wolfgke

> I’m going to create a certification for an “ls” command.

Sounds like a sound business opportunity [pun intended].

Just call it a “microdegree” for better marketability.

> There are 20 more that you could have named.

Of course; these were just examples as the "e.g." tells.

> How do you test that someone is an expert, especially if you don’t have an expert on staff?

I gave some idea on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24841552

> There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard.

In other comments on this article, I wrote my arguments why I don't believe that detecting good candidates is hard (I wrote suggestions there).

I believe the hard problem is rather that most companies/recruiters don't actually know (or won't say) what skills they are really looking for, so they use dubious processes to rationalize why they chose a specific candidate.

> How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary?

He doesn't claim that it has a valuable hidden purpose, he claims that it had (when it was constructed). :-)

> It's the combination of a really wide range of skill and a really big difficulty assessing that skill from just the resume.

If you know what skills you are looking for (hint: lots of companies and recruiters don't), this is not actually that hard.

For every skill, there are questions that should be really easy to answer for everybody with expertise, but are suprising/hard to answer for everybody who pretends to have knowledge. This enables you to check quite quickly whether the claimed skills are actually there or not.

For example, the easier sections in

> https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython

might give you a hint for topics that most seasoned Python programmers should know blindfolded while they are probably rather surprising for anybody with shallow Python knowledge. Let the applicant explain how they came up with their solution for, say, some of the problems, and you will see rather fast whether the claimed skills are actually there or not.

> I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates.

Simple solution: Be very clear what kind of candidate the company actually needs, e.g. do you need

- a genius in algorithm design

- a person who knows the subtle details of a specific language/platform/standard X

- a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated)

- how important is it really that the person is also nice to hang up after work

- an allrounder vs an expert for X, Y

- a person who creates solid code that will be good to maintain vs. a person that "simply get things done"

- a person who is is already good at X vs a person who has a high potential to become good at X

> The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"?

Two possible expanations:

- What works for a big company of FAANG type is not necessarily a good idea for other companies.

- Because the FAANG companies have found a formula for printing money, they can afford such a hugely broken hiring process.

> [NZ is] remote, defensible, politically and socially stable, self-sufficient in food and many materials.

And easy to (mostly - except for satellite connections) cut off from internet, since there exist only few sea cables to NZ that have to be cut:

> https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

> think fixed-instruction, l[...]. That's what RISC really means today.

> No variable-length instructions.

So, ARM is not a RISC instruction set, because T32 (Thumb-2) instruction can be 2 or 4 bytes long.

Similarly, RISC-V has variable-length instructions for extensibility. See p. 8ff of https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/releases/download/... (section "Expanded Instruction-Length Encoding").

> Yeah, but isn't the whole point of ARM to be a reduced instruction set?

It was the point at, say, the original ARMv1.

> Genderized things are [...] just something else that needs to be memorized

The same holds for the vocable - here, "nobody" complains that this is just something else that needs to be memorized. So, just consider the genus as part of the vocabulary word.

> he failed to predict fake news

In former days, "fake news" was simply named "propaganda" or "bad/manipulative journalism".

> Internet companies capitalize on this by bringing an optimized stream of stupidity for your viewing pleasure. Take a look at the front page of Reddit (logged out, default subs): Half of the content highlights stupidity of others: /r/IdiotsInCars shows the worst drivers from around the world, /r/insanepeoplefacebook shows the most bizarre clips from social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.

Scene from the movie Idiocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Idiocracy&oldid=9...):

https://youtu.be/1hj_7U40z5I?t=19

"IIRC LOOP was used in some software for timing loops; there was (important) software that did not work on CPUs where LOOP was too fast (this was in the early 90s or so). So CPU makers learned to make LOOP slow."

"(My opinion: Intel is probably still making it slow on purpose, and hasn't bothered to rewrite their microcode for it for a long time. Modern CPUs are probably too fast for anything using loop in a naive way to work correctly.)"

