Thinkpads, Dell XPS or Precision.
Readit Newscosmodisk commented on Ask HN: Developer laptop that doesn't suck in 2024 and it's not Apple silicone · Posted by u/kcindric
For a couple decades now, the way I have interviewed people is to ask a simple, very-high-level question, then repeatedly asking either "So how does it do that?" (drill down), or "What happens next?" (back out).
For instance: What does 'printf("hello, world\n");' do? Obviously, it prints something, but how does it do that? Pretty quickly you're talking about includes, macros, libc, linking, machine code, system calls... One question can easily fill an entire interview slot.
The fun thing is there's no "right" answer. Nobody is expected to know everything about how software works, but everyone is expected to know something. This format gives the interviewee the opportunity to show off what they know best, and the interviewer gets to pry in to see how deeply they know it.
I'm a low-level guy so that's the direction I tend to probe. Usually someone else asks a similarly abstract high-level question. One of my favorites is: "Design a parking garage". Again, there's no right answer. It's a prompt for the candidate to show what they know. Very quickly they're coming up with functions and class hierarchies and/or data structures for vehicles, spaces, turnstiles, payment kiosks, figuring out how to pass them around, etc. The interviewer has plenty of opportunities to pry into design tradeoffs, add complications, and so on.
The grand idea is to have a deep conceptual discussion instead of just seeing if they can write a few lines of code. This also demonstrates how well they can communicate. The catch is you have to be sure they give some actual concrete answers in a few places, and aren't just fast talkers.
I do the same. The last hiring I did, I sent them a homework assignment that shouldn't take more than an hour. Then, we started talking about it. I asked to explain what and why was done. The started expanding into the sides areas of the solution. Then zoomed out and we discussed what would be the implications of doing x,y,z in a wider context of the system. The natural flow of the conversation does a couple of things: their social skills and how they approach unknown situations. I've hear plenty of 'I don't know' which was absolutely fine and much better than some fake confidence.
I'm sorry, but why would you expect someone to know all of the food ingredients on the menu - even if they work there - if they don't personally prepare all of the foods? Heck, in the US, most of the places aren't even paying their staff a decent wage.
Servers go by the menu as well. It isn't like there is a list most places.
If the owners cared about your allergies, they'd make sure their staff could find out easily. Blame the folks that own the place, not the servers.
I don't expect people to know every single item on the menu and all the ingredients they are made of. What I do expect is if a meal is made in a restaurant, the restaurant ( as a whole) to know whether it contains milk, soya,nuts, bananas, whatever. We have fairly strict regulations when it comes to this, but how they are actually applied is a completely different thing.
> staff at food places can be sometimes less than reliable about food allergy concerns
As someone with Celiac disease, who often eats at restaurants, this is a bit of an understatement. Even in restaurants where things are marked allergen free on the menu, it is often the case that staff will make mistakes. More often than not, staff aren't even informed about the basics of food, things like eggs and dairy being two separate foods, or that they can't just scrape some sauce off of a bun if they put it there by mistake, etc. If I had a life threatening allergy, I would never set foot in a restaurant. It's terrifying.
Our daughter is allergic to a few things,nuts being one of them.
When we ask for food information at restaurants, often staff have no clue. We had cases where they couldn't confirm for sure even after checking with the kitchen( we walked away).
A vice president once asked me how I was able to get effective change in large organizations when no amount of exhortation on the part of senior management had been successful. I pointed out to him that the people who resist the change the hardest are the ones who cannot see what their job would be post change. As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that. This is the Shirky Principle embodied in individuals, and small groups some times too.
This is very true across all businesses layers. I remember some years ago implementing a CRM system for a small training company. The result was great and they successfully use it even today, however at the time we needed one the junior administrators in some of the discovery sessions so we better understand the processes they do,etc. She was absolutely petrified. Even though the system was meant to make her life much easier,instead she only saw it as her replacement. It took quite a bit of effort to convince her that she's staying. I had similar reactions in my team too when I announced that some processes could be completely automated. Instead of excitement,I received ' what will my job be like then?'.
This sounds a lot like when my kids realized anyone can edit Netflix/Disney+ profile names and pictures.
I've been playing this for a while now with our daughter. She wakes up in the morning and finds some absurdity written on my account,then she changes it and the cycle repeats on the following day:)
What's incredible is that nobody is yet in jail for all those swattings
I think a lot of this is because of balance issues. Many people have this type of problem and it can be corrected, or at least improved, with balance exercises. A physical therapist that knows about them can show elderly people how to do them. They're actually helpful before you get elderly, you might not even realize how off your balance is.
If you look at photos of people doing some of these exercises, their eyes are closed or they're wearing something over their eyes. This is to invoke non-visual means of balancing, which is really important.
I'm fairly young and I have balance issues. If I won't address them in near future,the retirement period will look very very bleak for me.
cosmodisk commented on Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer maginative.com/article/ma... · Posted by u/djcollier
GitHub CoPilot charges $10 for a subscription that it loses an average (!) of $20 a user on.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/11/github_ai_copilot_mic...
"Make it profitable" appears a secondary concern in the AI space.
I started using it recently. $30, 50, or even $100 a month is litterly nothing for most companies in wester world. They'll hike up the prices eventually.
cosmodisk commented on Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer maginative.com/article/ma... · Posted by u/djcollier
Maybe I'm naive, but I just don't feel threatened by this at all. As a software engineer, I'd love to have an AI engineer automate the boring stuff so I can work on higher-level architecture concerns.
Even without any AI, every senior I know( 10+ years of experience) is pretty much trying to shift to architect or similar position and sees day to day programming almost on the same level as sweeping floors. I appreciate this may not be the case in shops doing something truly unique,but in an average CRED app world, this will happen much sooner than a lot of people might think.