npsomaratna

IOI gold medalist here.

Most coding competitions tend to assess a specific set of skills: puzzle solving ability; algorithmic knowledge; and being able to code fast. All of these skills are useful in "real life" programming.

However, since the code you write will be thrown away post-competition, your focus is on churning out solutions that "just work" — proper engineering practices and maintainability isn't relevant. All your code needs to do is to generate the correct outputs.

Does competing turn you into a strong coder? Absolutely. Does this equate to being a strong engineer? Nope. Software engineering isn't just about coding fast.

This is anecdotal, but from what I've seen (as a trainer and friend of several IOI medalists): some of them appreciate that coding != engineering and proceed to develop their engineering skills. Others don't and remain stuck at the "I'll come up with a fast solution" mindset.

Whether one or the other happens very much depends on the person, plus, I believe, whom they end up working with. After all, we've all heard about the "10x" programmer – and when your colleague or subordinate appears to code at 10x speed, you just might think twice about whether you're qualified to advise or guide them. That results in their keeping any bad habits they might have.

Question: how do you guys structure this at DO?

Re: the frontend - Livewire components also work great, and might be an even easier leap.

Same here - my co-founder suggested that I use Numi one day, and I haven't looked back since.

True - but isn't this mainly limited to the sciences? (genuine question)

Example:

https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/11487570?hl=en

"I uploaded a YouTube video, which was a normal video in my eyes.. that got removed for inappropriate content and got my account disabled. Now my access to the gmail address is blocked"

Being banned from Youtube because you violated their TOS is one thing. Losing access to Gmail at the same time, because everything is linked to the same Google account? That's excessive.

The risk with Google is that (if you're like most of us), you're likely to be using several of their services. If you're flagged in any one of those services (for whatever reason), you run the risk of losing access to all of their services at once - including Gmail.

Out of curiosity, what's the challenger bank you started? I'd love to learn more.

Thanks for creating such a great product. After trying (and being dissatisfied) with many different self-hosted Wikis, we stumbled on BookStack - and never looked back.

You'd want to file your claim within a "reasonable time period." Undue delay will result in the court denying your claim.

What is "reasonable" is subjective. A couple of months would likely be considered reasonable; a couple of years, probably not.

Genuine question here: since the domain name is *.sba.gov, wouldn't that be enough to consider this legitimate?

This area of law is very tricky. As I've stated above, the technical (i.e., legal) interpretation can be quite different from how a layperson would understand the same words.

The basic idea here is that an authority (e.g., Congress) that has been given a specific power (e.g., declaring war) is obligated to exercise that power where appropriate.

Do note the specific phrasing above: if there is a situation in which exercising that power is the appropriate course of action, then that power must be exercised. The authority cannot choose not to exercise the power in such a situation.

So, Congress doesn't have to declare war for the sake of declaring war. However, if there is an existential military threat to the USA (e.g., aggression by the Japanese Empire in WW2) you could argue that Congress is obligated to declare war, as this would be an appropriate situation to exercise that power.

Of course, the above explanation is very simplistic. There can be specific wordings that clarify how much discretion that authority has; there may be case law pertinent to that area; and whether a given situation mandates "appropriate" exercise of a given power is never a black-and-white decision.

Agree with this. In administrative law (the principles of which apply here) certain words have technical interpretations that are very different from the colloquial meaning. "Shall" is one of those words - and I too would interpret this as an obligation.

That's definitely one way of solving it.

The con is that (as an employer), you'll have to require each individual employee to incorporate their own LLC and contract out their services that way. For obvious reasons, I can see more than a few employees giving this a pass.

Remote company founder and lawyer-to-be here (just finished the finals - hopefully, I've passed!)

Labor law is local. If you hire someone in a different country (say, Sri Lanka) and things go south for whatever reason, they can sue you in the relevant local court.

To re-emphasize: by hiring an employee in that country, you've submitted yourself to the jurisdiction of the labor courts of that country. This supersedes and replaces any language you might have in the employment contract about the jurisdiction of employment.

Of course, enforcement is a problem. If a court in Sri Lanka issues your company a summons and you ignore it, the legal consequences will be limited (although you might be arrested if you ever visit that country). However, if that employee is located in a major country or bloc (e.g., the European Union), not being able to travel there ever again is a high price to pay.

In nutshell, this is why many remote companies are careful about hiring in foreign jurisdictions. The potential legal complexity is probably not worth it.

I switched to DuckDuckgo a few months ago, and never looked back. The results used to be far inferior to Google's - but they seem to have caught up recently. If you haven't tried them out within the last couple of months, I strongly recommend that you give them a chance.

Yes - that is what I noticed as well. The two populations have different levels of expertise re: dealing with airborne infectious diseases; different frequencies of hand-washing; and no masks vs. masks. There are just too many confounding factors here to draw a conclusion (in isolation) re: mask effectiveness.

Edit: in addition, the departments used to dealing with airborne infectious disease may have had specialized protocols and policies that the other departments did not have.

Nope - 4.9 million. I'm wondering - do they mean stuff like credit card processing fees, etc?

