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kearneyandy

47 karma · joined October 5, 2015

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kearneyandy··on SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
I'm a little sad about this. My dad works in computer storage and had access to lots of computers doing nothing. He's now at "just about 11 quintillion flops, 99.12% ranking vs all other users"
kearneyandy··on Facebook Dating
I'm honestly just surprised that "secret crush" translates to other languages
kearneyandy··on Ask HN: Is it just me, or is CSS too damn hard?
It clicked a bit more for me understanding the box model better. More recently flexbox makes things a lot more clear/easier and handles a lot of those problems by default. I have no idea how design works, that seems a bit more art.

EDIT resources

I personally love https://cvan.io/flexboxin5/ for testing and https://flexboxfroggy.com/ for learning flexbox

kearneyandy··on Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
My personal experience with this was that Angular 2 was announced, which was completely non backwards compatible. So there were a bunch of people that

1) Needed to rewrite their code

2) Distrusted Angular to be stable

React had a philosophy of small reusable components and incremental upgrade. This is a particularly attractive idea for people experiencing the above. I think this is probably part of the shift in popularity.

kearneyandy··on Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
"I got all the way to the end, nailed everything perfectly and then never found out why I didn’t get it"

"I saw this repeatedly on jobs that I got all the way to the end point on."

"Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2"

Interesting points, although I would probably want to see more data before drawing the same conclusions.

kearneyandy··on Launch HN: Promise (YC W18) – Cost-effective, more humane alternative to jail
Perhaps repeat criminals on Promise are not eligible to use it in the future. All a repeat criminal in this case does is lower the governments trust in the product.
kearneyandy··on Ask HN: Moving to Mountain View CA – Places to go to hang with fellow geeks?
It's pretty incredible how many people rock climb (at Planet Granite in Sunnyvale). People are interested in talking there as well, as opposed to lots of cafes where people are heads down.

Meetup groups for things like Ultimate Frisbee, Spikeball are good too.

kearneyandy··on Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
5000 / 3,500,000 = 0.00142857142
kearneyandy··on Hired – Technical Interview Score
I think this is a good idea and would speed up interviewing at companies since you would be able to focus on the match. It does rely on companies actually knowing what criteria they are looking for and to be upfront about it, which unfortunately, is not common.

The real problem is that very good candidates are often not motivated to get certs, since they likely don't need them. However with the added benefit of speeding up the interviewer process, I think more people would do it and it could then become a standard and not a negative signal.

kearneyandy··on Hired – Technical Interview Score
Not OP, but I work at refdash

This is a fake feedback report for an interview, to show what companies and candidates can expect.

Thanks for your comment. I do think it's important particularly from a feedback perspective. Since companies don't give feedback, this is one of the first things to attempt to help candidates learn about what is being evaluated and how to improve.

I'm hoping this is a first step to finding out a better way to correlate those things, for now I think that things that help candidates find jobs are a good step :)

kearneyandy··on Hired – Technical Interview Score
Thanks for the suggestion, just added it.

Interviews are somewhat anonymous, the interviewer only gets your first name (added that too). We've discussed making it even more anonymous (voice modulation, hiding video, etc.) but it seems like this has been studied before and did not have much of an effect.

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

kearneyandy··on Hired – Technical Interview Score
The biggest thing is that there is more money in evaluating software engineers. There's higher demand than most other professions, so companies will pay more.

I have limited information about interviews for other industries, but other fields are often not evaluated in the same way. Lawyers do not have a mock trial as part of an interview, so tools for some industries would likely just be a video chat.

Also, as a minor correction this tool is Refdash.

kearneyandy··on Hired – Technical Interview Score
Just for some context about this document, this is a fake interview with fake interview feedback.

It is meant to highlight some of the criteria which Refdash uses to evaluate candidates and how companies and candidates can expect to receive that feedback.

disclaimer: I work for Refdash

kearneyandy··on Hired – Technical Interview Score
The interview data is only ever shown anonymously to companies, even if you apply to a company with it. Only when the candidate and company agree to do an onsite are names revealed.

