure that they are being honest.

Maybe one day society will figure out a way around these issues, but for now, I think a good first step is to spread an understanding that what you read on sites like Glassdoor should be taken with a big grain of salt. And so I am glad to see this getting attention on Hacker News.

I remember reading The Sociopath Next Door a few years ago, and the author, a Harvard psychologist who studies this stuff, claims that 4% of people are sociopaths.

My impression is that we aren't at the point where we can detect sociopathy reliably enough for a ban like this to be realistic. With such subjectivity and unreliability, it can just become a tool for governments, and those who influence governments, to abuse their power. I could even see it _increasing_ the amount of sociopathy amongst those in power. But once we develop the ability to detect sociopathy more reliably, I think the question changes, and I'm not sure what I think.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

> But startup costs have undeniably increased over the past few years. We thought a $30K increase was necessary to help companies stay focused on building their product without worrying about fundraising too soon.

I didn't realize that this was true. I'm interested in hearing more about what has caused the increase in startup costs.

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

1) Advice from a variety of sources.

2) Not being slowed down by all of the advice.

My impression from the article is that this usually doesn't happen in practice, but I can't help thinking that it is very doable in theory.

Other commenters: just because employees _are_ resources doesn't mean that managers should make them _feel_ like they are. There are companies that do a good job of making employees feel more of a sense of being valued, and so at least on that dimension Amazon seems to be doing a poor job.

I don't know why this is downvoted. I think that Bryan Caplan's book The Case against Education - Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html) makes a pretty strong argument to support the related points.

It's a new site and is on the todo list to fix.

Do you know this, or are you assuming this? It is certainly possible that, at the margin, someone is willing to spend money on a charity but not spend that same money on the product. Although I suppose there's probably a correlation between donating and willingness to pay more.

True, but that doesn't seem like enough to explain the drop from 90s to 30s in job placement rate within 3 months.

80% sounds really high. Other bootcamps seem to be in the 30-40% range within 3 months.

Also, I find it suspicious that App Academy seemingly isn't taking part in CIRR.

> third-party industry averages (~70% placement rate)

The ~70% placement rate seems to refer to what percentage of applicants get full time jobs within 6 months of graduating. For within 3 months of graduating, the placement rate seems to drop to 30-40%. (See https://cirr.org/data)

Back in 2014, coding bootcamps were advertising rates in the 90s. See https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-job-placement-rates-at-va.... From that post, this is what the director of admissions at Fullstack Academy claims are the job placement rates of some popular bootcamps:

- Fullstack Academy: 97%

- Hack Reactor: 99%

- App Academy: 98%

- Dev Bootcamp: 90%

- Flatiron School: 98%

(He edited his post to take this down literally as I write my comment. Ie. after this article exploded on Hacker News. See the logs for proof: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-job-placement-rates-at-va.... Here is his original post: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jsek2oum4lioeja/Screen%20Shot%2020...)

The Quora post doesn't mention it, but I assume these numbers refer to job placement rate within three months. I attended Fullstack Academy back in 2014 and recall being told these numbers by Fullstack, and by all of those other bootcamps (I applied to them too). And I recall all of them referring to job placement rate within three months.

I believe there is plenty of evidence that all of this is true. There are plenty of press articles, such as http://www.businessinsider.com/4-traits-that-make-developers... corroborating it. And there are thousands of applicants and students who probably remember being told about job placement rates in the upper 90s.

Now take a look at the data from CIRR. Below I list the percentage of graduates who are hired as full time employees within 90 days of graduating:

- Fullstack Academy (New York City): 30.4%

- Hack Reactor (New York): 43.6%

See for yourself: https://cirr.org/data.

I can only conclude that back when we were all told that the numbers were in the upper 90s, we were either lied to, or intentionally mislead. Credit to them for pushing for transparency with CIRR, but shame on them for lying/intentionally misleading us all for a very, very long time.