Yup - Laravel is fantastic. After many years of disappointments with PHP frameworks (Symfony - too complex; CodeIgniter/Yii - not complex enough), I tried out Laravel recently and haven't looked back since.

Thanks for the explanation.

I tried out React a while ago, didn't like the idea of JSX, then saw the complexity of the React ecosystem, and then decided "nope, too much complexity."

I ended up using Vue, although from that I'm seeing, Vue is going down the "let's add complexity" route with Vue 3.

I'll look at React again and reassess in this new light.

I think we have, for better or worse. When I think of frontend JS these days, what comes to mind is Angular, React, Vue, Svelte, etc. jQuery feels (and is) simple in comparison.

All the more surprising - I've been building frontend UIs from the late 90s, starting with plain JS, to prototype, to jQuery and onwards. I'm kinda amazed over how my perception of 'what is normal/acceptable in JS' has slowly but steadily changed over time.

I find this refreshing. jQuery works very well for simple and direct stuff. No need to over-complicate things!

To add my two cents: my company had the same problem - despite checking all the boxes ourselves.

When testing, something we noticed was that the content of our emails/newsletters had a significant impact on whether they ended up in the inbox vs. spam.

Of the major service providers, Outlook seems to put huge importance on the content of the email. The simple addition or deletion of a couple of words can dramatically affect spam rates.

Yahoo is less trigger-happy about content; and Gmail least of all. However, even for domains with a good sender reputation, Gmail will spam emails if the content is too 'spammy'.

Shameless plug here: we ended up building a tool to test out various email subjects/bodies against the big 3 providers above (you can even plug in your own email address/service when testing). Do try it out - I'm sure you'll find the results eye-opening: https://vetter.monsoonyeti.com/

From repeated testing using multiple sender accounts and domains, we've noticed that Outlook seems to pay significant weight to the content of the email - possibly as much as or even more than the email/domain of the sender.

What you say certainly rings true about Gmail - email subjects/bodies that set off warning bells in Outlook seemingly pass through Gmail without a hitch if your account has a good sender reputation - and vice-versa. However, we've also noticed that even if you have a good sender reputation, Gmail can and will (automatically) spam your content if the wording is too spammy/phishy.

Yahoo seems to be midway between Outlook and Gmail, at least from what I've observed.

Anyway, do give the tool a spin and try out various types of emails. I'm sure you'll find the results interesting!

[EDIT] Oh, BTW - you can set the tool to use your own service as well! Obviously, this will be more accurate than using the default (which is an SES account we use).

Shameless plug: we had the same issue with our deliverability rates. We ended up creating a tool to automate the process of checking spam % vs. inbox % for various email subject/body combinations: https://vetter.monsoonyeti.com/

Thanks for the advice! We've applied to join the Email Geeks Slack - fingers crossed.

Hi Hacker News!

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Medical Joyworks (the company which created Vetter). You might be wondering - why is a medical education company building an inbox delivery tool?

Well, we have a 150+ international medical board (specialist physicians who peer-review our medical education content). We communicate with them both directly as individuals, and as a group via a mailing list.

We've found that some of our emails tended to end up in spam, despite their content being very much non-spammy - and even though our email domain has neutral reputation (we just don't send a lot of emails!); and we've got SPF, DKIM, etc. setup. We even tried to validate our emails against SpamAssassin - but our scores were extremely good (-1 or lower).

We figured that instead of dealing with tools that try to guess whether your email might be spammed, we might as well test our emails against real email accounts. So, we hacked up a set of scripts to send emails from our domain to a set of Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook and Yahoo accounts, and just started playing around.

We were kinda shocked to see how trivial changes in an email's subject and body could massively affect inbox rates. In fact, Microsoft's email services (Outlook, Hotmail, and Live) were consistently sending our emails to the spam folder. Thanks to our tests scripts, we managed to adjust our emails' subjects/bodies to get 90% to 100% inbox delivery.

Because these scripts turned out to be so useful for us, we thought of turning them into a proper tool that anyone else could sign up for and use - hence Vetter.

Thanks for reading this. I'd love to read your comments and feedback - whether good or bad!

We're interested in moving away from GA completely - a self-hosted solution is what we've been looking for.

Could I know what your product is? If you'd prefer not to post it here, please feel free to inbox me (contact details in my profile). Thanks!

Amen to this. I stopped using Facebook due to the same reason. If anything, my quality of life has gone up since then.

My two cents: given the breadth and complexity of modern law, a legal degree (or at least, a bar certification to practice law) should be mandatory for any judicial appointee.

I am currently in the final year of a law degree. When I started my degree, I already had degrees in medicine and information technology, and I'd just founded my third startup.

Despite the legal exposure I'd already obtained as a doctor and entrepreneur, it was humbling to realize just how much about the law I didn't know - not just in terms of actual laws, but also in terms of interpretation of the law as a technical discipline.

For sure, if I'd been appointed as a judge with only my (pre-law degree) experience, I'd have messed up in all sorts of basic and fundamental ways.