3 ms·
I interviewed with Terraform Labs less than a year ago. The guy interviewing me was a pretty standard eng manager who'd left Amazon for the excitment of a crypt
by ambrozk 4y ago
I interviewed with Terraform Labs less than a year ago. The guy interviewing me was a pretty standard eng manager who'd left Amazon for the excitment of a crypto startup. I tried to prep for the interview by researching their white papers to figure out how the various balancing and investment mechanisms actually functioned on a technical level. But it was difficult to make sense of their white paper, which was fairly general, and different portions of their documentation seemed to contradict one another. When I asked what I'd been misunderstanding, he told me that I hadn't misunderstood anything: their white paper was not a full spec, and their documentation was out of date. In that case, I asked, how could one actually understand the protocol? "It's probably not possible at this point," he told me, "These things are in motion all the time." I thought his answer was pretty eye-opening.
Their interview question was: design a simple app which allows one to query the effect of crypto price changes on the supply & price of LUNA. I gathered that the upshot was, how big a movement would be required to break the $1 peg? I wonder if their models weren't good, or if their models were good, and they were just accepting a high level of risk?
- medo-bear 4y agoi wonder if these kind of things happen within the cardano ecosystem given their focus on peer reviews
- javert 4y agoAs someone who spent many years in academic computer science, I have zero confidence in the peer review system. Zero. Hoskinson talking up peer review for Cardano makes him look, to me personally, like more of a fraud. My micro-specialty was worse than some others, though. The quality of peer review is not a constant across all of computer science.
- mechanical_bear 4y agoComputer Science has a large reproducibility problem.
- abledon 4y agoIsn't Computer Science one of the most easiest things to reproduce? Its all.. Computation and Math?!
- mckirk 4y agoAnd awfully fragil pseudo-code, and hard-to-reproduce base data, and ridiculously extensive hyperparameter search, and specialty hardware, and proprietary libraries, and magic circumstances that a grad student with horrible sleep deprivation happened upon and now couldn't reproduce at gun point...
- mechanical_bear 4y agoI am that grad student. Lol
- josephg 4y agoSure; but lots of papers don't publish their raw data or their code. Or they do publish their code but its full of obvious problems. Abstract: "Algorithm X (ours) outperforms algorithm Y". Then you go read the code, and they have a sloppy implementation of algorithm Y which is missing all the obvious optimizations. Actually, they often have sloppy implementations of both algorithms X and Y, because they're a student and they've never really optimized anything before. So the conclusion of the paper is that some sloppily written code that you can't inspect outperforms some other sloppily written code that you also can't inspect. Wow.
- cuteboy19 4y agoEven I am guilty of this. There is basically no incentive for anyone to properly cross verify all these papers. At best the reviewers would check for any egregious errors in calculations.
- stnikolauswagne 4y agoSomewhat fun annectode about that: As my thesis in uni I was parallelizing some genetic analysis algorithm that a team published a paper about. I ended up with clean code with good speedup but my results were completely off from what was could be found in the initial paper. After weeks of pulling my hair out I looked into the actual code the paper was based on and found out that at some point they hardcoded a constant in such a way that there would always be a division by zero somewhere down the line which messed with their results. Been very sceptical of „peer-reviewed“ CS stuff ever since.
- vba616 4y ago>how big a movement would be required to break the $1 peg This is the sort of question that's important if you are managing capital for the long term and need to ensure that you remain in the black rather than being grounded on the shoals of fate.
- willhinsa 4y agoGood old sensitivity analysis! :)
- SilasX 4y ago>Their interview question was: design a simple app which allows one to query the effect of crypto price changes on the supply & price of LUNA. I gathered that the upshot was, how big a movement would be required to break the $1 peg? Lol it’s like a version of that xkcd[1]: “Oh, and if you could hurry up on those figures, that would be great, we’re not sure if the underpinning of our platform is at risk or not.” [1] https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/
- devoutsalsa 4y agoPlot twist. Hiring manager was the one who broke the peg by crowdsourcing the necessary information on how to do it.