nissimk

Is this insiders and private market investors hedging their restricted stock by shorting the common?

Exactly. So many of the proponents of the whiteboard algorithm question industry are thoroughly convinced that they are eliminating people who will fail on the job. Of course it's impossible to verify this. The only thing you can verify is the performance of candidates that do pass your test and you subsequently hire. I'm sure there are a lot of bad hires even at the companies where they use these interview techniques. The believers are clouded by survivorship bias and confirmation bias. They get no information from those that they reject and they refuse to acknowledge the bad people that they accept.

Didn't the guy who started WhatsApp fail his facebook interview? :-)

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-rejected-whatsapp-co...

Here is some debunking of other commonly held misconceptions about this interview strategy:

1) The questions are not tricks -- actually every coding algorithm question that has a "naive" solution and an optimized solution requires a trick. That's why you can study for these interviews. The studying involves memorizing the catalog of tricks and identifying which one to apply based on the question. Even the simplest and most commonly used tricks (using a hash table, multiple pointers into the same array / multiple accumulators, bit shifting) are still tricks.

2) The interviewers have a large catalog of these questions so you're not going to pass by memorizing stuff. As I mentioned in #1 above, this is false. The list of tricks that need to be employed to solve these puzzles is finite and definitely less than 100. Most common interviews will probably be solved by one of the top 10 tricks.

This page has 80 solutions: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/top-10-algorithms-in-interview-...

3) This method may have too many false negatives (when they reject a candidate who would have been a good member of the team) but it eliminates false positives (when they hire a candidate who cannot code). With enough dedication and time, anybody can train to pass these. It's not really a skill that is super useful for getting things done in a programming job.

Some people are very good at riddles but have no common sense. They do not make good members of a software development team but they are very good at these interviews.

It's not just survivorship bias, it's also confirmation bias. These folks fail to acknowledge the adverse selections made by their process. What about the people on your team that didn't work out? What about the net-negative producers? I don't believe you that your whiteboard heavy process eliminates all of those people. I've seen the counter-examples.

OK, but I got this question:

http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/given-n-appointments-find-confl...

It requires the simple comparison you mentioned, but is far more complex to come up with an efficient algorithm. Needless to say, I totally failed that one. Never heard of an interval tree until I looked it up after the interview. It took me just a moment to look it up with my awesome google skills and if I had to actually use that, I could copy paste that code in an instant :-) Even better, I could find a library and not even have to copy paste.

One time I was working on a language translator at my actual job. I was storing formulas for excel columns in a database and they had to be translated from their representation in the database to the excel formula language. It turns out that the columns had dependencies on one another and they had to be processed in dependency order. This required something called a topological sort. Again, something I had never heard of before I encountered this problem at work (I do have a CS degree). But I found the solution by a quick google search and employed a library that was already in use in my client's software that contained that algorithm.

That's the actual skill that's valuable: translating your requirements into a bunch of search terms that will quickly give you the name of the algorithm you need. (and obviously building the inputs / working with the outputs of that algorithm). Yeah, I guess if you already have all of those in your in your brain already you might save some time, but what about when you encounter a problem you don't know how to solve?

It says you can connect 10 devices to the car's AP via wifi. So all 5 passengers including the driver can have one wifi device in each hand!

I keep being reminded of something I read recently that made me feel uneasy about google's cloud spanner [1]:

the most important one is that Spanner runs on Google’s private network. Unlike most wide-area networks, and especially the public internet, Google controls the entire network and thus can ensure redundancy of hardware and paths, and can also control upgrades and operations in general. Fibers will still be cut, and equipment will fail, but the overall system remains quite robust. It also took years of operational improvements to get to this point. For much of the last decade, Google has improved its redundancy, its fault containment and, above all, its processes for evolution. We found that the network contributed less than 10% of Spanner’s already rare outages.

But when it fails it's going to be epic!

[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Sp...

I think the point is that the 10x programmer has those other skills. That is the differentiating factor. It's not about typing 10x faster or generating 10x the lines of code. It's about creating 10x the value.

That requires identifying areas where you can deliver value. Frequent cost benefit analysis of potential features vs their estimated cost. And as antirez said in the article, designing these things so that less code gets you those features.

The difference is kind of like book smart vs street smart. If you are just book smart and you understand algorithms and data structures really well it can only get you so far. You need to be able to interpret the user's requests and design what will really help them. You need to understand what they are asking for and what they really mean. And you need to generate solutions and sell them.

I'm curious to hear other people's opinions about this. I feel like the smartphone security model provides security for the OS developers, the app developers and their advertising customers at the expense of usability for the users. But it also provides real security to the users.

I generally choose usability over security, but maybe I should be more paranoid.

I do not have android pay enabled on my phone but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with it even if I wasn't rooted. I insist on root because I want to block ads and install themes. It's possible to do these things without root, but it's harder.

Please comment people with deeper knowledge of security.

This generation of AR is going to be like the last generation of VR -- a cool gimmick with great promise of things to come, but not really advanced enough to deliver on that promise. Even the virtualboy was pretty cool at the time, but it took 20 years to get to occulus. If someone can make these things work like they do in the movies then everybody will get one, but the technology doesn't seem to be there yet. I don't understand most of the words in this article, but it sounds like even if the computation equipment is powerful enough to render these images that the hardware to transmit them to the viewer has a lot of limitations.

I used the HoloLens at a demo and it was amazing, but after 3 demos of 5 minutes each over the course of 30 minutes, my eyes felt tired for the next hour. And the limited field of view did detract from the experience.

