The other thing I would encourage folks here to do is self-advocate.
We may deride the bloviations of the folks who are "all talk and no code" and how they seemingly ride the coattails of folks actually in the trenches, but honestly a lot of people do great work and sorta expect it to get "naturally noticed" in the corporate environment.
Not saying ditch your IDE and just throw around buzzwords in boring could've-been-an-email "sync meetings", but don't forget that demonstrating the value you have is also important and often neglected skill.
If a clever PR hotfix merges in the forest, does it make a sound?
I am telling on myself here, in a way, as this article hit hard and with great serendipity: I was part of a RIF at a well-known company this very morning, and I most definitely did not advocate very well for myself despite really holding the projects I was on together technically in the background / shadows.
I frankly don't know how I'd collect any useful info without it.
I'm sure there are bookmark services that also allow notes, but the tagging, linking related things, etc, all in the app is awesome, plus the ability to export bib tex for writing a paper!
Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters.
I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline.
The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."
Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume.
He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions".
I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate.
Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?
One positive thing I heard from Amazon folks is that everyone there is honest that they hate the company and hang there only for moneys. Both ICs, their managers, and managers of their managers. At least no hypocrisy.
Oh ya this. Also their recruiters aren’t the best but they are the most persistent. Meta seems to be going in the Amazon direction unfortunately, I still think Google is the least bad of the three.
> I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that.
Many, many years ago I sat next to HR in an open plan office while on a freelance gig.
They treated almost all candidates like subhumans, both when talking about the candidates within the team and when speaking on the phone to candidates.
They handled everyone from factory worker and janitorial roles, to specialists to director level. I very clearly got the impression that they only treated candidates well if those candidates could turn into people who had any power over them within the org.
I've carried that with me since and I often recognize it in HR staff I interact with now.
I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.
I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again."
Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.
I had a similar experience with Facebook, although my email was much more aggressive (this was when their recruiter contacted me right after I got tripped by one of their UX dark patterns in a way that translated to real world harm). I kept getting invites until I put a clear statement expressing my desire to never ever work for Facebook into my LinkedIn profile
FWIW I think it's because recruiters at most companies are effectively contractors and don't have access to all history of communications.
I think I wrote an email along those lines, at some point, although it was as much annoyance with the persistence of a particular recruiter as it was a desire not to work at Amazon.
+1, it's been a while since I interviewed with Google, but this brought me back to how annoying it was. I've never had a good interview experience with Google. I only interviewed during college for internship and then a full-time new-grad role and got a consistent "we're doing you a favour by even talking to you" attitude from them— the delays, the impersonality, the delays to the general vibe of the emails, etc.
They became significantly more attentive when I got an internship offer from a competing big-tech company, but as much as my recruiter seemed to try, the process just seem to be deficient beyond their capacity to do anything about it. It had to go through many steps, and be reviewed by many people who seemingly had better things to do.
Eventually they reached to the right people to tell me my decision before my other deadline. I _was_ going to get an offer. They couldn't get me the actual offer letter, or tell me if I had guaranteed host-matching though. I happened to know Google can send intern offers that don't guarantee you'll be matched to a team, and if you're not, the internship just doesn't happen. In my book that's not only as good as no offer really, it's also just disrespectful. I knew people who had this type of offers and didn't get teams.
I took the other offer. "You will get an offer, the details are just taking a while" is not enough to decide on, and the whole process didn't particularly warm me up to Google. For comparison, and to give credit where credit is due, the other company was Meta (then FB). My recruiter was very response, understanding, and personable, which is especially appreciated as an college student— you're nervous, unexperienced and have a lot going on beyond interviewing. They sent me pictures of their dog to lighten the mood. I had told them I'd appreciate quickness, and by the time I was eating dinner after my on-site, I had the offer letter in my inbox.
I remember at the time being frustrated that, after in person interviewing, they left me hanging for four months. I had a NSF grant that had been approved and if Google X had offered me a role I would have turned down the grant, but after months of silence I had to tell Google that I needed an answer or the decision would be made for me.
It was incredibly inconsiderate, the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
>> the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.
They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"
Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.
Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.
Why would the candidate be on the hook for the flight change and extra night at a hotel?
When I interviewed with Google ~10 years ago, they booked and paid for my my flights (from China to the US), hotel and car hire. I didn't have to book, pay and then ask for reimbursement, let alone foot the bill myself.
The 'two days' sounds weird to me as well. In my experience (on both sides of the table) face to face interviews were scheduled to be on a single day.
Perhaps things have changed or your friends were interviewing for very specialist roles?
The phrasing “from start to end” got me thinking—tangential, but—they were an extremely cool company when Millenials were in school and looking to join the workforce. Anybody would have jumped at the opportunity to work for them.
Actually, I can’t even think of a similar company nowadays.
Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a really bad hiring pipeline as a result. Why work on the skill of hiring, if people will jump through flaming hoops to work for you.
As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
IBM owns Red Hat, and companies grow to resemble their acquisitions all the time, though I think more people believe Red Hat is already deep in being borgified to be IBM Linux more than the other way around.
