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PNewling commented on Flunking my Anthropic interview again   taylor.town/flunking-anth... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
commandersaki · 3 days ago
That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.

Best to ask for feedback but of course they won't give it to you. I thought I did really well after 6 interviews with a FAANG company. They let me down by saying that another candidate was preferred. I pressed for feedback a month or so later and was ghosted. So I submitted a privacy request to the privacy and legal team about all and any data pertaining to the hiring process and interview, and was given a massive dump of their talent management system, plaintext notes of the interviews, group chat messages discussing me, etc.

It turns out I had a pretty bad read of the situation; there was some things that I had said that were misconstrued, some bad traits that I wasn't aware of, and then the key reason I was rejected (lack of domain exertise and relevant experience).

Anyways glad I went down this route, I still need to process the data and translate it to improving myself, but as my buddy GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle.

PNewling · 3 days ago
Tell me more about this privacy request you submitted. I wasn’t aware this was a thing.
PNewling commented on RFK Jr demanded a vaccine study be retracted – the journal said no   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rntn
lithocarpus · 9 days ago
It is excreted by the kidneys, but according to the studies I looked at, for aluminum that gets in the blood some of it gets into bone and brain and other places where some portion stays there for years.

Point being that for a given amount of aluminum, many orders of magnitude more of it is still in the body years later if it was injected as compared with ingested.

I'm not saying this is harmful necessarily, but it is not something I would simply dismiss.

PNewling · 9 days ago
> but according to the studies I looked at

(Not trying to be flippant, more just curious) Want to link to those?

PNewling commented on Mammals Evolved into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since Dinosaur Age, Study Finds   news.njit.edu/mammals-evo... · Posted by u/zdw
ants_everywhere · a month ago
I was thinking maybe that's why the evolved stingers, but it turns out ants evolved from stinging wasps not vice versa.
PNewling · a month ago
Your username makes me think you'd be a good person to ask:

Sorry, what? (Edit, this sounds like I don't believe you, but it is more that I am in disbelief!) Ants evolved from stinging wasps? Were they flying at that time? Or were wasps at some point non-flying and the 'wasps' grouping is a wide one like 'beetles' is?

This is such a fascinating space I know very little about.

PNewling commented on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it   cesarsotovalero.net/blog/... · Posted by u/cesarsotovalero
Ohkay · 2 months ago
> So yeah, Python is powerful, and it couples very well with the now ubiquitous VSCode editor.

I always found vscode lacking for Python and C compared to pycharm and clion. The latter just work without fiddling with config files.

PNewling · 2 months ago
Funny enough I feel the other way about JetBrains IDEs. They * seem * super powerful, but there is always a lot of config that needs to go into them if I'm doing app, infra, and pipeline work. (Edit, not saying they aren't powerful, just more that as coming into them I'm never sure how to wield it the best out of the box)

In my experience (not saying this is universal), the folks that like JetBrains IDEs came from java/intellij backgrounds, where I hear it really shines.

This all might be a skill issue, as almost all my professional projects have been VSCode based, but since I've only worked at smaller places I definitely can't rule out this was because it was easier to set things up than to fight for Fin to get us all licences.

In your opinion, what makes PyCharm (or CLion if you want to add that in) 'just work'? Do you think it is because you've used it for so long and just know the ins-and-outs? Or is there something you see that they have and VSCode doesn't?

I've always been curious about this as someone who hasn't had a lot of professional exposure to the JetBrains world.

PNewling commented on At Amazon's biggest data center, everything is supersized for AI   nytimes.com/2025/06/24/te... · Posted by u/pseudolus
DrBazza · 2 months ago
> is the first in a new generation of data centers being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters

Near both the Casadia fault that's produced magnitude 9 earthquakes and a chain of active volcanoes. Both of which are statistically likely. I do wonder what contingency plans Amazon (and Microsoft) have in the event of a megathrust earthquake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Forec...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier#Modern_activity_...

PNewling · 2 months ago
> Both of which are statistically likely.

It's seems a little dishonest to not include that 'statistically likely' is on a geological time scale.

PNewling commented on How to negotiate your salary package   complexsystemspodcast.com... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
rsanek · 2 months ago
you tell everyone up front what your timeline is, months ahead of time. that way, all of them coincide and you get maximum leverage.

last job search i got 4 offers to line up that i could use in negotiations.

PNewling · 2 months ago
> you tell everyone up front what your timeline is, months ahead of time

Honestly curious how this conversation goes, like "I'm busy with xyz for the next four weeks, then I can do round two of interviews..." or how does that go?

