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ivanechon Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

"Take-home technical assignment (~4h)"

Last time I was interviewing, I had ~5 take-home assessments sent to me. I didn't finish any of them. Much easier to prioritize a live interview. Less risk of having my time wasted.

ivanechon The Colorado Safety Stop is the law of the land

Beg buttons with yellow flashers aren't nearly as strong a guarantee in my experience – more people blow through those than stop signs in my area

ivanechon The Colorado Safety Stop is the law of the land

When I'm walking, I specifically plan routes with as many stop signs + as few stoplights for this reason.

ivanechon Taking Pictures the Hard Way

Ah okay if you have an f/2 50mm-FOV-equivalent lens (~25mm) on an MFT body and a 50mm f/2 on a full-frame body, yes, there will be more blur because the aperture radius is twice as large on the full-frame lens.

I read your comment as saying that the exact same 50mm f/2 lens will produce less blur on an MFT body than on a full-frame body. That'd be a narrower FOV (~100mm equivalent) but the same blur as full frame. Perhaps I misinterpreted?

ivanechon Taking Pictures the Hard Way

Very true, for a given lens design, the relationship holds!

You typed out what I should have - I accidentally wasted people's in this thread by being vague

ivanechon Taking Pictures the Hard Way

Run that test for real! The GH5 image will be cropped, but the relative amount of blur between your subject and out of focus areas will be identical

ivanechon Taking Pictures the Hard Way

A nit:

"The larger the sensor the blurrier the background can be, and this also changes the distance at what you can make a picture of something and still have a blurry background."

Blur is totally determined by optics and has no direct relationship to sensor / film area.

ivanechon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://echevarria.io

Started on it in undergrad to have a place of my own for photos and programming projects. I've slowly expanded it for the past few years. Heavily inspired by Tom MacWright's https://macwright.com

ivanechon How much do things really cost?

Yes, my ideal terminal state would be for driving to be predominantly done by professionals (like delivery drivers) or for leisure. Nobody in major metro would need to drive

ivanechon How much do things really cost?

sure but this frames it as if cars are the only way to get people to work. There are more efficient means that would require less subsidy and cause less waste (heavy rail transit, building places to live that don't require a car, bike roads, etc)

ivanechon Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?

That's what people have been saying about software engineering for 20+ years. More substantively, I wouldn't count on the sector getting saturated. The US has under-built new homes for a decade, and available housing stock is extremely low. A lot of the money that would have gone to buying a new home is flowing into renovations.

ivanechon Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood

Posted this in another thread about lead exposure: the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (https://leadelimination.org/) is an organization that's working to solve the problem of lead exposure internationally. I've been giving money on a monthly basis and have been blown away by their progress.

ivanechon Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

The Lead Exposure Elimination Project (https://leadelimination.org/) is an organization that's working to solve this problem internationally. I've been giving money on a monthly basis and have been blown away by their progress.

ivanechon Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

When I made my site statically generated, I considered using Hugo, but I ruled it out after 15 or so minutes because i ran into the same issue with the docs. Ended up just writing a python script to do it which didn't take long

ivanechon It is difficult for the average person to conceive of how useless NFTs are

Not a big NFT fan, but this thread is weak. NFTs do try to solve the very real problem of indicating ownership of a purely digital item. Not my preferred way of solving the problem but whatever.

A lot of these critiques betray discomfort with abstraction.

ivanechon The Matrix looks dramatically different on Hulu versus on HBO Max

Haha I almost said that the 2018 version hews closer to the theatrical release's hues but that felt too cheesy

ivanechon The Matrix looks dramatically different on Hulu versus on HBO Max

Oh geez the Star Wars special edition is one of the stronger arguments in favor of immutability

ivanechon The Matrix looks dramatically different on Hulu versus on HBO Max

Looks like the 2004 DVD also had a green tint

ivanechon Ask HN: If not fresh out of college, what did you do to join a FAANG?

I don't like the way this document is written, but it works: https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1eKirumpmwDWTtKCJKn2H...

I did what it said and got offers.

ivanechon Wayne Thiebaud, known for his colorful depictions of everyday life, dies at 101

There's also a very large Thiebaud painting in Terminal 2 or 3 of SFO. I've made a point of seeing it the last few times I was flying

ivanechon Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

nonfiction: Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams. I re-read it for the third or fourth time this year. It's probably the most important book to me.

Some excerpts:

- "Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive. Only the artist's presence in the work can convince us that its affirmation resulted from and has been tested by human experience."

- The best criticism comes from "the deepest commitment to sharing the picture with others. Anything less than that means defeat, calling attention not to the picture but to the critic."

- "When we are young, we want art that is filled with the bitter facts, because we believe that evil can be overcome if we face it; when we grow older and begin to doubt this optimistic belief, we want art that does not simply reinforce the pain of our disillusionment. In pictures like those by Hine the requirements of young and old are both met; the photographs urge reform, but seem to suggest that the need for it is not the most important thing to be said of life."

- "Contrary to popular expectations, many of the best nature pictures – often the truest and finally most reassuring – do contain people and their works."

fiction: Slaughterhouse-Five. I love repetition, and Vonnegut uses to great effect. I read most of it in an evening.

ivanechon Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?

I've been very happy with goatcounter on my personal site for 2 years now

ivanechon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

Not just FAANG. Public and large private cos have caught up.

ivanechon Saule Omarova says banks sank her chance to become a key regulator

It's bad but it's not what sank her nomination. She's right - banks were afraid of her

ivanechon Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS

This is a great list. The person who made it runs a school for CS fundamentals, and I've been taking classes there for about a year. I strongly recommend it: https://bradfieldcs.com

ivanechon An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter

I got nothing out of my high school geometry class but loved my foundations class in college. I would have been a lot better off just going straight to real proofs instead of those annoying pseudo-proofs. But I don't know, other people probably had different experiences and got a lot out of geometry.

ivanechon Casting pig iron at the Iroquois smelter

To clarify, it's "evil" as in the problem of evil [1] – not necessarily malicious but instead anything involving suffering. This is also how "evil" is used in the essay Photographing Evil by Robert Adams.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

ivanechon Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

Mamiya 7 camera. It is ergonomically great, especially considering its size and large film area (6x7). Good shutter button with a lock.

Its 65mm lens is amazing to use - the edges line up almost perfectly with the massive rangefinder window, so it's like taking a picture of what one eye sees. This is great because I believe the best images are the ones that look like seeing, that make it seem as if beauty is commonplace.

ivanechon Ask HN: Why crypto is rising so fast when its not creating value?

Crypto has a bunch of narratives around it that are compelling to different groups of people - it should be digital gold, or it will replace centralized applications, or it is a way to bring about a libertarian future, or it'll make transactions cheaper/more accessible, or it'll get you rich quick. They contradict each other, but that's okay because no single person believes all of them. People can hold whichever narrative they want to. Some of them might be true! I don't know.

The other side of this is that certain crypto markets are highly liquid, and liquidity is sticky. Sure, they're subject to high volatility and intense drawdowns, but being a focus of trading is something that lingers a long time. Most traders don't care about fundamentals. This is just another place to speculate to them (that's not a value judgement on my part), and the best places to speculate are places with lots of other participants.

I know that basically boils down to "it's popular because it's popular," but I do think it's self-reinforcing or self-sustaining. Narratives drove money into crypto and to this high point, but I think these reflexive dynamics are also keeping it elevated

ivanechon Texas Company Offers Truckers $14K/Wk During Tough Times for the Industry

This is from May of this year. Fast Company put out an article at the time that said it's not true: https://www.fastcompany.com/90634247/no-a-texas-company-is-n...