I knew what to expect, had practiced these things, and made it through. I tried to warn my colleagues that they were in for something a lot more difficult than what they were expecting. But yeah, as you might expect, almost everyone failed.

I remember my boss talking about it, shaking his head slightly, his mouth screwing up into that familiar chagrined smirk so many people get after performing poorly at these things. I told him that these technical interviews are purposely difficult, that most people fail. That it's much better for them to miss a good candidate than hire a bad one. That failing is normal. I could see some of the tension in him subside after I said that. I repeated, "It's normal." He calmed down some more. The word "normal" seemed to help a lot.

I wonder if bringing in elements from psychotherapy might help a surprising amount here. I've found that software engineers highly value rational thought - to a point that they neglect the emotional side of things. A little development of their softer side can go a long way.

Like having a pre and post interview counseling session with a therapist would maybe be a little absurd. But maybe something along those lines would work. Maybe GPT4 could do it.

I just think the fundamental problem here is not procedural as the post seems to suggest - but rather social-psychological. Making the experience less painful to the losers is the key problem to solve.

That would fix the candidate pipeline problem because people would be less terrified of failure.

I don't know how to solve it.

To quote Leonard Cohen:

  It's coming from the sorrow in the street
  The holy places where the races meet
  From the homicidal bitchin'
  That goes down in every kitchen
  To determine who will serve and who will eat

By definition, they only take the top 1%, and 99% of people get to eat shit. Inspiring existential resentment in the vast majority of people who interact with you is obviously not a recipe for good karma.

The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.

Not gonna lie, I'm kind of dying to hear them.

I then made a spreadsheet, dumped all my stock purchases into it, tagged each purchase with a strategy, and then averaged together the return on investment for each purchase within each strategy.

The tool helps you see what's working and what's not, and verify that your stock picking ideas are actually playing out well in the real world.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597193

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

It's nice because it goes under your mattress so you don't have to wear anything. The results seem to be accurate, at least when it comes to detecting tossing and turning vs sleeping.

lol, I don't think that's the reason. At the only place I worked that used SVN the real reason was that the old guys didn't want to learn something new.

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I see another possibility: They want to create the appearance of running a hot startup without actually having to do the work. Why make something people want when you can just dazzle some investors and get them to dump a million dollars in your lap, no strings attached?

I wonder if that also might explain why such a tiny fraction of startups generate essentially all the wealth -- most of them aren't really trying.

If you're a genius, then sure, not giving up makes a lot of sense. But if you're just pretty smart, you better think two, three, or four times before committing to do a startup. It's really easy to end up over thirty and broke.

I mean, I could write a function `add(x, y)` that does that in any language. You could even inspect the data or type to make it polymorphic. I believe NumPy does this, for example.

Skimming the rest of the article, I don't get how this is different from any other language. The primary difference seems to be the function names are all one or two characters long for some reason. I must be missing something...

That's actually a good point and one I hadn't really thought about.

The only way I can think of for humanity to get to these other planets would be to build a network of self sustaining space station colonies. And if we can do that we don't really need planets any more.

And in software development, the primary bottleneck is thinking. Anything you can do to enable greater clarity of thought is going to have huge leverage. So I think this is a super promising angle.

Bret's actively developing his ideas at DynamicLand: http://dynamicland.org But clearly it will be quite some time before that tech becomes viable in the real world.

Now I'm wondering if there are simpler ways to use the rest of my body to facilitate thinking. Like, I can't mount lasers and network connected cameras on the ceiling... but maybe there's some software that can use a webcam to do simple gesture recognition mapped to bash scripts or something like that.

I quickly ended up with a lot of duplicated code. So then I thought, "Well ok, I should add a bit of abstraction on top of this..." I started coding some simple functions to help map the tabular data to objects. One thing led to another and suddenly I looked at what I had done and said, "Wait a minute..."