mikebenfield

In my experience the kind of simple interview you describe is vulnerable to BS artists. For all their flaws, the common coding challenge kind of interview at least gives you concrete evidence about whether the candidate can solve a technical problem.

There are plenty of very difficult old games, but Super Mario 3 is definitely not one of them.

I don't have infinite time available. I can't read every article posted on HackerNews and carefully consider all its points. Knowing this author's affiliation is a big clue to me that this might not be a key source I want to rely on for this topic. Obviously this doesn't actually refute the author's points, but I don't care. This is enough information for me to decide to spend my time elsewhere.

Well, there’s two different angles here. I also might really enjoy working in AR/VR, but I’m almost certain that heading this way is a catastrophically bad business decision for Meta and will likely lead to worse outcomes for most of its employees.

As for my comment being “lame discourse”, fair enough, but why does that apply to my comment and not the one I was replying to?

I have no data to back this up, but if I had to bet I’d guess that the large majority of Meta employees - along with shareholders - are also strongly opposed to the company’s new focus.

Yeah… so are you implying that the solutions proposed by the other post - like punitively taxing second homes - are more universal solutions to the housing crisis than building more housing?

I don’t understand this perspective. Are you really confident those measures will increase supply? I’m not. I find it really hard to predict what the outcome of any of those measures would be.

How about this one:

4. Stop artificially restricting the goddamn housing supply and catering NIMBYs, and instead allow housing of reasonable quantity and density to be built.

But it actually kind of has ended this nonsense in the go community, and to a lesser extent in the rust community.

> The vast majority of people aren't going to use more than basic algebra and geometry

Most high school students take nothing past algebra and geometry, so what specifically are you complaining about?

As far as I can tell, most adults in the US working in a non-technical field do not understand very basic mathematical concepts like fractions, percentages, or negative numbers, and can’t really follow a line of logical reasoning. It’s definitely an indictment of mathematics education, but I can’t support the conclusion that students should spend less time learning mathematics.

> repetitive and pointless, which was exactly how the rest of HS was to me at that point.

So this wasn’t a complaint specific to math after all?

I am not a huge fan of PG and I seriously doubt that had anything to do with your downvotes.

So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?

Have you considered there may be a reason why so many large tech companies are so eager to move away from C++?

I disagree entirely. Ideally there should be one valid way to format your code, and robust tools to make that formatting happen automatically.

Allowing alternatives yields zero benefit and causes pointless debates and diffs.

I estimate that I receive maybe one unanticipated non-spam call per year.

> The worst case is that I say I can't afford you.

There are many possible bad cases. Possibly much worse than this is that the candidate lowballs themselves. Another bad case is that they price themselves out when they might have been willing to take a lower offer after learning more.

The candidate has just as much uncertainty as the employer. There's no reason the burden should be on the candidate to be the first to name a number.

The candidate has just as much if not more ambiguity and uncertainty as the employer, so why is the burden on the candidate?

It's very possible for a candidate to be thinking something like "I'm currently making $200K. I think it's possible I could get $300K, but $250K would probably be acceptable, and I might even settle for a lateral move of $200K if I find the position really appeals to me." What should they say? $300K and possibly price themselves out? $200K and possibly lowball themselves?

I don't entirely disagree with you about old vs new Trek. But I think it's important to avoid the idea that Roddenberry was "trying to achieve" some grand vision. What Roddenberry was "trying to achieve" was to make a TV show, and then he was the target of hero worship by some overzealous fans, and then he bought into the hype himself. It really weakens the argument to continue to present Roddenberry as a bold visionary when this is known to not really be true.

Maybe so.

And... you approve of this? Or what? What exactly is your message here?

Although I recognize that theoretically there are features in an IDE that could be useful, every time I've tried to use one I find it intrusive and slow and frustrating and confusing. I inevitably close it in a rage within 15 minutes because of some design decision that I find infuriatingly stupid.

neovim plus a couple extensions plus some Unix command line tools are just so simple and convenient.

There are better ways to build discipline than spending a huge chunk of ages 5-18 doing otherwise pointless busy work.

I think you misunderstood your parent post’s point.

The kinds of things people are talking about - fiddling with autotools or PYTHONPATH - are not “fundamental concepts” or “the why” behind anything. It’s just tedious, boring nonsense. There are plenty of intellectually curious people who would be turned off by this stuff.

Almost everyone would give lip service, at the right time and place, to values like charity and compassion for the homeless.

But there are many, many people who would never for a second even consider the welfare of homeless people as a factor in any decision they ever make, personal or political.

So for all practical purposes charity is definitely not a universal value.

NIMBY absolutists exist, and in fact are pretty common. There really are people who will oppose any new construction at all, even at the cost of destroying the livability of their city.

But do what you describe as “YIMBY absolutists” actually exist? Maybe they do, but from my perspective I don’t really see anyone arguing that everything should be buildable everywhere.

Really strange perspective. Sure it’d be nice if everyone understood those things. But to think they’re absolutely necessary for any application level programming is… odd.

Clearly “pile of lies” was meant to be a humorous way to put it. Also I’ve heard that “first bug” story many times and never had the impression it wasn’t meant both seriously and literally.

It’s amazing that someone could find this innocuous title and page offensive.

I think this is basically mixing up cause and effect. Cursive has been dropped from the curriculum because no one writes in cursive anymore.

So if I defame someone in this comment, you believe Y Combinator should be held liable?

Very hard to relate to this perspective. Recursion is extremely useful. It definitely has practical utility, and even in many cases where one shouldn't use recursion in actual code (perhaps because it would risk blowing the stack), it's often much easier to first develop a recursive algorithm and then afterwards create an iterative implementation.

As for linked lists, obviously it's true that the cases where they should be used are much more limited than they used to be. But still, they're a very simple data structure that's easy to reason about and which software engineers are very likely to occasionally encounter in practice. I don't think there's much to be gained by eliminating them from students' education.

Most Americans have few or zero regular international contacts. The US is geographically huge and there are only two other nations within relatively reach.

Personally I have one person in my contacts who's not in the US. This is someone I communicate with about twice a year, and we do indeed use WhatsApp for that.