Sometimes, good things are worth the wait. The two times that you accepted roles other than Google, did they turn out better than waiting for Google?
> after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined
I am surprised that you accept. I would never waste my time. If these companies refuse to provide reasonable interview feedback, why would you provide it to them?
I see. I am noticing the main difference is that forward_list manages the lifetime and allocation of nodes and that having a pointer to an object is equivalent to a pointer to the node (could be implemented as a helper).
At the byte level, it's quite possible the layouts are the same. However, an "intrusive data structure" means that the nodes themselves are the data.
In other words, intrusive is like this:
struct T : NodeType<T>
{
// T data
NodeType<T> next, prev;
};
whereas non-intrusive data structures the T's are not the nodes themselves
struct NodeType<T>
{
NodeType<T> next, prev;
T t;
};
Doing non-intrusive means you need to own the lifecycle of the nodes (and make them copyable, move-constructible, or some combo thereof). Intrusive means that the caller can manage the nodes' lifecycles and just say "here's a node, I promise it'll live while the list is still alive" and have that node be on the stack, heap, static, etc.
Mothy Roscoe, the Barrelfish PI, gave a really great talk at ATC 2021 [0]. A lot of OS research is basically "here's a clever way we bypassed Linux to touch hardware directly", but his argument is that the "VAX model" of hardware that Linux still uses has ossified, and CPU manufacturers have to build complexity to support that.
Concretely, there are a lot of things that are getting more "NOC-y" (network-on-chip). I'm not an OS expert, but deal with a lot of forthcoming features from hardware vendors at my current role. Most are abstracted as some sorta PCI device that does a little "mailbox protocol" to get some values (perhaps directly, perhaps read out of memory upon success). Examples are HSMP from AMD and OOBMSM from Intel. In both, the OS doesn't directly configure a setting, but asks some other chunk of code (provided by the CPU vendor) to configure the setting. Mothy's argument is that that is an architectural failure, and we should create OSes that can deal with this NOC-y heterogeneous architecture.
Even if one disagrees with Mothy's premise, this is a banger of a talk, well worth watching and easy to understand.
He is right. The point of the operating system is to, well, operate the system. Hardware, firmware, software engineers should work together to make good systems. Political and social barriers are not an excuse for poor products delivered to end users.
This is indeed interesting, but FYI this is a BSL-covered project with somewhat onerous times: only one instance per service (i.e. don't scale out, if I understand correctly) [0].
Still can't seem to do RAG or otherwise answer questions about a specific URL. Seems kinda useless compared to even copilot or Gemini 2.5 unless I'm missing something.
I asked it to summarize this thread [0] and it just said "that thread is about the monthly "who's hiring"' on HN", not even close.
I have seen some heinously long cmdline strings, but nothing close to that. Usually when invocations have creeped up into the O(1k) character limit at places I've worked, I've implemented a "yaml as cmdline args" option to just pass a config file instead.
Have you seen scenarios where this is actually limiting?
Yes, if *.c expands to a string over 2m. Maybe that is a lot for .c files, but it may easily happen with .tiff and a folder full of images used for training a deep learning model, for example.
Thanks, this is interesting. I have done a lot of this sorta stuff (glob expanding giant directories) without a thought for this `ARG_MAX` libc parameter, but now I know I need to keep it in mind!
This advice is thorough, but as the author admits a bit autistic. It approaches a relationship as a specific highly-fixated goal that requires reps / practice.
In general, I think any guy trying to do this is not going to find what they want.
I can only give my own (likely more applicable) advice to other straight men on here (which I suspect is a very high % of the users), but I would ignore much of this advice and do the following:
* Live your own life to the fullest. Don't even worry about dating / the apps. Just do activities you love and develop a passion (or more than one!). The apps are basically designed to mess with your psychology and the yield of your time spent on them is very low unless you are extremely attractive (not me lol!). Start rock climbing and go to a bunch of meetups for it, meet new people, and be the one who asks people (men and women) to meet up for climbing. Copy-paste this onto whatever activity you want (I've done it with skiing, climbing, mountain biking, and sailing). You will eventually meet a partner through these group activities and you won't waste any time trying to "date", and often you'll be able to vet your partner in a less intense "setting" than a date. For example, you can talk about what money "means" to each of you while walking to the crag and realize that although she might be attractive, you'll probably just fight about money all the time.
* As part of a full life, maintain your friendships. You need to be able to lean on your friendships to fulfill specific needs that your partner shouldn't need to or be able to do. I talk about code with my coding friends, not a girlfriend. I nerd out about sailing with my crewmates, not a girlfriend. I talk about espresso with a bunch of deep-pocketed coffee nerds on discord, not a girlfriend. Think of spending time with friends in the same way you do the gym: it might be tough to fit in on any single "session", but if you stop doing it after a while, you'll find yourself really behind the 8 ball. If you think you can't afford the time, I can almost assure you that the time spent in the company of friends will so vastly reduce your mental rumination / anxiety / depression you fight when you spend so much time alone that the "friend time" will more than "pay" for itself.