PNewling commented on Google Cloud Incident Report – 2025-06-13   status.cloud.google.com/i... · Posted by u/denysvitali
stogot · 3 months ago
Why did you leave? If you don’t mind asking
PNewling · 3 months ago
Not sure if you'll get an answer (I'd be interesting in a response as well), but from the blog in their profile it looks like they moved to be a 'member of technical staff working in the AI Reliability Engineering (AIRE) team at Anthropic'. So it might have just been an upward move to something different/more-exciting.
PNewling commented on Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/Thevet
WalterBright · 3 months ago
The "feel forces" exerted by the pilot are taken into account for the maximum ability to control the airplane.

A Boeing airliner has a travel limiter on the control surfaces that is automatically adjusted based on the speed. Exceeding that travel puts enough torque on the airplane to literally tear the structure apart.

There was an Airbus incident years ago where the pilot stamped on the rudder pedals to violently move the rudder full travel lock to lock, and it tore the rudder vertical stabilizer off.

There are also situations where no amount of control input is going to wrest control back from an uncontrolled dive.

In other words, designing the "feel forces" and travel has a large number of variables to it, and is not simple at all to get right.

For a dive fast enough, you run into an effect called "separation". This is where the air flowing over the wing no longer converges at the trailing edge, but separates. This separation can engulf the elevators such that even at full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air and from then on, you're just along for the ride into a crash.

This is a problem for many, many aircraft designs. You always gotta watch your airspeed.

This happened to a 727 once, where the autopilot went berserk and sent the airplane in a dive so bad that separation happened. The quick thinking pilot decided to lower the landing gear in a desperate attempt to slow the airplane down. He succeeded, although the slipstream tore the doors off and bent the gear backwards, and saved everyone.

It also happened to a 707, where the pilots weren't paying attention and the airplane slipped into a dive. By the pilots realized what had happened, they no longer had pitch control. One of them desperately began cranking the trim wheel by hand, and they managed to pull it up just before it hit the ocean.

Yeager's X1 rocket aircraft had this problem, as did the F-86 jet fighter.

For another fun anecdote, the F-80 Shooting Star had a problem in that its engine was too powerful. If you oversped the airplane, it would go unstable and pitch up, tearing the wings off. That meant the pilot always had to have one eye on the airspeed (yes, my dad was an F-80 pilot, and flew them in combat). One day, a pilot had a Mig on his tail he couldn't shake. He thought, I'm dead anyway, let's see if I can pitch up and lose the Mig. So he firewalled the throttle, and sure enough the F-80 went through a violent maneuver and miraculously the wings stayed on and he shook the Mig off his tail. When he landed, the wings were bent up and the airplane was scrapped.

Dive bombers used "dive brakes" to keep from overspeeding the airplane. My dad's favorite method for attacking an anti-aircraft gun emplacement was to dive straight down on it. AA gunners did not want to fire vertically (think about it). But it required my dad to have one eye on the target, one eye on the airspeed, and his third eye on the altitude.

PNewling · 3 months ago
These are all incredible stories. I appreciate you sharing them with us.

Could you link-to/tell-us more about the 727 affair? I've always had a fascination with autopilot (and autoland) systems, so I would love to read/hear more about this incident.

PNewling commented on Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)   kevinchen.co/blog/cant-st... · Posted by u/wonger_
aldanor · 3 months ago
It's not so hard to type in the problem to a chatgpt on your second monitor or an iPad next to your screen and just retype the answer with some alterations
PNewling · 3 months ago
Some certifications I’ve taken make you do a full room scan, including using a mirror to see the computer itself if you’re using a laptop, to ensure there is nothing you could cheat with. Normally a human reviews it before they open the test for you. In addition they have you install a browser extension that fails a check if there is more than one monitor along with a host of other items.

These are obviously extreme measures, but it is possible to try and enforce enhanced levels of proctoring. And I’m not saying I like the idea of doing this for all coding interviews, just that I guarantee people would go through with this if it meant a chance to get into big tech.

PNewling commented on The Rise of the Japanese Toilet   nytimes.com/2025/05/29/bu... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy
layer8 · 3 months ago
> it’s incomprehensible that in other countries people just wipe and…hope for the best.

Nowadays many people use wet wipes. Probably less environmentally friendly, but they solve the same problem.

PNewling · 3 months ago
Less environmentally friendly and greatly more damaging to the infrastructure. Spain is even looking to introduce legislation to reduce/remove their use[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/28/spain-to...

u/PNewling

KarmaCake day142July 27, 2022View Original