I've been wanting a heads up display in my glasses for years ever since the first "wearable computing" wave. Eventually it will happen, but all the hardware breakthroughs are so much slower than software.

Does this mean I can expect improvements in the mobile web app? It has so many issues that I won't click the links on my phone.

No, I don't want the android app. Stop asking me.

Stop directing me to my home page when I clicked a link to go deep into the site.

And please stop showing that spinner for unlimited time.

Also, these may be back end issues but both the desktop and mobile web sites fail to update the notification indicators after you've responded to friend requests or read your feed.

Part of it is the cereal business model. You introduce more flavors not because they are going to sell well or to increase volume, but just to take shelf space at the supermarket away from your competitors. In this case the shelf space is mindshare, media coverage and "feature coverage" in researcher's market comparisons.

Yes, but there are also the taxis and local delivery using trucks and cars. Are my children going to ever need to learn how to drive?

Are there going to be any jobs left? It seems like there are a lot of jobs that involve driving. This technology has the potential to displace a very large number of workers.

The entire solar city enterprise is based on "sophisticated financial engineeriing." They push solar lease and PPA deals on customers which are then securitized and sold to investors. Both sides of these deals (solar customers and abs investors) accept terms that benefit solar city at their expense. If it's not subprime 2.0 then it's subprime 3.0.

Block chains are one solution to this problem. They are open source data repositories. Currently, most block chain data is transactional in nature, covering transfers of currency from one account to another. As more distributed applications emerge that depend on block chain technology this may give rise to additional data sets.

Here is a simple heuristic that's worked well for me: look at all of the job ads online for similar roles in the same city. Most will not name numbers. Find the highest listed number (top of range) in all of those ads and add 20%. That is a place where you will not be selling yourself short. You may not be maximizing your comp, but you will be above the average. Just understand this may disqualify you from jobs where they only pay below average. You need to be comfortable with being disqualified for high comp.

In addition to highest published umber + 20%, I would advise to carefully read any stated salaries on message boards like this when they come along and pay attention to the highest numbers. Then you will be aware of what is possible.

Very well said. I don't find it necessary to maximized my result in a negotiation. I'd like to feel that I did well, but maxing out is not necessary. I've done very well for myself with this strategy so it really can work. I've seen the "refuse to say a number" tactic fail for candidates in the past. I distinctly remember hearing a manager on the phone with an agency recruiter saying that he wasn't going to interview someone if they wouldn't disclose their current comp.

Yes, they're frequently just looking for butts to put in chairs. Getting the numbers out of the way first helps to avoid wastes of time. But the other side is true also for more junior or underpaid developers. They need to use tactics like these to get themselves to the right side of the bell curve. Once you've developed the experience and skills and had the good luck necessary to move you into the upper range of compensation, it helps to tell them right away to avoid wasting time with employers who aren't interested in paying up for senior talent. Again, though, if you know the potential employer has paid rates / compensation in the range you are looking for in the past, it is also safe to delay because you may get a better offer even coming from an already high compensation.

It sounded to me like a euphemism for hanging out on the roof waiting for your non compete agreement term to run out.

There are several listed here, but most of them only work on x86, not consumer routers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_and_firewall_...

SEEKING WORK - NYC or remote.

Full stack software engineer with 20 years experience.

Let me help you take your systems to the next level. I can do the projects nobody on your team wants: modify maintenance mode code without requiring a rewrite; create automated integration testing infrastructure; add analytics capabilities to your operational systems. What are the pain points your dev/ops staff doesn't have the time to solve? I will work with you to design and implement a solution.

nissimk@gmail.com

Relational database: Oracle, MS SQL, Postgresql, Mysql Cache: redis Languages: Javascript, Python, C# Web: React, redux, knockout, angular Devops: Docker, ansible Cloud: AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, GCE OS: Linux and Windows

The bonds are great for investors because most of the the terms in there are designed to screw over the customer. These bonds are securitizations of SolarCity leased solar panel rooftop systems. The salesmane I met with in NY told me that was the only way I could get SolarCity panels installed at my home is if I signed the solar lease agreement (which would then be securitized into these bonds).

The lease says that if you default on the lease, by missing a single payment, SolarCity has the right to take back the panels, but you are still liable for the remainder of the lease payments even though you no longer have the panels.

It's still super cool even with the fov limitation.

1) Innovation of bitcoin is proof of work, not a chain of blocks. 2) credit crunch for unicorns is troubling. we should all be worried about where this can lead.

In kind interest payments let the lender increase the principal balance instead of actually paying interest. In this case it would be like issuing 10% more equity per year instead of paying the 10% in cash. It wasn't mentioned in the article if they have that option, but it wouldn't surprise me.

They can probably pay in kind and screw the investors more. Better than paying cash.

Originally, the web server was intended to be a very simple program with most of the complications in the browser. Most web app backbends are similar to this where all they do is query a database, cache or other web servers. This type of thing is perfect for node. If you are doing more complex stuff in your backend then go may be more appropriate.

It's unreasonable to assume that the faucet for investment money will be open indefinitely, especially when investors don't get the benefits they would have with a public company: liquidity, transparency, etc.

Staying private indefinitely is not just regulartory arbitrage, it's also maintaining significant control and information assymetry between managers / early investors and the rest of the investors and employees.

Facebook's mobile web app is very good. In fact it is quite a lot better than their native app on Android. I believe most of the examples of bad mobile web apps (eg: twitter, linkedIn) are because the organization focuses their resources on the native side instead of the mobile web app.