Hacker News: wtobey1

New comment by wtobey1 in "The Test"

wtobey1 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:53:03 +0000

Reporting and interviewing are completely different exercises with different goals and motivations.

New comment by wtobey1 in "The Test"

wtobey1 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:04:31 +0000

No it’s not. There’s a trade off to make between letting someone explain themselves and challenging them. The audience has their own braincells and can make their own decisions on what they are hearing.

Actually yes if a interviewee said something like that I’d like to know why they’re saying that because it doesn’t make sense to me!

New comment by wtobey1 in "The Test"

wtobey1 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:34:48 +0000

I think the end of this post misses the point of Ezra Klein's interviews. You can listen to him podcast about podcasting, and he explains very clearly what his goals are when he talks to someone. He's an interviewer, not a debater. His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view, not to win an argument with them or get them to admit that they're making up a silly anecdote like they don't know their address, because thats counter productive the the goal of helping his audience understand their viewpoint. I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.

New comment by wtobey1 in "The 37signals Manager Playbook"

wtobey1 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 06:28:21 +0000

Reading this, anyone give great advice on formulating take home projects that work really well in the AI age? I ran an interview cycle where I gave ~1 day, and tried to hold out some technical questions for a follow up design interview after they had delivered the take home. I felt like the project was very hard to define given AI lets people chew through most of what you throw in front of them very quickly. Giving a bigger project felt like it required drawing them too deeply into our domain, where I was trying to provide a slice of it that we could onboard candidates to in ~45 minutes. Given that the authors here are getting multiple weeks to do it, its hard for me to imagine an appropriate scope.

New comment by wtobey1 in "The relay market powering token resellers and fraud"

wtobey1 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:30:38 +0000

I spent years working on financial integrity at a large ads company and this isn't novel at all! The same resale markets are at play for the last generation of internet giant's products. Highly sophisticated actors, able to cobble together impressions through abuse of the billing systems, stolen financial instruments, taken over accounts, etc, create massive markets of discounted impressions for resale. It was very interesting to compete against them as we hardened our defenses and they invented new ways to exploit them. I imagine the same defensive tools and techniques are being deployed by my former colleagues who moved to the labs.