pythonb3sss

Still in India. And I will not learn a single new thing if I go back to university, unless it's a good one, and I'll have to compete with more than 1 million students to get into one of those and there are maybe 15-30k vacancies per year. In the rest of them, the lecturers just dictate what you need to cram into your brain and vomit it out on the answer sheet and that's it. Lecture done.

Still in India. The layoffs and the recent batch of fresh graduates have really made it impossible to get a job as companies can basically take their pick. Immediate joiners, low salary expectations, work experience from FAANG like companies. And then there's the great vanishing of VC money as interest rates have been raised sharply

I don't want to lie to get a job. And companies do verify. Maybe not small startups, but everyone else does. And those small startups will start verifying when they grow.

> huge machine that looked pretty much like a guillotine

My local binding shop actually still operates one of those.

The problem was that he was terrible at problem solving. He failed at simple logical problems like flattening a nested json array, cleaning data before running operations on it, etc. And probing further on his memorized answers, he couldn't explain anything. He'd just repeat the same thing but change voice of the sentence (active/passive)

I dislike cheating. I've taken ~50 interviews and in 90% of them cheated:

a) I could hear their keyboard clacking when they googled the answer

b) they'd stall with "umm" and "ooo" while their friend googles the answer and shows it to them

c) (the best one) they'd memorize everything from leetcode style solutions and definitions to mathematics MCQs.

In my country, you're the odd one out if you have an exam or an interview and you don't prepare for cheating. It's a cultural expectation among peers to cheat to get ahead.

To work around this, I follow the advice I've read here on HN:

1) Ask them about their programming experience. Bugs they ran into, solutions they thought of, implementation of those solutions etc.

2) take a problem I faced in my work and present it to them and observe how they navigate the problem to reach a solution. They don't have to solve it, I just see their approach

3) just talk to them while asking basic language syntax and definitions. Again, the goal here is to check if they've memorized the answers or are they speaking from experience. If the answer is a regurgitation of some interview prep website, probe deeper to see if they know what they're saying.

The downside of this approach is, of course, time. It takes 40 minutes to an hour for each of these interviews. Time that sometimes I don't have and I have to move some stuff around to accommodate, work late to cover up or delegate. This approach has worked for me so far. I've hired 5 people in my team and all of them have been good hires.

EDIT: formatting and grammar

Although I'm not sure, this [1] could be the reason. TLDR: A chinese hacker group took the official exe, added a malicious dll in it and distributed it to NGOs and government institutions, most likely through a clone website or phishing email. Purpose was said to be espionage.

[EDIT]

Ofcourse the Indian media reported that the official VideoLAN org was controlled by the said hacker group which leveraged it's position to distribute malware.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chinese-hacke...

I wouldn't say I'm addicted to them, but when I find myself bored, I open a meme site (which shall remain unnamed) and just look at mildly popular memes. Doesn't matter what they're about. I just like the occasional laugh I get out of them. I also like social topics being turned into dark, twisted humor which is sometimes captured perfectly in memes.

But when I was going through a rough patch of my life (depression, suicidal tendencies), I would doom scroll said website every free second I could. I just didn't have anything in my life that gave me joy, apart from dark, twisted memes. I'm doing much better now and even though I am an extreme introvert with social anxiety, I find that I have replaced my time that I would spend on that site with time I spend with my colleagues. I still don't have friends, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

Why did I waste so much time on the Internet? If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here. It gave me that much needed laughter every once in a while that kept me from going over the edge and I would just keep scrolling, looking for one more laugh that will make my day a bit more bearable.

Just my experience though. IMO, generally speaking, people are spending more and more time on the internet because the products, or rather the content factories, have become so good at capturing and keeping our attention on them, that in comparison the real world seems bleek and bland.

EDIT: Fixed some grammar. English not native language

Since Mullvad doesn't have any servers in India, they should be unaffected, right? I confirmed it with their support, they said it will not affect their users.

I am going to speculate here, so if I'm wrong please point it out.

Here, the number of steps directly affect the time.

In the first approach, the ".get()" method first analyses the type of "some_dict" and then uses an internal variable (the ones surrounded by double underscores) to try and fetch the value by using the provided key. If the key is present, then the value is returned, if not then a default value is returned. So if the key does not exist, the returning the default value saves 1 step (that of fetching the value from the map)

In the second approach, the exception raises the number of steps because the type of error has to be determined and the stack is traced every time an exception is raised. So the more exceptions are raised, the slower the code gets.

I tested this with 3.9.7 right now and in my testing, the runtime of first approach was virtually unchanged, while the second one was faster if exceptions were raised ~12% of the time or less. (I ran both 10 million times)

Well, I don't enjoy the "happy path" programming. Admittedly, this implementation to improve speed feels a bit hacky. I only did it because it had a measurable impact on the computational performance of my program. In my other grunt worker scripts, I actually prefer if-elif-else statements because they make code readability better for other programmers who are not Python "natives", but use the scripts or modify them to suit their use cases.

Wow! Prior to reading this, I was not aware of "Zero Cost" exception handling. While I am only a Python developer, I always assumed that in any programming language, exception handling, regardless of whether an exception is raised or not, cost some CPU cycles. I work at an HFT firm and they test their changes in equations in Python programs on crypto rather than C++. So I resorted to using try-except blocks in Python to reduce "branching" i.e if-elif-else blocks. I would just add all the different conditional functions in a dictionary and manage calls based on keys and handle exceptions. I don't know if that's the best way to improve speed, but I would like to check if this has any impact on it.

Hi. I realize you're not looking for answers, but I would like to give my 2 cents. Now, this is just my opinion and I welcome constructive criticism.

> are these people even real? Do they live somewhere I'm just unfamiliar with? Or did the internet give them some loud voice that otherwise doesn't exist in person?

Yes. Most, but not all, of these "loud" influencers are real. Social media has become their platform to voice their opinions extremely loudly. And it has given them a reach that wasn't possible before. One public tweet on Twitter is instantly available to all the users and "lurkers". The algorithm pushes it based on engagement and it propagates through the filter bubble it "fits" in. Now they know that there are others who agree with them, but the only way to reach them is through social media. So most of them just keep their opinion online.

> Why are these voices the loudest - does controversy really sell this well? Is social media purposefully putting controversial things on the forefront because it increases engagement?

Yes. The main goal of Big Social (is that even a real term?) is to increase engagement and then sell ads. Fixing this "most engaged content goes to the top" approach will cut into their profits which will spook investors.

P.S This is my first comment outside of my own post (yes, only one post). I am a lurker

I can handle interviews easily. Even non-technical ones. More often than not, I am able to come up with a rough architecture for the program while my boss is still describing it and adjust it as he adds more and more constraints or conditions. So I have that part covered. But what should I do if I want to change my technology (not that I want to, Python has plenty of openings for now)? I live in India where companies generally don't even shortlist candidates of interviews if they don't have a degree but I have never applied for jobs after gett6some experience

I'm in India. In my experience with the companies, they don't even shortlist candidates that don't have a bachelor's degree (atleast that's what I've been told since I was 10)