jpeterson

6 ms·

1.
by jpeterson 10mo ago
Code submissions either meet the standards of the project or they don't. Whether it was generated by human or AI is irrelevant.
2.
by jpeterson 1y ago
How do you deal with Hawking radiation?
3.
by jpeterson 2y ago
It's all really just basic calculus, with a couple nifty tricks layered on top: 1) Create a bunch of variables and initialize them to random values. We're going to add and multiply these variables. The specific way that they'
4.
by jpeterson 3y ago
You don't always want to use them right away.
5.
by jpeterson 3y ago
The probability of [HEADS, TAILS] is always the same as the probability of [TAILS, HEADS], no matter how the coin is weighted.
6.
by jpeterson 3y ago
You're not testing for "basic math skills" here. What you're testing for is more like "immediately retrieves an irrelevant math fact after many years of having no need to think about it." Look, if you think thi
7.
by jpeterson 3y ago
Having "extremely basic understanding" of prime numbers immediately at one's command is important for approximately 0% of software engineering jobs. If you instant-fail a candidate for this, it says a lot more about you and y
8.
by jpeterson 4y ago
"There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes." I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful
9.
by jpeterson 4y ago
If crypto has an "ethos", it's decentralization and departure from human institutions. The FTX fiasco is the opposite of that.
10.
by jpeterson 4y ago
Exchanges and trading firms are not "Crypto". They're human institutions which happen to sit atop cryptocurrency instruments. What we're seeing play out in realtime is what happens when unregulated human institutions c
11.
by jpeterson 6y ago
Yes. Implicit in these "free speech" arguments is the idea that the government should be able to force private companies to publish user content that violates their policies. This is the sort of thing that the 1st Amendment is act
12.
by jpeterson 6y ago
I've been doing this for a long time, and I've never seen any kind of correlation between how well someone solves silly algorithm puzzles in a 45 minute window and any kind of real-world performance. Also, there's no apparent
13.
by jpeterson 6y ago
I've worked remotely for almost a decade on my own. It works.
14.
by jpeterson 7y ago
I'm guessing he's relying on common knowledge of variance here. If you know that variance is always nonnegative, and you also know that variance can be defined as (mean square - square of the mean), then it's obvious.
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by jpeterson 7y ago
That 90%+ of the hiring signal can be projected onto "hours spent on leetcode" is exactly why this process has become a parody of itself.
16.
by jpeterson 7y ago
"they work for avoiding false positives" Citation needed. I have many years of experiential evidence that suggests otherwise.
17.
by jpeterson 8y ago
Investment markets operate on relative gain, not absolute gain. E.g.: if you invest in a stock and it gains $5, this would be a great return for a $1 stock but a poor one for a $1000 stock, so the absolute gain doesn't mean anything on
18.
by jpeterson 11y ago
Is the p-value really not the probability of your results being due to chance? No, it's the probability of a particular observation, given that we assume the result is due to chance. This sounds similar, but the difference is that it
19.
by jpeterson 11y ago
Yeah. The revisionist hero worship and sanctification of Steve Jobs has reached absurd levels since his death.
20.
by jpeterson 11y ago
Let's set aside for a moment that the exact means by which people keep up with friends is not necessarily "world changing", and also that this has been mostly enabled by the internet itself, not any particular app-du-jour tha
21.
by jpeterson 11y ago
These apps "change the world" only if your "world" is the silicon valley echo chamber. The real world is only moderately impacted, and only for a limited time, even by an anomaly like Facebook. Seriously, to all the sili
22.
by jpeterson 11y ago
The basic idea here is actually a very old approach -- clocks have been powered this way for centuries. But it's very cool and refreshing to see a modern electrical spin on it.
23.
by jpeterson 11y ago
In 15 years as a software engineer at companies large and small, I have never seen anyone code on a whiteboard (outside of interviews, anyway), nor have I.
24.
by jpeterson 11y ago
First of all, the browser environment is the asynchronous part here, not JavaScript. JavaScript is a language that happens to be interpreted on top of that environment. You'd run into similar issues with any other language over an asyn
25.
by jpeterson 11y ago
What's stopping you from doing that, exactly?
26.
by jpeterson 11y ago
Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Freque...
27.
by jpeterson 11y ago
> I don't think you would be a good designer though. I was willing to entertain the (far-fetched) notion that you actually know what you're talking about, up until that line.
28.
by jpeterson 11y ago
Well, obviously they should've checked with you before publishing their paper.
29.
by jpeterson 12y ago
We also have an abundance of green space and really low cost of living. Personally, I love Atlanta, and I wish people would stop putting it down all the time. Could be a really great city with a little more love.
30.
by jpeterson 12y ago
Well, that did it. Lifetime ignore for LessWrong or anything LessWrong-related. I want my 10 minutes back.

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