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waythenewsgoes

114 karma · joined February 20, 2022

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waythenewsgoes··on GCP Outage
Status pages at cloud providers aren't usually based in reality -- usually requires VP level political games to actually get them changed especially for serious outages.
waythenewsgoes··on In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
> If the interview for a coding job doesn’t involve actual coding, how do you know that the candidate can code?

LeetCode problems seldom resemble real-life coding scenarios, which in theory is what you are supposed to be most concerned with.

Why not present them with a real problem that you actually had to solve for your business? And ask them to walk you through how they would try to solve that? Perhaps as part of a take-home assignment?

Leetcode test or nothing is a false dichotomy. Accepting it is lacking without attempting to look into alternatives doesn’t seem logical.

>You can certainly memorize solutions

You can most certainly memorize the high level steps to LC problems. In fact I would argue that this is already the status quo. You may still be able to learn how they would approach a problem this way, but if they are good at “selling themselves” they can make all that “seem” real as well.

waythenewsgoes··on In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
As long as you don’t wake me at 3AM to rotate a red-black tree, or find the median of two sorted arrays we should be good
waythenewsgoes··on In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
I have always seen LeetCode problems as effectively hazing rituals in a job interview setting. A high pressure interview situation simply won’t bring out peak problem-solving capabilities in many people. At best you get some superficial insight into someone’s problem solving methodology, but at worst you filter out otherwise excellent fits for not being able to solve an ultimately inconsequential problem under pressure.

LeetCode questions as interview questions are mostly theater. Most people who do well on these aren’t actually “solving them” on the fly from scratch. They just happen to have seen the exact same problem before and retake the steps they’ve memorized to get to the answer. Testing whether or not someone can regurgitate the solution they have memorized to a math problem doesn’t tell you much about how they will perform in a truly novel non-contrived constraint problem scenario, which is generally what most dev work entails.

Perhaps if you are working at Bespoke Algorithms ‘R Us, benchmarking this would have more value to your org, but for most dev roles at most companies it is hard to see it as more than a compliance exercise, or maybe even as a tool to weed out those with families that can’t devote the hours/day to LC memorization.

waythenewsgoes··on College Grades Have Become a Charade. It's Time to Abolish Them.
How would changing the mechanics of grading affect graduate readiness for jobs? I think two separate ideas are being conflated.

Whether or not someone gets an A or a C in a course for Physics likely will not have any bearing on the needs of an employer who needs someone who is a Python wiz for data science.

Maybe the bigger problem is colleges offering undergraduate majors which lack demand, coupled with in-demand majors not having enough relevant course content for the job market, or maybe employers have just gotten more unreasonable in terms of expectations for graduates over time?

It's hard to make the argument these students are less qualified.. look at the acceptance rate of top schools over time, its essentially at or near all-time low percentages for the majority.

waythenewsgoes··on Feds killed 2014 plan to curb Medicare Advantage overbilling
In a just society this would be considered extortion
waythenewsgoes··on How to build a 50k ton forging press
In terms of raw output, the answer is likely no.

However, this might not matter as much now as it did in the past due to nuclear weapons being the primary deterrent in war these days, and the fact that our standing fleet of aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuke subs, tanks, etc... is essentially second to none. Additionally what we do have is highly capable and extremely specialized, in my opinion, leading to not really needing as many (quality over quantity). Take for example, an F35, which doesn't really have an equal in the skies, we have over 630 of them, with the goal of having around 2500. China only has 300 J-20s which are basically a copy of the older F22. Russia only has 22 non-test Su-57s. Would we have a realistic need to build 1000 of them within a year?

Due to many factors, but primarily free trade and globalization, it's unlikely that we ever see that non-automated manufacturing capacity return, though if needed we could probably mobilize the economy via the defense act to force more manufacturing capacity, though it's hard to imagine we would currently need to.

waythenewsgoes··on Nintendo Switch's iGPU: Maxwell Nerfed Edition
I don’t think the problem is necessarily PCs being inefficient. IMO it is more likely that it is simply much harder to optimize for random hardware combinations that people run, and that there is a lot of pressure on devs to optimize console gameplay (likely at the expense of optimizing PC gameplay, perhaps devs also see less of a need to since most PCs are better equipped than consoles anyhow, that and deadline pressure)
waythenewsgoes··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
Others may not necessarily agree, but at least anecdotally, a sizeable portion of drivers I see make all kinds of mistakes (law of averages dictates more of them are so called "neurotypical" than not no?).

"Acting Unexpectedly" can often mean following the actual laws and general guidelines for safe and/or defensive driving. I would hazard a guess that sometimes doing the intuitive thing is, in reality, unsafe and/or against the law. If the car does this in 99% of circumstances, and still gets rear-ended, who is really the problem here?

waythenewsgoes··on Meta will enforce ban on AI-powered political ads in every nation, no exceptions
If I am reading this correctly then I think it is simply preventing the companies that buy ads on Meta from using Meta’s own generative AI features to make certain types of ads. It’s not really feasible to accurately block AI generated content anymore with good accuracy afaik.
waythenewsgoes··on De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon
I would imagine they did lobby against this, likely fighting tooth and nail legally. However I do not think the EU is as easily swayed, especially as EU regulators are generally skeptical of the business practices of large US multinationals. IMO, and possibly objectively, the EU is generally more pro-competition and pro-privacy, it is also much harder to buy out politicians due to the parties being really fragmented and it would appear more difficult to unilaterally impose the will of these corps on their citizens.
waythenewsgoes··on U.S. Consumers Spent More on Food in 2022 Than Ever Before (Inflation Adjusted)
Not to flame but this is a very mis-informed opinion. Multiple sources[1][2] show that millennial homeownership rates when adjusted for age are lower across the board.