There is a reason why loop is (was made) slow: It was (in the 90s) explicitly made slow because it was used for timing loops. Making it faster would have broken existing software.

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35743699

See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35742570/why-is-the-loop...

> illegal as much as it is the storing of GDPR sensitive data in it (ie PII of customers and/or employees)

A lot of data is GDPR sensitive. Also, if some of the data must not be processed by Office 365, a lot of the advantage of Office 365 disappears.

> For a small business the first thing you should be looking at is Office 365. Put it in the cloud, get rid of the VPN.

In Germany, this is forbidden by the data protection laws:

https://www.heise.de/news/Microsoft-Office-365-Die-Gruende-f...

> Taking those points in mind, I think there can be a lot of similarity when thinking around an equals sign and the verb is/to be.

I am cautious about this: In Spanish and Portuguese, there exist two "to be": ser and estar, which roughly refer to "general situation" vs. "current state".

For European Portuguese, pedrocr gave a nice explanation on HN in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879529

So, don't confuse

  (Spanish)
  Tú eres linda.
  Tú estás linda.

  (Portuguese)
  Você é linda.
  Você está linda.

("you are gorgeous" (referring to a female person)). The second means that she is currently beautiful with a possible hint that she might normally be ugly.

> Why are there expensive rewards programs? Because consumers like them! And they insist on paying with a credit card because of them.

That is very US-centric - for example, this all does not hold in Germany (many people are actually still cautious of credit cards there).

> Payment costs won't materially decrease unless someone invents a form of payment that consumers prefer which doesn't have these cost burdens.

In the EU, there is: SEPA direct debit.

> Learning a language is _not_ like learning math.

I disagree. As a mathematician, looking at the language learning problem from a very "structural" perspective helped me a lot to grasp languages much better. Unluckily, most language learning textbooks are written by people who are not very "mathematically-minded", thus making their method of teaching overly complicated for me.

PhD students in mathematics told me that my explanations of languages make so much more sense than how the foreign language is taught at the language course at the university. On the other hand, from people who are more "humanities-minded", I often get reactions that my way of explaining languages is deeply confusing and has no value.

> You are doing life wrong if you are letting that sort of thing get you down.

I am not the person who demands of me that I obey all these stupid laws.

> I don't mind it as a general guideline, because it stimulates people to ask themselves whether they're the asshole - a good inroad to introspection that in many is sorely lacking. Likewise, in the context of nerds, it probably applies more often than not.

Lacking social skills is something completely different than being an asshole.

> Why Life Can’t Be Simpler

Because of the politicians and lawyers with their complicated, convoluted laws.

Isn't Heisenberg's uncertainty principle actually some kind of DRM on the data that we can measure?

> It's only a good alternative if you're looking to hang out with people who really like to use the n-word and who believe that everything is Jewish conspiracy.

This was not uncommon on Reddit before Reddit became more streamlined. :-)

> Just the one question: alternatives?

Voat: https://voat.co/

> I can just picture a gaggle of google employees jumping out of their seats: "They used the wrong word for it! Their argument is invalid!".

Would the "average" Google employees really care about this? I would rather imagine that only executive level employees of Google could be happy about this. And these people play much deeper political games than caring about a wrong word.

> However, regarding cryptography, the NSA's cryptographic expertise and resources are secret, so it's very hard to include them in a threat model.

Sometimes information leaks (most well-known example are the leaks of Snowden) or hints come up.

One example: https://theintercept.com/2017/05/11/nyu-accidentally-exposed...

A (German) commentary on this article: http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a73ff836

> If the NSA is in your threat model, you've lost the game.

For example for cryptographic primitives, if you didn't include the NSA in your threat model, you did something deeply wrong in your modelling.

> Yes, this is the monopoly part of the argument.

If there is a single customer, it is not a monopoly, but a monopsony:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monopsony&oldid=9...