There is a balance to be struck. You obviously don't expect a SWE to begin by identifying rare earth metal mining spots on his first day.

Where the line is drawn is context dependent, drawing the same single line for all possible situations is not possible and it's stupid to do so.

Not new they had that 5 years ago at least.

Anthropic interview is nebulous. You get a coding interview. Fast paced, little time, 100% pass mark.

Then they chat to you for half an hour to gauge your ethics. Maybe I was too honest :)

I'm really bad at the "essay" subjects vsm the "hard" subjects so at that point I was dumped.

I recently took their CodeSignal assessment, which is part of their initial screening process.

Oh, wow. I really believe they are missing out on great engineers due to the nature of it.

90 minutes to implement a series of increasingly difficult specs and pass all the unit tests.

There is zero consideration for quality of code. My email from the recruiter said (verbatim), “the CodeSignal screen is intended to test your ability to quickly and correctly write and refactor working code. You will not be evaluated on code quality.”

It was my first time ever taking a CodeSignal assessment and there was really no way to prepare for it ahead of time.

Apparently, I can apply again in 6 months.

You can definitely pass their interview without solving everything.

Man, the bugs they prevent. Vs everyone rolling their own multithreaded file reader/writer code in C. How many programmers would think to journal transactions and ship them for backup for example.

SQL or 15000 lines of C++ or Go or Rust doing whatever with files.

What does the ideal look like then? Data storage encapsulation in the app? Perhaps different DB users with granular access, accessed from different non-global parts of the program. Chuck in some views later when you need performance pragmatism!

Your program is also one giant type.

Yeah but I don't use that type in 100s of places.

It is slow. Like geocities.

Interesting concept http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/d...

I remember some 2010s websites offering a CHM version to download. Pretty neat for some things you might want to reference offline.

I used to think creating a CHM was peak professionalism. I'm a mini Microsoft!

Actually I'd go back to CHMs for docs. A modern reader would be good tho.

Yeah, I keep thinking that CHM was the peak format for offline docs. Today we have Kiwix [0] and Dash/Zeal [1] – both amazing projects, but somehow they feel more complex, and the formats they use aren’t as ubiquitous.

[0]: https://kiwix.org/en/

[1]: https://kapeli.com/dash for macOS, https://zealdocs.org/ for others

Is there a term for the situation that, when there's a dozen different products competing in the same space, there may as well be none?

I don’t think so, but there is a number. [927]

[927]: https://xkcd.com/927/

Choice paralysis, choice overload, analysis paralysis.

The other day I crammed some awful internal docs into zeal. It was a fun time, good format -- was able to reverse engineer it without looking at the specs in an hour or so. I wanted to be able to look at those docs having to remember exactly where they were every time.

They really mean crap not fake. If you use a nail where a screw is needed, that is crap.

that’s one way to put it.

Performance art of many HN exchanges on non-startup/cs topics.

Podiatry?

Isn't it possible you could make a mistake that maimed someone? Or that the medical billing is burdensome to some people? On the whole you might be helping people, but I would think there's a small minority that is negatively impacted too.

What benefit does gambling have?

Entertainment