Basically it's a good chance to practice and get feedback in the worst case, and a way to save some time and get your foot in the door in the best case.

disclaimer: I work for refdash

kearneyandy··on Ask HN: What are you thankful for?
I'm so thankful I work in an industry with high enough demand that I can have a job I love
kearneyandy··on Ask HN: Is it possible for someone to not be cut out for software engineering?
Interviewing is a skill like all things. The more you practice the better you will get at it. Unfortunately, this process can be slow and the worst part is that when you interview you don't really get any kind of feedback from the company about why they rejected you. I'm working at a startup in this space refdash.com where you could go do a technical interview and get some feedback from the interviewer on how to improve. Perhaps the problem is just that you don't know what the interviewer is looking for or what strategies to use to feel comfortable in an interview.

The other thing I'll say is that the "big four" companies are glamorized a lot, but each have their own issues. I would say focus more on the fit than the name.

Other tools that are nice are leetcode and hackerrank for practicing. They can offer positive reinforcement because you can see how you are able to solve problems and keep track of your success on those.

kearneyandy··on Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users
The article mentions a drop in Daily users of about 10M (specifies around 12M). This also include any launches that occurred over the last month, which means the retention over this time is likely much worse than just 75% but I don't have numbers on that.
kearneyandy··on Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
I like https://paribus.co/ It automatically requests refunds for things you buy online that drop in price. It's nice because it's very passive and it's basically found money when it works.
kearneyandy··on Show HN: S3io.com – using Amazon S3 for personal storage
From the author on the previous post

"It's just that a tool I'm using on the back-end doesn't work very well with the Frankfurt region because of signature version 4. But I'm sure this problem is solvable, I just didn’t put much effort into it yet."

kearneyandy··on Singapore will pay startups to solve its problems
Since document.querySelector only returns the first instance, you will need to run this for the number of redacted paragraphs. The above jQuery solution doesn't have this problem. You really would need a snippet with querySelectorAll and a loop. Since the page has jQuery, there's nothing wrong with providing a solution using it, and particularly since people just want to read the article.
kearneyandy··on Houdini: Maybe the Most Exciting Development in CSS
https://xkcd.com/927/ For the lazy
kearneyandy··on Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
"3 months later, call and offer the candidate a job she didn’t apply for" Even if they accept, you don't need to pay the referral bonus. win, win!
kearneyandy··on Show HN: Flexbox Defense – learn CSS flexbox by playing a tower defense game
This is awesome. I'd love to be able to move the towers around during the waves for some more challenging levels.
kearneyandy··on Lessons from a Failed Tech Startup
This was an interesting read in particular to contrast with other startup letters. The focus in the first point on sales and other roles is interesting because I've noticed before these posts focusing on the product (such as http://playbook.samaltman.com/). The idea that the sales and business will come naturally seems to stem from this kind of advice. It's clear that there needs to be some kind of balance that is usually not talked about.
kearneyandy··on Resizer: an interactive viewer for testing your responsive UI
It does recurse on itself, if you were curious

http://design.google.com/resizer/#url=http%3A%2F%2Fdesign.go...

kearneyandy··on Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
Great post and awesome interactive graph! props

I'm curious about the interviewer community. Specifically things like how are they vetted and how often they come to conduct interviews. It would be cool if there was a community of interviewers for the betterment of the process, but I could see their retention for conducting interviews to only be 1 or 2 before they drop out. I see in the appendix that there are those that do more, but no indication about what percent leave quickly.

A better drinking game might be when a candidate offers a data structure they know nothing about. Would a red-black tree work here? No.. I guess not.

kearneyandy··on Netflix Is Now Available Around the World
For some sources on Harrison Ford

Variety claims 10 - 20 million http://variety.com/2015/film/news/harrison-ford-star-wars-pa...

Sydney Morning Herald had an article says that it would be $34 million if it breaks $1 billion gross earnings (which is likely). http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/star-wars-the-for...

kearneyandy··on Show HN: CommuteKit: 120+ Digital Tools for a More Positive Commute
There's a Submit a commuting tool section at the bottom.
kearneyandy··on Flexbox Froggy: A game for learning CSS flexbox
I tried out your secret level, surprisingly easy after level 24 :)