Some highlights from these sources:

[1] Today the millennial homeownership rate is 43 percent, well below the rates of generation X (67 percent) and the baby boomer and silent generations (77 percent). An important feature of millennial homeownership that often gets muddled in the media conversation is that it is increasing, and with few minor exceptions, it has always been increasing. The oldest millennials turned 18 in 1999, and every year since then there has been a net increase in the number of millennial-owned homes. Since the Great Recession, the millennial homeownership rate has grown faster than any other, particularly in the last five years while the economy has expanded quickly. Today, millennials are the least likely to own a home, but they are the most likely to purchase one.

Millennial homeownership is rising, but it is rising slower than it did for previous generations. The chart below (see link) compares homeownership rates for each generation as they age

[2] If we isolate the effects of delayed household formation proxied by changes in marital composition (i.e., we assume the marriage rate was the same as in 1990), we find the hypothetical real homeownership rate would have been 39.1 percent, 9.8 percentage points higher than current levels. As of 2021, there are 44 million young adults ages 25 to 34, meaning there would be 4.3 million additional homeowners.

[1]: https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-gene... [2]: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/real-homeownership-gap-betw...

waythenewsgoes··on Cloudflare incident on October 30, 2023
Likely involves their most senior devs bypassing normal deployment procedures / access controls. In this case, to be able to edit their live production environment instance instead relying on Workers KV / other impacted internal services (which a lot of their infrastructure relies on) Which would then enable a proper rollback. The aim being to restore service as quickly as possible to minimize the customer impact.
waythenewsgoes··on The .ing top-level domain
In theory this is beneficial as it helps fund the ICANN and keep it independent. But the reality is that these are effectively money printing machines, effectively out of reach for all but large corporations, which bring questionable value to the internet in general. I selfishly hope that we can establish a free TLD, or at least one which just directly funds ICANN operations instead of benefitting rich middle men.
waythenewsgoes··on The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers
Wouldn't having a demonstrably false accuracy rate, but simultaneously claiming to be 99% accurate in all circumstances constitute making knowingly false statements, and perhaps even malicious disregard for truth?
waythenewsgoes··on The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers
I personally hope this will be the course of action we see being taken against these AI detector services. It is well-known to many that these are essentially snake oil salesmen, and it has been damaging in other contexts too, such as in academic settings where students are penalized for similar false accusations.

As LLMs continue to improve, it would seem that it is only going to get more difficult to accurately distinguish between content which is AI generated vs human generated, so barring some kind of AI-detection breakthrough, these services will continue to plague students and writers with horrible false positive rates.

waythenewsgoes··on Private equity is devouring the U.S. economy
It all comes down to available resources. It takes capital and motivated founders to create new vet clinics. Few will want to spread themselves thin enough to cover many clinics unless they are in the same geographic area, and even then the market has saturation limits. However, if an entity essentially resembling Chase bank in terms of capital resources comes into your town and either buys out or undercuts you drastically until you appear to be uncompetitive, and you can't make your mortgage payments, or cover your whole staff and equipment, what are you supposed to do? PE can starve you out, they have the resources, these small businesses do not. There is no competition in this instance, just a slaughter.
waythenewsgoes··on Lean4 helped Terence Tao discover a small bug in his recent paper
He had a lot of acclaim as a young mathematician, according to Wikipedia he was taking college level math at 9 years of age. At this level of talent I believe you begin to be courted by top universities similar to D1 athlete's, not only that, but you are likely genius-level smart, so sticking you in a classroom of people your age would be doing you an intellectual disservice, similar to sticking a college freshman in a 2nd grade classroom. At this level, you are probably seen as the next Newton or Gauss, and professors will want to attach themselves to you and work alongside you. At this point you bring a ton of value to the school just for attending and they won't mind if you are testing out of course material since they are just happy for you to be there for any length of time, and it just becomes more of a formality anyway.
waythenewsgoes··on Making CRDTs More Efficient
For the uninitiated, this might be a better starting point https://jakelazaroff.com/words/an-interactive-intro-to-crdts...
waythenewsgoes··on Github.com is down
Can't access any of my company's repos via the website
waythenewsgoes··on Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
This study seems inherently flawed to me, how are you isolating what is happening while simultaneously administering other brain—chemistry altering drugs to the patient? These patients are all undergoing surgery, yet another variable with drastic consequences on mental health. Just taking the drug alone doesn’t even seem to accurately reflect the primary treatment path of having talk therapy while the drug is taking effect. What if the anesthesia simply inhibits the drug from working? Additionally the sample size (40 people) is extremely small to extrapolate this to the general population. I’m not sure how these flaws can be reconciled.
waythenewsgoes··on An Open-Source Espresso
Auber instruments makes a PID integration kit for the gaggia classic / classic pro. It also gives you a pre infusion cycle as well.
waythenewsgoes··on Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 75 basis points
This doesn't work, when we tried this most recently all it did was increase stock buybacks by large corps. It's just effectively a wealth transfer to those already at the top of the food chain.
waythenewsgoes··on Ask HN: Have you noticed an increase of spam evading Gmail's filters recently?
Can only speculate -- but perhaps they continually train some spam detecting ML model and swap them out every few weeks. Wondering if there are some hidden regressions or something to that effect which are evading the new model. Wouldn't surprise me if they originally started with a rule-based engine and are A/B testing ML models for it instead now.
waythenewsgoes··on Ask HN: Why do Google/App Store search show ads and the real result together?
People / Companies who buy ads pay google to get their result to show up. Essentially if a user clicks the paid link its going to make more money for google than if you click the organically produced search result, so they have a financial incentive to show you the paid link, even if it is redundant (points to the same thing).