nolemurs

16 ms·

91.
by nolemurs 10y ago
Every few months I think to myself "maybe I should learn Lisp," but then I see things like this, and my suspicion that Lisp has been fetishized beyond all reason starts seeming more likely, and I decide to put that exercise off a
92.
by nolemurs 10y ago
> They don't necessarily care about syntax errors or spelling errors, but they absolutely want working code. I'm not sure how code with "syntax or spelling errors" qualifies as "working code." The fact that
93.
by nolemurs 10y ago
I absolutely agree that whiteboarding is a skill that requires practice. That said, with a reasonable interviewer, the first couple things you're discussing really don't matter. The trick is to understand that no one cares if you&
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by nolemurs 10y ago
I mean, this is fine if you're unemployed already. If you've got a job already though, I'm not sure quitting that for a lower paying multi-month interview process is terribly appealing. Most of the best candidates who can pic
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> a lot of programming interviews are terrible because they abuse the whiteboard I think this puts the cause in the wrong place. The interviews aren't terrible because they abuse the whiteboard. The interviews are terrible because t
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by nolemurs 10y ago
Absolutely. I would guess that's the most common reason for people to look the part. I can't really tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with what I said!
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by nolemurs 10y ago
You know, I read through the whole article. I even agreed with pretty much all of it. I didn't run into anything I found particularly insightful. Actually, I kind of feel like the reasoning in this article can be profitably applied to
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> I would venture to say there's no correlation between how someone looks and how someone performs. I would argue that if someone looks the part, then they can be successful with a lower level of skill, and so they have less incenti
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by nolemurs 10y ago
I totally agree with the core sentiment here, but I'm not sure this long-winded and moderately pretentious rant conveys much beyond "don't judge a book by it's cover." I would encourage others to skip the long read.
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by nolemurs 10y ago
I definitely don't think that the generalist hiring practice is the best for all purposes - just that it makes a lot of sense for the bulk of the hiring at a large company, and that most the big tech companies do it. The big tech compa
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by nolemurs 10y ago
Yeah, I totally agree with this actually. Amazon totally should have done everything you say. As it happens, I know that Google is really good at doing the things you list. The fact that Amazon screwed up doesn't mean that the author o
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> If they didn't have a stack of 100,000 resumes, they would throw this ridiculous process out the window in a heartbeat and actually interview people for the position. Absolutely. If they had far fewer resumes then they'd be m
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by nolemurs 10y ago
I mean, all the big tech companies use a similar white board/algorithm centric hiring process. If you're interested in working for one of them, 40-60 hours is really not a big investment to be in a good position to apply to all of
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> However, I'm also pretty sure I'd have more chance on the Google interview right after graduation then now, when all the theoretical stuff was fresh in my brain. So I'd have more chance while being a (in my opinion) less
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by nolemurs 10y ago
There's tons of information online about what the big companies' interview processes are like. If you show up to an interview without bothering to do any research or preparation (like the author clearly did), then it's not go
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this! I don't know about letting people
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> What makes you assume we're smart enough to fully understand how it is that we work and reproduce it non-biologically Absolutely nothing. I believe we'll eventually make artificial intelligence, and I doubt we'll really
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> People who ask questions such as this often don't consider that it remains eminently possible that AGI is an impossibility for us to build. I 100% agree that AGI is probably a long ways off barring some surprise (not that such a s
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> I haven't tried out desktop Linux in awhile I read your first sentence and was like "wow, this guy hasn't used Linux in a while." Then I got to your second sentence. So, yeah, maybe give it another go. In my experie
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by nolemurs 10y ago
I know right? We jump from > how much of the difference between people’s incomes can be tied to IQ to > So if IQ is only a minor factor in success, what is it that separates the low earners from the high ones? The second doesn't
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by nolemurs 10y ago
Well, in the worst case, you can literally revert all subsequent commits, merge the topic-branch, then reapply the commits. In most real situations you'll probably find that only a small number of commits actually need to be reverted
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by nolemurs 10y ago
After you merge everything you could just diff the originally committed files against the deployed and tested versions. If there are any differences, then those need testing! Presumably if you're merging a bunch of other changes in any
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by nolemurs 10y ago
I see what you mean about the messy mental model, and I do 100% agree that in a well designed system most problems should have one obvious best solution. That said, I'm not sure that's a fair criticism of git. For instance, in thi
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> Usually all the basic concerns have been accounted for in the actual study. Often. Yes. But I often go try to find the original publications when a study interests me, and I have yet to, once, find one where the causal claims made in t
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by nolemurs 10y ago
> This kind of implies that software development before "~tdd" was a complete disorganized gong show of quality especially where refactoring, but in fact that was not the case. The question isn't "do we need to test.&
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by nolemurs 10y ago
It's not that it's wrong. Having confidence your code works is ultimately the goal. That said, if I just need to know code works, manual, rather than automated testing works just as well, and requires less effort. Automated testin
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by nolemurs 10y ago
When people talk about `cargo` being awesome, they're comparing it to the similar tools for, say C++ or C or other systems programming languages. No one is comparing `cargo` to `pip-tools`.
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by nolemurs 10y ago
Ahh, fantastic. I just tried out the new build. It's a real joy to be able to do things like `rg pattern -g '!{docs,tests}/' -tpy` and have it just work. Honestly, all performance aside, your thoughtful choice of command
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by nolemurs 10y ago
I take it back! I'm definitely switching over to using ripgrep for the next bit. Off topic - is there a way to exclude directories? I tried doing things like `rg pattern -g '!my_dir/ ' but nothing I tried seemed to work
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by nolemurs 10y ago
`grep` itself is admirably fast on single files, and if you're just searching a small number of files, the bottleneck will be IO, and `grep` will be about as fast as anything. But if you want to use `grep` recursively on a selected sub

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