* Know what you want, and communicate it clearly. If you're looking for something low-key, be clear to your partner. If you are angling to get serious and move in faster, be clear about that. Most of the friction in relationships comes from when each individual is on different pages about the trajectory of where they want things to go.
* Talk about money. I see so many couples don't do this and perpetually fight over things that come down to "what does money mean to you?". For example, if your partner gets a tax refund and thinks "oh boy! let me buy a new computer" while you think "give me my interest-free loan back, US government, so I can shove this into an index fund and have greater financial security to tell my employer to kick rocks if things get too terrible", you're gonna have problems reconciling that unless you're very explicit.
* Table stakes are similar to the article though: stay fit, eat well, avoid mental numbing mechanism and substance abuse
> Live your own life to the fullest. Don't even worry about dating / the apps.
This doesn't work. I mean, it seems to work for you because you travel a lot or live somewhere where a lot of outdoor hobbies are possible.
For nerdy men, if you're not careful about hobbies you're going to pick some where you will literally never meet a woman into it, or else only strange or highly autistic ones who aren't good for you, and this isn't always obvious ahead of time.
I don't mean anything stereotypical about this either. Like "women aren't into video games or anime" isn't true, but they're not into it the way you might be into it. (In my experience they're healthier about it and like creating/producing things themselves, whereas men like complaining about them online. But this part is a bit stereotypical.)
You do need to know what women who are your type are into, and you need to genuinely be that kind of person or at least be able to appreciate it.
You've definitely called me out: I currently live in an area where I can do a bunch of different hobbies year round for the most part, and happen to enjoy them.
I totally agree that if one goes all in for their D&D hobby, meeting women directly is not likely, but it's totally possible to connect to other people via that hobby (e.g. to the dungeon master's single female friend, etc).
I guess the point I was trying to make is don't singular focus on "finding a girlfriend" and then contort oneself into doing things they don't find enjoyable for extended periods (e.g. cooking classes, volunteering with pets, salsa dancing. Those are great hobbies, but too often my awkward male friends begrudgingly do those even though they hate them because they think "that's where the women are").
Agreed -- the thing that frustrated me in the post is the idea that not going through a hookup phase before finding a serious partner is "like running a marathon without doing any training", as though the skills involved in sustaining a relationship were the same skills involved in hookups, as opposed to an amplification of regular friendship skills.
Abundance mindset doesn't need to come from a sense of mastery over a game sold to you by a corporate product. IMO it's better to have abundance from a rich life filled with solid friendships that let you feel supported in taking risks, which may involve getting hurt, grieving, pulling yourself together, and trying again.
Quite frankly this is the worst advice. As other commenters have noted if you tend to enjoy solo activities or activities that don't naturally involve the types of women you'd like to date, then it's not going to lead to you meeting anyone.
> You will eventually meet a partner through these group activities
Ah, the hope and pray method. Doesn't work. And when you do meet a girl you actually like, how do you figure you'll have the social skills to carry yourself through the dating process and developing a relationship? It's just natural? No, it's not.
This also doesn't work if you want to date an abundance of women and it doesn't allow you to meet women when you choose. Ever see a cute girl at the grocery store or at a coffee shop and you wanted to ask her out but you didn't know what to say? No amount of skiing and mountain climbing is going to fix that.
> but as the author admits a bit autistic
I don't know why (well, I can guess) it's such a turn-off for people to approach dating systematically. We don't criticize people for practicing math or coding, yet when it comes to social skills, if you're doing anything other than "just being yourself", it's somehow "wrong".
Even if Ampere could afford to undercut the internal development of these hyperscalar ARM chips (which to my knowledge they cannot), there is more value in in-housing ARM chips like Amazon / Microsoft are doing: you can more easily try out wacky ideas in chip / firmware design.
Often times these companies might have an idea for how to save power / tweak cores in a weird way on a CPU, but have a chicken-and-egg problem with not knowing exactly how much it'll reduce COGS. Not knowing that and having to negotiate with a vendor (who will often want to charge more for the feature) means that it's difficult to do unless it's an obvious slam-dunk.
By bringing chip development in-house, adding new features skews more towards a political decision that requires less rigorous financial calculations (e.g. "how much power will this save relative to the vendor_cost++ and our own developer cost?" for 3rd-party chips). It basically allows these cloud providers to ship new features more quickly in their CPUs.
We may deride the bloviations of the folks who are "all talk and no code" and how they seemingly ride the coattails of folks actually in the trenches, but honestly a lot of people do great work and sorta expect it to get "naturally noticed" in the corporate environment.
Not saying ditch your IDE and just throw around buzzwords in boring could've-been-an-email "sync meetings", but don't forget that demonstrating the value you have is also important and often neglected skill.
If a clever PR hotfix merges in the forest, does it make a sound?
I am telling on myself here, in a way, as this article hit hard and with great serendipity: I was part of a RIF at a well-known company this very morning, and I most definitely did not advocate very well for myself despite really holding the projects I was on together technically in the background / shadows.